HARDWOOD RECORD 



19 



remark was made on leaving Honolulu, 

 "Here is a land for which Nature has done 

 the most and man the least. ' ' Nature nray 

 have done the most, but man also has cer- 

 tainly ' ' done ' ' the islands. The trades here 

 are full of men whose only claim to employ- 

 ment is the fact that they are 2,000 miles 



NO. 6— ROCKS lIUItr.EK DOWN TO SEA 

 COAST BY DISTANT ERUPTION. 



closer than the man at San Francisco; but in 

 a majority of cases it would pay to wait for 

 the man at the other end instead of having 

 to employ beggars. As a matter of fact, 

 supervision here costs from five to fifty times 

 the amount of labor. This is on account of 

 the class of labor employed. 



To an American with any directness of 

 purpose in working, the handling of the 

 Japanese and Koreans, Chinese and Hindus, 

 and the mongrel mixture between, is a night- 

 mare. Japs do everything backward. One 

 fellow sent to put in a drain from the top 

 of a building to a water tank twenty feet 

 lower down, ran the drain across and ended 

 at the tank eighteen inches higher than 

 where he started. Some of them are smart 

 and with a crew of their countrymen have 

 dominated the carpenter business here be- 

 cause their carpenters are well paid at $1.25 

 to $2 a day. Our men could not live on 

 a few cents' worth of rice and meat two or 

 three times a week, nor could they sleep on 

 mats in a room where there are oiJy a few 

 cubic feet of air to a man. 



So, with all the beauties of Nature, all the 

 allurements of climate and grand scenery, 

 this is no place for a lumberman nor a man 

 dependent on any of the trades connected 

 with the mill business. Some have thought 

 otherwise, and thinking they could defy nat- 

 ural conditions, have spent large sums of 

 money in fruitless enterprises. For instance, 

 a concrete building on the eastern coast at 

 Pohoiki that was intended for a coffee mill 

 and sawmill, now stands as an everlasting 

 monument to the wanton expense of $100,000. 

 An abundance of wild guava bu.shes covers 

 this section, and part of the waste in this mill 

 was in a lot of machinory to make giiava jelly 



for export, but it did not pay. The building 

 is indestructible, as it is all of concrete, and 

 with the concrete stack is a fine piece of 

 work. 



Near this place, as shown in cut No. 1, 

 are extensive fields of the lau-hau-la trees, 

 whose curious root growth is seen in the 

 picture. The leaves of this tree are used for 

 siding houses, for roofing, for hats and mats 

 and many domestic uses. The wood is light, 

 fibrous and easily perishable, but the leaves 

 are very enduring. As they fall to the 

 ground, ripened or cured, they are picked up 

 and worked into the various purposes for 

 which they are adapted. One of the petty 

 forms of graft in existence here is that the 

 owners of the land on which this wild lau- 

 hau-la grows exact a mat or other tribute 

 from the natives for the privilege of pick- 

 ing up the fallen leaves. 



Cut No. 2 is a plant that would delight 

 the heart of some one with a fernery or hot- 

 house. It is the "epaulette" cactus, the 

 flowers of which are seen at the lower end 



^■0. 7— DOUBLE CIRCULAR MILL AT TAHOA. 



of the long stem, and which open at night 

 into a thing of rare beauty. No. t is the 

 "bird's nest fern," a plant that grows in 

 ku-ku-i trees, and this fine specimen is about 

 eight feet across, with a most beautiful 

 shading of the wide leaves. The leaves die 

 off and droop to the center, the new ones 

 forming a crown and the dead leaves being 

 used for weaving hats and some forms of 

 domestic utensils. 



No. 4 is the appearance of the coast for 

 almost its entire circumference. The island 

 is a vast deposit of Iseva, which, in contact 

 with the water while in a molten state has 

 broken into the most fantastic forms. The 

 wash of the surf for many years has rounded 

 many of these forms until they seem almost 

 to have been fashioned by human hands. Not 

 far from this scene is a part of a road which 

 was once a straight line, but now has an 

 offset of twice its width, caused by volcanic 

 disturbance moving a whole section of the 

 district about twenty feet toward the sea 

 at one time. As the ocean has a depth of 



something over a mile near the coast, it 

 seems possible that a lot of this country 

 will take a slide for lower levels some of 

 these days. This lava is from the now active 

 volcano of Kilauea, which is at present in 

 a state of activity, though not in eruption; 

 but the boiling lava bed, 350 feet down in a 

 pit 1,500 feet across, can be seen, and at 

 night frequently illuminates the surround- 

 ing country for miles in every direction. I 

 have made several trips down to the crater 

 and have seen the vast lakes of fire form 

 and disappear and the giant cones rise up 

 and then tumble back into the boiling depths 

 below. The whole thing is not unlike a huge 

 cauldron of molten iron, with the addition 

 of reverberations of the immense masses 

 tumbling back into the depths below. 



No. 5 is a rather distaut view of Green 

 Lake crater, now extinct, in which is a lak» 

 of emerald hued water of an unknown depth, 

 reaching down into what was once the bow- 

 els of the earth. The lake is now several 

 hundred feet higher than the surrounding 

 land, which is 110 feet above the sea level. 

 This crater is the last of a chain which 

 starts from Mauna Loa, now inactive, 14,850 

 feet high. This cone has thrown out vast 

 quantities of ashes in former times, forming 

 hills, one of which is shown in the cut, 

 and which has been for many years a fertile 

 sugar-cane field. The trees shown at the top 

 are wild coeoanuts, which grow abundantly 

 all over this side of the island. 



Some idea of the terrific forces exerted 

 here at times may be had from No. 6, which 

 shows some square rocks, broken out of a 

 crevice a half mile away and hurled down to 

 the sea edge by some of the titanic spasms 

 felt in this section. So far the writer has 

 felt only moderate ones, but enough to know 

 that the forces are there. 



NO. 8— CO>IMISS.\ 



No. 7 will perhaps look more natural. It 

 is the double circular mill at Pahoa, which 

 wo are just finishing. The stack does not 

 show, as it was not up at the time this was 

 taken. The boiler setting shows and the 

 stack will come up through the flat roof, 



