Kamehameha the Great, King of the Sandwich Islands, c. 1816. Oil on canvas, Anonymous copy, Chinese. The Boston Athenaeum.

There are 1.4 million people in Hawaii, of whom 960 thousand, nearly 70 percent, live on Oahu. It’s the most diverse state in the nation, with a population that’s 25 percent white, 2 percent black, and 37 percent Asian (Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian). More than 23 percent of the population reports its ethnicity as multiracial. About 10 percent of the population is Hispanic. About 10 percent of the population is Native Hawaiian, Kānaka Maoli. 

Hawaii is in the Pacific Ocean, 3800 miles and four time zones from Houston. It’s roughly the same latitude as Merida in the Yucatan. There are eight major islands, one of which, Ni’ihau, is privately owned, and one of which, Kaho’olawe, was used until 1990 as a military bombing range. Nobody lives there. Molokai was a leper colony. Lanai, Oahu. Kauai, Maui, and the Big Island, Hawaii, are all  tourist destinations. The largest city, Honolulu, is on Oahu.  

The principal businesses are sugar, pineapples, military, and tourists. 

Hawaii was first settled in the 13th century by Polynesian immigrants, likely from the Marquesan Islands and the Society Islands, more than 2000 miles away. In England, King John was signing the Magna Carta. Robin Hood was in Sherwood Forest, or not. Meanwhile the original settlers of Hawaii were traveling 2000 miles by double-hulled canoe.

Or maybe it was settled in the 5th century, when Rome was withdrawing from Britain and the Anglo-Saxons were coming in from mainland Europe. Arthur was king. Or not. 

Indigenous Hawaii is Polynesian, as is a vast settled area of the Pacific. With the Easter Islands, New Zealand, and Hawaii as the three corners, the Polynesian Triangle, the area settled by Polynesians, covers a whole lot of blue on a map. The Polynesian languages are derived from a Southeast Asia language group out of Taiwan, but genetic evidence traces Polynesian origins to earlier Asian migrants to New Guinea. 

Captain James Cook put Hawaii on navigation charts in 1798. He had already made first contact with Australia and circumnavigated New Zealand (to prove it wasn’t part of a larger, undiscovered southern continent), but on his third voyage Cook went and got himself killed by the Hawaiians. It was very unfortunate for all concerned, but particularly for Cook.

Before 1798, before 1820 really, the pre-literate history of Hawaii is mostly oral tradition, archaeology, and speculation, just like everyplace else with an indigenous population. Hawaii is different though because the first contacts were well-recorded. It helped that the New England missionaries and their descendants lived in the Hawaiian Kingdom for 70-odd years, plus the Hawaiians themselves quickly became literate. In the 19th Century, Hawaii may have been the most literate country on earth. They also surfed. 

Even after contact the Hawaiians were polytheistic, polygamous, radically hierarchical, and incestuous (at least among the royalty). Historically they had practiced slavery, infanticide, human sacrifice, and capital punishment for breaking the codes of conduct, the kapus, that governed society and religion. It was a jolly sort of place, even if women could be put to death for eating with men, or for eating a pork chop. The last recorded human sacrifice occurred in 1809. 

Notwithstanding speculation about the modern Islanders’ fondness for Spam, the native Hawaiians did not practice cannibalism. They did eat dogs. 

Between 1782 and 1810, Kamehameha the Great waged a war of unification against the other high chiefs, and consolidated island governance. Whalers arrived in 1819, and for the next 50 years Hawaii was a center for Pacific whaling. The same year, Kamehameha II, Liholiho, sat down to eat with women and ended the kapu prohibitions.  He also disbanded the priesthood–the kahuna, both big and small–and destroyed the polytheistic shrines.  

In 1820, Congregational missionaries arrived from New England,  and they and their descendants would wield an outsized influence on the Islands. They brought education, which many Hawaiians took to, and they brought Christianity, which many Hawaiians also took to. The New Englanders were disturbed to find Kamehameha II married to multiple wives, including both his half sister, his first wife, and his sister, his second wife. Apparently that sort of thing wasn’t common in New England, particularly among Congregationalists.

For a place that developed the ukulele, Hawaii in the 19th century must have been pretty tense. There were the rigid, pious, and fanatical missionaries; there were the licentious whalers and merchant ships coming into port looking to have a good time (and having it); there were the Native Hawaiians who were being marginalized by land privatization and population changes. Large numbers of Japanese and Chinese workers were brought in as agricultural laborers. Commercial interests–as often as not the enterprises of the missionary descendants–were beginning to dominate the economic life of the islands.  To top it off there was international intrigue. Hawaii didn’t have to be American. It could have been French, British, Russian, even Japanese. It could have been Hawaiian.

I thought that Texas was the only Republic to enter the Union, and here late in life I’ve realized I was misled. Hawaii was (1) a kingdom under the House of Kamehameha and then the House of Kalākaua, and then (2) the Republic of Hawaii under its president, Sanford Dole. The monarchies weren’t exactly paragons of governmental virtue, but their overthrow involved sugar tariffs, rich sugar planters, the price of sugar, landowning descendants of missionaries, and price subsidies paid to Louisiana sugar interests and sugar beets in Colorado.  Did I mention sugar? I’m sure there were some Dole pineapples in there somewhere. Hawaii was finally brought into the States as a territory in 1898, 100 years after Captain Cook, because our destiny as a world power required a powerful navy, and Hawaii was a key to a powerful navy.  Really.

By 1900, there were only about 30,000 Native Hawaiians. When Captain Cook reached the islands, the population estimates are from 100,000 to one million, but the archaeological record supports a population of up to 300,000. There hadn’t really been wars to reduce the population, not after Kamehameha the Great anyway, but there was plenty of disease, measles, tuberculosis, influenza, and whatnot, particularly tied to ships transporting miners for the 1840s California gold rush. There was also plenty of intermarriage, so that the 20 percent multiracial ethnicity will include many Hawaiian descendants. There was at least some out-migration. With a current Hawaiian-only population of about 140,000, the Native Hawaiian population has grown since the end of the monarchy. 

There is a modern Hawaiian separatist movement, or a lot of them, and unlike other indigenous American people Native Hawaiians do not have sovereignty, so there are also native sovereignty movements (which I think may be different from the separatist movements). 

What’s all this got to do with fishing? No idea.