heir appearance
prior to a death in the royal family. The rumbling and hissing and
the sounding of a heavy major chord in the depths of Kilauea that
followed the funeral of Kaiulani were directly attributed to her death.

The Cannibals

Despite the denials of Hawaiians that their ancestors ever ate the
flesh of men, it is admitted that a large company of cannibals, strong,
dark, tattooed, and speaking a strange language, were storm-blown
to Kauai in the seventeenth century. It is guessed that they were
Papuans. The daughter of Kokoa, their chief, a beautiful girl of
eighteen or so, with braided hair that almost touched the ground,
and strings of pearls at her neck and ankles, found an admirer and a
husband in an island chief who tried to instruct her in the taboo,
for he had seen with horror and apprehension that the new-comers
allowed their women to eat bananas, cocoanuts, and certain fish, and
even to take them from the dishes used by the men. The bride promised
to reform and live on poi, but she had not been bred to this sort of
victual, and had never been reproved by the gods for eating other,
so it was almost inevitable that she should backslide in her virtuous
intention, and when she so far defied public opinion, and thunders,
and earthquakes as to eat a banana in view of the priests, the public
arose as one man and demanded punishment. The chief begged that he
might be allowed to send her back to her father, but the high priest
told him that the gods had been flouted beyond endurance, and would
be satisfied only with her death. The beautiful and hapless woman was
therefore torn from the arms of her afflicted husband, strangled, and
thrown into the sea,--a warning to all the sex against forbidden fruit.

Then trouble began. Women's appetites might be restrained, but not
those of men,--especially the appetite for blood. Kokoa revenged
himself for his daughter's murder by killing a relative of her
husband and serving him hot to an eager, because long abstemious,
congregation. The taste of Hawaiian chops and shoulders revived a greed
for this sort of meat, and they preyed openly on the populace of Kauai
until those who remained arose as several men and drove them out of
the island. The cannibals fled in haste to Oahu, taking possession
of the plateau of Halemanu, which was high, reachable by only one
or two paths, and those of steepness, difficulty, and under constant
guard, and here they established the