Hawaii by James A. Michener
And with his wife and children in tow, he led the Hales to Captain Janders’ store and said boldly, “Captain, I have come to throw myself on your mercy.”
“What do you mean?” Janders asked suspiciously.
“You’re doing a large business here, Captain, and with more whalers coming each year, you’ll need a partner. I want to be that partner.”
“You leaving the mission?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Over the Hewlett affair?”
“Yes, sir. And others. I happen to believe that men who work should get a just salary.” He tugged at his ill-fitting trousers, pointed at Amanda’s dress and said, “I’m tired of going down to the mission grab bag in Honolulu to see what scraps the good people in Boston have sent us this year. I want to work for myself, get my own wage, and buy my own things.”
“Does Amanda feel the same?” Captain Janders asked.
“She does.”
“Do you, Amanda?”
“I love the Lord. I love to serve the Lord. But I also love an organized home, and in these matters I am with my husband.”
“You got any money to put into the venture?” Janders asked warily.
“My family comes to you with absolutely nothing,” the handsome dark-haired doctor, then twenty-nine, replied. “We have these clothes, picked from the rag bag, and that is all. I have no medicine, no tools, no luggage. Certainly I have no money. But I have a knowledge of these islands that no other man on earth has, and that’s what I offer you.”
“Do you speak the tongue?”
“Perfectly.”
Janders thought a moment, then stuck out his rugged hand. “Son, you’re my partner. On the Thetis, when you asked so many questions, I remarked you.”
“I have only one request, Captain,” Whipple said. “I want to borrow enough money … right now …”
“We’ll fix you up with clothes and a place to live.”
“Enough money to buy my own medical outfit. And anyone who wants medical advice from me can get it free. For I am a servant of the Lord, but I am determined to serve Him in my way, and not some other.”
By the end of the week the Whipples had moved into a small grass shack, which Kelolo gave them along with a substantial square of land in return for medical care for Malama, whose exertions on behalf of the new laws had taxed her strength, and at the start of the next week the first of many signboards that were to become famous throughout Hawaii appeared on the dusty main streets of Lahaina: “Janders & Whipple.”
ABNER’S DISTURBING EXPERIENCES in Honolulu, where both Abraham Hewlett and John Whipple had challenged the missionary board, confirmed his natural suspicion that there was inherent danger from too close relationships with the Hawaiian savages, and it was under the impetus of this fear that he built a high wall around his entire establishment, leaving an extra gate at the rear through which Jerusha could exit to her girls’ classes, held in an open shed under the kou trees. Within the wall not a word of Hawaiian was spoken. No Hawaiian maid was allowed to enter unless she knew English, and if a deputation of villagers came to see Abner, he would carefully close the door leading to where his children were, and he would take the Hawaiians to what he called “the native room,” where their voices could not be heard by the little ones.
“We must not learn the ways of the heathen!” Abner constantly warned his family, for what Abraham Hewlett had suggested in Honolulu regarding all missionaries was particularly true of Abner: he loved the Hawaiians, yet he despised them. He was therefore not in very good humor when Kelolo came to visit him one night, which forced him to close off the children’s room, lest they hear Hawaiian being spoken.
“What is it you want?” he asked testily.
“In church the other day,” Kelolo said in Hawaiian, “I listened to Keoki read that beautiful passage from the Bible in which this man begat that man, and the other man begat another man.” The big chief’s face was radiant with pleasant memory of the Biblical message which Hawaiians loved above all other. “The Begats,” they called it among themselves.
Abner had long been curious about this partiality for the chapter in Chronicles, for he felt sure the Hawaiians could not understand it. “Why do you like that passage so much?” he probed.
Kelolo was embarrassed, and looked about to see if anyone was listening. Then he confessed somewhat sheepishly, “There is much in the Bible we do not understand. How could we? We don’t know the many things the white man knows. But when we hear ‘The Begats,’ it is like music to our ears, Makua Hale, because it sounds just like our own family histories, and for once we can feel as if we, too, were part of the Bible.”
“What do you mean, family histories?” Abner asked.
“That is what I came to see you about. I see you at work translating the Bible into my language, and we appreciate your hard work. Malama and I were wondering, if before she dies … No, Makua Hale, she is not well. We wondered if you would write down for us in English our family history. We are brother and sister, you know.”
“I know,” Abner mumbled.
“I am the last one who knows the family history,” Kelolo said. “When Keoki should have been learning it, he was learning about God. Now he is too old to memorize the way I did when I was studying to be a kahuna.”
Abner, a learned man, instantly saw the value of preserving old fables, and asked, “How does a family history sound, Kelolo?”
“I want you to write it as if Keoki were saying it. I am doing this for him, so that he will know who he is.”
“How does it begin?” Abner pressed.
It was dark in the grass house, with only one feeble whale-oil lamp swaying with its retinue of shadows, when Kelolo, seated cross-legged on the floor, began: “I am Keoki, the son of Kelolo who came to Maui with Kamehameha the Great; who was the son of Kanakoa, the King of Kona; who was the son of Kanakoa, the King of Kona who sailed to Kauai; who was the son of Kelolo, the King of Kona who died in the volcano; who was the son of Kelolo, the King of Kona who stole Kekela-alii from Oahu; who was the son of …”
After Abner had listened for a while, his curiosity as a scholar overcame his initial boredom at this tedious and probably imaginary ritual. “How did you memorize this genealogy?” he asked.
“An alii who doesn’t know his ancestry has no hope of position in Hawaii,” Kelolo explained. “I spent three years memorizing every branch of my family. The kings of Kona are descended, you know, from the …”
“Are these genealogies real, or made up?” Abner asked bluntly.
Kelolo was amazed at the question. “Made up, Makua Hale? It is by these that we live. Why do you suppose Malama is the Alii Nui? Because she can trace her ancestry far back to the second canoe that brought our family to Hawaii. Her ancestor was the High Priestess Malama who came in that second canoe. My name goes back to the first canoe from Bora Bora, for my ancestor was the High Priest of that canoe, Kelolo.”
Abner suppressed a smile as the illiterate chief before him tried to establish relations with some mythical event that must have occurred ten centuries before, if at all. He thought of his own family, in Marlboro. His mother knew when her ancestors reached Boston, but no one could recall when the Hales had got there, and here was a man who could not even write, claiming …
“You say you can remember the canoes in which your people came?”
“Of course! It was the same canoe on each trip.”
“How can you remember that?” Abner demanded sharply.
“Our family has always known its name. It was the canoe Wait-for-the-West-Wind. It had Kelolo as navigator, Kanakoa as king, Pa at one paddle and Malo at the other. Kupuna was the astronomer and Kelolo’s wife Kelani was aboard. The canoe was eighty feet long by your measures and the voyage took thirty days. We have always known these things about the canoe.”
“You mean a little canoe like that one at the pier? How many people did you mention. Seven, eight? In a canoe like that?” Abner was contemptuous of the
“It was a double canoe, Makua Hale, and it carried not eight people but fifty-eight.”
Abner was dumfounded, but once more his historical sense was excited, and he wished to know more about the myths of these strange people. “Where did the canoe come from?” he asked.
“From Bora Bora,” Kelolo said.
“Oh, yes, you mentioned that name before. Where is it?”
“Near Tahiti,” Kelolo said simply.
“Your people came in a canoe from Tahiti …” Abner dropped the question and said, “I suppose the family history ends there?”
“Oh, no!” Kelolo said proudly. “That is not even the halfway mark.”
This was too much for Abner, and he stopped abruptly calling it a family history. He realized that he had got hold of one of the classic myths of the Hawaiian islands, and he said bluntly, “I’ll copy it down for you, Kelolo. I would like to hear the story.” He adjusted the swinging lamp, took fresh sheets of paper, and laid aside for some nights his Bible translation. “Now tell me very slowly,” he said, “and don’t leave out anything.”
In the darkness Kelolo began to chant:
“The time of the birth of the tabu chief,
The time when the bold one first saw light,
At first dimly like the rising of the moon
In the season of the Little Eyes in the ancient past.
The great god Kane went into the goddess Wai’ololi
And the offspring of light were born, the bringers of men,
Akiaki who dragged the islands from the sea
And gentle La’ila’i who made the flowers and the birds,
And in the evening of the long day Akiaki knew his sister,
And the man was born, bringer of honor and war …”
And as Kelolo chanted the historic summary of his people the little room was filled with the clash of battle, the birth of gods, the abduction of beautiful women and the explosions of ancient volcanoes. Men in yellow capes, carrying spears, marched from one lava flow to another; queens fought for their children’s rights and brave men perished in storms. In time Abner fell under the spell of the fabulous events, these made-up memories of a race, and when Kelolo and Malama and the canoe Wait-for-the-West-Wind made their second journey from Bora Bora to Hawaii the little missionary caught a momentary thrill of the vast ocean and its perils as Kelolo, sitting in the darkness, chanted what purported to be the song of directions for that imaginary voyage:
“Wait for the west wind, wait for the west wind,
Then sail to Nuku Hiva of the dark bays
To find the constant star.
Hold to it, hold to it
Though the eyes grow dim with heat.”
But whenever Abner found his mind prepared to accept some small aspect of the narrative as true, ridiculous legendary events intruded, like Kelolo’s account of how his ancestor in Bora Bora left for the trip north at the height of a hurricane, with waves forty feet high.
“Imagine a Hawaiian canoe even venturing out of port in a strong wind!” Abner laughed to Jerusha as he recounted some of the more fantastic passages in the history. “Just look! Right here we have more than forty generations of supposedly historic characters. Now if you allot twenty years to each generation, and that’s conservative, Kelolo wants us to believe that his ancestors came here more than eight hundred years ago and then went back to get a second canoeload. Impossible!”
When Kelolo finished his genealogy—128 generations in all—Abner prudently made a copy of what he termed “this primitive and imaginary poem” and sent it to Yale College, where it formed the basis for most accounts of Hawaiian mythology; scholars appreciated in particular the detailed descriptions of the conflict between the Bora Bora god Kane and the Havaiki god Koro. Abner himself had slight regard for his work, and when he summoned Keoki to present the original he said condescendingly, “Your father claims it’s a family history.”
“It is,” Keoki bristled.
“Now, Keoki! More than a hundred and twenty-five generations! Nobody can remember …”
“Kahunas can,” Keoki said stubbornly.
“You sound as if you were defending the kahunas,” Abner suggested.
“In the recitation of family histories, I am,” Keoki replied.
“But this is ridiculous … mythology … fantasy.” Abner slapped the manuscript with disdain.
“It is our book,” Keoki said, clutching it to his bosom. “The Bible is your book, and these memories are our book.”
“How dare you, a man who presumes to ask when he will be made a minister?”
“Why is it, Reverend Hale, that we must always laugh at our book, but always revere yours?”
“Because my Book, as you improperly call it, is the divine word of God, while yours is a bundle of myths.”
“Are ‘The Begats’ any more true than the memories of the kahunas?” Keoki challenged.
“True?” Abner gasped, his temper rising with his astonishment. “One is the divinely revealed Word of the Lord. The other …” He paused in contempt and ended, “Good heavens, do you consider them equal?”
“I think there is much in the Old Testament that is merely the work of kahunas, nothing more,” Keoki said firmly. Then, to repay Abner for his arrogance, he asked in confidence, “Tell me, Reverend Hale, don’t you honestly think that Ezekiel was mostly kahuna?”
“You had better go,” Abner snapped icily, but he felt some shame for having goaded the boy, so he put his arm about his shoulder and pointed to a canoe on the beach. “Keoki,” he reasoned quietly, “surely you must know that a canoe like that could not carry fifty-eight people for thirty days … all the way from Tahiti.”
Keoki moved so that he could see the broad, silvery passageway that lay between Lanai Island and Kahoolawe, leading south. “Reverend Hale, do you recall the name of that stretch of water?”
“Don’t they call it Keala-i-kahiki?” Abner replied.
“And have you ever heard the name of that point at Kahoolawe?”
“No.”
“It’s likewise Keala-i-kahiki Point. What do you suppose Keala-i-kahiki means?”
“Well,” Abner reflected. “Ke means the; ala means road; i means to; and I don’t know what kahiki means.”
“You know that what we call k, the people to the south call t. Now what does kahiki mean?”
Against his will, Abner formed the older word, of which kahiki was a late corruption. “Tahiti,” he whispered. “The Way to Tahiti.”
“Yes,” Keoki said. “If you sail from Lahaina, pass through Keala-i-kahiki Strait and take your heading from Keala-i-kahiki Point, you will reach Tahiti. My ancestors often sailed that way. In canoes.” And the proud young man was gone.
But Abner refused to accept such claims, and by consulting many Hawaiians he proved to his satisfaction that the word kahiki meant not Tahiti but any distant place, so he added his own note to the Yale manuscript: “Keala-i-kahiki may be translated as ‘The Path to Far Places’ or ‘The Beyond.’ ” Then, as if to prove that Abner was right, the Hawaiian captain of Kelolo’s ship Thetis got drunk, stayed in his cabin during a storm, and allowed his sturdy old veteran of many seas to climb upon the rocks off Lahaina, where it rotted through the years, a visible proof that Hawaiians could not even navigate in their own waters, let alone penetrate distant oceans.
IT WAS WHILE Abner was drafting a letter to Honolulu, advising the mission board that his assistant Keoki Kanakoa was behaving strangely, so that perhaps the board ought to consider Keoki’s reassignment to some post of lesser importance, that the news was shouted through the still morning air that was to disrupt Lahaina for many days. Pupali’s oldest daughter came screaming to Jerusha’s school: “Iliki! Iliki! It has arrived! The Carthaginian!” And before the startled Jerusha could intercede, the bright-eyed beauty had leaped over the bench and dashed madly away with her sister. Together they swam out to the sleek whaler, with the dark sides and the white stripe running lengthwise
But he was interrupted. Kelolo dispatched three policemen to the Carthaginian under orders to drag Pupali’s daughters off to jail, but when they climbed aboard the whaler, Mister Wilson met them on the afterdeck, shouting, “Get away! I’m warning you!”
“We come fetch wahines,” the officers explained.
“You’ll get broken jaws!” Mister Wilson threatened, whereupon one of the policemen shoved out his elbows, knocked the first mate aside and started for the after hatchway. Mister Wilson, thrown off balance for a moment, tried to lunge at the intruder, but another of the policemen grabbed him, which became the signal for a general scuffle, in which, because most of the men were ashore, the three rugged policemen appeared to be winning.
“What the hell’s going on here?” came a roar from the lower deck, followed by a lithe form, tall and muscular, leaping up the ladder. Captain Hoxworth was dressed only in a pair of tight sailor’s pants, and when he saw what was happening on his ship, he lowered his head, lunged at the first policeman and shouted, “Into the ocean with ’em!”
The agile officer saw Hoxworth coming, sidestepped with agility, and brought his right forearm viciously across the back of the captain’s neck, sending him sprawling across the deck, where the New Englander cut his lower lip on his own teeth. Wiping the blood onto the back of his hand, Hoxworth glimpsed the red stain, and from his knees cried ominously, “All right!”
Rising slowly, testing his bare feet on the decking, Hoxworth moved cautiously toward the policeman who had pole-axed him. With a deceptive lunge to the right, followed by a snakelike twist to the left, Hoxworth brought his powerful right fist into the policeman’s face. Then, with the Hawaiian’s head momentarily snapped back, Hoxworth doubled up his own head and shoulders and drove into the man’s stomach like a battering ram. The surprised policeman staggered backward and fell onto the deck, whereupon Hoxworth began kicking viciously at his face, but remembering, from the pain in his bare feet as they crashed into the man’s head, that he wore no shoes, he quickly grabbed a belaying pin and started to thrash the fallen islander, thundering solid blows onto the man’s head and crotch, until the policeman fainted. Still Hoxworth continued hammering him until sounds from other parts of the deck called him to activity there.