HAWAII. 229 



three cents a pound, in goods. At Honolulu, it is sold at a profit of 

 one hundred per cent, to the shipper. 



Indigo might be made a profitable culture; for it grows wild in 

 many parts of the island, and in great luxuriance. It is naturalized 

 at Hilo, where I learned that some experiments had been made, 

 which leave little doubt that if it were cultivated, it would be found 

 to be eqiially valuable with that of the West Indies. 



Sandalwood, it is well known, was the first article that brought 

 this people into notice, gave importance to the islands, and tempted 

 foreigners to visit them. The chiefs, finding they had a store of 

 treasure, believed it to be inexhaustible ; and were tempted, by their 

 own cupidity and that of their visiters, to cut it without stint. The 

 course of this trade led to all sorts of tyranny and oppression by the 

 chiefs towards their dependants. The trees have been for some 

 years tabooed ; but this plan was adopted too late to preserve any 

 of large size. Those which were not cut down for sale, it is said 

 were destroyed by the natives, to prevent impositions being prac- 

 tised upon them. Not unfrequently, the chiefs would despatch 

 their dependants to the mountains, with nothing to eat but what 

 they could gather from the forest of ferns, the core of whose trunk 

 supplied them with a scanty and precarious subsistence. These 

 hardships were enough to cause whole tracts to become waste. It 

 will be a long time before the remainder of these trees are large 

 enough to become an article of commerce. 



Mr. Brackenridge on his return from the mountain passed from the 

 volcano to the sea-board at Papapala. He found the whole country 

 to the southwest of the crater a flat barren waste of smooth lava, 

 mixed with fields of drifted scoria, and with bundles of capillary glass, 

 or Pele's hair, hanging to the few stunted tufts of Silene and Compo- 

 sitse. This character continues to within six miles of the sea, 

 when the lava becomes more rough, and bushes of Metrosideros 

 and Sophora (mamanee) succeed, and extend to the edge of a 

 precipice, whose height was estimated at six hundred feet. This 

 precipice is faced with loose blocks of lava, thickly overgrown with 

 bushes and trees. Among these was an amaranthaceous shrub of 

 great beauty. From the base of this precipice to the sea-clifF, 

 is a flat plain of smooth glassy lava, with some rents and crevices. 

 In these grew the Agati grandiflora, which here assumed a pros- 

 trate habit. Daphnes, and some rubiaceous shrubs, and several 

 VOL. IV. 58 



