April 20 Friday – Sam’s fifth letter to the Union, dated “Honolulu, March, 1866: BOARD AND LODGING SECURED” ran in the Union:
Washing is done chiefly by the natives, price, a dollar a dozen. If you are not watchful, though, your shirt won’t stand more than one washing, because Kanaka artists work by a most destructive method. They use only cold water-sit down by a brook, soap the garment, lay it on one rock and “pound” it with another. This gives a shirt a handsome fringe around its borders, but it is ruinous on buttons. If your washerwoman knows you will not put up with this sort of thing, however, she will do her pounding with a bottle, or else rub your clothes clean with her hands. After the garments are washed the artist spreads them on the green grass, and the flaming sun and the winds soon bleach them as white as snow. They are then ironed on a cocoa-leaf mat spread on the ground, and the job is finished. I cannot discover that anything of the nature of starch is used.
Board, lodging, clean clothes, furnished room, coal oil or whale oil lamp (dingy, greasy, villainous)— next you want water, fruit, tobacco and cigars, and possibly wines and liquors—and then you are ‘fixed,’ and ready to live in Honolulu [Day 37].