When he came to lie, without issue, on the bed of death, he summoned his next brother, Nanteitei, made him a discourse on royal policy, and warned him he was too weak to reign.  The warning was taken to heart, and for some while the government moved on the model of Nakaeia’s.  Nanteitei dispensed with guards, and walked abroad alone with a revolver in a leather mail-bag.  To conceal his weakness he affected a rude silence; you might talk to him all day; advice, reproof, appeal, and menace alike remained unanswered.

The number of his wives was seventeen, many of them heiresses; for the royal house is poor, and marriage was in these days a chief means of buttressing the throne.  Nakaeia kept his harem busy for himself; Nanteitei hired it out to others.  In his days, for instance, Messrs. Wightman built a pier with a verandah at the north end of the town.  The masonry was the work of the seventeen queens, who toiled and waded there like fisher lasses; but the man who was to do the roofing durst not begin till they had finished, lest by chance he should look down and see them.

It was perhaps the last appearance of the harem gang.  For some time already Hawaiian missionaries had been seated at Butaritari—­ Maka and Kanoa, two brave childlike men.  Nakaeia would none of their doctrine; he was perhaps jealous of their presence; being human, he had some affection for their persons.  In the house, before the eyes of Kanoa, he slew with his own hand three sailors of Oahu, crouching on their backs to knife them, and menacing the missionary if he interfered; yet he not only spared him at the moment, but recalled him afterwards (when he had fled) with some expressions of respect.  Nanteitei, the weaker man, fell more completely under the spell.  Maka, a light-hearted, lovable, yet in his own trade very rigorous man, gained and improved an influence on the king which soon grew paramount.  Nanteitei, with the royal house, was publicly converted; and, with a severity which liberal missionaries disavow, the harem was at once reduced.  It was a compendious act.  The throne was thus impoverished, its influence shaken, the queen’s relatives mortified, and sixteen chief women (some of great possessions) cast in a body on the market.  I have been shipmates with a Hawaiian sailor who was successively married to two of these impromptu widows, and successively divorced by both for misconduct.  That two great and rich ladies (for both of these were rich) should have married ‘a man from another island’ marks the dissolution of society.  The laws besides were wholly remodelled, not always for the better.  I love Maka as a man; as a legislator he has two defects:  weak in the punishment of crime, stern to repress innocent pleasures.