Sandwhich Islands

Sandwhich Islands

  • Submitted By: AZHAR
  • Date Submitted: 05/21/2009 11:22 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 439
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 288

The Sandwich Isles are 2,000 miles southwest from San Francisco, but why they were put away out there in the middle of the Pacific. The islands are a dozen in number and their entire area is not greater. They are of volcanic origin, of volcanic construction I should say. There is not a spoonful of dirt in the whole group, unless it has been imported. Eight of the islands are inhabited, and four of them are mountains comprising the most productive sugar lands in the world.
These islands were discovered some eighty or ninety years ago by Captain Cook. When these islands were discovered the population was about 400,000, but the white man came and brought various complicated diseases, and education, and civilization, and all sorts of calamities, and as a result the population began to drop. Forty years ago they were reduced to 200,00.The people here are known as kanakas. These natives are very friendly people indeed .If you want to stay a few days and nights in a native's cabin you can stay and welcome. They will do everything they possibly can to make you comfortable. They will feed you baked dog, or raw fish, or raw salt pork, or cats--all the luxuries of the season. One thing of these Kanakas is that nearly every one of them has a dozen mothers. They are an odd sort of people, too. They can die whenever they want to. That's a fact. They don't mind dying. When they take an idea to die they die, and it don't make any difference whether there is any matter with them or not. When one of them makes up his mind to die, he just lies down and is just as certain to die.
A Kanaka will eat anything he can bite--a live fish, scales and all, which must be rather annoying to the fish, but the Kanaka doesn't mind that. It used to be said that the Kanakas were cannibals, but that was a slander. They didn't eat Captain Cook--or if they did, it was only for fun. These people do nearly upside-down. They buckle the saddle on the right side which is the wrong side; they mount a...

Similar Essays