THE VOYAGE TO MAUI
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Emerson, Nathaniel Bright
Hiiaka’s voyage across the Ale-nui-haha channel, considered merely as a sea adventure, was a tame experience. There was no storm, no boistrous weather, sea as calm as a mill-pond, nothing to fillip the imagination with a sense of excitement or danger; yet it was far from being an agreeable experience to the young woman who was now having her first hand-to-hand tussle with the world.
They had spent the night at the house of one Pi’i-ke-a-nui. In the early morning their host and a younger man—apparently his son—named Pi’i-ke-a-iki, made ready their canoe to sail for Maui. Hiiaka, assuming that passage would be granted both of them, in accordance with a promise made the previous day, stood ready against the hour of departure. At the last moment, the younger man, having assisted Wahine-oma’o to her seat in the bow next to himself, called to his elder, “Pi’i-ke-a-nui, why don’t you show your passenger to her seat, the one next you?”
“I won’t do it,” Pi’i-ke-a-nui answered groutily. “I find that the canoe will be overloaded if we take passengers aboard and all our landlord’s freight will get wet.”
The real reason for this volte-face on the part of the old sailor was that he had made an unseemly proposition to Hiiaka the night before and she had repelled him.
Wahine-oma’o, thereupon, left her seat and the canoe started without them. It was not more than fairly underway, however, when a violent sea struck the craft and swamped it, and all the loose freight was floating about in the ocean.
“There, you see! We’d ’ave had better luck with the women aboard.” Such was the exclamation of Pi’i-ke-a-iki.
It did not take long to convince the old man Pi’i-ke-a-nui, who was captain of the canoe, that he had invited this disaster on himself, the agent of which, as he rightly suspected, was none other than the distinguished-looking young woman who now stood on the beach watching him in his predicament with unperturbed countenance.
The two men floated their canoe, collected their baggage and came ashore. When they had got the stuff dry and stowed in the waist of the craft, they escorted the women aboard, seating Wahine-oma’o, as directed by the captain, in the bow near Pi’i-ke-a-iki and Hiiaka in the after part, within arm’s length of Pi’i-ke-a-nui, and they put to sea.
The canoe was a small affair, unprovided with that central platform, the pola, that might serve as the cabin or quarter deck, on which the passengers could stretch themselves for comfort. In her weariness, Hiiaka, with her head toward the bow, reclined her body against the top rail of the canoe, thus eking out the insufficiency of the narrow thwart that was her seat; and she fell asleep, or rather, entered that border-land of Nod, in which the central watchman has not yet given over control of the muscular system and the ear still maintains its aerial reconnoissance.
The wind, meanwhile, as it caromed aft from the triangular sail of mat, coquetted with her tropical apparel and made paú and kihei shake like summer leaves.
The steersman, in whom that precious factor, a chivalrous regard for woman, was even of less value than is common to the savage breast, in the pursuit of a fixed purpose, began to direct amorous glances at the prostrate form before him and to the neglect of his own proper duties. Presently he left his steering and stole up to Hiiaka with privy paw outstretched. Hiiaka roused from her half-dreamy state on the instant, and the man sprang back and resumed his paddle.
Hiiaka, with the utmost coolness, expressed in song her remonstrance and sarcastic rebuke for this exhibition of inhospitable rudeness:
A Hono-ma-ele au, i Hono-ka-lani,
Ike au i ka ua o ko’u aina,
E halulu ana, me he kanaka la—
Ka ua ku a-o-a i kai.
Haki kaupaku o ka hale i ka ino, e!
Ino Ko’o-lau, ino Ko’o-lau, e-e!
TRANSLATION
With pillowed neck I lay, face to heaven:
The rain, I found, beat on my bed;
Came a tremor, like tread of a man—
The slap of a rain-squall at sea;
Within, the roof-tree broken down,
My house exposed to the storm,
My garden of herbs laid waste!
The young man added his protest: “Yes, his whole conduct is, indeed, shameful, scandalous. He hasn’t the decency to wait till he gets ashore.”
In the midst of this unpleasantness it was a comfort to hear the strong cheerful voice of her former companion Paú-o-pala’e calling to her across the stretch of waters. It will be remembered that their roads had parted company sometime before Hiiaka had left the big island. The separation had made no change, however, in their mutual affection:
O hele ana oe, e ka noe, e ka awa,
E na ki a Wahine-kapu,
E ka ua lele a’e maluna
O Ka-la-hiki-ola, la:
O hele ana, e!
TRANSLATION
Like a cloud you fleet by,
On the wings of the storm—
Vision of womanly tabu—
Of the rain-clouds that sweep
O’er the Hill-of-good-luck:
May you speed on your way!