Give me some wine, and let me speak a little.
“God gave the Portuguese a small country as a cradle but all the world as their grave.”—António Vieira, 17th century.
I was looking for the grave of Augusto Dias. It would have been about as old as the weathered marker in front of me, which I regarded with sober curiosity: a gray slab of crumbling, porous stone with pitted surfaces and ground off edges wearily upthrust through a rough-hewn granite base. Cratered by lichens and haired over with moss, the inscription was faint and without relief, as though melted, in the shadowless, muted light. I brushed the arc of letters—the name—with my fingertips, attempting to read it by touch, Braille-like, but the characters remained at large, elusive, anonymous.
The small congregation of Portuguese graves surrounding me lay laterally round the flank of Punchbowl Crater like a ruin, a few uneven rows of teetering, lonely memorials. Uphill, a multitude of impeccably cared for Buddhist monuments clustered together to honor issei ancestors; downhill, near the lava wall facing Pensacola Street, plots for the kama‘aina and privileged white oligarchy stretched out, royalists and republicans, patriots and revolutionaries, equal now in their final repose beneath the terraced, grass-covered hillock of Makiki Cemetery. Away to the south, the modern towers of bustling Honolulu rose against the sky; to the east, block upon block of tall hotels perched on the sandy apron of Waikiki Beach, squeezed between the rugged promontory of Diamond Head and the serene, blue Pacific.
Trade winds swept up the pitched grade where I knelt and compressed moist, low clouds against the leeward Ko‘olau, wringing out freshets of sweet, clear rainwater onto the slopes below. The showers had been invigorating in the summer heat as I made my way quickly through the cemetery, starting at street level and then zig-zaging up the hill, skimming over every chiseled epitaph. In Loving Memory. Beloved Father. Mother. Wife of. Infant Son. Daughter. Born. Died. There was the barrow of the historian and scholar Abraham Fornander who committed large tracts of Hawaiian oral history to the printed page before expiring in 1887. And there—there was the ossuary of the muenbotoke—289 nineteenth-century plantation workers from Japan who died without descendants to tend their graves.
To my right was the granite headstone of João Fernandes, a plumber from the island of Madeira who arrived in Honolulu in 1879. By his own account, João was the first person in Hawai‘i to play the Madeiran machete, the little four-string guitar we now call the ‘ukulele. Reminiscing in 1922, a year before his death, he recounted playing for Queen Lili‘uokalani, composer of the immortal Aloha O‘e, and for her brother Kalakaua, the Merry Monarch, Hawai‘i’s last king. “Good music that ukulele makes,” João mused. “Good for dance, for sing, for everything. I go out with August Dias and Joao Luiz Correa in the old days. We would go to the king’s bungalow. Lots of people came. Plenty kanakas. Much music, much hula, much kaukau, much drink. All time plenty drink. And King Kalakaua, he pay for all!” The old man suddenly became contemplative. “But now—now all pau [dead].”
João and his friend August—Augusto—Dias made the four-month voyage from Madeira to Honolulu together with more than four-hundred and twenty of their countrymen, including Correa and Dias’ common-law wife, Roselina, and their four daughters. Seeking to escape a cycle of poverty and famine brought on by the collapse of the Madeiran economy, the Madeirense migrated to Hawai‘i by the thousands beginning in 1878, lured by promises of easy money and a sub-tropical climate not unlike the one they were leaving behind. But once in Honolulu, representatives of the Hawaiian and Portuguese governments coerced Fernandes, Dias and the rest to sign up as contract laborers on the sugar plantations, hardy European stock to replace earlier immigrants from China against whom there was a great and malignant prejudice in Honolulu.
After several years working cane fields on the Big Island and Kaua‘i, Dias settled in Honolulu and resumed his former trade as a violeiro, or guitar maker. The first such craftsman to advertise his services in the Honolulu City Directory in 1884, Dias could count King Kalakaua among the influential patrons who frequented his shop at 11 King Street. In addition to encouraging the revival of traditional Hawaiian performing arts, particularly hula, Kalakaua popularized the ‘ukulele among his subjects, so much so that it quickly became the instrument of choice to accompany mele and the gentile hula ku‘i. Late in life, Dias’ eldest daughter, Christina—Auntie Tina—related that her father “enjoyed being part of the scene at Kalakaua’s court” and recalled that as a young woman she was often asked to translate for Augusto because he spoke very little English. This included conveying orders for custom-made guitars and ‘ukulele from the king, who spoke very little Portuguese.
When Dias died in 1915—two weeks before the opening of the P.P.I.E. in San Francisco—the Honolulu papers reported that his remains would be interred at Makiki Cemetery, but a 1980s survey of the site failed to record his grave. After spending two weeks at the State Archives researching the lives of Dias and the other early guitar makers of Hawai‘i, I was on my way home, headed for the airport with little time to spare. Impulsively, I veered off H-1 and careened up the narrow streets of Makiki to the cemetery, hoping to find the grave of Augusto and pay homage to the ‘ukulele maker of the last king of Hawai‘i.
With both knees planted and sinking in the hallowed ground, and my torso cantilevered out and over, I leaned in to get a closer look at the rough tablet. This was it, I thought. The end of the line. The last grave in the last row in the only Portuguese section of the cemetery. And the clock was ticking. I had a plane to catch. If only I had more time, there might be a break in the overcast. I reached out once more. The surface of the stone was sharp and wet against my fingers and wept where I touched it, sending angular rills of tear-like droplets down the rock face. And then it happened. The clouds relented, admitting effulgent streams of sunlight that swirled across the hillside, casting crisp, black shadows. The fuzzy, run-together letters of the inscription drew up in tight focus. It was in Portuguese:
Augusto Dias / Faleceu / A 5 de Feve de 1915 / com / 73 Annos de Edade
[Augusto Dias / Passed Away / On February the 5th, 1915 / at / 73 Years of Age]
Image of Augusto Dias courtesy Jim Tranquada
Text © 2007 by John King