Unfamiliar Fishes Read online

  Of the five countries the United States invaded and/or acquired in 1898, Hawaii is the only one that became a state. That said, I have come to understand that even though Hawaii has been a state since 1959 and an American territory since 1898, a small but defiant network of native activists question the legality of both developments and do not consider themselves to be Americans at all. Which is pretty easy to pick up on when they’re marching past you down the main drag of Honolulu on the fiftieth anniversary of statehood, carrying picket signs that say “We Are Not Americans.”

  HAWAIIANS HAVE A word for all the pasty-faced explorers, Bible thumpers, whalers, tycoons, con men, soldiers, and vacationers who have washed ashore since Captain Cook named their homeland the Sandwich Islands in 1778: haole.

  Like many nouns in the Hawaiian language, haole evokes multiple meanings, including foreigner, tourist, Caucasian, or, in the movie in which I first learned it, blond nitwit who learned to surf in a suburb of Phoenix.

  In 1987 I saw an endearing, low-budget coming-of-age picture about a surfer. In his review of the film, North Shore, Vincent Canby of the New York Times complained that “the surfing, writing, direction and performances are of a caliber to interest only undiscriminating adolescents.” Being seventeen at the time, I liked it. Not being seventeen anymore, I still do. Despite the soundtrack’s dated synthesizer shenanigans, there’s something sweet and timeless about the protagonist’s quest for knowledge and new friends.

  Rick, played by Matt Adler, is an amiable, landlocked teenager who surfs in a wave tank in the Arizona desert. When he wins a contest at this motorized bathtub, an announcer asks him, without irony, “How does it feel to be the best surfer in the state of Arizona?”

  Rick uses his prize money to fly to Oahu to surf the big waves at the North Shore. Upon arrival, he falls for a native Hawaiian girl named Kiani while studying the path of the “soul surfer” under the tutelage of Chandler, a guru who owns a surf shop. Chandler assigns Rick to work his way through a historical survey of boards, including a thick slab of koa wood used by the ancient Hawaiian surf riders who perfected the sport. Rick discovers, the hard way, underwater hazards unheard of back home in the wave tank. A reef shreds his back, thereby furnishing a romantic yet educational opportunity for the girl he has a crush on to school him in native healing. Kiani soothes his scrapes with a sprig of aloe even though he is wary of antiseptic that doesn’t come out of an FDA-approved plastic tube. Through all these tutorials Rick discovers what I would one day find out for myself: in Hawaii, there is so much to learn.

  Kiani takes Rick for a walk to a stone heiau, or temple, what she calls “an ancient sacred place” built by “priest kings” uphill from Waimea Bay. She shows him how to make a wish by wrapping a lava rock inside a leaf and placing it on the ruins. He’s a teenage boy, she’s pretty, and it’s about to rain; if I’ve guessed his wish correctly, it almost comes true in the next scene. Too bad the lovers are interrupted by wild-pig hunters—that old teen-movie cliché.

  The girlfriend’s male relatives are less hospitable to Rick, but when isn’t that true? To Kiani’s cousin and his tight-knit gang of local surfers committed to defending their home turf from a never-ending flood of yahoos on vacation, Rick personifies two centuries of trespassing. He is oblivious to his status among the locals as a stand-in for every freckled missionary’s son who helped turn land into real estate.

  This gang is identified as the hui, which is the Hawaiian word for club or organization. Da Hui is a real and formidable surf collective on the North Shore, famous for organizing an annual beach cleanup and for having an attitude that might be politely described as self-assured. The punk band the Offspring once recorded a funny portrait of what it’s like to enter their territory, sung from the point of view of a haole who knows his place: “I won’t park next to Da Hui/Because I don’t really feel comfortable!”

  When Rick meets this daunting crew, he’s on his surfboard, bobbing in the sea, just thrilled to be in water that didn’t come out of an Arizona faucet.

  “Hey, haole,” says one of the hui who paddles out to intimidate Rick.

  “Hi,” a grinning Rick replies, “haole to you too!”

  “He’s so haole he doesn’t even know he’s haole,” the local informs his friends. Then he advises Rick to scram: “This is our wave.”

  Admittedly, this is a not-so-major motion picture with the production values of a Bananarama video, but the serious resentment lurking in those words—this is our wave—gets to the heart of the whole history of Hawaii’s losing battle to ward off foreign intruders.

  Rick’s uncomfortable run-in is not unprecedented on the North Shore. This information isn’t in the movie, but that Waimea heiau he visited with Kiani is a specific kind of temple, one where human sacrifice was practiced centuries ago. It’s called Pu‘u o Mahuka. The cold shoulder Rick got from those surfers was nothing compared to how their ancestors greeted four sailors from George Vancouver’s Royal Navy supply ship, Daedalus, when they came ashore for water in 1792. Only one of those men made it back to the ship alive. The three murdered seamen may have been sacrificed at the temple, perhaps on the very rock that Rick wrapped in a leaf, praying to ancient gods that his girlfriend would let him round third base.

  I visited the ruins of that temple, which is now maintained by the National Park Service. It commands an otherworldly view of the Waimea Valley and the island’s coast. But the most memorable thing to see there might be a plaque the park service erected in 1965 purporting that “this site possesses exceptional value in commemorating and illustrating the history of the United States.” My Hawaiian friend who drove me there pointed at this plaque and rolled her eyes.

  It is laughable to think that a lava rock temple—built at least a century before the Declaration of Independence was signed five thousand miles away—has much to do with the history of the United States. (Though it is entertaining to wonder what John Adams would make of the sacrificial demands of ferocious priest kings, given all that fuss about Parliament taxing tea.)

  In January of 1778, when George Washington’s army was holed up and shivering at Valley Forge, Captain James Cook of the British Royal Navy became the first European on record to set foot in the Hawaiian archipelago, landing at Waimea on the island of Kauai. The seven inhabited Hawaiian islands—Kauai, Oahu, Maui, Molokai, Lanai, Niihau, and Hawaii (also called the Big Island, for obvious reasons)—were governed as separate though interrelated feudalistic chiefdoms. The nephew of one of those ruling high chiefs, the warrior Kamehameha, may have been one of the Big Island natives who clobbered Cook during the confusing scuffle when the explorer got himself killed in 1779 at Kealakekua Bay. Cook and his men attempted to recover a stolen boat by trying to take the high chief hostage. This was, needless to say, frowned upon. The Hawaiians stopped the Brits from kidnapping their chief, and when Cook turned to retreat, natives hit and stabbed him, “his face,” a shipmate wrote, “falling into the water.”

  I have a friend whose father, a native of Liverpool, refused to eat pineapples his entire life because he held a grudge against Hawaiians for killing Britain’s greatest explorer.

  Three years after Cook’s death, Kamehameha’s uncle the high chief died. In the ensuing power struggle, Kamehameha had his rival (and cousin) whacked and assumed control of the Big Island. He began acquiring guns, ammunition, a cannon, and a pair of haole advisors from the Western ships that followed in Cook’s wake, using them to wage civil wars against the neighboring islands.

  Captain George Vancouver had served as a midshipman on Cook’s Pacific voyages. When he returned to Hawaii in 1793 at the helm of his own naval expedition, he was alarmed by the devastation. He wrote that “[Maui] and its neighboring islands were reduced to great indigence by the wars in which they had for many years been engaged.”

  I visited Iao Valley, the site of Maui’s bloodiest skirmish, with my sister and nephew. This cool, verdant retreat is one of the most glorious places in the Hawaiian Islands,
which is saying something. A clear creek ambles beside a skinny peak, the Iao Needle, thrusting up more than two thousand feet from the valley floor. I might describe the Needle as adorable, though apparently the ancients regarded it as the phallic stone of Kanaloa, the god of the underworld.

  A sign states, “During periods of warfare, the peak was used as a lookout by warriors.” I don’t know what the lookouts shouted down in 1790 when they saw Kamehameha and his cannon coming but I’m guessing it was the Hawaiian equivalent of Run for your lives.

  “What’s a musket?” my nephew Owen asks me, looking at one of the signs explaining that this was the first big battle of the Hawaiian civil wars to use Western weaponry.

  “It’s a big, long gun,” I tell him. “George Washington’s soldiers were using them around the same time as Kamehameha.”

  Owen, who is eight, knows who Kamehameha is. In fact, he does an amusing if insensitive impression of the Hawaiian warrior. He strips down, twisting his underwear into a loincloth. Brandishing an imaginary spear, he screws his eyes into a menacing stare while shouting, “I’m Kamehameha, and you are going to die!”

  We mosey around the valley a little and he points to the creek below the trail. “That’s a pretty stream,” he says.

  I tell him that the battle here in 1790 became known as “the Damming of the Waters” because Kamehameha’s muskets and cannon butchered so many of Maui’s soldiers that stacks of corpses formed a human dam that stopped up the creek.

  Kalanikupule, the Maui commander, escaped the carnage at Iao Valley, but he and Kamehameha would meet again five years later on Oahu, in the Battle of Nuuanu, Kamehameha’s last.

  Nuuanu is another good view with a bad massacre. These are the cliffs overlooking present-day Honolulu, their serrated edges usually softened in a silvery mist. Kamehameha’s forces pursued the enemy warriors up the comely cliffs—and over, a long drop. Around four hundred soldiers were pushed off the peaks.

  These are the same rainy cliffs Queen Liliuokalani alludes to in her song “Aloha ‘Oe.” She had been on a horseback ride over the mountains and noticed one of her friends kissing his girlfriend goodbye. She set to music the story of their romantic farewell. Their “fond embrace” happened to take place on slopes that, decades earlier, had been crucial in Kamehameha’s founding of the monarchy Liliuokalani would soon inherit, a scene of such slaughter it’s a wonder the lovers in her song didn’t trip over a pile of skulls.

  Kamehameha conquered all the islands except Kauai (though Kauai eventually, and wisely, submitted to him without a fight). In 1810 he founded the Kingdom of Hawaii and would rule as its first monarch until his death in 1819, missing the first New England missionaries’ arrival by mere months.

  When Hawaiians describe Kamehameha’s path to power, they usually say that he “united” the islands instead of saying that he “conquered” them. That is because islanders had already been fighting civil wars for at least a century before he was born. The ferocity of Kamehameha’s battles was matched only by the finality of the peace accompanying his domination. The end result was not unlike that of the Hundred Years’ War waged in medieval France—a rickety mishmash of fiefdoms controlled by regional aristocrats giving way to a strong central monarchy and a new sense of national pride.

  Kamehameha is so beloved that his birthday is an annual Hawaiian holiday, featuring parades on most of the islands. In a yearly ceremony at the statue of Kamehameha in downtown Honolulu, the fire department backs a fire engine up next to the sculpture and a couple of firefighters spend an hour or so going up and down on a crane, accepting leis from civic organizations and draping them around the king’s bronze neck, as if he were on fire and only yellow flower necklaces can put it out.

  One year at the lei ceremony, the minister from the church founded by the first missionaries said a prayer. He prefaced his prayer by remarking that Kamehameha united the islands in time for the missionaries to unite them in Christ.

  This power shift from a king beholden to the war god Ku to the haole nerds representing the Prince of Peace was inspired by the first Hawaiian Christian, an orphan whose parents were killed by Kamehameha’s warriors in a stint of vigorous “uniting.”

  Opukaha‘ia was born on the Big Island around 1792. The haoles called him “Henry Obookiah,” and that is how he signed his name once they taught him to write. I will use his anglicized name because I like how it has the word “book” in it. Published in New England in 1818 right after Obookiah died, the slim volume Memoirs of Henry Obookiah launched the first missionaries from Boston Harbor to the Sandwich Islands the following year, or, as one of them described their destination, “the far distant land of Obookiah.”

  Memoirs of Henry Obookiah and Alfred Thayer Mahan’s 1890 colonialism starter-kit, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, are arguably the two books published in the nineteenth century that had the most impact on the history of Hawaii. The former summoned American missionaries; the latter beckoned the U.S. military. As Mahan, the godfather of American imperialism circa 1898, would argue in a later, less action-packed, book on religion, “However men severally may regard imperialism as a political theory, the dominion of Christ is essentially imperial, one Sovereign over many communities, who find their oneness in Him, their Ruler.”

  Obookiah, the young man who invited the army of Christ to invade his homeland, had witnessed Kamehameha’s men slaying his parents when he was around ten years old. He tried to escape from their attackers, carrying his infant brother on his back. The pursuers killed the baby with a spear while Henry was still shouldering him.

  “I was left alone without father and mother in this wilderness world,” Obookiah would later recall. A child does not have to endure such horror to grow up to be a religious fanatic, but I suppose it helps.

  Obookiah went to live with his uncle, a priest at Kealakekua Bay. This is the inlet on the Big Island’s west coast where Captain Cook had been killed in 1779. Cook had visited Obookiah’s uncle’s temple, the Kikiau heiau. In fact, it was where the captain performed the first Christian service in Hawaiian history, a funeral for a member of his crew.

  The Kikiau temple was dedicated to Lono, the god of agriculture and peace. Some Hawaiians initially believed Cook to be an incarnation of Lono because his ships resembled the god’s symbol and the expedition first arrived in Kauai at the beginning of the Makahiki festival, the annual season of peace devoted to Lono worship, when Ku the war god disappears.

  At Kealakekua Bay, the white obelisk erected by British sailors in Cook’s honor is visible from the ruins of Obookiah’s uncle’s temple. The monument and the roped-off patch of grass around it is sovereign British soil. There’s also a small marker at the water’s edge marking the spot where Cook “met his death.”

  There are three ways to get to it—swim or kayak from the dock down the shore next to the old temple, or, for us landlubbers, a sweaty, four-hour-roundtrip hike down an overgrown trail from the top of the cliffs above the bay, perhaps with a whiny child in tow. Owen so detested trudging down this unkempt path with me that every subsequent hike we have taken together prompts the following exchange.

  Owen: Check if we can kayak instead.

  Me: To the top of a mountain?

  Him: Just check.

  Western ships started rolling in after Cook’s findings put the Sandwich Isles on European maps, and Henry Obookiah would sail away on one of them. In Memoirs, Obookiah recalls, “While I was with my uncle, for some time I began to think about leaving that country to go to some other part of the globe. I did not care where I shall go to.”

  Obookiah signed on as a hand on a trading ship out of New York. He did not know then that he had just steered a course for the Second Great Awakening by way of the China trade. The ship left for the Seal Islands between Alaska and Japan to pick up a cargo of sealskins, and then on to Macao, where it was detained by a British warship, proceeding to Canton to trade the sealskins for cinnamon, silk, and tea before returning to New York around
the Cape of Good Hope.

  In New York, Obookiah disembarked with Thomas Hopu, a Hawaiian shipmate he had met on board. As the missionary Hiram Bingham described their first night in Manhattan, “Like the mass of foreign seamen who then visited our cities without being improved in their morals, [they] were for a time exposed to the evil of being confirmed in vice and ignorance, and in utter contempt of the claims of Christianity.” That is how a missionary describes the fact that the Hawaiians went to the theater.

  When some New Yorkers invited the Hawaiians to their home, Obookiah recalled, “I thought while in the house of these two gentlemen how strange to see females eat with them.”

  In Hawaii, it was forbidden—kapu—for men and women to eat together. Women were also barred from eating certain foods, notably bananas because the sight of females consuming phallic fruit offended Hawaiian men. Breaking a kapu was a crime, often punishable by death. (After Obookiah’s parents were killed, his aunt was executed for a kapu infraction. She was thrown off some cliffs, and her jinxed little nephew saw the whole thing.)

  The captain of Obookiah’s ship came from New Haven, Connecticut. He invited the boy home with him, and Henry started hanging around the Yale campus. In the tall-tale version of what happened to Obookiah at Yale, he was sitting in a doorway, weeping because unlike the students stepping over him he did not know how to read. Really, he just struck up a conversation with young do-gooder Edwin W. Dwight, who offered to teach the boy to read and write.