The commerce of the islands is largely in the hands of foreigners, and the sugar plantations are almost exclusively under their control. There are but few native merchants, the large dealers being Americans, Germans, English and French, while the smaller traders are generally Portuguese and Chinese. There are native lawyers, clerks, mechanics, magistrates and police-men; but the most of the race who are compelled to labor for their support find employment as farm and plantation laborers, stevedores, sailors, coachmen, boatmen, fishermen, gardeners, fruit-pedlars, waiters, soldiers and house-servants, in all of which capacities they are generally industrious, cheerful and honest.
The products of the islands for export are sugar, molasses, rice, bananas, fungus, hides and wool, of an aggregate approximate value of eight million dollars annually. The principal product, however, is sugar, amounting to perhaps one hundred thousand tons yearly. Nine-tenths of the exports of the group find a market in the United States, and four-fifths or more of the imports in value are from the great Republic. The receipts and expenditures of the government are a little less than one million five hundred thousand dollars annually, derived principally from customs duties and direct taxation.
The population of the islands is a little more than eighty thousand, of which about forty-five thousand are natives. The Americans, English, Germans, Norwegians and French number perhaps ten thousand, and Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese from the Azores constitute the most of the remainder.
The postal facilities of the islands are ample and reliable. Inter-island steamers, of which there are many, convey the mails throughout the group at regular intervals, and the San Franciscan and Australian steamers afford a punctual and trustworthy service with the rest of the world. The islands have a postal money-order system reaching within and beyond their boundaries, and are connected with the Universal Postal Union.
Over twenty thousand of the inhabitants of the group are centred in Honolulu, the capital of the kingdom, and its beautiful and dreamy suburb of Waikiki. The business portions of the city, with their macadamized and lighted streets, and blocks of brick and stone buildings, have a thrifty and permanent appearance, while the eastern suburbs, approaching the hills with a gentle ascent, abound in charming residences embowered in palms. Small mountain streams run through the city and afford an abundant supply of sweet water, which is further augmented by a number of flowing artesian wells. With a temperature ranging from seventy to ninety degrees, Honolulu, with its substantial churches and public buildings, its air of affluence and dreamy quiet, is a delightful place of residence to those who enjoy the heat and languor of the tropics.
In the midst of these evidences of prosperity and advancement it is but too apparent that the natives are steadily decreasing in numbers and gradually losing their hold upon the fair land of their fathers. Within a century they have dwindled from four hundred thousand healthy and happy children of nature, without care and without want, to a little more than a tenth of that number of landless, hopeless victims to the greed and vices of civilization. They are slowly sinking under the restraints and burdens of their surroundings, and will in time succumb to social and political conditions foreign to their natures and poisonous to their blood. Year by year their footprints will grow more dim along the sands of their reef-sheltered shores, and fainter and fainter will come their simple songs from the shadows of the palms, until finally their voices will be heard no more for ever. And then, if not before—and no human effort can shape it otherwise—the Hawaiian Islands, with the echoes of their songs and the sweets of their green fields, will pass into the political, as they are now firmly within the commercial, system of the great American Republic.
February, 1887.
1 The Princess Likelike died February 2, 1887. ↑
Hina, the Helen of Hawaii.
CHARACTERS.
Hakalanileo, a chief of Hawaii.
Hina, wife of Hakalanileo.
Uli, a sorceress, mother of Hina.
Niheu andsons of Hina.Kana,
Kamauaua, King of Molokai.
Keoloewa andsons of Kamauaua.Kaupeepee,
Nuakea, wife of Keoloewa.
Moi, brother of Nuakea.
HINA, THE HELEN OF HAWAII.
A STORY OF HAWAIIAN CHIVALRY IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY.
I.
The story of the Iliad is a dramatic record of the love and hate, wrong and revenge, courage and custom, passion and superstition, of mythical Greece, and embraces in a single brilliant recital events which the historic bards of other lands, lacking the genius of Homer, have sent down the centuries in fragments. Human nature has been substantially the same in all ages, differing only in the ardor of its passions and appetites, as affected by the zone of its habitat and its peculiar physical surroundings. Hence almost every nation, barbarous and civilized, has had its Helen and its Troy, its Paris and its Agamemnon, its Hector and its demi-gods; and Hawaii is not an exception. The wrath of no dusky Achilles is made the thesis of the story of the Hawaiian abduction, but in other respects the Greek and Polynesian legends closely resemble each other in their general outlines.
The story of Hina, the Hawaiian Helen, and Kaupeepee, the Paris of the legend, takes us back to the twelfth century, near the close of the second and final era of migration from Tahiti, Samoa, and perhaps other islands of Polynesia—a period which added very considerably to the population of the group, and gave to it many new chiefs, a number of new customs, and a few new gods. That the tale may be better understood by the reader who may not be conversant with the legendary history of the Hawaiian Islands, it will be necessary to refer briefly to the political and social condition of the group at that time.
Notwithstanding the many sharply drawn and wonderfully-preserved historic legends of the Hawaiians, the early settlement of the little archipelago is shrouded in mystery. The best testimony, however, warrants the assumption that the islands were first discovered and occupied by a people who had drifted from southern Asia to the islands of the Pacific in the first or second century of the Christian era, and, by migratory stages from the Fijis to Samoa and thence to Tahiti, had reached the Hawaiian group in about A.D. 550. The first discovery was doubtless the result of accident; but those who made it were able to find their way back to the place from which they started—either Tahiti or Samoa—and in due time return with augmented numbers, bearing with them to their new home pigs, fowls, dogs, and the seeds of such fruits and vegetables as they had found to be wanting there.
The little colony grew and prospered, and for nearly five hundred years had no communication with, or knowledge of, the world beyond. At the end of that time their geographical traditions had grown so faint that they spoke only of Kahiki, a place very far away, from which their ancestors came. First landing on the large island of Hawaii, they had spread over the eight habitable divisions of the group. The people were ruled by district chiefs, in fief to a supreme head on some of the islands, and on others independent, and the lines dividing the masses from the nobility were less strictly drawn than during the centuries succeeding. Wars were