Page:A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-of-War.djvu/288

256 Bay, embowered in magnificent hills, with towering rocks like lofty minarets guarding its entrance. Mr Coan says the scene was so grand as to be almost overpowering. He rowed for some miles along the wonderful coast, which he believes to be almost without an equal in nature. Rocky cliffs, towering domes, and lofty precipices, rent, grooved, and fluted, everywhere charmed the eye; and from these bold heights, sometimes of 2000 feet, silvery cascades leaped to the sea.

Here and there shaded dells opened along the rocky shore. Small valleys filled with fruit-bearing trees, and murmuring with living waters, appeared as if by enchantment. But all were desolate, for fierce bloody war had slain the inhabitants, or driven them from these Edens of beauty.

For the tribes of Hanavave Bay have waged ceaseless war with those of Omoa, and the latter seem of late years to have had the best of it.

At Omoa (which is separated from Hanavave by dividing ridges of inaccessible crags and precipices), the Hawaiian teachers assembled to meet Mr Coan and his friends. The party consisted of the Rev. S. Kauwealoha, the Rev. J. Kekela, the Rev. A. Kaukau, the Rev. T. W. Kaiwi, the Rev. Z. Hapuku, and Mr T. W. Laioha. The names are characteristic. So is the fact of the Rev. Z. Hapuku going out to meet the ship, by diving through raging surf in which no boat could live, that he might pilot the vessel to another bay, where the boats found a landing-place on a smooth sand-beach; and the visitors were led to the mission-house by an avenue, cut like a long tunnel, through the hybiscus and cotton shrubs.

At Omoa a large proportion of the native converts had assembled for church services. About seventy persons were present. In the morning a new pastor was ordained to the work of the ministry. In the afternoon seventeen adults and two children were baptised, and afterwards the Holy Communion was administered to about forty communicants, nearly all of whom had but a few years, or even months, previously, been reclaimed from heathenism and wild cannibal orgies.