Revenue and Currency.—The annual revenue of the Government amounts to about 600,000 dollars derived chiefly from custom duties (284,000 dollars in 1878), taxes on real and personal property, and a poll tax. It does not equal the expenditure, and there is a funded debt of from 400,000 to 500,000 dollars. Accounts are kept in dollars, and the coins in circulation are those of American States.
The Capital.—Honolulu (population 14,114), the capital of the island group, stands on the S.W. coast of Oahu, in 157° 51′ 48″ W. long. and 21° 17′ 56″ N. lat., at the mouth of the valley of Nuuann, which runs back between tall cliffs to two peaks about 3000 feet high in the great eastern range of mountains. It is the seat of the central government and the residence of the king. Although consisting largely of one-story wooden houses, mingled with grass huts half smothered by foliage, Honolulu is said to present to approaching vessels more of the appearance of a civilized place with its churches and public buildings than any other town in Polynesia. The streets, laid out in the American style, are straight, neat, and tidy. Water-works supply the town from a neighbouring valley. Among the stone erections are the king's house, a hospital, a large hotel built by the Government, and the Government buildings, in which are a fair library of English books and a museum containing corals, shells, and other natural curiosities, as well as specimens of ancient weapons and other native articles. Amongst the brick buildings are large iron works, a brass foundry, an establishment for working up wood, and rice mills. All the necessaries and most of the luxuries of civilized life can be obtained in Honolulu. There are several hotels for the accommodation of strangers, and numerous agencies of both British and American insurance offices; American and English medical men and lawyers have settled in the town; two weekly newspapers in English and two in the Hawaiian language are published. Honolulu has a good natural harbour, with wharves, a custom house, and warehouses. It is connected by regular lines of mail steamers with San Francisco, Sydney, and New Zealand. There are also lines of steamers to Liverpool and Glasgow, New York and Boston, Bremen, China, and Peru. Small steamers ply between the islands. Business is almost entirely carried on by foreigners, and chiefly by Americans, British, Germans, and Chinese. The last are the most numerous; they are acquiring property rapidly, and some of them are wealthy. The foreigners are very sociable, and have established numerous clubs, benevolent societies, &c. American influence and customs are said to be dominant. In the neighbourhood of the town is a college, where for a small sum boys and girls receive a good English education.
| Islands. | Length in Miles. |
Width in Miles. |
Estimated Area in Acres. |
Population. Census 1878. |
| Hawaii | 100 | 90 | 2,500,000 | 17,034 |
| Maui | 54 | 25 | 400,000 | 12,109 |
| Kahulawi | 12 | 5 | 30,000 | 60 |
| Lanai | 20 | 9 | 100,000 | 214 |
| Molokai | 35 | 7 | 200,000 | 2,581 |
| Oahu | 35 | 21 | 350,000 | 20,236 |
| Kauai | 30 | 28 | 350,000 | 5,634 |
| Niihau | 20 | 5 | 70,000 | 117 |
| 4,000,000 | 57,985 |
Hawaii has an area nearly double that of all the other islands put together. In shape it is a rude triangle, with sides of 85, 75, and 65 geographical miles in length. Almost the whole of its surface is occupied by the gentle slopes of four volcanic mountains, Mauna Kea on the N., 13,805 feet in height (the highest peak in the Pacific Ocean); Mauna Loa on the S., 13,600 feet; Mauna Hualalai on the W., 8275 feet; and Mauna Kohala on the N.W., 5505 feet.
The highest points of Mauna Kea are truncated cones with craters rising from plains of clinkers and gravel, ashes and sand; but no modern streams of lava are visible, nor is there record of any eruption of this mountain. The slopes on the west side are so gentle that the base of the terminal cones may be reached on horseback. On the windward side cryptogamic vegetation reaches as high as 12,000 feet, but the forest ceases at 6000 feet.
Mauna Loa is the most interesting mountain of the whole group from its being still an active volcano. The circular terminal crater, 8000 feet in diameter, is quite perfect, with nearly vertical walls from 500 to 600 feet high on the inner side; and the bottom between the numerous cones is usually covered with solid lava, from the fissures of which issue steam and sulphurous vapours; but its features change with every eruption. There is no record of any eruption from Mauna Loa before 1832, when lava flowed from the summit crater on several sides. In 1843 a vast flood of lava was discharged, which formed three streams 5 or 6 miles wide and between 20 and 30 miles long. There were eruptions in 1851, 1852, 1855, and 1859, but in none of these did the lava reach the sea except on the last occasion, when the eruption continued for two months, and a winding current 50 miles long, from 1 to 5 miles wide, and from 10 to some hundreds of feet thick, arrived at the west coast in eight days. Its surface is now black, shining, brittle, and very porous. In 1868 occurred another eruption attended by many earthquakes. One of these caused a huge sea wave 40 feet high to break on the shore, occasioning the loss of many lives and the destruction of much property. The wave crossed the Pacific to the Californian coast. Later in the same year, at a time when earthquakes were taking place on the coast of South America and the town of Iquique in Peru was destroyed, a great wave came across the Pacific, struck the Hawaiian Islands, and made itself felt in New Zealand. The last eruption took place in February 1877, when a stream of lava flowed for six hours.
Sixteen miles to the S.E. of Mauna Loa is a hill called Kilauea, with a crater which is the largest active one in the world. The earliest recorded eruption was in 1789, and there was another in 1832. This volcano was first made known to the civilized world in 1823, when Mr Ellis and a party of American missionaries visited it. At an elevation of 4400 feet above the sea they found in the midst of a plain an oval crater 9 miles in circumference with vertical sides 1000 feet deep, covered at the bottom with a lake of liquid lava at one end red and boiling. Around the edge or from the midst of this fiery lake, 51 conical craters sent forth jets of lava or smoke and flame. A stony ledge round the inside of the crater, and 300 or 400 feet above the lake, indicated that the lava had risen to that height and had then run off by a subterranean channel to the sea, where some miles of coast had been filled up with liquid lava a few weeks previously. Since that time many travellers have ascended to the craters of both Mauna Loa and Kilauea, and have given vivid descriptions of the very grand and wonderful phenomena they witnessed.[1] In 1840 the commander and officers of the United States Exploring Expedition spent three weeks on the summit of Mauna Loa and made an accurate survey of the crater. In that year there was a great outburst from a crater 8 miles from the summit of Kilauea, when a stream of lava half a mile broad and 40 miles long reached the sea.
Over the whole summit of Hualalai, another of the four mountains of Hawaii, are scattered many pit craters from 300 to 500 feet deep and from 700 to 1000 feet in diameter, their solid walls being nearly vertical. On the edge of one of the deepest craters there is a mound about 50 feet high, composed of drops of lava and fragments of all sizes, coloured yellow, orange, red, blue, and black. They seem to have been ejected in a viscid state, for they are slightly agglutinated together. In the centre of the mound is a blow-hole 25 feet in diameter and about 1800 feet deep. The inside of this hole is grooved horizontally, but otherwise smooth as if turned. More than 150 cones have been counted on the sides of Hualai. The last eruption took place in 1801, when a copious flow of lava reached the coast, where it filled up a deep bay.
The lavas of Hawaii are distinguishable according to the aspect of their surface into three classes. 1. The pahoehoe of the natives, or velvety lava, is folded and twisted in a manner that shows it was once a viscid fluid. This is the common form when the flow has passed over rocks or dry ground on a gentle slope. 2. The clinkers or scoriaceous lava is rough and covered with fragments. This is found wherever the stream has passed through woods or has been impeded by inequalities of the ground, or where its heat has caused the explosion of caverns beneath the floor of older beds. 3. The a-a or spongy lava, which, on account of its extreme roughness and hardness, is carefully avoided by all travellers. This form is thought to owe its origin to the fact that, just as the lava was granulating, impediments that stood in its course gave way, when the spongy mass rolled over and built up piles from which the liquid portion drained off. The natives are in the habit of making holes in the a-a, and planting in them banana shoots or sweet-potato cuttings, and though the holes are simply filled with stones or fern leaves the plants grow and in due time are productive.
- ↑ Amongst the minor phenomena they speak of the delicate glassy fibres called Pele’s hair by the Hawaiians, which are spun by the wind from the rising and falling drops of liquid lava, and blown over the edge or into the crevices of the crater. Pele in idolatrous times was the dreaded goddess of the volcano. It is noteworthy that a substance resembling Pele’s hair is made from the slag of iron furnaces, by driving steam or air against a thin current of the melted slag. The filamentous material thus made has been termed mineral or slag wool; it can be woven into sheets which are useful for coating steam boilers, &c., as the substance is a very bad conductor of heat.
