HAWAIIAN GRASS HOUSES
Then came the memory of that excursion made in 1783 to Puna for the sake of robbery and possible murder. The king wondered what had become of the men who had attacked him. He had gone to Hilo and was having a fine fleet of wide and deep canoes made in the splendid koa forests back of Hilo. While waiting here, some time between the years 1796 and 1802, he determined to find the men of the splintered paddle. He knew that these men might have changed their residence from the Puna district to Hilo. So he sent messengers throughout both districts summoning all the people to a great meeting in Hilo. Certain large grass houses were set apart for the large assembly. The Hilo people were separated from [[173]]the families of the other district. When the people were thus gathered together they found themselves prisoners. They feared wholesale destruction. The days of human sacrifices among the Hawaiians had not passed by. The new king, against whom they had at one time fought, might intend their sacrifice in numbers. They were his property to be burned or cut to pieces and placed in the temples of the gods. No one could dispute the will of the chief. It was a political condition which the Hawaiians of a hundred years later could scarcely begin to realise. That man is very ignorant who thinks the old days best.
The king passed through the houses allotted to the Hilo people. It must have been an anxious time for the prisoners. Wholesale destruction, possibly because of the bitter war of 1783, stared them in the face. But the chief touched them not and passed through their lines out to the houses in which the Puna people were confined.
A suspicion at least of the reason for their imprisonment must have come to the guilty men. The story runs that when they saw Ka-meha-meha they bowed their heads, hoping to escape recognition. But this revealed them at once to Ka-meha-meha, and he approached them with the command to raise their heads. It was an interesting scene when these common men were brought before the chiefs for final judgment. It is said the chief [[174]]asked them if they were not at the sea of Papai. They assented. Then came the question to two of them:
“You two perhaps are the men who broke the paddle on my head?”
They acknowledged the deed.
“To the death, to the death!” cried the chiefs around the king.
“Down the face!” “Command the stones!” “Let the man and his friends be stoned to death!”
The king listened to the suggestions of his companions. Then he said: “Listen! I attacked the innocent and the defenceless. This was not right. In the future no man in my kingdom shall have the right to make excursions for robbery without punishment, be he chief or priest. I make the law, the new law, for the safety of all men under my government. If any man plunders or murders the defenceless or the innocent he shall be punished. This law is given in memory of my steersman and shall be known as ‘Ke Kana-wai Ma-mala-hoa,’ or the law of the friend and the broken oars. The old man or the old woman or the child may lie down to sleep by the roadside and none shall injure them.”
The law with the name Ma-mala-hoa is still on the statute books of Hawaii. It has been greatly modified and enlarged, but the decree against robbery by any man, and especially the plunder of the [[175]]weak by the powerful, had its beginning for Hawaii in the days of Ka-meha-meha.