Hawaii (61 page)

"Oh, Malamal Malamal Cherished of my heart, Malamal" In his misery he wept for some moments. Then with superhuman resolution he took the stick again and placed its dulled point next hi? nose and in the corner of his right eye. With a sudden inward thrust followed by a lateral pull, he scooped away his eye and threw it onto the grave. Then he fainted.

It was ten days before the powerful chief Kelolo Kanakoa reappeared in Lahaina. He came walking erect, proudly, but removed, as if he were still in contact with his gods. About his shoulders he wore a lei of maile leaves, its fragrance reminding him of his de—

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parted wife. His right eye socket, a horrible wound, was covered with morning-glory leaves, bound in place by alona and ti. His cheeks were scarred with ugly blisters and his lips, when closed, were thick with wounds; when opened they disclosed a lacerated jaw. He moved like a man set free from grief, a man who walked with love, and as he passed, his Hawaiian friends, knowing what he had done, stepped aside with respect; but his American friends stopped with horror, wondering how he could have borne so much.

It was important that he warn Reverend Hale, but when Jerusha saw him she screamed, but he was not offended, saying through lisping lips, "The whistling wind is coming. It always does at the death of an alii."

"What is the wind?" Jerusha asked, trying to compose herself, for she realized that he was speaking with great conviction.

"The whistling wind is coming," he repeated and stalked off, a man apart.

When Jerusha told her husband of the message, and of Kelolo's appearance, Abner held his head in his hands, lamenting, "These poor, bewildered people. Thank God we gave her a Christian burial." And Jerusha agreed, saying, "We should be grateful that Malama forbade heathen practices."

They grieved for obstinate Kelolo, and finally Jerusha asked, "What was the wind he spoke about?"

"One of his superstitions," Abner explained. "He's probably in a trance because of the horrible things he did to himself and is convinced that since an alii died, there will have to be some supernatural occurrence."

"Is the wind rising?" Jerusha asked.

"No more than usual," her husband replied, but as he spoke he heard a weird whistling coming down from the distant valleys that led to the crests of the hills where Malama, unknown to them, now ky.

"Abner," Jerusha insisted, "I do hear a whistling."

Her husband cocked his ear, then ran out into the dusty roadway. Dr. Whipple and Captain Janders were already listening to the ominous sound, while Hawaiians were running out of their houses and huddling under trees. "What is it?" Abner cried.

"Not like anything I ever heard," Janders replied, and the moaning whistle increased in pitch while high in the coconut palms dead branches began to tear loose. A Hawaiian sailor, who had swum in panic from one of the whalers, abandoning the ship to its fate, dashed by, wet and frightened and shouting in Hawaiian, "The whistling wind is upon usl"

"Should we go inside?" Abner asked hesitantly, but the same sailor yelled back over his shoulder, "No stay in house! Bimeby come plenty pilikia." And the three Americans remarked that the Hawaiians, who seemed to know what the wind could do, had abandoned their huts Abner was already on his way to collect his children when Murphy

the saloonkeeper, rushed up and shouted, "This wind is a killer! Get out of your houses!" And while the three men scattered, the first important gust of wind struck Lahaina.

It bent the palm trees level, ripped off the roofs of several houses, then roared out to sea, where it threw great clouds of spume across the roads and tore away the masts of two whalers. During its destructive passage the whistling increased to an intense shriek and then subsided. Under the protection of a clump of kou trees Janders asked, "Where's the rain?"

None came, but the wind howled down from the mountains in new gusts, knocking down trees and throwing pigs into ditches. From the little stream before the mission house it picked up water, flinging it upon the trees, then passed out to sea, where it dashed three moored whalers together, staving in the sides of one and leaving it in perilous condition.

Still no rain came, but the winds increased, rising to even more furious levels than before, and now it became evident why the Hawaiians had left their homes, for one after another the little huts went flying through the air, crashing into the first solid object that intervened. "Will these trees hold?" Abner asked anxiously, but before anyone could assure him he saw a dark object hurtling through the air and cried, "The church!"

"It's the roof," Whipple shouted, astonished at what he saw. "It's the entire roof!" Majestically, the roof sailed over the town of Lahaina and plunged into the sea. "The walls are going down!" Whip-pie cried as the wind utterly destroyed the building.

But before Abner could lament his new loss, a woman shrieked, "The whaling boats are sinking!" And she was correct, for in the roads the demonic wind, still with no rain, had whipped up a sea that the rugged whalers could not survive. The unfortunate ones were those who were torn loose from their anchorages and dashed across the roads to the island of Lanai, on whose steep and rocky shores no rescue was possible. In that manner four ships and seventy men perished, and as they died, the Hawaiians of Lahaina mourned, "They are the sacrifices for the death of our Alii Nui."

Therefore, the sailors whose ships capsized off Lahaina would also have perished at the feet of the fatalistic Hawaiians had not Abner Hale limped among them, shouting, "Save those poor men! Save them!" But the Hawaiians repeated, "They are sacrifices!" until in frenzy Abner rushed up to one-eyed Kelolo, screaming above the storm, "Tell them, Kelolol Tell them Malama does not require sacrifices! Tell them she died a Christian!"

There was a moment's hesitation during which the old man, weak from his vigil in the cave, looked out at the sickening sea. Then, throwing aside his tapa breechclout, he plunged into the waves and began fighting them for the bodies of sailors. Ashore Abner organized rescue parties which waded, tied together by ropes, onto the reef from which most of the water had been blown by the fantastic winds. At the end of each line swimmers Lke Kelolo battled the turI

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bulent waters to haul foundering sailors across the jagged reef's edge, delivering them into the hands of rescuers. Without the work of Kelolo and Abner, the loss of American sailors would have been not seventy but nearly three hundred.

Toward the end of the struggle, Abner was limping about the reef, shouting encouragement, when he received from the hands of a swimmer the already dead body of a cabin boy, and he was overcome by the ceaseless tragedy of the sea and he started to pray: " "They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep.'" But his prayer was halted when he looked into the violent storm and saw that the swimmer who had handed him the boy was Kelolo, who was shouting to the other Hawaiians, "Pray to Kanaloa for strength." And Abner could see that the swimmers were praying.

When the whistling subsided, Abner sat limply beneath the kou trees, watching Dr. Whipple treat the rescued sailors, and when the doctor came to him for a rest, Abner asked, "These things couldn't have had any connection with Malama's death, could they?" When Whipple made no reply, he continued, "John, you're a scientist." From the day Whipple left the mission, Abner had never again referred to him as Brother. "How do you explain such a wind? No rain? Coming not from the sea but from the mountains?"

Even while helping to rescue the whalers, Whipple had been perplexed by this problem and now suggested, "The mountains on the other side of our island must form a curious kind of funnel. I would judge there must be wide-open valleys up which the trade winds rush. When they roll over the tops of the mountains, the entire volume is compressed into this one narrow valley leading down into Lahaina."

"That wouldn't have anything to do with the death of an alii, would it?" Abner asked suspiciously.

"No. We can explain the wind as it roars down this side of the mountain. We know that's a force of nature. But of course," he added slyly, "it's entirely possible that the wind on the other side of the mountain blows only when an alii dies." Shrugging his shoulders he added, "And if that's the case, why you have just about what Kelolo claims."

Abner started to comment on this but instead changed the subject. "Tell me, John, how did you feel, at the very height of the storm, when you were on the reef rescuing the sailors . . . seeing the whalers that had so recently been tormenting us ... well, seeing them destroyed by the Lord?" Dr. Whipple turned to study his companion, staring at him in disbelief, but Abner continued: "Didn't you feel that it was something like . . . well, I thought it was like the Egyptians at the Red Sea."

Whipple got up, disgusted, and called his wife, who was tending wounded sailors. "I don't think the alii sent the wind, and I don't think God sank the ships," he growled and left.

But he had not waited for Abner to develop the full meaning of

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his speculations, as they had matured on the coral reef, so Abner chased him and said, "What I wanted to ask, John, was this: 'At that moment of what I have called God's revenge for the cannonading, did you feel any actual sense of revenge against the sailors?' " "No," Whipple said flatly. "All I thought'was, 'I hope we can s

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save

the poor devils.'

"I thought the same thing," Abner said frankly, "and I was astonished at myself."

"You're growing up," Whipple said sharply and left.

ONE UNEXPECTED BENEFIT came from the whistling wind that leveled much of Lahaina in 1829. When the damage was cleared away, Kelolo for the third time helped Abner rebuild his church, but this time the kahunas refused even to argue where the door should be. They put it where it should have been in the first place, where the local gods ordained, and the famous stone church they built that year stood for more than a century.

Now Lahaina, most beautiful of all Hawaiian towns, prospered as the national capital. The business center of the kingdom was Honolulu, to be sure, for foreigners preferred living near their consulates, but the alii had never liked Honolulu, finding it hot, cheerless and commonplace, so that even though it was true that the boy king and his regents had to spend more and more time there, he returned whenever possible to his true capital, Lahaina, and his women often remained in the cool grass houses under the kou trees even when he was called to the larger city.

Whaling vessels, their crews now better behaved, came to Lahaina in increasing numbers�78 would come in 1831, 82 in 1833�and because each stayed for about four weeks in the spring and four in the autumn, there were sometimes many tall-masted ships in the roads; and since the famous whistling wind of Lahaina blew only about twice a century, they rested in security within the charmed pocket of islands. The important thing to Janders & Whipple was that every whaler who came into the roads paid them a fee for something or other. Did the ship need firewood? J & W had it. Salt pork? Dr. Whipple found out how to salt down island hogs. Salt itself? J & W had a monopoly on the fine salt evaporated from the sea in flat lava-rock beds. Did a ship's captain insist upon fresh pork at sea? J & W could provide healthy live pigs and bundles of ti leaves for fodder on long trips. Sweet potatoes, oranges that had been introduced by Captain Cook, and fish dried by Dr. Whipple . . . J & W had them all. And if a ship required balls of olona twine, strongest in the world, or even cables woven of it, J & W controlled that monopoly, too.

It was John Whipple, however, who devised one of the simplest moneymaking schemes for the firm. When a whaler put in with an unwieldy amount of whale oil, not enough barrels to warrant sailing all the way home, but so many that there seemed no purpose in re—

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turning to the Off-Japan Banks, Whipple arranged for the captain to leave his entire cargo at Lahaina, under the care of J & W, who, when they had assembled half a dozen such cargoes, would argue some New England captain into running the entire lot back to New Bedford. In this way J & W made a profit on storing the barrels of oil, on shipping them, and on chartering the ship that did the work. It therefore seemed to Whipple that the next logical step ought to be for his firm to buy the odd lots of oil outright and to hold them on speculation.

Accordingly, he proposed that J & W acquire its own ships and take over the whale-oil business, but cautious Captain Janders, tugging at his red beard, was adamant. "Only one way to make money in this world," he judged. "My motto: 'Own nothing, control everything.' Own a batch of oil outright? Neverl Because then you worry about the market. Let someone else own it. We'll handle it, and we'll make thd better profit. But to own a ship. That is real madness. I've watched the tribuations of shipowners. They have to trust a rascally captain, a worse mate and a depraved crew. They've got to feed the lot, insure the vessel, live in anguish when there's a storm, and then share whatever profits there are with the crew."

"You bought the Thetis," Whipple argued.

"Sure!" Janders agreed. "I bought her, but did you see how fast I sold her? On an earlier trip I had watched Kelolo's mouth watering for such a ship, and I knew I could turn a quick profit. Me operate a ship on my own responsibility? Neverl" And he pointed to the rotting hulk that still hung on the reef. "Whenever you want to buy a ship, John, always remember the Thetis."

Still Whipple was not satisfied, for he argued, "Somebody makes money on ships. I thought it might as well be us."

Janders agreed, in part, for he said, "I grant that properly handled a ship can make a little money, but if you and I learn how to manage the business and the lands right here, John, we'll make a fortune that will stagger the shipowners. Own nothing, control everything."