“warriors came here to revel with their paramours.  The Tartarean gloom was slightly relieved by torches ingeniously formed of strings of the candle-nut.  Beneath this rugged roof, and amid this darkness—­their faces strangely reflecting the feeble torch-light—­and divested of every particle of apparel, they promiscuously united in dancing the hula hula (the licentious dance)....  Wives were exchanged, and so were concubines; fathers despoiled their own daughters, and brothers deemed it no crime to perpetrate incest.”

Waitz-Gerland (VI., 459) cite Wise as attesting that “in 1848 the missionaries gave up a girls’ school, because it was impossible to preserve the virtue of their pupils,” and Steen Bill wrote that in 1846 seventy per cent of all the crimes punished were of a lewd character, and that on the whole island there was not a chaste girl of eleven years of age.  Isabella Bird wrote (169) that “the Hawaiian women have no notions of virtue as we understand it, and if there is to be any future for this race it must come through a higher morality.”

THE HELEN OF HAWAII

As there was practically no difference between married and unmarried women in Hawaii, it is not strange that cases of abduction of wives should have occurred.  The following story, related in Kalakana’s book, probably suffered no great change at the hands of the recorder.  I give a condensed version of it: 

In the twelfth century, the close of the second era of migration from Tahiti and Samoa, there lived a girl named Hina, noted as the most beautiful maiden on the islands.  She married the chief Hakalanileo, and had two children by him.  Reports of her beauty had excited the fancy of Kaupeepee, the chief of Haupu.  He went to test the reports with his own eyes, and saw that they were not exaggerated.  So he hovered around the coast of Hilo watching for a chance to abduct her.  It came at last.  One day, after sunset, when the moon was shining, Hina repaired to the beach with her women to take a bath.  A signal was given—­it is thought by the first wife of Hina’s husband—­and, not long after, a light but heavily manned canoe dashed through the surf and shot in among the bathers.  The women screamed and started for the shore.  Suddenly a man leaped from the canoe into the water.  There was a brief struggle, a stifled scream, a sharp word of command, and a moment later Kaupeepee was again in the canoe with the nude and frantic Hina in his arms.  The boatmen lost no time to start; they rowed all night and in the morning reach Haupu.

Hina had been wrapped in folds of soft kapa, and she spent the night sobbing, not knowing what was to become of her.  When shore was reached she was borne to the captor’s fortress and given an apartment provided with every luxury.  She fell asleep from fatigue, and when she awoke and realized where she was it was not