Hawaii (114 page)

By January 15, 1900, eight substantial areas had been completely razed and innumerable rats that might have carried their infected fleas to uncontaminated sections of the city were destroyed; and it seemed as if a general eruption of the plague had been mercifully prevented. Three thousand Chinese were already in refugee camps from which they could not spread contagion, but unknown thousands were hiding out in the narrow warrens to which they had fled and they now began to accomplish what the rats could not. As the

FROM THE STARVING VILLAGE

571

reports came into headquarters that night, each with tales of fresh death and new infection, it became hideously apparent to Dr. Whipple that the epidemic was not halted and that the fate of Honolulu hung in a precarious balance.

On the sixteenth he convened his doctors again, a group of exhausted men who understood how fearful the next week could be, for by their own inspection they had proved that the plague stood poised in upper Chinatown, ready to explode across the entire city, and they knew that on this day they must either take final steps to drive it back or surrender the general community to its ravages; and the only cure they knew was fire. Dr. Whipple was first to speak: "Our teams found twenty-nine new cases yesterday."

"Oh, hell!" Dr. Harvey cried in acute frustration. He folded his arms on the table and bowed his head upon them, retiring from this part of the discussion.

"All the cases this week, and most of the deaths, have been concentrated toward the mountains," Whipple explained, pointing to a map, "and we can thank God that they seem to be leading out of the city rather than in toward the heart."

"That's the only good news we've had," snapped an older doctor who had found seven cases in the mountain area.

Dr. Whipple hesitated, then said, "Our obligation is clear."

"You mean to burn that entire outlying area?"

"I do."

"Jesus, they'll explode. They just won't permit it, Whipple."

Dr. Whipple pressed his hands to his forehead and pleaded: "Have you an alternative?"

"Look, I'm not arguing one way or another," the older man explained. "I'm just saying . . . Hell, Whipple, there must be five hundred homes in that area!"

"And every one infected with the bubonic plague."

"I want no part of this decision!" the older doctor protested.

"Nor me!" another cried. "Christ, Whipple, that's half the city!"

From his position with his head on his arms, Dr. Harvey asked harshly, "If your arm is infected with blood poisoning that is certain to destroy your entire body, what do you do?"

There was no answer, so after a moment he slammed his fist onto the table and shouted, "Well, what in hell do you do? You cut it off! Burn those areas. Now!"

"Only the government can make this decision," Whipple said in slow, terrified tones. "But it's got to make it."

"We are withdrawing from this meeting," two of the doctors warned. "Let it be recorded."

Dr. Harvey shouted, "And let it be recorded that I did not withdraw. Burn the goddamned city or perish."

On the eighteenth of January, 1900, the emergency committee decided to burn a very substantial area of Honolulu in a last prayerful attempt to save the general population, and when the doomed areas were marked in red two facts became apparent: they were not in the

572

HAWAII

center of town but in the residential district; and almost everyone who lived in the area was Chinese. Two members of the cabinet, as they faced the map, were in tears, and a man named Hewlett, who had a good deal of Hawaiian blood, asked, "Why does misery always fall on those least able to bear it?"

"You burn where the plague has fallen," a cabinet member named Hale replied. "And it's fallen on the Chinese."

"Stop this talk!" the chairman cried. "There's already an ugly rumor that we're burning Chinatown as punishment because the Fakes left the sugar fields. I don't wapt to hear any of that libel in this room. We're burning Chinatown because that's where the plague is."

Hewlett, part-Hawaiian, felt that he was being unduly hectored, so he asked, "Would you bum here," and he banged the haole areas of the map, "if that's where the plague was? Would you burn your own houses?"

"The plague didn't come to our houses," the chairman replied. "It came to the Chinese."

On the nineteenth of January the Fire Department gave all its men the day off and advised them to sleep as much as possible in preparation for a hard day's work on the twentieth. The Honolulu Mail in its edition that day reported: "We beg all citizens of our city to be especially alert tomorrow and to watch for flying sparks, because although the able laddies of our Fire Department have proved over and over again that they know how to set fire to one house and save the next, the very magnitude of the job they now face increases the ever-present danger of a general conflagration. Brooms and buckets of water should be at hand throughout the city."

When word of the proposed burning reached Chinatown, it created panic and many tried vainly to force their way through the cordons that kept everyone within the plague area. Those whose homes were to be razed were rounded up and solemnly marched away to a refugee camp on the slopes of Punchbowl, where they could look down at their doomed homes, and this last view of buildings which they had worked so hard to acquire inspired them with a dumb rage, and that night there were many unpleasant scenes. One Chinese who knew a little English rushed up to Mrs. John Janders, the supervisor of the Punchbowl camp, and screamed, "You doing this on purpose!"

"No," she said quietly, "it is the plague."

"No plague!" the furious Chinese cried. "Your husband own my store. He say all time, 'More rent! More rent!' I not pay so he decide to burn."

"No," Mrs. fanders argued reasonably. "Mr. Apaka, it is the

plague. Believe me, it would not otherwise be done." But the

Chinese knew better, and through the long night of January 19

they watched the mysterious lights of the city and waited in bitter-

> ness for the fires to begin.

FROM THE STARVING VILLAGE 573

Fortunately, the twentieth was a calm day with no wind that might have agitated the planned blaze. At eight in the morning the firemen, according to a schedule worked out to provide maximum protection for the rest of the city, poured liberal amounts of kerosene over a small shack diagonally across from where the Whipple mansion, burned earlier, had stood. The shack certainly merited destruction, for it had already caused the deaths of five plague victims and the illness of three others. At eight-ten a match was applied to the kerosene, and the filthy hovel exploded in flame.

As it blazed, a slight breeze started blowing from the northeast. It crept down from the mountains and as it funneled into the valleys that led into Honolulu it increased in speed, so that by the time it reached the flaming shack it was prepared to blow the sparks in exactly the opposite direction from that intended by the Fire Department. Within three minutes half a dozen shacks not on the list were ablaze, but they were easily evacuated and were of little value, so the fire fighters simply surrounded them and beat out any sparks that might escape toward the center of the city where property was of real value.

Then at eight-thirty the capricious wind blowing down from the hills arrived in an unpredicted gust and whipped a flurry of sparks high into the air. Fortunately, the land across from the fire had already been razed, so there was no danger of spreading the flames in that direction, but the wind seemed sent from hell, for it suddenly veered and deposited many active sparks on the large Congregational church that had been completed in 1884 directly across from where the old Whipple mansion had stood. The church had two soaring steeples, for the king had reasoned: "A man has two eyes so he can see better and two ears so he can hear better. My church has got to have two steeples so it can find God better." Now the steeples were in peril, and firemen noted that if any of the embers flamed to life on those tall spires, the rising wind would surely whip sparks clear across the areas previously burned and throw them down into the valuable center of the city, so two brave Hawaiians scrambled up the sides of the church seeking to reach the steeples, and one man arrived in time to stamp out the fires beginning on his, but the other did not, and when he pulled himself onto the upper ledge of his steeple, he found it already ablaze and he barely escaped.

In a few minutes the great tall church became a torch. Its bell plunged to the basement, clanging through the flames. The famous pipe organ, imported from London, melted into lumps of useless metal, and stained-glass windows crashed into the fire. As the church burned furiously in the morning wind, many who had helped build it with their dimes and personal labor gathered to weep. But what was most important was not the loss of the church, but the fact that its unusual height made it a target for every gust that blew down the valley, and even as the people gathered at its foot to mourn, far over their heads the wind was scattering a multitude of

sparks. Had the fire occurred at night, the sight would have been one of fairylike splendor, with stars of fire darting across the dark sky; but in an ominous daylight the passage of the flames occasioned no beauty and only dread. For they sped high in the air across the already burned-out areas, a few falling harmlessly on charred land but most flying on into the very heart of the city, where they descended upon dried-wood roofs, there to ignite the fires that were to destroy almost all of Chinatown. With Old Testament accuracy the embers which flew out from the Christian church fell only upon heathen homes. If the Christians of Honolulu had righteously planned to destroy every Chinese building in the city, they could have accomplished the fact no more skillfully than did the sparks erupting from their doomed church.

The first blaze in downtown Chinatown occurred at nine-forty, when a sizable ember fell upon a closely packed area of houses and ignited a central one. Gangs of firemen quickly surrounded the house to extinguish the fire, and after considerable effort succeeded in doing so; but while they were at that job, another ember struck a house of somewhat special nature. On the outside it looked like an ordinary home, but when it started to burn, all the Chinese nearby fled, and Hawaiian firemen alone were left to fight its flames.

"Come back!" an old Chinese man kept wailing in a language the firemen could not understand. Grabbing a young Chinese he shouted, "Tell them to come back!"

A group of daring Chinese hurried forward toward the burning house, grabbed the firemen by the hands and pulled them away. "Mo bertah you come back!" they yelled.

The firemen, who were terribly afraid of the Chinese after the troubles of the night before and who had been cautioned that the Orientals might attempt to riot when the burnings started, interpreted this strange behavior as the start of communal rioting, and stopped fighting the fire in order to protect themselves from the Chinese, and it was fortunate that they did so, for as they left, the house exploded. In a golden, smoky gasp of flame, the little house simply disintegrated, and then the firemen understood: it was one of the closed sheds in which some trivial Chinese merchant had kept his kerosene. But what the firemen did not understand was that the explosion, frightful though it had been, was merely the beginning of something worse; for now from the ruins a series of fantastic fiery rockets exploded through the city. Some threw stars into the air. Others pinwheeled through streets, and still others went up with a crazy, violent zigzag through the morning sky, falling at last on the roof of some new house, there to burn with vigor until its shingles too were ablaze; for the shed had harbored not only kerosene but also a store of fireworks for the Chinese New Year.

With the explosion of the shed, any hope of saving downtown Chinatown was lost, and for the next seven hours the anguished Chinese on the Punchbowl hillside, huddling behind the barbed

FROM THE STARVING VILLAGE 575

wire of their refugee camp, could spot the progress of the huge blaze from one of these kerosene dumps to the next. All day the little sheds exploded with violence, throwing their flames into new areas, and wherever the fire went, sooner or later it found out a horde of fireworks, and when they soared into the air with their burdens of flame they seemed invariably to fall back onto areas that were not yet ablaze. And to make the destruction of Chinatown certain, the vagrant wind kept blowing from its unusual quarter in the hills. By midafternoon, it was apparent that hardly a Chinese house in mid-city would be spared.

When it became obvious that all was doomed, the Chinese fell into panic. Old men who could barely walk after forty-five years of work in the cane fields began running into burning houses to salvage some item of family life which they prized above any other, and they soon appeared in the crowded streets hauling carts, or running with bamboo carrying-poles, each with some useless treasure. No one thought to bring blankets or food, both needed in the refugee camps, and soon the streets leading out from Chinatown were jammed with a miscellaneous horde: barefoot old women in blue smocks, men in laboring shirts, pretty young girls, their hair in braids, and round-faced babies. From a Japanese tea house two geisha girls, their faces ashen with talcum powder, hurried nervously in pin-toed, mincing steps that kept their brightly colored kimonos swaying in the smoke, while old Punti women hobbled behind on stubby feet. The pigtailed men tried to lug burdens which would have staggered horses and which soon staggered them. The escape routes became a litter of lost wealth and it was pitiful to see families who had never owned much, stooping as they ran, picking up valuables they had always coveted, only to abandon them later in the same breathless way as their owners had had to do.

Now the major tragedy of the day approached, for as the fleeing Chinese, with flame and firecracker at thejr back, sought to break out from Chinatown they ran into solid rows of impassive policemen whose merciless job it was to hold them back within the plague-ridden area. There was no intention whatever�absolutely none, the police commissioner later swore�to trap the Chinese within the fiery area, but there was an ironclad insistence that they move out by established routes that would take them not into the uninfected parts of Honolulu but into the barbed-wire refugee camps, where doctors could watch them for new outbreaks of the plague.