better purposes. In the public square, which is the exchange, the merchants meet in groups and pleasantly gossip and discuss business.

The Spice islands are a land of enchantment, priests peopling them with gods and merchants filling them with gold, or things more precious than gold, as frankincense and myrrh, pearls and precious stones, fine spices and death destroying drugs. From hills of richest verdure one may gaze on cloudencircling peak and coral sea. The air is perfumed with flowers, and scented with cinnamon, pimento, nutmegs, and cloves. But there is less of enchantment in a steamy, sticky atmosphere at a temperature of 95°; in living with lizards, cockroaches, flies, fleas, bugs, spiders, scorpions, centipedes, wood-leaches, ants, snakes, cobras, and the rest. The scenery is better than the vermin for purposes of enchantment,-shades of green, light upon the mountain sides, dark in the ravines, while embowering the Malay huts that line the shore are groves of palms and betel, and back among the hills dorian and mangosteen. The East India company took possession of the isl and of Penang, opposite Sumatra and near Malacca, and held it until 1857, when the British government assumed control.

Batavia, the capital of Java, where the Dutch are still in evidence, was called the queen of the east under the Dutch East India company régime, and it still fraternizes commercially with Ceylon and the Moluccas. Coffee and rice come first among the valued products of Java, where are made many mats from the cane which comes from Sumatra. Sandalwood of a delicate yellow color and fine fragrance grows in the mountains of Timor, and is exported largely to China for burning in the dwellings of the wealthy, and in temples. Here, also, an important article of commerce is the wax of the wild bees, which hangs from the trees in huge honeycombs.

CHAPTER XXIII

HAWAII, THE PEARL OF THE PACIFIC

SAYS the author of Anson's Voyage, writing in 1746, “It is indeed most remarkable, that by the concurrent testimony of all the Spanish navigators, there is not one port, nor, even a tolerable road as yet found out, betwixt the Philippine islands and the coast of California; so that from the time the Manila ship first loses sight of land, she never lets go her anchor till she arrives on the coast of California, and very often not till she gets to its southernmost extremity." Thus it would seem that when Cook came, a quarter of a century later, the existence of the Hawaiian islands was not known.

Although one of the Hawaiian islands was discovered by Gaetano in 1542, the fact seems to have been forgotten, by the commanders of the Spanish galleons, as well as by the pirates and circumnavigators, if indeed the discovery had ever been known by them. Whatever the secret archives of Spain may have contained, it is very certain that Spanish navigators did not know of the islands for over two centuries. Evidently Captain Cook knew nothing of them, nor any of the geographers, chart-makers, or navigators of his day. The memory of Columbus is honored as fully as if he had been the first to find America, as if he had been the first to deem it possible. or probable, that by sailing west, the other side of east might be found. So with regard to Captain Cook, who was a hired sailing-master ploughing in the Pacific a straight furrow from south to north, from the previously discovered South sea isles to the fur-seal lands of Vitus Bering, when he accidentally ran against this land.

In the Hawaiian group are eight large and seven small islands, the former mountainous, and some of them volcanic: the latter, little more than islets or rocks. The islands lie in midocean, just within the tropics, in latitude 20° more or less.

on nearly a straight line from Cuba to the Philippines. The eight large islands, with their total area of 6,740 square miles, are Hawaii, 4,210 square miles; Kahoolaui, 63 square miles; Lauai, 150 square miles; Maui, 760 square miles; Molokai, 270 square miles; Oahu, 600 square miles; Kaui, 590 square miles; and Niihau, 97 square miles. Kaui is called the garden island from its well-watered and luxuriant vegetation. It is devoted largely to sugar and rice, with coffee possibilities. Maui has sugar plantations and coffee lands; Haleakala, the principal mountain of Maui, is covered with small farms growing potatoes, corn, beans, and pigs. Oahu, besides containing the capital, Honolulu, with 30,000 inhabitants, and extensive sugar lands, has in course of construction a railway to make the circuit of the island. The peaks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, Hawaii, each some 14,000 feet high, are on the largest and most important island agriculturally, and which gives its name to the group. Oahu holds the commercial and political supremacy in Honolulu, the capital and chief city, which is American, so far as occupied by Americans, and native where the natives dwell. Kilauea, on the Mauna Loa mountain, whose active crater is three miles wide, erupts 25 times as much as Vesuvius. It is always in action, but the great eruptions come periodically; one occurred in 1840, one in 1843, and another in 1852. An eruption in 1855-6 continued for fifteen months. Mauna Kea, 13,805 feet high, always wears a cap of snow, even in the hottest season. Weaimea rejoices in a broad breezy plain, a grand sweep of mountain curves, all intermingled with the variegations of mountains and sea, from the white snow on the ragged volcanic dome to the innumerable hues of green and blue and red and gold overspreading the foliage below.

Nature is still at work enlarging the borders of these islands by means of volcanic masonry, and there may be here another Australia in time. The flora too will increase and improve; there are no hurricanes, and thunderstorms are rare. The soil is prolific; a man can live on the products from 40 square feet of it, that is so far as food is concerned. An acre will grow 500 banana trees, yielding ten tons of fruit; there are two and a half tons of sugar to the acre. There is nothing like American farming on the islands; it is not necessary. Insectivorous birds should be propagated here for the benefit of horticulture.

Honolulu, the capital city of the Hawaiian islands, is constructed largely of one-story wooden houses, with government buildings, water-works, museum, and manufacturing establishments, electric lights and tramways. The harbor is ample, with good wharves, and has direct communication with most of the ports of the Pacific. Among the prominent edifices are the Executive building, the Oahu college, and the Kamehameha school. Many of the present native Hawaiians read and write English in addition to their own language. Besides schools there are libraries and churches; some of the stores are quite elegant, corresponding with those of the civilized world elsewhere, and all for the proper accommodation of the American English and native population. At the time of annexation there were a normal and training school, a minister of public instruction, reading circles, and several schools with foreign teachers. Modern industrialism has long held the attention of the islanders. The Kamehameha schools of manual training were established by the Princess Pauahi, the last of the Kamehamehas. The well-endowed Polynesian museum is housed in a massive stone building.

The first printing at the island was a school book in 1822, and two years later 2,000 natives, including the king and his chiefs, were able to read. Schools were established; and the days of Hawaiian feudalism were but just passed, when from the California coast came the children of Mexican rancheros for a better education than they could obtain at home. Laws and a written constitution were promulgated in 1840.

At the mission one sees here and there an old adobe with thick grass roof projecting six feet to shade the windows, the house itself embowered in palms and algarobas, while the night air is filled with the fragrance of hibiscus and oleanders.

An Hawaiian forest is a tangled mass of broad-leaved vege tation, like that of the banana tree, intermixed with the kos, or mahogany, and the green and silver leaved candle-nut, and a score of other forest trees and plants, with an undergrowth of grass ferns and flowers. But for the open ways cut by the wood-haulers these vast hot-beds of redundant nature would be impenetrable. Lining and over-arching the roads are mango caoutchouc and umbrella trees, bread-fruit orange and bamboo, monkey-pod, date and cocoa palms, and alligator pears, while at the houses and hamlets the moist air is heavy

with the odor of flowers. Paradise in the Pacific, the Hawaiian islands have been called, by those who knew nothing of the other paradise long ago established in these waters by one. who knew little of either the Pacific ocean or of any paradise.

The capital and metropolitan city of the Pacific may yet be planted upon this pearl; the great ocean could find no more fitting place for a capital than these charming central isles. The war made plain to all what long had been plain to some that as a strategic outpost of the Pacific coast the islands were necessary to the United States, and must be held by no other power. With the conquest of Manila, and the unfolding of large American interests on the Asiatic shores, the question of Hawaiian annexation assumed a different shape. The islands then obviously became a necessity. A German or a Japanese flag floating over Honolulu might not imply hostile designs on our coast, but it would be a serious inconvenience to our oriental commerce. Americans who opposed the annexation of the Hawaiian islands need only to shut their eyes, and imagine how it would be with this outpost of the American coast, and point d'appui in the centre of the Pacific, in the hands of a hostile power.

Cattle-raising is the chief industry of Waimea, whose tableland, 2,500 feet in height, has an average temperature of 64°, with clear cool evenings, but moistened by rain or mist nearly every day in the year. Over this high level Mauna Loa sometimes throws a light such as enables one to read a newspaper at midnight forty miles away. But all the fierce eruptions to which these fiery hills are subject trouble not the gentle sheep that pasture on their slopes, nor yet the gentle shepherd, for that matter, particularly if he happens to be a mounted Chinaman or sleepy Kanaka. Coffee, fruit, and grazing lands are now offered at from $10 to $40 an acre. For the past half century the policy has been pursued by the government of selling lands at low prices for cash, and also of making long leases of large tracts. The terms have been so easy that the best lands are now practically monopolized by wealthy holders, who will sell only at a large price.

Coffee, sugar, rice, peanuts, hides, paddy, goat-skins, tallow, horns, fungus, sperm oil, cocoanut oil, whale oil, whalebones, paiai, shark's fins, betel leaves, tamarinds, sweet potatoes, bananas, pineapples, pulu cocoanuts, oranges, limes, and sandal