Ethel Vincent - Forty Thousand Miles Over Land and Water

Mr. McIntyre, the pilot, who for forty years has been bringing ships along the buoyed course and over the dangers of the coral reef which surrounds the bay in which Honolulu lies, boarded us from the flat-bottomed boat, as did all its stalwart native rowers. Inside the reef we saw an iron tripod that supported a small conical-shaped box; from this issued forth a troop of little nut-brown native boys, who with wild whoops plunged into the water and swam towards us, and twisting about like eels, dived after the dimes we dropped over and brought them up successfully. Water seems the natural element of the Hawaiians, and all bathe once if not twice a day, fearless of the sharks who sometimes penetrate within the reef.

How beautiful are these island coral reefs, bringing forth as they do and blending within their shallow depths every unsurpassed and heavenly shade of colour that the ever-varying ocean shows! From the dull purple line near the shore, and within the bay they pass into a delicate opaque sea-green, near the coral reef where the line is abruptly broken by curling circlets of foam, fading away in an indistinct line of sky blue shaded in the distance to cerulean, and then ultramarine, and dying on the horizon to the most exquisite sapphire.

Mr. McIntyre having brought us safely into dock, we took a "buggy" to drive about for the two hours the Australia stayed in port.

Honolulu is a town containing 15,000 inhabitants. With the native population there is an admixture of Germans and Chinese. The American element, too, is very strong, and American manners and customs have strongly influenced the Hawaiians. The roads are of the best macadam, the town is lighted with gas, there is a public telephone office which shows how general is the use of that instrument; and fire-plugs testify to their precautions against fire.

The Parliament House is of stone with handsome colonnades. Before it stands the gold figure of King Kamehameha I., first king of the Sandwich Islands, wrapped in the famous "00" mantle. This mantle descended from generation to generation; it was made from the feathers of a rare black bird, of the tribe of honey-suckers. Under each wing only two or three feathers of the required shade were found, so that it took scores of years to collect the necessary quantity, as the mantle measured some four feet long and eleven feet wide at the bottom widths when spread out.

The palace, surrounded by high walls, stands in beautiful gardens, as does also the Palace of Queen Emma. There is a college, and a native cathedral, built twenty-five years only after the introduction of Christianity; the English church, as yet only four bare walls, the Queen Emma Hospital, the prison, the theatre, and a comfortable hotel. But the gardens, how beautiful they seemed to us—a fairy vision almost—as our first sight of tropical vegetation—I longed to know the name of each and every strange bright blossom I saw.

There was the straight broad leaf of the palm, the jagged one of the banana, the cocoa-nut palm with its straggling arms and brown nuts, the feathery algeroba, and glossy-leaved mango and monkey pod, the dark-green koa, and very many others I had never heard of. And these formed the dark-green background for scarlet bunches of ohias, and the vivid crimson blossom of the hibiscus, for magnolias, and orange trees, and gardenias, heliotrope, roses, and honeysuckle, for thickets of mimosa, trailing passion-flowers and tropical parasites of all kinds.

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