Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  In the arts of war he had a tutor, Kekuhaupi‘o, under whom he mastered the traditional weapons of the islands: the bloodcurdling twelve-foot spears, and the ability to dodge one, snatch it from midair, and launch it back toward the enemy; the war clubs studded with sharks’ teeth, and the pahoa, the double-bladed dagger that could stab both left and right. His agility he honed by rolling through the town balanced on a rounded lava boulder (still preserved in a local museum), an astonishing feat for a man of his height.

  When old Alapa‘i died about 1754, the island of Hawai‘i was thrown into civil war. In this culture all land belonged to the king. The high chiefs held their domains as his vassals, and under them the chiefs (and chiefesses, for in this society genealogy trumped gender and women could be very powerful) held their parcels of land, called an ahupua‘a. This was usually a wedge of an island from highest peak to shore. Whether by accident or design, this form of landholding allowed most of the chiefs to be largely self-sufficient, for the average ahupua‘a contained all the productive topographies of an island, from tidal fishponds and irrigated taro fields to upland crops and forest. Commoners were not tied to the land like European serfs, but that was virtually the only distinction between their status and that of the peasants of medieval Europe. Whichever chief’s ahupua‘a they lived on, they were allowed to keep only perhaps a third of all that they produced—fish, taro, fruit, tapa cloth.11 The other two-thirds they handed up the hierarchy, to the chief, the high chief, the king, and the kahunas who placated the gods. In addition, kanakas had to hold themselves in readiness to serve as the chief’s warriors when he called for them. It was all very feudal, a system that Norman barons would have recognized, except in one important respect: There was no expectation that a chief’s land tenure would survive the king. Once a king died, his successor held the right to redistribute all the land as he pleased. When there were rivals for the throne, as there almost always were, chiefs and high chiefs curried favor and struck alliances with contenders who would bestow the most favorable lands on them. Thus, more often than not a king’s death occasioned a bloodletting free-for-all.

  Kalaniopu‘u whom Cook greeted was Alapa‘i’s great-nephew, and had not been in the line of succession but became king by conquest. Kamehameha was too young to have taken part in this war, but as he matured into the fearsome warrior he was acknowledged to be by the time of Cook’s arrival, he would have been indispensable in quelling later rebellions against Kalaniopu‘u’s rule. Nor were the circumstances of Kamehameha’s fortuitous birth forgotten, and he was installed third in importance after the king and his son Kiwala‘o. But second in line was not as good as inheriting the kingdom. Kalaniopu‘u was old, Kamehameha was ambitious, and once the kingship was vacant he would have to fight his cousin to establish his own rule.

  * * *

  Now aboard Cook’s ship, as the others traded and visited, Kamehameha could not conceal his wonder at the ship’s weapons. Their superiority over native spears and war clubs was stupefying. Iron to the Hawaiians was almost a legendary substance. They knew that it existed, for they had acquired small pieces of it—strong, malleable, extremely useful—from the drift of shipwrecks and, it seems likely a few times over the centuries, storm-driven Japanese fishing vessels whose survivors became assimilated into the population. But before Cook’s arrival they had no dependable source of it. And here on this white men’s ship were huge weapons—cannons—made of iron, which seemingly weighed as much as the Naha Stone. The chief who could gain possession of such weapons, and master them, could conquer the entire island. The British did not need to know of Kamehameha’s birth prophecy, because his covetous rapture over their big guns shouted his ambition all too loudly.

  The islanders’ avidity for iron, and their desire to know how to work it, was such that Cook had the Resolution’s forge brought on deck, and the blacksmith fashioned implements before the astonished natives’ eyes. Cook also observed a telling aspect of the culture: The chiefs wanted the iron for themselves: “If a common man received anything, the chief would take it. If it was concealed and discovered the man was killed.”12 When Cook requested a place on land to establish a camp to note down astronomical data, the chiefs, believing him to be Lono, were quick to offer him the Hikiau heiau on the south shore, since the temple was dedicated to him anyway. Cook established the scientific station there with a guard of marines; the chiefs laid a kapu against women approaching the sacred ground, but the sailors and the marine guard had no disposition to turn away the women eager to offer pleasure to these exotic men. The chiefs withdrew the kapu to save face, but were displeased that Lono’s retainers would defile their own temple. “It was the beginning,” wrote Ledyard, “of our subsequent misfortunes, and acknowledged to be so afterwards when it was too late to revert the consequences.”

  Another disquieting incident occurred when William Watman, one of the Resolution’s gunners, suffered a stroke, requested to be buried ashore, and died. The natives had not suspected that one of the god’s attendants could die, albeit he was not the god himself. They accorded him a mighty funeral within the limits of the Hikiau heiau, heaping the grave with flowers and sacrificed pigs. But their awe of the English began to disintegrate. Soon after, William Bligh instructed about fifty Hawaiians to haul Resolution’s rudder, which had been taken on land for repair, back to the shore. Their response to being ordered about was typically Hawaiian. As Ledyard noted, they took up the rope, “and pretended to pull and labor very hard, though at the same time they were in fact doing all they could to retard the business, to ridicule and make their pastime.” Bligh, as he later became famous for doing, responded by beginning to beat them, but was stopped by a chief; Bligh demanded that the chief make his people help. The chief then joined his people, who “laughed at him, hooted him, and hove stones.”13 Ledyard sought permission to arm his detail and ran to assist Bligh, but it was the English sailors who eventually hauled the rudder back to the Resolution; the kanakas had had enough of them.

  After a stay of eighteen days, Cook sailed the ships away to find a better anchorage on Maui; happy to be rid of him but still thinking that he might be a god, the Hawaiians sent him off with ceremonies fit for the divine. But then on February 4 gale-force winds cracked the Resolution’s foremast. In deciding where to put in to repair, Cook made a fatal error. Had he visited the new island he could have enjoyed the ecstatic welcome all over; but despite his misgivings he chose to return to Kealakekua Bay, where he knew the terrain and believed he had a friendship with the people. He arrived there on February 10 after a hard sail in adverse conditions.

  Makahiki had ended, however. The food stores were exhausted and working life had resumed. Not only was Cook’s reappearance unexpected, in the native mind no god would return with a broken mast. The kahunas of Lono’s Hikiau heiau continued to treat the British with deference, laying kapu against disturbing the white men who were repairing the mast. But the chiefs’ and their people’s respect crumbled with continued familiarity. Thefts of iron implements from the ships became more common; watering parties sent ashore began to be stoned and driven away.

  Events climaxed on February 14 with the theft of Discovery’s cutter. The incident may have begun with a chief named Polea, aikane (young male lover) of the king, whom English sailors had knocked to the ground when he tried to prevent their taking his canoe. “He was angry,” according to native folklore, “and thought he would secretly take one of the ship’s boats, break it all to pieces for the iron in it, and also because he wanted revenge for the blow which knocked him down.”14 Cook was more tolerant of native behavior than most British or indeed other European officers, but stealing one of his ship’s tenders was an act that he must not allow. Going ashore with a lieutenant and nine marines, he intended to handle the situation the same way he had in Tahiti; he invited Kalaniopu‘u out to the Resolution, intending to hold the king hostage until the cutter was returned and the thieves punished. At first Kalaniopu‘u agreed and walked toward th
e shore, but Cook’s purpose was guessed, and in a growing cacophony the crowd prevailed on the king to listen to his retainers and not get into the waiting boat. Threats were made, weapons appeared. Cook was compelled to fire one of his double musket barrels, but the gun partially misfired and the ball struck a warrior’s body mat harmlessly. The crowd surged forward, but a musket volley from the marines drove them back, leaving several dead. As they were reloading and Cook’s three small boats stood in to rescue them, Cook killed another native with his second barrel.

  One of the warriors lunged at Cook with a large stone dagger, but he evaded the thrust. He had noticed this type of weapon before, as he wrote in his diary: “They have a sort of weapon we had never seen before, and not mentioned by any navigator, as used by natives of the South Sea. It was somewhat like a dagger; in general, about a foot and a half long, sharpened at … both ends, and secured to the hand by a string. It is used for stabbing in a close fight; and it seems well adapted to the purpose.”

  Cook was stabbed in the neck and was then overwhelmed, clubbed, and repeatedly stabbed facedown in the surf. Four of the marines also died before the rest of the party was plucked from the shore. The Hawaiians immediately thought better of the violent outburst, and they treated Captain Cook’s corpse with the same reverence as they did that of the highest ali‘i. They baked his body in an imu, or underground oven, but only to make the flesh easier to remove from the bones. They did not eat him, as some British sailors came erroneously to believe—although three children did come across Cook’s heart, which had been placed in a tree fork to dry, and believing it to be a pig’s heart helped themselves. Cook’s bones were washed and wrapped, for to the Hawaiians, the bones of a powerful man held enormous mana.

  Kalaniopu‘u went into hiding in a cliff cave but sent out word that Cook’s remains would be returned. His nephew, the suspicious Kamehameha, too wary to return to the ships, showed his peaceful intentions by sending out an enormous pig as a gift, and the British returned word that his gesture was accepted. These attempts to salvage the situation were not followed by the people, who gesticulated, mooned, and threw stones at the English at every opportunity. Captain Clerke, now in command, adopted a policy of restraint, but when he first asked for the return of Cook’s body, he received a parcel that, when opened, contained to everyone’s horror only “a piece of human flesh from the hind parts.”

  Seeing a man among the crowd on the shore waving Cook’s hat, Clerke opened up with his four-pounders, scattering the people with some casualties including, it was learned, an injury to Kamehameha, who learned firsthand the power of the weapons he had been coveting. But only after a village was sacked and burned were more of Cook’s remains handed over—skull, scalp, feet, long bones, and his hands (recognizable from the distinctive scars of old wounds)—which were given burial at sea. With Resolution’s foremast repaired, Clerke sailed out of Kealakekua Bay on the evening of February 22, 1779.15

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  Three years after the English departed, old Kalaniopu‘u died, and the Big Island was thrown into chaos once more. He had sought to avoid the traditional war over the succession—and its spoils—by naming his son Kiwala‘o as his heir. This he was bound to do, for Kiwala‘o bore the ni‘aupi‘o rank, the highest possible kapu, which he inherited from his mother.16 Kamehameha was the better fighter, and hoping to placate him the king entrusted him with custody of the war god, Kuka‘ilimoku, a responsibility almost as great as being king. He also made him high chief of Waipi‘o on the northeast coast, perhaps the most beautiful, historic, wealthy, and productive valley on the island. Far from placated, Kamehameha knew his time was approaching. He was the son of the king of Maui and grandson (through his other father) of the most powerful king of Hawai‘i before Kalaniopu‘u. With that lineage, and with his reputation as the island’s mightiest warrior, he would have no difficulty enlisting allies to unseat Kiwala‘o. Indeed, five powerful chiefs of the Kona district came to him first, including his father-in-law, three of his uncles, and Kekuhaupi‘o his mentor in warfare, to announce that if Kiwala‘o did not reapportion the lands to their advantage, they would align with Kamehameha in a war to overthrow him.17

  The split began over a sacrifice before the old man was even dead. In the thousand years since this isolated archipelago was first settled by voyagers from the Marquesas Islands, and in the perhaps four hundred years since the Tahitian conquerors arrived and subjugated the original settlers, the religious system developed around two concepts: kapu and mana. The common people were kept under control by the regimen of kapu, a complex list of foods, lands, and practices that were forbidden to defined classes of people. Mana was the source of spiritual power for the chiefs, and mana was gained somewhat by descent but more by killing one’s enemies in battle, sacrificing them to the gods, and/or having possession of their mortal remains—hence their reluctance to hand over more than a token of the bones of such a powerful man as Captain Cook.

  Even though Kamehameha had become keeper of the war god, it was the king’s prerogative to make sacrifices to him, so that the mana of the victims would flow to him. When Kamehameha himself sacrificed a rebellious ali‘i to Kuka‘ilimoku and took that mana for himself, it was a serious challenge to the power of Kiwala‘o. Six months after the death of Kalaniopu‘u a sharp, brief war erupted; the death of Kiwala‘o at the Battle of Moku‘ohai in July 1782 left Kamehameha supreme ruler of three of the Big Islands’ six districts: Kona along the west coast, Kohala at the northern end, and Hamakua, southeast of there. Emboldened to seize his dream to conquer the entire island, Kamehameha opened a campaign against the Hilo district in the east, but suffered a blistering defeat and was forced to withdraw.

  Then followed a series of conflicts with Keoua Kuahu‘ula, the younger half brother of the deceased Kiwala‘o, who had escaped that fatal battle to his own district of Kau on the southern point of the island. The two fought repeatedly, depleting land and people, with no decisive victory. In 1785 Kamehameha returned to his own stronghold at Kailua, midway up the Kona coast, regrouped, and married a new wife, Ka‘ahumanu, the teenage daughter of a Maui ally. With her he shared both an intense devotion and bitter combat for the rest of his life. By now Kamehameha had also gained control of two districts on Maui, but those chiefs rebelled in 1786 and maintained their freedom against an army that he sent under one of his brothers. The destructive stalemates continued for some four years before fate—and America—handed him a breakthrough.

  * * *

  Even as it was an American—marine corporal John Ledyard—who viewed Captain Cook as having a different impact on Hawai‘i than the one memorialized by his officers, so it was an American who, albeit unwittingly, gave Kamehameha the means to transform himself from only a partially successful war chief, who was defeated as often as he was victorious, into the Conqueror.

  Capt. Simon Metcalfe was a Yorkshireman by birth but American by long residence and disposition—deputy surveyor of New York and a supporter of the colonial Americans’ revolution. Imprisoned by the British for a time in Montreal, and his Vermont property lost during the war, he settled his wife and younger children in Albany, and went to sea as a trader. At fifty-two, in 1787, he acquired a brig called the Eleanora and entered the Pacific fur trade, installing his son Thomas Humphrey Metcalfe as captain of the small schooner Fair American to sail and trade in concert with him. Two years later the two ships were ensnared in the trading dispute between Britain and Spain known as the “Nootka Crisis,” and became separated; the Eleanora managed to escape Spanish capture but the Fair American was taken briefly to Mexico.

  Father and son had, it is believed, agreed in case they were separated to rendezvous on the west coast of Hawai‘i. January of 1790 found Simon Metcalfe’s Eleonora off the Kohala coast on the northwest of the Big Island, where Metcalfe received a local chief aboard his vessel. The nature of the incident is lost, but the chief did something to offend the captain. Brittle, severe, authoritarian, and ignorant of the stati
on of the ali‘i, Metcalfe had the chief flogged with a rope’s end. It was Metcalfe’s bad luck that the headman he abused was Kame‘eiamoku, a high chief and cousin of Kamehameha’s mother, and one of the first chiefs to rally to the Conqueror in his campaign to rule the entirety of the Big Island. He remained one of Kamehameha’s most trusted advisers. Mortally insulted, he vowed to avenge himself on the next foreign vessel he encountered.

  Oblivious, Metcalfe then sailed the Eleanora across the strait to Maui to trade. There one of his crewmen disappeared, along with a small boat, and he made sufficient inquiry to learn that it was not a desertion, that islanders had stolen the boat and killed the man. As an American on a far frontier, Metcalfe behaved just like later Americans on the Western frontier, arrogating to himself the roles of judge, jury, and executioner, and he determined upon massive retaliation to teach the natives a lesson. Learning that those who stole his boat were from Olowalu, about four miles south of Maui’s main settlement of Lahaina, Metcalfe sailed there and indicated his eagerness to trade. No canoe, however, might approach his port side; all the transacting would be done to starboard. The Eleanora carried seven guns below the main deck, all of which were moved to the starboard side and loaded with small shrapnel. As the swarm of canoes gathered, the gunports were opened and a broadside fired into the canoes only a few feet away. At least one hundred Hawaiians were killed and countless more wounded.

  The place where he massacred the natives, Olowalu, was a pu‘u honua, a “city of refuge.” In Hawaiian culture, common persons be they born ever so low, if they violated a kapu and if they reached a city of refuge before they could be apprehended and killed, could be ritually cleansed and returned to their lives without fear of further molestation. For Metcalfe to kill people there, aside from mass murder, was an unspeakable sacrilege.