Once There Was Fire: A Novel of Old Hawaii

by Stephen Shender

  As the ship works its way down the island chain from Honolulu, I use the occasions of each port visit to tell my stories about personages and events of days long past. It is mainly for Kalākaua’s and Lili’s benefit. Esther, of course, has heard all my stories by now. Yet she listens as if she’s hearing them for the first time.

  The first day’s sail brings us by late afternoon to the small village of Kaunakakai on Moloka‘i. Here, I tell them how Kamehameha came to Moloka‘i to see Kalola, collect his half-sister and niece, and take them back to Hawai‘i with him, and how my uncle knocked out one of his own teeth in grief over Kalola’s death. Kalākaua shakes his head in disbelief as he reflexively raises one hand to his lips. I had not heard of this before, he says.

  We remain in the small harbor at Kaunakakai overnight, the captain preferring to sail among the islands in the daytime. At dinner, I take the opportunity to speak to Beckwith about Ezra. He is noncommittal. Nevertheless says Beckwith, Send the young man to me. Perhaps there will be more to my legacy than a memoir.

  In the morning after breakfast, the first mate barks his orders, crewmen haul up the anchor and scramble into the rigging to unfurl the ship’s sails, and the Frances Palmer is all at once under way for Kahului. It is mid-afternoon when we reach Kahului, where our ship is to remain until the next morning. After bidding farewell to Beckwith, I see a young man at the dock, a Hawaiian with a horse and cart, and ask him if he can take us the few miles mauka to the ‘Īao Valley. Why would you want to go up there, old man? he asks.

  I am Nāmākeha‘okalani, I say. My father was Keli‘imaika‘i, and the Conqueror was my own uncle.

  The young man’s eyes widen. He understands and requires no further explanation.

  About twenty minutes later we are standing at the mouth of the ‘Īao Valley. I recount the story of that horrible battle, of how bodies of the fallen choked the stream and the water ran red with their blood. Lili cringes to hear about it; Esther bites her lip and shakes her head, truly seeing the battle for the first time. Kalākaua is fascinated, eagerly asking many questions about tactics and weapons, which I try to answer as best I can.

  Esther has told me about your memoir, sir, Kalākaua says. I would like to read it, and help you publish it if you wish.

  The next evening finds us at anchor in the bay at Hana. From the ship’s deck, I point out Kauwiki Hill, where the old fort stood and where Ka‘ahumanu was born. To the women’s further dismay and Kalākaua’s unflagging interest, I speak of yet more battles and suffering. I am compelled, for everywhere we touch land, I see soil soaked in blood.

  D eparting Hana the next morning, we are graced by a strong following wind. The Frances Palmer is under full sail and positively surfing the swells, which are rolling in the same direction. Dolphins leap in and out of the foam that boils around the ship’s rising and falling bow. The air is full of salt spray. We are exhilarated and laughing now, all the sad thoughts of the previous day expunged. We cross the forty miles of the ‘Alenuihāhā Channel to ‘Upolu Point in northern Kohala in less than three-and-a-half hours.

  As the Frances Palmer stands in to land and sails southward, I point out Kokoiki, Kamehameha’s birthplace, which I can make out through the early-afternoon haze. Perhaps an hour and a half later, we come abreast of Kawaihae and I call out in excitement, Look up there on that long hill, do you see the old temple? The Pu‘ukoholā heiau’s lava-stone walls still proudly grace the Hill of the Whale. Beyond it we can see ‘Olohana’s old compound. And look above the temple, I cry. That is where my old friend John Young once lived.

  Queen Emma’s grandfather! Lili exclaims.

  Yes, I say. Now I am subdued, seeing my younger self on that hillside, watching the sun set over the bay. Can it really have been so long ago?

  Esther notices. What is it, my love? she asks, taking my arm gently in hers.

  Oh, it is nothing important, I say. I am thinking of ‘Olohana’s daughter, my niece Fanny, who is Queen Emma’s mother. At fifty-three, fifteen years my junior, Fanny is in ill health. I may well outlive her. Already, I have unaccountably outlived so many of my contemporaries: Liholiho and his wife Kamehamalu, who traveled to London in 1824 to call upon King George, only to succumb to measles there; his younger brother, Kauikeaouli, who reigned as Kamehameha III until his own death five years ago; and Ka‘ahumanu, Keopuolani, Kalanimoku, Kahekili Ke‘eaumoku, and the rest. The future calls to Esther and her friends, but it is the past that beckons me now. I keep these thoughts to myself as the Frances Palmer continues down the Kohala Coast toward Kailua.

  W e reach Kailua at sunset. The Frances Palmer drops anchor in the bay, and one of the crew rows us ashore in the ship’s dinghy. The small craft rides low in the water, burdened as it is with our assorted valises and travel chests as well as us. Fortunately, the bay is calm at this hour.

  At Kailua, we have been invited to stay at the Hulihe‘e Palace by its young master, John Pitt Kīna‘u, who greets us effusively. Welcome! Welcome! Come in at once, he exclaims, as we stand at the threshold, shaking the sand from our boots.

  Kīna‘u is my uncle Kamehameha’s great-great grandson. Now in his seventeenth year, he was only five when he inherited the palace from his father, who died in the measles epidemic of 1848. He is an engaging young man—outgoing, friendly, and immediately likeable. Alexander Liholiho—Kamehameha IV—is not well, and has already named his brother, Lot Kapuāiwa, as his heir. As a lineal descendant of Kamehameha I, young Kīna‘u is eligible to succeed Lot on the throne. Kīna‘u bustles cheerfully here and there, directing household servants to see us and our luggage to our rooms, while others go about preparing a simple meal for us. I am very tired after our daylong sail, and excusing myself, I retire soon after dinner. Hours later, I awake briefly as Esther slips into bed beside me.

  Mother has agreed to join us for dinner! Kīna‘u exclaims.

  We have just returned to the Hulihe‘e Palace after a pleasant morning walking about Kailua village. I have taken Esther, Lili, Kalākaua, and Kīna‘u to see the nearby site of the long-since vanished Ahu‘ena Heiau. This place, I explained to them, is where Kamehameha honored Ka‘ahumanu as his most important partner, and where, years later, Ka‘ahumanu invested Liholiho, better known these days Kamehameha II, as king, and proclaimed herself as his co-regent. Now, with the day growing sultry, we have returned to the palace to rest and to take advantage of the cooling breezes off the bay.

  When he is not attending school in Honolulu, Kīna‘u lives at the palace with the Big Island’s governor, his mother, Ruth Ke‘elikōlani. She is Kamehameha’s great-granddaughter—her grandfather was Pauli Ka‘ōleiokū, Kamehameha’s son by Kaneikapolei, so she and I are distant cousins. Ruth is a tall woman of thirty-three, who in the way of many ali‘i women, already weighs several hundred pounds or more. Her broad, mostly dour countenance is only occasionally relieved by a smile.

  Ruth is a traditionalist. She refuses to reside in the palace, preferring to live in a large, stone-floor, thatched-roof, pili-grass hale on the spacious grounds. Ruth patronizes dancers of the hula and singers of the old meles and will not attend worship services at the Congregationalist church directly across the road. I believe the structure itself offends her because it is built in part with stones taken from the Ahu‘ena Heiau’s lava-rock foundation. Villagers say that in the privacy of her hale, Ruth Ke‘elikōlani worships the old gods.

  Much like the Hale Ali‘i in Honolulu, the palace that Ruth abjures is a pleasant, unpretentious structure with large, comfortable rooms. It boasts two floors, with rooms for entertaining on the first floor and private rooms for its occupants on the second. The Hulihe‘e Palace presents an unadorned façade to the road just mauka. But makai it is graced by a lanai that runs the length of the building’s second story and affords a view of the bay.

  Kīna‘u tells me that it is most unusual for Ruth to dine at the palace. Mother prefers to eat at her hale, he says. She will not come to the house to eat with me; I must always go to h
er. I think she has made an exception in this instance for you, sir.

  Later, Ruth takes her seat at the head of the long koa-wood table in the palace’s dining room. As the five of us join her, Ruth insists that I sit next to her. I want to hear about the old days from one who was there, she explains. Ruth withholds her questions, however, until we have finished dinner, a splendid meal of Hawaiian fare: succulent kalua pork baked all day in an imu; yam, roasted bananas, and coconut; and, of course, poi—plenty of poi. For all her insistence on observing the old traditions, Ruth thinks nothing of men and women eating together, or of women eating food once kapu to them. In this respect she is a thoroughly modern wahine.

  After dinner, Kīna‘u begins to interrogate me about Kamehameha’s old battles, but Ruth silences him with a wave of her hand. You were there the night Ka‘ahumanu and Keopuolani ended the kapu eating, were you not? she asks me. You saw the burning of the heiau?

  Yes, I respond.

  Tell us about that, Ruth says. Tell us about Kuamo‘o.

  Much later, Ruth thanks me, bids us good evening, and returns to her grass house. We all go upstairs to sit on the lanai. The unclouded, moonless sky is alive with the light of untold thousands of dancing stars. Looking up in this moment, I imagine our ancestors gazing heavenward in awe of the gods who set them there. For some time we sit in companionable silence, listening to the sound of the waves striking the lava shelf that lies between the house’s lawn and the bay.

  At last, Lili asks me, Benjamin, what was the purpose of all the fighting? What was gained?

  I take some time to respond. Then I say, Alapa‘i, Kalani‘ōpu‘u, Kahekili, and those other old chiefs gained nothing enduring, but my uncle, Kamehameha, gained a nation.

  Later in our room, I am about to join Esther in our elegant, four-poster haole bed when I glance out our window toward Ruth’s grass house, enveloped in the shadows between the palace and the road. I see a pale light through Ruth’s window. Kīna‘u has told me that his mother refuses to use whale-oil lamps and persists in lighting her hale with kukui-oil lamps. As I watch, Ruth’s light flutters and winks out.

  In the morning, we go by carriage to Keauhou and then to Kuamo‘o, where my brother Kekuaokalani fought his only battle. The five of us—young Kīna‘u has come, too—stand at the edge of the barren, rocky field, near the place where Hoapili and his men waited with their muskets for my brother and Manono forty years ago.

  Kalākaua surveys the field and says, There is nothing to mark this place. It is all a confusion of rocks. Who would know that an important battle was waged here?

  Keep looking, Kalākaua, I say.

  Kīna‘u sees the cairns first. Look! he cries. Graves!

  Yes, burial mounds, I say. Keep looking.

  Now they all see them. There are hundreds of them! Lili exclaims. The longer I look, the more I see. Lili turns to her brother. Can you see them now, David? They extend all the way to that long, low hill over there.

  Yes, I see them, Kalākaua replies. Turning to me, he asks, Benjamin, where is your brother’s grave, do you know?

  No, I say.

  As I watch the cairns reveal themselves in ever-increasing numbers, my mind’s eye has turned elsewhere, toward Ruth Ke‘elikōlani’s hale, where the light fades as her kukui-oil lamp’s flame dies. I think of Gideon and Sarah, Ezra’s dispossessed, maka‘āinana parents, and how our people are like Ruth’s lamp. As we lose our connection to the land, and our numbers continue to decline, our flame is also dying, our light is growing dim. We are drowning in a sea of foreigners, I murmur.

  What did you say, Nāmākēha? Esther asks. She sees that I am upset and draws closer to me as the others gather around us. I hardly take notice, for my eyes are still fixed on the cairns and I am listening to other voices, whispering to me on the afternoon breeze.

  Do you hear them? I ask Esther and the others. Do you hear spirits of this place calling to us? They cannot, of course.

  What are they saying? Kalākaua asks.

  Turning to him, I reply, ‘Remember, once there was fire.’

  — Kailua-Kona, July 18, 1859

  Afterward

  N early all the persons portrayed in Once There Was Fire are historical figures, and accounts by near-contemporaneous, 19th century historians inform many of the events described in the novel. While I have strived to keep faith with the history of the Hawaiian people, Once There Was Fire is fiction. History is its armature, but dramatic license propels it.

  For example, the battle at ‘Īao Valley on Maui is described only in the most general terms by the 19th century historians S.M. Kamakau and Abraham Fornander. Kamakau devotes a third of a page to this battle in his 430-page work, Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii, and Fornander, about one of 350 pages in his Ancient History of the Hawaiian People. Both men write that Kamehameha won a decisive victory thanks to his superiority in haole weaponry and the assistance of his English advisers, John Young and Isaac Davis. Kamakau and Fornander, however, leave the battle’s details to the imagination, and I felt free to imagine how this fierce fight waged with clubs and spears on one side and muskets and cannons on the other might have unfolded.

  Similarly, Kalanimoku’s and Ka‘ahumanu’s plot against Kekuaokalani prior to the battle at Kuamo‘o is my invention. Kamakau recounts that Kekuaokalani refused a request to go by sea to Kailua — not to Keauhou, as in the novel — electing instead to travel overland with his people, and that his decision precipitated the battle. I spun the scheme against him from this bit of historical detail. I imagined the way the battle developed, but not the way Kekuaokalani and Manono died. Today the Kuamo‘o battlefield is a historical site, and the cairns of the dead are still there. The first time I visited the site, I initially saw a jumble of rocks, and perceived the graves only gradually, cairn by cairn, just as Nāmākēha’s companions do. I do not believe in spirits, but in that moment, I felt a chill.

  The ancestry of Benjamin Nāmākēha, the narrator of Once There Was Fire, is conjectural. Nāmākēha was a contemporary of Kamehameha’s who lived until 1859. Early in my research, I came across Benjamin in a genealogy of Big Island ali‘i posted on Ancestry.com. I wanted to tell the story of Kamehameha and his times from the perspective of a Hawaiian noble who could have been close to him, and Nāmākēha, identified in the online genealogy as the son of Kamehameha’s favorite brother Keli‘imaika‘i and the half-brother of Kekuaokalani, seemed ideal for my purpose. According to other sources, however, Benjamin was neither Keli‘imaika‘i’s son, nor Kamehameha’s nephew, nor Kekuaokalani’s brother. Whatever the truth of the matter, Benjamin (or Bennett) Nāmākēha did in fact marry the much younger Esther Kapi‘olani, who married David Kalākaua after Benjamin died. Esther became the Hawaiian Kingdom’s queen when Kalākaua ascended to the islands’ throne in 1874.

  During the more than ten years I spent researching and writing Once There Was Fire, my appreciation for the Hawaiian people and their culture deepened considerably. The Hawaiians of old were resourceful and industrious. Inhabitants of volcanic islands with no access to metals and thus no opportunity to develop metallurgy, they made the most of the resources at hand — stone, wood, and all manner of plant material — to make their clothing, build their temples, construct their houses and sailing vessels, and to farm, fish, and conduct warfare.

  Preliterate 18th century Hawaiians had a rich oral tradition handed down through generations in genealogies, chants, and dance. Spiritually, they were animists who saw manifold gods and goddesses invested in the physical world and the natural forces that surrounded them. Their religious beliefs are exemplified in the Kumulipo, the complex Hawaiian creation myth whose metaphysics eerily anticipate modern cosmology’s “big bang.” The old Hawaiians have been portrayed elsewhere in fiction as simple, childish people. I found them to be anything but.

  The Hawaiians lived in a Garden of Eden, but it was by no means paradisiacal. Their society was rigidly stratified and their kapus—laws—were unbending and often unmercifully har
sh on transgressors. Warfare among the Hawaiians of old was constant and prosecuted with bloody enthusiasm. The Hawaiians propitiated their gods with human sacrifice and they decorated their heiaus with human skulls.

  Benjamin Nāmākēha touches on good and unfortunate aspects of this milieu without judgment. I have endeavored throughout the novel to treat the old Hawaiians and their culture with respect through his voice. Readers will have noted that commoners, the maka‘āinana, receive little notice or respect from Nāmākēha. This was perhaps inevitable, since the story of this period as told by Kamakau and Fornander, two of its most prominent exponents, is the story of the ali‘i, in which commoners hardly register, and Nāmākēha, himself a proud ali‘i, reflects this ethos.

  Though I do not speak Hawaiian, I have sought to infuse Once There Was Fire with a sense of the old Hawaiians and their world by incorporating Hawaiian words, phrases, and sentences (of my own questionable construction) in the novel. In doing so, I have no doubt subjected this beautiful, lyrical language to a certain amount of abuse and for this, I can only say to native Hawaiian speakers, E mihi au. I apologize. Finally, to readers who have persisted to this point, mahalo.

  Stephen Shender

  Santa Cruz, California

  Bibliography

  Beaglehole, J.C. The Life of Captain James Cook. Stanford University Press, 1974

  Beckwith, Martha. Hawaiian Mythology. University of Hawaii Press, 1970.

  Bushnell, O.A. Hygiene and Sanitation among the Ancient Hawaiians. Hawaii Historical Review, 1966

  Bushnell, O.A. The Return of Lono. University of Hawaii Press, 1971.

  Cahill, Emmett. The Life and Times of John Young. Island Heritage Publishing, 1999

  Cook, Capt. James. The Journals. Penguin Books, 2003.

  Cordy, Ross. Exalted Sits the Chief. Mutual Publishing, 2000.

  Desha, Stephen L. Kamehameha and his Warrior Kekūhaupi’o. Kamehameha Schools Press, 2000.