Once There Was Fire: A Novel of Old Hawaii

by Stephen Shender

  “How are they slain?” my father asked.

  “We tie ropes around their necks and drop them from a yardarm.”

  “Hi‘ah‘ama?” My father looked uncomprehendingly at Burney.

  “There,” said Burney, pointing at one of the highest crosspieces on the nearest mast. “That is a yardarm.” My father understood him now.

  “That is a novel way to slay an offender,” Kamehameha said when he heard of this.

  “On your island, Ī‘īklī‘ana, do all the people talk Ī‘īklī?” my father asked Burney.

  “Oh yes,” Burney answered, “for that is the talk we learn as infants.”

  “Then how is it that you can speak our talk?”

  “I learned it from the people of Otahiete,” said Burney, referring to Tahiti. “They look much like you and they speak much the same.”

  “‘Okahiki?’ Where is this Okahiki?” my father asked.

  “It is that way,” Burney said, pointing southwest, where Maui now lay. “Otahiete is on the other side of your island, but it is far, far away. You cannot see it from here.”

  “But that is not our island,” my father exclaimed. He pointed southeast. “Our island is that way,” he said.

  This news greatly excited Burney. “Wait here!” he exclaimed. He hurried to where Cook was conferring with two of his ali‘i sub chiefs. He raised his right hand briskly to his forehead, and then spoke rapidly. Cook turned and regarded the Hawai‘ians, whom he had mostly ignored until now. He spoke to Burney, who hastened back to my father and the others. “Come,” he said, with an enveloping gesture. “Captain Cook wishes to speak with you.”

  “Pu‘unē conducted us to the higher deck, where Kāpena Kuke was standing before a piece of flat wood on two pedestals,” my father told me. “He had spread out a large piece of very thin kapa cloth before him. It was held in place against the wind by several small pieces of ailon‘e. We did not know what to make of it.” The Hawai‘ians had never before seen a map, let alone paper.

  Now it was Cook who asked the questions. Stabbing the paper with one finger and then turning to point at the island behind them, he asked, “What island that? What name that island?”

  “That is Maui,” Kamehameha replied.

  “Mow’ēē,” Cook slowly repeated. Then he asked, “What name your island?”

  “Hawai‘i,” Kameha said.

  “O’why’hee,” Cook said, savoring the syllables. “Where this O’why’hee?”

  Kamehameha pointed in the general direction of the Alenuihāhā Channel. “There is Hawai‘i,” he said.

  Now Cook stabbed at the paper and spoke rapidly in English to his sub chiefs, who immediately scurried away, issuing urgent commands to the great canoe’s commoners. Then Cook turned to Kameha once again. “Good,” he said. “We go this O’why’hee.”

  The winds abated with the setting sun, so it was not until morning that the Big Island came into view. The Hawai‘ians had passed a pleasant night. Kamehameha, Kekūhaupi‘o, and my father spent the evening on the vessel’s elevated rear deck with Burney, while the canoe paddlers gathered with the great canoe’s commoners on the main deck.

  Cook’s people offered to share their evening meal with their guests. Earlier in the day, the great canoe’s deck had reverberated with terrified squeals as the pigs brought aboard by the Hawai‘ians were slaughtered. Now the vessel’s cook served up a watery stew of pork and local yams. This meal was apportioned amongst the crew in large wooden vessels of a sort that the Hawai‘ians had never seen before. One such vessel was set before Kamehameha, Kekūhaupi‘o, and my father. “We call them ‘meal buckets,’” explained Burney.

  “Me‘ele pu‘uke?” my father hazarded.

  “Close enough,” Burney said, laughing.

  Distributed with the meal buckets were smaller vessels shaped like our people’s eating and drinking gourds, but also fashioned of wood—as well as pewter ladles and spoons, implements new to the Hawai‘ians.

  “Lāke‘el‘e; po‘ole; pū‘ūn‘e,” my father repeated, twisting his tongue around the unfamiliar sounds of this new language. “What kind of ailon‘e is that?” he asked, pointing at the implements.

  “It is called pewter,” Burney replied.

  “P‘uke?” my father tried.

  “Close enough,” said Burney, laughing again.

  Now Burney commenced to demonstrate the purpose of the ladle and spoons. The Hawai‘ians watched in rapt attention as he plunged the ladle into the bucket, filled it with stew, and poured the stew into the bowl, whereupon he dipped the spoon into this same bowl and raised it to his own mouth. Then, with much show, Burney sucked the food from the spoon and chewed vigorously on a bit of pork while some of the juice dribbled down his chin. Wiping his chin clean with the back of his hand, Burney dipped the ladle into the meal bucket, filled three more bowls, and set them, with spoons, before my father, Kameha, and his kahu. “Now you try,” he said.

  Accustomed to dining on savory meat and vegetables wrapped in ti leaves and baked in their imus, the Hawai‘ians were repulsed by this fare. “We beheld these bits of pig meat and shreds of yam floating in a malodorous, oily broth,” my father told me, “and it turned our stomachs.” But out of politeness, they tried it anyway. Then, with murmurs of “Mahalo, mahalo,” they begged off eating any more of this concoction and commenced instead to dine on the provisions they had brought on board—bananas, baked yams, and dried fish.

  “Our food is not to your liking?” Burney asked.

  In answer, Kekūhaupi‘o screwed up his face and grunted. Kamehameha looked embarrassed.

  “It is too new to us,” my father replied diplomatically. “Perhaps we will come to like it in time.”

  “Tell us about this Okahiki and its people,” Kamehameha said, changing the subject. My father had told him of Burney’s revelation concerning this faraway land.

  Burney went on to describe the far-off archipelago, its people and language, and some of the crew’s experiences there. Then he began to tell a story of how Cook had been forced to retaliate against the people of one of these islands, “Eimeo,” when they stole some goats, but Kamehameha interrupted him almost at once.

  “What is a kō‘oko?” he asked.

  “A goat is a four-footed animal with horns.”

  The Hawai‘ians stared at Burney without comprehension. “We have them on board. I will show you later,” he said. Then he recommenced his tale.

  These people of Eimeo, he said, had taken two of several goats that Cook had temporarily put ashore to feed. The previous day, Cook had refused a request by the island’s chief to give these animals to him. “They already had two goats,” Burney explained. “Captain Cook could not obtain any more such animals and he was husbanding the rest for settlement on other islands. So he was determined to recover these thieved creatures.”

  Cook succeeded in persuading the Eimeo people to return one of the goats, Burney continued, but the other they still withheld. “It was a female goat, heavy with a baby, and Captain Cook would not put to sea without it.”

  The next day, Cook led a shore party on a fatiguing and ultimately fruitless overland march to find and recover the goat. Not finding the animal in any of the villages along the way, Cook became angry and ordered his men to burn the houses and canoes at the last village they visited. On his orders, his shore party burned more canoes on their march back to their own boats.

  The following morning, Burney said, “Captain Cook sent a message to the chief of Eimeo with a warning that he would destroy every canoe on the island if the goat was not returned to him.” He first demonstrated his resolve by destroying every canoe in the bay where his own ship was anchored and moving on to a neighboring bay where his people destroyed more canoes. “By the time he regained the ship,” Burney concluded with a smile, “the goat had been returned—from one of the villages the captain had visited the previous day. Captain Cook was much irritated by the inconvenience this incident had caused, for he had meant
to put to sea again much sooner, but he was well satisfied that he had taught these people a lesson they would not soon forget.”

  Thinking of Kalani’ōpu‘u‘s recent depredations on Maui, Kamehameha said to my father, “This Kāpena Kuke is not so different from our own uncle.” Then he turned to Burney and said, “I would like to see these kō‘oko now.”

  B urney conducted Kamehameha, Kekūhaupi‘o, and my father to the ship’s lower deck, where they had earlier seen the cannons, galley, ship’s stores, and the crew’s quarters. But now he led them to a different compartment—illuminated by a single oil lantern hanging from a beam—where the livestock was kept. The goats, tethered with ropes, were lying amid dried grass that had been laid upon the deck. The air was close and reeked of the sickly sweet smell of dried excrement. Wrinkling their noses, the Hawai‘ians inspected these goats and their formidable horns with great interest, but did not touch them.

  “They are good to eat?” Kamehameha asked.

  “Yes,” replied Burney, “especially when we can cook them over an open fire, instead of boiling their meat, as we must do on board the ship. They also give milk, which we can drink.”

  “Milk such as that from the breast of a wahine? You drink it?” Kameha queried. This was new, the thought of people other than infants drinking milk—and animals’ milk at that. Infants and little children suckled, but only at their mothers’ or some other wahine’s breasts. The Hawai‘ians had never heard of people, adult or otherwise, consuming animals’ milk—and certainly not that of dogs or pigs, which were the only domesticated animals they knew.

  Kamehameha screwed up his face in disgust. “What kind of lamp is that?” he said now, pointing at the compartment’s sole source of light. Like many of the articles on the ship, it was fashioned of some sort of iron. Its essential workings were familiar to the Hawai‘ians, but they had never seen glass before.

  “It is a lantern,” said Burney. “It is enclosed in glass to prevent the flame from escaping and starting a fire.”

  “La‘an‘ak‘en‘e, ka‘ala,” my father tried to repeat the strange new words.

  While this conversation continued, Kekūhaupi‘o noticed a doorway leading to another compartment near the front of the ship. It was darker than the first, for its only light came from the adjacent compartment where the animals were kept. Peering in, he could make out the shadowy forms of two men reclining against the compartment’s sloping wall. They were shackled at their ankles by thick bracelets of iron which were in turn affixed to heavy chains which were themselves firmly connected to the compartment wall.

  “Pu‘unē, why are these two confined here?” he asked.

  “Ah, those men,” Burney said. “They are down here by the will of Captain Cook. He ordered them bound in irons after they deserted from our ships at Ulietea and were caught. They did not want to return to England with us. Now they will—poor wretches.”

  “What will happen to them in Ī‘īklī‘ana?” my father asked.

  “They will both hang by their necks from a yardarm, no doubt.”

  “For violating the kapu of your chief, Kāpena Kuke?” Kamehameha asked.

  “Yes,” answered Burney.

  “It is only fitting,” said Kameha.

  When Burney, Kamehameha, and his companions regained the great canoe’s main deck at last, they encountered a scene of rollicking merriment among the ship’s commoners and their own canoe paddlers, who were in the midst of demonstrating their peoples’ dance customs to one another. They had gathered near a mast, to which several oil lamps had been hung to afford them some light.

  “First, some of the Ī‘īklī people would jump up and down upon the deck on their toes, twirling around with their hands in the air while one of their number played a strange wooden instrument that made whining sounds when he pulled a stick across some thin ropes pulled tight upon it,” my father told me. Then, he said, the Hawai‘ians, six in number, would commence to dance. “They danced like the true men they were,” my father said. “They thumped the deck with their feet and moved in unison while one of them drummed on the bottom of one of the Ī‘īklī people’s empty me‘ele pu‘uke.” Throughout, my father said, the Hawai‘ians would shout their fearsome war chants, much to the amusement of the Englishmen, who would roar with laughter. Then it was the Englishmen’s turn to resume their dance, to their guests’ equal amusement.

  Finally, they turned to mimicking each other. The Englishman with the strange rope-strung instrument and stick gestured to his Hawai‘ian counterpart that he wished to exchange his own instrument for the meal bucket. The trade was accomplished and a scene of even greater hilarity ensued.

  “Now the Ī‘īklī man began to beat on the me‘ele pu‘uke while his fellows jumped here and there loudly chanting nonsense,” my father said. “Then the Hawai‘ian with the Ī‘īklī instrument commenced drawing the stick across it, eliciting from it horrible sounds while all the while his comrades spun around feverishly. Soon both sides began dancing in mockery of each other all at once, mixing in together amid great laughter.”

  But the laughter came to an abrupt end with the arrival of short, stout haole who kicked the meal bucket away from his own man and began shouting at his people. They dispersed at once. Next he sought to recover the crewman’s instrument from the Hawai‘ian, who would not release it. The Hawai‘ian was taller than the haole, strong and wiry in build, but not nearly as heavy. The two men struggled mightily for the instrument, the haole leveraging his superior bulk against the Hawai‘ian’s longer reach and greater agility.

  “They might have come to blows,” my father said, “had not Pu‘unē and Kamehameha intervened.” These two stepped forward simultaneously. At a word from Burney, the stout haole let go of the instrument and stepped away. Meanwhile, Kameha spoke sharply to his own man who immediately dropped to knees before his ali‘i lord, still holding the foreign instrument in his now-shaking hands. Kamehameha said nothing, but merely gestured at the Hawai‘ian, who handed him the instrument while keeping his head down and his eyes on the ship’s deck. Ignoring the stout haole, Kamehameha returned the instrument to Burney. Burney spoke softly in his twittering tongue to the stout haole, who shot Kameha a withering look and stalked away.

  Kamehameha asked, “Is that man one of your lesser chiefs—a lesser chief than you?”

  “Yes,” Burney replied. “He is the ship’s master. He helps us find our way on the seas. His name is Bligh…William Bligh.”

  “This Ūli‘iama P‘ulī, why did he order those people away? Were they violating a kapu?”

  “Yes,” said Burney, an unmistakable note of disapproval in his voice. “They were violating his kapu.”

  Bligh stood at the deck railing, glowering down at the Hawai‘ians as they departed in their canoe the next morning. Burney, standing nearby, waved to them. Several of the canoe paddlers waved back. The morning sunlight reflected dully off the pewter spoons in their hands.

  “Uncle, this ‘Lono’ and his people are not gods,” Kamehameha declared to Kalani‘ōpu‘u upon returning to Maui. “They are only men.”

  Kalani‘ōpu‘u, reclining on a sedge mat in the hale he had appropriated at Wailua, regarded his nephew quizzically and said nothing.

  “I have observed them closely,” Kameha continued. “They eat and drink like men; they urinate and defecate like men—and they smell bad, like men who have not bathed for a long time. They are not divine.”

  “Nephew, do they bleed like men?” Kalani‘ōpu‘u asked at last.

  “This I do not yet know, Uncle,” Kamehameha said.

  “Perhaps you are right, Kameha,” said Kalani‘ōpu‘u. “But until we know the answer to that question, we must reserve judgment.”

  Kealakekua Bay, January, 1779

  While Kalani‘ōpu‘u withheld judgment at Maui, Cook unwittingly assumed the mantle of a god upon reaching the Big Island. Coincidence combined with the Hawai‘ians’ own legends to confer divinity upon him.

  A
s he had at Kaua‘i, Cook arrived in the middle of the Makahiki season—Lono’s time. Upon his first close approach to the coast at Kukuipahu in Northern Kohala, Cook was greeted by the villagers there, much as the people of Waimea had greeted him at Kaua‘i. “When the Kohala people saw Kuke’s ship with its great square sails, they likened it to a floating island with its own clouds—Lono’s clouds, just as the Kaua‘i people had,” my father told me. “And they said to each other, ‘Surely, this is Lono returned to us from Kahiki, as the prophecy foretold that he would in the Makahiki time.’”

  The Hawai‘ians gathered along the Kohala cliffs and waved white kapa cloth banners at “Lono’s” vessel. Others ran to their canoes and raced out to the ship, flying similar ensigns. In answer, Cook ordered his people to break out his red flag, with its red, white, and blue cross. The Hawai‘ians took this as a sign of Cook’s godhead, too, for the prophecy also foretold that “Lono” would respond by displaying a banner of his own. “When the people in the canoes drew closer to Kuke’s ship,” my father recounted, “they saw that some of the men watching them from the deck railings were blowing smoke from their mouths and they said, ‘Surely there is no question that these people who breathe fire are gods.’”

  Gods or no, the people of Kohala struck up a brisk commerce with these strangers, trading pigs, fruit, roots, and sugar cane for pieces of iron that they transformed into weapons and fishhooks. “Even some haole axes changed hands,” my father told me.

  Intent on charting the Big Island and defining the extent of his latest “discovery,” and in search of a safe harbor for his ships, which were in need of repairs, Cook sailed on: down the Hāmākua Coast; past Hilo; around Cape Kumukahi, the island’s easternmost point; past the forbidding lava desert of the Ka‘ū district where gouts of fiery lava flowing down from Kilauea met the cold sea, sending up white clouds of steam; and around the island’s southernmost extent at Ka Lae and up the Kona Coast. Although he found no welcoming anchorages for much of the way, he repeatedly closed with the shore—“stood in”—for trade. Everywhere Cook’s ship appeared, events unfolded much as they had at Kohala. The Hawai‘ians waved their white banners; Cook in turn broke out his colorful ensign. The people of the coastal villages paddled out to his ship in their canoes and clambered aboard to exchange hogs, vegetables, and fruit for iron.