CHAPTER 9

Molokai and Maui

The channel between Oahu and Molokai is twenty three miles wide. Steamers to Maui and Hawaii cross it and then skirt the lee shore of Molokai, which is an island forty miles long and only ten wide. This lee shore, by far the less interesting, is the only one usually seen by travellers. One of the smaller inter-island steamers leaves Honolulu every Tuesday afternoon, and, after calling at all the ports on Molokai, at most of those on the south side of Maui, and at Lanai, reaches Honolulu again on Sunday morning. Fine as the scenery on this trip is, however, the voyage can be recommended only to those for whom the sea has no terrors, as for a good part of the time the water is certain to be rough and many of the landings are difficult. There is much on Molokai that is of real interest, but there are no hotels, no good carriage roads, so that the only practicable way to visit it is on a camping expedition. For this arrangements must be made in Honolulu, where shooting permits must also be obtained. Hunting is excellent, as the Island is full of deer.

The west end of Molokai is comparatively barren, being in general occupied by ranches, although near the shore some sisal is grown. The landing for this part of the Island, and indeed the natural centre for all excursions, is Kaunakakai, a dreary and desolate village surrounded by dusty and withered scrub algaroba. The east end of the Island is fertile, and here the mountains rise to a height of about 5,000 feet. The southern shore is protected by coral reefs, which in two or three places have formed good harbours. Along this shore fishing is still an important industry, although the walls of the ancient fish ponds, which can be seen from the hills, have either sunk below the surface of the water or have fallen to pieces. Along the north shore the bluffs drop into the sea, being especially fine on the northeastern side, where a large part of the mountains must have broken off and disappeared in the ocean. In this region, in two magnificent valleys accessible only from the sea, Pelekunu and Wailau, there are settlements of Hawaiians who live much as they used to live before the discovery of the Islands. They even keep many of the ancient traditions which are elsewhere lost, and indeed throughout the Island the natives are inclined to be superstitious. The powerful Poison God, saved somehow from the burning of idols in 1819, was kept on Molokai by a priest, or kahuna, until the latter part of the nineteenth century. The power of this god to bring sickness and death has never been satisfactorily explained. It probably was made—it may still be in existence—of some extremely poisonous wood, which only the kahuna knew how to handle safely. Certain it is that its effects cannot be explained as the result only of the imagination. In these lonely valleys the natives make a living by raising taro for the Leper Settlement. This settlement, which gives to Molokai its melancholy celebrity, is on a triangle of land, made probably by some ancient lava flow, which juts into the sea on the north of the Island. A steep and dangerous path, always guarded, leads up the bluff behind it, and is the only means of access to the rest of the Island. The lepers carry on a certain amount of agricultural work themselves, but are really supported by the Government. Their houses are comfortable; the hospitals are of the best; everything is done to make the unfortunate people happy. The Settlement is very pretty as one sees it from the deck of a steamer or looks down on it from the hills, but it is a spot too sad to be visited by any but medical men, who go for the purpose of information. For the ordinary traveller it is a place to avoid as he would avoid the leprosarium at Panama or anywhere else.

To the hunter Molokai is most alluring. Landing at Kaunakakai, he makes his way back into the hills, where the woodlands are charmingly interspersed with meadows, where the climate is soft and cool, where deer are so plentiful that he is sure of a haunch of venison to roast over his camp fire. Or else he goes eastward, where the mountains are higher and the gulches more precipitous, where wild goats scramble over the highest rocks and give an opportunity for really skilful shooting. From these peaks the views are marvellous—the rocky coast to the south, with its lines of ancient fish ponds under the shallow water; endless cliffs and gorges to the north, inaccessible, tremendous; the misty mountains of Oahu to the northwest; and to the east the fine serrated pile of west Maui across a narrow blue-black strip of water. It is to this Island, since Molokai lacks roads and inns, that the traveller naturally proceeds.

Maui is, in size, the second island of the group, containing 728 square miles. It is really a double island, the northwestern and much smaller part being as old as Oahu, or perhaps as Kauai, and showing, therefore, great erosion; the southeastern, comparatively recent part, being entirely taken up by the great and only superficially eroded dome of Haleakala. These two parts are connected by a low plain or isthmus, formed by lava flows from the east, which gradually filled the channel that originally separated the two islands. On this low plain are sand dunes, sometimes 200 feet high, which, before the plain was cultivated, used to move slowly across from north to south as they were driven by the wind. The Island has a population of 25,000, and on it are some of the most important of the Hawaiian plantations. Industries are diversified and experiments with new crops are continually being made. There is already extensive pineapple planting above Haiku on the northern slope of Haleakala, and in the region to the east large rubber plantations have been set out. There is no carriage road around the Island, although one is in process of construction, and some of the finest scenery is, therefore, accessible only on horseback.

The first landing on Maui is Lahaina, an open roadstead on the west coast, which is, however, well protected, except during the rare Kona or southwesterly storms. The district, although having little rainfall, is watered by streams from the high mountains behind. The village of Lahaina, the oldest white settlement in the Islands, used to be the capital of the group. Its prosperity was due to the fact that it was the regular port of call for whaling ships, of which there were sometimes fifty or more anchored off shore. This prosperity was, however, precarious, and brought with it disease and death, since the sailors were allowed free run of the town without any kind of supervision on the part of the ship captains. It was here, therefore, that the most acute of the troubles occurred when the King promulgated laws against vice. The village has dwindled away and is now strung out along the shore, most of its original site being occupied by the cane fields of the Pioneer Mill Company. Some two miles above the town the Lahainaluna Seminary, established in 1831, still maintains its position among the most successful of the Hawaiian industrial schools. The deserted missionary home, a dingy white in its grove of ancient trees, is a pathetic and picturesque landmark of elder days. Aside from its beautiful situation and its dry, temperate climate, there is little to detain one long in Lahaina.

Northward, a carriage road follows the shore to Honolua, where there is a large cattle ranch. The scenery along this road is fine, with mountains rising ruggedly at the right and the blue peaks of Molokai thrusting themselves up from the water across the narrow channel. Beyond the end of the road, as one nears the northern point of the Island, the general formation of the cliffs and valleys is something like that of the Napali section on Kauai, but the precipices are neither as high nor as vividly coloured, and they lack the sense of remoteness and of solitary grandeur which makes Napali unique. Sometime the road will continue around to Wailuku, but at present the trip can only be taken on horseback, a ride of about fifteen miles through a wild country, which is cut into tremendous gorges and crowned with innumerable pinnacles of bare rock. The regular carriage road from Lahaina to Wailuku, a distance of twenty-three miles, leads along the shore to the southeast. After passing a small sugar plantation, Oluwalu, it winds along high above the sea, its line cut in the face of the steep, barren hills, climbs the shoulder of the mountain—always as near the ocean as possible—before dropping to the isthmus which connects the two parts of the Island. The view from the top of this shoulder is magnificent. Below are miles of level country covered by the cane of the Hawaiian Commercial Sugar Company, the largest sugar plantation in the world. The extent of the fields makes it easy to realise that the Plantation produces 60,000 tons of sugar every year. The different fields make great blotches of different shades of green, those in flower of a mauve grey. The huge mill sends out its streamers of black smoke. Immediately to the right and far to the left is the ocean; unruffled, its colours melting into each other insensibly off the southern shore; deep blue with specks of white off the northern. And straight ahead, back of the cultivated fields, in a long, bare, upward sweep, rises the stupendous dome of Haleakala, "the house built by the sun," 10,000 feet high, its summit floating blue and immeasurably calm above the little industries of men, above the encircling ring of clouds. It is the first sight of a really great Hawaiian mountain. From here to Wailuku the road leads through the cane fields across the level plain—a plain that seems like a broad highway leading between endless mountain masses from the southern to the northern ocean.

In a battle near Wailuku, which is now an attractive town of some 3,000 inhabitants, Kamehameha completed the conquest of Maui. It is said that the waters of the stream flowing from lao Valley back of the town were so stained with blood that their course could be marked far out to sea—hence the name Wailuku, or " red water." The town is now the county seat. It is a pleasant place to stay in, principally because of its situation, with the rugged mountains of west Maui behind it and in front Haleakala looming up across the plain. In its way lao Valley, reached by a drive of a few miles, is quite as fine as the Yosemite. Its perpendicular walls are as high and give the impression of being even higher, since the floor is narrower. Unlike most Hawaiian gulches, lao, after the narrow entrance is passed, broadens into an amphitheatre, the sides of which are broken with great rock bastions, ridges that spring from the sides of the mountain. These precipices are thickly wooded with trees and shrubs of every imaginable shade. At the head of the valley, to the right, the massive peak of Puu Kukui, 5,780 feet high, dominates all the lower spires and domes. Here, surrounded by inaccessible mountain walls, one gets again, as so often in the Islands, a sudden sense of complete isolation. It seems impossible that a few miles of macadam road lead back to civilisation. The only reality is the encircling precipices. Even to speak seems an intrusion on the silence of this predestined solitude, and the shriek of an automobile horn is an abomination. In lao also the feeling of being on an island is gone. It is far m-ore as though one had penetrated some beautiful and lonely mountain range in the middle of a continent. Indeed, the traveller who has been so far afield will find that it recalls insistently one of the beautiful valleys back of Kutais on the warm, southern slope of the Caucasus.

High on the ridge back of Puu Kukui, between the Waihee and Honokahau valleys—the former is as beautiful as lao, but not so easy of access—is a very tiny but perfect crater. Eke, by name. It was originally, of course, at the top of a mountain, but the winds and rains of thousands of years have carried away most of its support, so that it hangs now in mid-air, suspended on its narrow ridge, a position probably unique for a crater. So steep are the walls which support it, so tangled with tropical growth the lower ridges, that only one white man has ever succeeded in reaching its rim. And this is but a sample of the climbing in the west Maui mountains, with their tempting peaks, each with its glorious view—all baffling except to the most expert because of their matted vegetation and of the angle at which they shoot into the air. Nothing anywhere could surpass the outlook from the top of Puu Kukui, with superb gorges running on all sides to its base, with the mighty dome of Haleakala in the distance and all around the blue-black ocean.

The landing for Wailuku, about four miles to the east, is Kahului, a flourishing village that has, however, much of the raw newness of a Western mining town. It is the port of shipment for sugar from the Hawaiian Commercial and other plantations, and behind its breakwater the largest steamers can find safe anchorage. It is the necessary starting point for a trip to east Maui, and for the incomparably interesting excursion to the top of Haleakala, with its huge extinct crater. The ascent of the mountain, with the return trip, takes two days, not including the descent into the crater. The distance to the summit from Paia, the eastern terminus of the Kahului Railroad, is about twenty-two miles. The first seven miles, to Makawao, a pretty village at an elevation of 1,500 feet, and the social centre of the district, is done by carriage or automobile. It is possible, at extra expense, to continue in the same way to Idlewilde, which, in spite of its name, is a delightful spot 4,500 feet above sea level. From here it is necessary to continue the ascent on horseback. Here a stop is made for luncheon or supper, as the case may be; here refreshments are provided for use on the mountain top, and costumes and blankets for the trip may be rented if necessary. Warm clothing and overcoats are essential, as it is often very cold, and ladies, who are required to ride astride, should also be provided with short skirts and leggings, or divided skirts. At the summit is only a rough shelter, a house to keep off the rain, and where those who can sleep without beds may sleep, while others wait more or less patiently for dawn. Since no one lives here, all food and comforts must be carried from below. On the regular excursions they are provided as a matter of course. The steep horseback climb from Idlewilde, across great upward-swinging plains, past herds of cattle that recognise men as men only when they are on horseback, and would probably prove troublesome to the pedestrian, is interesting principally because one more and more realises the altitude. The cultivated fields below shrink, and at the same time the ocean spreads wider and wider and always more definitely blue. Or, if it is night—and most people make the ascent by night, so that sunrise may not be too many long hours away—the land is an indistinguishable grey, and the ocean is jet black, and overhead the stars seem very many and very near. In the vast silence, so different in quality from the troubled silence of the lowlands, one can almost hear the crisp rustle of their sparkling. It is no wonder that so many Oriental monasteries are built high on the mountains of Asia Minor. Lofty solitudes seem always most open to celestial influences, and perhaps it was with the consciousness of the near presence of the gods that the Hawaiians named this mountain not Haleokala, "house of the sun," but Haleakala, "house built by the sun," thus making the sun god's connection with it more intimate.

Bridge over crack on floor of crater

On a dark night the summit of the mountain is merely the end of rising ground—or more than that, the end of everything, since straight ahead yawns a pit, which is the crater. Nor by moonlight is it satisfactory, since the indistinct outlines only make one long to see more. In general it may be said that, except to the imagination of poets, mountains by moonlight, unless they are snow mountains and are very near, are disappointing. It is true that here on Haleakala the moon seems to hang lower and to be more silvery than anywhere else, but its brightness brings out clearly only the hut and the rocks that are close at hand. The proper thing to do is to build a fire and to persuade the guide to tell stories of the mountain —stories, it may be, of quite modern experiences, of hunting and camping in the crater, or of the rescue of foolish strangers who try to find paths up the rocky walls and are marooned on treacherous landslides; or, perhaps, if the guide is Hawaiian, of some of the elder, legendary history, of the time when the fire goddess Pele broke through the wall of the crater at the great Koolau gap and fled from Maui forever, across the water to Hawaii. And then it is wise to try to sleep until the sunrise.

Dawn comes quickly in the tropics, and even more quickly on a mountain top. When the first faint light appears the party takes its position at the edge of the crater. The stars grow pale, as though they were strewing their own brightness over all the sky. Then the light reaches downward and is reflected from below, from the upper surfaces of cloudbanks that were invisible a moment before. They shine whiter and whiter, revealing black chasms that cut across them. And then, as there comes a hint of saffron in the sky, what seem three more lofty clouds to the southeast take on solidity with their morning colours and resolve themselves into the three dome-like mountains of Hawaii. The black rim of water at the eastern edge of the world grows sharper as the green and red behind become more intense; the tips of the Hawaii mountains first gleam golden in the sunlight, and then suddenly the sun itself springs over the horizon, and all the colours of the cloud tops vanish in white daylight. But far below it is still night. The ocean, except to the east, is still black through the cloud rifts. The fields below are still dark, and the west Maui mountains are sombre. There is something unreal and very wonderful in standing thus in the golden light above the clouds, above the world asleep, alone with the beautiful snow-capped Hawaii mountains that surge high above the surf-like clouds across the channel. Then as the light glides down the mountain, picking out forests and fields and villages, and turning the black sea blue, as the horizon, that is the rim of a great bowl, pales, and fuses at last in the misty sky, one turns to look at the wonder near at hand, at the vast crater at one's feet.

The extinct crater of Haleakala is 20 miles in circumference, 7 1-2 miles long, and 2 1-3 miles wide. Where one stands, in front of the rest house, there is an almost perpendicular drop of 2,000 feet to the floor of the ancient volcano. The apparently tiny cones at the bottom are, in reality, good-sized hills, one of them 700 feet high. This crater is by far the largest in the world. Except for the still active crater on Mauna Loa, Hawaii, Haleakala is the only intact summit crater in the Islands. In all other cases such craters were probably filled to the brim by the final volcanic activity, and subsequent erosion has completely done away with all semblance of the original form. On Maui, however, some great geological fault caused the sides of the mountain in two places to slip into the sea, leaving two huge gaps in the rim of the crater, through which the last lava flowed away, instead of piling itself up and up until it filled the bowl.

Most travellers will be satisfied with the view into the crater. For those who wish to descend, a trip necessitating a day and comfortably filling two days, there is a difficult trail of about three miles along the rim, which is continued, by an easy trail, into the crater. The floor is covered with lava sand and is practically bare of vegetation, except at the eastern end, where there is a low growth of trees. There are almost no signs of erosion, since it seldom rains at this altitude. Scattered throughout the crater are many silver swords (Argyroxiphium), a kind of plant found nowhere else. They are polished silver in colour, looking like rosettes of long, thin swords, growing three or four feet high and bearing panicles of flowers something like a yucca. The leaves last indefinitely. On the floor of the crater the evenly formed cones are interesting, thirteen in all, seven of them sand hills. There is a so-called bottomless pit which is an ancient blowhole; a natural bridge across a fissure which marked one of the eruptions; there are many tiny craters; curious lava and crystalline formations. But above all there is the impressive magnitude of the whole— the stupendous walls, broken in places by landslides, the miles of rolling desert country that seem rather to be at the bottom of some great Sahara valley than to be the floor of a volcano. Haleakala must have been awe-inspiring almost to stupefaction when its cones were spouting fire and when rivers of scarlet, molten lava crawled along its floor. It is quite as superb in the desolation of its death.

From Paia, where one leaves the railroad to make the ascent of Haleakala, another most interesting excursion is to the eastward, along the north side of the Island, through a region which was almost impenetrable until the recent opening of a long irrigation ditch. The distance from Paia to Hana, at the eastern end of Maui, is forty-seven miles, a good two days' trip, although the first eighteen or twenty miles may be made by carriage. There is then a horseback trail of a few miles, once more two or three miles of good road, then another trail for a few miles which connects with the road running around the eastern end of the Island. After leaving Paia the road passes through the rich, rolling country of Haiku, thickly planted with pineapples. Beyond Puelo there is an excellent paved trail following the line of the ditch through the wild jungle of this, the wettest part of the Island. It winds in and out, always at an elevation of from 1,000 to 2,000 feet, following the contours of the ragged gulches which cut into the mountain from the sea. Often it is actually blasted out of the sides of precipices where one looks down a sheer 1,000 feet to the valley bottoms, with the sea beyond. The Kaenae Valley, inhabited only by Hawaiians and, until the trail was built, accessible only from the sea, leads up into the Koolau gap and into the crater of Haleakala. The ascent is gradual, leading through magnificent scenery and splendid, untouched native forests. On either side of the gap, at the entrance to the crater, the precipices tower ruggedly hundreds of feet into the air, forming the stately gateway through which the Fire Goddess left her ancient home. A few miles beyond this valley the trail, still winding along the precipices and crossing the gulches at their narrow upper ends, always through beautiful tropical growth, reaches Nahiku, the centre of the new Hawaiian rubber industry. From here around the eastern end of the Island there is a good carriage road, part of It following the line of a paved road built by the kings of Maui in the sixteenth century. The village of Hana at the eastern point is situated on a charming little bay protected by two headlands. That to the south, Kauiki Head, is an ancient crater and was a famous fort in olden times. When Kamehameha invaded Maui this stronghold withstood his attacks for two years, long after the rest of the Island had been subjugated. Beyond Hana the road extends south and west for a few miles only, and a rough trail leads around the southern slope of the mountain to Makena landing. The country here is protected from the trade winds, and the plains, little cut by streams and rising more steeply than on the northern slopes, are used only for grazing purposes. The ranchers have a trail which leads upwards through the abrupt Kaupo gap, the break in the southern wall of the mighty summit crater.

Makena, except for the queer little crescent-shaped island of Molokini, the remains of a tiny volcano a mile or two off shore, is a place of no interest, but the road connecting it with Makawao and the northern slopes of east Maui, and with Kahului on the isthmus, leads through the beautiful district of Kula, across the great western shoulder of Haleakala. This Kula district, high, with only a moderate rainfall, but with very rich soil, is an excellent farming region and has a climate as nearly perfect as one could wish. People are beginning to build on these cool, beautiful uplands, where the air is pure and delicious, where there are no high winds, where flowers and vegetables and trees of every kind can be raised with almost no care, and where society, centering about the village of Makawao to the northward, is made up of intelligent, well-informed people. If there were only a hotel, as there must be sometime, the region would surpass all other parts of the Islands as a place for a summer holiday.

Maui, with its extremely rugged western end, and its dome-like eastern end, is an island with perhaps more diversity of scenery than any of the others. It is easily accessible. At Lahaina and Wailuku, the latter being the natural centre for excursions, there are good hotels. lao Valley, with its cañon-like walls, its marvellous colours, and its lonely sublimity, would be worth the effort necessary to visit the Island if there were nothing else to see. The extinct crater of Haleakala, unique in its desolate, dead magnificence, and the glorious view of the Hawaii mountains across the clouds as the sunlight touches them in the early morning, is a sight memorable to the most hardened and unemotional of men. It is one of those great, amazing experiences of life which can no more be described than they can be forgotten. Even the wonder of Kilauea is surpassed by the wonder of this mighty crater, in which Vesuvius would be only a deeper depression, barren, alone, and eternally silent in the high quiet spaces on the summit of its huge mountain. It dominates Maui, makes of it a land of inexpressible fascination.

Two small islands to the south are of little or no interest. Lanai, opposite Lahaina, with an area of 139 square miles, is a single cone 3,400 feet high. On it are springs, one running stream, and some low forest growth, but no cultivation. The Island is given over to cattle and sheep ranches. Kahoolawe, off Makena, covers 69 square miles and is entirely surrounded by low cliffs. It is almost barren, supporting only a few sheep and cattle, and the herdsmen are its only inhabitants. These little islands would not be worth mention except that one likes to know their names as the steamer passes between them and Maui on its way to Hawaii.

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