Hawaiʻi
The Shape of It
A chain of volcanic mountains, most of them underwater, moving slowly toward Japan.
The Hawaiian islands are not a fixed place so much as a snapshot. They sit above a hot spot — a plume of heat rising from deep in the earth — and as the Pacific plate drifts slowly northwest, new islands are born, used, and eventually eroded back into the sea. The oldest of the chain, now the Emperor Seamounts, disappeared beneath the waves millions of years ago. Kauaʻi is the eldest of the visible islands, around five million years old. The Big Island, at the other end, is still under construction.
Mauna Kea, on the Big Island, is by one reckoning the tallest mountain in the world. Above sea level it stands 13,803 feet, which nobody would call modest. But measured from its base on the ocean floor, it rises more than 33,000 feet — a mile taller than Everest. It is also, improbably, a mountain that carries permanent astronomical observatories on its summit and bore glaciers during the last ice age. Snow falls there most winters. This is tropical Hawaiʻi.
Some twenty miles offshore from the Big Island's southeastern coast, a new volcano is growing. Kamaʻehuakanaloa — formerly known as Lōʻihi — is currently around 3,000 feet below the surface. It will break the waterline in perhaps 100,000 years. The Hawaiians already know its name.
Kīlauea is among the most continuously active volcanoes on Earth. Between 1983 and 2018, it erupted for 35 years without real pause, adding 875 acres of new land to the island during the 2018 eruption alone and destroying the town of Kalapana in 1990. The lava reaching the sea produces what locals call laze — a corrosive haze of hydrochloric acid and fine volcanic glass. The new coastline it builds is equally new and genuinely dangerous.
Hawaii is the only US state that lies entirely outside the North American continent. It is also the only state that grows coffee commercially. It does not observe daylight saving time, which makes scheduling calls with the mainland a more philosophical exercise than it should be.
Notable Folk
A queen who composed in captivity, a swimmer they refused to believe, and a princess who gave her fortune to schoolchildren.
The only woman ever to rule Hawaiʻi as queen, and the last Hawaiian sovereign of any kind. She ascended the throne in 1891, immediately moved to restore a constitution that would return political power to native Hawaiians, and was overthrown in January 1893 by a committee of American and European businessmen, backed by US Marines. She yielded, as she later wrote, to avoid bloodshed. President Grover Cleveland found the coup illegal and ordered her restored; the provisional government simply ignored him.
She was held under house arrest in ʻIolani Palace. There, denied newspapers and literature, she composed music with pencil and paper. “For me, composing was as natural as breathing,” she wrote. Her songs were smuggled out and printed anonymously in Hawaiian-language newspapers; her people replied in kind, also in song. This exchange continued for months before anyone in authority noticed. Over her lifetime she composed more than 150 works. She is buried at Mauna Ala, the Royal Mausoleum, in Nuʻuanu.
His name was Duke not because he held any title, but because his father was born the day the Duke of Edinburgh visited Honolulu in 1869 and was named accordingly. Duke senior passed the name to his firstborn, and that firstborn changed the sporting world. At Hawaiʻi’s first official amateur swim meet in 1911, held in Honolulu Harbour, the twenty-year-old Kahanamoku swam the 100-yard freestyle in 55.4 seconds — a full 4.6 seconds faster than the world record. The Amateur Athletic Union, on the mainland, refused to recognise the result. They assumed the timekeepers were wrong.
They were not. He went on to win Olympic gold in Stockholm (1912), Antwerp (1920), and silver in Paris (1924) — where his brother Samuel took the bronze. His Olympic career spanned twenty years, four Games, and six medals. In between, he surfed his 16-foot, 114-pound koa wood board at Waikīkī, gave exhibitions in Australia, California and New Zealand, taught the Prince of Wales to surf, and appeared in thirty Hollywood films. In 1925, while visiting Newport Beach, California, he used his surfboard to rescue eight men from a capsized fishing boat. The police chief called it the most superhuman surfboard rescue act the world has ever seen. He later served thirteen consecutive terms as Sheriff of Honolulu. He was inducted into both the Swimming Hall of Fame and the Surfing Hall of Fame — the first person in either.
The great-granddaughter of Kamehameha I and the last direct descendant of his dynasty, she declined the throne when it was offered to her after the death of Kamehameha V — an act of restraint that is still remembered. She married the American banker Charles Reed Bishop and became one of the largest landowners in the islands. When she died, she left the bulk of her estate — nearly 375,000 acres — in trust for the education of Hawaiian children. The Kamehameha Schools, founded under her will, still operate today. Her portrait hangs in the Bishop Museum, which her husband founded in her memory.
In 1824, the Hawaiian king and his queen visited England on a state visit. Both died of measles within weeks of arrival — a disease they had no immunity against. They had hoped to meet King George IV, who was away at the time and did not rush back. Their remains were returned to Hawaiʻi aboard HMS Blonde, escorted by the naturalist Andrew Bloxam. The islands, for five years without a king they had known since birth, went into deep mourning. The young nation’s first diplomatic venture had ended in a pair of coffins.
The Tongue
A language of thirteen letters, banned for eighty years, now fighting its way back. And another one that grew in the plantation fields from six languages at once.
The Hawaiian language — ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi — has thirteen letters: five vowels (A, E, I, O, U) and eight consonants (H, K, L, M, N, P, W, and the ʻokina, a glottal stop written as an apostrophe and treated as a full letter). Every vowel is pronounced. The W is sometimes V. There are no consonant clusters. The language flows accordingly.
Before Captain Cook arrived in 1778, the language had no written form. American Protestant missionaries developed an alphabet for it between 1820 and 1826, specifically so they could print Bibles. When Hawaiʻi became a US territory in 1898, Hawaiian was banned from schools. For eighty years, children were punished for speaking their mother tongue in class. The language was not reinstated as an official language until the 1978 state constitutional convention — making Hawaiʻi the only US state with a non-English official language. Immersion schools, the first of which opened in 1984, are still working to rebuild what was taken.
Alongside Hawaiian, the islands developed Pidgin — properly Hawaiʻi Creole English, though nobody calls it that in conversation. It grew on the sugar plantations of the nineteenth century, where workers from Japan, China, the Philippines, Portugal, Korea and Puerto Rico needed to communicate with each other and with Native Hawaiians. Pidgin is not broken English. It is a rule-governed creole with its own grammar, its own cadences, and more than 600,000 speakers. The US Census Bureau recognised it as a distinct language in 2015. The New Testament was translated into it in 2000. The translation is called Da Jesus Book.
Some ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi worth knowing
Some Pidgin worth knowing
Place Names
Hawaiian place names are not decorative. They describe, they remember, they warn.
Then there is the state fish. The humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa — pronounced roughly hoo-moo-hoo-moo-noo-koo-noo-koo-ah-poo-ah-ah — is a small reef triggerfish whose Hawaiian name means “triggerfish with a snout like a pig.” It was designated the state fish in 1984, but the legislation included a five-year sunset clause. Nobody renewed it. Hawaiʻi went officially fish-free from 1990 until 2006, when the legislature permanently reinstated it. School children campaigned for the reinstatement. They are to be commended.
At the Table
Not a cuisine but a history: of what the canoes brought, what the plantation workers cooked, and what Hormel added to the equation.
The first Hawaiians arrived by canoe with what are called canoe plants: the thirty-odd species they brought deliberately from their homelands, including taro, sweet potato, yam, breadfruit, banana, sugarcane, coconut, and the kukui nut. Of these, taro was the foundation. It was grown in flooded paddies along mountain streams, fed by the ahupuaʻa system, and pounded into poi.
Poi is cooked taro root mashed and thinned with water to a smooth, slightly fermented paste. It is classified as one-, two-, or three-finger poi depending on its consistency: the thicker the poi, the fewer fingers needed to lift it. To a newcomer it tends to taste of very little; to someone raised on it, it is comfort food of the most fundamental kind. The missionaries found it revolting. The Hawaiians ate it at every meal.
The plantation era changed everything. Workers from Japan, China, Korea, the Philippines, and Portugal arrived in waves. Each brought their food and, given that the plantation store was often the only shop, they traded and shared and improvised. The plate lunch — two scoops of white rice, macaroni salad, and a protein — is the direct descendant of the Japanese bento box, adapted for the inter-ethnic realities of a field canteen. You will find it everywhere. It is substantial.
Spam arrived during World War II, when refrigerated fresh meat was scarce and Hawaiʻi was a military staging ground. It stayed. Hawaiʻi now consumes around seven million cans per year, more per capita than anywhere else in the United States. McDonald’s serves it at breakfast alongside eggs and rice. It appears atop ramen, fried with kimchi, tucked into musubi. The Spam musubi — a slice of fried Spam on rice, wrapped in nori, pressed into a block — is sold at every convenience store, every petrol station, and most school cafeterias. It costs about a dollar and is not nothing.
The Loco Moco
In 1949, a group of teenagers in Hilo called the Lincoln Wreckers Athletic Club asked the owner of the Lincoln Grill restaurant, Nancy Inouye, to make them something hot, filling, cheap, and not a sandwich. She put white rice in a bowl, laid a hamburger patty on it, and poured brown gravy over the top. The fried egg came shortly after. The teenagers named it “Loco Moco” — loco being the Spanish for crazy (the nickname of one club member, George Okimoto), and moco added because it rhymed and sounded good. It spread across the islands within a decade. Today it is served from roadside wagons to hotel restaurants, where the hamburger patty has sometimes been replaced by lobster, and the brown gravy is no longer from a packet, but the principle is unchanged: rice, meat, gravy, egg.
A note on poke. It is pronounced poh-keh, not “poke” as in to poke someone. The Hawaiian word means to slice or cut crosswise — a description of the method, not the dish. The mainland “poke bowl” trend of the 2010s caused considerable sighing in the islands. Also: it is shave ice, not shaved ice. This is the number-one tourist identification marker, more reliable than a camera strap.
Songs
A queen in a palace prison, a pencil, and the most famous Hawaiian song ever written.
Liliʻuokalani composed “Aloha ʻOe” first in 1878, originally as a love song about parting. She wrote it down — along with several other compositions — while under house arrest in ʻIolani Palace after the 1895 insurrection, when she was denied access to newspapers, books, and visitors. The song was published in 1898, the same year she published her autobiography. It has been performed at Hawaiian funerals, presidential inaugurations, and the closing ceremonies of events from which Hawaiʻi would have preferred not to take its leave. Whether it was always a farewell song, or became one, is a question the history settles without ambiguity.
Haʻaheo ē ka ua i nā pali,
Ke nihi aʻela i ka nahele,
E hahai ana paha i ka liko,
Pua āhina nui o Makua.
Proudly swept the rain by the cliffs,
as it glided through the trees,
still following ever the bud
the āhina blossom of the vale.
E ke onaona noho i ka lipo,
One fond embrace,
A hoʻi aʻe au,
Until we meet again.
While imprisoned, Liliʻuokalani also translated the Kumulipo — the great Hawaiian creation chant, some 2,000 lines long — into English. She feared she might not leave the palace alive and wanted the outside world to know that Hawaiian civilisation had produced something of this kind. She left the palace in 1895. The translation was published in 1897.
Hawaiian music of the pre-annexation period was not merely entertainment. Songs circulated news, encoded genealogy, preserved history, and — during the occupation of the palace — carried messages between a queen and her people that the authorities could not easily intercept. A culture that had no written language until missionaries invented one for it had long understood that words set to melody are more durable than words set in print. They proved correct.
Did You Know?
A selection of Hawaiian particulars for the curious, the sceptical, and those who enjoy pointing things out.
- That Pearl Harbor was called Puʻuloa — long hill — by Hawaiians for a thousand years before it became Pearl Harbor? Its other name, Wai Momi (waters of pearl), came from the oysters harvested there. Hawaiians used the mother-of-pearl shells to decorate wooden bowls and fashion fish hooks. The pearls themselves they ignored.
- That Kamehameha II and his queen, Kamāmalu, both died of measles on a state visit to London in 1824? They hoped to meet King George IV. He was unavailable. A 78-gun warship, HMS Blonde, returned their bodies to Hawaiʻi, along with the naturalist Andrew Bloxam, who made detailed observations of the islands. It was Hawaiʻi’s first diplomatic visit to Europe and its worst.
- That Kauaʻi is the only Hawaiian island Kamehameha I never conquered by force? His first attempt was turned back by storms; a second invasion force was decimated by an epidemic. The island’s king, Kaumualiʻi, eventually agreed to cede it diplomatically in 1810. Kamehameha probably found this more satisfying.
- That the Hawaiian flag is the only US state flag to contain the Union Jack? It was designed around 1816, at a time when Hawaiʻi had warm relations with Britain and was simultaneously pressed by American interests. The eight stripes represent the eight main islands. The Union Jack stayed.
- That Niʻihau, the “Forbidden Isle,” has been privately owned since 1864, when Elizabeth Sinclair purchased it from Kamehameha V for $10,000 in gold? Her descendants, the Robinson family, still own it. Access is restricted; the population is around 70. It is one of the few remaining places where Hawaiian is the primary language of daily life.
- That Mark Twain visited Hawaiʻi in 1866 as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union and called it “the loveliest fleet of islands anchored in any ocean”? On reaching the summit of Kīlauea, he wrote that finding a decent hotel in such a remote spot startled him considerably more than the volcano did. He remained Mark Twain about it.
- That astronauts preparing for moon landings in the 1960s trained by walking in the hardened lava fields of Mauna Loa? The terrain there — barren, basaltic, otherworldly — is the closest analogue to the lunar surface that Earth offers without leaving Earth.
- That the humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa, Hawaiʻi’s state fish, lost its official status in 1990 because the legislature forgot to renew the five-year designation? The islands were without a state fish for over a decade. It was reinstated permanently in 2006, largely through the lobbying of schoolchildren.
- That King Kalākaua, who reigned from 1874 to 1891, was the first monarch in history to circumnavigate the globe? He did so in 1881, visiting the United States, Japan, China, India, Egypt, and several European countries. He was trying to negotiate immigration treaties to bring more workers to the islands and slow the growing power of American planters. He was not particularly successful, but he did see the world.
- That the Hawaiian language was banned in schools from 1898 until 1978 — eighty years — and that the number of native speakers fell to fewer than 2,000 as a result? The first Hawaiian-language immersion school opened in 1984. There are now around 18,000 speakers, still far fewer than there once were, but the trend has reversed.
- That Liliʻuokalani attended the inauguration of US President William McKinley in 1897, travelling on a passport issued not by the United States but by the Republic of Hawaiʻi — the government that had overthrown her — made out to Liliuokalani of Hawaii? She was lobbying Congress against annexation at the time. Congress annexed Hawaiʻi in 1898 anyway.
- That the loco moco was named partly after a boy whose nickname was “Crazy” and partly because “moco” rhymed with “loco” and sounded good? George Okimoto, who inspired the name, was a member of the Lincoln Wreckers Athletic Club of Hilo. He did not invent the dish. He just had a memorable nickname.
- That Hawaiʻi is the only US state that grows coffee commercially? The Kona district of the Big Island has been producing coffee since the 1820s. Kona coffee is expensive, frequently imitated, and genuinely good. The distinction between “Kona coffee” and “Kona blend” (often as little as 10% actual Kona) has been a source of legal dispute for decades.
- That the USS Ward fired the first American shot of World War II — more than an hour before the aerial attack on Pearl Harbor — sinking a Japanese midget submarine near the harbour entrance on the morning of 7 December 1941? The report was delayed and not acted upon. The Ward was later sunk in the Philippines in 1944, by Japanese aircraft.
- That there are no snakes native to Hawaiʻi, and that possessing one is a Class C felony carrying a fine of up to $200,000? Snakes were never part of the island ecosystem; without natural predators they would be catastrophic to bird populations. The brown tree snake, accidentally introduced to Guam, has eliminated most of Guam’s native birds. Hawaiʻi has observed what happened to Guam and enforces accordingly.
This page draws on a range of sources including the Bishop Museum’s collections and publications, Noenoe K. Silva’s Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2004), Queen Liliʻuokalani’s own Hawaiʻi’s Story by Hawaiʻi’s Queen (1898), the US Geological Survey Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, the American Masters documentary series on Duke Kahanamoku, and the work of the Liliʻuokalani Trust. The editorial voice, emphases, and any errors are our own.