and another huge American war vessel, the Benicia, are moored in
line with the British corvette Scout, within 200 yards of the shore;
and their boats were constantly passing and re-passing, among
countless canoes filled with natives. Two coasting schooners were
just leaving the harbour, and the inter-island steamer Kilauea, with
her deck crowded with natives, was just coming in. By noon the
great decrepit Nevada, which has no wharf at which she can lie in
sleepy New Zealand, was moored alongside a very respectable one in
this enterprising little Hawaiian capital.

We looked down from the towering deck on a crowd of two or three
thousand people--whites, Kanakas, Chinamen--and hundreds of them at
once made their way on board, and streamed over the ship, talking,
laughing, and remarking upon us in a language which seemed without
backbone. Such rich brown men and women they were, with wavy,
shining black hair, large, brown, lustrous eyes, and rows of perfect
teeth like ivory. Everyone was smiling. The forms of the women
seem to be inclined towards obesity, but their drapery, which
consists of a sleeved garment which falls in ample and unconfined
folds from their shoulders to their feet, partly conceals this
defect, which is here regarded as a beauty. Some of these dresses
were black, but many of those worn by the younger women were of pure
white, crimson, yellow, scarlet, blue, or light green. The men
displayed their lithe, graceful figures to the best advantage in
white trousers and gay Garibaldi shirts. A few of the women wore
coloured handkerchiefs twined round their hair, but generally both
men and women wore straw hats, which the men set jauntily on one
side of their heads, and aggravated their appearance yet more by
bandana handkerchiefs of rich bright colours round their necks,
knotted loosely on the left side, with a grace to which, I think, no