The anchor was again on its way to the surface when a row-boat driven by four oarsmen with drawn muscles and clenched teeth glided in under the bow of the ship. Its passenger, a belated teacher who at the last moment had wandered from the pier, was shouting for some one to throw him a rope, and a few moments later our last passenger whose silvery hair little indicated the probability of such a blunder was landed in a heap on the deck. Our ship was now under way and soon passed out of the Golden Gate bearing on and between her decks the largest number of teachers as well as the largest cargo of pedagogical equipment that any vessel in the history of the world ever bore to a foreign land to instruct an alien people. Late in the afternoon five whales came up and spouted and played around us. We passed on and as their fountains of spray disappeared in the distance the sun sank down to pay his wonted devotion before the shrine of night. We were alone.
By good fortune we went by way of the Hawaiian Islands and touched at Honolulu. We entered the harbor in the first faint light of the coming morn while the moon still shone with resplendent glory just above the nearer rim of the old extinct volcanic crater lying just behind the town. High points of land lay around us on three sides, while across the bay soft billowy clouds completed an enchanting circle from the spell of which none of us wished ever to escape.
No traveler who lands at Honolulu will feel unrequited for his time and his money should he visit two places in the vicinity of the town. The first is the _Pali_ and the second, the Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology.
The first is a gigantic precipice, reached by a few hours ride from the city by horse. As one reaches the precipice, there spreads out before him at a dizzying depth below a verdant plain, bounded in the distance by an emerald sea. The wind which always blows in tropical countries is gathered in between the long projecting arms of a mountain chain and rushes over the face of cliff with such force that it is said by travelers to be one of the strongest continual winds on the globe.
The Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology contains the finest collection in existence of things illustrating the life and customs of Polynesia. Among other things, the visitor is shown the personal god of war of that sovereign whose grand-child was the last to hold the sceptre of the Kanakas. There are royal documents to prove that more than one thousand men have been beheaded before this grim-faced old idol. Here, too, is the famous robe of birds' feathers, made to please the fancy of this same grim old monarch. The feathers of which this strange, but really elegant, robe is made are of a reddish color. The birds from which they were plucked were found only in the Hawaiian Islands and each bird had only four feathers, two being under each wing. The extinction of the bird is attributed to the making of this royal robe. So many of them were needed that hundreds of hunters were employed a score or more of years to secure the number required. Placing the wages of the hunters at a reasonable figure, the value of the robe is over three hundred thousand dollars.