Ancient Hawaii - Tahitian Conquest

Ancient Hawaii, by Herb Kawainui Kane:
TAHITIAN CONQUEST

Olapana: A chief of Waipi'o Valley
Collection of
The Kaua'i Coconut Beach Hotel, Kaua'i

Of the first Hawaiians, we know only that they were Polynesians, possibly from the Marquesas Islands two thousand miles away, and we know them only through archaeology. Their names and traditions are lost, obliterated by high status chiefs who arrived perhaps a thousand years later from the leeward Tahitian islands of Ra'iatea, Bora Bora and Huahine. With these new rulers the Hawaiian traditions begin. Histories are composed by conquerors.

Ra'iatea had become a powerful center of cultural change, and its major temple, Taputapuatea, a "Vatican" from which chiefs derived great mana and status. They adventured and conquered in all directions. On the Island of Tahiti they fought and subjugated people they called Manahune. In Hawaiian tradition, Menehune probably derives from the same term given to the original inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands.

The term is disparaging, belittling, meaning a people of small status. But when Western writers heard stories of Menehune, they thought their informants were speaking of a people of small size. European tales of leprechauns and gnomes leaped to mind, imaginations took wing, and a new genre of "Hawaiian" folk-lore was born-no doubt abetted by Hawaiian informants as soon as they perceived the joke and revised their stories accordingly. Writers received tales of a magically strong little folk working in great numbers, building great voyaging canoes, huge temple platforms, long aqueducts and large fishponds-each project completed in a single night or left undone. There is, however, no authentic Hawaiian tradition of the Menehune as a race of physically small people.

Necker image

On Kaua'i you may see solid evidence of an earlier people: the rockwork lining the "Menehune ditch"—an ancient aqueduct that once brought water from the Waimea river to irrigate dry lands for growing taro. The rocks were shaped and fitted together—a method of stonework requiring immense labor, and not typical of Hawaiian rockwork. At Nawiliwili the large Alekoko fishpond is said to have been built by Menehune.

A retreat by Menehune groups along the island chain would explain why the island of Kaua'i, as their last holdout, has the most stories about them. Tales of the Menehune as a people living in the mountains but with a taste for seafood suggest they had been driven inland from the shore. It is also said that the Menehune king at last gave it up and sailed off to the west with most of his people. They would have passed Necker and Nihoa islands, where carved stone images have been found which are Polynesian but not typically Hawaiian. But some apparently remained on Kaua'i, where a census ordered by King Kaumuali'i in the early 19th century recorded 65 persons as being of Menehune ancestry.

Migration Map #2

After voyaging was opened from the Tahitian leeward islands there arrived in Hawai'i the high priest Pa'ao. Here he determined that the chiefs, by intermarriage with lower classes, had lost the purity of lineage necessary to receive chiefly mana from the patron spirits. By his standards, none were qualified to rule. Back he sailed to his homeland, where he recruited Pili, a prince of the purest lineage. Returning to Hawai'i, no doubt with a strong force, Pa'ao installed Pili as king, and Pili founded the dynasty from which Kamehameha descended 28 generations later. Pa'ao instituted new rites and built temples. At about the time William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel, Pa'ao logged not less than 9,000 miles on his three voyages.

Breadfruit may not have reached Hawai'i until this era. In Polynesia the tree has been under cultivation so long that it will not seed itself, but must be transplanted as a sprout from the root of a parent tree, and is often difficult to move successfully from one yard to the next. That it could be brought three thousand miles in an open canoe is evidence of the horticultural skills of ancient planters. A legend of this time credits Kaha'i, a grandson of Mo'ikeha, for bringing breadfruit from Taha'a (then Upolu), a small island at the northern end of the Ra'iatea lagoon in the leeward Tahitian islands .

Voyaging between Hawai'i and the South Pacific appears to have ceased several centuries before European arrival. No explanation is found in the traditions, but several may be imagined. The appropriation and development of lands much larger than any they had known in the South Pacific demanded much attention, leaving little time for voyaging. Those who visited their southern homelands may have found that shifting alliances had made them less welcome; and, in the murky world of chiefly politics, there was always the danger that a chief who went on a long voyage might return to find his place usurped by another.

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