 |
| Waikiki Beach was the Royal Coconut Grove when Twain arrived in 1866. |
In 1866, Mark Twain was virtually unknown without a
single published book. He had bright red
hair and he talked and gestured in such an animated way that people meeting him
for the first time often thought he was drunk.
And then he got one of the greatest jobs in history.
The Sacramento
Union, the best newspaper on the West Coast, sent him to the Sandwich
Islands (as Hawaii was then called) and agreed to pay $20 for every letter or
story he sent back. Though Samuel
Clemens, writing as Mark Twain, would go on to become America’s most famous writer
and the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and would travel extensively
around the world, he never forget Hawaii. He called it “the loveliest stream of islands that
lies anchored in any ocean.”
Though he was only in Hawaii for four months in 1866 and
never returned, much later in his life he wrote, “No alien land in all the
world has any deep strong charm for me but that one, no other land could so
longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a
lifetime, as that one has done…. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its
summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear; I
can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by
the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack;…in
my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.”
 |
| Rainbow Falls on the Big Island is just one of many places Twain visited that are much the same today. |
So when my brother and I decided to spend two weeks exploring
the Hawaiian Islands, who better to be our guide than Mark Twain? Armed with editions of Twain’s two travel
books on the subject “Letters from Hawaii” and “Roughing It,” we decided to follow
his route and see how much we could return to the Sandwich Islands of 1866,
when it was still an independent kingdom and the most isolated population
center on earth.
Honolulu
Twain arrived in Honolulu on March 18, 1866 after a ten
day voyage and set out to explore the settlement of then 15,000. “The further I traveled through the town the
better I liked it. Every step revealed a
new contrast -- disclosed something I was unaccustomed to…I saw luxurious banks
and thickets of flowers fresh as a meadow after a rain, and glowing with the
richest dyes…I saw huge-bodied, wide-spreading forest trees, with strange names
and stranger appearance – trees that cast a shadow like a thundercloud….I saw
long-haired, saddle-colored Sandwich Island maidens…gazing indolently at
whatever or whoever happened along.”
 |
| The porch of the Moana Surfrider hotel, opened in 1901. |
Much like Mark Twain, we arrived in Honolulu after what
seemed like a ten-day trip, although it was really just a seven-hour flight and
five-hour delay. After negotiating the maze of Waikiki streets,
we checked in, had a drink and walked out at midnight into a light mist of
rain. And into a Hawaii not too far different from
Twain’s. Oh, of course, Honolulu is a now
sprawling city of 400,000, with 8 million more tourists thrown in. But the shock of arriving from the mainland
in winter was the same. Here there were
flowers – everywhere – in January, with palm trees swaying overhead and huge
banyan trees covering a city block. The
temperature, even at midnight, was balmy and on every corner there were woman
looking at us, perhaps not “indolently,” but at least sizing us up to see if we
were potential customers.
Waikiki is
known for boasting a large collection of streetwalkers. They were all colors, races and sizes, and
beautifully dressed. And strangely, they
were working the territory in front of the Moana Surfrider, perhaps the most
gorgeous and expensive of Waikiki hotels, and one of the oldest, dating back to
1901. On this street, Kalakaua Ave, which
has the same look and feel of Rodeo Drive, with many of the same stores, it is
an odd sight to see prostitutes on every corner. Their target is rich Asian men, so two old,
pale and poorly dressed Americans didn’t cause much excitement, but one did ask
my brother if he wanted a massage.
 |
| The sunsets on Waikiki have not changed since Mark Twain's visit. |
The Waikiki of Twain’s day was a village of white
cottages. It was the royal coconut grove
and one-time home of King Kamehameha I, the king that united all of Hawaii by winning
a famous battle here in 1795. It was
also here on the thin sliver of Waikiki Beach that Mark Twain tried surfing,
and first introduced the sport to the world.
“In one place we came upon a
large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves
with the national pastime of surf- bathing. Each …. would paddle three or four
hundred yards out to sea (taking a short board with him), then face the shore
and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right
moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the
board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell! It did not seem
that a lightning express-train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed.
I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I got the
board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection
myself. The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any
cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of
water in me.”
 |
| The statue of Duke Kahanamoku, the most famous of all Hawaiian surfers on Waikiki. |
Today, of course, they are still surfing at Waikiki and the
beach is home to the ultimate surfing tribute, a statue of the king of the
board, Duke Kahanamoku. But the real
excitement of surfing in winter is on the north shore of the island – a place
that would have been inaccessible to Mark Twain except by boat because in 1866,
no road penetrated Oahu’s central spine of mountains.
 |
| Breakers on Banzai-Pipeline Beach are so close to the shore you can capture them with cellphones. |
Today, it’s a drive of an hour or so by tunnels and
highway to Sunset and Banzai-Pipeline Beaches.
Both are known for their flat reefs that cause waves to break when they
hit shallow depths, creating a huge curling tube of water that surfers can actually
ride down the center. In winter, these
can be the deadliest of beaches with waves averaging nine feet, and reaching
even 14-20 feet high, with the constant danger of surfers being hurled into the
coral below.
The incredible thing when visiting is that the main road
is literally at the edge of the beach.
You just pull over for free parking, and in less than a minute you can
walk right up to the gigantic breaking waves and be so close that you can
actually photograph a surfer in curl … with a cell phone! Of course, the beach is lined with professional
photographers with two-foot long telephotos and some of the top surfing photos come
from here, but you don’t need one to feel part of the action. You can buy cold coconuts at the beach, or
it’s a short drive to Hale’iwa, an old hippie surfing town that is also home to
the most famous of all North Shore stops: Matsumoto’s Shave Ice.
 |
| The North Shore is a laid back look at an older, less commercially developed Hawaii. |
Diamond Head
This 700-foot-high extinct crater looms over Honolulu and
has fascinated every visitor from Mark Twain to the TV show Hawaii Five-O. Twain rented a broken-down horse named Oahu
and struggled to the top, but now people think nothing of walking from Waikiki
and climbing to the summit at dawn, taking a $10 cab ride back to their
hotel. It’s an interesting hike, with
tunnels and curving staircases cut through rock.
 |
| Of course the view from the top of Diamond Head includes thousands of modern buildings, but nature hasn't changed. |
The summit was converted to an army lookout
point in World War II. Of course the
view today includes hundreds upon hundreds of modern hotels, apartments and
office buildings, but nothing much has changed along the shoreline or in the
steep mountain crags, so much of the view is the same as Mark Twain described
it: “Impressed by the profound silence
and repose that rested over the beautiful landscape…I gave voice to my
thought. I said: What a picture is here slumbering…How strong
the rugged outlines of the dead volcano stand out against the clear sky! What a
snowy fringe marks the bursting of the surf over the long, curved reef! How
calmly the dim city sleeps yonder in the plain! How soft the shadows lie upon
the stately mountains that border the dream-haunted Manoa Valley! How….at this point the horse called Oahu
deliberately sat down in the sand. Sat
down to listen, I suppose….I stopped apostrophizing and convinced him that I
was not a man to allow contempt of court on the part of a horse.”
 |
| Mark Twain in 1867 |
On his way back to town, Twain noticed a beautiful island
woman and thinking to impress her, he galloped by like a cavalier. She called to his friend Brown, who was bringing
up the rear and spoke to him. Twain
waited and when Brown caught up, he asked what she had said. Brown laughed. “She thought from the slouchy
way you rode and the way you drawled out your words, that you was drunk! She said, ‘Why don’t you take the poor
creature home, Mr. Brown? It makes me
nervous to see him galloping that horse and hanging on that way, and he so
drunk.’ “
Maui
Twain’s next stop was Maui. He wrote famously, “I went to Maui to stay a
week and remained five. I had a jolly
time. I would not have fooled away any of it writing letters under any consideration
whatever… I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place good-bye
so regretfully.”
 |
| Big Beach on Maui |
Most people feel the same way. Twain based in Lahaina, so we did too. In the 1800s, this large whaling town could
have 400 ships in harbor at a time, and seemingly just as many bars, saloons
and brothels. One of the surviving
buildings from the era is the sturdily built town jail. Today, Front Street, Lahaina is a wacky mix
of tourist shops, historic buildings with balconies, restaurants, galleries, stone
churches and bars, with an old fort and picturesque harbor that offers bobbing
boats and classic mountain and sea views.
 |
| Lahaina at sunset from the Pier |
Perhaps the two most familiar landmarks – the giant
banyan tree that covers an entire city block and the historic balconied Pioneer
Hotel where writer Jack London once stayed, both came after Twain’s visit, But there are a dozen or so buildings from
his time, and no matter how many Subway sandwich shops and pizza joints invade,
Lahaina still has the look of an old whaling town. Have a local Haleakala IPA from the Maui
Brewing Company on the balcony of Captain Jack’s Island Grill, and you can
drift with the swaying overhead palm trees back to a different time.
 |
| Captain Jack's looking towards the Pioneer Hotel, where Jack London stayed and wrote some of his stories. |
By 1866, the missionaries had arrived in Lahaina, and
were in steady conflict with the sailors, the native Hawaiians and Mark Twain,
who loved needling them. He complained
that the missionaries had come to make the native people “permanently miserable
by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how
nearly impossible it is to get there.”
He wrote, “How sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to
their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell.”
 |
| Lahaina is a weird mix of tourist shops and upscale galleries and historic buildings with a whaling port town feel thrown in. |
One of Mark Twain’s permanent gifts to Maui was
popularizing the idea of watching sunrise from the 10,023-foot summit of the extinct
volcano Haleakala, “the house of the sun.”
Twain camped on the top and at
dawn had the not uncommon experience of being in bright sunshine, while all below
him was blanketed with clouds. “It was
the sublimest spectacle I ever witnessed, and I think the memory of it will
remain with me always,” he wrote.
 |
| Hiking above the clouds on the summit of Haleakala. |
Today,
the ritual, which involves driving twisting roads in the dark and freezing on
the summit until the sun comes up, has become so popular that as of Feb. 1,
2017, the National Park Service requires permits and only cars with permits are
allowed on the summit at dawn. No matter.
The summit view is fantastic at any time, and since the volcano is covered
with hundreds of microclimates, there are always constantly swirling clouds and
light formations. Dress warm.
The Big Island of Hawaii
With its active volcano, waterfalls, and historic sites,
Twain liked the island of Hawaii above all else. He sailed from Honolulu and wrote, “We landed
at Kailua (pronounced Ki-loo-ah), a little collection of native grass houses
reposing under tall coconut trees – the sleepiest, quietest, Sundayest looking
place you can imagine. Ye weary ones
that are sick of the labor and care… and sigh for a land where ye may fold your
tired hands and slumber your lives peacefully away, pack up your carpet sacks
and go to Kailua! A week there ought to
cure the saddest of you.”
 |
| The buildings of Kailua line one side of the street, the ocean the other. |
I liked Kailua best of all myself. The historic town consists of a half moon bay
with the sea on one side, where towering waves crash against a rock wall
breakwater every minute or so, sending a spray water splashing over the
sidewalk. On the other side, is a South
Pacific paradise of historic buildings sprinkled with new ones made to look old
with shutters, balconies, bars, live music, ABC liquor stores, towering palm
trees and an assortment of Hawaiian tourists shops.
 |
| The current Hawaiian State Flag was the national flag in 1866 when Twain visited. |
Of course, it’s touristy.
There’s a steady stream of cars, convertibles, motorcycles and people,
with drifts of a live singer doing John Denver or a tourism shop playing Iz
Kamakawiwo’ole’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” a song, by the way, that you’ll
probably hear more than a hundred times.
The official Youtube page for the song has 261 million views. I suppose there are people who hate it, but
to me, never has a song captured a place better. Even Mark Twain, a hundred years before the
song was recorded, wrote, “Why did not Captain Cook have taste enough to call
his great discovery the Rainbow Islands?
These charming spectacles are present to you at every turn; they are as
common in all the islands as fogs and wind in San Francisco.”
 |
| The parks along the sea in downtown Kailua look directly west and are perfect for sunsets. |
Captain Cook was killed on Hawaii, a fact that fascinated
Twain, and he spent a great deal of time visiting the site of the murder, and
also the site where Cook was “cooked.”
Twain had no great respect for Captain Cook, who he thought had
pretended to be a god and got what he deserved.
He delighted in the fact that when the British demanded the return of
Captain Cook’s body, the natives could sheepishly only produce nine pounds of
it… the rest having been eaten. The
monument to Cook that Twain visited is now underwater. Not a good sign for global warming.
 |
| Wood carvings and a giant stone wall are the attractions at Pu"uhonua o Honauuau, City of Refuge |
The big island is filled with sights visited by Twain
that have changed little if at all. You
can walk by the massive black lava walls of Pu’uhonua o Honauuau, the City of
Refuge, which is now a National Park.
The earth’s largest volcano, Mauna Loa, is still 13,677 feet high and
consumes half the island, while the planet’s youngest and most active volcano,
Kilauea, is still spewing gas, smoke and ash, as it did when Twain climbed down
into it.
 |
| Looking down into the crater. Photo: Donald Grant |
You can have the same view of
Halema’uma’u Crater from the Volcano House, that he enjoyed. The current restaurant is new, but the
location of the park’s only hotel is the same.
He wrote, “The surprise of finding a good hotel in such an outlandish
spot startled me considerably more than the volcano did.” Not only is the drop off Kilauea caldera
steep, but so are the restaurant prices.
But at least stop in Uncle George’s Lounge for a Kona Brewing Co. IPA
and the splendid view. You might even
want to stand by the fireplace – at 4,000 feet, it can be chilly up here.
 |
| The Waipi'o Valley can't have changed much since Mark Twain was here. |
Mark Twain also rode through the Waipi’o Valley, which is
just as inaccessible today as in 1866, and rode up and down all of the Kona
Coast, writing, “Kona to me will always be a happy memory.”
But his happiest memory of Hawaii appears to be the
women, which he mentions over and over, most often when he happens upon them
swimming or dancing what he called, the “hula hula.” But being Mark Twain, he was always a
gentlemen. “At noon I observed a bevy of
nude native young ladies bathing in the sea, and went and sad down on their
clothes to keep them from being stolen.”
 |
| Mark Twain never forgot his visit to Hawaii, and unfortunately, was never able to return. |
No comments:
Post a Comment