And I'd Do It Again

by Crocker, Aimée;

  At all events, Mr. Dow was very much respected, if not liked, by the crew. His orders were crisp, brief, and issued without profanity. The men obeyed him with more alacrity than they did Captain Judd, who was just a lovable old fellow with white hair and a Cape Cod beard.

  But there was one man in the forecastle called Sully … I do not know whether it was short for Sullivan (he did have red hair) or whether that was his right name … and he was a trouble-maker. Also a bad sailor, I was informed later, and I could see it, too.

  But Sully was a giant. He stood well over six-foot-three and was built in proportion. The only job he seemed to do with any sign of willingness was to swab down the deck. Then he could strip to the waist and exhibit his magnificent torso, his bulging muscles and his Herculean arms, all bristling with ruddy hair that gave him something of the appearance of a huge pink gorilla.

  From the first day it was easy to see that no love was lost between Mr. Dow and Sully. Not that the mate showed open dislike or that Sully refused to carry out orders, but there was a sort of shuffling swagger that the red man put on whenever he received one, and there was a peculiar metallic quality in Mr. Dow’s voice whenever he had occasion to speak to the other.

  One day I got up very early in the morning to see the sea at dawn. The men were busy swabbing down. Sully, his big body glistening with sea-mist, was making chests to impress his shipmates while he worked. He saw me as I came up on deck, and he turned straight at me. He leered, dropped his mop and flexed his bulging biceps and breast muscles the way strong men do in vaudeville shows. I might have admired it, too, but I did not like his conceited leer, and so I turned my back on him and crossed the deck.

  Suddenly I heard a sharp word.

  Mr. Dow had appeared from nowhere and had ordered the man back to work. They stood there for a minute, looking at each other. I could see real animal hatred in Sully’s face. Then, when Mr. Dow turned away with his quiet dignity, Sully made a disgusting, insulting noise with his lips. The First Mate turned like a flash. He stepped up to the towering giant and said something in a low voice, got an answer which I will not repeat here, and with one blow knocked the big man down.

  What happened then came so fast that I can only remember the high spots. Sully was on his feet again in a fraction of a second and leaped at the First Mate like a tiger, his great red hands clutching, his face and his whole body as red as his hair, completely transformed into a brute.

  As the man reached for him, Mr. Dow stepped aside and hit him three terrific blows. I thought it would have killed anybody else. Then they went at it, toe to toe. I cannot describe it, but I have never seen two human beings in my life so completely changed. I caught a glimpse of Mr. Dow’s face, and I knew right then that the only thought in his mind was to kill the man in front of him.

  He very nearly did it, too. Hitting with a power that still seems unbelievable to me, even today after I have seen many a professional fighter in the ring, he knocked the huge fellow down again and again, and when the red man had had apparently enough for all his big torso and muscles, the mate picked him up, and standing him there groggily, smashed him in the face so that the blood spurted out. Sully fell down unconscious, but Mr. Dow was not finished. Still raging, he picked up the big red body again and threw it against a stanchion and would have done so again if one of the men had not tried to hold him back, pointing to me standing there.

  The mate turned his tiger’s face towards me blankly, then drew himself together and said:

  “Sorry.”

  That was all. He walked away, controlled once more, with that usual poise and quiet dignity of his.

  Sully went on the sick list for the rest of the trip. I learned that his jaw-bone was broken, two ribs cracked and his nose completely smashed. I understood then something of our mate’s authority.

  Map of Hawaii or the Sandwich Islands, c. 1854.

  ✥

  But our voyage ended.

  Honolulu.

  Diamond Head, sticking proudly up over us, a mountain rock, the blue harbor, the palms, little brown bodies swimming out to the schooner as she tacked into the basin. Strange-looking craft darting about us, paddled by more little brown people. Cries like songs. Far away somewhere a drum or some percussion instrument beating a rhythmic tum-tum-tum-tum.

  No factories on the horizon. No storage docks. No industry. No smoke-cloud. No hum of machines. No rancid smells. No industrial waste afloat. No city skyline. Little houses over the water on poles. Hundreds of children playing on a magnificent beach, untouched by picnic parties and unstrewn with their banana peels.

  That is the first impression I had of the East … for it is the fringe of the East … the mid-ocean doorway to the East. I have been back to Honolulu more than once since the entry of American industrialism into the affairs of Hawaii, and I have felt a sense of being hurt. I have had a sense of being deprived of something. But it is still beautiful; you cannot destroy so perfect and so powerful a beauty. But the great simplicity, the freshness of that pearl-like cluster of islands is gone, fled before the march of missionaries, Marines and modernity.

  Now it is one thing to be received at a European court in your overlong robes, but a distinctly different thing to be greeted by the ruler of an island full of sweet but semi-civilized people, all of whom are born and remain good and generous and lovable, but distinctly untaught in the magnificent ways of the West.

  The Palace of King David Kalakaua was not any ramshackle bamboo affair as you might imagine, however. It was an immense modern stone building, and a very beautiful practical thing, too. My confusion came when I was greeted by innumerable dignitaries in decent white suits … and bare feet.

  There was absolutely no self-consciousness about them, for all their lack of shoes, and they were very considerate and courteous. Some of them spoke something that I recognized, vaguely, as English, and I made it known that I had come to see their king.

  The idea penetrated eventually, and a little later my friend David Kalakaua appeared, very splendid in whites … and complete with shoes, too. Probably no one in the world has ever been as surprised as he to see the little girl he had spun yarns to a few years ago in London, all grown up and arriving, unannounced, on the grand porch of his Palace. But he contained himself with proper dignity, for there were formalities to be gone through with, and he made a long speech in Hawaiian to the assembled crowd which had gathered at my arrival. It was a very beautiful speech, although I understood not a word, and it made me fall immediately in love with his language. I learned later that Hawaiian utilizes very few consonants, and certainly to the ear it seems like a liquid flow of vowels. I have often wished I could hear “Die Valkyrie” or “Parsifal” in Hawaiian.

  When the formalities were over, we … (Captain Judd, Mr. Dow, and I, that is) … were brought into the Palace, and it was amusing to see the Island manner of our king change for that of a London drawing-room.

  We were presented to the Queen, one of the most charming women I have ever met, whose native name was Kapiolani, and her younger sister Liki-Liki, and we were made to feel at home in real earnest.

  How long would we stay? An American house was mine if I would please to take it. (It turned out to be a portable affair, delivered by Sears, Roebuck and Co.) Or would I prefer to stay at the hotel?

  All these and a hundred more questions were asked, and I must admit that King David Kalakaua was more than pleased as well as surprised to learn that I had no time limit on my visit. Here was real hospitality and no selfish pretense of it.

  An amusing incident marked the afternoon. The King had imported or brought back with him from London one hundred and five Royal Guards, with all their trappings. These he intended to use for parade purposes on special occasions. And my arrival gave him his first such “special occasion,” so the Palace guards were duly dressed up for a great demonstration.

  Ceremonies started toward three o’clock. The men, gleaming and gorgeous and gaudy and very marvelous indeed, ma
rched past the Palace and through the town, under the command of five officers (of whatever rank: I think they were all generals) more or less in step.

  But when they returned to the Plaza in front of the Palace, every last man of them, officers included, was stripped naked save for the usual loin-cloth, and was carrying the precious British uniform and furry shako behind him.

  In a temperature of 93 degrees Fahrenheit it is difficult to be military, let alone to be British. Even the King had a good laugh over it, albeit the joke was really on him.

  King Kalakaua of Hawaii, 1882. Hawaii State Archives.

  ✥

  It would be impossible to give any sort of a day-to-day account of my life in Hawaii, not only because my memory of it is dimmed and distorted, but especially because it may not be very interesting when told that way. What I want to do is to give a general impression of life in pre-American Hawaii and to touch some of the higher spots. As a matter of fact there are several hundred books on the Sandwich Islands, past and present, and it is not my purpose to compete with globe-trotting writers of travelogues. And I have been told by my friends that, for a person who had traveled as much as I have, I retain less of the obvious things and more of the underneath things than anybody they know.

  At any rate my life began very newly in the Hawaiian Islands. Most of my time was devoted to riding and swimming. Incidentally I was fairly good at both sports. This last sentence recalls two interesting things, too, and I shall put them down here before I let them slip by me.

  The first concerns a horse named “Monte Carlo.” I had bought him to enter the weekly races which the King patronized and sponsored, and I learned to love him very much.

  When I purchased Monte Carlo I was warned that he was very dangerous except with those whom he happened to like, and that he liked very few persons. Well, he got to like me, it seems, for he was as docile and sweet as could be, and he won several races for me, sometimes riding him myself and other times with a little Hawaiian boy up that I trained to jockey him.

  But when I finally decided to leave the Island and to sail on to the South Seas, an American woman who lived rather mysteriously (she was really a sort of demimondaine who had exiled herself from San Francisco for reasons best known to herself) wanted to buy him.

  Now I wanted to send Monte Carlo home to my Sacramento ranch, really, and I told the woman about his peculiar disposition, hoping to scare her off. Not a chance. She insisted, and, realizing that it would be more practical to sell him than to send him back to the continent, I let her have her way.

  I sailed away toward adventures that you will hear of later on, and when I came back to Hawaii I learned that the first time she rode him he carried her calmly enough to the open road, and that then, without warning or apparent reason he dumped her off and walked on her with all fours. She was killed instantly while some natives looked on, powerless to interfere.

  The second incident was a swimming adventure, and includes one of the greatest scares I have ever had.

  The bay upon which Waikiki Beach gives is supposed to be free from sharks. This is largely true because of the shallows at the mouth of the Bay and because of some peculiar construction of the bottom (I do not understand these technical things very well). Everybody swims there, and frequently we swam at night, going in from the King’s beautiful boathouse pier. The water was always at perfect temperature, the air always warm, night or day, and the picture of the beach as you look back, floating or swimming, with its torches and Chinese lanterns, was really beautiful.

  One day I went in with a bathing-party consisting of King David Kalakaua, some members of his Court, and some of the dancing-girls from the Palace.

  I was a fairly strong swimmer and I got ahead of the party, paddling about not far from the narrows where the bay proper begins.

  Suddenly I felt something under me. It was just as if some person were playing a prank, and, swimming under water, had come up under me, lifting me high on his back. I was lifted, in fact, quite out of the water. I laughed at first, but when the swimmer did not reappear I began to have misgivings and swam back to the group as fast as ever I could. When I told them my story. everybody began to swim in hard, and they assured me that I had made the acquaintance of a shark. There was no more swimming that evening, and everyone was very careful for days. It seems that if it were really true about it being a shark and not some other big fish or turtle, I was more than lucky not to have been cut by his dorsal fin, perhaps even seriously mutilated or killed.

  King Kalakaua thought it must have been a very small shark, for, as he himself said, “A man-eater would have made more of an impression.” I was just as glad.

  One thing that perhaps people do not know is that sharks are supposed to prefer white human flesh to brown. Many of the European and American visitors to Hawaii in those days used to swim in black tights and jerseys that covered almost all their bodies, so that the sharks, if any, would mistake them for natives. This may be just a superstition, but it seemed to work, for we had no casualties … except one.

  That one was Mr. Dow, my strong-armed mate.

  The death of the mate is one of the most pathetic stories I know. It was a real fatality. I did not witness it myself, thank God, but what I did see of it was enough.

  Mr. Dow, as you may have imagined, was a daring and powerful swimmer, belying completely the legend that sailors are at home on, but not in, the water. He also wore a charm-amulet that had been given him by an Indian sorcerer from some part of the South American coast. Whether it worked or not is not the story. The fact is that he swam far out very often, past the narrows, to the reef where Kalipi Creek met the sea, easily and slowly, like a machine. Nothing ever happened to him, regardless of the many warnings of the natives, and he had a perfect confidence in the powers of his amulet over the tiger-like sharks of the outside deep water.

  Now there was a little Kanaka girl called Pali-Mana who loved Mr. Dow. She would follow him around wherever he went, keeping some distance in back of him, timidly, but radiating admiration for the sturdy sailor. At first he was embarrassed, then he began to like it. He ended by “marrying” her in the native ceremony, and she lived with him in the Sears, Roebuck house (which I had evacuated, meantime, in favor of a more primitive, native one of grass).

  Pali-Mana was fascinated by Mr. Dow’s amulet. She wanted it and asked him for it, time and again, but he very firmly and seriously refused to give it to her. It got to be quite a joke on the island.

  One day when they were both lazing on the beach he fell asleep, and the mischievous Pali-Mana slipped it off his neck, put it around her own, and started swimming out, calling to everybody within hearing that she had at last stolen the magic charm.

  When he awoke, a few minutes afterwards, he missed his wife and his amulet. Some of the crowd called laughingly out to him, and he saw the delighted gesticulations of Pali-Mana, some hundred yards out in the bay. He easily guessed what had happened.

  Rather annoyed by her prank, he plunged in after her, and a swimming race ensued, while all the beach watched, amusedly. Pali-Mana, like all the native girls, was a fish in the water and the powerful strokes of Mr. Dow were not more than enough to catch her after a serious struggle. Out and out they swam, past Mokulo Island, nearing the inlet constantly, until, little by little, the girl began to tire and the great strength of the American began to tell.

  Then suddenly, while everyone watched from along the beach, far back, something happened. There was a flicker of water near Mr. Dow. His powerful voice screamed … (that is the only word I have for it: I was not there, but I was told about it right afterwards) … and everybody knew that tragedy had happened.

  Pali-Mana swam furiously back towards her man, who had stopped swimming and seemed to be sinking. Rapid little canoes pushed off from the shore. The girl, insane with fear for her husband, was screaming and calling.

  And when the unconscious American seaman was finally brought in, his leg had been cut off short at the
thigh, almost as if shorn by a knife. Every effort was made to save him, but he died three days later from loss of blood, and Pali-Mana, inconsolable, disappeared one morning never to be seen again.

  So much for the superstition of the amulet. One does not attempt to explain these things. In the East you learn to accept. You do not apply Western logic to that which you see but do not understand.

  A missionary preaching to the natives under a screen made of plaited cocoa-nut leaves at Kairua by William Ellis.

  ✥

  My time in Hawaii was troubled only by one thing. Perhaps the word “troubled” is badly chosen, but I might truly have been annoyed had I been more thin-skinned … or if I had cared.

  The trouble was missionaries.

  Now I am perfectly aware that there have been and are good, earnest, well-working missionaries who are content to let human beings be human, and occupy themselves only with the spirit and the welfare of those whom they have gone out to teach. But one thing I do know is that many of those who came to Hawaii in those early days only brought trouble and harm, and many others enriched themselves at the expense of the honest, good little people they had come there to convert to the creed of Christ.

  All that aside, and call it injured pride if you want to, the missionaries were no friends of mine on the island. In the first place I scandalized them, and they criticized me for the way I lived. I have become used to that: others than missionaries have criticized my way of living and have been scandalized at me during my life.

  But the things they objected to were so silly. Just because I refused to live like an American or the way most of the handful of white persons on the island did, and that I knew and liked many of the dancing-girls, dressed as they did when I wanted to, and learned to dance the hula-hula (not the cheap thing of the modern vaudeville stages and night-clubs, thank you) and that I generally had a good time in my own and really harmless way, they were distressed and harassed and annoyed beyond measure. And these ladies and gentlemen of suppressed desires and ill-gained possessions first complained to the King.