Names for the New World

Sunset, Nov, 1998 by Peter Fish

Given Douglas's poor eyesight, the easiest supposition is that he stepped where he shouldn't have. But over the years, competing theories have sprouted - as if people are unable to accept that such a rational man could meet such a random end. It has been suggested that Gurney killed Douglas for the money he carried. Or that he was killed after having an affair with Gurney's wife. One biographer suggests that Douglas succumbed to a cosmic despair: that his work and his life had ceased to have meaning. And so he threw himself down.

"Here we are," Nevin says. A small wood sign stands at the roadside. "Kaluakauka," it reads. We get out and traipse down the hill in the rain, slipping, falling. At last we see it: a stone monument planted in a small clearing in the forest. A plaque describes who it honors and why, and explains that the Hilo Burns Club erected this monument to honor a fellow Scot. That is Douglas's mark on posterity here, except for that sign back on the road. It's one last grim bit of posthumous naming: kaluakauka means the doctor's pit, and so honors both Douglas's scholarship and the means of his demise.

I take some pictures. I write some notes. The rain makes the ink blot the pages. It muffles the sounds of the forest. In this mist-filled silence, you have to strain to imagine Douglas's noisy, violent end, imagine what he would have heard, what he would have seen: an unruly New World, named, categorized, classified, but still capable of terror and surprise.

Centennial Western Wanderings is sponsored in part by Ford Explorer.

RELATED ARTICLE: Following David Douglas's trail

David Douglas has garnered remarkably few memorials. There is a high school named for him in Portland; a monument to him in Scone, Scotland. In Honolulu, Kawaiahao Church (where he was buried in the cemetery, although the grave site is now lost) has a plaque: it reads "victima scientiae," victim of science. And there is the monument on the Big Island. Visiting it requires a vehicle suited to chancy roads, local guidance, and a desire to plunge through thick underbrush to view a cracking stone column. Terry Nevin will lead you there for $100; he can be reached at (808) 885-4607.

The two best books about Douglas are out of print. John Davies's Douglas of the Forests excerpts Douglas's North American journals. William Morwood's Traveler in a Vanished Landscape is an almost novelistic account of his life. Still in print, Hawai'i Chronicles: Island History from the Pages of Honolulu Magazine (University of Hawaii Press, 1996; $15.95) includes an article about his death.