Honoring the Legacy of
Kauai’s Last King
No task is too big
when done together by all
*Enjoy this excerpt featuring the King in his youth, as an interested and curious learner and an accomplished athlete.
Kaumuali’i, Kaua’i’s Last King
*Enjoy this excerpt featuring the King in his youth, as an interested and curious learner and an accomplished athlete.
Lineage, Birth and Early Learning
Kāʻeo and Kamakahelei were the Aliʻi who ventured forth in a double-hulled canoe to make “first contact” with English Captain James Cook and his men on the ships Resolution and Discovery anchored offshore at Waimea on January 19, 1778.
It was Hawaiian custom, called “hānai,” of the high aliʻi to have those of their children who were intended future rulers to be adopted by other relatives, to raise through their dependent childhood. In this way, Kamakahelei’s son with Kaneoneo, Keawe, who was born about 1777, was given in a hānai arrangement to the family of Wailua District senior Chieftain Inamoʻo.
The younger son, Kaumualiʻi, from husband Kāʻeo, was not adopted out to others. He was instead raised in the Wailua household of his mother. She was the primary influence in his young life, since his father Kāʻeo was often away on military campaigns on the other islands.
It was, then, Kamakahelei who personally taught him to chant his very long “mele inoa,” or “song of identity,” evidencing his personal genealogical connection to the Hawaiian Gods and thus his powerful mana. Memorizing and reciting such long chants with the required exactitude was very difficult and took most of the ruling aliʻi years of their childhood to accomplish. But young Kaumualiʻi took joy in the task of learning and mastered his chant in such a short time that his parents’ “kāhuna” (“priests”) were positively impressed and came to respect his prodigious memory and quick mind.
These priests explained to Kaumualiʻi the need to respect and enforce the Hawaiian system of “kapu” and sacrifice, which pleased the Gods so that they protected the people of Kauaʻi from natural disasters, from privation, and from subjugation by other peoples. As a result of this instruction, Kaumualiʻi became quite religious even as a youth and spent significant time in prayer (“pule”), seeking advice from the Gods.
Learning His Island to Become a Wise and Competent Ruler
In his youth, Kaumualiʻi learned to fish with hooks and spears and nets. He learned to manage fish in man-made ponds. He learned to plant and harvest taro in irrigated plots called “loʻi”. He learned how clothing and canoes, “waʻa” were made.
He grew up to be tall and strong like his father, and in his teens established himself as one of Kauaʻi’s foremost aquatic athletes. He could stay under water longer, swim faster, and surf the waves more ably than anyone else. He could paddle canoes more strongly than others of his cohort for many hours without resting. He made “spirit leaps” into the water from all Kauaʻi’s prominent heights to “prove his mana.” And he became proficient in the use of weapons, wooden daggers and spears, shark-toothed clubs, and, in his early adulthood, western metal swords, firearms and cannon.
Early Interest in the World and Learning a New Language
Kaumualiʻi as a young man was always curious, asking frequent questions of his elders and of the foreigners, like English Captain George Vancouver he first met in 1792. He applied himself especially enthusiastically to the study of Vancouver’s “foreign language”, English. In time his skill in English became immensely valuable to him, as he used it to communicate with diverse English and American seamen, traders and, later, missionaries.
Helping him in this effort from an early age were three sailors named Rowbottom, John Williams, and James Coleman who were left behind on Kauaʻi to collect sandalwood by American Captain John Kendrick of the Lady Washington in 1793. These three gave Kaumualiʻi much of his first English language instruction, albeit of a very rough, often profane, quality.
Later Kaumualiʻi engaged Boston seaman John Gowan as his interpreter and instructor of English. It was Gowan who pointed out to Kaumualiʻi that there were different levels of English that he should speak to different people in different circumstances and this Kaumualiʻi learned to do. He soon came to call himself in English by the name “George,” after Captain Vancouver and the English King George III. He also gave his son, Humehume, the English name “George.”
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