Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (46 page)

During World War II, 1,200 Japanese kamikaze pilots died trying to sink American ships. Number of ships sunk: 34.

But most rich folks weren’t as fortunate as Queen Caroline. They became frustrated by the hermits sneaking off and embarrassing them. So some wealthy landowners placed wax dummies in chairs in their hermitages. John Hill of Hawkestone Park in Shropshire went one step further: He used a puppet. That’s because his real hermit, known as Father Francis, had died after living for 14 years in a cave at Hawkestone, sporting the requisite long beard and contemplating an hourglass to the delight of passersby. After his search for a suitable replacement failed, Hill instructed his servants to build him a life-size replica of Father Francis. The new “Francis” turned out to be distinctly less animated than his predecessor, but Hill had a solution for that as well: He hired a man to crouch behind the dummy and make it “stand up” whenever a visitor approached. The operator would then recite poetry while moving Francis’s mouth with a string.

EMPTY NESTS

As the Romantic Era came to a close in the mid-1800s, interest in ornamental hermits declined, and the practice was all but forgotten. However, many of the hermitages have been kept up for posterity. And every once in a while, one is actually used for its intended purpose. In 2004 an artist named David Blandy revived the hermitage built by Charles Hamilton at Painshill Park, announcing on his website:

The 18th-century tradition of housing a human pet at the bottom of your garden to impress the neighbours is set to return. I will seal myself off from the outside world and reside in a house with similar proportions to a rabbit hutch.

Like his Romantic predecessors, Blandy was protesting modernism. His goal was to illustrate that in today’s world, people care more about their electronic gadgets than each other. So how long did Bandy’s detachment from society last? Only a few weeks.

They just don’t make hermits like they used to.

IT’S ALL YOU NEED

Who doesn’t love a good quote page?

“How on Earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?”

—
Albert Einstein

“One’s first love is always perfect until one meets one’s second love.”

—
Elizabeth Aston

“Some pray to marry the man they love. I humbly pray to heaven above that I love the man I marry.”

—
Rose Pastor Stokes

“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”

—
Dr. Seuss

“Love is what is left in a relationship after all the selfishness has been removed.”

—
Cullen Hightower

“Love works a different way in different minds; the fool it enlightens and the wise it blinds.”

—
John Dryden

“Love is the only satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”

—
Erich Fromm

“I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.”

—
Mother Teresa

“Love is a game that two can play and both win.”

—
Eva Gabor

“If Jack’s in love, he’s no judge of Jill’s beauty.”

—
Benjamin Franklin

“If I know what love is, it is because of you.”

—
Herman Hesse

“If you have love in your life, it can make up for a great many things you lack. If you don’t have it, no matter what else there is, it’s not enough.

—
Ann Landers

“John Lennon said, ‘All you need is love.’ John obviously never met my bank manager.”

—
Danny McCrossan

First African-American member of the US Senate: Hiram Rhoades Revels, Mississippi, 1870.

FORBIDDEN ISLAND, USA

If you’ve ever visited the Hawaiian islands, you may already know that one of them, Niihau, west of Kauai, is off-limits to outsiders. Here’s the story of how that came to be, and what life on the island is like today
.

F
OR SALE BY OWNER
In 1863 Eliza McHutchison Sinclair, the wealthy 63-year-old widow of a Scottish sea captain, set sail with her children and grandchildren from New Zealand for Vancouver Island off the southwest coast of Canada. There she hoped to buy a ranch large enough to support the dozen family members who were traveling with her, but after arriving in Canada, she decided the country was too rough for a ranch to be successful. Someone suggested she try her luck in the kingdom of Hawaii, 2,400 miles west of North America in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On September 17, 1863, she and her family sailed into Honolulu harbor, and quickly became friends with King Kamehameha IV.

The Sinclairs toured the islands looking for suitable ranch property. They turned down an opportunity to buy much of what is now downtown Honolulu and Waikiki beach, and they passed on a chance to buy much of the land in and around Pearl Harbor. “After some months of looking,” Eliza’s daughter Anne recalled years later, “we gave up and decided to leave for California. When King Kamehameha heard of this he told us that if we would stay in Hawaii he would sell us a whole island.”

SALE PENDING

The island was Niihau (pronounced NEE-ee-HAH-oo), a 72-square-mile island 18 miles off the southwest coast of Kauai. Population: about three hundred natives. Anne’s brothers, Francis and James Sinclair, had a look and liked what they saw. They offered King Kamehameha $6,000 in gold; the King countered with $10,000 (about $1.5 million in today’s money). Sold! Kamehameha IV died before the sale could be completed, but his successor, King Kamehameha V, honored the deal. In 1864 the Sinclairs ponied up about 68 pounds of gold, and Niihau has been the family’s private property ever since.

State of war: More than half of all Civil War battles were fought in Virginia.

CAVEAT EMPTOR

History (including Hawaiian history) is filled with examples of indigenous peoples being cheated out of their land by unscrupulous outsiders, but this may be a case where the natives pulled one over on the foreigners. When the Sinclair brothers first laid eyes on Niihau, the island was lush and green, seemingly the perfect place to set up a ranch. What Kamehameha apparently did not tell them was that the island was coming off of two years of unusually wet weather. Normally it was semi-arid, almost a desert. Niihau sits in the “rain shadow” of Kauai and receives just 25 inches of rain a year, compared to more than 450 inches on the wettest parts of Kauai. Droughts on Niihau are so severe that it was common for the Niihauans to abandon their island for years on end until the rains returned. If they didn’t leave, they starved.

Indeed, the only reason the island was available for sale—and the reason Kamehameha was so eager to unload it—was because it was so barren. After the Great
Mahele
(“division”) of 1848, when the monarchy made land available for purchase by native Hawaiians for the first time, the Niihauans had tried to buy the island themselves. They’d hoped to pay for it with crops and animals raised on the island, but the land wasn’t productive enough for them to do it, not even when the price of the land was just a few pennies an acre. They ended up having to lease the island from the King instead, at an even lower price. By the time the Sinclairs sailed into Honolulu harbor in September 1863, the Niihauans had fallen so far behind on even these meager payments that Kamehameha IV was ready to sell the island to someone else.

HEDGING HER BETS

After the sale went through, the Sinclairs built a large house on the west coast of Niihau and set up their ranch. But the dry weather returned, and it became evident that the operation might never be successful. Luckily, Eliza Sinclair still had plenty of gold left, and in the 1870s she bought 21,000 acres of land on Kauai that the family developed into a sugarcane plantation. It, too, remains in the family to this day. (In 1902 Eliza’s grandson bought the island of Lanai at a property auction, making the family sole owners of
two
of the eight inhabited Hawaiian Islands...but only for a time. They sold Lanai to the Hawaiian Pineapple Company—now part of Dole—in 1922.)

Most popular official state insect: the honeybee (17 states). #2: monarch butterfly (7 states).

CHANGES, CHANGES, EVERYWHERE

When King Kamehameha V signed ownership of the island over to the Sinclairs, he told them, “Niihau is yours. But the day may come when Hawaiians are not as strong in Hawaii as they are now. When that day comes, please do what you can to help them.” The Sinclairs, it turned out, were more than just the owners of an island—they were also the rulers of the Hawaiians who lived on Niihau...at least those who chose to stay on the island after it changed hands. Having their land sold out from under them was a bitter blow to the Niihauans, and many moved off the island. By 1866 the native population of Niihau was half of what it had been in 1860.

Those Niihauans who moved away soon discovered that change was coming to
all
the islands, not just to Niihau. And few of the changes would be to their benefit. In 1887 a group of armed American and European landowners forced King Kalakaua to sign what has become known as the Bayonet Constitution, which stripped the king of much of his power and denied many native Hawaiians the right to vote. According to the new constitution, foreign-born landowners were allowed to vote, even if they weren’t Hawaiian citizens.

Kalakaua died in 1891, and his sister Liliuokalani became Queen. In 1893 she tried to replace the Bayonet Constitution with one that restored the power of the monarch, but her attempts had the opposite effect and she was overthrown in a coup organized by the foreign landowners. The Republic of Hawaii was declared in 1894, and in 1898 Hawaii was annexed by the United States.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH

Eliza Sinclair did not live to see the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarch; she died in 1892. Other family members opposed it, and it’s likely that she would have too. She was deeply concerned about the threat the outside world posed to the Hawaiian culture and way of life. Those threats went way beyond politics: They included exposure to deadly Western diseases as well as alcoholism, prostitution in the seafaring ports, gambling, tobacco, and other vices of the modern world. English was quickly displacing Hawaiian as the primary language of the islands, and even the hula and other Hawaiian art forms were beginning to disappear.

The Mars rovers contain pieces of metal from the World Trade Center.

It was distressing for all Hawaiians to see their way of life under threat. What set the Niihauans apart was the fact that their island was owned by a family that was willing and able to honor the commitment made to King Kamehameha V to assist them in preserving their culture. Beginning with Eliza Sinclair, and continuing with her grandson Aubrey Robinson, who assumed responsibility for Niihau after her death, the family began limiting access to Niihau as a means of allowing the Niihauans to live their lives as they always had, free from the pressures of the modern world. When a measles epidemic on Niihau killed 11 children in the 1930s, they sealed off the island almost completely.

Over the years, control of the island passed from Aubrey to his son Aylmer and then to Aylmer’s brother Lester. When Lester died in 1969 his widow Helen Robinson assumed responsibility, and when she died in 2002 control passed to her sons Keith and Bruce Robinson. They oversee the island today.

Each generation of the family has respected the wish of the Niihauans (and Eliza Sinclair) to maintain their isolation from the outside world. The Niihauans are free to come and go as they please, and many do spend significant portions of their lives off the island. But outsiders can visit Niihau
only
with the Robinsons’ personal permission, and that is rarely given.

LAST OF ITS KIND

If you’ve ever been to Hawaii, you know that there’s plenty of Hawaiian culture to be found in the museums and souvenir shops that serve the 6 million tourists who visit each year. But that’s about the only place you’ll find it. The 80,000 Hawaiians who claim full native-Hawaiian ancestry today make up less than 6% of the state’s total population. Fewer than 2,000 Hawaiians are native Hawaiian speakers, and half of those are over 70 years old.

There are no communities left on the Hawaiian Islands that speak Hawaiian as their first language. No communities, that is, except one: the 130 Hawaiians who live on Niihau. Their culture and privacy are still carefully guarded by the descendants of Eliza Sinclair. On every other island, the traditional Hawaiian way of life has all but disappeared.

Part II of the story is on
page 457
.

In ancient Rome, it was illegal to bury a body within the city limits.

CELEBRITIES IN THE CAN

They go to the bathroom, just like us. Except weirder stuff happens
.

L
EONARDO DICAPRIO.
While attending a soccer game at the World Cup in South Africa in the summer of 2010, DiCaprio stepped out to use the bathroom. To his horror, a bunch of fans spotted him and followed him in. DiCaprio tried to find some privacy by running into a stall, but there were too many men—and women—in the bathroom, crowding around to peek into it. They started shaking the stall walls and nearly toppled them onto DiCaprio, which would have put him at the bottom of a pile of gaping fans. But DiCaprio screamed for help and security officers came to his rescue before anything serious occurred.