are then free to move into and adapt to open habitat niches, a process called radiation, often rapidly speciating into a variety of new forms unprecedented in their ancestry. As an archipelago of continuously transforming high islands with radical climatic gradients over short distances, Hawai‘i presented successful colonists with a dizzying array of different habitat types, resulting in stunning biodiversity and a level of endemism unknown elsewhere in the world. Among plants, insects, spiders, moths, birds, freshwater fish, shrimp, and snails adapted to trees, land, and freshwater, evolution produced not only new species but entire genera unique to Hawai‘i. Among the forest birds is the most spectacular example, the Drepanidae, or Hawaiian honeycreepers, with forty-two historically known species exhibiting an extraordinary diversity of color, form, and lifestyle, all descended from a single ancestor.23 Had Darwin landed in Hawai‘i before the Galápagos, he might have had the evidence he needed to come out with his theories decades earlier.
Yet in the process, it is typical of colonizing organisms to lose the extraordinary powers of dispersal that got them to the islands and shed defensive characters that no longer serve any purpose. With no herbivorous animals, Hawaiian plants generally have no thorns or toxic compounds: mints have lost their oils and raspberries, their spines. This loss of defenses would come back to have devastating consequences when Hawai‘i was suddenly “reconnected” with continental flora and fauna with the advent of Polynesians and later, Europeans and Asians.24
Molokai had its share of unique species, including, in the historic period, the endemic birds kākāwahie, or Molokai creeper (Paroreomyza flammea); ō‘ō, or Molokai or Bishop’s ō‘ō (Moho bishopi); mamo, or black mamo (Drepanis funerea); and numerous plant species, including the lo‘ulu palms Pritchardia forbesiana and P. lowreyana and the tree hibiscus Kokia cookei.
SETTLEMENT OF MOLOKAI
Molokai, the fifth largest of the eight main islands, is 38 miles long and 10 miles wide at its widest point, with an area of 260 square miles and a coastline of 100 miles. It lies 25 miles southeast of O‘ahu, 8.5 miles northwest of Maui, and 9 miles north of Lana‘i—a position in the center of the archipelago and thus at the locus of four of the archipelago’s most important channels and essential sea travel routes. This location may have been memorialized in its name, as molo means “to interweave and interlace,” and kai means “sea” or “seawater.” Or the name is of unknown, ancient origin and cannot be translated—though this seems unlikely given the wealth of layered linguistic tradition around names in Hawai‘i and Polynesia, generally. (The use of the glottal stop, Moloka‘i, is likely a modern mistake, possibly the invention of singers in Honolulu in the 1930s who tailored syllables to rhyme in their verses.)25 The island is an amalgamation of two originally separate volcanoes; topographically and climatically, they retain their differences. The eastern half of the island is dominated by steep mountains; the tallest is the 4,970-foot Kamakou peak. Its north shore, the Ko‘olau district, consists of precipitous sea cliffs, at 3,000 feet the highest in the world, plunging into deep water. At its center is a large collapsed caldera, drained by three deep, steep-sided valleys open to the sea: Waikolu, Pelekunu, and Wailau. All are heavily forested and virtually inaccessible except by sea—and even then sometimes only in the summer months, when the giant northerly swells and the high trade winds that make landings impossible much of the rest of the year subside. At the eastern tip of the island is a narrow bay opening into another long valley, Hālawa, which can be reached overland from the south. East Molokai’s south slope, the Kona district, known locally as mana‘e side to the east of Kamalō (from mana‘e, east, versus malalo, or west of Kamalō), is deeply dissected by roughly fifty sets of alternating narrow valleys and ridges, some nearly vertical in the upper reaches, where they are known collectively as the canyon country. The higher elevations are forested, while, moving downward and southward, rain shadow progressively dries the landscape. Some perennial streams exist here and, at the immediate coast, abundant groundwater surfaces near shore or just offshore in shallow sea water. The south side, sheltered from trade swells by mountains and from southerly winter kona storms by Lana‘i, has some of the most developed fringing reefs in the islands. The middle portion of Molokai is a gradually sloped shield formed by lava from the eastern volcano and the alluvial outwash plains from both ancient volcanoes, becoming progressively more arid toward the west. The West End is dominated by the remnants of Mauna Loa, now reduced to 1,381 feet. Its landscape is arid or semiarid except for the peak itself. There are sandy beaches facing fringing reefs on the south side but only isolated beaches, without developed reefs, on the west and north sides. As on the East End, the West End’s north coast consists mainly of sea cliffs exposed to the rough waters of the open ocean. Midway along, extending seaward at the base of the cliffs, is Kalaupapa Peninsula, a more recent volcanic product shaped liked a low lava table, or, as its name indicates, a stone leaf lying on the sea.
Probably the earliest Hawaiian settlement site known for Molokai was found in the backshore dunes at the seaward entrance to Hālawa Valley, likely settled by AD 1200–1400.26 While the first archaeologically recorded Hawaiian sites, such as the Bellows dune site on windward O‘ahu, came earlier, perhaps as early as AD 800, the initial settlement at Hālawa was presumably typical of Hawaiian subsistence patterns in the colonization period.27 Excavation of this stratified site revealed the long-term occupation of a small, nucleated fishing camp consisting of several dwellings and hearths, loosely grouped and probably inhabited by a small group of people. Artifacts recovered indicate direct affinities with the material culture of the Marquesas, according with the broad archaeological consensus that the initial colonization of Hawai‘i originated in that island group.28
Hālawa has many advantages that would have made it ideal for early Hawaiians, and judging from the archaeological record, it is exemplary of how early Polynesian settlers fit their economy and culture into Hawai‘i’s physical environment and how that environment in turn shaped the development of Hawaiian culture. Three kilometers long, the valley is nearly one kilometer wide at the coast, narrowing to less than half a kilometer inland. Unlike the other large valleys on the north coast, where plunging sea cliffs and exposure to winter surf make access difficult, Hālawa is somewhat sheltered in a bay, with a headland to the north and a cape to the southeast blocking swells and a navigable river mouth and estuary easily accessible to canoes. The bay and shoreline have abundant invertebrates and fish. Fossil remains from the earliest period show a preponderance of mollusks and inshore fish in the diet—though no tuna or other deepwater species—as well as pigs, dogs, and rats.29
Hālawa’s name means both “curve,” perhaps in reference to the bay, and plenty (lawa) of stems (ha), either of kalo, sugarcane, coconut, or banana—indicating its potential for Polynesian agriculture.30 Everywhere in Polynesia, where conditions allowed, well-watered but sunny windward valleys, ideal for kalo cultivation, were the first locations settled. These have been called the “salubrious cores” that sustained settlers until they could multiply and expand out into less favorable environments. The Hālawa Stream is reliably perennial, draining a large watershed in the high mountains of East Molokai through four tributaries. Rainfall high in the watershed is above one hundred inches and above sixty inches at the head of the valley but just twelve inches at the beach, making for mostly sunny conditions in the low-lying fields.31
In the colonization period, kalo would have been grown in the low, swampy flats around the mouth and the estuary, where clay soils that can hold water are well developed. The degree of water control required in the earliest stages is uncertain; cultivation may have been ad hoc, in semipermanent, unlined fields. Shifting or “swidden” cultivation of kalo in cleared patches of forest farther up the valley where slopes are steeper and soils less developed is attested to by much evidence of charcoal flecking in the strata, indicating periodic burning for clearing.32
According to models proposed by Kirch and others, after colonization of Hawai‘i by one or more small canoe loads of settlers, population numbers would have increased slowly for the first four hundred to five hundred
