Читать книгу Down Under with the Prince - Everard Cotes - Страница 8

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In warm, moist atmosphere, and the tropical light that glares beneath a cloudy sky, the Renown dropped anchor in the open roadstead off the rocky coast of Honolulu. Around the ship were depths of clear, iridescent blue, with streaks of brilliant green where the water shallowed inshore. Further on, a line of low, white breakers bounded a green patchwork of undulating cultivation which sloped upwards, with occasional ploughed fields of red, volcanic soil, towards a cloud-topped horizon of mountains in the interior of the island. Immediately overhead, showing black against the clouds, half-a-dozen flying boats and aeroplanes rattled a cheery American welcome. The smoke of the light-cruiser and dozen destroyers which had met the Renown at sea and escorted her to anchorage, drifted in the heavy air, blurring the cranes and derricks of the inner harbour.

Salutes banged off. Flags dipped and rose. Words of command rang through the battle-cruiser. A guard-of-honour of marines, lined up in white uniforms on the quarter-deck, came with a clank to attention. The notes of the United States National Anthem floated out, as the American Governor and other local authorities came aboard to pay visits of ceremony to the Prince. It was our second glimpse of Imperial America. It is just twenty-two years since the United States, after some preliminary coquetting with Queen Liliuokalani, took up this white man's burden in the Pacific under the style of a Territory; and her guests, more familiar with the conception, looked with interest at the fringe of the experiment. It seemed immensely prosperous and contented. Its obvious aspects were those of a principal base of America's naval power and the bourn of an endless tide of tourists, for whom alone the place might exist with profit. These naturally exposed a social life almost exclusively American. Hotels, newspapers, warehouses, factories, and stores were managed by Americans. Only on the beach among the bobbing craft of the breakers were the island originals conspicuous, at home in an element they love. Elsewhere they seemed to form a brown undercurrent of the Hawaiian world, content, in their Polynesian way, with a little so it was easily come by. They are still, one gathers, much governed and influenced by the missionaries to whom they owe their Christian faith. Like the North American Indians they are fast dying out. Like the Burmese they are content to be supplanted in their own labour market by others—Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Filipinos. Doubtless there are Hawaiian boys at American Universities, Hawaiian professional men, Hawaiian merchant princes, cultivated Hawaiians who read Bergson and Bernard Shaw and are the product of a generation of progress; but our opportunity was too brief to find them. It is hardly surprising that the Hawaiian was not greatly in evidence, when one was told that there are but 22,000 of pure race, against 110,000 Japanese for example, 31,000 Americans and British and 23,000 Chinese, with a considerable Filipino element, and more than a flavouring of Spanish.

On a large open space upon the wharf, surrounded by the substantial stone buildings of a prosperous modern harbour, the Prince landed to receive his welcome to the island. On one side of the square was an up-to-date guard-of-honour of United States infantry at attention, every button gleaming, every uniform stitch identical, with that felicity of neatness so characteristic of American kit, as His Royal Highness shook hands with its commanding officer, and walked down the line. On the other side was a motley gathering of his own fellow-countrymen and women, residents of the island, who had served with the British Forces during the war, and had now gathered, in varying costumes much mingled with khaki bearing many a worn decoration, to do honour to their King's eldest son, whom they cheered lustily. On the third side of the square the indigenous element was represented by pleasant, brown-faced young men in blue uniforms of modern cut, over which they wore brilliant red and yellow tippets of priceless "Oo" and "Iiwi" feathers, handed down from days gone by, when they were insignia of Hawaiian royalty. Their function, on behalf of the remaining representatives of the ancient dynasty, was to garland the British Prince with "lais," ropes of close-strung pink carnations and scarlet ilima flowers, bringers of good-luck, and to present him with a polished brown calibash, the size of a foot-bath, adze-hewn, a hundred years ago, from hard-wood felled in the interior, and now filled with a luscious assortment of bananas, mangoes, loquats, paw-paws, water-lemons, pineapples, bread-fruit, and crimson mountain-apples, symbols which made him free of the good things of the island.

Subsequently the Prince returned the official visits paid to him, and was introduced to various local institutions. His reception by the American Governor was in the spacious, many-windowed hall of the Iolani palace, where an elected assembly of Hawaiian representatives now prosaically meets in what were once such picturesque places of authority as the king's bed-chamber and the queen's boudoir. On the walls a number of mellowing oil-portraits, depicting stout, brown, benevolent monarchs, uncomfortable but doubtless impressive in the tight fashions of the Victorian age, mutely testified to the splendours of the past. They seemed to look down at the function with mingled sorrow and superiority, as those who could have given an entertainment committee points on such an occasion as this.

Famous the world over is the surf-riding of Honolulu's wide Waikiki beach. To surf-ride with the joy of confidence it is necessary to have an acute sense of balance; it is even more necessary to be able to swim. The base of the exercise is a flat surf-board, the shape of a snow-shoe, with which the rider swims out to meet the approaching breaker. This, with bewildering agility, he then mounts and strides, and the breaker carries him poised and dramatic to the beach. The adventure was most graceful when it succeeded, but it often ended in a considerable tumble in which the swimmer was lucky to escape a bang upon the head from his own capsized means of support.

The Prince was naturally enthusiastic for an initiation, and came off in the end passing well, to the delight of the heterogeneous crowd that had assembled in bathing costumes appropriate to the warmth of the occasion to see him undergo it. Cinematograph men, in swaying surf-boats, made a valiant effort for pictures alongside the swimmers, but, for once upon the tour, were handsomely discomfited, for the rollers of the Waikiki beach are no respecters of public purposes.

In the evening, H.R.H. was taken to an official ball, given by the Governor, in the spacious town armoury, where the principal white residents, now costumed in the garments of civilization, were formally presented beneath a forest of national flags, amongst which predominated the Stars and Stripes of the United States and the combined Union Jack and tricolor of Honolulu. The ball was much as other balls, but it had an unusual pendant. Before midnight struck the Prince was spirited away ten miles across the island, through long shadowy aisles of pillared cabbage-palms, shining ghost-like in dim starlight, beneath dense foliage of bread-fruit, mango, and coco-nut trees, where sweet-scented aloes perfumed the warm, still night, and on through grey cuttings in volcanic rock, to the country-house of Mr. Robert Atkinson, to whom had occurred the excellent idea of affording him an opportunity of seeing a real "Hookupu" gathering, now a very rare event amongst the dwindling race of Hawaiians. Stout, white-robed, brown-faced ladies, bearing the coloured, feather-tipped sticks of royal state, and chanting the "aloa" of welcome, lined the path leading to the deep-foliaged "ouhani" tree of happiness which shaded the front of the bungalow, a self-sown visitant that every Hawaiian prizes, provided only that it has not been artificially planted, and that it is not at the back of the residence. Here, in a large and reckless hole in the well-kept lawn, the entire carcases of four pigs, quantities of chickens, fish, and sweet potatoes, wrapped closely in green "ti" leaves, were in process of being roasted by Hawaiian cooks, the heat being provided by boulders, previously made red-hot, with which the sides and bottom of the pit had been lined. Fruit was piled high in golden profusion, upon low, wooden platforms around which, upon mats on the ground, the Prince and other guests took their seats. Princess Kawananakoa, a lady of fine figure, in middle life, dressed in the conventional garments of Bond Street, representative of the Hawaiian Royal house, was given a place of honour next to the guest of the occasion. Hawaiian soldiers in yellow robes, with scarlet head-pieces that might have been patterned on the helmet of Achilles, and gold-tipped "tabu" staves, the size of broom-sticks, which represented life-and-death authority under the old régime, took up stations in the background. Immense flower-garlands were hung round the visitors' necks and they were served, upon plates of "ti" leaves, with savoury viands from the still smoking pit.

Then from gourd-lutes of a weird band of musicians, tinkled out a soft refrain. Suddenly, from the dim shelter of an aerial-rooted banyan tree, human voices reinforced the chant, and four Hawaiian damsels, voluminously clad in flaming yellow feather-mantles, ending in deep ruffs over the ankles, leapt gracefully upon a mat in front, where they were joined by two similarly caparisoned and equally agile male partners with whom they proceeded to dance. The performance was like an Indian nautch run mad. The heads and busts of the dancers remained almost stationary, thus forming a fulcrum around which the rest of their persons seemed to gyrate, with serpentine arms, india-rubber hips, and racing feet, the dancers, all the time, pouring out doleful melodies to which the gourd-lutes twanged in solemn harmony. One could almost see, as the weird notes rose and fell, Polynesian folk, in frail, palm-wood canoes, blown out to sea by fierce Eastern typhoons, from fisheries on the far coasts of the Malay, to perish mournfully and alone, in the vast empty spaces of the Pacific, only an occasional wanderer, through the centuries, finding refuge in some rare isle, and there building up a race of mingled blood, whose high cheek-bones, soft tongue, swaying dances and outrigged boats, speak of a Mongolian origin and an Eastern home.

Another expedition, on which the Prince was taken before leaving Honolulu, was to a grass-grown hill, once the scene of human sacrifice, where a pageant was being held in honour of the centenary of the arrival in Honolulu of the Christian missionaries, who have played so important a part in the history of the island. Here he saw half-naked folk, with conch-shell trumpets, similar to those in use to-day at festivals at the mouth of the Ganges, also processions of queer idol images that would not have jarred the decorative scheme of a Durga-Puja celebration in Hindustan. Scenes were here enacted, in which shapely brown maidens, clad in ancient, indigenous paper garments, reminiscent of Japan, took part. European missionaries, some of them lineal descendants of those who landed in Honolulu from the brig Thaddeus in 1820, also appeared in the garments of their predecessors of a hundred years ago. One of the incidents depicted was the historical breaking up and burning of the island idols in the days of Queen Kaahumanu, widow of King Kamshamcha, "the lonely one." There was a tense moment in the audience when the first image had to be flung upon the ground, for superstition dies hard even after a century's banning; but the image was flung and went into fifty pieces, at the feet of civilization. Christianity is now the only religion actively practised in the island, but the Hawaiian prefers to be on the safe side in case the old powers of darkness should not be altogether dead. He is not a whole-hearted iconoclast.