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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.
"And be it mine to muse there, mine to glide From day-break when the mountain pales his fire, Yet more and more, and from the mountain top, Till then invisible, a smoke ascends, Solemn and slow." "Vedi Napoli! e poi muori!" Memory! beloved memory! to us thou art as hope to other men. The present solitary, unexciting where are its charms?
I was frequently invited to dip my fingers into the poi and try it, being told that it was very good; but I had not the courage. But to proceed on my walk up the Nuuanu Valley. About two miles from the town, we came to a very pretty villa on one side of the road, with some large native huts, in a shady garden, on the other. We find that this villa is the country residence of Queen Emma.
Her imagination was almost furiously alive, and as the Padrone talked, waving his hands and striking postures like those of a military dictator, she saw the dead Empress, with her fan before her face, nodding her head to the jig of "Funiculi, funicula," while she watched the red cloud from Vesuvius rising into the starry sky; she saw Sarah Bernhardt taking the Greek cat upon her knee; the newly made Czar reading the telegram with his glass of punch beside him; Tosti tracing lines of music; Gladstone watching the sea; and finally the gaunt figure and the long beard of Tolstoy bending over the book in which he wrote clearly so many years ago, "Vedi Napoli e poi mori."
Moving among the stirring crowds, you come to the poi merchants, squatting in the shade on their hams, in true native fashion, and surrounded by purchasers. Poi is the chief article of food among the natives, and is prepared from the taro plant. The taro root looks like a thick, or, if you please, a corpulent sweet potato, in shape, but is of a light purple color when boiled.
The Fish Market We Are Treated to Poi We Visit the Stores Hawaiian Curiosities The Southern Cross Our Trip to the Dreadful Pali The Rescue The Flowers and Trees of Honolulu The Mango Tree and Its Fruit. My first impressions of Honolulu were disappointing.
Poi is sold in the streets in calabashes, but it is also shipped in considerable quantities to other islands, and especially to guano islands which lie southward and westward of this group. On these lonely islets, many of which have not even drinking-water for the laborers who live on them, poi and fish are the chief if not the only articles of food.
To foreigners poi has a most unpleasant, disagreeable taste. When made into cakes and baked, however, it is much relished by foreigners. Kava is the national drink. It is made from the roots of a shrub belonging to the pepper family. The root is ground between stones and then soaked in water. After a while it is pounded and rubbed until all the milky juice is squeezed out of it.
So universal is its use among the natives that the manufacture of poi is carried on now by steam-power and with Yankee machinery, for the sugar planters; and the late king, who was avaricious and a trader, incurred the dislike of his native subjects by establishing a poi-factory of his own near Honolulu.
We halted for an early lunch at the clean grass-house we had stopped at before, and later in the afternoon at that of the woman with whom we had ridden from Hakalau, who received us very cordially, and regaled us with poi and pork.
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