The Ruler of the Heavens

The Rulers of The Heavens

Spirits of Darkness primeval,
Spirits of Light,
To Kane, the eternal,
To Kanaloa, the eternal,
To Hoomeha, the eternal,
To all my ancestors from eternity,
To Ku-huluhulumanu, the eternal,
That you may banish the darkness,
that we may enter the light.
To me, give divine power,
Give intelligence,
Give great success.
Climb to the wooded mountains,
to the mountain ridges,
Gather all the birds,
Bring them to my gum
to be held fast.
Amen Ua Noa (the kapu is lifted, the way is open).
Emerson, Bird-hunters of Ancient Hawaii, 1895

 It all started with a name; an elusive, mysterious, auspicious, magical name, one sufficient 

to provide all the incentive necessary to solve the mystery surrounding my Hawaiian great great 

great great grandfather. For most of my life, it languished on a nineteenth century deed 

supposedly connected to our mother’s native ancestors. But when I discovered that it was one of 

the most powerful names in Hawaiian mythology, everything changed, and solving the mystery of 

Kanehoalani became an obsession.

 Sadly, during my mother’s lifetime, we children neglected her family history, in no small part

because there was so little available. Just two names on a deed, and a cryptic reference to a 

family homestead in Kama’e’e, a tiny ahupuaa of which no one had heard on the Hamakua coast, 

between Ninole and Hakalau, on the island of Hawaii. Her Caucasian ancestors had come ashore 

and closed the door on their former families and homelands.  Consequently,  our mother was not 

always a source of reliable information. For example, her statement about her Grandfather 

Wessel’s Germanic origins was incorrect. She said we could be part French, because the Wessels 

were originally from Alsace-Lorraine. They weren’t; they were from Schleswig-Holstein, which 

explained the ten percent Scandinavian (and no French) that turned up when I did a DNA test 

recently. In the age of the internet and DNA tests, the truth will out. A computer search found 

a biography for our Wessel great grandfather, who had sailed from Hamburg in 1852 on the 

Deutschland to escape Kaiser Wilhelm, and settled near Davenport, Iowa, at Belle Plaine, where 

he became a farmer, and later, a canning factory manager.

For a long time I assumed there were no comparable source or sources of information

regarding our mother’s Hawaiian ancestors. I was wrong.

One day while searching my Hawaiian dictionary, something or someone directed me to the

Glossary of Hawaiian Gods, where I found Kanehoalani described as the “ruler of the heavens”.

The Hawaiian Zeus. Out of the blue. I was transfixed. My great- great- great -great

grandfather, the ruler of the heavens? Why, how such an auspicious name? So I asked my native

ancestors, out loud, and over the next few months and years, bit by bit, the answer

materialized.

It was shortly thereafter that I had my first encounter with the current ruler of the

Hawaiian heavens, in the form of a native hawk (b. solitarius). I had been hiking in the wild

eastern valleys for thirty years or more, and had seen the shorebirds, but on this day

I heard a compelling, high-pitched call, and directly overhead was the hawk, great wings

extended, motionless on the wind. I was utterly awestruck, enthralled. It was not just a bird.

It was by far far the largest winged creature I had ever seen in the Hawaiian sky, and its

sudden appearance lent an unavoidable element of mystery to it. I had gooseflesh on my head,

neck, shoulders and arms. A signal? Absolutely. Hawaiians have a word to describe just this

event. They call it ho’ailona, a strong signal or omen. I left the shorebirds and began to

follow the majestic hawk. It was as if by following this ancient, solitary native, I had found

a way to connect more deeply with my own forebears. The call of that unique, royal native was

resonating in my genes. Although in that moment I was not fully aware of it, the hawk would

lead me home.

Thereafter, there were daily encounters. I upgraded my camera equipment, in order to

have a record of the encounters, and soon there was a growing collection of images that evolved

into a book and a slide collection.

Ornithology had not been part of my previous educational curriculum. It was now. I began

to distinguish the larger, broad-winged natives from the occasional peregrine, with the

pointed, swept-back wings and black mustache. The native owls were easily identified by their

much larger heads, and their lower, slower flight paths. The silent, stealthy owls listened as

they flew, the hawks and peregrines were all very sharp-eyed motion detectors.

Family members assisted. My sister wrote an insightful story about Kanehoalani’s

granddaughter, our great great grandmother, Rebecca Ioela, and her ancestral home at Kama’e’e.

The steamer stop on the coast nearest Kama’e’e was called Pohakumanu (bird rock). From there it

was a steep climb up the flanks of Mauna Kea to the family compound. Our ahupuaa was located

next door to Hakalau, which translates as “many perches”, a place where birds congregated.

There was one more piece to the family puzzle. Before she died, our mother

collected copies of Six Months in the Sandwich Islands, by Isabella Bird, to give to each of

her four children. “Your great great grandmother is in this book”, she said, “A young native

whom the Austins selected to guide Miss Bird on the Hamakua coast”.

“ I shall never again see anything as beautiful as this fringe of the impassable
timber belt. I enjoyed it more than anything I had yet seen; it was intoxicating,
my eyes were “satisfied with seeing.” It was a dream, a rapture, this maze of
form and color, this entangled luxuriance, this bewildering beauty, through which
we caught bright glimpses of a heavenly sky above, while far away, below
glade and lawn, shimmered in surpassing loveliness the cool blue of the Pacific.
Here in cool, dreamy, sunny Onomea, there are no stabbing mosquitos as at
Honolulu to remind me of what I forget sometimes, that I am not in Eden.”
( Isabella Bird, The Hawaiian Archipelago, Picador, p. 113)

Isabella Bird arrived in the tiny town of Hilo on the windward coast of the island of

Hawaii in the winter of 1873. An Edinburgh Scot traveling for her health, she was soon

introduced to the Austins and their sugar plantation at Onomea, just north of Hilo on the

Hamakua coast. Stafford Austin had come from a line of New York lawyers and judges, while his

wife, Caroline Clark Austin, had been born in the islands, the daughter of an American

missionary.

Bird and the Austins became good friends and the Onomea plantation became her base

of operations while she explored the island of Hawaii, and wrote the letters which later became

a book, the popular title of which is Six Months in the Sandwich Islands.

Had serious thought been given to the idea of Rebecca Ioela and isabella Bird taking

horses along the Hamakua coast from Onomea to Waipio valley and back in January, the trip

would have been vetoed. The Austins allowed the two to go because it was understood that

Rebecca’s uncle would accompany them. Uncle’s horse had broken down. He could not

go. Rebecca’s unpredictable, unruly sixteen year old male cousin went instead.

November marks the start of the rainy season on the windward coasts of the Hawaiian

Islands. The northeast trades push the heavily laden clouds shoreward from far out to sea.

Trapped against Mauna Kea, the clouds dump winter rain in ceaseless torrents.

Between Hilo and Waipio Valley, sixty miles north, the rain has cut gorges, gulches

and a few larger valleys from the lower slopes of Mauna Kea. Rivers run through each.

In summer the volume of water recedes, making for easy crossing. In winter, the rivers

often flood, making crossing at times impossible. In 1873, there were no bridges.

Rebecca had two reasons for this trip, the first to act as guide, the second, to

stop at her grandfather’s compound at Kama’e’e, where her family had made a wedding

present for her. That stop would be made on the way back from Waipio.

Toward the end of the second day on horseback the rains came. It would be many days

before it stopped. Rivers would flood, putting lives at risk.

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…the roar was deafening, the sight terrific. Where there were two
shallow streams a week ago…there was now one spinning, rushing
chafing foaming river, twice as wide as the Clyde at Glasgow…
And most fearful to look upon, the ocean, in three huge breakers,
had come quite in, and its mountains of white surge looked fearfully
near the only possible crossing…Ibid. p. 148

Between the deluge and the deep dark sea, on horseback, returning to Onomea,

the summer streams all now, by January, at flood stage, to cross or not to cross became

a decision with potentially fatal consequences. Bird, older and more conservative, was

less willing to risk death. Rebecca, much younger, on a stronger horse, and anxious

to get home to her husband, was inclined to take greater chances, and she plunged ahead,

yelling spur, spur, and aim horses’ head upstream.

They stopped at Kama’e’e for the wedding present. Miss Bird described riding an extra

mile mauka while on their way home, in order to visit her guide’s grandparents, and to

receive a gift, a lei of bird feathers which Rebecca’s grandfather and granduncle had

made on the occasion of her recent marriage to Benjamin Macy of Nantucket. Bird described

the lei as “a very beautiful as well as costly ornament, for which I am sure 300 birds must

have been sacrificed”.

The birds had finally brought me home. The intrepid Isabella Bird was speaking of

our ancestors, Kanehoalani and Manuhoa, and from her description it was clear that they were

bird collectors and feather workers. What more auspicious names to give male children of

generations of Hawaiian bird collectors than Manuhoa and Kanehoalani? Friend of birds

and ruler of the heavens indeed.

My questions had been answered. Our maternal native ancestry had been clarified in a

most unlikely way. Our family owes a debt of gratitude to Miss Bird that can never be repaid.

Yet there she was, in the native cook house of the family Kanehoalani, waiting for the chicken

to cook in the imu, with her guide, a bilingual member of the family. They had traveled a

mile from the main road back to a period hundreds of years earlier, to an ancient time of bird

collectors, cape makers and kings. If only she had thought to ask questions? Were 300 birds

sacrificed in order to complete the feather wedding lei? The birds, what of the birds? Mamo?

Elepaio? Apapane? I’iwi? The heavily tattooed native women who were present in the cook

house where it was warm and relatively dry, thanks to its thatched roof of pili grass; what of

those women? What did the tattoos signify, if anything, beyond adornment? She could have

learned so much more had she only thought to inquire. But it was cold and wet on the windward

coast, and she had been on horseback for nine days, narrowly escaping death while fording

flooded streams with our great great grandmother. After all that, Bird must have been more

than ready to return to a hot bath and a dry, warm bed at the Austins. But the worst

crossings were yet to come. Miss Bird later attributed her survival to the Mexican saddle she

utilized. Had she used an English saddle, she would have been swept away and drowned.

Fortunately for all of us, that did not happen.

One can only hope that the feather lei survived the remainder of that wild trip. By

1870, the bird which provided those feathers had been hunted to near extinction. Further,

the two remaining men of my mother’s native family who had the expertise to capture the

last few birds and fashion the lei had grown older, and could no longer perform the arduous

collection work. There was no one left in the family to carry on the ancient craft of cape and

feather lei making. Barely in time, Bird had arrived to witness and document the end of the

age of bird collection and feather work at Kama’e’e.

Today, in the deep forest above Hakalau, the brilliantly colored palila, ‘apapane and

‘elepaio that remain from the time of Manuhoa and Kanehoalani enjoy protected status. One

hopes for their continued survival and proliferation. As one of the curators from the British

Museum recently observed, the Hawaiians of old lacked the mineral resources necessary to create

jewelry fit for monarchs. What they had instead were the endemic forest birds with their

dazzling feathers, and so my native forefathers collected them in order to acquire the

materials needed to craft the breathtakingly beautiful capes, leis and helmets worn by the

kings and queens of Hawaii.

During her lifetime, my mother was, sadly, unaware of the calling of her cape making

native ancestors, the literary efforts of Isabella Bird notwithstanding. I regret that my own

search for those forebears was not completed before her death. Perhaps there could be a

degree of consolation in the fact that, seven generations later, one of my grandsons carries

the Manuhoa name, and through the inspired work of Ms. Bird, Rebecca Ioela and my mother, the

auspicious history of that name, and that of Kanehoalani and Mahulualani will now be more

widely known within our family, if nowhere else, and my grandson, if he is asked regarding

the origins of his name, will be able to explain that he is the namesake of one who was a

member of an ancient Hawaiian family of bird collectors and feather workers who lived and

worked on the windward flanks of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii, engaged in the unique

and exotic craft of creating feather cloaks and helmets for Hawaiian kings and queens. And

his explanation, as improbable and astonishing as it sounds, will be entirely true.
Ua noa: The kapu is lifted, the way is now open.

The Boys in the Fifth

In 1943 I was born into a world at war. My father, an American infantry captain, was in New Guinea with General Robert Eichelberger’s Eighth Army. Eichelberger later disclosed that his marching orders from General MacArthur had been to clear New Guinea of the enemy or not return. Both he and my father survived, but in my father’s case, with hearing loss, battle fatigue, malaria and foot fungus. He managed to shake the malaria.

As he put it so eloquently in one of his few comments about his wartime experiences, they hunkered in tents at night with a blanket of artillery overhead so they could sleep, nothing to fear but a short round or extending lull. Incursions followed lulls. No great wonder he spent the rest of his life in the deafening quiet that signaled an incoming New Guinea nightfall.

While awaiting my father’s possible return, my mother and I stayed with my grandparents at their home in Waiakea Uka, on the outskirts of Hilo, Hawaii. Early photos show me and my mother surrounded by young Caucasian men in Khaki uniforms. There was a Marine training camp just behind our home, and my grandfather provided shelter, weekend meals, transportation, mail service, pharmacy supplies and newspapers from his drug store downtown. The Marines were training for the Iwo Jima landing.

***********************************************

Harry Arthur Wessel arrived in Hilo in 1912 to work as a pharmacist for the Hilo Drug Company. He received his undergraduate degree from the University ofCalifornia Berkeley just prior to the San Francisco earthquake, and jobs in Northern California were hard to find. He married Tamar Reinhardt of Hilo in 1920. Shortly thereafter, he boughtthe drug company and erected the building that is now located on the corner of Waianuenue and Kamehameha Avenues in downtown Hilo. Harry was an intelligent hard worker who wasn’t afraid to speak his mind, and one of my favorite recollections of my grandfather was his comment when a prominent Hilo politician came through the store on a campaign walking tour.Harry shook his hand, looked him in the eye and said quietly: “I’m not voting for you, Doc, you know that.”

On the day before the Marines were scheduled to depart for the war, there was a knock on the front door of the Wessel home. A not so young Marine sergeant had a gift, a newly framed pastel painting of an island scene. The inscription on the back read as follows:

Grant Powers, Pl. Sgt. USMC, To Harry Wessel, with thanks and best wishes from the boys in the “Fifth”.

Powers, a Philadelphia native, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1921 with a degree in architecture. He joined the Philadelphia Daily News and worked there as an illustrator, cartoonist and sports writer until 1942, when he re-enlisted in the Marines. He survived the landing at Iwo Jima. Combat Team 28 had the unenviable task of taking Mt. Suribachi. Of sixty-nine sergeants, only six survived. After retiring from the Marines, Powers settled in Central Sandwich, New Hampshire, where he was a landscape artist and cartoonist. He died there in 1978.

The painting went to my mother’s younger sister after my grandfather died. Recently it was given to me, and it now occupies a place of honor on a living room wall in my home in Hawaii.

My thanks to the talented and patriotic Sergeant Powers. En route to his second war, he paused in Hawaii and shared an island vision. Thanks also to the Sandwich Historical Society of Central Sandwich, New Hampshire, for their biography of Pl. Sgt. Ulysses S. Grant Powers, USMC.

Pages: 1 2

COMDESRON-50

It was lunchtime with the Admiral, at his winter home in Hilo. My mother made macaroni and cheese, his favorite meal. She had a not-so-secret recipe; she added milk to the noodles, put a heavy layer of cheddar over everything, then baked it. I took my portion first, the rest was his. There would be no leftovers.

Later, “where were we”, he asked. I checked my notes: Renshaw, I said. 1942, I collected the new destroyer from the Federal shipyard in New Jersey, and after sea trials, took her through the Panama Canal and then out to Pearl. We escorted transports to the Solomon Islands, and while there did some ground bombardment. While that was going on, I got word that I would be promoted. Admiral Spruance was putting together a large task force for operations in the western Pacific.” “Is that this cryptic coded material on your war record following Renshaw?” I asked. “ Right, he said, Destroyer Squadron 50, made up of nine new very fast ships. We provided escort for the Enterprise, and other carriers. I commanded the group, first from the Cogswell, then, in May of 1944, I moved to the Bronson. By then we were returning from providing air support for General Eichelberger’s Hollandia invasion in New Guinea.

Before we could get there, though, we had to take the Marshall islands. We left Hawaii in mid January. Majuro came first, and it turned out to be a huge gift from the enemy. The enormous lagoon and all the civilian and military infrastructure we collected intact. Before the bombardment was scheduled to begin, we put a scouting party ashore. They found natives who reported that the enemy had all left for Eniwetok, leaving a single officer in charge, who was soon captured. The report came back from the scouts: “stop the bombardment, we’ve taken Majuro”.

We moved in and immediately began refueling and rearming operations. Majuro soon became the Pearl Harbor of the central Pacific. Just in time; two days after we took over, the Indiana struck the stern of the Washington in a 4am collision. Washington had crossed in front of Indiana, which almost managed to steer clear. Washington had its stern sheared off by Indiana’s bow, which was crushed. One of them was zigging when it should have been zagging. Both battleships later made it to Majuro. We did search and rescue for crew members. With so many ships, it was a wonder there weren’t more of those collisions.

From Majuro we next attacked Truk Lagoon in mid-february. Truk was heavily fortified and I suppose they figured we would look for less dangerous targets. We caught them with their assets exposed. Two hundred fifty planes destroyed, forty ships sunk. It was a big win for us. Revenge for Pearl Harbor. Very good for morale, because the work was incredibly stressful. Continuous calls to battle stations (GQ), night and day. Never enough sleep. Watch for aircraft, stay in proper formation, zig zag followed by straight line followed by zig zag, watch for periscopes and torpedo wakes, we couldn’t let our guard down for a minute out there.

I forgot to mention one more thing about Hollandia. Your father and I almost crossed paths there, he was an infantry captain with General Eichelberger’s outfit. They were fortunate with that landing, very little resistance. Earlier, however, just down the coast at Buna, they had not been so lucky. Eight thousand American and Australian troops slaughtered. The cemetery where they all were buried was called Eichelberger square. I don’t know how your father survived that one.

MacArthur learned some lessons, though. No more futile frontal assaults against dug in enemy machine guns. Find places on the coast where the enemy had not set up. Land troops and build forward airfields. Bomb enemy positions. Then keep leap-frogging toward Manila. Leave the enemy remnants to die of the two m’s, malnutrition and malaria.

MacArthur was in a big hurry to get back to Manila. Guilty conscience. Vanity. Bad combination. Just before the enemy overran Corregidor and started the Bataan death march, he and his family and staff (and no one else) were evacuated from Manila Bay in the middle of the night through enemy-controlled ocean six hundred nautical miles south to Mindanao by a very resourceful U.S. Navy PT boat commander named John Bulkely. Despite long odds, Bulkely and his passengers made it safely to their destination, where an Army B-17 waited to evacuate the MacArthur party, first to Darwin, then Brisbane where he set up his headquarters. Bulkely, meanwhile, returned to duty. For that improbable passenger delivery he received heartfelt thanks from MacArthur and the Medal of Honor from a grateful Franklin Roosevelt. “

The Search for Amelia Earhart: Nikumaroro

When it became apparent, on July 2, 1937, that the plane carrying Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan was lost and would not be landing at Howland Island as planned, the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, which had been dispatched to Howland to assist Earhart, contacted US Navy headquarters in Honolulu and requested assistance with a search. The Navy sent the battleship USS Colorado from Pearl Harbor.

While the Colorado was en route, Itasca headed northwest from Howland in the direction of a large cloud bank which had obscured visibility. Because of problems with equipment, Itasca could receive radio transmissions from Earhart, but she could not receive from Itasca. The last transmission from Earhart reported that they were on line157 337, which is a northwest to southeast navigational line that bisects Howland Island. Southeast of Howland on this line is Nikumaroro Island.

Nikumaroro is twice the size of Howland, and has a large central lagoon that Howland lacks. The other distinguishing feature at Nikumaroro in the summer of 1937 was the wreck of a tramp steamer on the outer reef.

In the midst of a nocturnal tropical storm in late November, 1929, the freighter Norwich City ran aground. Initially, the captain hoped to keep the crew aboard ’til daylight. That plan had to be abandoned when a fire that had started in the engine room spread out of control. Fortunately, an SOS was sent. Two lifeboats were lowered, but both quickly overturned in the rough surf. In the chaos that followed, some men drowned, some were taken by sharks, and others managed to make it ashore. All who made it ashore had been cut on the coral reef. At sunrise, twenty-four survivors were counted, and they spent the next week waiting to be rescued. They constructed a large shelter using tree branches secured by salvaged canvas and rope. They hunted birds and crabs and searched for drinking water. When two freighters from Samoa reached them a week later, they left behind the considerable evidence of their recent habitation; they left the bodies of the dead sailors; and they left the Norwich City, which was still high on the reef, when eight years later, on July 9, 1937, three recon float planes from the USS Colorado flew overhead.

The planes were looking for a Lockheed Electra and its two occupants. They found nothing. The significance of this cannot be overemphasized. Between July 2 and July 13, there were widespread reports of radio transmissions from Earhart. In order to transmit, she required an aircraft. If the transmissions were authentic, they could not have been coming from Nikumaroro.

Recently there has been renewed speculation regarding Nikumaroro as Earhart’s final resting place. Such speculation ignores the conclusion of the U.S. Navy that the plane sank, (“eighteen thousand feet down”) and it ignores the search conducted by the float planes from the Colorado only seven days after Earhart’s Electra went missing. Finally, if Earhart’s aircraft did in fact manage to land at Nikumaroro, following navigational line 157, it first had to pass directly over Howland where the Itasca waited, smoke belching from her smokestack; all eyes on the empty morning sky.

The Search for Amelia Earhart: Howland

There had been rain in the night, like thunder on the aged tin roof. Not the usual Hilo rain, this deluge reminded the Admiral of the furious squalls in the Line Islands south of Hawaii, at Howland, where he had spent that never to be forgotten July a lifetime ago, before the War, when he was a junior deck officer on the battleship Colorado. Nothing he had done in his life before or after that July had been as tumultuous, gallant, romantic or futile. The Colorado had been called to Howland to participate in the search for Amelia Earhart.

There had been a brief flirtation, before she had finally married Putnam (after refusing him no less than six times.) Had she been waiting for the then Lieutenant? He had married a year later, in 1932. The romance had ended by 1937, had it not? But after arriving in the search area a week after Earhart had gone missing, the Lieutenant had asked to join the recon flights as an observer, and his request had been granted. (The Colorado carried three unarmed float planes for reconnaissance work.) Considerable care had been given to the question of where to begin the search. With the southeast trades blowing from Howland in the general direction of the Phoenix Islands, the decision was made to start there. Consequently, on the 9th of July, he joined pilot John Short and two other planes as they catapulted away from the ship to try to locate Amelia at Nikumaroro (Gardner Island.) Except she wasn’t there, or if she was, she wasn’t visible from or responsive to the three noisy biplanes, and her silver Lockheed was nowhere to be found. They searched the remaining Phoenix Islands before returning to the ship and then, a few days later, after the arrival of the carrier Lexington with sixty more planes, Colorado returned to Honolulu.

Howland. Did anyone else appreciate the irony in that name? Howland. How to land an airplane there when one has reached the navigational landing coordinates and the runway, the island, the world below has been obliterated by rain. Had navigator Noonan been too nonchalant regarding his navigational skills? He was good, but he wasn’t God. Had anyone in the Earhart entourage thought to plan for such a contingency, before they chose a runway at the center of a vast empty sea and at the far end of the Lockheed’s fuel range? Once they took off from New Guinea with this flight plan, it was Howland or bust.

He thought often of that summer, how the Colorado had brought him home, first to Lahaina for some practice bombardment at Kahoolawe. Unleashing the thunder of the big guns always brought daily events to a crashing halt on Front Street, in Kihei and Kaunakakai, even Lanai City stopped to listen and stare and marvel. Then the short scenic cruise along the familiar southwest coast of Molokai and across the Ka Iwi (Boneyard) Channel to Diamond Head, and finally to Pearl Harbor, where the berth waited on Battleship Row. He had left Honolulu in 1921, on the Matsonia. Now he was returning, after graduating from the Naval Academy, an officer on one of the most powerful ships in the world. From Pearl, he caught a cab to Nuuanu for dinner with his proud parents, then a long, well deserved liberty weekend in Waikiki. Crosby was all over the radio, with something new called “Sweet Leilani”. It had recently won an Academy Award, somehow beating the Gershwins’ supremely sophisticated (and ironic) “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”.

He was still asleep in his old bed when the weekend plans were dashed the next morning. The call came canceling liberty; Colorado was shipping out immediately for search and rescue in the Line Islands. An aircraft was overdue.

Gone To The Sandwich Islands part 2

Tracking my Macy forebears was easy. But the clues relating to my native ancestry were all in another language, my mother’s language, the one she used when she and her nurse Alice Kaleikau had lunch together at our home in Hilo. It was miko if the poi was a bit on the sour side, and ho’opailua if the poi had lumps.

Waikamalo, for example, was our nineteenth century family compound on the Hamakua coast at Ninole. My mother knew little about her Hawaiian family, and the name did not appear in Place Names of Hawaii, the comprehensive dictionary of Hawaiian place names. Then one day, I saw Waikaumalo in Place Names, and realized we had misspelled it, even if the translation made little sense: “Placing loincloth water”. A deep stream perhaps, one that will result in wet clothes while crossing? Perhaps.

The first clues were found in a government award of seventy eight acres at Kamae’e on the island of Hawaii to my mother’s native ancestors, Manuhoa and Kanehoalani. The land was located somewhere on the windward side of the 14,000 foot shield volcano called Mauna Kea. But where? What did it mean? No one knew. There was nothing in Place Names, and it was not until my mother died and an old newspaper interview surfaced that I found out where it was located. In 1967, the Hilo Tribune-Herald ran a feature article on my grandmother’s aunt, Caroline Austin Macy Patten, on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday. It was she who placed Kamae’e above Hakalau, and who said that she had visited her great-grandfather, Kanehoalani, who had lived there in native grass houses; one for cooking, the other for sleeping. Sadly, she was not asked to provide any translations. Manuhoa did not require assistance; it meant “friend of birds”; and Hakalau, also a bird-related term, meant “many perches”, but what about Kamae’e? Was it Ka-mae’e, or Kama-e’e? Completely different outcomes depending on the emphasis. The problem was that my first efforts at translation were often erroneous. That happens with Hawaiian words, especially if the context is absent, as it was in this instance. Then my son found a translation in an old Hawaiian dictionary. It was based on the Ka-mae’e presumption. It referred to people who were very kind and very able. Flattering, but was it accurate? More context would be needed.

Mahulualani was the next clue; the name of my maternal great grandmother. For a long time I pronounced it mahu-lua-lani. Wrong, of course, but I didn’t know that until my sister sent me a 1926 memoir written by one of the Austins of Onomea Plantation, who translated the name of his Hawaiian nanny, for whom my great grandmother was named, as Ma-hulu-a-lani, or “bright heavenly feather”. Thank you, Franklin Austin. Another clue now deciphered. The steamer stop on the dangerous windward coast at Kamae’e was called Pohakumanu. That was easy; it meant “bird rock”. The bird references were accumulating.

Because the bird references kept appearing, I felt comfortable placing the context for the translation of Kamae’e in the realm of avifauna. As result, the translation involves two root words: Kama (to bind, tie or wrap), and e’e (the yellow underwing feathers of the o’o, a Hawaiian forest bird now extinct). Simply stated, it means feather work. Were my native ancestors bird collectors?

Gone To The Sandwich Islands part 1

           Like the voyage of the mountain itself into the northwest, the eon
           of the birds seemed perpetual like the mountain
          long before another side of the night gave birth to humans
           and for an age after that there was no sign of them
           growing closer around the unbroken horizon
          the streams went on overflowing seaward…
          and small fish and crayfish brought their salt in from the sea
           and swam up the falling water
         to live in the falling before time until the first canoe
          appeared in the west and only the birds saw it…
                                                              (WS Merwin, The Folding Cliffs)

The 1890 edition of the two-volume Macy family genealogy devoted but a single line to my great- great grandfather: Benjamin Baxter Macy, born Nantucket 1842: gone to the Sandwich islands. Gone, at age 19, on an eighteen thousand mile sea voyage, first to Rio, around Cape Horn to Valparaiso, then northwest into the Pacific, never to return. Why leave Nantucket? Were there clues in some of the other genealogy entries? There was, unfortunately, another one-line entry, repeated many times for others in the family: “fell from aloft off the Vineyard, off New Bedford, off Nantucket.” A Macy occupational hazard. A fall also killed a cousin, George Nelson Macy, but on an icy sidewalk in Boston. A fall that might not have been fatal but for the Derringer in his coat pocket that discharged when he hit the bricks.

In early 1861, George had enlisted in the Twentieth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (the Harvard Regiment). By the battle of Gettysburg, he was a Lieutenant Colonel, and second in command of his company. He briefly took command when Colonel Paul Revere was killed, but soon after, when his left hand was blown off, he retired from the field.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Baxter, who chose not to enlist, boarded a ship that was leaving for San Francisco. In California, he booked passage on the clipper ship Yankee, bound for Honolulu. He was not the first in his family to undertake this voyage. His four older siblings had all preceded him on the many thousand mile journey to the Islands. The eldest, George Winthrop, had started a business provisioning the whaling ships that called at Kawaihae, on the lee side of the island of Hawaii.

Kawaihae in 1861 was a foul, depressing rathole; hot, dry, barren; so Ben went looking for work on the lush windward coast at Onomea, at the Austin sugar plantation, where he became a carpenter and later a supervisor. There, in 1873, he married Rebecca Ioela, a native of the area. Their daughter, Emma Mahulualani, was my maternal great grandmother.

Their first son was named George Manuhoa, perhaps for Benjamin’s older brother, George Winthrop, who died in Honolulu in 1883, or, possibly for cousin George Nelson, who distinguished himself in war service, only to die an untimely death on a Boston street corner.

The Silver Ship part 2

The Kilauea Hou offloaded two lifeboats; the first contained a dozen patients; the second, RLS and two nuns who were arriving for the first time. One of the nuns was in tears. As he put it later in a letter to his wife, Stevenson recalled his golden rule: when one is ashamed to speak, that is when one must speak up immediately. He spoke to the nuns and tried to reassure them (and himself) that God was present and welcoming them. But then they reached the dock, and a “great crowd (God save us!) of pantomime masks in poor human flesh, was waiting to receive the Sisters and the new patients.”

At the time of Stevenson’s arrival, Father Damien had already been dead for a month. Nevertheless, Kalawao, where Damien had lived and worked, was the objective for RLS,and he set out on foot from the dock. He spent a “harrowing” week there. On most mornings, he rode three miles along the base of the great cliffs to Bishop Home (a miracle of neatness, per Stevenson) in Kalaupapa where he played croquet with Mother Marianne Cope and seven young ladies. He used their mallets. Later, when asked if he wore gloves, he said: ” of course not, the Sisters suggested it, but because they didn’t use them, how could I”? Then there was lunch with the players after which he returned on horseback to Kalawao, where he conducted interviews with english-speaking residents and medical staff.

On the day of his planned departure he was refused passage because he had not been supplied with an exit permit. Perhaps it had simply been an oversight by the administrator of the Department of Health, Dr. Emerson, the man Kalakaua had pressured to grant RLS access to visit Kalawao. The matter was only resolved when Stevenson finally gathered his courage and leapt aboard, consequences be damned, as the Mokolii was casting off.

After returning to Honolulu, RLS had a grand piano sent to Bishop Home. He also sent a letter to a book seller in London with instructions to prepare a personalized set of his most popular titles (Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The New Arabian Nights, and The Merry Men) for Princess Kaiulani, who was then with the Davies in Liverpool. In August, Kaiulani received the books and sent Stevenson a thank you note which included: “I hope that when I have finished school I will be able to fulfill the position you offered me as your secretary.” But by august RLS had left Honolulu; it was too cold; there were too many electric lights; and was southbound through the Gilbert Islands on the Equator, a small trading schooner.

The departure from Honolulu had taken place on June 24th. At the very last minute, two fine carriages arrived at the dock to deposit Kalakaua and musicians. A final champagne farewell ensued, to Hawaiian musical accompaniment. They would not meet again. In eighteen months, Stevenson would be living in Samoa, at Vailima, and Kalakaua would be dead.

The Silver Ship part 1

“The Silver Ship, my King—that was her name
in the bright islands whence your fathers came—
The Silver Ship, at rest from winds and tides,
Below your palace in your harbor rides:”
(from To Kalakaua, by RLS)

It was late January, 1889, when the yacht Casco, with Robert Louis Stevenson and family aboard, finally made landfall in Honolulu after a brutal thirty day passage from Tahiti. RLS arrived without food or funds. Dry rot in the masts had delayed the departure while expensive repairs were conducted. Upon collecting his mail and finding no money from London or elsewhere, he concluded that he could no longer afford the Casco. He soon discharged the yacht, which returned to San Francisco, and the Stevensons took up lodging at the Diamond Head end of Waikiki, not far from the Cleghorn residence at Ainahau. In order to restock his bank account, he decided to go dark (his words) for a few months and write. He hadn’t counted on meeting the King, David Kalakaua.

Fanny Stevenson’s daughter, Belle, and her husband, Joe Strong, had arrived in Honolulu in 1882, and were friends of the King. Two days after his arrival, RLS was introduced to Kalakaua by Joe Strong. Champagne parties followed, and card games at the King’s boathouse. The King introduced Stevenson to his brother-in-law, Archibald Cleghorn, another Edinburgh Scot, and president of the local Thistle Club. There were dinners at Ainahau, where RLS met Cleghorn’s young daughter, Princess Kaiulani, leading to afternoon teas, and dinners at the Stevensons’s. Later still, RLS would escort Kaiulani home to Ainahau along the path between the beach at Sans Souci and Kapiolani Park. It all ended in May, when the Princess, her sister Annie and her father sailed on the Umatilla for San Francisco. On the same boat, coincidentally, was Stevenson’s mother, on her way home.

A few days later, RLS caught the Kilauea Hou for Molokai. The morning of 22 May found his freighter “wallowing along under stupendous cliffs,” until Kalaupapa came into view, a “little town of wooden homes, bare and bleak and harsh.” Stevenson’s initial request to visit the leper settlement had been denied and permission had come only after a personal intervention by Kalakaua.

Kaiulani’s Crystals part 4

Fresh from three long years before the mast on the whaling ship Peruvian, George M. Robertson landed in Honolulu in 1844. He was 23, and had no interest, after seeing Oahu, in returning to St. Johns, New Brunswick, with his ship. He began to study law and the Hawaiian language, and within a short time was appointed to the Land Commission. Judicial appointments followed, as did marriage and the birth of his son James William, in 1852. Oddly enough, James, at age 15, set out for St Johns, where he went to work for an uncle as a clerk in an insurance office, after which he went to sea for four years, before finally returning to Honolulu in 1871. There he made the rounds seeking employment, and eventually he was hired by Archibald Cleghorn. Marriage to Cleghorn’s daughter, Rose Kaipuala, came next.

It may be that the final gathering of the Robertson clan took place in Honolulu in January, 1914, on the occasion of the ninetieth birthday of Sarah Humphreys Robertson, widow of Judge George Morison Robertson. Someone had the good sense to copy a photograph of the assemblage, and even better, to identify each of the forty three participants in a Robertson genealogy. My grandmother, Hilda Rose Robertson Chillingworth, is present, holding my father’s older brother, two year old Selden. She is also pregnant with my father, who will be born in June of that year. My grandfather, an infantry captain, (for whom I am named) has gone to war. Rose Cleghorn Robertson, Hilda’s mother, is also absent, as she died in 1911. Sadly, she was the third Cleghorn daughter to die too soon. She barely survived the death in late 1910 of her father, Archibald, who had never recovered from the death of Kaiulani.

The bad news did not end with Archibald’s death. The contents of his will made the front page of the Honolulu newspapers of November 11, 1910, including the disinheritance of my grandmother’s older brother. That brother would soon be responsible for the final injustice when he convinced the territorial legislature to refuse the Cleghorn testamentary gift of Ainahau as a public park in memory of Princess Kaiulani. The legislative refusal opened the way for the subdivision and sale of the entire Ainahau acreage. The residence eventually came into the hands of a photographer/promoter of Hawaiian travelogues whose unattended gas heater caught fire one night in 1921, and before the fire department could arrive (from Kaimuki), Ainahau burned to the ground.