The Hawaiians profoundly altered the environment of the islands. They had brought with them the plants they had found most useful in the Marquesas Islands: taro, ti, the trees from which they made a bark cloth (kapa), sugarcane, ginger, gourd plants, yams, bamboo, turmeric, arrowroot, and the breadfruit tree. They also brought the small pigs of Polynesia, dogs, jungle fowl, and, probably as stowaways, rats. They used slash-and-burn technology to clear the native lowland forests for the crops they brought. Habitat loss together with competition for food with and predation by the newly introduced animals wrought havoc with the native animals, particularly birds. Many species of birds had already become extinct long before Europeans arrived.
On the eve of the Europeans’ accidentally stumbling across Hawaii, the major Hawaiian islands held substantial numbers of people of Polynesian descent. They had no written language, but their oral and musical traditions were ancient and rich.
Their technology apparently remained as static as their rigid social system. Commoners, or makaainana, lived in self-sufficient family groups and villages, farming and fishing for most necessities and trading for necessities they could not otherwise obtain. The land was divided among hereditary chiefs of the noble class (alii). Commoners paid part of their crops or catches as taxes to the chief who ruled the land-division they lived on; commoners served their chief as soldiers. Higher chiefs ruled over lower chiefs; the higher chiefs received taxes and commoners to serve as soldiers from the lower chiefs in turn. People especially gifted in healing, divination, or important crafts served the populace in those capacities (for example, as priests). There was also a class of untouchables, the kauwa. Most people were at death what they were at birth.
Strict laws defined what was forbidden, or kapu, and governed the conduct of kauwa toward everyone else, of commoners toward alii, of alii of a lower rank to alii of higher rank, and of men and women toward each other. Some of the laws seem irrationally harsh. For example, a commoner could be put to death if his shadow fell on an alii.
Chiefs frequently made war on each other. If the chiefs of one island were united under a high chief or a king, often that island would make war on the other islands.
The people of Kauai, like other Hawaiians, worshipped many gods and goddesses. The principal ones were Ku, Kane, Kanaloa, and Lono. Ku represented the male aspect of the natural world. Ku was also the god of war and demanded human sacrifice. Kane was the god of life, a benevolent god who was regarded as the Creator and the ancestor of all Hawaiians. The Kauaians worshipped Kane at many places. The high alii of Kauai, both men and women, made a difficult annual pilgrimage from Wailua to worship at Kane’s altar on the forbidding, stormy summit plateau of Kauai’s sacred mountain, Waialeale. Kanaloa ruled the dead and the dark aspects of life, and he was often linked with Kane in worship.
Lono was another benevolent god; he ruled clouds, rain, and harvests. The annual winter festival in Lono’s honor, Makahiki, ran from October to February. Makahiki was a time of harvest, celebration, fewer kapu, and sporting events. Images of Lono were carried around each island atop tall poles with crosspieces from which banners of white kapa flew. (Legend said Lono had sailed away from Hawaii long ago and would return in a floating heiau (temple) decked with poles flying long white banners from their crosspieces.) Chiefs and chiefesses met the image of Lono with ceremonies and gifts, and commoners came forward to pay their taxes.
Systems like that can last for hundreds and even thousands of years in the absence of compelling internal problems or changes and of external forces, as the Hawaiian system did. But change eventually comes.
The Europeans arrive by accident
Christopher Columbus had sailed from Spain to what he thought was the Orient, hoping to find a sea route to replace the long, hazardous land route. But in fact he discovered an obstacle called North America. With a direct sea route between Europe and the Orient blocked, people sought other sea routes. The southern routes around the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa and Cape Horn at the tip of South America proved to be very long and very treacherous. Still, the trade was lucrative. The European demand for Oriental goods such as spices, Chinese porcelain, and silk was insatiable. By trading their way around the world, a captain, his crew, and the government or the tradesmen that financed them might become very wealthy in just one voyage.
All over Europe, people came to believe that a good, navigable route must exist in northern waters that would allow them to sail west from Europe around the northern end of North America to the Orient. (It doesn’t exist.) Captain James Cook sailed from England on July 12, 1776, to try to find the Northwest Passage from the Pacific side.
In December of 1777, Cook left Tahiti sailing northeast, not expecting to see land again until he reached North America. Instead, he sighted land on January 18, 1778, and reached the southeast shore of Kauai on January 19th. In Hawaii, it was the time of Makahiki, the festival honoring the god Lono. The Hawaiians mistook the masts and sails of Cook’s ships for the poles and kapa banners of the floating heiau on which Lono was to return. They received Cook as if he were Lono.
Cook was an intelligent and compassionate man who respected the native societies he found and who tried to deal with their people fairly and decently. He tried to keep crewmen who he knew had venereal diseases from infecting the natives, but he failed. Cook did not stay long in Hawaii. He spent most of 1778 searching for the Northwest Passage; unsuccessful, he returned to Hawaii in early 1779 to make repairs and resupply. It was Makahiki again. All went well at first, but the Hawaiians stole an auxiliary boat from one of his ships. When he tried to retrieve it, there was a brief skirmish, in which Cook and four of his crew were killed.
Cook’s ships survived a second futile search for the Northwest Passage, after which the crew sailed westward for England, stopping in China. There the crew learned the astonishing value of another of the expedition’s great discoveries: the furs of the sea otters and seals of the Pacific Northwest. Trade with the Orient suddenly became even more profitable, and Hawaii was to become not an isolated curiosity but an important point on a major world trade route.
In Hawaii, the young chief Kamehameha began his conquest of the islands in 1790. Kamehameha actively sought Western allies, weapons, and advice. He conquered all the islands but Kauai and Niihau; his two attempts to invade Kauai failed.
Kamehameha’s wars, Western diseases, and the sandalwood trade decimated the native Hawaiians. Chiefs indebted themselves to foreign merchants for weapons and other goods. New England merchants discovered that Hawaii had abundant sandalwood for which the Chinese would pay huge prices. Merchants demanded payment in sandalwood. The heartwood nearest the roots was the best part; the whole tree had to be destroyed to get it. The mountains were stripped of their sandalwood trees. Those ordered into the mountains often died of exposure and starvation. Communities that had depended on their labor for food also starved.
Kamehameha I died in 1819, leaving the monarchy to his son Liholiho and a regency in Liholiho’s behalf to his favorite wife, Kaahumanu. Liholiho was an amiable, weak-willed alcoholic. Kaahumanu was strong-willed, intelligent, capable, and ambitious. She believed that the old Hawaiian kapu system was obsolete: no gods struck down the Westerners, who daily did things that were kapu for Hawaiians. Six months after Kamehameha I’s death, she persuaded Liholiho to join her in breaking several ancient kapu. The kapu system, discredited, crumbled; the old order was dead.
The missionaries arrive
Congregationalist missionaries from New England reached Hawaii in 1820, Kauai in 1821. Liholiho grudgingly gave them a year’s trial, but the king of Kauai welcomed them: one of his sons had been traveling abroad and had returned with the missionaries. The end of the kapu system had left a religious vacuum into which the missionaries moved remarkably easily. To their credit, they came with a sincere desire to commit their lives to bettering those of the people of Hawaii. Liholiho’s mother converted