The Legends and Myths of Hawaii: The fables and folk-lore of a strange people

by King of Hawaii David Kalakaua

Kanaloa-kuaana,		sons of Keawenui by differentmothers.
Lonoikamakahiki and
Pupuakea

LONO AND KAIKILANI.

A ROMANTIC EPISODE IN THE ROYAL ANNALS.

I.

What a hustling and barbaric little world in themselves were the eight habitable islands of the Hawaiian archipelago before the white man came to rouse the simple but warlike islanders from the dream they had for centuries been living! Up to that time their national life had been a long romance, abundant in strife and deeds of chivalry, and scarcely less bountiful in episodes of love, friendship and self-sacrifice. Situated in mid-ocean, their knowledge of the great world, of which their island dots on the bosom of the Pacific formed but an infinitesimal portion, did not reach beyond a misty Kahiki, from which their fathers came some centuries before, and the bare names of other lands marking the migratory course of their ancestors thither.

The Hawaiians were barbarous, certainly, since they slew their prisoners of war, and to their gods made sacrifice of their enemies; since no tie of consanguinity save that of mother and son was a bar to wedlock; since murder was scarcely a crime, and the will of the alii-nui on every island was the supreme law; since the masses were in physical bondage to their chiefs and in mental slavery to the priesthood. Yet, with all this, they were a brave, hospitable and unselfish people. The kings of the islands of Hawaii, Maui, Oahu and Kauai were in almost continual warfare with each other until brought under one government by Kamehameha I.; but the fear of foreign invasion never disturbed them, and the people, who feared their gods, reverenced their rulers and possessed an easy and unfailing means of sustenance and personal comfort, were content with a condition which had been theirs for generations and was hopeless of amelioration; for the high chiefs in authority claimed a lineage distinct from that of the masses, and between them frowned a gulf socially and politically impassable.

The Hawaiians were never cannibals. The most conspicuous of their barbarisms was the sacrifice of human beings to their gods; but did not the temples of early Gaul and Saxon flow with the blood of men? and did not one of the fathers of Israel sharpen his knife to slay the body of his son upon the altar of the God of Abraham? They knew but little of the arts as we know them now, and the useful and precious metals were all unknown to them; yet they made highways over the precipices, reared massive walls of stone around their temples, carried effective weapons into battle, and constructed capacious single and double canoes and barges, which they navigated by the light of the stars. They had no language either of letters or symbolism, but so accurately were their legends preserved and transmitted that the great chiefs were able to trace their ancestry back, generation by generation, to something like a kinship with the children of Jacob, and even beyond in the same manner to Noah, and thence to Adam. What wonder, then, that under their old kings the islands of Hawaii should have been the home of romance, and that the south wind should have sighed in numbers through the caves of Kona?

And now, borne by the soft breath of the tropics, let us be wafted to the island of Hawaii, and backward over a misty bridge of historic meles to the reign of Kealiiokoloa, a son of Umi and grandson of the famed Liloa. It was during his brief reign—extending, perhaps, from 1520 to 1530—that for a second time a white face was seen by the Hawaiians. A Spanish vessel from the Moluccas was driven upon the reefs of Keei, in the district of Kona, and completely destroyed. But two persons were saved from the wreck—the captain and his sister. They were first thought to be gods by the simple islanders; but as their first request was for food, which they ate with avidity, and their next for rest, which seemed to be as necessary to them as to other mortals, they were soon relieved of their celestial attributes and conducted to the king, who received them graciously and took them under his protection. The captain—named by the natives Kukanaloa—wedded a dusky maiden of good family, and the sister became the wife of a chief in whose veins ran royal blood.