October 25 Thursday – Sam’s 24 th letter to the Union dated “Kilauea, June 1866: A NOTABLE DISCOVERY” ran in the Union:
FREE-AND-EASY FASHIONS OF NATIVE WOMEN
Tired and over-heated, we plodded back to the ruined temple. We were blistered on face and hands, our clothes were saturated with perspiration and we were burning with thirst. Brown ran, the last hundred yards, and with out waiting to take off anything but his coat and boots jumped into the sea, bringing up in the midst of a party of native girls who were bathing. They scampered out, with a modesty which was not altogether genuine, I suspect, and ran, seizing their clothes as they went. He said they were very handsomely formed girls. I did not notice, particularly.
These creatures are bathing about half their time, I think. If a man were to see a nude woman bathing at noon day in the States, he would be apt to think she was very little better than she ought to be, and proceed to favor her with an impudent stare. But the case is somewhat different here. The thing is so common that the white residents pass carelessly by, and pay no more attention to it than if the rollicking wenches were so many cattle. Within the confines of even so populous a place as Honolulu, and in the very center of the sultry city of Lahaina, the women bathe in the brooks at all hours of the day. They are only particular about getting undressed safely, and in this science they all follow the same fashion. They stoop down snatch the single garment over the head, and spring in. They will do this with great confidence within thirty steps of a man. Finical highflyers wear bathing dresses, but of course that is an affectation of modesty born of the high civilization to which the natives have attained, and is confined to a limited number. Many of the native women are prettily formed, but they have a noticeable peculiarity as to shape—they are almost as narrow through the hips as men are [Day 278; Schmidt].
Note: Sam’s letters may not have been printed in the same sequence they were written. Furthermore, he wrote his mother that he had not bothered with writing while on Maui, so some of the letters from this period were penned after he arrived back in Honolulu, Sam affixing the dates of his activity rather than the date written. By the time the last Hawaii letters were printed, Sam was back in the States lecturing. On this day Sam gave the “Sandwich Islands” lecture in You Bet, Calif. On their way back to the Exchange Hotel on horseback, Sam and McCarthy became lost in a dense thicket and wandered about until dawn [Sanborn 300-301].