Shortly we came in sight of that spot whose history is so familiar to every school-boy in the wide world—­Kealakekua Bay—­the place where Captain Cook, the great circumnavigator, was killed by the natives, nearly a hundred years ago.  The setting sun was flaming upon it, a Summer shower was falling, and it was spanned by two magnificent rainbows.  Two men who were in advance of us rode through one of these and for a moment their garments shone with a more than regal splendor.  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 common in all the islands; they are visible every day, and frequently at night also—­not the silvery bow we see once in an age in the States, by moonlight, but barred with all bright and beautiful colors, like the children of the sun and rain.  I saw one of them a few nights ago.  What the sailors call “raindogs”—­little patches of rainbow —­are often seen drifting about the heavens in these latitudes, like stained cathedral windows.

Kealakekua Bay is a little curve like the last kink of a snail-shell, winding deep into the land, seemingly not more than a mile wide from shore to shore.  It is bounded on one side—­where the murder was done—­by a little flat plain, on which stands a cocoanut grove and some ruined houses; a steep wall of lava, a thousand feet high at the upper end and three or four hundred at the lower, comes down from the mountain and bounds the inner extremity of it.  From this wall the place takes its name, Kealakekua, which in the native tongue signifies “The Pathway of the Gods.”  They say, (and still believe, in spite of their liberal education in Christianity), that the great god Lono, who used to live upon the hillside, always traveled that causeway when urgent business connected with heavenly affairs called him down to the seashore in a hurry.

As the red sun looked across the placid ocean through the tall, clean stems of the cocoanut trees, like a blooming whiskey bloat through the bars of a city prison, I went and stood in the edge of the water on the flat rock pressed by Captain Cook’s feet when the blow was dealt which took away his life, and tried to picture in my mind the doomed man struggling in the midst of the multitude of exasperated savages—­the men in the ship crowding to the vessel’s side and gazing in anxious dismay toward the shore—­the—­but I discovered that I could not do it.

It was growing dark, the rain began to fall, we could see that the distant Boomerang was helplessly becalmed at sea, and so I adjourned to the cheerless little box of a warehouse and sat down to smoke and think, and wish the ship would make the land—­for we had not eaten much for ten hours and were viciously hungry.