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Updated: May 22, 2025
"Pélé is nought," she declared, "I will go to Kilawea, the mountain of the fires where the smoke and stones go up, and Pélé shall not touch me. My God, Jehovah, made the mountain and the fires within it too, as He made us all." So it was noised through the island that Kapiolani, the queenly, would defy Pélé the goddess.
Some years before this Pele and her brothers had migrated from the far southern islands and had made their home in Hawaii, close to the crater of Kilauea, so close that they were believed to be under the special protection of the gods; and from that belief no doubt grew the later faith that Pele and her family were gods themselves; that they lived in the cones thrust up from the floor of Kilauea by gas and steam while it was in a viscid state; that the music of their dances came up in thunder gusts, and that they swam the white surges of lava in the hell-pit.
It was usual on arriving at the crater to break a branch covered with berries, and turning the face to the pit of fire, to throw half the branch over the precipice, saying, "Pele, here are your ohelos. I offer some to you, some I also eat," after which the natives partook of them freely.
Princess Ruth, a descendant of Kamehameha, was appealed to. She hated the white race, and would have seen with little emotion the destruction of all the European and American intruders in Hilo; but it was her own people who were most in danger, so she answered, "I will save the Hilo fish-ponds. Pele will hear a Kamehameha."
For Hiika had been gone so long on this journey that a wrong construction had been put on her delay. Lohiau and Hiika had, indeed, learned to esteem each other, but they had not violated the trust imposed in them by the goddess. Pele was madly jealous, however.
Then, as now, ohelo berries grew profusely round the terminal wall of Kilauea, and there, as elsewhere, were sacred to Pele, no one daring to eat of them till he had first offered some of them to the divinity.
We collected several specimens of sulphur and lava, and also a quantity of what the natives call the hair of Pele. Every bush around was covered with it. It is produced from the lava when first thrown up, and borne along by the air till it is spun into fine filaments several inches in length. It was of a dark olive colour, brittle, and semi-transparent.
She is the granddaughter of the heroic Princess Kapiolani, who, when the worship and fear of the goddess Pélé were at their height, walked boldly up to the crater of Kilauea, in defiance of the warnings and threats of the high-priestess of the idolatrous rites, proclaiming her confidence in the power of her God, the God of the Christians, to preserve her.
At the volcano of Kilauea in Hawaii, this substance, as previously stated, is abundantly produced, and is known as 'Pele's Hair' Pele being the name of the goddess of the mountain. Birds' nests are sometimes found composed of this beautiful material.
The people began to waver under the threats, but a brown-faced woman, with strong, fearless eyes that looked out with scorn on Pélé priests, was not to be terrified. "It is Kapiolani, the chieftainess," murmured the people to one another. "She is Christian; will she forsake Jehovah and return to Pélé?"
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