Waimanalo | Images of Old Hawaiʻi

August 6, 2019 by Peter T Young 2 Comments

Waimānalo Sugar Plantation

High Chief John Adams Kuakini Cummins was born on Oʻahu on March 17, 1835, the son of High Chiefess Kaumakaokane Papaliʻaiʻaina and Thomas Jefferson Cummins, Jr. His mother was a cousin of King Kamehameha I. His father was a wealthy and aristocratic Englishman, born in Lancashire and reared in Massachusetts, who came to the Islands in 1828.

Thomas Cummins first acquired interests in land in Waimānalo (meaning potable water) on March 27, 1842, when High Chief Paki leased Cummins a parcel of land on which to build a house (that he named Mauna Loke, or Rose Mount)

On November 25, 1850, Cummins leased 970 acres in the same vicinity from King Kamehameha III. This property extended from Popoʻokaʻala Point to the hills of Kaʻiwa and Kaʻakaupu of the Koʻolau district. Over the years more land was acquired. In 1890, Cummins leased nearly 7,000-more acres for his sugar operation.

The land was first used as cattle pasture and horse breeding ranch. After attending the Royal School, Cummins worked on his father’s ranch, becoming manager in 1855.

One of the goals in horse breeding related to racing, an item of interest to the royalty and elite in Honolulu. Cummins had one of the largest stocks of race horses (and introduced some blooded stock to the islands) and was a promoter of horse racing. In about 1872, a horse racing track was laid out at Kapiʻolani Park. He was a Charter member of the Hawaiian Jockey Club in 1885.

John Cummins was elected representative for his Koʻolau district in 1873 and assisted in the election of King Lunalilo that same year. The following year, he aided in the election of King Kalākaua.

Cummins was instrumental, in helping King Kalākaua effect a reciprocity treaty with the United States in 1874, after which the sugar industry prospered.

Cummins conceived the idea of converting the ranch into a commercial sugar venture in 1877, two years after King Kalākaua had concluded a reciprocity treaty with the United States, greatly enhancing the sugar industry in the kingdom. Its first mill started grinding cane in January 1881.

The mill stood near Poalima Street behind present-day Shima’s Market on Kalanianaʻole Highway. Homes were on both sides of the highway. Rail tracks were laid out and three locomotive engines were brought in to haul cane to the mill and the wharf.

The sugar industry became a huge success.

The sugar plantation required more water than was easily available and a ditch was built to divert water from Maunawili Stream to Waimanalo. Two million gallons of water per day was pumped through a 2-mile long tunnel through Mount Olomana and into a reservoir where it was tapped to Waimanalo Sugar Company until the 1950s.

In the 1870s, Waimānalo Sugar Company built a 700-foot pier, Waimānalo Landing (near what is now the intersection of Huli Street and Kalaniana’ole Highway,) to use to transport the sugar, as well as serve as a landing for inter-island steamers (it was dismantled in the early 1950s.)

The railroad tracks from the mill culminated at a long wooden pier; at the end of the pier, winches and cranes lifted the bags of sugar onto the vessel alongside. Today, the line of broken pilings and all the landing’s machinery and crane and rigging, lies submerged beneath 12-15 feet of water at Waimānalo Beach Park.

The 86-foot ocean steamer “SS Waimānalo” (later renamed “SS John A. Cummins” or “Kaena”) owned by John Adams Cummins of the Waimanalo Sugar Plantation Company, made trips twice a week between stops in Koʻolaupoko (Heʻeia and Waimānalo) and Honolulu, exporting sugar and returning with supplies and goods.

Control of the plantation passed to W. G. Irwin and Co. in 1885, with Cummins continuing as manager. Cummins was ahead of the time in adopting a sort of “social welfare” plan for his employees, building a large structure containing a reading room and a section for dances and social gatherings for the plantation laborers.

It was decorated with Chinese and Japanese fans on the ceiling and pictures of King Kalākaua and other members of the royal family on the walls, and contained books, tables, an organ and singing canaries.

John Cummins left the sugar business to William G. Irwin, agent of Claus Spreckles, and developed a commercial building called the Cummins Block at Fort and Merchant streets in Downtown Honolulu.

In 1889 he represented Hawaiʻi at the Paris exposition known as Exposition Universelle. On June 17, 1890 he became Minister of Foreign Affairs in Kalākaua’s cabinet, and thus was in the House of Nobles of the legislature for the 1890 session.

He died on March 21, 1913 from influenza after a series of strokes and was buried in Oʻahu Cemetery.

Due to security concerns, an Executive Order from President Woodrow Wilson in 1917 significantly changed Waimānalo and Waimānalo Sugar Company – more than 1,500-acres belonging to the Waimānalo Sugar Company were converted to a military reservation.

In 1947, the plantation was shut down.

One lasting remnant of those plantation days is the Saint George Catholic Chapel. It is among the oldest parishes in Waimānalo. Built in 1842, it still has a sizable congregation, many of them descendants of the Portuguese and the Filipinos who worked for the sugar company.

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Waimanalo Sugar Plantation c1890s

1941_01_00 – Waimanalo sugar? SB BW photo.

Small flat cars piled high with sugarcane-(Smithsonian)

Plantation field worker hauling sugar cane up a handmade ramp onto the 4-wheel flat car-(Smithsonian)

‘Olomana’ and ‘Pokaa’ (Chloe) at work in Oahu on the Waimanalo Plantation

Locomotive ‘Thomas Cummins’ at Waimanalo

Hauling sugarcane to mill-(Smithsonian)

Engineer guiding train over temporary tracks-(Smithsonian)

Cars being hauled over temporary track-(Smithsonian)

14-1-14-38 =waimanalo plantation mill j.a.cummins photog- Kamehameha Schools Archives

John Adams Kuakini Cummins’ 80-foot steamer ‘Waimanalo’ anchored off the Waimanalo Sugar Company’s pier

Aerial_view_BellowsField_(note_sugar_cultivation)-1942

The old St George Church, ca. 1933 (StGeorgeChurchWaimanalo)

December 6, 2014 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

1st POW

11 pm, December 6, 1941, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki and Petty Officer Second Class Kiyoshi Inagaki entered their 2-man midget submarine and were released from their mother sub about 10-miles off Pearl Harbor.

They were part of Special Attack Forces, an elite 10-man group of five 2-man midget submarines that would attack Pearl Harbor.

They planned to carry out suicide attacks against the enemy with no expectation of coming back alive: “That the personnel of the midget submarine group was selected with utmost care was obvious.”

“The twenty-four, picked from the entire Japanese navy, had in common: bodily strength and physical energy; determination and fighting spirit; freedom from family care. They were unmarried and from large families.”

“None of us was a volunteer. We had all been ordered to our assignment. That none of us objected goes without saying: we knew that punishment was very severe if we objected; we were supposed to feel highly honored.” (Sakamaki)

His 78.5-foot-long submarine, HA-19, and four other midget subs, each armed with a pair of 1,000-pound torpedoes, were to attack American destroyers or battleships. (NYTimes)

From the beginning, things went wrong for Sakamaki and Inagaki. Their gyrocompass was faulty, causing the submarine to run in circles while at periscope depth – they struggled for 24-hours to go in the right direction.

The submarine was spotted by an American destroyer, the Helm, which fired on them, and the midget sub later got stuck temporarily on a coral reef. The submarine became partially flooded, it filled with smoke and fumes from its batteries, causing the two crewmen to lose consciousness.

With the air becoming foul due to the battery smoking and leaking gas, the midget sub hit a coral reef again. They abandoned the sub.

Sakamaki reached a stretch of beach, but, again, fell unconscious. In the early dawn of December 8, he was picked up on Waimanalo Beach by Lt. Paul S. Plybon and Cpt. David Akui of the 298th Infantry. (hawaii-gov)

Sakamaki became Prisoner No. 1 (the first US Prisoner Of War in WWII.)

He was the only crewman to survive from the midget submarines; his companion’s remains later washed up on the shore. All five subs were lost, and none were known to have caused damage to American ships.

Humbled to have been captured alive, Sakamaki inflicted cigarette burns while in prison at Sand Island and asked the Americans permission to commit suicide. His request was denied and the first prisoner of war spend the rest of the war being transferred from camp to camp. (Radio Canada)

He spent the entire war in various POW camps in Wisconsin, Tennessee, Louisiana and Texas. He and others were offered educational opportunities through the “Internment University” that had lectures on English, geography, commerce, agriculture, music, Japanese poetry, Buddhist scriptures and other subjects.

He became the leader of other Japanese POWs who came to his camp; he encouraged them to learn English. He also tried to address the problem of other Japanese POWs’ wanting to commit suicide after their capture, since he previously had gone through the same feelings.

At the end of the war, he returned to Japan and wrote his memoirs, ”Four Years as a Prisoner-of-War, No. 1,” in which he told of receiving mail from some Japanese denouncing him for not having committed suicide when it appeared he could be taken captive.

His memoirs were published in the United States on the eighth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack with the title, ”I Attacked Pearl Harbor.” (NYTimes)

Mr. Sakamaki became a businessman, serving as president of a Brazilian subsidiary of Toyota and then working for a Toyota-affiliated company in Japan before retiring in 1987.

His submarine was salvaged by American troops, shipped to the United States in January 1942, and taken on a nationwide tour to sell War Bonds. Admission to view the submarine was secured through the purchase of war bonds and stamps.

On April 3, 1943, HA-19 arrived in Washington DC for the war bond drive and for a brief time sat in front of the United States Capitol Building for people to see.

On arriving in Alexandria, Virginia, “George W. Herring, Virginia lumberman, bought $16,000 worth of war bonds yesterday for the privilege of inspecting a Jap submarine. One of the two-man submarines captured at Pearl Harbor was here for a one-day stand in the war bond sales campaign.”

“Those who buy bonds are allowed to inspect it. Herring held the record for the highest purchase and was the first Alexandrian to take a peek at the submarine. War bond sales for the day totaled $1,061,650.” (Belvedere Daily Republican, April 3, 1943)

It was placed on display at a submarine base in Key West, Florida, in 1947 and later transferred in 1990 to its current site, the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas, home of Admiral Chester W Nimitz (who served as Commander in Chief of the US Pacific Fleet during WWII.)

Back to Sakamaki … when he returned from America, he saw a woman working in a neighbor’s field with whom he fell in love at first sight, although he reviewed her papers (“a health certificate, academic records, a brief biography, a certificate of her family background, all certified as to their accuracy”) prior to making the commitment to marriage.

Her father and brother had died in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, so her mother and she had moved back to their ancestral home next to Sakamaki’s home. They married on August 15, 1946, the first anniversary of the end of WWII. (Lots of information here from Gordon and hawaii-gov.)

The image shows the beached midget submarine at Waimanalo. In addition, I have added other related images in a folder of like name in the Photos section on my Facebook and Google+ pages.

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October 24, 2014 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

United Nations

States first established international organizations to cooperate on specific matters. The International Telecommunication Union was founded in 1865 and the Universal Postal Union was established in 1874.

In 1899, the International Peace Conference was held in The Hague to elaborate instruments for settling crises peacefully, preventing wars and codifying rules of warfare. It adopted the Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes and established the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which began work in 1902.

The League of Nations, conceived during the first World War and established in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles, was established “to promote international cooperation and to achieve peace and security.” (The League of Nations ceased its activities after failing to prevent the Second World War.)

On January 1, 1942, representatives of 26-Allied nations fighting against the Axis Powers met in Washington, DC to pledge their support for the Atlantic Charter by signing the “Declaration by United Nations”. This document contained the first official use of the term “United Nations”, which was suggested by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (UN)

The United Nations officially came into existence on October 24, 1945, when the Charter was ratified by the five permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, the Soviet Union, United Kingdom and United States) and the majority of other signatories.

The United Nations was founded by 51 countries as an international organization committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights. (UN)

The UN needed a home.

At the height of world capital search in late-1945, the United Nations and newspaper accounts typically reported that between thirty and fifty suggestions for the headquarters site had been received.

The range and scope of proposals indicated the previously unexplored public fascination with the prospect of creating a “capital of the world” and offered a source base for investigating the evolving relationship between local, regional and national identity, and global consciousness. (Capital of the World)

Hawaiʻi got caught up in this, as well.

At the July 4, 1945 meeting of the National Governor’s Association, Hawaiʻi Governor Ingram M Stainback was successful in amending the group’s motion “we respectfully invite and urge all of you to use your good offices to locate the headquarters and capitol site of the United Nations organization at some place within the continental United States of America.”

Stainback noted, “I think Hawaiʻi would be a good place to locate the headquarters and suggest the word ‘continental’ be removed.” (His amendment passed unanimously.) (NGA)

Folks in Hawaiʻi then got to work and Governor Stainback initiated a campaign to attract the UN to Honolulu. In contrast to other contenders, who stressed their proximity to world capitals, the Hawaiians stressed the advantages of being “far enough removed from any of the potentially explosive situations of the world.” (Capital of the World)

“A resolution adopted by the Hawaiian Senate emphasized that Hawaiʻi is especially appropriate for UNO headquarters because it is the home of Pearl Harbor, whose treacherous bombing brought the United States into the war and gave the world a symbol of unity of action.” (Herald Harper, November 23, 1945)

“The decision to propose Hawaiʻi as the permanent site of the United Nations Capitol was made relatively late, after other cities (nearly 250-across the US) had prepared elaborate campaigns to ‘sell’ themselves. However, a highly effective presentation was prepared and shipped to London by Hawaiʻi’s committee”. (Dye)

“A huge book presenting Hawaiʻi’s invitation, the most comprehensive yet presented, signed by IM Stainback, Governor of the Territory, and Hawaiʻi’s leading businessmen and industrialists, has been received in London for consideration by the UNO’s preparatory commission.” (Herald Harper, November 23, 1945)

“The huge volume was sent with an attractive cover with a tapa cloth and flower lei design and a decorative map emphasizing Hawaiʻi’s central location in the Pacific. It was mounted on a wooden standard for ease in reading. The word ‘Hawaiʻi’ was spelled out on the cover in letters hard-carved of wood.” (Dye).

The site of the Hawaiʻi proposal? … Waimanalo.

However, the dream of the UN moving its sweet home to Nalo Town was short-lived.

A site committee of the United Nations Preparatory Commission voted after two hours of bitter debate to locate the permanent headquarters of UNO in the Eastern US. (United Press, December 22, 1945)

In the end, they picked New York. A last-minute offer of $8.5-million by John D Rockefeller, Jr, for the purchase of the present site was accepted by a large majority of the General Assembly on December 14, 1946. New York City completed the site parcel by additional gifts of property. (UN)

The cornerstone was laid on October 24, 1949; the United Nations headquarters in New York is made up of four main buildings: the Secretariat, the General Assembly, Conference Area (including Council Chambers) and the Library.

The tallest of the group, consists of 39 stories above ground and three stories underground. The exterior facings of the 550-foot tall Secretariat Building are made exclusively of aluminum, glass and marble. (UN)

This was not the first lost-opportunity for international awareness. In early-visioning for the home of the UN, President Franklin D Roosevelt “thought that the Secretariat of the organization might be established at Geneva, but that neither the Council nor the Assembly meetings should be held there.”

“He believed that the Assembly should meet in a different city each year, and that the Council should have perhaps two regular meeting places, one being in the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic and the other on an island in the Hawaiian group in the middle of the Pacific.”

“He felt that locating the Council in the Azores or the Hawaiian Islands would bring the benefit of detachment from the world. Being at heart a naval man, he liked the perspective obtained from surveying the world from an island out at sea.”

“(Roosevelt) had been eager, in the later thirties, to promote a meeting of the heads of nations on a battleship or on such an island as Niʻihau.”

The image shows a portion of a newspaper graphic showing Waimanalo as Hawaiʻi’s UN home proposal. In addition, I have included other related images in a folder of like name in the Photos section on my Facebook and Google+ pages.

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September 13, 2014 by Peter T Young 1 Comment

Bellows

Waimanalo Military Reservation was created in 1917 by Presidential Executive Order, and later renamed to Bellows Field in 1933 (named after Lieutenant Franklin Barney Bellows, a war hero who was killed in action during World War I while on a reconnaissance flight near St. Mihiel, France, on September 13, 1918.)

The land was leased from Waimanalo Sugar Plantation. It was used as the bivouac area and a target practice area by the Coastal Artillery, which strung a line of 90-mm guns along the beach. During the 1930s, Bellows was used as a bombing and gunnery range by aircraft from Luke (Ford Island,) Wheeler and Hickam Fields.

Back then, the field was nothing but overgrowth of sugar cane and guava. The only clearings were for training areas and tents where the men slept. It was a training area for the infantry, coast artillery and Air Corps. There was a wooden traffic control tower and a single asphalt runway, 983-feet long and 75-feet wide.

Bellows Field was used for training both air and ground forces. During the mid-1930s the Air Corps chiefly used this area for a strafing and bombing practice site. Those operations extended into 1938, when the total Air Corps personnel on duty only consisted of five to ten men supplied from Wheeler Field.

Bellows was a sub-post of Wheeler Field until July 22, 1941 when it became a separate permanent military post under the jurisdiction of the Commanding General, Hawaiian Department. Overnight, an accelerated construction program began and Bellows began to grow. Two-story wooden barracks and a new and larger runway started filling the landscape.

Bellows was among those installations attacked by the Japanese during the Pearl Harbor attack. The 44th Pursuit Squadron had 12 P-40’s located at Bellows on December 7th, 1941. Unfortunately the planes had been flown the day before the attack and the aircraft guns had been removed for cleaning. (Trojan)

Two military members were killed (Lt. Hans Christenson and Lt. George Whiteman) and six wounded at Bellows. They included three pilots of the 44th Pursuit Squadron who were at Bellows for gunnery training and attempted to take off in their P-40s. One of the pilots had to swim to shore when his badly damaged aircraft crashed into the ocean.

Also swimming ashore the next day was the commander of a Japanese two-man midget submarine which grounded on the reef off of Bellows. Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, captured by Cpt. David Akui and Lt. Paul S. Plybon, was the first US prisoner of war taken in WW II. His companion, Petty Officer Second Class Kiyoshi Inagaki, died and his remains later washed up on the shore. (hawaii-gov)

With the outbreak of war, Bellows was transformed almost overnight into an important facility where aircraft were prepared for their duty in the Pacific Theater. Hundreds of men and aircraft flowed through Bellows requiring more runways and facilities.

Five runways, the longest 6,290-feet, were in two different airfields, connected by a taxiway – they were identified as “Bellows Field (Army)” to the south and “Bellows Field Bombing Range (Emergency)” to the north.

Later (1955,) the north Bellows airfield was “closed” and the south field was labeled simply as “Bellows,” without any kind of military designation. The field was also described as “Not attended.”

The south Bellows airfield may have been used for some time during the 1950s as a civilian airfield of some type. The runways at Bellows were eventually closed in 1958 and the base was used for other purposes.

In 1960, the U.S. Army built two Nike-Hercules anti-aircraft missile sites at Bellows, which were operated full-time by the Hawaiʻi Army National Guard for the aerial defense of Hawaii until inactivated in 1970. The communications transmitter facility replaced the Kipapa area transmitter and receiver sites. The Army National Guard continued at Bellows until 1995.

Later, Bellows was operated and maintained by members of the 15th Communications Squadron. Its transmitters were the principal ground-to-air link with aircraft (particularly military aircraft) flying to and from Hawaiʻi; and they provided communications for Presidential flights and others carrying high-level government officials. (The facility was decommissioned in the 1980s or 1990s.)

This communications network was one of the reasons the runways at Bellows went out of use; an antenna was located right in one of the runways. In addition, a large communication building was constructed right in the middle of the crossed runways.

The Bellows property was renamed Bellows Air Force Station (AFS) in 1968. In 1970 the US Air Force offered part of Bellows to the State of Hawaiʻi for use as a general aviation airport, but opposition by the nearby Waimanalo community was so strong that the state had to decline.

In 1999, the Marine Corps acquired about 1,050-acres for the Marine Corps Training Area Bellows (MCTAB;) it’s now part of Marine Corps Base Hawaiʻi, headquartered in Kāneʻohe Bay. MCTAB adds significant training capabilities and maneuver space for non-live fire military training activities.

The Marines and other services use the training areas to conduct amphibious, helicopter and motorized exercises in conjunction with troop land maneuver training. It is currently the only place in Hawaiʻi where amphibious landings can transition directly into maneuver training areas for realistic military training.

The Air Force’s property at Bellows is now limited to the recreational facilities. The Bellows Recreation Center is composed of 102 beach cottages, a small exchange & a beach club. Bellows is still depicted as an abandoned airfield on recent Sectional Charts.

The facility also serves as all-service beach-front recreational area for active-duty and retired military personnel, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, dependents and guests.

On most weekends and holidays, the Marines continue a practice started by the Air Force to open the Bellows Beach training area to the general public, in cooperation with the City and County of Honolulu. (Lots of information here from hawaii-gov and Trojan.)

May 7, 2014 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Pāhonu

Honu neʻe pū ka ʻāina
The land moves like the turtle.
(Land passes slowly but inexorably from owner to heir.)
(Pukui)

From its earliest period of occupation, the Waimānalo Bay region was an extensive agricultural area, featuring taro farms that used the traditional Hawaiian loʻi (pondfield) cultivation system.

Taro was grown in the lowlands, irrigated with water from Waimānalo Stream, as well as on terraced sections that were watered by the small streams and springs flowing out of the Koʻolau Range.

These terraced sections extended for nearly 2-miles in a semicircle at the foot of the mountains around the broad base of the Waimānalo valley. By the 1850s, the area’s fertile soil provided not only taro but also breadfruit, mountain apple, kukui and coconut trees, sweet potatoes and sugar cane. (NPS)

In addition to the agrarian-based economy, several fishing villages dotted the bay’s shoreline. Two of the best-known villages in the area were Kaupō and Kukui. Kaupō was on a small peninsula opposite Mānana Island (Rabbit Island) and just northwest of Makapuʻu Beach Park (where Sea Life Park is located.)

The village may have been depopulated during the early-1800s and probably was repopulated during the early-1850s when a disastrous smallpox epidemic struck Honolulu and Hawaiians settled temporarily in the Waimānalo Bay region to escape its ravages.

The small fishing village of Kukui was further northwest, along the bay in the Kaiona Beach vicinity near Pāhonu Pond (‘Turtle enclosure’) – a prehistoric walled enclosure where it is said that turtles were kept for the use of Hawaiian chieftains. (NPS)

Before we go there, let’s look at some findings of Dr Marion Kelly where she speaks of three main technological advances resulting in food production intensification in pre-contact Hawai‘i: (a) walled fishponds, (b) terraced pondfields with their irrigation systems and (c) systematic dry-land field cultivation organized by vegetation zones.

The Hawaiian walled fishpond stands as a technological achievement unmatched elsewhere in island Oceania. Hawaiians built rock-walled enclosures in near shore waters, to raise fish for their communities and families. It is believed these were first built around the fifteenth-century.

The general term for a fishpond is loko (pond), or more specifically, loko iʻa (fishpond). Loko iʻa were used for the fattening and storing of fish for food and also as a source for kapu (forbidden) fish.

Samuel Kamakau points out that “one can see that they were built as government projects by chiefs, for it was a very big task to build one, (and) commoners could not have done it (singly, or without co-ordination.)” Chiefs had the power to command a labor force large enough to transport the tons of rock required and to construct such great walls.

The fishponds just described refer to aquaculture to grow fish – they were found throughout the Islands; however, at Waimānalo, Oʻahu, the only remaining aquaculture of green sea turtle known to have been carried out by the early-Hawaiians involved a coastal pond named Pāhonu that was used to maintain turtles until they were ready to be eaten. (NOAA)

The green sea turtle is the principal marine turtle species in the Hawaiian Islands. Common names used in the Hawaiian Archipelago include honu, green turtle and green sea turtle. They are herbivorous, feeding primarily on seagrasses and algae. This diet is thought to give them greenish-colored fat, from which they take their name. (NOAA)

In Hawaiʻi, as throughout Polynesia and other islands in the pacific, sea turtles have always been a traditional part of the local culture and have historically been revered as special and sacred beings. (Luna)

“There was once a chief who was so fond of turtle meat that he ordered a sea wall be built to keep captured turtles from escaping. Every turtle caught by a fisherman was put into this enclosure. No one else was allowed to partake of turtle meat under penalty of death. No one dared to eat turtle as long as the old chief lived.” (Pukui; Maly)

Kikuchi in his “Hawaiian Aquaculture Systems,” notes that “An early visitor to Waikiki area remarked that the ruling chief of Oʻahu, Kahekili, ‘mentioned also some others where he had a quantity of turtle.’”

“… We walked back to Mr. Castle’s house, where we sat on a long bench outside, facing the sea. There Aiona told me the story of Pa-honu, an enclosure for turtles that was once located back of Mrs. Wall’s present home.” (Pukui; Maly)

Pāhonu, the offshore pond (500 feet long, 50 feet wide,) is just south of Kaiona Beach Park fronting the shoreline; a line of stones, submerged at high tide, but visible at low tide, notes its location. (Pukui)

Kaiona Beach Park, a small four-acre park at the south end of Waimānalo Bay, is a popular camping site that has also been used for many years as a community boat anchorage.

In 1998, residents of Waimānalo built a boat ramp in the south end of the park, the only paved ramp in Waimānalo. They also placed a monument to Hawaiian fishers from their community near the ramp. Kaiona means “attractive sea. (Clark)

The beachfront residence named Pāhonu inland of the pond was used from 1980 to 1988 as the base of operations for the popular television series, Magnum PI. A surf site borders a small channel through the reef and is also known as Magnums. (Ulukau)

Next to Pāhonu is Kaʻakaupapa (shallows at the right.) The old saying of this place was, “Papa ke kānaka, papa nā mea a pau”—“Multitudes of people, multitudes of gods, all in multitudes.” (Aiona, Informant, Sept. 14, 1939; Cultural Surveys)

Nearby is the Shriners Club, a private clubhouse that opened on April 20, 1931. Popularly known as Shriners Beach, it is used for a wide variety of events, including wedding receptions, birthday parties and other social gatherings. (Clark)

The green turtle is listed as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. In 1978, the Hawaiian population of the green turtle was listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973. NOAA Fisheries and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) have joint jurisdiction for green sea turtles.

State and Federal laws prohibit harassing, harming, killing, or keeping sea turtles in captivity without a permit allowing these activities for research or educational purposes. Divers should be aware that riding turtles is illegal and puts these animals under stress.

The image shows Pāhonu Pond in Waimānalo. In addition, I have added other images in a folder of like name in the Photos section on my Facebook and Google+ pages.

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