Braided Waters

Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawaii

Wade Graham

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780520298590
• eBook ISBN: 9780520970656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Braided Waters sheds new light on the relationship between environment and society by charting the history of Hawaii’s Molokai island over a thousand-year period of repeated settlement. From the arrival of the first Polynesians to contact with eighteenth-century European explorers and traders to our present era, this study shows how the control of resources—especially water—in a fragile, highly variable environment has had profound effects on the history of Hawaii. Wade Graham examines the ways environmental variation repeatedly shapes human social and economic structures and how, in turn, man-made environmental degradation influences and reshapes societies. A key finding of this study is how deep structures of place interact with distinct cultural patterns across different societies to produce similar social and environmental outcomes, in both the Polynesian and modern eras—a case of historical isomorphism with profound implications for global environmental history. 

1

Wet and Dry

The Polynesian Period, 1000–1778

The moment that the first Polynesian canoes touched Hawaiian beaches, around AD 1000, marked one of the culminating achievements of the greatest seaborne colonizing society in the premodern world.¹ Over a two-thousand-year period, Polynesians perfected techniques of long-range ocean voyaging and permanent agricultural settlement that allowed them to claim small islands and thrive in an archipelagic realm covering a quarter of the globe. Contrary to earlier theories that held that these mariners must have been descendants of migrants into the region from as far away as Asia or India, archaeologists now believe that “becoming Polynesian took place in Polynesia,” in the words of Patrick Kirch, the preeminent Pacific archaeologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. According to this view, ancestral Polynesian culture evolved in situ first, from Melanesian and “Austronesian” Southeast Asian antecedents, up to thirty-five hundred years ago in what is called the Lapita cultural cradle area in eastern Melanesia. From there, these peoples reached Fiji and then Tonga and Samoa by perhaps 880 BC, where, over the next millennium, the fully formed Polynesian cultural complex incubated. It was a lifestyle based on crops—the Melanesian suite of vegetatively propagated roots such as aroids (taro, or kalo in Hawaiian) and yams—supplemented with orchard crops, such as coconuts and breadfruit, and fish and other products of the surrounding sea. In maintaining links between these neighbor islands, Polynesians effectively created a “voyaging nursery”: the small, outrigger canoes of Melanesia and Southeast Asia became large oceangoing vessels equipped with double hulls and lateen sails, sailed by large crews and guided by a supple science of navigation by stars, winds, currents, swells deflected between islands, and the signs of birds and other creatures.² In the face of the near-constant easterly trade winds at this latitude, Polynesians perfected the art of sailing upwind to remote landfalls and then returning to their islands of origin. When, after one thousand years, the cultural conditions coalesced in favor of purposefully searching for new lands to colonize, the skills and technologies required were in place, allowing Polynesians to reach nearly every (not yet populated) inhabitable island in the Pacific Ocean and establish themselves on them.

The first waves of settlement out from the Fiji-Tonga-Samoa-Futuna core reached the Society group and the Marquesas; later migrations traced northward up the Line Islands to Hawai‘i; eastward to Easter (Rapa Nui); and southward to Mangareva, the Southern Cooks, and finally, New Zealand (Aotearoa) by AD 1200–1300—making it “one of the last places on earth to be settled by preindustrialized humans,” in Kirch’s words.³ The addition of the South American sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) to the crop repertoire of the last-settled islands also indicates Polynesian contact with that continent.⁴ Polynesians went—and stayed—everywhere, occupying even rocky, inhospitable Pitcairn and Henderson in the Eastern Pacific, and remote islets like Necker and Nihoa in the Hawaiian chain northwest of Kaua‘i, for as long as six hundred years.⁵ Linguistic and material evidence shows that they maintained links between islands across formidable distances for centuries, before isolation returned for unknown reasons.⁶

When Europeans ventured into Polynesia in numbers in the eighteenth century, they immediately recognized that the widely dispersed people they encountered, from Tahiti to Easter Island to New Zealand to Hawai‘i, belonged to a single group closely related by race, language, religion, technology, and cultural patterns and organization from agriculture to architecture.

This expansion was not just a question of boats and navigation: the islands of the Pacific east of the Solomons had few edible plant or animals species, especially on atolls.⁷ Prospective settlers had to bring almost everything with them, providing a textbook example of what the anthropologist Edgar Anderson called “transported landscapes” and the historian Alfred Crosby called a “portmanteau biota”: all the biological resources necessary to long-term survival, without which the technological and cultural skills of the voyagers would have proven useless.⁸ Settlers in Hawai‘i would eventually import dogs, pigs, chickens, rats, and the Hawaiian horticultural complex (differing only in emphasis from that of elsewhere in Polynesia): taro (kalo), sweet potato (‘uala), yam (uhi), banana (mai‘a), sugarcane (kō), breadfruit (‘ulu), coconut (niu), paper mulberry (wauke), kava (‘awa), gourd (ipu), ti (ki), arrowroot (pia), turmeric (‘olena), and bamboo (‘ohe).⁹

All across Polynesia, the colonizers adapted to fit the diverse environmental circumstances they found. In a general sense, these can be divided into the three principal kinds of islands in the Pacific: atolls, makatea islands, and high islands. Their origins can be either from “arc” islands or “hot spot” islands. All Pacific islands are volcanic or tectonic in origin; most on its western margin are arc islands, accretive products of plate margin subduction, wherein pieces of crust sitting atop the diving plate are scraped off onto the overriding plate. Arc islands, such as New Zealand, Fiji, and New Caledonia, are often large and mountainous. In the mid-ocean, including most of Polynesia, islands are products of midplate hot spots—plumes of molten magma rising from the earth’s mantle that pierce the crust to form volcanic shields; as the plates move over the stationary plume, islands string out like beads on a necklace, leaving lines, arcs, or clusters of islands diminishing in size as they recede in distance and time from their point of origin and erode back into the sea. High islands, such as Tahiti, Rarotonga, and the main Hawaiian islands, are examples of relatively recently formed hot-spot islands. Built of volcanic basalts and lavas, younger islands often lack surface water because of extreme rock porosity and lack fringing reefs because of steep slopes into the surrounding depths. Older high islands, removed by plate motion from the building process of the hot spot, gradually erode, developing deeply incised stream valleys, broad coastal flats, and fringing or barrier reefs. Atolls are formerly high islands that have been lowered, through a combination of erosion and subsidence under their own weight, to near or below sea level, leaving fringing reefs surrounding a volcanic core that eventually disappears, leaving no dry rock, just a barrier reef surrounding a lagoon. Makatea islands are older atolls or subsided high islands where previously submerged portions have been partially raised above water, either by falling sea levels or by tectonic forces. Typically, the uptilt is caused by the weight of a nearby, related volcanic shield formation. Makatea means “white stone,” after the exposed limestone of former reefs elevated to become limestone ramparts and plateaus. These are often marginal environments for cultivation because rainfall disappears into their porous limestone karsts and thin soils. Mangaia and Henderson, both islands with histories of socioenvironmental stress, are examples.¹⁰

Within environmental limits, most Polynesian societies thrived—and evolved. The ability of Polynesian societies to adapt their main crop, taro (Colocasia spp.), to highly varying circumstances is the most significant “event” in Polynesian prehistory, second only to success at voyaging. All of these adaptations involved the control of water. On atolls, which are typically dry zones because of high soil porosity and low rainfall, taro was grown by pit cultivation: digging down through the sand or coral to the thin freshwater lens overlying the seawater. On high islands and makatea islands with swampy coastal valleys, it was by raised-bed cultivation: digging drainage canals through the swampy flats and heaping the spoils up into mounds where taro, yams, sugarcane, and other crops were planted. On high islands with well-developed stream valleys, irrigated pondfields were constructed, with streams diverted through barrages and ditches to a series of linked, walled paddies, in which flooding and drainage were controlled by means of headgates.

Several writers have pointed to a seeming paradox of Polynesians’ existence: though accomplished at seafaring and fishing, the majority of them derived their subsistence from the land. The dominance of the land over the sea would have profound effects on the history of Hawai‘i, as we will see later; here I will list just a few examples. E. S. and Elizabeth Handy, with Mary Kawena Pukui, in their classic study Native Planters in Old Hawaii, cite much evidence that most common Hawaiians were farmers, not fishers.¹¹ Suggestively, the word for an island or a division of land, moku, is also that for a ship or a boat. The sea as highway is a frequent metaphor in legend and oral tradition, and it is even reported that some Polynesian navigators talked about the moving sea passing by the stationary canoe.¹² In an agricultural society with a severely limited land base that practiced a form of primogeniture, younger sons would be pushed to sea in search of tillable land: as it was for many of the Scandinavian Vikings who sailed off in search of new lands, oceanic expansion was a farmer’s imperative.¹³

NATURAL HISTORY OF THE PACIFIC ISLANDS

The discoverers of Hawai‘i found the largest piece of unclaimed island real estate in the Pacific, excluding New Zealand: an area of 16,692 square kilometers (6,424 square miles) 30 percent larger than Connecticut.¹⁴ It was also the most remote: 2,557 miles from Los Angeles, 5,541 miles from Hong Kong, 3,847 miles from Japan, and 5,070 miles from Sydney.¹⁵ The insularity of the Hawaiian Islands, together with their geologic history, accounts for much of their physical—and in certain ways, their social—destiny. From its origin over a stationary, midplate hot spot now under the island of Hawai‘i, the Hawaiian chain extends 2,449 miles westward toward Kure Atoll, where the eroding volcanoes submerge, then carries on northward as the Emperor Seamounts, ending at Meiji Seamount, beyond which the Pacific Plate subducts into the Kuril Trench off Kamchatka. The oldest seamounts date to seventy-five million to eighty million years; the islands’ life span above water varies from eight million to fifteen million years.¹⁶ Active volcanism is limited to the zone directly over the hot spot: three volcanoes on the island of Hawai‘i—Mauna Loa, Hualalai, and Kilauea—and Haleakala volcano on Maui, have erupted historically (since 1778). Mauna Loa last erupted in 1984, while vents on Kilauea have erupted continuously since that year. The island-making process continues: Loihi, a new, actively building, submerged volcano southeast of the Big Island, is expected to surface in roughly one hundred thousand years.

On these islands, age is fundamental to form. The Big Island of Hawai‘i, so new that its surface rocks are no more than a million years old, has no significant stream valleys with developed soils, except on its northernmost and oldest coasts, Kohala and Hamakua. Offshore, its slopes drop precipitously into deep water, and consequently, the island has no fringing coral reefs. By the same token, as islands increase in age, erosion gradually changes their character: at the other end of the main group, five-million-year-old Kaua‘i is typified by deep canyons, broad and swampy coastal valleys, and more generous fringing reefs than on the other islands.

As age equals geomorphology in a general sense, topography is fundamental to climate at the local level, and variation is tremendous. Ten percent of the main island area is above 7,000 feet, with relatively cold temperatures; Mauna Kea volcano on Hawai‘i reaches 13,796 feet and boasts ancient glaciers and a seasonal snowcap. Precipitation varies abruptly and radically depending on local topography, with the main dynamic being orographic rain produced over windward mountains by the prevailing trade winds from the northeast and compensatory rain shadows in their lees: Mount Waialeale on Kaua‘i receives up to 486 inches of rain, more than forty feet, the highest total in the world; not far away, in its rain shadow, is a desert. The northeasterly trades are so predictable—blowing at or above twelve miles per hour 50 percent of the time in summer and 40 percent of the time in winter—that the windward/leeward (ko‘olau/kona) distinction orders climate, vegetation, and land use a priori in Hawai‘i.¹⁷ With the exception of areas too low to create orographic clouds (below about one thousand feet) and that are therefore largely arid—such as West Molokai and much or all of Lana‘i, Kaho‘olawe, and Ni‘ihau—windward areas are wet, and leeward ones are dry, irrespective of elevation. Windward coasts (with the previous exceptions) are well watered yet see some sunshine most days. With increasing elevation, windward ranges are wetter and more often cloud shrouded, clothed in deep forest dominated by ohi‘a lehua (Metrosideros collina), until the alpine zone, above eight to ten thousand feet. At higher elevations, the flanks and lees of mountains are covered in mixed mesic, or medium rainfall, forest dominated by koa (Acacia koa). Low leeward areas once grew a distinctive, variegated dry forest, though this has been very nearly wiped out since human colonization and replaced with grasslands. Precipitation gradients are commonly extreme, as much as 118 inches in a mile, though more typically 25 inches per mile.¹⁸ Nearly every main island has rain forests just around the corner, so to speak, from semiarid zones or near-deserts that see fewer than 20 inches per year. In between can be found a representative of every climate zone on Earth from subtropical to alpine, save true tropical humidity and polar cold. Mark Twain wrote in 1866 that if a person were to stand at the top of Mauna Loa, “he could see all the climes of the world at a single glance of the eye, and that glanc...

Table of contents

• Subvention
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps and Tables
• Foreword by Donald Worster
• Introduction: Outer Island, In Between
• 1.  Wet and Dry: The Polynesian Period, 1000–1778
• 2.  Traffick and Taboo: Trade, Biological Exchange, and Law in the Making of a New Pacific World, 1778–1848
• 3.  A Good Land: Molokai after the Mahele, 1845–1869
• 4.  The Bonanza Horizon: Molokai in the Sugar Era, 1870–1893
• 5.  A Bigger, Better Hawai‘i: Making an American Molokai, 1893–1957
• 6.  From Lonely Isle to Friendly Isle: Economic Struggles in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries and the Future of “the Most Hawaiian Island”
• Conclusion: Two Experiences of Settlement
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index