CHAPTER XXII.

I

HAWAIIAN CHARACTERISTICS.

HAVE visited many parts of the earth,' writes an old voyager, but nowhere in my travels have I met with more than two sorts of human beings,-men and women.'

It will seem trite, after this remark, to say that in the Hawaiian character good and ill qualities are combined; yet, because this is essentially true, it must be said in spite of its triteness. The important question is, whether the mixed ore, upon analysis, holds out the hope of reduction to a valuable metal.

The most salient points in the native race are courage, hospitality, a friendly and affable disposition, a constitutional good humour and mirthfulness. This much for good. On the other hand must be written against them, indolence, sensuality and licentiousness, improvidence, and a carelessness about life and death, apparently arising from ignorance of, or disbelief in, a future existence. In things indifferent, their natural taste is æsthetic; they have a great love of beauty, are imitative, and ambitious to copy the manners, habits, dress, and luxuries of foreigners. They have as much imagination as other Pacific tribes, but in their religion they were materialistic idolaters, and in this were strongly distinguished from the red tribes of North America, whose

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worship is purely spiritual, having no visible representations of divinity, and is addressed to the great spirit Manetou. Considerable importance should be given to the fact of this distinction in comparing the aborigines of North America with those of Oceanica.

After this short summary, we will proceed to examine the features of the Hawaiian character more in detail. And first a word as to the physique of the race. The Hawaiians are strong, well-made, and active; in height rather above the average of our own country. In complexion they vary much among themselves. The fishing and other classes, which expose themselves very greatly in the sun, become almost black: on the other hand, there are natives who might be properly called fair, and these of pure blood; the half-castes being, naturally, lighter in hue. Speaking generally, their skin may be said to be olive brown, approximating to the tint of the Moors of North Africa. The hair is black and waving, frequently quite straight. Its curl is perfectly free from the woolliness of the African, scarcely differing from the hair of those Europeans who are fortunate enough not to have straight locks. The women are unquestionably attractive. Their figures whilst young keep the juste milieu between lightness and embonpoint; the limbs and bust are finely formed, and the hands, feet, and ankles are small and delicate. Their beauty is inferior, on the whole, to the Marquesan women's, but they retain it much longer than women generally do in tropical climates, or even in Europe. Many Hawaiian females are still handsome at fifty, the common fault brought by advancing years being that of excessive corpulency. In men and women the countenance is characterized by a fulness of the nostrils, although the nose is not flat; the face is wide, and the eyes bright and black. The

women are attractive from their cheerful, smiling, and lively expression; whilst their merry laugh and pleasant aloha, or welcome, show the face to be an index of their mind. From the remarkable height and bulk of the chiefs, both males and females, the dominant class has been considered by some writers to be a distinct and conquering race. Residents in the islands are not of this opinion, and account for the difference in size between the chiefs and the common people as arising from abundance of food and rest and other hereditary advantages. Sir George Simpson speaks of a chief and chiefess to whom he was introduced as so unwieldy, that though in perfect health, they were unable to walk.

Courage-stronger than battering-rams-is the basis of every fine character. The Hawaiians possess the virtue in an unquestionably high degree. It was shown in the old warlike times by their open, standing-up fight. Their bodies were unprotected by armour or even by clothes; their weapons were the spear, the dagger, the club, and stones. They did not resort to artifice or stratagem in war, and they kept up a fight with the determination of a Witherington, and for a length of time which makes Chevy Chase shrink into insignificance. War has been entirely abolished for forty years, but their valour shows itself under new forms. The Hawaiians are now as peaceful a people as any upon earth; they are more free from crimes of violence than almost any nation that can be named. Their natural courage crops out in their love of, and daring in, riding; in their delight in swimming among the heavy breakers rolling over the reefs; their descent of precipices, and even in their games. Kaméhaméha I. would allow six of his warriors to throw their spears

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at him, himself armed only with one of the javelins, with which he would turn aside the flying weapons, each ready to let out his life-blood. The women no longer follow their husbands to the battle, to staunch their wounds or fight beside them; but they endure long journeys, and bear heavy burdens, swim through the raging surf, and plunge down the waterfall into the ocean when the leap is forty feet and upwards in height. The courage of both sexes is exhibited in the calm indifference with which they await death. The king of terrors does not much appal them. This may arise partly from stoicism, and partly from unbelief or want of a strong belief in an after-state; it probably is also due in part to their constitutional firmness.*

It appears strange, and contrary to analogy, that a people of bold and forcible character, should express themselves in a language more fitted for the Sybarites. We are accustomed to look upon language as among national idiosyncrasies and indicative of the national character. The angular teutonic speech with its crowd of obstructive consonants, seems natural and necessary to the peoples which use it; the vocal and emasculated derivations from the Latin, flow congruously from the

* The following remark of a missionary may seem somewhat at variance with the above view; but superstition is an infection which saps many bold and even religious minds :

The Hawaiians can lie down and die the easiest of any people with which I am acquainted. I have pretty good reason for the belief that they sometimes die through fear, believing that some person having the power to pray them to death is in the act of doing so; and the imagination is so wrought up that life yields to intense fear.' ('Answers to Mr. Wyllie's Questions.')

The yielding up of life under these circumstances is not, however, inconsistent with the possession of great courage; because the Hawaiians had a settled belief that no degree of courage or resistance could avail them in such a case, and they in consequence submitted themselves calmly to their fate.

pleasure-loving inhabitants of South Europe. The Greek language was born of masculine energy and elegant fancy; and so delicate was the people's apprehension of the expressive, that several dialects necessarily grew up where there were geographical and other differencing circumstances within the nation. The Hawaiian language is so soft as rather to be compared to the warbling of birds than the speech of suffering . mortals. It is usually said to contain but twelve letters, namely, seven consonants, and five vowels. This is, however, only the case by counting the two pairs of interchangeables as two letters. The k and t, and the l and r, are so blended, that the distinction between the letters of each pair is not observed by the natives, or even by those who have been long resident in the islands. It is probable that the two interchangeable pairs were really two real letters, not found in European alphabets, and were analytically resolved into two elements by the missionaries, in order to give them known phonetic expression. The Arabic guttural, combining g and r, cannot be phonetically expressed in our language.

Assuming, however, the two pairs to be four letters, the Hawaiian alphabet consists of the vowels a, e, i, o, u, and the consonants h, k, and t, l, and r, m, n, p, and w. The consonants rejected are b, (since the residence of white people, added for foreign words) c, not used as a sibilant, and only found under the sound of k; d, f, g, j, I, 8, v, x, y, and z. Our ears are so accustomed to a centrifugal language, that we can scarcely conceive how a people could get on without an ƒ, a g, or an s. Whole

*I do not speak decisively on this point. An informant who knows the language very thoroughly, states that the k and t, and the and r are as pure in a Hawaiian's mouth as in a European's.