European History in Hawaii

Abstract

In June 1994, my husband, Bob, and I went to Hawaii. We hadn't really planned to take our vacation there; we hadn't planned to take a vacation at all. We can't be classified as world travelers; our last real trip was to Paris in 1983. The purpose of both these trips was the same: my husband wanted to study French history. While it makes sense to do that in France, it seems to make little sense to do it in Hawaii. However, it makes sense to the United States Government. The National Endowment for the Humanities sponsors Summer Seminars at major universities where noted faculty present seminars related to their areas of expertise. Rachel Laudan, a historian of science and a professor at the University of Hawaii, was director of the seminar my husband attended. The seminar's title was Images of Science in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1800-1880. Since Bob's research is on the popularization of science in late-19th-century France, this seminar was made for him. Fortunately, Dr. Laudan thought so too; and he was selected as one of the seminar's 12 participants. While he looked forward to having six weeks to work on his research and to participate in the group's discussions, he was not thrilled with the idea of going to Hawaii. Bob is from New England and is neither accustomed nor attracted to the tropics. So, I agreed to make the ultimate sacrifice and go to Hawaii with him for the first few weeks to help get him settled in paradise. Though Bob never did fall in love with Hawaii, I did. Since we had to stay in Honolulu on the island of Oahu, we didn't travel to the other islands-which are said to be much more beautiful. Even Oahu is lovely, once you get away from the huge hotels of downtown Honolulu (though we couldn't get away too easily because the apartment we rented was close to Waikiki.) When we arrived in Honolulu after a terribly long and horribly crowded flight, we discovered that our apartment building, the Pomaikai, was on one of Honolulu's main thoroughfares, Ala Moana Boulevard. Before I go any further and throw any more Hawaii-ese at you, I should say a word about the Hawaiian language. It was solely an oral language until the 19th century when it was written down by missionaries. In transcribing the sounds, they found that only seven consonants were necessary, which is why there are so many k's and m's, and no b's or c's. They used an apostrophe to connote an almost inaudible click of the throat, a glottal stop. If I were going to be true to the Hawaiian language, I would add the stop in Hawai'i. I won't go that far, but I will use it where it is needed, as in the names of several bird species, the 'Akialoa, the 'I'iwi, and the 'Akohekohe (Pimm 1995). Though I am hardly an expert on the subject of Hawaii, I have done some research both in Hawaii and since my trip, and I want to discuss my discoveries here. I have come to love Hawaii, almost as much from what I've read about it as from what I've experienced of it. Because much of what I've read is about Hawaii before the 20th century, before tourism became the single biggest industry in the Islands and the military the second biggest, I have a very different perspective. While my husband was studying European history, I learned a little about Hawaiian history and natural history, and that's what I want to discuss in this column and in next month's as well.