Oahu Trails. Kathy Morey
would make war on the other islands.
The Hawaiians worshipped many gods and goddesses. The principal ones were the gods Ku, Kane, Kanaloa, and Lono. Ku represented the male aspect of the natural world. Ku was also the god of war, and he demanded human sacrifice. Kane was the god of life, a benevolent god who was regarded as the Creator and the ancestor of all Hawaiians. 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 tapa flew. (Legend said Lono had sailed away from Hawaii long ago and would return in a floating heiau, or 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 now 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 tapa banners of the floating heiau on which Lono was to return and 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.
The Hawaiian 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.
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 from the chiefs in sandalwood; the chiefs ordered the commoners into the mountains to get the precious wood. 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. Many of those ordered into the mountains 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, having been discredited, crumbled; the old order was dead.
The missionaries arrive
Congregationalist missionaries from New England reached Hawaii in 1820; Liholiho grudgingly gave them a year’s trial. 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 to Christianity and made it acceptable for other alii to follow her example. Kaahumanu became a convert, too, and set about remodeling Hawaii socially and politically, based on the Ten Commandments.
An ecosystem passes
Cook and those who came after him gave cattle, goats, and large European pigs as gifts to the Hawaiian chiefs, and the animals overran the islands. They ate everything. Rainwater sluiced off the now-bare hillsides without replenishing the aquifers. Areas that had been blessed with an abundance of water suffered drought now. Native plants could not reestablish themselves because the unrestrained animals ate them as soon as they sent up a shoot. People wrongly concluded that native plants were inherently unable to reestablish themselves, and they imported non-native trees like the eucalyptuses and ironwoods that you see so often today.
The native habitat area and diversity shrank still more before the new sugar plantations. Planters drained wetlands for the commercially valuable crop and erected dams, ditches, and sluices to divert the natural water supply into a controllable water supply. What they did was not so very different from what the Polynesians had done when they had cleared the native lowland forests in order to plant their taro, but the scale was far vaster. In one particularly terrible mistake, growers imported the mongoose to prey on the rats that damaged their crops. But the rat forages at night, while the mongoose hunts by day: They seldom met. What the mongooses preyed on instead were the eggs of native ground-nesting birds.
Native beach naupaka (Scaevola sericea, foreground) and hala (Pandanus odoratissima, middle ground) arrived on ocean currents.
Be-still, a yellow-flowered, non-native oleander common in lowland Hawaii, is so-called because it’s poisonous: Eat any part of it, and you’ll be still forever.
Few of Hawaii’s native plants put forth showy flowers or set palatable fruit, so the new settlers imported ornamental and fruiting plants to brighten their gardens and tables. Many shrubs and trees did so well in Hawaii’s favorable climate that they escaped into the wild to become pest plants, crowding out native species and interrupting the food chain.
Birds brought over as pets escaped to compete with native species. More species of native birds have become extinct in Hawaii than anywhere else in the world, and most of the birds you see will be introduced species like the zebra dove and the myna.
It is tragic but true that when you visit Hawaii, you will probably see very few of its native plants and animals. But don’t give up: Your chances of seeing native plants and animals are better on the trail than elsewhere on Oahu!