Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: September 30, 2025
The "aborigines" have not been crowded out of sight, or into a special "quarter." We saw many groups of them sitting under the trees outside their houses, each group with a mat in the centre, with calabashes upon it containing poi, the national Hawaiian dish, a fermented paste made from the root of the kalo, or arum esculentum.
There were fully two tons of kalo and sweet potatoes in front of the court house, hundreds of fowls, and piles of bananas, eggs, and cocoa-nuts. The hookupu was a beautiful sight, all the more so that not one of that radiant, loving, gift-offering throng came in quest of office, or for any other thing that he could obtain.
Hurricanes are unknown, and thunderstorms are rare and light. Under favourable circumstances of moisture, the soil is most prolific, and "patch cultivation" in glens and ravines, as well as on mountain sides, produces astonishing results. A Kalo patch of forty square feet will support a man for a year.
"My son," replied his mother, "a youth who wishes to please ought to make himself ready at labor, and skillful in fishing; this is the only secret of making a good match." Kawelo too eagerly followed his mother's advice, and soon there was not on the island a more indefatigable planter of kalo, nor a more expert fisherman.
I visited Hula and Kerepunu within six weeks of the massacre, and was so impressed with the peaceful bearing of the people in both places that I should have been glad to have re-occupied both stations immediately. I should have visited Kalo, but was afraid of compromising the mission, as it is possible the natives may be punished for the outrage.
The Waimanu day had begun; and it was odd to think that through the long summer years days dawned like this, and that the people of the valley grew grey and old in shrimping and sewing and kalo baking. All Waimanu shook hands with me, the kindly "Aloha" filled the air, and the women threw garlands over us both. I could hardly induce my host to accept a dollar and a half for my entertainment.
We rode among most extensive kalo plantations, and large artificial fish-ponds, in which hundreds of gold-fish were gleaming, and came back by the sea shore, green with the maritime convolvulus, and the smooth-bottomed river, which the Waipio folk use as a road.
Near the Anuenue Fall we stopped at a native house, outside which a woman, in a rose-coloured chemise, was stringing roses for a necklace, while her husband pounded the kalo root on a board. His only clothing was the malo, a narrow strip of cloth wound round the loins, and passed between the legs. This was the only covering worn by men before the introduction of Christianity.
The Kalo natives felt that Hula and Kerepunu got the most tobacco and tomahawks, and that their share was small indeed. Instead of our buying all the thatch required for the other stations only obtainable at Kalo we got the teachers, with their boys, to get it. We meant it well, to save expense. My experience teaches me to throw all I can in the way of natives not connected with our head station.
The water leaped to a prodigious height, disappeared in the form of fine rain, and fell in vapor over a circuit of two leagues, spreading sterility over the land to such an extent that neither kalo nor sweet-potatoes could be grown there. The chief Kaleikini closed the mouth of the gulf by means of enormous stones, which he made the natives roll thither.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking