The Hawaiian Archipelago - Six Months Among The Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, And Volcanoes Of The Sandwich Islands By Isabella L. Bird
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Outrigger Canoes, With
Garlanded Men And Women, Were Poised Upon The Motionless Water Or
Darted Gracefully Round The Ironclads, As Gracefully To Come To
Rest.
Then a stir and swaying of the crowd, and the American
Admiral was seen standing at the steps of an English barouche and
four, and an Hawaiian imitation of an English cheer rang out upon
the air.
More cheering, more excitement, and I saw nothing else
till the Admiral's barge, containing the Admiral, and the king
dressed in a plain morning suit with a single decoration, swept past
the Nevada. The suite followed in the other boats, - brown men and
white, governors, ministers, and court dignitaries, in Windsor
uniforms, but with an added resplendency of plumes, epaulettes, and
gold lace. As soon as Lunalilo reached the California, the yards of
the three ships were manned, and amidst cheering which rent the air,
and the deafening thunder of a royal salute from sixty-three guns of
heavy calibre, the popular descendant of seventy generations of
sceptred savages stepped on board the flag-ship's deck. No higher
honours could have been paid to the Emperor "of all the Russias." I
have seen few sights more curious than that of the representative of
the American Republic standing bare-headed before a coloured man,
and the two mightiest empires on earth paying royal honours to a
Polynesian sovereign, whose little kingdom in the North Pacific is
known to many of us at home only as "the group of islands where
Captain Cook was killed." Ah!
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