letter ni.] ANTI-MISSIONARY STATEMENTS. 



33 



of heat. Even the imperishable cocoanut trees, whose tall, bare, 

 curved trunks rose from the lava or the burnt red earth, were 

 gaunt, tattered, and thirsty-looking, weary of crying for moisture 

 to the pitiless skies. At last the ceaseless ripple of talk ceased, 

 crew and passengers slept on the hot deck, and no sounds were 

 heard but the drowsy flap of the awning, and the drowsier creak 

 of the rudder, as the Kilanea swayed sleepily on 'the lazy 

 undulations. The flag drooped and fainted with heat. The 

 white sun blazed like a magnesium light on blue water, black 

 lava, and fiery soil, roasting, blinding, scintillating, and flushed 

 the red rocks of Maui into glory. It is all glorious, this fierce 

 bright glow of the Tropic of Cancer, yet it was a relief to look 

 up the great rolling, featureless slopes above Ulupalakua to a 

 forest belt of perennial green, watered, they say, by perpetual 

 showers, and a little later to see a mountain summit uplifted 

 into a region of endless winter, above a steady cloud-bank as 

 white as snow. This mountain, Haleakala, the House of the 

 Sun, is the largest extinct volcano in the world, its terminal 

 crater being nineteen miles in circumference at a height of 

 more than 10,000 feet. It, and its spurs, slopes, and clusters 

 of small craters form East Maui. West Maui is composed 

 mainly of the picturesque group of the Eeka mountains. A 

 desert strip of land, not much above high Avater mark, unites 

 the twain, which form an island forty-eight miles long and 

 thirty broad, with an area of 620 square miles. 



We left Maui in the afternoon, and spent the next six hours 

 in crossing the channel between it and Hawaii, but the short, 

 tropic day did not allow us to see anything of the latter island 

 but two snow-capped domes uplifted above the clouds. I have 

 been reading Jarves ; excellent book on the islands as indus- 

 triously as possible, as well as trying to get information from 

 my fellow-passengers regarding the region into which I have 

 been so suddenly and unintentionally projected. I really know 

 nothing about Hawaii, or the size and phenomena of the 

 volcano to which we are bound, or the state of society or of 

 the native race, or of the relations existing between it and the 

 foreign population, or of the details of the constitution. This 

 ignorance is most oppressive, and I see that it will not be 

 easily enlightened, for among several intelligent gentlemen who 

 have been conversing with me, no two seem agreed on any 

 matter of fact. 



From the hour of my landing I have observed the existence 

 of two parties of pro and anti missionary leanings, with views 



n 



