This Realm of Chaos and Old Night
Five hundred thousand years ago, the great volcanoes of the easternmost island of Hawai'i, among them Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, and Hualalai, rose eighteen thousand feet above the floor of the northern Pacific Ocean, breaking the surface in successive eruptions and outpourings of lava. Volcanoes still remain active on the Big Island, the last of the eight major Hawaiian Islands to rise from the bottom of the ocean (the islands of Kaua'i and O'ahu are thought to have been formed ten million years ago). Moving from west to east, we find Ni'ihau and Kaua'i; O'ahu, the capital island; Moloka'i; Lana'i; Kaho'olawe; Maui; and Hawai'i, with a combined area of 6,424 square miles (including the numerous uninhabited Leeward Islands, submerged seamounts, and atolls stretching 1,600 miles to Kure Atoll in the northwest).
At first and for a very long time, there was nothing but lava. The following was told to the anthropologist Martha Beckwith in the early twentieth century by J. M. Poepoe, a lawyer, legislator, and editor of the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Na'i Aupini:
This was the beginning of the earth ... It was an insect that made the coral and all things in the sea. This was the beginning of the period called the first interval of time. During this time grew the coral, the shellfish (such as the sea cucumber, the small sea urchin, the flat sea urchin, tiny mussels, the oysterlike mussel, the mussels of the sea, the clam, the barnacle, the dark sea snail, the cowry and so forth) ... The water was made to be a nest that gave birth and bore all things in the womb of the deep.
Over millennia, plants and seeds found their way to the Islands, washed ashore with the spring tide of a full moon, blown by trade winds, carried inside birds or in their feathers, in the trunks and branches of trees, and floating in the jetsam of sunken ships. The chance of a seed or sapling reaching an island as isolated as one of the Hawaiian chain (a combined area of 6,424 square miles, including the numerous uninhabited Leeward Islands, and atolls stretching 1,600 miles to the northwest) is infinitesimal. If it managed to survive its unlikely journey, there remained the still greater difficulty of finding what biologists call a niche. A prerequisite of its survival (and the same would be true for some of the first human settlers) would have been the ability to survive on hard, dry lava or in sand. With time, those species that managed to grow were able to provide shade and food to less vigorous species that followed them.
Indeed it is hypothesized that such an event occurred nearly 300 times during the history of the archipelago. Dividing this number into the number of years available in which such natural introductions could have occurred ... leads to the conclusion that, on average, one successful introduction need have occurred once every 20,000-30,000 years ... If one takes 70 million years as the life of the entire archipelago ... such an event need not have occurred more than once every 250,000 years.
In other words, not very often.
The first stanza of a birth chant for Kauikeaouli, who would become King Kamehameha III in 1824, refers to the spreading of the powerful Kamehameha dynasty, but also serves as a description of the birth of the Islands:
Born was the earth, rooted the earth.
The root crept forth, rootlets of the earth.
Royal rootlets spread their way through the earth to hold firm.
Down too went the taproot, creaking
like the mainpost of a house, and the earth moved.
Cliffs rose upon the earth, the earth lay widespread:
a standing earth, a sitting earth was the earth,
a swaying earth, a solid earth was the earth.
The earth lay below, from below the earth rose.
* * *
In the spring of 1823, after a journey from New Haven of 158 days, the Reverend Charles Stewart, his wife, and their companion, the black missionary Betsy Stockton (who had once been a servant in the household of the president of Princeton University), along with fellow Congregationalist missionaries in the Second Company from Boston, watched from the brig Thames as it tacked along the north coast of the island of Hawai'i. "The broad base ... covered with Egyptian darkness, came peering through the gloom," wrote Stewart in his journal. "The reality was too certain to admit a moment's question; and was accompanied by sensations never known before ... The first tumult ... quickly succeeded by something that insensibly led to solemnity and silence."
Canoes of natives pulled alongside the brig, and the excited Stewart, who would become an astute and even sympathetic observer, had his first view of the men he and his brother ministers and lay teachers had come to baptize in the name of the Lord:
Their naked figures, and wild expression of countenance, their black hair streaming in the wind as they hurried the canoe over the water with all the eager action and muscular power of savages, their rapid and unintelligible exclamations, and whole exhibition of uncivilized character, gave to them the appearance of being half-man and half-beast.
A boat was sent ashore, and, when it returned, a ship's officer sternly advised the missionaries to remain on board the Thames. "If I never before saw brutes in the shape of men, I have seen them this morning. You can never live among such a people as this, we shall be obliged to take you back with us!"
Stewart was alarmed. He wrote, "Can they be men-can they be women?-do they not form a link in creation, connecting man with the brute?" The missionaries did not heed the officer's warning-how could they, after the great distance they had traveled and the avowals they had made?-but instead disembarked, confused and alarmed. Stewart was to remain so for some time.
* * *
There is still dispute and controversy as to the identity and origin of the first human settlers in the Hawaiian Islands, although most scholars agree that the initial voyagers sailed from distant islands, known by Polynesians as Kahiki, in the South Pacific, most likely the Marquesas. Around 1200 B.C., the farmers and fishermen who had migrated over centuries from Asia to Australia, Indonesia, and New Guinea began to move slowly across the Pacific, sailing to Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, which lie only a few days' sail from one another, where they became the ancestors of present-day Polynesians. After almost two thousand years, the islanders began to venture farther, eventually reaching Hawai'i to the north, New Zealand to the southwest, and remote Easter Island to the east.
Historians once believed that many of the islands in the Pacific were discovered by fishermen who had been blown off course, although the fact that the first voyagers to Hawai'i carried with them crops, seeds, and animals, as well as women and children, suggests that some of the journeys were deliberate and well-prepared. Abraham Fornander, a historian who was a circuit judge on the island of Maui in the late nineteenth century, believed that the first settlers arrived in the sixth century A.D. in what would become the Hawaiian Islands, and lived secluded and isolated for twelve to fourteen generations until the beginning of the eleventh century, when Polynesian folklore, legends, and chants attest a second migration of voyagers who made the journey north from Tahiti, a distance of 2,626 miles.
The double-hulled canoes of the settlers were eighty to one hundred feet long, rigged with masts, and triangular sails woven of lau hala (the dried leaf of the hala, or pandanus tree). A raised platform, screened and roofed with mats, was lashed across the hulls for the women, children, animals, plants, and, not least of all, the images of the gods that the travelers carried with them. When there was no wind, men sitting two to a bench would paddle with the guidance of a master steersman, who, trained since childhood, used his deep knowledge of the sky, wind, clouds, ocean currents, temperatures, and the habits of sea creatures and birds to guide them across the ocean.
The small companies of perhaps fifty men, women, and children brought with them dogs, pigs, and chickens, as well as food and water. They had seedlings of hibiscus, sugarcane, bamboo, mountain apple, coconut, breadfruit, mulberry, and tubers of wild ginger, kalo (taro), yam, and sweet potato, and rhizomes of tumeric. They are thought to have first landed on the desolate southernmost tip of Hawai'i Island, where the land rises gently to the summit of Mauna Loa. The settlers named their new home Ka'u, or "the breast that nursed them," although the leeward coast (facing the direction in which the wind is blowing) would have been dry and hot, with little fresh water. Although parts of Ka'u are now covered with layer upon layer of lava from successive eruptions, at the time of the first settlers it would have been wood and brush land, interspersed with broad prairies of native grass (the now ubiquitous kiawe tree was introduced in 1828 by Father Bachelot, the head of the first Catholic mission; the sugi pine arrived in 1880; the Australian bluegrass gum in 1870; the bagras eucalyptus in 1929).
The settlers would have known at once that their new home would not give them all that they needed. There was no reef and few beaches and coves, which meant that there were insufficient amounts of shellfish and seaweed, foods essential to Polynesians, but they would have seen, too, that it was a safe place in which to live, where they would not be threatened by enemies, human or animal. "Only the sea was treacherous, but only occasionally, and Polynesians are accustomed to the moods of Kanaloa [the god of the sea]."
The environment of Hawai'i Island, owing to trade winds from the northeast, the height of the mountains, and the warmth of the surrounding ocean, can shift within a few miles from bog to rain forest to coastal shrub, all with widely different levels of wind and rainfall. In the north, on the windward (facing into the wind) side, the settlers would find streams and springs, grasses, and trees. Thanks to the lush inland forests, the island would have been less windy than it is now, and there would have been more rainfall (eighteenth-century travelers describe snow on Mauna Loa in July and August). The hills of Kohala in the north would have been rolling grassland, much as they are today, with an occasional grove of native 'ohi'a trees.
In time, the settlers ventured to other islands in the archipelago. Cultivation began in Waialua valley on O'ahu, and Halawa on Moloka'i. On Hawai'i Island, fertile Waipi'o Valley was settled, and the sloping mauka (inland) highlands of Kona, Ka'u, and Kohala, as the settlers sought the verdant valleys where water could be found ("The man with the water gourd, that is a god" is a line in the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation chant), spreading across the hills and plains overlooking the ocean to settle on land where soil and rainfall were sufficient for their simple needs. In the beginning, they lived in caves, low rock shelters built on hillsides or near the ocean, and in lava tubes, which are formed when a river of hot lava forces a path under lava that has already cooled and hardened. They built houses of grass in small villages near rich fishing grounds, although bays and inlets amenable to fishing or the use of canoes were few in relation to the length of coastline. To bring their canoes safely ashore, ladders were built with wooden runners or steps to make easier the task of pulling canoes from the rough surf, and over sharp lava. Those living near the shore bartered fish, seaweed, shellfish, and salt for the produce grown by those living in the hills and gulches. The historian Mary Kawena Pukui (1895-1986) described the sharing of food during her childhood in the book The Polynesian Family System in Ka'u:
In the days of the horse-drawn vehicle, [people traveling between Hilo and Ka'u] often stopped at my aunt's to pass the night-usually unexpected. There was no market ... and whatever of fish and meat there was, was salted. The family gave the poi to the guests, and the best salted meat, even if it was the last ... Cowboys came too, tired and hungry, to share the salted fish, or meat with poi. Sometimes, they came with a portion of a wild bullock or pig-then there was fresh meat. But only for that meal.
As the settlers began to clear the endemic vegetation to grow the subsistence plants they brought with them, many native plants disappeared from areas of cultivation. The forest was both altered and exploited as trees were used to make canoes, house posts, religious statues, weapons, and utensils. The bird population, with few if any predators before the arrival of the settlers, was reduced by hunting, both for food and later to make kahili (royal standards) and leis, and the feather helmets and capes worn by the chiefs. More than six hundred species of fish were once found in Hawaiian waters, and fish were farmed in carefully tended ponds built along the shore with sluice gates to allow passage of both fish and clean tidal water. Sweet potato and arrowroot, gourd vines, ki (the small evergreen Cordyline fruticosa), sugarcane, breadfruit, and coconut were planted.
Kalo was tended with reverence, and the preparation and eating of it was an act complex in meaning. A square mile of kalo was capable of feeding fifteen thousand people; forty square feet could support one man for a year. Mary Kawena Pukui remembered that her grandmother would not allow any serious conversation at dinner once a calabash of poi, the paste made from kalo, was placed on the table, as it would offend Haloa, the progenitor of the Hawaiian race, and a poetic name for both kalo and sweet potato. Should anyone disobey, her grandmother would call out in a surprised voice, "Kahaha! ke ho'ole mai ne'i ka 'umeke poi!" "Oh! The poi bowl does not consent to this kind of talk!"
As there were no fireproof cooking utensils or vessels-no iron or clay with which to make them-food, usually eaten cold, was first cooked in lined pits in the ground, or in calabashes into which hot stones had been dropped. Unlike rice, which causes an acid reaction in the body, kalo is full of vitamins A and B. It was early remarked by Europeans that Polynesian chiefs were unusually well developed in contrast to the ethnic stock from which they most likely descended, and it has been suggested that the switch from an acidic starch (rice) to that of poi was responsible for the robust health and beauty of the ali'i, or ruling class. Poi, rich in mineral and organic salts, was largely responsible for the large jaw structure of Hawaiians and their exceptionally fine teeth. The uniformity and strength of their teeth were later to astonish foreign sailors (no difficult task given the teeth of eighteenth-century English- and Irishmen), as was the size of their bodies, particularly those of the ali'i, which in both men and women was frequently more than six feet in height.
Charles Stewart found the ali'i, who were not simply local nobility but thought to be avatars of the gods, superior to commoners in their physical appearance:
They seem indeed in size and stature to be almost a distinct race. They are all large in their frame, and often excessively corpulent; while the common people are scarce of the ordinary heights of Europeans, and of a thin rather than full habit ... although little more than twenty-five years old, [one chief] is so remarkably stout, as to be unequal to any exertion, and scarcely able to walk without difficulty. This immense bulk of person is supposed to arise from the care taken of them from their earliest infancy ... Many of the common people ... have a great beauty of person, though of a less noble scale.
* * *
The later migrations of the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries, originating in Tahiti, are known as the Long Voyages. Like the earlier journeys, they are now thought to have been forays of exploration, rather than a flight from internecine struggle, war, famine, or epidemic. The travelers brought seeds and animals with them, but they also carried new gods, powerful beings who demanded the enactment of a system of strict kapu, or taboo.
This second migration, a period of enterprise and innovation coming after a sleep of fifteen generations, was to alter profoundly the customs, beliefs, and polity of the earlier settlers. Judge Fornander noted that as late as 1830 it was easy to tell where a man lived based on his use of the letters t and r, which had been brought to the Islands by the second migration of settlers from Tahiti. Kaua'i and O'ahu people used the original k and l, while other Hawaiians used the later Tahitian style, substituting t and r for k and l. Foreigners such as Cook and Vancouver often replaced the older k with the then contemporary t, as in "Tamehameha." As there was no written language before 1822, foreigners transcribed Hawaiian words phonetically, which resulted in the varied spelling of Hawaiian words in the writings of early travelers. Captain Cook used the newer Tahitian style when he called the island of Kaua'i "Atooi," as did Charles Stewart when he wrote the name Kamamalu as "Tameha-maru."
The physician and ethnographer Nathaniel Bright Emerson, son of the missionary John Emerson, and an early translator of Hawaiian myths and chants, described one of these later voyagers, a legendary priest of the eleventh century named Pa'ao, as a man of "strong and vengeful nature, shrewd and scheming ... versed in the ceremonial and bloody rites of southern worship ... a magician." Pa'ao is said to have returned to Tahiti after landing in North Kohala, only to sail back on one of the last voyages to Hawai'i before migration mysteriously ended, bringing with him the design for a temple, or heiau, and the ritual of human sacrifice. (Emerson added, "We have no proof that he was a cannibal. The times were perhaps not ripe for the development of this particular quintessence of paganism and heathenism.")
Heiau were most commonly stone platforms of different sizes, often a quadrangle or parallelogram, some of them terraced and contained within four walls, and frequently placed to overlook the ocean (it is said that in the courtyard of one heiau built by Pa'ao, there was a sacred grove with specimens of every tree growing in the Islands). Some heiau were used for human sacrifice, and others were for healing (lapa'au), or for agriculture and fishing, or to honor the hula or the making of cloth, kapa. Large wooden images of the gods, wrapped in whitekapa, were sunk into the enclosure grounds, or stood without the walls. Smaller gods were kept inside a grass hut built on the platform. A structure made of bamboo, called an 'anu'u, or oracle tower, twenty-four feet high and eighteen feet square, was also wrapped in white kapa. The tower was used by a priest or king who hid inside to issue a god's pronouncements. Commoners remained outside the stone walls, seated silent and motionless on the ground. Women were forbidden from entering heiau, except under special conditions, such as a period of mourning for a chief.
The Tahitians of the Long Voyages brought with them the god Kane, lord of creation, the ancestor of both chiefs and commoners, and god of sunlight, fresh water, and forests; Lono, the god of clouds, winds, peace, agriculture, and fishing; and Ku, a male fertility symbol and the god of war, canoe-making, and the rising sun. There was Kanaloa, the Enemy, god of the sea, the Hot-Striking Octopus, but also god of healing. It was at this time, too, that the fire goddess Pele, capricious, cruel, jealous, and vengeful, appeared with her five compelling brothers and sister, to make her home in Kilauea crater on the Big Island.
Those first Hawaiians became acquainted with two manifestations of divine power they could not have seen in the land of their birth. With a fine sense of relationships, and their realists' humor, they decided that these novel forces must be feminine. The blazing, impulsive, destructive, hot-tempered, and beautiful one who issued so unpredictably from her underground realm they called Pele. The haughty, pallid, silent, cold maiden who never deigned to descend from her lofty mountain citadels they named Poli'ahu ... Pele as their Earth Goddess in her triple manifestations: as Mother, maker of mountains and of islands and humankind; as Lover-Pursuer-Virago, devourer of men who do not heed her power, no matter how handsome and accomplished they may think they are; and, finally, as Kuku Wahine, Grandmother, who receives in her wrinkled bosom the bodies of the dead, taking them into her care once more.
Hundreds of lesser gods represented temporal objects as well as abstractions and states of being-gods of fish, reptiles, birds, mountains, revenge, music, strange noises, trees, hills, rain, pigs, empty houses, the sick, peace and war, stones, the insane, the dance, canoes, and darkness and light. The very trees in the forests were spirits. The 'ohi'a tree was thought to have a human voice and to cry in pain when cut, and the wood used by a man to make an image of a god was thereafter kapu to him (in this usage, kapu does not mean forbidden, but special, unique, or exclusive). The enticing calls and songs of the woodland spirits filled the forests with incessant sound.
"The forty thousand little gods" ... moved so easily in and out of the all-embracing spirit world. These lived in mountains and hills, in valleys, caves, and stones; in trees, herbs, ferns, and grasses; in fishes, birds, and beasts of every kind; in springs, streams, swamps, and drops of dew; in mists, clouds, thunder, lightning, winds; and in the wandering planets, the glittering far-off stars.
Like the original voyagers of the sixth century, the later settlers venerated the spirits, or 'aumakua, who served as intermediaries between humankind and the great gods. An 'aumakua, which was mortal as well as divine, could be, among other things, a shark, eel, hawk, limpet, a red-haired woman (symbolizing a volcano), lizard, wild goose, mouse, caterpillar, or owl. An 'aumakua, which is particular to individuals and to families to this day, represented both fertility and a deified ancestor, the two becoming indistinguishable with time.
People were very frightened of a guardian, or kahu, of the shark, who smeared his skin with turmeric, kept his head covered, and spoke in a hushed voice. In heiau dedicated to shark gods, the priests rubbed themselves with salt to give an appearance of scales, and uttered piercing shrieks. Kahu of Pele, the fire goddess, coated their long hair with red dust, and made their eyes red. The fact that sharks happen to devour people, and volcanoes destroy entire villages, helped to underline the magical connection between the visible danger (the kahu) and the invisible danger (the god).
The nineteenth-century Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau (1815-1876), who converted to Christianity before writing his history of ruling chiefs, is careful, even impatient, to distinguish between the actual object or living creature, and a god:
The owl itself is a worthless thing; it is eaten by the people of Kula, Maui, and Na'alehu in Ka'u, Hawaii, and thrown about on the road. The owl itself is not a god-it has no mana. The god is separate. Kukauakahi is the main god ... who is consecrated in the body of the owl and who shows his mana in the worthless body of the owl ...
Is the owl a god? The writer of this history says that the owl is not a god-it is the form ... taken by a god.
There were enough gods to keep a man busy, and very frightened should he fail to honor them in accord with the rigid and seemingly arbitrary, although in practice often efficient and purposeful rituals that each required.
* * *
For perhaps one hundred years after the arrival of the second group, there was sporadic warfare between the original settlers and the aggressive newcomers. The Tahitians prevailed, and those earlier settlers who did not become assimilated through marriage were transformed over generations into the elusive nocturnal elves known as Menehune. Whimsically and perhaps guiltily described as our memories of the past, the Menehune are said to have found refuge in the mountains, where some people still claim to hear their plaintive sighs and murmurs, although the ability to see them is denied to all but their own kind. They are thought to creep after dark from the caves and hollow trees where they live, summoned to build in one night a ditch, or a heiau, or a house constructed of the bones of birds.
As the number of new settlers from Polynesia grew, the original inhabitants slipped into servitude. Mary Kawena Pukui believed that the outcast slaves known as kauwa, kept for human sacrifice, may have been the descendants of the earliest people. Kauwa, who were regarded as foul-smelling things, were tattooed on their foreheads and made to hide their heads under pieces of kapa. Like the Untouchables of India, kauwa were scapegoats born into and imprisoned within an abhorred class. Confined to certain districts such as Makeanehu in Kohala, and Kalaemamo in Kona on the Big Island, they were forbidden to marry outside their caste, or even to enter the house or yard of a man who was not kauwa. If a child was born of a union between a commoner or chief and akauwa, the child would be dashed to death against a rock, and the disgrace felt for generations. Kauwa were buried alive next to their dead masters, and often served as proxies for chiefs who had been sentenced to death for infractions of kapu, their heads held underwater until drowned. If it was discovered that a kauwa was among a man's ancestors, the man's eyes would be gouged from his head.
* * *
The small fishing and upland communities of Hawai'i, the property of certain hereditary high chiefs, were not important in a political sense. The primary unit was the scattered community known as 'ohana, consisting of relatives by blood, marriage, or adoption, some living in the hills and some by the sea, but tied by descent, habit, and sentiment to a special area, which was the 'aina, a word deriving from the verb 'ai, to eat. The word 'ohana, or extended family, originates with the planters of kalo, as oha means to sprout. The shoots of the kalo corm, the basis of the Hawaiian diet, are called 'oha. With the nominalizing suffix na, 'oha-na literally means offshoots.
The small groups of chiefly families and priests were served by the makers of kapa, feather capes, helmets, andkahili; canoe builders; singers and dancers; woodsmen; canoe men; genealogists; healers; and a large number of fishermen and farmers, known as commoners.
As sailors, they built their houses with tie and lash, rather than nails or pegs. A coarse wild grass (pili) that grew near the ocean was used, although a chief's house might be thatched in banana leaves, and the ends of the roof decorated with black grass to give it beauty and distinction. A house, often built on a platform of lava rock or smooth river stones, was dark inside, as there was only one small, low door, and no windows or chimney. The thatched roof sloped from a center ridgepole. The dirt floor was covered with dried potato vines and mats, and the corpses of family members were often buried beneath the floor. In cold mountain regions, like Waimea on the Big Island, houses had small fire pits for warmth, as cooking was done in a separate house or in the open. A well-built house would last from eight to ten years.
Kapa, cloth made from the bark of the wauke, or paper mulberry, a tree from East Asia, and the small native treemamaki, was primarily the work of women. Samuel Kamakau, who collected mo'olelo, or stories and oral histories, wrote that men with an artistic leaning who were not inclined to pursue manly work were also allowed to make cloth, particularly the prized ribbed kapa used for men's loincloths, or malo, and the skirts worn by ali'i women, called pa'u. A malo was nine feet in length, and six or eight inches wide, although a king's malo might be twelve feet long, made of feathers, and weighted with dog and human teeth. A pa'u was composed of five joined strips of cloth. Charles Stewart rightly found Hawaiian kapa to be exquisite in design and color:
I have seen ... mantles of it, as thin and transparent as Italian crape; which, at a short distance, it greatly resembled. That generally used for maros [loincloths] and paus (skirts), is more compact, like paper. The kiheis [short capes] of the men and covers for sleeping, are still firmer and thicker; and are composed of several sheets spread with a gelatinous wash made from the gum of a tree, and then beaten together. There is a kind still superior in texture and beauty, worn by the chiefs ... made of the best (mulberry) bark, and is as thick as morocco ... stamped with the brightest colours, and glazed with a composition having the effect of varnish ... The cloth for sleeping, is the largest in size; each sheet, ten of which, fastened together at one end, form a bed-cover, being as large as an ordinary counterpane.
Female commoners wore skirts made with long ribbonlike strips of pounded hibiscus bark, leaves of the ki plant, or plaited reeds and grasses, attached to a drawstring encircling the waist The kapa skirts worn by both male and female dancers were so full that they resembled large balloons. Ali'i women wore golden palapalai ferns on their heads, and another lei of ferns thrown over one bare shoulder and tied loosely at the waist beneath the opposite arm. Sandals woven of coconut fiber, hau, banana bark, or dried ki leaves were worn when walking over difficult terrain or lava, and always removed upon entering a house.
The compound of a chief would have contained at least six grass houses for his own use, including a small house in which the family gods were kept and honored, although the altar in the men's eating-house could also serve to shelter idols and the 'aumakua particular to each family. There was a small house where kapa was beaten in bad weather, and a thatched canoe shed if the compound was near the ocean. During menstruation and after childbirth, women were confined to a special hut, called a hale pe'a, where they sat on discarded kapa stuffed with the root-stock fuzz of a large tree fern. Soiled kapa (only cloth that was worn around the hips could be used) was buried under the house when a woman's confinement of three to five days was complete, when she would be further purged by bathing in the ocean. The hale noa was the house where women lived, which was open only to a husband and young children (boys were taken into the men's house after circumcision at age seven). A man slept alongside his wife in her house, where no eating was allowed, as men avoided the utensils, dishes, and even fires needed to cook women's food.
Before the arrival of the carved beds brought from China by foreign traders, and the New England four-poster beds made for the most favored chiefs by the more handy of the American missionaries, the ali'i slept on platforms raised three feet from the ground and covered with thirty or more mats woven of either rush or the leaves of thehala, their heads resting on small rectangular blocks. (It was considered dangerous to sleep with your head next to the wall, as a spear thrust through the thatch could be fatal.) The quality of the mats varied greatly. The finest were woven with a small and delicate pattern, unlike anything else in Polynesia, often with a thick-fringed border. Floor mats, where a family and guests sat and talked, and children played, were of a wider mesh than the mats used for sleeping. A chief's favorite mat was carried over the arm of an attendant, to be used when needed for eating, sitting, or lounging.
As in most royal courts, ali'i life was profoundly different from that of commoners. When not at war, the chiefs spent their time in songwriting contests, gambling, surfing, games, mock warfare, religious rituals, and feasts. Two games that were very popular-there was one version for ali'i, and one for commoners-were versions of wife-swapping. Men and women sat on the ground in a circle and a leader touched one of the participants with a stick, indicating that he was free to leave with a chosen partner. A person could also be selected by spinning a coconut bowl until it stopped in front of one of the players. As long as the two lovers did not remain together past daybreak, there was no cause for jealousy.
The hunting of rats with bows (rats were descendants of the gods of Po, the underworld) was much favored by the chiefs. The game of konane, similar to but more complicated than checkers, was a frequent pastime (King Kamehameha I was known to play by the hour with his chiefs). Boxing matches began as homage to the god Lono, who is said to have wandered through the Islands delirious with grief after he killed his wife, challenging every man he met to fight. Bouts, particularly during the Makahiki festival, which was held in honor of Lono, drew large crowds and were often injurious to the fighters. Another favorite sport, limited to the ali'i, was the racing of narrow wooden sleds (holua) down a steep slide cut into the side of a mountain and sometimes ending in the ocean. The course was often long (four thousand feet), and covered in dirt and wet grass to increase the speed of the racers, who lay on their stomachs on the sleds. The chief who covered the longest distance in a single run was the winner. In the display known as 'oahi, men hurled lighted firebrands from a cliff into the ocean below while people waited in canoes to retrieve the sputtering torches from the water. It was considered a sign of good fortune to brand yourself or a companion with sticks quickly retrieved from the ocean. Spectators and competitors bet on games, particularly sledding, boxing, and surfing.
Surfing was the passion of men, women, and children, commoner and ali'i alike. As with all things, it was a ritualized act. The right tree with which to make the board had to be found. The hewing and shaping of the wood was imbued with ceremony, in the hope that the gods would favor the board, its maker, and its owner. The first time that a board was put into the water had its own ritual, and its care (drying, oiling, wrapping in kapa) was accompanied by chants and prayers. People surfed naked, lying outstretched on thin boards made of either koa or breadfruit, five to seven feet long, and flat on both sides, although the most accomplished surfers would stand. The chiefs, who often put a kapu on the best surfing spots so as to have exclusive use of them, used glossy black boards made of wiliwili wood, which was lighter than koa, that could reach sixteen feet in length and one hundred and fifty pounds in weight. In a surfing contest, a buoy was anchored close to shore, and whoever reached it first was the winner. If more than one surfer reached the buoy, or no one reached it, a tie was conveniently declared.
A chief's household was established at his birth, when a kahu was assigned to the infant. Ali'i women frequently had little contact with their children, often living in a separate house, if not another district or island. As in the rest of Polynesia, children of both ali'i and commoners were often left in the care of grandparents, leaving the parents free to work, or to indulge in pleasure (such children were considered fortunate, as they would benefit from the family legends and cultural traditions taught them by the elders). A high chief kept between fifty and one hundred attendants, companions, counselors, and servants who lived with him, and whom he clothed and fed. The chief's intimate attendants each had a precise responsibility, often dependent on lineage-lighter of the chief's pipe; keeper of the loincloth; bearers of the feathered kahili; court historian, who was a junior member of the family; executioner and his assistants; astronomers; dancers; orator; the "lap," who had taken care of the chief in childhood; night guards and day guards; chanters; treasurer; hereditary reader of signs (who could be put to death if his predictions were not thought to be accurate or even pleasing); person of the private parts, who cared for the chief when he was ill, and for a chiefess when she was menstruating; masseurs; and keeper of the household stores and goods. The guardian of the king's food was called an a'i'pu'upu'u, which means calloused shoulders. The man who watched over the king while he slept was called the keeper of the head. Men of lesser rank prepared and served food, and drew water, which was a long and tiring task, given its scarcity during the dry season.
Another valued member of a chief's household was the punahele, or favorite, who had been adopted or taken in by the chief, and who might be the son of a friend, or a foster son (the custom of hanai was common, in which a child, usually the firstborn son or daughter, was freely given to a grandparent or friend or relative to raise). Regarded as sacred to the chief, a favorite had the right to enter the kapu places. The favorite was not the same, however, as a moe aikane, or a man's male sexual companion. A shocked John Ledyard, a marine from Connecticut who in 1777 accompanied Captain Cook on HMS Discovery, wrote that chiefs eagerly sought the most beautiful young men in the Islands, whom they brought to court and kept close to them. The chiefs, who were jealous of any unwelcome attention paid their favorites, appeared to Ledyard to be very fond of the boys, and to treat them with more kindness than they showed women. The Kohala high chief Kamehameha, later to be the greatest of Hawaiian kings, was twice described at age twenty-five as being extremely affectionate with a favorite. David Samwell, a surgeon also traveling with Cook, wrote in his journal that Kamehameha had a young male companion with him when he visited Cook's ships in 1778:
Kamehameha, a chief of great consequence and a relation of Kariopoo [Kalaniopu'u], but of a clownish and blackguard appearance, came on board of us in the afternoon dressed in an elegant feathered Cloak, which he brought to sell but would part with it for nothing but iron Daggers, which they of late preffered to Tois and everything else; and all the large Hogs they bring us now they want Daggers for and tell us that they must be made as long [as] their arms, and the armourers were employed in making them instead of small adzes. Kameha-meha got nine of them for his Cloak. He, with many of his attendants, took up his quarters on board the ship for the Night: among them is a Young Man of whom he seems very fond, which does not in the least surprize us as we have had opportunities before of being acquainted with a detestable part of his character which he is not in the least anxious to conceal.
Although commoners ate when they were hungry, one cooked meal was traditionally eaten just before dark, in the hope that ghosts would not be attracted to the food. Chiefs, however, ate four times a day, feasting amply on dog or pig, pickled or raw fish seasoned with salt water, and poi; the first time upon rising, followed by a second meal near noon, and then again in the afternoon and at night, with frequent snacks throughout the day of coconuts, bananas, and sugarcane. The chiefs, stretched across piles of mats, ate with one hand, while leaning upon an arm, although an attendant could scoop the food with his fingers to make a little ball, which he then dropped into his master's mouth, or he could first chew the food and transfer it directly from his mouth to that of the chief. Sharp splints of bamboo with which to cut meat, and calabashes of water in which to wash before and after eating, were held for the chiefs, and the hands dried with fresh ferns and leaves.
The English missionary William Ellis described a visit made by his fellow missionaries Asa Thurston, Artemas Bishop, and Joseph Goodrich to the house of Kuakini, governor of Hawai'i Island from 1812 to 1820:
Their baggage was removed from the vessel, and deposited in a small comfortable house, formerly belonging to Kamehameha, but which the governor directed them to occupy so long as they should remain at Kairua. He also politely invited them to his table ... The breakfast room presented a singular scene. They were seated around a small table with the governor and one or two of his friends, who, in addition to the coffee, fish, vegetables, &c., with which it was furnished, had a large wooden bowl of poe, a sort of thin paste made of baked taro, beat up and diluted with water, placed by the side of their plates, from which they frequently took very hearty draughts. Two favourite lap-dogs sat on the same sofa with the governor, one on his right hand and the other on his left, and occasionally received a bit from his hand, or the fragments on the plate from which he had eaten. A number of his punahele [favorite chiefs], and some occasional visitors, sat in circles on the floor, around large dishes of raw fish, baked hog, or dog, or goat, from which each helped himself without ceremony, while a huge calabash of poe passed rapidly round among them. They became exceedingly loquacious and cheerful during their meal; and several who had been silent before, now laughed loud, and joined with spirit in the mirth of their companions.
In 1828, a trader described a lunch that he gave on board his merchant vessel for Kamehameha III and his retinue:
My royal guest ... knew the proper use of cutlery ... although it appeared that he could more easily lift the food to his mouth with his fingers-especially a certain porridge called pooy, which he took from a bowl ... held by one of his bodyguard sitting on his heels on the deck at the right side of the king in such a way that Kauikeaouli [King Kamehameha III] without looking could drop his hand in the porridge. He stirred it with two fingers, helped himself to about a spoonful of the stuff, and raised this to his wide-open mouth.
The name for a chief was the "shark that travels on land," and commoners believed that he could be denied nothing. All land was the unquestioned property of the king, or ali'i nui. Sections of land called ahupua'a (wedge-shaped divisions made at a high point on an island, running downhill to the ocean), were given to loyal chiefs and favorites as long as the high chief held power, and they in turn allowed smaller sections of land to be used by their retainers. The only restriction on the power of the ali'i was the land tenure system, which permitted a commoner to enter the service of another chief, should he wish to change masters. It was not unusual for people to protest the practices of a cruel or unjust chief, who was sometimes murdered for his crimes. Loyalty was not considered by the Hawaiians to be static-like commoners, a chief could change his allegiance at will. It was considered politic for ali'i of one island to marry into the royal families of other islands, which resulted in sometimes surprising alliances between rival clans.
Commoners were not compensated for their labor, although they did not pay rent for the right to farm their own small portions. Tenants were obliged to work on the chief's own land one day a week, when men, women, and children assisted each other in the kalo patches or sweet potato fields in the hope of finishing the work on time. Two-thirds of a commoner's crops, the animals he raised, and the kapa made by women (and after the arrival of foreign merchants, any small sums of money acquired through private trade) were owed to the chief, who did not hesitate to take all of a man's goods and land (and wife), should he decide he wanted them. If a tenant farmer refused to obey his chief, his parcel of land, his animals, and his modest goods were taken from him. In 1821, the English traveler Gilbert Mathison wrote that while he was in Waialua, on O'ahu, he observed a chief order hundreds of his people to the sandalwood forests to cut wood:
The whole obeyed, except one man, who had the folly and hardihood to refuse. Upon this, his house was set fire to, and burnt to the ground on the very day: still he refused to go. The next process was to seize his possessions, and turn his wife and family off the estate; which would ... have been done, if he had not ... made a timely submission.
The levies of canoes, timber, pigs, dogs, dried and salted fish, chickens, vegetables, nets, mats, cloth, feathers, baskets, calabashes, and kalo collected by chiefs from the farmers and fishermen on their land were given in turn to the governor of the island. A commoner sometimes paid twenty pieces of kapa in tax. When Queen Ka'ahumanu, the widow of Kamehameha I, traveled with Captain George Byron to Hilo in 1825 to collect tribute, she was given two thousand pieces of kapa.
Before the unification of the islands of Hawai'i, Maui, Kaho'olawe, Lana'i, O'ahu, and Moloka'i, each island was ruled by its own ali'i nui, whose rights were not guaranteed by simple linear succession but by genealogy and his proved ability to prevail among rivals. King Kamehameha's victory on O'ahu in 1795 was to end these long and bloody struggles, but for hundreds of years, local chieftains struggled ceaselessly, raiding each other in wars of gain, whim, revenge, or dynastic hegemony. As each chief had the right to apportion his land as he chose among his kin and followers, the constant shifts of power caused dissension and confusion, and rendered land ownership both unreliable and unstable. With the death of a king, or the defeat of a king in battle, land was again divided and distributed between chiefs, a practice which often led to a renewal of war. Samuel Kamakau attributed the constant battle for land to the value of the produce and goods of each district. On Hawai'i Island, different kinds of especially fine kapa were particular to the area controlled by the Kona chiefs, while the districts of Hilo and Hamakua were known for their fast war canoes, and for the mamo and 'o'o feathers required to make the cloaks, helmets and kahili prized by the ali'i. The chiefs of Kohala in the north wanted land in the mild and dry districts of Kona to the southwest with their rich fishing grounds, while the Kona chiefs sought land in the mountainous districts for their fresh water, kalo terraces, and plentiful crops.
As much time was spent in war, fighting became the main occupation of the chiefs and their warriors. Except for the four months devoted to the great Makahiki festival beginning in October with the rising of the Pleiades, they studied warcraft, and staged mock battles. Archibald Menzies, a Scots surgeon and naturalist sailing with Captain George Vancouver in 1792, 1793, and 1794, witnessed a pretend battle in which Kamehameha I took part. Menzies was surprised when some of the men suffered serious injury, and even death (the corpses were used as sacrifices):
Finding what were supposed to be his party giving ground to the others very fast, he [Kamehameha] darted in to the middle of them without any weapon whatever, and placing himself at their head, a shower of spears was instantly aimed at him from the opposite side. He caught hold of the first that came near him in its course and putting himself in a position of defense, with his eyes fixed on the spears coming toward him, and by the spear in his hand he parried every one of them off with the greatest coolness and intrepidity, and watching at the same time with a vigilant eye every favorable opportunity of getting a good aim, when he would instantly dart back the spear in his hand and get hold of the next that was hove at him. In this manner they continued ... with such apparent virulence that many of them received considerable hurts and bruises. At last they had resort of the pololus, which are spears of fifteen or eighteen feet long, pointed like daggers ... They do not heave them like the other spears but charge with them in a close bodied phalanx to close action ... They manage them with great dexterity, by resting them on the forearms of one hand to guide their direction, while the other hand pushes them on or gathers them in with great ease and alertness. They were not long engaged with these weapons when one of the warriors fell, and then a violent scramble ensued between the two parties for his body ... as those who get the dead body were allowed to be victorious by being thus enabled to carry off the first sacrifice to the marae [Tahitian word for heiau].
The rules, etiquette, and ritual of both combat and mock battle were as formalized as those at any medieval European court. Competitions and entertainments, not unlike jousting, were used to further fighting skills, to win admiration and honor, and to encourage the sometimes vicious rivalries essential to upholding morale during battle. All fighting was done in daylight, and in a very methodical fashion, with the place, style of fighting, and time often determined before the battle (those chiefs who resorted to less predictable tactics, such as night raids, surprise attacks, and later, guns, had a clear advantage). The armies, arrayed in crescent formation, met on open ground, although one warrior could be chosen to fight from each side, while the two armies watched nearby.
Fighting, whether between an army or two chiefs, was limited to brutal hand-to-hand combat, using slings (which in Polynesia took the place of bows), spears, clubs, and javelins. Once joined, the grappling fighters were limited to choking, stabbing, and clubbing. Men wore as little clothing as possible, their long hair wrapped in kapa, although the chiefs wore their bright red, yellow, and black feather capes, made in designs of fins, rainbows, sharks, and wings (the color yellow was associated with O'ahu; black and red with the island of Hawai'i), flung over one bare shoulder to facilitate the use of weapons, and crested wickerwork helmets onto which hundreds of feathers had been sewn. Canoe men, often in squadrons of hundreds, wore forbidding gourd helmets decorated with ferns and fluttering strips of kapa. Captain Cook, who mistakenly believed the helmets were used in "mummery," described them in the journal of his third voyage (as recorded by one of his officers, Lieutenant James King): "It is a kind of mask, made of a large gourd, with holes cut in it for the eyes and nose. The top was stuck full of small green twigs, which, at a distance, had the appearance of an elegant waving plume: and from the lower part hung narrow stripes [sic] of cloth, resembling a beard."
No standing army was maintained, but each man kept his simple weapons ready in his house, constituting a reserve force that was always on alert. Chiefs sent men, most of them farmers and fishermen, in answer to an alarm, and if a man was discovered to have remained behind, his ear would be slit and he would be dragged to the battlefield in ropes. Women frequently went to war beside men, caring for their weapons, carrying food and water, and tending to the wounded, but also joining them in combat. When a man was killed in battle or captured for ritual sacrifice, the woman accompanying him would be killed or enslaved. Those warriors who were not taken prisoner would attempt to flee to places of sanctuary like Honaunau, four miles south of Kona on the Big Island, and La'ie on O'ahu, where a fighter's wives, children, and elderly relatives could also find shelter. If a defeated warrior, or likewise a criminal, could reach such a refuge, he would be granted mercy. Anyone who dared harm him would be considered to have broken sacred law and would himself be declared an outlaw. A person could leave the sanctuary after a lapse of time and return home without fear of retribution or punishment.
Copyright © 2015 by Susanna Moore
Map copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey L. Ward