be permitted in the hive is unwise, but as long as they are permitted there will be no lack of them. These remarks are important in estimating the calibre of the Hawaiians, for in this bustling age little interest can be felt in a hopelessly lazy man or people.

The effect of the ancient custom of the chiefs calling upon their retainers to go together to labour, and return together to repose, is observable in many of the popular habits at the present time. The people of a village often agree that on a certain day they will in a body undertake such or such a job, though the work done by each is on his own account. In our country we are accustomed to see each individual perform what he has to do when it best suits his own convenience, and are surprised at a procedure so different from our own.

In the same way the women will enter into a convention that on a given day they will go into the woods to pick apples or gather flowers for wreaths, although the apples would have tasted as sweet and the wreaths have become them as well if gathered on any intervening day.

Among the Hawaiian customs may be mentioned a fashion of giving a feast on the death-day of those who were dear to them. On such, to us sad, occasions they make quite as merry as if they were assisting at the celebration of a birth. They very frequently, also, keep the bodies of the dead, coffined, but unburied, in their dwelling-houses, eating and enjoying themselves in that solemn presence, and telling good stories of the departed, whom they indicate by name, or, more forcibly, by pointing to the bier. Widows of rank sometimes have a tent pitched near the graves of their husbands, to which they retire with a retinue every evening, to sleep or mourn. Yet they fear spirits, and when they see

CUSTOMS.-FAMILY RELATIONS.

365

one in the dark (as the females often do), they scream till the hills echo their alarm.

A common practice existed in Hawaii of giving away children at their birth. It was, and still is, very much the custom to do so. Children so made over have at least as much, and very often more, love for their adoptive than their natural parents. They regard the real authors of their being in much the same light as uncles and aunts; and as if to assist an indefiniteness of feeling in these respects, the real or the adoptive parents go by the same title as uncles and aunts; and it does not require a near connection to make an uncle or aunt. As a consequence, it is sometimes difficult to know the exact relationship of some person alluded to. For instance, a young Hawaiian may be speaking of his 'makuakane.' You ask him if he means his actual father? No.--His adoptive father, then? No. Who does he mean? Why, the brother of his father's brother's wife. The father's brother's wife being his aunt, all her sisters are his aunts, and all her brothers his uncles, and are known (unless particular distinctness is required) by the same definition of relationship as his father and mother de facto. A great many wise things might be said about a custom which breaks up what has been considered the nucleus of all government, to wit, the relationship between parents and their offspring. The custom referred to arose probably in the good old troublous times, when the people, females as well as men, were a good deal ordered out by their superiors, and a family of young children was inconvenient. We may fancy, too, that the chiefs, who liked to increase the number of their retainers, encouraged those under them to adopt the children of others who were less in a condition to be burthened

with them. But then the chiefs did the same thing; perhaps from considerations of policy in another shape. Whatever the origin of the custom, of late years it has probably been complied with principally from a desire on the part of the person adopting to have some young thing to take care of, and be amused by, or to secure an heir. To whatsoever causes we assign the present want of fecundity among the Hawaiian females, we must suppose them to have been more prolific when this custom first prevailed. To the desire of the childless. for children, therefore, can hardly be traced the origin and universality of what in most countries would be called an unnatural practice.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE DEPOPULATION OF THE ISLANDS-KIBROTH-HATAAVA.

THE

HE depopulation of the Hawaiian Islands is a chapter which must be written, with however much regret.

There are, of course, some general principles involved in the phenomenon of coloured races dying out in the presence of the white man. They are sufficiently obscure; and were the fact of depopulation confined to a few instances, some obvious natural causes might seem sufficient to account for the decay of native races when in contact with white-skinned settlers or invaders. But as the rule of decay of dark races seems, rather, to be universal, we must suppose some more comprehensive agents of destruction. The fact had attracted the attention of the Hawaiians themselves many years ago. Mr. Hill, who visited the islands in 1849, mentions that one of his European friends who mingled much with the natives informed him that there was a general impression among them of their early extinction. Even in the year 1823, when Mr. Ellis was in Hawaii, a fear of the consequences of the approach of white men prevailed.

At Waikiki the natives seemed to doubt the propriety of foreigners coming to reside among them permanently. They said they had heard that in several countries where foreigners

had intermingled with the original natives, the latter had soon disappeared; and should missionaries come to live there, perhaps the land would ultimately become theirs, and the Kanaka Maore (aborigines) cease to be its occupiers.

It is now generally agreed that Captain Cook overestimated the population of the islands at the time of his visit. He supposed, from what he saw on the coasts, that the entire number of people on the group was about 400,000. He would, perhaps, make allowance for the concourse at any particular bay which such a great event as the arrival of his ships would draw together, but he probably overlooked the identity of the crowd, as to part of its numbers, when he moved from one anchorage to another. A theatrical manager would have put him right at once, because accustomed to make numerical display of a limited company, by many exits and entrances: or if he had watched a city pageant, he would have ascertained that part of the unsatiated spectators in one street filter through side-lanes and alleys and form a portion of the crowd in another thoroughfare before the procession arrives there. Two hundred thousand would be probably the more correct computation of the Hawaiian population in 1778-9. Even then it seems likely to have been on the decrease, and that good old times had preceded that age-times in which a more numerous people covered the islands, and left traces of their strength and abundance in roads, walls, temples, and other works. From Cook's time to the present, the decay of the population has been continuous and rapid. At the time of Mr. Ellis's visit, (1823) the number on the whole of the islands was estimated at from 130,000 to 150,000 souls, of which 85,000 lived on the great island Hawaii. A rapid depopulation had certainly taken place in the previous