Hawaii (51 page)

"Iliki has an immortal soul," Jerusha said firmly. "Exactly as you and I."

"You mean to claim that Iliki . . . wahine i Pupali . . . like you or me?"

"Exactly like you, Malama. Exactly like me."

"I cannot believe it," Malama said. "She has always gone to the ships."

"It is our job to stop her. To stop all the girls."

Malama would do nothing that night, but on the next day she assembled the alii then in residence, and Reverend and Mrs. Hale presented their arguments, with Jerusha pleading: "You can tell a good town by the way it protects its babies and young girls. You can tell a good alii by the way in which he protects women. You are not good alii if you permit your own daughters to go out to the ships. In London the good alii try to stop such things. In Boston, too."

Kelolo contradicted this assertion by pointing out: "Kekau-ike-a-ole sailed on a whaler and he got to both London and Boston and he has often told us of how there were special houses filled with girls. Everywhere he went there were such houses."

"But the good alii in all cities try to control this vice," Jerusha argued bitterly.

It was Abner, however, who delivefed the aching blow. "Do you know what happens if you alii of Lahaina permit your girls to be debauched in this way?" he asked ominously.

"What happens, Makua Hale?" Malama asked, for she trusted him.

"When the ships sail back home, the men laugh at Hawaii."

There was a long silence as this ugly accusation was digested, for the alii of Hawaii were proud people, desperately hungry for the world's approval. Finally, Malami asked cautiously, "Would the alii of Boston allow their girls to swim out to a Hawaiian ship?"

"Of course not," Kelolo snapped. "The water is too cold."

There was no laughter, for this was an honest observation, and Abner quickly added, "Kelolo is correct. The water in Boston is not so sweet and warm as here, but even if it were, no girls would be allowed to swim out to Hawaiian ships. The alii of Boston would be ashamed if that happened."

Malama asked quietly, "Do you think the sailors laugh at us, Makua Hale?"

"I know they do, Malama. Do you remember the whaler Carthaginian when it was here? I was aboard the Carthaginian on the whaling grounds, and the sailors were laughing about Honolulu."

"Ah, but Honolulu is known to be an evil place," Malama admitted. "That is why I will not live there. That's why the king keeps his capital here at Lahaina."

"And they laughed at Lahaina," Abner insisted.

"That is bad," Malama frowned. After a while she asked, "What should we do?"

Abner replied, "You should build a fort, by the roads, and each

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night at sunset a drum should beat, and any sailor who is ashore should then be arrested and kept in the fort till morning. And any girl who swims out to ships should be put in jail, too."

"Such laws are too harsh," Malama said, and she dismissed the meeting, but when the other alii had gone she took Jerusha aside and asked querulously, "Do you think the sailors laugh at us, because of the girls?"

"I laugh at you!" Jerusha said firmly. "To think of people debauching their own daughters!"

"But they are not alii," Malama insisted.

"You are the conscience of the people," Jerusha replied.

That night the Hales argued long as to whether the daughters of Pupali should be admitted back into the mission school, and Abner was for dismissing them permanently, but Jerusha held that they should be given another chance, and when the John Goodpasture left the roads, the four delinquent girls, dressed neatly in new dresses, came penitently back. The more Jerusha preached to them about the miserableness of their sin, the more heartily they agreed. But when, some weeks later, a child heralded the arrival of the whaler Vashti with the exciting cry, "Vashti iron hook fall now, plenty kelamoku," the four girls bolted again, and that night Abner insisted that the older three at least be expelled. They were, and since these were the years when whalers came to Lahaina with increasing frequency�seventeen were to arrive in 1824�the three older daughters of Pupali did a good business. They no longer had to go out to ships, for they became the dancers at Murphy's grog shop and kept little rooms aft of the small dance floor, where they were permitted to keep half of the coins they earned.

Iliki, the fairest of the daughters, was allowed to stay in the mission school, and under Jerusha's most careful guidance grew to understand the Bible and to forswear whaling ships. She was slim for a Hawaiian girl, with very long hair and flashing eyes. When she smiled, her handsome white teeth illuminated her face, and Jerusha could appreciate why it was that men wanted her. "When she is twenty," Jerusha said, "we will marry her to some Christian Hawaiian, and you mark my words, Abner, she'll be the best wife in the islands."

When Jerusha spoke thus, Abner was not listening, for he had erected for himself, out of rough ends of timber gathered here and there�for nothing in Lahaina was more precious than wood�a small table upon which papers were spread in seven or eight neat piles, each with a sea shell placed on it to preserve order. For he had begun, in co-operation with the other missionaries throughout the islands, the work which would be his most lasting contribution to Hawaii. He was translating the Bible into Hawaiian and sending his pages as they were finished to the printer in Honolulu, where they were being published a little at a time.

Nothing that Abner applied himself to in these years gave him greater pleasure, for he kept before him his Greek and Hebrew texts,

Cornelius Schrevelius' Greek-Latin Lexicon, plus those versions of the Bible he had studied at Yale. He was happy, like a plowman who turns furrows in a field without stones, or a fisherman who sets his nets for known returns. Usually he worked with Keoki, laboring over every passage with the most minute attention, and as the years passed he reached those two books of the Bible which he cherished most. The first was Proverbs, which seemed to him a distillation of all the knowledge man could hope to know. It was especially appropriate for Hawaii, since its crystallizations were in simple language, easily understood and long remembered, and when he came to the glorious closing pages in which King Lemuel describes the ideal woman, his pen truly flew along the ruled pages, for it seemed to him that Lemuel spoke specifically of Jerusha Bromley: "Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. . . . She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her food from afar. . . . She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. . . . Strength and honor are her clothing; . . . Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all."

When he finished translating Proverbs he left the last pages exposed, so that Jerusha might read them, and he was disappointed that she did not take notice of them, for she had learned not to interfere with his Biblical studies; so at last he was forced to hand her the pages of King Lemuel's conclusions, and she read them quietly, saying only, "A woman would do well to mark those pages." He was constrained to cry, "They were written about you, Jerusha!" but he said nothing, and put them along with the rest and forwarded them to Honolulu.

In the decades that were to follow, more than six committees would have occasion to polish this first translation of the Bible into Hawaiian, and in the portions contributed from the big island of Hawaii, or from Kauai, or Honolulu, the scholars frequently found understandable errors in translation or emphasis. But in the portions for which Abner Hale had been responsible, they rarely found an error. One expert, with degrees from both Yale and Harvard, said, "It was as if he had been in turn a Hebrew and a Greek and a Hawaiian." Abner did not hear this praise, for it came long after he was dead, but he reaped his full enjoyment from his great task when it came time to translate Ezekiel, for there was something about this strange book�a contrapuntal melody of the most banal observations and the most exalted personal revelations�that spoke directly to him and epitomized his life.

He loved the recurring passages in which Ezekiel, who must have been a rather boring man most of the time, laboriously set down the specific dates on which God spoke to him: "Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day . . . that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. . . . The word of

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the Lord came expressly unto Ezekiel." The assurance with which Ezekiel spoke on all matters, and his confidence that the Lord personally directed him, gave Abner great consolation, and whenever he copied out Ezekiel's blunt statements of his correspondence with God, he felt that he, too, was participating in it: "In the sixth year, in the sixth month, in the fifth day . . . , as I sat in mine house, and the elders of Judah sat before me, . . . the hand of the Lord God fell there upon me." It was, to Abner Hale, clarity itself that the prophet Ezekiel, sitting in counsel with the elders of Judah, was markedly similar to the prophet Abner, sitting in counsel with the alii of Mam, and if the latter prophet sometimes spoke with an authority that the Hawaiians had difficulty in accepting, Abner felt that the elders of Judah must have had the same difficulty with the preachments of Ezekiel. Yet there it was in imperishable writing: "Again the word of the Lord came expressly unto me." A man required no greater authority than that.

IN 1825, Jerusha had a second baby, the saucy little girl Lucy, who was in later years to marry Abner Hewlett, whom her father had also delivered. As Kelolo's big church neared completion, a serious problem confronted Abner, for he was determined above all things that when it was dedicated the Hawaiians who entered it must be dressed as proper Christians. "There will be no nakedness in this church," he announced. "There will be no wreaths of maile branches, with their distracting fragrance. Women will wear dresses. Men will wear pants."

But even as he promulgated the law, he wondered where enough cloth would be found to convert these heathens into Christians. The alii, with access to cargoes from China, were well taken care of. They had worn proper clothing from the first, and in recent months many visiting naval captains had been astonished by the gigantic and solemn noblemen who greeted them at the small stone pier. "They would do credit to the city of London," one Englishman reported to his superiors. "The men were dressed in black coats, proper trousers and yellow capes. The women wore strange but becoming dresses with af yoke at the neck, and an unbroken fall of expensive material from the tops of their bosoms to their ankles. When they moved, men and women alike seemed like gods, so straight and arrogant were they. They confided to me privately that a missionary from Boston had told them how to greet incoming ships properly, and if he has done as well with their souls as with their deportment he is to be commended, but this latter I doubt, for I have rarely seen so much open debauchery in any principal port as at Lahaina."

It was cloth for the poor people that worried Abner, and then from the coasts of China appeared his salvation. The hermaphrodite brig Thetis returned from its sandalwood expedition loaded with wares for sale in local markets. Captain Retire Janders, already com-

mitted to selling his ship to Kelolo, had determined to enter the trading business with a flourish and had gambled every farthing of his sandalwood sale in Canton on things he thought the Hawaiians might like. It was therefore an exciting moment when he opened his store next to Murphy's grog shop and started unloading the bales from China.

For men there were sturdy gabardine, shimmering silk shirts, knee-length black pants such as had been popular in France thirty years earlier, silk-ribbed stockings and shoes with fancy buckles. There were cigars from Manila, brandies from Paris, and one entire box filled with ready-made suits of which Captain Janders had told the Canton tailors, "Make each one big enough to hold three Chinese. These are for Hawaiians."

For the women the captain's lures were irresistible: bolts of fine brocades, lengths of satin, whole dresses made of velvet, yard upon yard of green and purple cloth, with boxes of lace edging. There were glittering beads, and bracelets and rings; fans for hot nights, and perfumes from the Spice Islands.

What the alii particularly prized, however, were the full-length mirrors, transshipped from France, and the massive mahogany furniture constructed in Canton from English patterns. Each noble family felt that it had to have a secretary, with two round rests for lamps and numerous pigeonholes for filing papers. The delicate chinaware was also appreciated, especially that in blue and white, but more treasured than tableware were the gleaming white chamber pots, decorated with raised roses, etched in pink and blue and green.

And for the common people there were hundreds of bolts of turkey-red cloth, with some brown and white samples intermixed. It was this commodity that attracted Reverend Hale and led him to propose the strategy that laid the foundation for the Janders fortune.

"You have many bolts of good cloth here, Captain," Abner pointed out. "I have long dreamed of having my congregation properly clothed when the church opens. But the people have no money. Will you extend them credit?"

Captain Janders tugged at the rim of beard that still fringed his face and said, "Reverend Hale, long ago you taught me to revere the Bible. I have got to stand on Proverbs 22, verse 26: 'Be not thou one of them . . . that are sureties for debts.' Thus saith the Lord, and it's good enough for me. CashI Cash! The rule of this establishment."

"I know that cash is a good rule," Abner began.

"The Lord's rule," Janders repeated.

Abner said: "But it doesn't have to be money cash, does it, Captain?"

Janders said: "Well ... if something could be converted . . ."

Abner said: "A lot of whalers come into these roads, Captain. What do they need that my natives could supply?"