Photograph by
Cade MartinBy
Paul Therouxtors. His wife, Manono, fought furiously and died
beside him.
But even decisive battles are never so simple.
This one would probably never have been fought
in the way it was if foreigners from America, En-
gland, France and Russia had not gone to Hawaii
as plunderers, advisers and traders—infl uential,
not to say subversive, in their habits, swaggering
through the islands, questioning the kapu, indiff er-
ent toward the gods, boasting of their fi repower and
their ironmongery. Most of these foreigners were in
search of sandalwood, the fragrant timber that they
sold for high prices to Chinese traders in Canton.
Money did not fi gure in these sandalwood transac-
tions ; fi repower and iron took its place. Capt. James
Cook had established the tradition. In February 1779,
when Cook took a fancy to an extravagant red feather
cloak that Liholiho’s father, Kamehameha the Great,
was wearing, the king handed it over to the English
voyager in exchange for seven iron daggers.
The sandalwood traders off ered “Brown Bess”
muskets, pistols, ammunition, swords, powder and
fl ints. According to the British Royal Navy explor-
er George Vancouver, who would visit the islands
in the 1790s, and others, the rifl es were of inferi-
or quality, antiquated and unreliable. But clashes
in the islands, among rival clans and chieftains,
boosted the trade in armaments, turning Hawaiian
society into a gun culture.
“In view of the strife of contending chieftains,”
Ralph Kuykendall writes in his defi nitive work,
The Hawaiian Kingdom, “it is not strange to fi nd in
the contemporary literature of the period repeat-
ed references to the eff orts of the chiefs to obtainT
HIS MAJESTIC FEATHER cloak
is a trophy from a bloody bat-
tle, fought two centuries ago
by two cousins with opposing
views, a confl ict that decid-
ed forever the cultural fate
of Hawaii. One cousin, Lih-
oliho—Kamehameha II—was
determined to end the ancient
kapu system that regulated traditional customs,
the veneration of gods, the conduct of eating and
much else. The other cousin, Kekuaokalani, was a
traditionalist; to him, it is said, even a chief ’s shad-
ow was sacred and anyone who stepped into it must
be killed. The ai kapu—the eating taboo—was also
severe; women were forbidden to eat bananas, for
example, among other things. But the kapu had
endured for centuries. It ordered Hawaii society, it
conferred respect, it is related to our word “taboo.”
The dispute over this belief system became a
battle that was fought at Kuamo’o, near Kona on
the Big Island of Hawaii, toward the end of Decem-
ber 1819. Kekuaokalani was wearing the feather
cloak, a sanctifi ed symbol of his prestige. He was
mortally wounded, and at his death on the battle-
fi eld the cloak was stripped from him by the vic-FROM THE
SMITHSONIAN
NATIONAL
MUSEUM OF
NATURAL
HISTORY