pele’s malignity. 303 
leaped into the canoe, and with his broad spear 
paddled out to sea. Pele, perceiving his escape, 
ran to the shore, and hurled after him, with pro¬ 
digious force, huge stones and fragments of rock, 
which fell thickly around, but did not strike his 
canoe. When they had paddled a short distance 
from the shore, the Kumukahi (east wind) sprung 
up. He fixed his broad spear upright in the 
canoe, which, answering the double purpose of 
mast and sail, he soon reached the island of Maui. 
Here they rested one night, and proceeded to 
Ranai. On the day following, he removed to 
Morokai, and from thence to Oahu, the abode of 
Koronohairaau his father, and Kanewahinekeaho 
his sister, to whom he related his perils, and with 
whom he took up his abode. 
The above tale is a tolerable specimen of their 
traditions, though not among the most marvellous 
we have met with, and the truth may easily be 
separated from the fiction. A sudden and unex¬ 
pected eruption of a volcano, when a chief and his 
people were playing at horua, is probably its only 
foundation. It exhibits, however, much of the 
general character of the people, the low estima¬ 
tion in which the females were held, and the 
wretched state of their domestic society, in which 
those fond attachments, that in civilized and 
Christian life endear the different members of 
kindred and family to each other, appear scarcely 
to have existed. The absence of relative affec¬ 
tions shewn by Kahavari, who, notwithstanding 
the entreaties of his wife, could leave her, his 
children, his mother, and his sister, to certain de¬ 
struction, meets with no reprehension; neither is 
any censure passed on his unjust seizure of the 
canoe belonging to his brother, who was engaged 
