and cries and the rapid beating of their hearts,
that he could feel as he held them under his arms, stirred his pity,
and he agreed to let them go if they would promise to assemble their
tribe, drag the tree to his canoe shed on the shore and fashion it
into a boat. This they promised so eagerly that he put them back on
the earth and laughed as they scampered into the thicket. True to
their promise, they dragged the tree to the ocean that very night,
and carved and hollowed it into the finest vessel to be seen on the
island; so, friendly relations being thus established, Laka set a
feast for them, which they ate in thankfulness and never troubled
him more. Whether he succeeded in the search for the parental bones,
or left his own to whiten on the same soil, is not recorded, but you
can see for yourself the hollow he dug for the tree, and his canoe
shed was standing after white men reached the group.

The Hawaiian Iliad

Kaupepee, who might have governed Molokai in the twelfth century, had
he not chosen war as his vocation, was a believer in home rule. He
did not like the immigrants who were swarming northward from Tahiti
and Samoa. Though they resembled his own race, to be sure, and
spoke a language he could understand, he regarded them as greedy
and revolutionary, and they worshipped strange gods and sometimes
misused the people among whom they had cast their fortunes. So
Kaupepee resigned his kingship to his brother, and became a fighter,
a devastator. With some hundreds of hardy men at arms and the finest
ships of the time, hewn from Oregon pines and Canada spruces that
had drifted to the islands, he bitterly harassed the other kingdoms,
dashing ashore at the principal towns in buccaneer fashion, laying
violent hands on their stores, capturing their handsomest women,
breaking the taboo in their temples, killing a dozen of their men,
then flying to his canoes again, hoisting his red sails, and putting
off before the astonished people knew exactly what had happened.

This prince had fortified himself in quite a modern fashion at Haupu,
in his native kingdom. From the land side the tract was reached
only by a narrow dike which he had walled across with lava blocks,
a tunnel beneath this obstruction affording the only exit toward the
mountains. On the ocean front he had also built his forts of stone,
although the sea boiled five hundred feet below and the plateau ended
in an almost sheer precipice. Deep rav