Forty Thousand Miles Over Land and Water. Ethel Gwendoline Vincent

that time to communicate with his government. We met at meals, and then dispersed about, so much so that going up on the decks, and finding them nearly deserted, you wondered where everybody did go to. In the afternoon, and immediately after luncheon, there was the sort of quiet and lazy cessation from work that sometimes comes unconsciously even on shore, when I believe many took a nap, and then by four there would come a gradual awakening and stirring up, with a sharp turn and brisk walk before the dressing-bell at 5.30, and once more the re-assembling for dinner.

      We had a particularly nice set of officers; and Captain Guest was most agreeable and well-informed, very solicitous for the comfort and amusement of his passengers. We sat one on each side of him, with Mr. Davidson on my other side, and there was always a good deal of information flying across me between them. We also all had the advantage of being waited on partly by "Tonga," his Chinese servant, dressed in national costume.

      All the sailors were Chinese, with English quarter-masters. They make most efficient, hard-working tars, and are allowed to wear their native dress, rolling up their pigtails under their skull-caps when at work.

      September 4th.—It was beginning to get rather warm, as we had entered the Tropic of Cancer.

      The captain's patent windsail in the saloon was brought into use with great success, except on one very hot night, when its canvas sails hung limp and flabby, and there was absolutely not one breath of wind to swell it to its usually large dimensions.

      We were now within the influence of the trade winds, those hot damp winds that flow on either side of the Equator within a radius of three days' steaming. Whilst they lasted we were never dry; we lived in a perpetual Turkish bath, everything we touched was damp and sticky, the awning dripped in the early morning or after sundown as if there was a heavy dew; scissors, razors, knitting-needles, even the very pins in the pin-cushion became rusted.

      Saturday, September 5th.—A blurred outline against the sky seen since early morning, growing into the arid island of Molokai, the place of banishment of six hundred lepers, exiled there to live and die by inches, was the first island of the Sandwich group which we saw. There are eleven in all, only six of which are habitable; these are Kauai, Oahu, Molokai, Lauai, Mani, and Hawaii, which contains the volcano of Kilauea. By the afternoon we were passing under the lee of the island of Oahu, on which lies the capital of the group, Honolulu. Oahu has a magnificent outline of jagged peaks, seared and scored by volcanic action; whose precipices dark and gloomy run sheer down into the sea, and form at their base a rocky breakwater against which the sea vainly lashes itself into fury, rising into the air in a cloud of foam. The promontory called Diamond Head stands boldly out into the sea, and rising from the centre of the island is the sharp mountain peak of Pali.

      The mouths of extinct craters can be easily traced by the utter barrenness around, and in sharp contrasts to the lava and scoria are the rich valleys running up into the interior of the island, where all grows in tropical luxuriance. There were patches of deep brown on the mountain sides, alternating with others of yellow-green grass; tall straggling cocoa-nut palms waving their feathery arms along the shore, where the intensely blue line of the sea touches the fringe of yellow sand. In a quiet little cove we distinguished a tall manufacturing chimney standing in the midst of its sugar-cane plantation, and further on we passed Waikiki, the favourite watering-place of the Hawaiians, with its vast cocoa-nut grove growing to the water's edge. Amongst them we could see a few flat roofs, with the grey palace of the king standing out prominently. We are going now round the frowning brow of Cape Diamond, and Honolulu comes in sight. It lies on a very dead level, and is a long-drawn-out collection of flat-roofed houses, famous for its many spires.

      Mr. McIntyre, the pilot, who for forty years has been bringing ships along the buoyed course and over the dangers of the coral reef which surrounds the bay in which Honolulu lies, boarded us from the flat-bottomed boat, as did all its stalwart native rowers. Inside the reef we saw an iron tripod that supported a small conical-shaped box; from this issued forth a troop of little nut-brown native boys, who with wild whoops plunged into the water and swam towards us, and twisting about like eels, dived after the dimes we dropped over and brought them up successfully. Water seems the natural element of the Hawaiians, and all bathe once if not twice a day, fearless of the sharks who sometimes penetrate within the reef.

      How beautiful are these island coral reefs, bringing forth as they do and blending within their shallow depths every unsurpassed and heavenly shade of colour that the ever-varying ocean shows! From the dull purple line near the shore, and within the bay they pass into a delicate opaque sea-green, near the coral reef where the line is abruptly broken by curling circlets of foam, fading away in an indistinct line of sky blue shaded in the distance to cerulean, and then ultramarine, and dying on the horizon to the most exquisite sapphire.

      Mr. McIntyre having brought us safely into dock, we took a "buggy" to drive about for the two hours the Australia stayed in port.

      Honolulu is a town containing 15,000 inhabitants. With the native population there is an admixture of Germans and Chinese. The American element, too, is very strong, and American manners and customs have strongly influenced the Hawaiians. The roads are of the best macadam, the town is lighted with gas, there is a public telephone office which shows how general is the use of that instrument; and fire-plugs testify to their precautions against fire.

      The Parliament House is of stone with handsome colonnades. Before it stands the gold figure of King Kamehameha I., first king of the Sandwich Islands, wrapped in the famous "00" mantle. This mantle descended from generation to generation; it was made from the feathers of a rare black bird, of the tribe of honey-suckers. Under each wing only two or three feathers of the required shade were found, so that it took scores of years to collect the necessary quantity, as the mantle measured some four feet long and eleven feet wide at the bottom widths when spread out.

      The palace, surrounded by high walls, stands in beautiful gardens, as does also the Palace of Queen Emma. There is a college, and a native cathedral, built twenty-five years only after the introduction of Christianity; the English church, as yet only four bare walls, the Queen Emma Hospital, the prison, the theatre, and a comfortable hotel. But the gardens, how beautiful they seemed to us—a fairy vision almost—as our first sight of tropical vegetation—I longed to know the name of each and every strange bright blossom I saw.

      There was the straight broad leaf of the palm, the jagged one of the banana, the cocoa-nut palm with its straggling arms and brown nuts, the feathery algeroba, and glossy-leaved mango and monkey pod, the dark-green koa, and very many others I had never heard of. And these formed the dark-green background for scarlet bunches of ohias, and the vivid crimson blossom of the hibiscus, for magnolias, and orange trees, and gardenias, heliotrope, roses, and honeysuckle, for thickets of mimosa, trailing passion-flowers and tropical parasites of all kinds.