182 THE ISLANDS OF THE PACIFIC.

defended the missionaries against the corrupt foreign-€rs.

Quite as notable was Kapiolani(the captive ofheaven), who was descended from a line of kings and wasthe wife of Naihe, the national orator. In December,1824, she determined to break the spell of the belief inPele, the dread goddess of the volcano. For this pur-pose she made a long journey to Kilauea . Her husbandand a multitude of friends besought her not to provokethe wrath of the supposed goddess; and a priestess mether at the brink of the crater and predicted her death ifshe persisted in her course. But she boldly descendedinto the volcano and walked to the brink of the burninglake, then half a mile in breadth, and there defiantly atethe berries consecrated to the goddess and threw stonesinto the fountains of fire. As she did this she exclaimed,“Jehovah is my God . He kindled these fires. I fearnot Pele.” She then knelt in prayer to the true God andunited with her attendants in singing a Christian hymn.Rev. C. Forbes said at her death, in 1841:“This nationhas lost one of its brightest ornaments. She was con-fessedly the most decided Christian, the most civilized inher manners, and the most thoroughly read in the Bible of all the chiefs this nation ever had; and it is saying nomore than truth to assert that her equal in these respectsis not left in the nation. The hand of God is to be seenin the consistent Christian life for twenty years of thischild of a degraded paganism.”

Another important helper was Kinau, daughter ofKamehameha I. , wife of Kekuanoa, who in later times