The services of the courageous alone were accepted by Kaupeepee, and it was a wild and daring warfare that the little band waged for years against the alien chiefs and their subjects. They could put afloat a hundred war-canoes, and their operations, although usually confined to Oahu, Maui, and Hawaii, sometimes in a spirit of bravado extended to Kauai. Leaving their retreat, they hovered near the coast selected for pillage until after dark, and then landed and mercilessly used the torch and spear. This part of their work was quickly done, when they filled their canoes with the choicest plunder they could find or of which they were most in need, and before daylight made sail for Haupu. Women were sometimes the booty coveted by the buccaneers, and during their raids many a screaming beauty was seized and borne to their stronghold on Molokai, where in most instances she was so kindly treated that she soon lost all desire to be liberated. Occasionally they were followed, if the winds were unfavorable to their retreat, by hastily-equipped fleets of canoes. If they allowed themselves to be overtaken it was for the amusement of driving back their pursuers; but as a rule they escaped without pursuit or punishment, leaving their victims in ignorance alike of the source and motive of the assault.
A prominent chief of Oahu, whose territory had been ravaged by Kaupeepee, traced the retiring fleet of the plunderers to the coast of Molokai, when it suddenly disappeared. He landed and paid his respects to the venerable Kamauaua, then at Kalaupapa, and craved his assistance in discovering and punishing the spoilers, who must have found shelter somewhere on the island. The old chief smiled grimly as he replied: “It is not necessary to search for your enemies. You will find them at Haupu, near the ocean. They are probably waiting for you. They do not disturb me or my people. If they have wronged you, land and punish them. You have my permission.”
The Oahu chief offered his thanks and departed. He made a partial reconnoissance of Haupu, ascertained that it was defended by but a few hundred warriors, and shortly after returned with a large fleet of canoes to capture and retain possession of the place. Arriving off the entrance to the gulches, and discovering a number of war-canoes drawn up on their steep banks, he opened the campaign by ordering their seizure. Sixty canoes filled with warriors rode the surf into the gulches, where they were met by avalanches of rocks from the walls of the fortress, which dashed the most of them in pieces. The chief was startled and horrified, and, believing the gods were raining rocks down upon his fleet, he rescued such of his warriors as were able to reach him from the wrecked canoes, and hastily departed for Oahu, not again to return.
It is said that Kamauaua watched this assault upon Haupu from the hills back of the fortress, and, in token of his pleasure at the result, sent to Kaupeepee a feather cloak, and gave him the privilege of taking fish for his warriors from one of the largest of the royal ponds on the island. He also quietly presented him with a barge, than which there were few larger in the group. It would accommodate more than a hundred warriors and their equipments, and was intended for long and rough voyages.
These barges were constructed of planks strongly corded together over a frame, and calked and pitched. They were sometimes ten or more feet in width, and were partially or wholly decked over, with a depth of hold of six or eight feet. It was in vessels of this class, and in large double canoes of equal or greater burden, that distant voyages were made to and from the Hawaiian Islands during the migratory periods of the past, while the single and double canoes of smaller dimensions, hollowed from the trunks of single trees, were used in warfare, fishing, and in general inter-island communication. After the final suspension of intercourse, in the twelfth century, between the Hawaiian and Society Islands—the possible result of the disappearance of a guiding line of small islands and atolls dotting the ocean at intervals between the two groups—the barges referred to gradually went out of use with the abandonment of voyages to distant lands, and were almost unknown to the Hawaiians as early as one or two centuries ago. Their spread of sail was very considerable, but oars were also used, and the mariner shaped his course by the sun and stars, and was guided to land by the flights of birds, drifting wood, and currents of which he knew the direction.
Some of the double canoes with which the barges were supplanted were scarcely less capacious and seaworthy than the barges themselves. They were hollowed from the trunks of gigantic pines that had drifted to the islands from the northern coast of America, and when one was found years sometimes elapsed before wind and current provided a proper mate. One of the single-trunk double canoes of Kamehameha I. was one hundred and eight feet in length, and both single and double canoes of from fifty to eighty feet in length were quite common during his reign, when the native forests abounded in growths much larger than can now be found. But the native trees never furnished bodies for the larger sizes of canoes. They were the gifts of the waves, and were not unfrequently credited to the favor of the gods.
Kaupeepee was delighted with the present of the barge. It gave him one of the largest vessels in all the eight Hawaiian seas, and rendered him especially formidable in sea-encounters. He painted the sails red and the hull to the water-line, and from the masthead flung a saucy pennon to the breeze, surmounted by a kahili, which might have been mistaken for Von Tromp’s broom had it been seen a few centuries later in northern seas. He provided a large crew of oarsmen, and made a more secure landing for it in one of the openings near the fortress.
With this substantial addition to his fleet Kaupeepee enlarged the scope of his depredations, and his red sails were known and feared on the neighboring coasts of Oahu and Maui. Haupu was filled with the spoil of his expeditions, and the return of a successful raiding party was usually celebrated with a season of feasting, singing, dancing, and other boisterous merriment. Nor were the gods forgotten. Frequent festivals were given to Kane, Ku, and Lono; and Moaalii, the shark-god of Molokai—the god of the fisherman and mariner—was always the earliest to be remembered. A huge image of this deity overlooked the ocean from the north wall of the heiau of Haupu, and leis of fresh flowers adorned its shoulders whenever a dangerous expedition departed or returned. On one occasion this god had guided Kaupeepee to Haupu during a dark and rainy night, and on another had capsized a number of Oahuan war-canoes that had adroitly separated him from his fleet in Pailolo channel.
At that period the islands were generally ruled by virtually independent district chiefs. They recognized a supreme head, or alii-nui, but were absolute lords of their several territories, and wars between them were frequent; but they were wars of plunder rather than of conquest, and sometimes continued in a desultory way until both parties were impoverished, when their chiefs and priests met and arranged terms of peace. But Kaupeepee was inspired by a motive higher than that of mere plunder. He hated the southern chiefs and their successors, and his assaults were confined exclusively to the territories over which they ruled. His sole aim was to inflict injury upon them, and the spoils of his expeditions were distributed among his followers. Brave, generous and sagacious, he was almost worshipped by his people, and treason, with them, was a thing unthought of.
It was indeed a wild and reckless life that Kaupeepee and his daring associates led; but it lacked neither excitement abroad nor amusement at home. On the upper terrace a kahua channel had been cut, along which they rolled the maika and threw the blunted dart. They played konane, puhenehene, and punipeki, and at surf-riding possessed experts of both sexes who might have travelled far without finding their equals. The people of the island were friendly with the dashing buccaneers, and the fairest damsels became their wives, some of them living with their husbands at Haupu, and others with their relatives in the valleys.
II.
We will now return to Hina—or Hooho, as she was sometimes called—the beautiful wife of Hakalanileo, nephew of Paumakua, of Hawaii. Hakalanileo had acquired his possessions in Hilo partly through