Two tables were set at Kailua, Kona on the night of Kūkahi, one of the three sacred nights of Kū. It was 1819, and the Makahiki festival was opening. Liholiho had inherited the throne from Kamehameha I, and it was his duty to attend. His high priests had learned of a plot by the regent Kaʻahumanu to use the new king in destroying the kapu system, and they advised him not to come. He attended anyway.
The Two Tables at Kailua, Kona
Liholiho presided over a long table filled with many different kinds of delicious foods. Only the men of the aliʻi, captains of ships, and foreign ambassadors sat at this table. However, to the astonishment of all, another identical table was set for the women only. This table was directed by Queen Kaʻahumanu, with her mother, Keōpūolani, beside her.
Tension was in the air. The men, as they were seated on the low mats and cushions, looked about them, wide-eyed and nervous. The women betrayed their own fright and near hysteria with cackling laughs, chatter, and fearful glances at the men trying to settle themselves to the weirdest feast in Hawaiian history. To make the point of their first public emancipation, a few women were already trying to bolster their courage by peeling and eating their plateside bananas in the very presence of men.
When all were in their proper places, the high priest, Hewhewa, came forward and chanted a long, fervent prayer. The silence during the supplication was broken by nervous coughs. When the prayer was completed, the people sat with expectancy and fright.
Suddenly, Liholiho rose from his table, walked nervously over to the women's table, sat down at a vacant spot reserved for him next to Kaʻahumanu, and ate with her. For the first time in Hawaiian history, a king ate with a woman and broke one of the most sacred laws of the kingdom. And when the gods did not strike Liholiho dead, the women reacted hysterically and screamed that the gods were false and that the kapu system did not have any power.
Emerson on the Night of Kūkahi
In the following account, N.B. Emerson explains the significance of Liholiho's action.
In October of the same year (1819), on Kukahi, the third day of the Hawaiian lunar month Ikuwa, which you will please note, was the date fixed for the beginning of the annual observance of the Makahiki festival, Liholiho publically breaks kapu and thus fires the train which overthrows the stronghold of Hawaiian heathenism and idolatry. I must repeat that I regard it as the highest degree of significance that this particular day, or night rather, of Kukahi in October, which was the one set apart in the Hawaiian calendar on which to initiate the observance of the Makahiki solemnities, and which was observed as especially tabu, should have been the very time chosen by Kaahumanu for publicly initiating the revolutionary movement against the tapu system.
With the abolition of the kapu system, the Makahiki festival, along with its rituals, celebrated feasts, and sports and games, gradually disappeared from ancient Hawaiian life.
Reading and Writing
Hawaiians took quickly to the new European culture, and it changed what filled their days. Emerson traced the breakdown of Hawaiian culture to a process that began before foreigners even arrived, one in which the games were slowly given up as people took on a new way of life.
With the strong desire to learn to read and write, massive crowds filled the schools. The aliʻi, using their full authority and influence, urged the people to attend gatherings of secular and religious training. With the powerful authority of the aliʻi leading the way to a new life style, the old life, with its ancient rituals, festivals, and public games, slipped back into the memories of the people.
The Battle of Kuamoʻo
The acquisition of firearms, gunpowder, and other weapons of war was another factor in the decline of the games. These weapons were more fascinating and deadly than the obsolete spear and sling. The Battle of Kuamoʻo was decided by the firearms of the new civilization, not by the ancient Hawaiian weapons. With the vanishing of these ancient weapons came, naturally, their discontinuance in sports competition.
New Gambling Devices
Gambling games such as kōnane and pūhenehene were quickly replaced by the fascinating new games of playing cards and dice. The Hawaiians were eager to stake their malo, their wives, and their very bones to try their skill at these new implements of gambling.
The Horse
The disappearance of kūkini, the running footraces, was partly caused by the introduction of the horse. Hawaiians were eager to possess this animal of endurance and quickness instead of resorting to the old methods of travel by foot and canoe.
Upkeep of the Ancient Courses
The amount of tedious work required to maintain or repair the hōlua and ʻulu maika courses was another factor in their decline. Interest and enthusiasm for the games were not enough to preserve them. An important aliʻi was necessary to preserve these courses, and with the changing times, new demands drew that attention elsewhere: making roads, raising food, and carrying out services for the king, among them the gathering of sandalwood, which reaped great profits for the kingdom.
Emory gave his own account of how the new culture displaced the old games.
In spite of the fact that so many of the Hawaiian pastimes were in every way equal to those brought by the Europeans, and often better suited to the island environment and Hawaiian temperament, they have with the single exception of surf-riding been almost entirely replaced by their European equivalents or have been dropped. In the great shock to Hawaiian culture occasioned by the first contact with the Europeans, most of the Hawaiian athletic sports and games immediately went almost or completely out of existence. This was due to two main facts. The first was the absorption of the Hawaiians in their adaptations to the new life. They were busy learning to read and write. They were earning money to buy clothes and other foreign articles and to pay the greatly increased taxes of the chiefs.
Peace and War
Mitchell offered one explanation for the games' decline: peace itself. As Kamehameha I unified the islands, the chiefs no longer needed to prepare their young men for combat, and stopped promoting the sports and games that had once served that purpose.
Emerson took the opposite view. Before Kamehameha I united the islands, constant warfare had raged among competing aliʻi for supremacy. Fornander described the toll of those wars.
It was an era of strife, dynastic ambitions, internal and external wars on each island, with all their deteriorating consequences, of anarchy, depopulation, social and intellectual degradation, loss of knowledge, loss of liberty, loss of arts.
Emerson continued that the spirit of war during that era pulled people away from the peaceful pursuits that had drawn communities together in competition. In wartime, the excitement of combat became a stronger pull than sliding down the hōlua or rolling the ʻulu maika.
The Missionary Influence
There were two contrasting views on how much the missionaries influenced the games' disappearance.
Emerson argued they had little to do with it.
My answer, then, to the question of what part the early missionaries took in the death and retirement of Hawaii's ancient sports and games, is that they exercised no direct or appreciable influence in the matter whatever. They were for the most part in great ignorance of many of the institutions that the Hawaiian people had cast off in the wilderness. Their spirit and mood was practical and philanthropic and did not concern itself with philosophizing. The causes that had produced Hawaii's great revolution were national and were in operation years before their arrival on her shores. The missionaries were not the authors of Hawaii's century of wars; they did not cause the abolition of her tabus and idol worship; they did not put a stop to the Makahiki festival; they did not introduce gunpowder and muskets, playing cards and dice.
Emerson went on to note that whenever an important part of a culture is set aside, something else quickly fills the space it leaves. When the kapu system was discarded, Christianity filled that position, and nearly every part of Hawaiian life took on a European substitute: iron for stone, woven fabrics of cotton, linen, wool, and silk for kapa, framed vessels for the waʻa. The most significant substitution of all, in his account, was one god for the Hawaiian deities of Kū, Kāne, Lono, and Kanaloa.
Brigham noted that the missionaries had no objections to swimming, surfing, horseback riding, or other healthful athletic activity, so long as it was not tied to immorality.
Emory saw it differently, and gave a second reason for the games' decline.
The second was the fact that because their pastimes were bound up with their ancient mode of life, religious belief and practices, all these ancient pastimes were discouraged by the missionaries. A stigma or feeling of inferiority and disgrace was attached to everything connected with their former life.
Ellis, writing on the games and the missionaries' hopes for Hawaiian life, recorded the following.
Since schools have been open in the islands and the natives have been induced to direct their attention to Christian instruction and intellectual improvement, we have had the satisfaction to observe these games much less followed than formerly; and we hope the period is fast approaching, when they shall only be the healthful exercises of children; and when the time and strength devoted to purposes so useless, and often injurious, shall be employed in cultivating their fertile soil, augmenting their sources of individual and social happiness, and securing to themselves the enjoyment of the comforts and privileges of civilized and Christian life.
After a visit from Lord Byron, the chiefs in Honolulu met in 1825 and agreed, as Kuykendall recorded, to patronize instruction, extend it throughout the islands, and suppress vice such as drunkenness, debauchery, theft, and violation of the Sabbath. That August, the same chiefs met again, and a crier proclaimed their edict.
. . . for two or three nights past a crier has been sent out to proclaim in the ears of the people an edict from the chiefs, the substance of which is, that the people are not to play at ulumaika, pahee, puhenehene, cards, etc., but turn to the palapala, and that husbands must not forsake their wives neither wives their husbands, nor any be guilty of lewdness, that the people should observe the Sabbath and go to meeting.
Kuykendall also recorded that Brigham urged the chiefs to give up the sports, particularly the games that involved gambling with money.
Conclusion
It is evident that through their attitude, beliefs, and teachings, the missionaries did have some degree of influence in the decline of the games. Many factors contributed to the decline of the ancient games. All were devastating to the games and sports of the ancient Makahiki festival.
Makahiki Games
Sources
Bailey, Paul. Those Kings and Queens of Old Hawaii. Los Angeles: Westernlore Books, 1975.
Emerson, N. B. "Causes of the Decline of Ancient Hawaiian Sports." Paradise of the Pacific, Volume 43, Number 2, February 1930.
Emory, Kenneth. Ancient Hawaiian Civilization. Honolulu: The Kamehameha Schools Press, 1933.
Mitchell, Donald K. Hawaiian Games For Today. Honolulu: The Kamehameha Schools Press, 1975.
Fornander, Abraham. An Account of the Polynesian Race: Its Origin and Migrations and the Ancient History of the Hawaiian People to the Times of Kamehameha I. 2nd Edition. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, Co., Ltd., 1890.
Ellis, William. Polynesian Researches in Hawaii. Japan: Charles E. Tuttle Co. Inc., 1969.
Kuykendall, Ralph S. The Hawaiian Kingdom 1778-1854: Foundation and Transformation. Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1957.