Wanderung 26

Bob:

The wounds on my leg had scabbed over nicely although it was still rather tender, so first thing in the morning we walked on the shady side of the Promenade Deck for half an hour (the sunny side was too hot!), and then checked out email before having breakfast.

The "Special Interest Lecture" by Paul Eschenfelder concerned Hawaii before its discovery by Western Europeans. Since that was scheduled at 9:45, we could take that in before our Pop Choir rehearsal at 11:30. He recounted the early settlement of Hawaii by Polynesians from Samoa and Tahiti, plus the later invasion by Tahitian royalty who dominated the Hawaiian Islands thereafter.

One curious tidbit was the "Law of the Broken Paddle" passed by Kamehameha I after he had consolidated control over all the Hawaiian Islands. It is curious to me because the law made unprovoked attacks on commoners by the royalty illegal, an offense he himself had been guilty of. In his case, he stumbled and the fishermen he was attacking broke a paddle over his head and almost killed him, so maybe he thought such attacks were bad Karma or something. In any case, European contact was clearly the ultimate downfall for the Hawaiian people. The islands’ pre-contact population was estimated at 400,000, but a hundred years later the number of pure Hawaiians had dropped to around 40,000.

We would like to have also attended Ronelle Adams port lecture on Oahu, but it was scheduled at 11:15 so it overlapped with the rehearsal. We reluctantly decided to try to catch Ronelle's lecture on a TV replay and attend the Pop Choir rehearsal. The Crossing the Equator ceremony took place at 2:00 p.m., complete with "King Neptune" and his wife, "Double-D". The ceremony involved messy but fun hijinks out on the pool deck. The crew had thoughtfully spread a water-proof tarpaulin to catch the food mess as it hit the decks, which greatly facilitated cleaning up, I suppose! Afterwards we were "shellbacks" who had officially crossed the Equator rather than being "polliwogs".