Such a man would
reconcile me to far greater discomfort than that of the "Kilauea."
I wonder if he is ever unamiable, or tired, or perturbed?
The next day was fine, and we were all much on deck to dry our
clothes in the sun. The southern and leeward coasts of Hawaii as
far as Kawaaloa are not much more attractive than coal-fields.
Contrasted with the shining shores of Hilo, they are as dust and
ashes; long reaches of black lava and miles of clinkers marking the
courses of lava-flows, whose black desolation and deformity nature,
as yet, has done almost nothing to clothe. Cocoa-nut trees usually,
however, fringe the shore, but were it not for the wonderful colour
of the ocean, like liquid transparent turquoise, revealing the coral
forests shelving down into purple depths, and the exciting proximity
of sharks, it would have been wearisome. After leaving the bay
where Captain Cook met his death, we passed through a fleet of
twenty-seven canoes, each one hollowed out of the trunk of a single
tree, from fifteen to twenty-five feet long, about twenty inches
deep, hardly wide enough for a fat man, and high and pointed at both
ends. On one side there is an outrigger formed of two long bent
sticks, to the outer ends of which is bound a curved beam of light
wood, which skims along the surface of the water, rendering the
canoe secure from an upset on that side, while the weight of the
outrigger makes an upset on the other very unlikely.
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