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Princess Kapiolani was probably the first native to protest against these sacrifices, and in 1824, after her conversion to Christianity, she gave an instructive exhibition by defying the taboo of Kilauea, eating the berries growing on the sides of the peak, in defiance of the priestly order, and throwing rocks contemptuously into the pit.

Kapiolani broke off a branch from one of the bushes regardless of the horrified faces of the priests. And she ate the berries, without stopping to ask the goddess for her permission. She carried a branch of the berries in her hand. If she had told them what she was going to do they would have been frenzied with fear and horror.

"King Kalakaua started this collecting fad, over on Oahu," Prince Akuli continued. "And his queen, Kapiolani, caught the fad from him. They collected everything old makaloa mats, old tapas, old calabashes, old double-canoes, and idols which the priests had saved from the general destruction in 1819.

The taste for ornament has not died out in either sex, and women are to be seen in Kalawao, hideous and bloated beyond description, decorated with leis of flowers, and looking for admiration out of their glazed and goggle eyes. King Kalakaua and Queen Kapiolani have paid a visit to the settlement, and were received with hearty alohas, and the music of a leper band.

Queen Kapiolani is a nice-looking woman, with a very pleasing expression of countenance.

The superstition regarding the Goddess Pele was thought to have received a death blow in 1825, when Kapiolani, an Hawaiian princess and a Christian convert, ascended, with numerous attendants, to the crater of Kilauea, where she publicly defied the power and wrath of the goddess. No response came to her defiance, she descended in safety, and faith in Pele's power was widely shaken.

"Kapiolani, bold in the Christian faith, resolved practically to show how utterly powerless were these supposed fiery gods. After a journey of a hundred miles, as she neared the side of the mountain, a prophetess of the supposed goddess met her with warnings and denunciations of vengeance.

I haven't seen a pearl-shell fish-hook in years, but I swear that Kalakaua accumulated ten thousand of them, to say nothing of human jaw-bone fish-hooks, and feather cloaks, and capes and helmets, and stone adzes, and poi-pounders of phallic design. When he and Kapiolani made their royal progresses around the islands, their hosts had to hide away their personal relics.

John Williams, the torch-bearer of the Pacific, whom the brown men loved, the great pioneer, who dared death on the grey beach of Erromanga, sounds a morning bugle-call to us, a Reveillè to our slumbering camps: "The daybreak call, Hark how loud and clear I hear it sound; Swift to your places, swift to the head of the army, Pioneers, O Pioneers!" Kapiolani

Then Kapiolani did a thing at which the very limbs of those who watched trembled and shivered. She went to the edge of the crater and stepped over onto a jutting rock and let herself down and down toward the sulphurous burning lake. The ground cracked under her feet and sulphurous steam hissed through crevices in the rock, as though the demons of Pélé fumed in their frenzy.