The Hawaiian archipelago : six months among the palm groves, coral reefs, & volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands / by Isabella L. Bird.
- Isabella Bird
- Date:
- 1890
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The Hawaiian archipelago : six months among the palm groves, coral reefs, & volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands / by Isabella L. Bird. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![dresses were black, but many of those worn by the younger women were of pure white, crimson, yellow, scarlet, blue, or light green. The men displayed their lithe, graceful figures to the best advantage in white trousers and gay Garibaldi shirts. A few of the women wore coloured handkerchiefs twined round their hair, but generally both men and women wore straw hats, which the men set jauntily on one side of their heads, and heightened their picturesqueness yet more by bandana hand- kerchiefs of rich, bright colours round their necks, knotted loosely on the left side, with a grace to which, I think, no Anglo-Saxon dandy could attain. Without an exception the men and women wore wreaths and garlands of flowers, carmine, orange, or pure white, twined round their hats, and thrown carelessly round their throats, flowers unknown to me, but redolent of the tropics in fragrance and colour. ]Many of the young beauties wore the gorgeous blossom of the red hibiscus among their abundant, unconfined, black hair, and many, be- sides the garlands, wore festoons of a sweet-scented vine, or of an exquisitely beautiful fern, knotted behind, and hanging half- way down their dresses. These adornments of natural flowers are most attractive. Chinamen, all alike, very yellow, with almond-shaped eyes, youthful, hairless faces, long pigtails, spot- lessly clean clothes, and an expression of mingled cunning and -simplicity, foreigners, half-whites, a few negroes, and a very i^^ dark-skinned Pohnesians from the far-off South Seas, made -jp the rest of the rainbow-tinted crowd. The foreign'' ladies, who were there in great numbers, generally wore simple, light prints or muslins, and white straw hats, and many of them so far conformed to native custom as to wear natural flowers round their hats and throats. But where were the hard, angular, careworn, sallow, passionate faces of men and women, such as form the majority of every crowd at home, as well as in America and Australia? The conditions of life must surely be easier here, and people must have found rest from some of its burdensome conventionalities. The foreign ladies, in their simple, tasteful, fresh attire, inno- cent of the humpings and bunchings, the monstrosities and deformities of ultra-fashionable bad taste, beamed with cheer- fulness, friendliness, and kmdliness. Men and women looked as easy, contented, and happy as if care never came near them. I never saw such healthy, bright complexions as among the women, or such sparkling smiles, or such a diffusion oi feminine grace and graciousness anywhere.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21042305_0037.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
