A Brief History
The history of Hawaii reads like the story of a mythical
kingdom. The first wave of Polynesian settlers crossed the equator and
arrived from the Marquesas in the South Pacific perhaps as early as
a.d. 400. These immigrant voyages were breathtaking and treacherous,
requiring the crossing of 2,500 miles (4,000 km) of open seas aboard
dugout catamarans and outrigger canoes. Their destination was even more
resplendent with forests than the paradise we see today, but hoary bats
and monk seals were the only mammals in residence. The first Polynesian
settlers brought much of what they needed, however, from pigs and
chickens to bananas and taro, the root crop that would sustain them.
Paddies of taro are to this day a signature crop in rural Hawaii.
A second wave of Polynesian immigrants from Tahiti arrived
centuries later. By a.d. 1300 they had erased the vestiges of a
Marquesan outpost and developed a Hawaiian society of their own. Rival
chiefs ruled each island; fish farms and temples were laid out; and
tribal and inter-island warfare was common. The chiefs governed their
feudal domains by force, ritual, and taboo. The system of taboo (kapu)
gave society its laws and the people a complex moral code. To fend off
natural and cosmic catastrophes, the rituals of human sacrifice came
into play, intended to placate the more violent of the local gods, such
as those of the volcanoes and typhoons. While such island societies
might seem less than Edenic, the early Hawaiians led a pleasurable
life, singing their own histories to the beat of gourds, riding the
waves on long wooden surfboards, and developing an elaborate, graceful
form of story-dance, the hula.
Captains and Kings
The first Westerner to reach Hawaii was Captain James Cook,
the British commander whose mission was to discover the mythic
Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. He, too, had
set out from Tahiti when he came upon the Hawaiian Islands. The year
was 1778; his landfall was the northerly island of Kauai; and the name
he gave his new discovery was the Sandwich Islands (after the Lord of
the Admiralty, the Earl of Sandwich). The name did not stick, and had
Captain Cook known his fate, he would not have stuck around either. The
natives seemed friendly enough, rowing out to greet Cook’s ships, which
received much-needed provisions in exchange for fastenings and other
trinkets. When Cook later tied up on the Big Island of Hawaii, at
Kealakekua Bay, he was hailed as the god Lono and feasted on a grand
scale. But returning later to regroup after being slapped by an angry
storm, a dispute arose over stolen property. Cook took a chief hostage,
and in turn he was ritualistically hacked to pieces.
Cook’s cohorts had opened fire, to no avail. Among those
wounded that day was the young man who would soon unite the Hawaiian
kingdom for the first time in its long history. Known as Kamehameha the
Great, he considered the unification of Hawaii his divine fate, one
which he was to fulfill before he turned 30. He did so with the help of
a foreign navy vessel. After Cook’s voyage, a small but steady flow of
American and European vessels, already engaged in the China trade,
started to use Hawaii as a convenient, much-needed stopover. The
warring chiefs demanded guns in exchange for food. Kamehameha, as chief
of the Big Island, not only got his share of guns, but finally captured
a cannon and ship. Maui fell first, followed by Oahu, Lanai, and
Molokai. Kauai, where Cook had begun his fateful voyage of Hawaiian
discovery, became Kamehameha’s vassal in 1810.
As the first king of all Hawaii, Kamehameha established a
new empire that preserved the old ways, including the rituals performed
at the outdoor temples (heiau), while creating an overlay of
British-style government. A viceroy ruled each island at the King’s
pleasure. These Western ideas, which seemed to amuse Kamehameha, were
introduced by a new friend, another famous English explorer, Captain
George Vancouver, who had once served under Captain Cook. The King
encouraged the arrival of Westerners, giving land grants to some of his
favorite foreigner visitors. Vancouver had left scores of cattle and
sheep on the islands to supply passing ships. To round them up, the
King brought cowboys from Spain and Mexico, initiating the paniolo
(Hawaiian cowboy) tradition. Another seafarer, the American John
Kendrick, launched the sandalwood trade in 1791, when China had run out
of its own supply. By 1825, Hawaii’s sandalwood forests had been
thoroughly cut away, too, and non-native flora and fauna were imported
to fill in, altering the landscape of paradise.
There were other changes, too. Among the commodities
exchanged when foreign ships called were Hawaiian women, who soon
gained a measure of economic independence through prostitution and
other endeavors involving outsiders. Foreign ships carried new diseases
to the islands as well. Measles, cholera, and syphilis soon riddled the
population, which was cut in half over just a few decades. By the time
the first great king of Hawaii died, in 1819, the underpinnings of
native society were disintegrating.
Missionaries, Whales, and Sugarcane
The year of 1820 was a pivotal one in the story of the
Kingdom of Hawaii. It was the year the first missionaries arrived from
America. But more immediately, it was when the kapu system of taboos
broke down completely under the leadership of young King Kamehameha II
(the first king’s son, Liholiho) and the regent, Kaahumanu (the
favorite of the 21 wives of the first king). Hawaii’s royalty resisted
replacing the old religious system with newly-arrived Christianity
until Kaahumanu was nursed back to health and converted by the wife of
one of the first missionaries, Hiram Bingham. Madam Regent attended
church and the mission schools (which you can still visit in Honolulu)
and burned images of the old Hawaiian gods, while Kamehameha II
entertained lavishly in the company of his wives. In 1824, the King
decided to travel abroad, but immediately upon disembarking in England
he contacted measles, dying in London.
Many in the church and among the native population viewed
the King’s overseas death as a judgement. The regent Kaahumanu, ruling
in the name of her young charge, Kamehameha III, seized the opportunity
and followed many of the strictures favored by the Calvinist
Congregationalists, who were modernizing the country through the
establishment of schools and the printing of books in the Hawaiian
language (which they formulated in a written form for the first time).
Among Kaahumanu’s many reforms was the banning of prostitution, a
ruling which led to pitched battles in whaling ports such as Lahaina.
Alcohol sales, gambling, and dancing were banned for a time in
Honolulu. The Calvinistic reforms were soon reversed when Kaahumanu
died and Kamehameha III ascended to power in 1824. The new King resumed
the ways of the two previous monarchs, abolishing laws against adultery
and prostitution and taking up with his half sister; but powerful
interests, particularly those of the flourishing foreign business
community (which would be increasingly dominated by the descendants of
the first missionaries), were intent on usurping the throne, in effect
if not in name. The new King was eventually persuaded to issue a decree
guaranteeing religious freedom, and the next year, 1840, he established
a constitutional monarchy.
The most famous Prime Minister under Hawaii’s new political
system was an American missionary and physician, Gerrit P. Judd, who
served in the post from 1842 to 1854. During this period, foreigners
were allowed to buy large parcels of land for the first time (much of
it used for the sugarcane plantations), and ties to America, both
economic and political, were dramatically tightened, with talk of
possibly annexing Hawaii reaching the White House. However, many
Hawaiians were opposed to surrendering their sovereignty. When a new
king, Kamehameha IV, ascended to the throne in 1854, Judd was tossed
out. The missionary influence waned, and the royal court asserted its
power, as well as its love of luxury. The Hawaiian economy was rising,
sustained in part by whaling. But the demand for whale oil would
decline steeply after 1859, with the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania
and the start of the American Civil War in 1860. No matter — Hawaii had
a great crop in reserve: sugar. The first refinery appeared in 1849 on
Maui. The cane plantations, increasingly in the hands of American
tycoons, found a ready market in the US. Duty-free sugar imports from
Hawaii were eventually granted by the US, in exchange for rights to a
military base at Pearl Harbor in the future.
The growth of the sugar market led to waves of immigration
from China (1852), the Azores (1878), and Japan (1885). Native
Hawaiians were finding themselves overwhelmed and outnumbered. Disease
had lowered the Hawaiian population to just 20% of what it was when
Captain Cook arrived. The Kamehameha line ended with the death of
Kamehameha V, in 1872, and the election first of William Lunalilo, then
of David Kalakaua in 1874 as Hawaii’s constitutional monarch.
The Merry Monarch
The Hawaiian people loved their King, who was soon dubbed
the “Merry Monarch. ” In 1881, King David Kalakaua launched a world
tour, visiting the heads of state in Japan, Thailand, Egypt, and
England. The next year, he built himself a palace, Iolani, which can
still be toured in Honolulu. He also legalized the hula, Hawaii’s
traditional dance. But the King’s nationalism upset the vested
interests of foreigners. Sanford Dole, head of a missionary family, and
others led a successful movement to curb Kalakaua’s powers. When the
King died during a tour of San Francisco, in 1891, he was succeeded by
his sister, Liliuokalani, who proved to be an expectedly fierce
defender of Hawaiian ways and the monarchy. Dole and others thought it
high time for a US coup, and they were able to persuade the US naval
forces to assist in deposing the Queen in 1893. When the US refused to
annex Hawaii, and instead demanded the reinstitution of the Queen, the
sugar industry simply declared Hawaii a Republic, with Sanford B. Dole
its president. A new US President, McKinley, made annexation official
in 1898. In 1900, Hawaii became a US Territory; the first territorial
governor was Dole. Queen Liliuokalani lived out her life near Honolulu,
quietly and defiantly; she composed songs, including Hawaii’s most
famous, Aloha Oe.
Pineapples and War
The mythical kingdom of Hawaii was now a dream of the past.
Political and economic power resided with non-Hawaiians. Dole and other
business families were turning vast fields into pineapple plantations
and importing new workers to plant and cultivate them. Puerto Ricans
began arriving in 1900, followed by Koreans in 1903 and Filipinos from
1907 on. Like the Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese before them, many
of the new peoples would stay on in Hawaii, adding to the ethnic and
racial mix that has become a hallmark of the islands. By 1920, the
Japanese in Hawaii outnumbered Hawaiians two to one.
Yet Hawaii was still an island paradise in the eyes of
travelers, if not in those of its original people. Kilauea volcano on
the Big Island had been attracting tourists since the 1860s, but it
wasn’t until after 1901, with the opening of the Moana Hotel in
Waikiki, that organized tourism took hold. Steamships of the Matson
Line soon were arriving regularly at Aloha Tower, bearing tourists from
San Francisco who had been at sea for five long days. America’s rich
made up a goodly portion of these early travelers. They arrived with
maids and trunks, and often stayed for months. In 1936, Pan American
Airways introduced daily passenger air service from San Francisco. The
annual number of visitors had increased to over 30,000 by the time
World War II began.
The war broke out in Hawaii as nowhere else in America with
the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941). The US declared
war on Japan. Hawaii, as America’s western outpost and major Pacific
military base, was ruled by martial law. The Waikiki hotels housed
soldiers; the white sands were strung with barbed wire; and even the
American currency in local circulation was stamped as HAWAII dollars,
so that the enemy could not spend it on the world market if the islands
fell.
Statehood and Tourism
After the war, sugarcane and pineapple production remained
strong for a time, but tourism began its rise to ascendancy. Spurred on
by the “Hawaii Calls” live radio program broadcast weekly to the US,
Canada, and Australia from Waikiki, millions fell under the spell of a
new island paradise of surf and hula aimed at tourists. Trader Vic’s
opened garish Polynesian-themed restaurants; Arthur Godfrey brought the
ukulele to television; Burt Lancaster and Debra Kerr rolled in the wet
sands of Oahu; and jet air service brought in vacationers by the
hundred thousands. The surge was topped off by Hawaii’s statehood, on
21 August 1959, but the vision of a mythical kingdom on America’s
Pacific frontier was still expanding. Hilton built a resort village
right on Waikiki Beach; Sheraton and other hotel chains followed. Among
the millions of visitors lured there in the 1980s were huge waves of
Japanese vacationers, newly rich and ready to spend big bucks in an
East-West paradise. By 1990, Hawaii was welcoming nearly 7 million
visitors annually, seven times its own resident population, which is
the most ethnically and racially diverse in the US. The same year, the
University of Hawaii campus at Manoa became the site of the Center for
Cultural and Technical Interchange Between East and West (popularly
known as the East West Center), a unique and venerated resource for
advanced Pacific Rim studies.
More recently, the overwhelmed native Hawaiian culture
underwent a renewal as well. The return and preservation of ancient
traditions was a response, in part, to the increasing demand of savvy
tourists for a cultural as well as a leisure experience, but a leading
component was a growing movement by native Hawaiians to restore the
rights stolen from them when the royal monarchy was overthrown. This
movement has led to calls for self-determination and increased native
sovereignty, even full independence as a new nation for the estimated
250,000 people of Hawaiian ancestry. But perhaps the greatest legacy to
travelers today who arrive at the world’s premier island beach resort
is the warmth, friendliness, and sense of family that Hawaiian culture
has created in the land of its rise, fall, and renewal.
