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He had as much right to be in that mess as he had to his accent, for he was Oxford-educated and held the Queen's Commission. For Prince Akuli might have been King of Lakanaii, and of all Hawaii, perhaps, had not his grandfather been soundly thrashed by the first and greatest of the Kamehamehas.
He died amidst the rejoicings incident to his birthday, and on the next day "lay in state in the throne-room of the palace, while his ministers, his staff, and the chiefs of the realm kept watch over him, and sombre kahilis waving at his head, beat a rude and silent dead-march for the crowds of people, subjects and aliens, who continuously filed through the apartment, for a curious farewell glance at the last of the Kamehamehas."
It was under the Kamehamehas, long before, that he had served his own country as Chinese Consul a position that was not altogether unlucrative; and it was under Kamehameha IV that he changed his citizenship, becoming an Hawaiian subject in order to marry Stella Allendale, herself a subject of the brown-skinned king, though more of Anglo-Saxon blood ran in her veins than of Polynesian.
It is said that the natives like their king better, because he was truly, "above all," the last of a proud and imperious house, which, in virtue of a pedigree of centuries, looked down upon the nobility of the Kamehamehas. When the last gift was deposited, the lawn in front of the court- house was one densely-packed, variegated mass of excited, buzzing Hawaiians.
All Hands, ex-Northwest trader, the godless, beach-combing, clipper-shipless and ship-wrecked skipper who had stood on the beach at Kailua and welcomed the very first of missionaries, off the brig Thaddeus, in the year 1820, and who, not many years later, made a scandalous runaway marriage with one of their daughters, quieted down and served the Kamehamehas long and conservatively as Minister of the Treasury and Chief of the Customs, and acted as intercessor and mediator between the missionaries on one side and the beach-combing crowd, the trading crowd, and the Hawaiian chiefs on the variously shifting other side.
The feeling among the people is changing, the feudal instinct is disappearing, the old despotic line of the Kamehamehas is extinct; and king-making by paper ballots, introduced a few months ago, is an approximation to president-making, with the canvassing, stumping, and wrangling, incidental to such a contested election.
When we ascended above the scattered dwellings and had passed the tasteful mausoleum, with two tall Kahilis, or feather plumes, at the door of the tomb in which the last of the Kamehamehas received Christian burial, the glossy, redundant, arborescent vegetation ceased.
But the most interesting object of all was still to come the real feather cloak, cape, and girdle of the Kamehamehas, not generally to be seen, except at a coronation or christening, but which the Princess Kamakaeha, in her capacity of Mistress of the Robes, had kindly ordered to be put out for my inspection.
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