Hawaii - James Michener [286]
ON CLOSER INSPECTION, Honolulu of 1865 proved far less glamorous than its physical setting. Because Hawaii could provide no lumber, nor skilled stonemasons to work the product of its quarries, the houses of the city were meanly built, each foot of timber being conserved for practical rather than aesthetic use. Buildings were therefore low, formless and hastily put together. In the central area they crowded in upon each other and were usually not painted. Streets were unpaved and very dusty, and although a few business thoroughfares had rude sidewalks made of granite ballast hauled from China, in most areas pedestrians had to use the fringes of the road. There were, however, a good police force and an active fire department, but judging from the numerous scars that showed where flames had gutted whole rows of attached buildings, the latter seemed to enjoy only a modest success.
Business establishments occupied big rambling buildings, often made of brick carried as ballast from England, and stores sprawled aimlessly over many haphazard counters. At the corner of Fort and Merchant streets in a bright new brick building distinguished by green cast-iron shutters, Janders & Whipple had the town's largest emporium, but the most impressive commercial building stood on an opposite corner: Hoxworth & Hale's huge shipping headquarters. Sharp-eyed Mun Ki, comparing Honolulu's grubby appearance with the grandeur of Canton, where impressive stone buildings lined the waterfronts, was frankly disappointed in the contrast.
Meanwhile, other Punti from the Carthaginian were discovering that the lush tropical growth of the island was confined to the inaccessible mountains, whereas the land on which they were to work was really more bleak and barren than that which they had fled in China. This depressed them and they thought: "Uncle Chun Fat lied to us. Not even a Chinese can make his fortune on such a barren island." Out of a hundred average fields surrounding Honolulu, not less than ninety were desert, for on them no rain fell. The vast acreages west of Honolulu, which belonged to the Hoxworth family through inheritance from the last Alii Nui, Noelani, were practically worthless, thirsting for water. But scattered across the island there were small valleys in which an occasional bubbling stream fed the fields, and here the Chinese were put to work. Some grew rice for the booming California market. Others worked on small sugar plantations. A few lucky men were taught to ride horses, and became cowboys on the parched rangelands, and many were put to work growing vegetables; but as they started their new tasks, each man carried in his memory an exciting picture of Honolulu's close-packed streets and dusty enterprise, and all thought: "I've got to get back to Honolulu. That's where the life is."
Hawaii's reception of the Chinese was somewhat dampened by Captain Rafer Hoxworth's frightening account of his heroic escape from mutiny, and the newspapers were peppered with predictions from other seafaring men that Honolulu had entered upon a period of maximum danger, when the possibility of an armed Chinese uprising, with all white men murdered in their beds by slinking Celestial fiends, was a distinct possibility. Captain Hoxworth volunteered several interviews with the press in which he contended that only his swift reaction to the first attempts at mutiny had preserved his ship, and thereafter he became known as the intrepid captain who had quelled the Chinese mutiny.
The friends of Dr. John Whipple were therefore apprehensive when the doctor took into his home the Kees to serve as cook and maid, and men stopped him several times on the street to ask, "Do you think it wise, John, to harbor in your home such criminal characters?"
"I don't find them criminal," Whipple responded.
"After the mutiny?"
"What mutiny?" he always asked dryly.
"The one that Rafer Hoxworth put down on the Carthaginian."
Dr. Whipple never