The Floating Island (17 page)

The quartette enjoyed several
very interesting walks. The natives pleased our Parisians. Their character is
well marked, their hue brown, their physiognomy gentle and proud. And although
the Hawaiians were a republic, it is not unlikely that they regretted their
former savage independence.

“The air of our country is free,”
says one of their proverbs, and they are none the less so.

And in fact, after the conquest
of the archipelago by Kamehameha, after the representative monarchy established
in 1840, each island had been administered by its own governor. At this period,
under the republican
régime
, they were divided into districts and
sub-districts.

“Come,” said Pinchinat, “there is
no want of prefects, sub-prefects, and counsellors of prefecture, with the
constitution of the Year VIII.”

“All I want is to get away!” replied
Sebastien Zorn.

He would have been mistaken to
have done so without admiring the chief places of Oahu. They are superb, if the
flora is not rich. Along the shore there is an abundance of cocoanut trees and
other palms, breadfruit trees, trilobas which yield the oil, castor-oil plants,
daturas, indigo plants. The valleys, watered by the mountain streams, are
carpeted with such encroaching vegetation as menervia, shrubs becoming
arborescent, chenopodium, and halapepe, a sort of gigantic asparigines. The
forest zone, prolonged to an altitude of two thousand metres, is covered with
ligneous species, myrtles of lofty growth, colossal docks, and band-creepers,
which intermingle like a many-branched thicket of serpents. As to the products
of the soil which furnish items of commerce and exportation, there are rice,
cocoanuts, and sugar-cane. Hence an important coasting trade between one island
and another, so as to concentrate at Honolulu the products which are despatched
to America. In the fauna there is little variety. If there is a tendency for
the Kanakas to become absorbed in the more intelligent races, the species of
animals show no sign of change. There are only pigs, fowls, and goats as
domestic animals; there are no wild animals beyond a few pigs. There are
mosquitoes, which are not easy to get rid of, a number of scorpions, and a few
species of inoffensive lizards; birds that never sing, among others the “Oo,”
the
Drepanis
pacifica
, of black plumage, with ornamental yellow
feathers, of which was formed the famous mantle of Kamehameha, on which nine
generations of natives had worked.

Man’s task
—
a considerable one in this archipelago
—
has been to become
civilized in imitation of the United States with his learned societies, his
schools of compulsory education, which gained a prize at the Exposition of
1878, his rich libraries, his newspapers published in English and Kanaka. Our
Parisians could not well be surprised at this, for the notables of the
archipelago are most of them Americans, and their language is as current as
their money. Only these notables freely attract to their service the Chinese of
the Celestial Empire, contrary to what is done in Western America, to combat
the infliction to which has been given the significant name of the “Yellow
Plague.”

After the arrival of Floating
Island within sight of the capital of Oahu, many of the local boats often
sailed round it. With this magnificent weather, this sea so calm, nothing could
be pleasanter than an excursion of some twenty kilometres at a cable’s length
from the steel shore, over which the custom-house officers exercised such
strict surveillance.

Among these excursion boats one
could not help noticing a small vessel which every day persisted in sailing in
Floating Island waters. It was a kind of Malay ketch, with two masts and a
square stern, manned by twelve men under the orders of a captain of energetic
appearance. The Governor, however, took no objection to this, although the
practice might have seemed suspicious. These people, in fact, kept a constant
watch on the island all round it hanging about from one port to the other,
examining through the glasses every part of the coast. After all, supposing
that their intentions were unfriendly, what could such a crew undertake against
a population of ten thousand inhabitants? So that there was nothing to be
uneasy about in the proceedings of this ketch during the day and night, and the
maritime administration of Honolulu was not appealed to in the matter.

The quartette bade farewell to
the island of Oahu on the morning of the 10th of July. Floating Island got
under way at the dawn, obediently to the impulsion of its powerful propellers.
Turning quite round, it headed south-west, to come in sight of the other
Hawaiian islands. Moving obliquely across the equatorial current running from
east to west, it moved in an inverse direction to that in which the archipelago
lies towards the north.

For the convenience of the
inhabitants on the larboard side, Floating Island boldly entered between the
islands Molokai and Kauai. Over the latter, one of the smallest of the group,
rises a volcano of eighteen hundred metres, Nirhau, which is always giving
forth a few fuliginous vapours. At the foot are rounded hills of coralline
formation, dominated by a range of sand-hills, against which the echoes are
reflected with metallic sonority when the surf beats fiercely on the shore. The
night had come when the island entered the narrow channel; but there was
nothing to fear under the command of Ethel Simcoe. When the sun disappeared
behind the heights of Lanai, the look-outs could not have noticed the ketch,
which left the harbour after Floating Island, and endeavoured to keep in its
wake. Besides, as we may again remark, why should any one have been uneasy at
the presence of this Malay vessel?

Next day, when the sun
reappeared, the ketch was only a white speck on the horizon.

During the day the voyage was
continued between Kahulaui and Maui. Owing to its extent, the latter, with
Lahaina for its capital, a harbour renowned for its whalers, occupies the
second place in the Sandwich Archipelago.

Haleahala, “the house of the sun,”
rises three thousand metres towards the sky.

The two following days were spent
in coasting along the shores of the Great Hawaii, whose mountains, as we have
said, are the highest in the group. It was in the Bay of Kealakeacua that
Captain Cook, after being received as a god by the natives, was massacred in
1779, a year after discovering the archipelago, to which he gave the name of
Sandwich in honour of the celebrated Minister of Great Britain. Hilo, the chief
place of the island, which is on the eastern coast, was not sighted; but a view
was obtained of Kailu on the western shore. Hawaii possesses fifty-seven
kilometres of railway, used principally in the transport of goods, and the
quartette could perceive the white smoke of its locomotives.

“It only wanted that!” said Yvernès.

Next morning the Pearl of the
Pacific had left these regions, and the ketch rounded the extreme point of
Hawaii, dominated by Mauna Loa, the Great Mountain, whose summit is lost in the
clouds at a height of twelve thousand feet.

“Come,” said Pinchinat, “we have
been cheated
—
really
cheated!”

“You are right, said Yvernès; “we
ought to have been here a hundred years earlier. But then we should not have
been brought here on this admirable Floating Island!”

“No matter. Having found natives
in waistcoats and turn-down collars, instead of savages in feathers, as that
rascal Calistus promised us, I regret the days of Captain Cook!”

“And if these cannibals had eaten
your Highness?” said Frascolin.

“Well, I should have died with
the consolation of having once in my life been loved for myself alone!”

SINCE the 23rd of June the sun
had been moving towards the southern hemisphere, and it had become necessary to
leave these regions, wherein the bad season would soon exercise its ravages. As
the star of day in its apparent course was nearing the equinoctial line, the
island should cross the line in its track. Beyond were pleasant climates,
where, in spite of the names of October, November, December, January, and
February, the months were no less agreeable than those of the warm season. The
distance which separates the Hawaiian Archipelago from the Marquesas Islands is
about three thousand kilometres, and Floating Island, being in haste to
accomplish it, was driven at maximum speed.

Polynesia properly so-called is
comprised within that wide extent of ocean bounded on the north by the Equator,
on the south by the tropic of Capricorn. In that five millions of square
kilometres there are eleven groups, composed of two hundred and twenty islands,
a land surface of ten thousand kilometres, of which the islets can be counted
in thousands. These are the summits of submarine mountains, of which the chain
runs from the northwest to the south-east, to the Marquesas and Pitcairn,
throwing out almost parallel ramifications.

If, in imagination, this vast
basin were suddenly emptied, what an extraordinary country would be displayed
to view! What Switzerland, what Norway, what Tibet, could equal it in grandeur?
Of these submarine mountains, volcanic for the most part, some of madreporic
origin are formed of calcareous or corneous matter secreted in concentric beds
by the polyps, those radiated animalcules of such simple organization, endowed
with immense productive power. Of these islands, some
—
the youngest
—
have the mantle of vegetation only at
their summit; the others, draped in vegetation from head to foot, are the most
ancient, even where their origin is coralline. There exists then a wide
mountainous region buried in the waters of the Pacific. Floating Island moved
above the mountains as an aerostat over the peaks of the Alps or the Himalaya.
Only it was not the air, but the water that bore her up.

And as large displacements of
atmospheric waves exist across space, so there are liquid displacements on the
surface of this ocean. The main current flows from east to west, and under its
lower beds are two counter currents from June to October, when the sun moves
towards the tropic of Cancer. Besides these, on the borders of Tahiti there are
four tides, which neutralize each other in such a way as to be almost
imperceptible. The climate of these different archipelagoes is essentially
variable. The mountainous islands stop the clouds, which pour their showers
down on to them; the lower islands are drier, owing to the mists being driven
away by the prevailing winds.

It would have been strange if the
casino library did not possess a few charts relative to the Pacific. It had a
complete collection, and Frascolin, the most serious of the quartette, often
consulted them. Yvernès preferred to abandon himself to the surprises of the
voyage, to the admiration provoked in him by this moving island, and did not
seek to bother his brain with geographical notions. Pinchinat only cared to
take matters on their amusing or fantastic side. For Sebastien Zorn the
itinerary mattered little, inasmuch as it was taking him where he had never
intended to go.

Frascolin was the only one to
work at this Polynesia, studying the principal groups that compose it, the Low Islands,
the Marquesas, Paumotu, the Society Islands, the Cook Islands, the Friendly
Islands, Samoa, the Austral Islands, Wallis Island, Fanning Island, the Tokelau
Islands, the Phoenix Islands, the Penrhyn Islands, Easter Island, Sala y Gomez,
etc., etc. He knew then that in most of this archipelago, even those under
protectorates, the government is always in the hands of powerful chiefs, whose
influence is never disputed, and that the poorer classes are entirely subject
to the rich. He knew also that the natives are of all religions, Brahmin,
Mahometan, Protestant, Catholic, Catholic being preponderant in the islands
dependent on France owing to the pomp of its services. He knew that the native
language, of which the alphabet is simple enough, owing to its being composed
of from thirteen to seventeen characters, is much mixed with English, and will
be finally absorbed by the Anglo-Saxon. He knew, in short, that in a general
way from an ethnic point of view the Polynesian population tends to decrease,
which is regrettable, for the Kanaka type
—
a
word which signifies a man
—
is
whiter under the Equator than in the groups distant from the equinoctial line,
and is magnificent, Polynesia losing much by its absorption by the foreign
races. Yes! He knew that and many other things which he learnt in the course of
his conversations with Commodore Ethel Simcoe, and when his comrades asked him
he was not at all embarrassed at having to reply to them.

And so Pinchinat nicknamed him
the Larousse of the tropical zone.

Such were the principal groups
amid which Floating Island was to bear its wealthy population. It justly
deserved its name of the happy island, for in a certain way it offered all that
could promote happiness. Why was it that this state of things was in danger of
being troubled by the rivalries, the jealousies, the disagreements, by
questions of influence and precedence which divided Milliard City into two
camps, as it were into two sections
—
the camp of the Tankerdons and the camp of the Coverleys? In any case, for the
artistes who were quite disinterested in the matter, the struggle promised to
be interesting.

Jem Tankerdon was Yankee from his
head to his feet, big in build, with a reddish goatee, lank hair, eyes bright
in spite of his sixty years, the iris almost yellow like that of a dog’s eye,
the pupil glowing. He was tall in stature, powerful in the body, strong in the
limbs. He was the trapper of the prairies, although the only traps he had set
were those into which he had precipitated the millions of pigs in his
slaughter-houses at Chicago. He was a violent man, whose position ought to have
made him more careful, had not his early education been defective. He liked to
show off his fortune, and, as people say, he had noisy pockets. And it seemed
that he did not find them full enough, for he and a few others on the island
were thinking of returning to business.