DEGENER: LEAVING HAWAII 77 



entire block in the Moiliili District of Honolulu, a district mostly inhabited by 

 Japanese, was a shambles due to enemy bombing. Eye-witness accounts by 

 friends and by friends of friends hitherto always reliable, passed the rounds as 

 well as idle rumors : how the enemy fliers flew low to slice off with their whirl- 

 ing propellers the head of any one so unfortunate as to be caught stranded on 

 our air-fields ; how exhausted one physician was from holding leg after leg 

 during amputations, and the sudden great weight of the human leg as the knife 

 has cut it clean from the body ; how nauseated a surgeon's faithful wife became 

 when she had to clean the clotted blood from his clothes and white tennis shoes 

 after he returned dead tired in the early morning hours from the hospital ; of 

 the many instances of heroism by individuals ; and, by the ignoring of unmis- 

 takable warnings, of the sale of Hawaii down the river by politicians in their 

 effort to rouse the Nation. 



The ceiling of the Honolulu house was threatening to give way under the 

 weight of unsold copies of Books 1 and 2 of the "Flora Hawaii ensis" and of 

 stored lares and penates. Xo commercial warehouse accepted anything for 

 storage. To add copies of "Plants of Hawaii National Park" to the overbur- 

 dened attic was impossible. Moreover, in those days Honolulu was safe neither 

 from invasion nor from bombing. In fact, during the speaker's stay in Hono- 

 lulu, two or three bombs were dropped one night back of the house in the 

 lantana on Round Top from a Japanese plane. This had jettisoned its deadly 

 load in its frantic escape from our pursuers. So while hugging the phone for 

 the anticipated call for the clipper flight, the speaker and his protege wrapped 

 and addressed additional thousands of books, using the piano as table, for 

 mailing as gifts to additional thousands of public libraries. It was practically 

 impossible to leave the house for fear of missing the clipper call. Thus they 

 lived like prisoners from February 1st till May 28th — four months ! — when the 

 welcome call at length came. Carrying their baggage allowance of fifteen pounds 

 each, they were whisked away at break-neck speed by limousine to board the 

 plane moored in Pearl Harbor. This had been stripped of unnecessary trap- 

 pings to reduce its total weight for the carrying of additional air mail and pas- 

 sengers during the emergency. The speaker, eager to see from the air the 

 islands he had botanized for years, was sorely disappointed. So long as the 

 plane was within sight of land, all windows were blacked-out lest passengers 

 observe sights of strategic importance. Upon arrival in San Francisco, the 

 hegira to The New York Botanical Garden continued by bus. 



The speaker finally learned he was a suspect. His return from Fiji to 

 Hawaii five months previous to Pearl Harbor, his attempts to induce the plan- 

 tations to import as laborers native Fijians instead of additional Orientals, and 

 his mailing thousands of books from Hawaii to each community of 5,000 popu- 

 lation or over throughout the entire United States was most suspicious. Were 

 not these Hawaiian Floras actually code books in disguise planted in public 



