involved than on the environment there. In each case, the moves that precipitated a collapse were cultural failures to adapt or respond adequately to environmental challenges rather than simply these challenges themselves. In each case Diamond narrated, culture was the man behind the curtain: decisions were made—economic, military, legal, reproductive, even aesthetic—that had an impact on the tendencies, trajectories, and outcomes of the societies under the microscope. Cultural categories were often the fundamental, causative problems such as elite competition and unaccountability, warmaking, religion, dictatorship, and the most powerful and environmentally (and socially) damaging of these, the “lust for power.” We hardly need an environmentally centered history to tell us this. And such a history, focused on cataloging and understanding physical factors, is not sufficient to get to the bottom of the story. What is needed is a catalog of cultural factors alongside physical ones and an analysis of their dynamic interaction where historical outcomes are produced.
What Collapse proved is that while environment is hugely important in influencing historical outcomes, environment is not destiny; it is just a set of constraints and limitations on which and within which human social structures and values work and are in turn worked on. The lesson is that it takes two to tango, and neither partner—environment or society—always or necessarily leads the dance. This study of Molokai is an effort to write a history of a Hawaiian island and, through it, of the Hawaiian Islands, that combines the optics of nature and culture into a more integrated practice of history than we have generally seen in this reach of the ocean.
1
Wet and Dry
The Polynesian Period, 1000–1778
The moment that the first Polynesian canoes touched Hawaiian beaches, around AD 1000, marked one of the culminating achievements of the greatest seaborne colonizing society in the premodern world.1 Over a two-thousand-year period, Polynesians perfected techniques of long-range ocean voyaging and permanent agricultural settlement that allowed them to claim small islands and thrive in an archipelagic realm covering a quarter of the globe. Contrary to earlier theories that held that these mariners must have been descendants of migrants into the region from as far away as Asia or India, archaeologists now believe that “becoming Polynesian took place in Polynesia,” in the words of Patrick Kirch, the preeminent Pacific archaeologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. According to this view, ancestral Polynesian culture evolved in situ first, from Melanesian and “Austronesian” Southeast Asian antecedents, up to thirty-five hundred years ago in what is called the Lapita cultural cradle area in eastern Melanesia. From there, these peoples reached Fiji and then Tonga and Samoa by perhaps 880 BC, where, over the next millennium, the fully formed Polynesian cultural complex incubated. It was a lifestyle based on crops—the Melanesian suite of vegetatively propagated roots such as aroids (taro, or kalo in Hawaiian) and yams—supplemented with orchard crops, such as coconuts and breadfruit, and fish and other products of the surrounding sea. In maintaining links between these neighbor islands, Polynesians effectively created a “voyaging nursery”: the small, outrigger canoes of Melanesia and Southeast Asia became large oceangoing vessels equipped with double hulls and lateen sails, sailed by large crews and guided by a supple science of navigation by stars, winds, currents, swells deflected between islands, and the signs of birds and other creatures.2 In the face of the near-constant easterly trade winds at this latitude, Polynesians perfected the art of sailing upwind to remote landfalls and then returning to their islands of origin. When, after one thousand years, the cultural conditions coalesced in favor of purposefully searching for new lands to colonize, the skills and technologies required were in place, allowing Polynesians to reach nearly every (not yet populated) inhabitable island in the Pacific Ocean and establish themselves on them.
The first waves of settlement out from the Fiji-Tonga-Samoa-Futuna core reached the Society group and the Marquesas; later migrations traced northward up the Line Islands to Hawai‘i; eastward to Easter (Rapa Nui); and southward to Mangareva, the Southern Cooks, and finally, New Zealand (Aotearoa) by AD 1200–1300—making it “one of the last places on earth to be settled by preindustrialized humans,” in Kirch’s words.3 The addition of the South American sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) to the crop repertoire of the last-settled islands also indicates Polynesian contact with that continent.4 Polynesians went—and stayed—everywhere, occupying even rocky, inhospitable Pitcairn and Henderson in the Eastern Pacific, and remote islets like Necker and Nihoa in the Hawaiian chain northwest of Kaua‘i, for as long as six hundred years.5 Linguistic and material evidence shows that they maintained links between islands across formidable distances for centuries, before isolation returned for unknown reasons.6
When Europeans ventured into Polynesia in numbers in the eighteenth century, they immediately recognized that the widely dispersed people they encountered, from Tahiti to Easter Island to New Zealand to Hawai‘i, belonged to a single group closely related by race, language, religion, technology, and cultural patterns and organization from agriculture to architecture.
This expansion was not just a question of boats and navigation: the islands of the Pacific east of the Solomons had few edible plant or animals species, especially on atolls.7 Prospective settlers had to bring almost everything with them, providing a textbook example of what the anthropologist Edgar Anderson called “transported landscapes” and the historian Alfred Crosby called a “portmanteau biota”: all the biological resources necessary to long-term survival, without which the technological and cultural skills of the voyagers would have proven useless.8 Settlers in Hawai‘i would eventually import dogs, pigs, chickens, rats, and the Hawaiian horticultural complex (differing only in emphasis from that of elsewhere in Polynesia): taro (kalo), sweet potato (‘uala), yam (uhi), banana (mai‘a), sugarcane (kō), breadfruit (‘ulu), coconut (niu), paper mulberry (wauke), kava (‘awa), gourd (ipu), ti (ki), arrowroot (pia), turmeric (‘olena), and bamboo (‘ohe).9
All across Polynesia, the colonizers adapted to fit the diverse environmental circumstances they found. In a general sense, these can be divided into the three principal kinds of islands in the Pacific: atolls, makatea islands, and high islands. Their origins can be either from “arc” islands or “hot spot” islands. All Pacific islands are volcanic or tectonic in origin; most on its western margin are arc islands, accretive products of plate margin subduction, wherein pieces of crust sitting atop the diving plate are scraped off onto the overriding plate. Arc islands, such as New Zealand, Fiji, and New Caledonia, are often large and mountainous. In the mid-ocean, including most of Polynesia, islands are products of midplate hot spots—plumes of molten magma rising from the earth’s mantle that pierce the crust to form volcanic shields; as the plates move over the stationary plume, islands string out like beads on a necklace, leaving lines, arcs, or clusters of islands diminishing in size as they recede in distance and time from their point of origin and erode back into the sea. High islands, such as Tahiti, Rarotonga, and the main Hawaiian islands, are examples of relatively recently formed hot-spot islands. Built of volcanic basalts and lavas, younger islands often lack surface water because of extreme rock porosity and lack fringing reefs because of steep slopes into the surrounding depths. Older high islands, removed by plate motion from the building process of the hot spot, gradually erode, developing deeply incised stream valleys, broad coastal flats, and fringing or barrier reefs. Atolls are formerly high islands that have been lowered, through a combination of erosion and subsidence under their own weight, to near or below sea level, leaving fringing reefs surrounding a volcanic core that eventually disappears, leaving no dry rock, just a barrier reef surrounding a lagoon. Makatea islands are older atolls or subsided high islands where previously submerged portions have been partially raised above water, either by falling sea levels or by tectonic forces. Typically, the uptilt is caused by the weight of a nearby, related volcanic shield formation. Makatea means “white stone,” after the exposed limestone of former reefs elevated to become limestone
