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IIA WAIL 



or any other person to succeed him in his possessions, but at 

 his death they reverted to the king, whose order was required 

 before the testamentary wish became of any value. There 

 were some wise regulations generally applicable, concerning 

 the planting of cocoanut trees, and a law that the water should 

 be conducted over every plantation twice a week in general, 

 and once a week during the dry season. This king con- 

 structed immense fish ponds on the sea coast, and devoted 

 himself to commerce with such success that in one year he ex- 

 ported $400,000 of sandalwood (felled and shipped at the cost 

 of much suffering to the common people), and on finding that 

 a large proportion of the profit had been dissipated by harbour 

 dues at Canton, he took up the idea and established harbour 

 dues at Honolulu. 



From Vancouver Kamehameha learned of the grandeur 

 and power of Christian nations ; and in the idea that his people 

 might grow great through Christianity, he asked him, in 1794, 

 that Christian teachers might be sent from England. This 

 request, if ever presented, was disregarded, as was another 

 made by Captain Turnbull in 1803, and this exceptionally great 

 Polynesian died the year before the light of the Gospel shone 

 on Hawaiian shores. 



Some persons, it does not appear whether they were English 

 or American, attempted his conversion ; but the astute savage, 

 after listening to their eloquent statements of the power of 

 faith, pressed on them as a crucial test to throw themselves 

 from the top of an adjacent precipice, making his reception of 

 their religion contingent on their arrival unhurt at its base. He 

 built large hriaus, amongst others the one at Kawaihae, at the 

 dedication of which to his favourite war god eleven human 

 sacrifices were offered. To the end he remained devoted to 

 the state religion, and the last instances of capital punishment 

 for breaking tabu, a thraldom deeply interwoven with the reli- 

 gious system, occurred in the last year of his reign, when one 

 man was put to death for putting on a chief's girdle, another 

 for eating of a tabooed dish, and a third for leaving a house 

 under tabu, and entering one which was not so. 



His last prayers were to his great red-feathered god Kukai- 

 limoku, and priests bringing idols crowded round him in his 

 dying agony. His last words were " Move o?i in my good way 



and" In the death-room the high chiefs consulted, and 



one, to testify his great grief, proposed to eat the body raw, but 

 was overruled by the majority. So the flesh was separated from 



