KAPIOLANI, THE HEROINE OF HAWAII

Kapiolani

(Date of Incident, 1824)

“Pele[24] the all-terrible, the fire goddess, will hurl her thunder and her stones, and will slay you,” cried the angry priests of Hawaii.[25] “You no longer pay your sacrifices to her.  Once you gave her hundreds of hogs, but now you give nothing.  You worship the new God Jehovah.  She, the great Pele, will come upon you, she and the Husband of Thunder, with the Fire-Thruster, and the Red-Fire Cloud-Queen, they will destroy you altogether.”

The listening Hawaiians shuddered as they saw the shaggy priests calling down the anger of Pele.  One of the priests was a gigantic man over six feet five inches high, whose strength was so terrible that he could leap at his victims and break their bones by his embrace.

Away there in the volcanic island[26] in the centre of the greatest ocean in the world—­the Pacific Ocean—­they had always as children been taught to fear the great goddess.

They were Christians; but they had only been Christians for a short time, and they still trembled at the name of the goddess Pele, who lived up in the mountains in the boiling crater of the fiery volcano, and ruled their island.

Their fathers had told them how she would get angry, and would pour out red-hot rivers of molten stone that would eat up all the trees and people and run hissing into the Pacific Ocean.  There to that day was that river of stone—­a long tongue of cold, hard lava—­stretching down to the shore of the island, and here across the trees on the mountain-top could be seen, even now, the smoke of her anger.  Perhaps, after all, Pele was greater than Jehovah—­she was certainly terrible—­and she was very near!

“If you do not offer fire to her, as you used to do,” the priests went on, “she will pour down her fire into the sea and kill all your fish.  She will fill up your fishing grounds with the pahoehoe[27] (lava), and you will starve.  Great is Pele and greatly to be feared.”

The priests were angry because the preaching of the missionaries had led many away from the worship of Pele which, of course, meant fewer hogs for themselves; and now the whole nation on Hawaii, that volcanic island of the seas, seemed to be deserting her.

The people began to waver under the threats, but a brown-faced woman, with strong, fearless eyes that looked out with scorn on Pele priests, was not to be terrified.

“It is Kapiolani,[28] the chieftainess,” murmured the people to one another.  “She is Christian; will she forsake Jehovah and return to Pele?”

Only four years before this, Kapiolani had—­according to the custom of the Hawaiian chieftainesses, married many husbands, and she had given way to drinking habits.  Then she had become a Christian, giving up her drinking and sending away all her husbands save one.  She had thrown away her idols and now taught the people in their huts the story of Christ.