Kalakaua was so devoted had suffered three major traumatic shocks that had crippled its original vitality: namely, the realization that there existed another culture of technical superiority (first evident on the arrival of Captain Cook's ships in 1778), the renunciation in 1819 (by the Hawaiians themselves) of ancient traditional religion and revered social laws based on taboos, and the inflow of aliens to Hawaii from the mid-nineteenth century onward. A fourth blow to Hawaiian confidence came in 1893, when financially ambitious Americans overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy. Already the inroads of imported diseases and the dispirited condition of the Hawaiians had reduced their numbers to a fraction by the time of King Kalakaua's reign.
Fortunately, in the twentieth century, the number of native Hawaiians has increased, and there is a growing awareness of the value of their past. Today Hawaii is the fiftieth State of the U.S.A., a conglomeration of ethnic groups and racial admixtures. The Hawaiian is, however, still under the burden of an unequal battle with circumstances over the past two hundred years. The cry for identity that King Kalakaua put up has more meaning today than ever before, and it seems clear that right use of traditional Hawaiian culture will contribute tremendously to the life of modern Hawaii. The basic means of the study of Hawaiian culture today is literature, and no doubt King Kalakaua's book has a distinctive role to play.
Anthropology was an infant subject in Kalakaua's day, while Polynesian archaeology as a science was half a century in the misty future. The Polynesians are not, as he believed, Aryan wanderers out of "Asia Minor or Arabia" who reached Polynesia via India. In fact they are a racially mixed group whose ancestors ventured out from the eastern limits of the Southeast Asian islands and coasts in voyages of ever increasing length. Some eight hundred years after Christ it appears they had found and populated every habitable island from New Zealand in the south to Hawaii in the north and from Fiji to Easter Island. The entry of the Polynesian ancestors into Polynesia began some centuries before Christ. Hawaii itself was settled by migrations which seem to have originated first in the Marquesas Islands about 750 and then about 1250 in the Society Islands.
Modern scholars will also be critical of Kalakaua's belief that the first Western discoverers of Hawaii were Spanish. It seems clear that Captain James Cook was the first rediscoverer of Hawaii following its initial discovery by the first Hawaiians. Captain Cook was unquestionably the greatest Western explorer of the Pacific, humane and much loved by the Polynesians. One may say that Hawaiian history is dominated by two great symbolic figures. They are King Kamehameha I and Captain James Cook. The story in this book entitled "Kaiana, the Last of the Hawaiian Knights" concerns them both, but Kalakaua's description of Cook's character as Exacting, dictatorial, and greedy" is uninformed. One feels that Kalakaua was reflecting a fashion of the time to downgrade the contribution of Captain Cook and to justify Hawaiian treatment of him.
King David Kalakaua was born in 1836, when memories of old Hawaiian ways and beliefs were still fresh. He was a man of both past and present, singularly colorful in character. Robert Louis Stevenson, who became his friend, found in him a cultured intellectual of unusual mental powers. His warmth of feeling and his unsurpassed ability to absorb alcohol were evident to all in the kingdom.
Kalakaua sought a revival of traditional Hawaiian life along with a political and cultural revival elsewhere in Polynesia. In fact, he attempted to unify Polynesia into one state: an idea as impractical then as it would be today.
But the Hawaiian monarchy was soon to end. In 1893, two years after King Kalakaua died, Queen Liliuokalani, the sister who had succeeded him, was deprived of her throne. The sad story has been retold in varying lights, but the truth is that the end of the ruling high chiefs was as inevitable as the earlier rejection of the Hawaiian pantheon of gods, demigods, guardians, and ancestral spirits. The world of old Hawaii was then ended forever.
Finally it should be noted that The Legends and Myths of Hawaii is not all mythology. It is rich in historical narrative. King Kalakaua relates the stories of certain great events with such verve that one can readily imagine he was an eyewitness. No doubt he had heard the same tales from the sons and daughters of those who had been present on occasions such as the death of Captain Cook. Since the momentous Hawaiian rejection of the ancient gods took place only two decades before his birth, many of the people about him as he grew to manhood had lived under the old system. His sources of knowledge were direct indeed.
TERENCE BARROW, PH.D.
PREFACE
FOR material in the compilation of many of the legends embraced in this volume obligation is acknowledged to H. R. H. Liliuokalani; General John Owen Dominis; His Excellency Walter M. Gibson; Professor W. D. Alexander; Mrs. E. Beckley, Government Librarian; Mr. W. James Smith, Secretary of the National Board of Education; and especially to Hon. Abram Fornander, the learned author of "An Account of the Polynesian Race, its Origin and Migrations."
The legends, in the order of their publication, beginning with the first and ending with "The Destruction of the Temples," may be regarded, so far as they refer to the prominent political events with which they are associated, as in a measure historic. Those following have been selected as the most striking and characteristic of what remains of the fabulous folklore of the Hawaiian group.
The Legends and Myths of Hawaii.
HAWAIIAN LEGENDS: INTRODUCTION.
Physical Characteristics of the Hawaiian Islands—Historic Outlines—The Tabu—Ancient Religion—Ancient Government—Ancient Arts, Ha-bits and Customs—The Hawaii of To-day.
GENERAL RETROSPECT.
THE legends following are of a group of sunny islands lying almost midway between Asia and America—a cluster of volcanic craters and coral-reefs, where the mountains are mantled in perpetual green and look down upon valleys of eternal spring; where for two-thirds of the year the trade-winds, sweeping down from the northwest coast of America and softened in their passage southward, dally with the stately cocoas and spreading palms, and mingle their cooling breath with the ever-living fragrance of fruit and blossom. Deeply embosomed in the silent wastes of the broad Pacific, with no habitable land nearer than two thousand miles, these islands greet the eye of the approaching mariner like a shadowy paradise, suddenly lifted from the blue depths by the malicious spirits of the world of waters, either to lure him to his destruction or disappear as he drops his anchor by the enchanted shore.
The legends are of a little archipelago which was unknown to the civilized world until the closing years of the last century, and of a people who for many centuries exchanged no word or product with the rest of mankind; who had lost all knowledge, save the little retained by the dreamiest of legends, of the great world beyond their island home; whose origin may be traced to the ancient Cushites of Arabia, and whose legends repeat the story of the Jewish genesis; who developed and passed through an age of chivalry somewhat more barbarous, perhaps, but scarcely less affluent in deeds of enterprise and valor than that which characterized the contemporaneous races of the continental world; whose chiefs and priests claimed kinship with the gods, and step by step told back their lineage not only to him who rode the floods, but to the sinning pair whose re-entrance to the forfeited joys of Paradise was prevented by the large, white bird of Kane; who fought without shields and went to their death without fear; whose implements of war and industry were of wood, stone and bone, yet who erected great temples to their gods, and constructed barges and canoes which they navigated by the stars;
