thesis: bigness tends toward social stratification, coercion, and monopoly control of land and resources, though scholars may argue over the comparative coerciveness of the wet versus dry modes in precontact Hawai‘i. In either case, bigness constitutes itself, at least in part, on the destruction of the environmental basis of small community reproduction and by seizing control over the common resources that remain, such as streamflows, fishponds, fishing rights, and access to the kula uplands, and by instigating or coercing economic development by expansion into new areas with capital-intensive infrastructure and labor-intensive production. In Sahlins’s words, “all life begins with the chiefship”—and this is because the chiefship has, in seizing power, seized the resources that give life.
What I have been trying to do with these analyses is to sketch a moving picture, or series of pictures, of the physical Hawaiian universe on the eve of contact. I have tried to show some of the dynamic interaction of the environment and the social and how each was shaped in particular ways by it. With Kirch, I have tried to show that “by the end of prehistory the Pacific world was a constructed world, an ocean full of thoroughly modified, transformed, anthropogenic islands.”130
2
Traffick and Taboo
Trade, Biological Exchange, and Law in the Making of a New Pacific World, 1778–1848
The postcontact period of 1778–1848 was one of radical change in Hawai‘i, at some times and in some places gradual, at other times and in other places turbulent. Molokai was not central to the largest historical events of the period, which occurred instead on the larger islands—especially O‘ahu, scene of the fiercest Hawaiian battles in the first half of the period, site of the majority of foreign shipping and commercial activity at the port town of Honolulu, and seat, after 1804, of the Hawaiian government. In contrast, Molokai would have seemed a tableau of stability. But even there, occasional violent battles shredded the social and physical fabric of native communities, and deeper, systemic changes were afoot that, at the end of the period, would lead to fundamental, even catastrophic, change: foreign people, weapons, organisms, trade goods, religion, and civic and legal institutions all came to Hawai‘i and engaged Hawaiian people, communities, institutions, and the natural systems they depended upon. This chapter will try to sketch both the larger panorama of change in Hawai‘i and the Pacific Basin in the contexts of world and regional history and the foreground details of historical change in Molokai between the end of Polynesian isolation in Hawai‘i and the Mahele, the revolution of land tenure that marked the coming of Western legal, economic, and political norms to the Sandwich Islands kingdom.
MOLOKAI AND THE FINAL ROUND OF HAWAIIAN WARFARE
In the centuries prior to contact with Europeans, the control of Molokai passed back and forth between a series of warring O‘ahu, Maui, and Hawai‘i chiefs. As the largest and most productive of the islands “in the middle,“ Molokai was a natural resort for provisioning, especially along its protected south shore with its many fishponds, groves, and kalo lands, and for enlisting Molokai ali‘i and their troops for campaigns elsewhere. It was also a target for retribution by successive conquerors for the inevitable alliances made by Molokai chiefs with the previous ruling mo‘i, or king. Not infrequently, occupiers ravaged the place, and Molokai remained a battleground and a pawn.
At the time of Captain Cook’s advent, in 1778, Molokai had been for some time under the O‘ahu king Peleioholani, and after his death in 1780, under his successor Kahahana.1 Here, Kahekili, king of Maui, came to visit Kahahana, as Kamakau relates: “The two chiefs met with many professions of affection, but Kahekili’s was feigned; he coveted O‘ahu and Molokai for their rich lands, many walled fish ponds, springs and water kalo patches. The island of O‘ahu was very fertile and Molokai scarcely less so, and Kahekili lay sleepless with covetous longing. He asked for Hālawa . . . and Kahahana gave it to him.”2 Here is a historically recorded example of the paradigmatic eastern island chiefs’ lust for the wet western islands and an example of the fine, productive state of Molokai before the nineteenth century.
For some years after Cook’s visits, the Hawaiian balance of power was not greatly disturbed. In the late 1780s, what had been a handful of ships became a steadily rising tide, and warring chiefs lost little time in integrating foreign ships, weapons, and personnel into their forces. They engaged in fierce competition to obtain them, sometimes by kidnapping, seizure, or massacre. The next decade and a half saw a violent scramble to consolidate control of larger and larger territories. In 1785, Kahekili had invaded O‘ahu by way of Molokai, taking the whole of it.3 Five years later, Kamehameha, having consolidated his grip on the Big Island, invaded Maui, then ruled by Kalanikupule. He was victorious, but Kalanikupule escaped to O‘ahu; Kamehameha and his army began to pursue him but stopped on Molokai for a year to prepare an attack across the rough Kaiwi Channel that separates the two islands.
According to one account, Kamehameha spent the year living at Kauluwai in Kala‘e, practiced his troops on the plains of Kaiolohia, and grew kalo at the Paikalani patch in Honomuni Valley on the East End.4 All accounts indicate that his stay was very hard on the people and the land. Vancouver observed in March 1792: “The alteration which has taken place in . . . these islands since their first discovery by Captain Cook, has arisen from incessant war, instigated both at home and abroad by ambitious and enterprizing chieftains.“ He called the devastation of “Mowee and Morotoi . . . the principal feats of Tamaahmaah’s wars, and that Rannai [Lana‘i] and Tohowrowa [Kaho‘olawe], which had formerly been considered as fruitful and populous islands, were nearly over-run with weeds, and exhausted of their inhabitants.” He continued: “The troubles . . . had hitherto so humbled and broken the spirit of the people, that little exertion had been made to restore these islands to their accustomed fertility by cultivation.”5
Archibald Menzies, surgeon aboard the HMS Discovery with Vancouver from 1792 to 1794, agreed that Kamehameha had employed a scorched-earth policy through Maui, Lana‘i, and Molokai: “In desolating the country by destroying the fields and plantations of the inhabitants.“ Off the West End, March 18, 1792, he wrote: “We were visited by no natives or canoes of this end of Molokai. The people we had on board told us that Kamehameha’s descent upon it had desolated the country, and that it had not yet recovered its former state of population.”6
Later that year, news of rebellion on Hawai‘i reached the chief on Molokai, prompting him to return there without attacking O‘ahu. In his absence, Kahekili regained Molokai and Maui.7 In 1795, the cycle repeated with a far stronger Kamehameha who, his strength fortified with European sailors, ships, and firearms, encountered little resistance in taking Maui and Molokai again. He went on to secure O‘ahu with a campaign that culminated in his famous victory at the battle of Nu‘uanu.
The cost was particularly high. The conqueror’s army of Hawai‘i men, reported to be ten thousand to fifteen thousand strong, increased O‘ahu’s population by a quarter and ate through the island’s resources like locusts.8 Kamehameha installed himself and his court at Honolulu and focused on preparing a fleet to cross the channel to take Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau, the last islands not under his control. Visitors universally described a massive shipbuilding effort, with Euro-American and native carpenters toiling on hundreds of vessels and the king’s men bargaining hard with foreign ship captains to obtain weapons and naval stores in exchange for supplies. Various accounts place his armada at dozens of foreign and foreign-type vessels and eight hundred peleleu double-hulled canoes.9
William Broughton, who commanded one of the vessels of George Vancouver’s expedition, described O‘ahu in February 1796: “The situation of the natives was miserable, as they were nearly starving; and, as an additional grievance, universally infected with the itch. No cultivation was to be seen on shore; and, consequently, little prospect of their future subsistence. The attention of Ta-maah-maah was entirely engrossed by the vessel which the English carpenters were constructing for him.”10 Broughton and others reported that Kamehameha projected that after he conquered Kaua‘i, he would move on to an invasion of Bora Bora in the Society Islands,