In the eleventh century A.D., by the Lakanaii historians, at the time brothers and sisters mated because none existed to excel them, their rank received a boost of new blood of rank that was next to heaven's door.One Hoikemaha, steering by the stars and the ancient traditions, arrived in a great double-canoe from Samoa.He married a lesser alii of Lakanaii, and when his three sons were grown, returned with them to Samoa to bring back his own youngest brother.But with him he brought back Kumi, the son of Tui Manua, which latter's rank was highest in all Polynesia, and barely second to that of the demigods and gods.So the estimable seed of Kumi, eight centuries before, had entered into the aliis of Lakanaii, and been passed down by them in the undeviating line to reposit in Prince Akuli.
Him I first met, talking with an Oxford accent, in the officers' mess ofthe Black Watch in South Africa.This was just before that famous regiment was cut to pieces at Magersfontein.He had as much right to be in that mess as he had to his accent, for he was Oxford-educated and held the Queen's Commission.With him, as his guest, taking a look at the war, was Prince Cupid, so nicknamed, but the true prince of all Hawaii, including Lakanaii, whose real and legal title was Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole, and who might have been the living King of Hawaii Nei had it not been for the haole (white man) Revolution and Annexation--this, despite the fact that Prince Cupid's alii genealogy was lesser to the heaven-boosted genealogy of Prince Akuli.For Prince Akuli might have been King of Lakanaii, and of all Hawaii, perhaps, had not his grandfather been soundly thrashed by the first and greatest of the Kamehamehas.
This had occurred in the year 1810, in the booming days of the sandalwood trade, and in the same year that the King of Kauai came in, and was good, and ate out of Kamehameha's hand.Prince Akuli's grandfather, in that year, had received his trouncing and subjugating because he was "old school." He had not imaged island empire in terms of gunpowder and haole gunners.Kamehameha, farther-visioned, had annexed the service of haoles, including such men as Isaac Davis, mate and sole survivor of the massacred crew of the schooner Fair American, and John Young, captured boatswain of the snow Eleanor.And Isaac Davis, and John Young, and others of their waywardly adventurous ilk, with six-pounder brass carronades from the captured Iphigenia and Fair American, had destroyed the war canoes and shattered the morale of the King of Lakanaii's land- fighters, receiving duly in return from Kamehameha, according to agreement: Isaac Davis, six hundred mature and fat hogs; John Young, five hundred of the same described pork on the hoof that was split.
And so, out of all incests and lusts of the primitive cultures and beast- man's gropings toward the stature of manhood, out of all red murders, and brute battlings, and matings with the younger brothers of the demigods, world-polished, Oxford-accented, twentieth century to the tick of the second, comes Prince Akuli, Prince Squid, pure- veined Polynesian, a living bridge across the thousand centuries, comrade, friend, and fellow-traveller out of his wrecked seven- thousand-dollar limousine, marooned with me in a begonia paradise fourteen hundred feet above the sea, and his island metropolis of Olokona, to tell me of his mother, who reverted in her old age to ancientness of religious concept and ancestor worship, and collected and surrounded herself with the charnel bones of those who had been her forerunners back in the darkness of time.
"King Kalakaua started this collecting fad, over on Oahu," Prince Akuli continued."And his queen, Kapiolani, caught the fad from him.They collected everything--old makaloa mats, old tapas, old calabashes, old double-canoes, and idols which the priests had saved from the general destruction in 1819.I haven't seen a pearl-shell fish-hook in years, but I swear that Kalakaua accumulated ten thousand of them, to say nothing of human jaw-bone fish-hooks, and feather cloaks, and capes and helmets, and stone adzes, and poi-pounders of phallic design.When he and Kapiolani made their royal progresses around the islands, their hosts had to hide away their personal relics.For to the king, in theory, belongs all property of his people; and with Kalakaua, when it came to the old things, theory and practice were one.
"From him my father, Kanau, got the collecting bee in his bonnet, and Hiwilani was likewise infected.But father was modern to his finger-tips.He believed neither in the gods of the kahunas" (priests) "nor of the missionaries.He didn't believe in anything except sugar stocks, horse- breeding, and that his grandfather had been a fool in not collecting a few Isaac Davises and John Youngs and brass carronades before he went to war with Kamehameha.So he collected curios in the pure collector's spirit; but my mother took it seriously.That was why she went in for bones.I remember, too, she had an ugly old stone-idol she used to yammer to and crawl around on the floor before.It's in the Deacon Museum now.I sent it there after her death, and her collection of bones to the Royal Mausoleum in Olokona.
