THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS. CHAPTER I. GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION AND ORIGIN-HARBOURS. the imagination of the ancient Greek or Roman Tthe imagination of ts formed the entrance into a the pillars of Hercules formed the entrance into a dark and mysterious sea; yet, somewhere in its unknown waters, towards the setting of the sun, lay, in his belief, the Fortunate Islands, under a clearer sky and in a happier climate than any known in the world of men. This dream of a land, of which they spoke sometimes as an Elysium for departed spirits, sometimes almost as a region which might be reached by the living, was not altogether without an influence for good. It kept awake a longing curiosity, which might one day give birth to active enterprise; it prevented the mind from accepting the bounds of one or two inland seas as the limits of the habitable world. Such dreams were doomed to be dispelled, when, eighteen centuries later, the march of geographical discovery began; but in their place was left the fact, that the earth was larger than antiquity had taken it to be; and the belief gradually grew up that even another B continent lay interposed in the untraversed sea between Europe and the Indian land. The conviction was justified by the discoveries of Columbus, and his successors. One of the latest results of geographical research may be thus stated:-All the continents stretch downwards from the northern pole of our planet, and terminate in points; as if its waters, receding to the south, had left bare at the lower extremities of the land the central ridges only. In the Southern hemisphere, islands form a partial equipoise to these continental masses of land, and declare themselves, by several indications, to be peaks of land, once elevated but afterwards submerged by the increased depth of ocean. Islands elevated by volcanic action constitute exceptions to this general formula. Lieutenant Julien, of the French navy, gives, as a farther fruit of his own investigation, that in proceeding from the North to the South Pole, the ratio of land to water diminishes regularly with every parallel of latitude. Islands, comparatively few in number above the Tropic of Cancer, stud the southern waters of the world in countless abundance. Group after group spreads onwards like the constellations of the firmament. In size, they vary from the vast mass of Australia, and of Borneo, with its fifty millions of inhabitants, to little pulos and low lagoon-islands, rising but a few feet above the sea-level. * The whole of this tropical and southern realm of waters has been named Oceanica, and has been divided hydrographically, for convenience of reference, into five districts-as the stars have been mapped out into ima * Its population is so reported by the bishop of Labuan. GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION. ginary figures with corresponding names. The divisions of the Ocean World are the following:-To the eastward, POLYNESIA; comprising the Sandwich, Marquesas, Society, Harvey, Friendly, New Zealand, and Samoan groups. To the south, MELANESIA-inhabited by black races; it includes the Figi (or Feejee), New Hebrides and Solomon Archipelagoes, and New Guinea. Still more south, AUSTRALASIA-comprehending the great land of Australia, and its dependencies. Westward, MALAISIA―embracing the East India Islands, and inhabited principally by the Malay races. These islands, six thousand in number, contain the largest in the world, with the exception of Australia. Lastly, situated somewhat centrally with respect to the other groups, a region of small isles and islets, fitly named MICRONESIA. It is proposed in the following pages to give an account of the most northerly cluster of the Polynesian Archipelago, viz. the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands. And if on close inspection we find reason to remove the place of the Islands of the Blest still onward with the retreating horizon, and discover that, amidst natural charms and delicious climate, vice and death and sorrow hold their place, we only confirm the poet's discovery that 'things which to the world belong, But we shall be made acquainted with a very interesting people, evincing an extraordinary aptitude for European civilisation, and possessing a 'government which, youthful as it is, will bear comparison with those of the best |