Memoirs of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint) - Tapa dura

Excerpt from Memoirs of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History, Vol. 1

IN selecting the Stone Implements of the Ancient Hawaiians for the subject of the next chapter of what I had some years since intended should be a history of Hawaii, or rather of the Hawaiians before the advent of other and very different racial influences, it may be fair to explain to my readers almost at the Start, my method in this fragmentary edition of such information about old Hawan and its customs as I have been able to gather during the past thirty-six years. And here I must be pardoned for thrusting a personality into what I greatly desire to make a clear and impersonal statement of facts.

When I came to these islands a young man full of enthusiasm, fresh from the teachings of Agassiz, Gray, Wyman and Cooke, eager to study nature in all her aspects, unbiased by theory, only anxious to learn, I found a land where traces of a native civilization were not all effaced. The American Mission had labored a little more than forty years and the results of their work were still vigorous: the missionary homes still existed, oases in the outlying districts, where I could talk with venerable men and women who had landed in 1820 when the young son and successor of Kamehameha had cast aside all that his ancestors had held sacred in religion, and was not yet ready to assume new responsibilities,~-indeed he hardly gave much thought to the great change that was impending. One era was at an end, another was on the threshold. Hitherto intercourse with for eigners had but little modified the native ways of living. There had been no interruption of the ancient worship although it had been for years falling into mild decay. The admirable unwritten system of law regarding land tenure, water rights, fishing privileges, and the stern but generally beneficial kapu were almost unimpaired, and that little band of missionaries that went like Joshua's spies to View the land, and whose story is so charmingly told in Ellis' T our of Hem/cm, found people and things much the same as did the wrecked Spaniards when they knelt on the Hawaiian beach three centuries before.

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