Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (4 page)

East and a little south of O‘ahu, Cook raised the lozenge-shaped island of Moloka‘i, whose sea cliffs plunged three thousand feet down to the water; then small, pear-shaped Lana‘i; and tiny Kaho‘olawe, a desert that lay in the rain shadow on the leeward side of an island called Maui, which was dominated by a tall, dormant volcano. Beyond that cluster lay the largest by far of all the islands, which the natives called Hawai‘i.

The island chain extended from northwest to southeast, directly across the prevailing trade winds. They were volcanic islands, with high mountains that squeezed the moisture from the passing winds, so that the eastern sides of the islands consisted of the rankest dense jungle with innumerable streams and waterfalls, leaving the western sides of the islands semidesert. Cook found no coral atolls. In later years it would be understood that these are new islands; not enough time had passed for their mountains to be pummeled back beneath the surface of the ocean, leaving their telltale coral rings. Likewise, the many beaches were beautiful but intimately small. It takes eons of time for the waves to pound rock into sand, and these islands were still in their youth.

At Maui, Captain Cook found a sheltered anchorage and finally allowed the natives aboard. A quick examination of the eager women showed many of them to be infected with syphilitic chancres; Cook was heartsick that the venereal disease his men had left on Ni‘ihau only a year before had raced all the way through the chain—ample evidence of the sexual libertinism of this native culture. But there was no need to deny his men their pleasures, either, and the women were led belowdecks to vent their enthusiasm in mating with this alien species of white and obviously very powerful men.

That English sailors introduced syphilis to Hawaii has become an indispensable element of the historical recitation, but in justice to Cook, he only assumed that his men were the origin of the disease he found on Maui because he believed that he was the first outsider to discover the islands. There was in fact an extensive native tradition that there had been contacts previous to his.
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Of the Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, and Japanese candidates who may have landed and brought the disease before Cook did, the latter are the likeliest possibility. Syphilis had been introduced into Japan more than 250 years before, perhaps as many as two-thirds of Japanese sailors were infected, and demographers estimate from three to twelve instances of storm-driven Japanese ships becoming marooned on Hawai‘i before Cook. So venereal disease in Hawai‘i may have predated Cook and come from a different vector entirely.
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Cook, however, assumed that the responsibility was his, and once the women of Maui were sated, Cook provided them with what medicines the era afforded.

*   *   *

This largest island, Hawai‘i, anchored the archipelago at the southeast, and Cook surveyed it leisurely. Over a period of weeks the
Resolution
and the
Discovery
sailed in a clockwise direction down the northeastern and southeastern sides, and then north up the western side. He had no idea what significance this action had for the natives. On this island it was the season of
makahiki
, the lengthy, intricate festival celebrating harvest and year’s end, and the beneficence of Lono, the god of storms, harvest, and fertility. One of the four primal gods of Hawai‘i who had existed before Creation, Lono had a particular history with this island. Long ago Lono had sent two of his brothers down to earth to find him a beautiful woman to marry. They found such a woman, named Kaikilani, and Lono descended to earth on a rainbow and lived with her, making their home at Kealakekua Bay (
ke ala ke kua
, meaning “the Road of the God”) on the western shore. One day Lono overheard a local chief singing a love chant to her: “O Kaikilani, your lover salutes you! Pull his out, stick mine in: you will still be filled.” Outraged at the suggestive lyric, Lono struck Kaikilani down, but before she died she proclaimed her innocence and her love for him. Frantic and remorseful, Lono raced about the island, challenging any to wrestle him—the origin of the seasonal games held in Kaikilani’s honor. Finally in despair Lono sailed away in a magnificent vessel the like of which none had ever seen before, with tall masts that reached into the sky and great square sails of Ni‘ihau matting.

Beginning in October and lasting nearly four months,
makahiki
was a time for games and sports. A
kapu
was laid against work and war, which for the other eight months of the year occupied much of the islanders’ time. A stylized image of the god was processed around the perimeter of the island—clockwise—through each district, as inhabitants brought offerings out to the god’s keepers. The procession always ended at Kealakekua Bay, where Lono had loved and lost. High overlooking the south shore they erected a mighty
heiau
, or temple, called Hikiau (Moving Currents). Throughout the islands, hundreds of
heiau
had been erected over the centuries, of various types. This was a
luakini heiau
, one in which sacrifices were offered to the god to whom it was dedicated. Hikiau
heiau
was a platform of stacked lava rocks, 100 feet wide, 250 feet long, and 16 feet high, surrounded by a walled court and presided over by numerous
ki‘i
, carved wooden images of gods fashioned to be as terrifying as imagination could make them.
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Each year the
makahiki
procession ultimately converged here, and the people built a wicker raft, which was laden with offerings and sent to sea as the people remembered Lono’s promise that he would return one day with gifts and bounty beyond their dreams. Then, toward the end of the festival, the semiannual
kapu
against eating
aku
(a tuna known to the West as bonito, or skipjack) was lifted by the
kahuna
, the priest, who ceremonially ate first the eye of an
aku
and then ate also a human eyeball, gouged from the face of a sacrifice.
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What made this
makahiki
different from all others was that now, as the festival season ended and the people converged on Kealakekua Bay, two ships sailed into it, of a type none of them had ever seen before, but that fit to an unnerving degree the kind of vessel in which Lono was said to have departed: tall wooden masts, taller than any of them had ever imagined, with enormous square sails. The natives greeted the arrival with awe: Could it be that Lono, their god, had returned to them at last?
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1.
The Loneliness of a God

After rounding the southern tip of the island, Cook’s ships headed north up the western side. About thirty miles on, a small bay opened up on their right, about a mile across that bit half a mile into the coast. On the south shore lay a beach;
1
the east side vaulted steeply up to a beetling precipice several hundred feet high that sheltered the bay from the trade winds. Its face was so inaccessible that its caves held the bones of generations of kings, and the natives called it
Pali Kapu o Keoua
, the Sacred Cliff of Keoua, after the dynastic founder. Then it descended on the north shore to a lava shelf just above the water, as low and flat as a wharf.
Resolution
and
Discovery
entered Kealakekua Bay and dropped anchor in seven fathoms of turquoise water.

Within moments a throng of thousands teemed on the shore, and the people raced out in their canoes to discover what manner of gods had come to visit them, and what gifts they had brought. “Cook,” wrote Ledyard, “ordered two officers into each top to number them with as much exactness as they could.”
2
Both counts exceeded three thousand canoes in the water, with as many as six natives in each, with more thousands of people on the shore, rejoicing. Overall, Cook made a rough guess that between 350,000 and 400,000 natives inhabited the entire archipelago—a number that, interestingly, has stood as a sensible midrange figure in a scholarly debate over the size of the precontact population, figures that have ranged from 200,000 to more than 1 million.
3

But of the three thousand canoes knifing toward him, Cook was not alarmed, for he knew the Polynesians to be fulsome, festive people. Women swarmed on board to give themselves to these godlike creatures; they chanted their intentions, reinforced with stunningly suggestive hula, as recorded by twenty-eight-year-old ship’s surgeon David Samwell, of the
Discovery
:

Where, oh where

Is the hollow-stemmed stick, where is it,

To make an arrow for the hawk?

Come and shoot.…

A penis, a penis to be enjoyed:

Don’t stand still, come gently,

That way, all will be well here,

Shoot off your arrow.
4

Leaving behind the mass mating on his ships, Cook was rowed ashore in his pinnace; chiefs who accompanied him motioned the crowding canoes aside with long white poles—necessary because three thousand canoes in less than one-half square mile of water, and then crowding about Cook, created an unmanageable confusion. Ashore, “as they passed through the throng, the chief cried out in their language that the great Orono [Lono] was coming, at which they all bowed and covered their faces with their hands until he was passed [
sic
].”
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To Ledyard’s consternation, Cook made a joke of the natives’ groveling: Having prostrated themselves, they rose once he went by and stared after him; then Cook would spin around and face them again, forcing them to fall to the ground once more. Cook was feted with the best that the islanders had to offer, although as a god, he could not be troubled by having to chew his own food. He was attended by chiefs, who reverently chewed the food for him and placed the masticated wads in Cook’s mouth, which he managed to swallow. Contrary to the Captain Cook cult fostered by his officers, Corporal Ledyard was mortified by what he saw, and in later years American missionaries who heard the story from old natives blamed Cook darkly for his hubris in accepting their homage as a deity, which, they declared, made him responsible for his own looming disaster.

After preliminary contact was made, and with suitable advance preparations, Cook returned the courtesy and welcomed aboard Kalaniopu‘u, the king of Hawai‘i Island, an old man, noticeably not as huge as other chiefs of his class, wizened and palsied from years of consuming
‘awa
, a native hallucinogen.
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Among the king’s gifts to the god was an
‘ahu‘ula
, a feather cloak that featured vivid geometry in red, black, and yellow; such cloaks were the epitome of the islands’ handicrafts. The king removed the cape from his own shoulders and placed it on Cook’s, then removed also his matching feathered helmet, his
mahiole
, and gave it as well; perhaps a half dozen more cloaks were laid at Cook’s feet, gifts of stunning value. The rarest feathers were the yellow; the bird from which they came, the
‘o‘o
, was jet black, with a single yellow feather beneath each wing. Professional birdcatchers harvested the yellow feathers and released the birds to regrow them. It would have been difficult for Cook to realize the wealth that was offered at his feet.

Accompanying Kalaniopu‘u onto the
Resolution
was his son and heir, Kiwala‘o, and a representative sample of the young
ali‘i.
The most striking of them, to British sensibilities, was the king’s nephew. A massive young man, he was variously described as from six feet four inches to seven feet in height. Heavyset and to Western eyes ugly, he was intense, brooding, with the thick, downturning mouth of the Polynesian, a low, prominently ridged brow, and heavy-lidded eyes. He was aloof, observant, his every glance seeming to be an appraisal. His name was Kamehameha, which in its full iteration meant “the Loneliness of a God.”

*   *   *

Because of a variety of factors—his destiny to forge the modern Hawaiian kingdom, the fact that his own early history took place before the advent of written records, and the modern scholarly contest over control of the narrative—Kamehameha’s early years are impossible to piece together with certainty. Sources equally probative differ beyond reconciliation, but within wide latitude general features are known:

King’s nephew he may have been, but it was a miracle that Kamehameha had lived to see this day. He was born on the Kohala Coast at the northern point of the island, and shortly thereafter the
kahunas
laid the noble infant on the Naha Stone, a three-and-a-half-ton block of lava, to divine his royal worth: If he cried, he would be tossed out to the common people to share their miseries; if he was silent, then truly he was an
ali‘i
, born to rule. The baby did not cry, and he was given the name Pai‘ea, meaning “hard-shelled crab”; an important
kahuna
prophesied that he would one day overturn the chiefs of Hawai‘i and rule the entire island. This, the priests saw with consternation, the baby had the lineage to do, and in Hawaiian culture, bloodline was everything. His mother, Kekuiapoiwa II, was an important chiefess of the Kohala district, and he had two fathers—a condition known as
po‘olua
(two heads). In this polyamorous culture, paternity could be shared among a woman’s husband and lovers, and of these two Kahekili was king of Maui, and Keoua (who had placed his ancestors’ bones in the caves above the bay) was the grandson of the last chief to nearly unite the island of Hawai‘i.
7
Kamehameha himself preferred to claim Keoua as his father, and after his rise to power he made it treason—and death—to question it, perhaps reason enough to suspect Kahekili.
8
Keoua’s father and uncle were defeated in battle by an insurgent chief named Alapa‘i, who took the surviving orphans into his own clan. Pai‘ea, therefore, was born into the extended family of the king, but because of his lineage and the dangerous prophecy, Alapa‘i placed the baby under a death sentence.
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