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Updated: May 17, 2025
The boat came ashore for us, and in a little while the clouds and the rain were all gone. The moon was beaming tranquilly down on land and sea, and we two were stretched upon the deck sleeping the refreshing sleep and dreaming the happy dreams that are only vouchsafed to the weary and the innocent. In the breezy morning we went ashore and visited the ruined temple of the last god Lono.
Perceiving that the people took him for the long vanished and lamented god Lono, he encouraged them in the delusion for the sake of the limitless power it gave him; but during the famous disturbance at this spot, and while he and his comrades were surrounded by fifteen thousand maddened savages, he received a hurt and betrayed his earthly origin with a groan. It was his death-warrant.
The disturbance which made the bay famous is known to every schoolboy; how the great explorer, long supposed by the natives to be their vanished god Lono, betrayed his earthly lineage by groaning when he was wounded, and was then dispatched outright. A cocoanut stump, faced by a sheet of copper recording the circumstance, is the great circumnavigator's monument.
Therefore, he instituted games called makahiki, and ordered that they should be held in his honor, and then sailed for foreign lands on a three-cornered raft, stating that he would return some day and that was the last of Lono. He was never seen any more; his raft got swamped, perhaps.
Lono built a yacht worthy of this Cleopatra, a double canoe eighty feet long and seven wide, floored and enclosed for twenty feet amidships, so that the queen had an apartment which was luxuriously furnished with couches, cloths, festoons of flowers, shells, and feathers, and containing a sacred image and many charms against evil.
Kaikilani became the wife of the heir-apparent, who cared so little for government, however, that the young woman was made chief. Her marriage to this easy-going, ambitionless, though generous prince had been a failure. As it was a state marriage, she cared little for him. His stalwart brother, Lono, was the object of her love and admiration.
The religious faith that white men drove from Hawaii, or think they did, is based on the customary moral precepts, while the theogeny comprehends a trinity, composed of Kane, who plans and who lives in the east; Ku, who builds, and Lono, who directs.
Therefore, he instituted games called makahiki, and ordered that they should be held in his honor, and then sailed for foreign lands on a three-cornered raft, stating that he would return some day and that was the last of Lono. He was never seen any more; his raft got swamped, perhaps.
At the guardian stones, they pause long enough to sacrifice a pig and a rooster, and offer blood and rice to the spirits, and then they proceed to the center of the village, where they dance tadek and da-eng until dusk. At nightfall a pig is killed, its flesh is divided among the people, and a lono stalk, after being dipped in the blood, is given to a member of each family.
I have spoken, several times, of the god Lono I may as well furnish two or three sentences concerning him. The idol the natives worshipped for him was a slender, unornamented staff twelve feet long.
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