44 Ka Ha II a Kapa. 



others. He records: — " Les etoffes, qu'ils out eu tres-grand quautite, sont faites avec 

 le murier a papier comme celles des autres insiilaires ; niais quoiqu'elles soient peintes 

 avec beaucoup plus variete, leur fabricatiou m'a paru iuferieure a toutes les autres." '' 



AVe canuot doubt that if the uufortunate French commander could have seen 

 more of the Hawaiian kapa he would have recorded a very different opinion. His 

 suro-eon, AI. Rollin, in his Dissertation on the inhabitants of Easter Island and the 

 Island of ]\Iowee, as published in the English translation of La Perouse, London, 

 1779, 11, 332, savs: — "The stuffs, manufactured by these islanders from the bark of 

 the paper-mulberrv, are extremelv beautiful, and of various kinds. They paint them 

 with considerable taste, and the designs are so regular, that one might almost believe 

 they had copied some of our chintz." In ]\Iay of the same year came to the islands 

 Captains Portlock and Dixon, aud thev were better pleased with the cloth they found. 

 "Cloth is another article which gives these Indians equal scope for fanc}- and inven- 

 tion. It is made from the Chinese paper mulberr3--tree, and when wet, (being of a 

 soft, malleable substance) is beat out with small sqiiare pieces of wood to from twelve 

 to eighteen inches wide and afterwards stamped with various colours and a diversity 

 of patterns, the neatness and elegance of which would not disgrace the window of a 

 London lineu-draper. 



"How the cloth is stamped I never could learn; the different colours are 

 extracted from vegetables found in the woods. There is another kind of cloth much 

 finer than the above and beat out to a greater extent : it is of a white colour, and 

 frequentlv wore bv the Aree women in addition to the ahou."" 



In the earlv daj-s of the American ^Mission to the Hawaiian Islands there came 

 from the Societv Islands a man on his way home to England, seeking health for him- 

 self and wife, and fortunatel}- for us as for the [Mission the Reverend William Ellis 

 was persuaded to stay with the new teachers, to whose labors he gave great help, as 

 he was alreadj- familiar with the cognate Tahitian language, and soon not onlv 

 preached in Hawaiian, but wrote hvmns, while the American missionaries were 

 acquiring the Hawaiian tongue. He was an excellent missionar}- and pastor, and in 

 addition a very observant man who did more than any else to preserve the manners 

 and ways of the Hawaiians before foreign influence had utterly transformed them. 

 In his Tour of Hawaii, and his PoUmesian Reseaixhes he pictures the people of 

 Kamehameha most faithfully and distinctly, and to him I now turn for a description 

 of the kapa-making as he saw it in the earlv twenties of the last centur}-. 



-'-Voyage de La Perouse autnur du'monde. Paris, 1798. II. p. 144. He was there in May, 1786. 

 ^'A Vo}-age round the W'orld. Capt. Geo. Dixon. London, 17S9. p. 272. 



