“Honolulu,” British author William Somerset Maugham’s (1874-1965) tale of sorcery, is written with such authenticity that one has the impression that Maugham based it on a firsthand account he’d heard while visiting Honolulu in 1916.
In “Honolulu,” Captain Butler, the master of a trading ship, makes his rounds traveling between Honolulu on Oahu and the smaller Hawaiian islands – the islands smaller than Oahu being Kauai, Molokai, Niihau, Lanai and Kahoolawe.
On one island (likely Kauai), he met a Hawaiian girl, the daughter of a taro farmer, and she captured his fancy and she agreed to accompany him on his travels.
When Butler catches his mate, a Hawaiian named Wheeler, but called Bananas by Butler, behaving drunkenly and harassing the girl aboard ship, he punches Bananas face with a fist fitted with brass knuckles and Bananas secretly vows revenge.
Later, Butler becomes seriously ill, but an American medical doctor finds nothing wrong with him.
However, when a Hawaiian kahuna examines Butler, the kahuna tells the girl that Butler is being prayed to death by an enemy, and he will die unless the enemy dies first.
The girl, who cares for Butler, is convinced that Bananas is that enemy.
Maugham wrote, “She knew that if he could be brought to look into a calabash in which was water so that a reflection of him was made, and the reflection were broken by hurtling the water, he would die as though he had been struck by lightning; for the reflection was his soul.”
Bananas then died as she’d planned and Captain Butler recovered.
During his lifetime, William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was the most famous author in the world.
“Honolulu” appeared in one of Maugham’s best works, “The Trembling of a Leaf,” a collection of short stories published in 1921 with locales in Tahiti, Samoa and Hawaii.
The other stories in “The Trembling of a Leaf” are “Mackintosh,” “The Fall of Edward Barnard,” “Red,” “The Pool,” and “Rain.”
Maugham found inspiration for writing them during his Pacific travels of 1916-17.
Incidentally, the 1953 movie adaptation of “Rain,” “Miss Sadie Thompson,” starring Rita Hayworth, was filmed on Kauai.
