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February 15, 2026 by Peter T Young 1 Comment

Moku Manu

About 2-million years ago, much of the northeast flank of Koʻolau volcano was sheared off and material was swept onto the ocean floor (named the Nuʻuanu Avalanche) – one of the largest landslides on Earth.

The Pali is the remaining edge of the giant basin, or caldera, formed by the volcano. Mōkapu Peninsula (where Marine Corps Base Hawai‘i is situated) is evidence of subsequent secondary volcanic eruptions that formed, among other features, the islet of Moku Manu.

The majority of seabird-nesting colonies in the main Hawaiian Islands are located on the offshore islands, islets and rocks. Many of these offshore islands are part of the Hawaii State Seabird Sanctuary System.

These sanctuaries protect seabirds, Hawaiian Monk seals, migrating shorebirds, and native coastal vegetation. These small sanctuary areas represent the last vestiges of a once widespread coastal ecosystem that included the coastlines of all the main Hawaiian Islands. (DLNR)

Hawaiian seabirds today are subject to a number of threats to their survival, including predation by introduced mammals, habitat loss and degradation, and human impacts by people trespassing in seabird nesting areas.

Moku Manu (Bird Island) is three-quarters of a mile off Mōkapu Peninsula. It’s aptly named; it has the most diverse and one of the densest seabird colonies in the Main Hawaiian Islands. The state designated it the Moku Manu State Wildlife Sanctuary. (DLNR)

It is home to Uʻau Kani or Wedged-Tailed Shearwater, Noio or Black Noddy, Noio kōhā or Brown Noddy, ʻOu or Bulwer’s Petrel, Koaʻe ʻula or Red-tailed Tropicbird, ‘Ewa ʻEwa or Sooty Tern …

… ʻIwa or Great Frigatebird, Christmas Shearwater, Pākalakala or Grey-backed Tern, ʻā or Masked Booby, ʻā or Brown Booby, ʻā or Red-footed Boobies and various common shorebird species. (DLNR)

Moku Manu is protected as a state seabird sanctuary like its neighbors to the south, Manana, Kāohikaipu, and Mōkōlea Rock. “It is prohibited for any person to land upon, enter or attempt to enter, or remain in any wildlife sanctuaries …” Regardless, landing by boat is nearly impossible due to the lack of a safe beach.

The island is actually of two parts; the main western one is about 18 acres in extent and the smaller outer part is about three acres.

It has a relatively flat top, averaging about 165 feet in height but running up to 202 feet. The cliffs of Moku Manu drop directly into the sea around more than half of the island.

Moku Manu is perhaps the least accessible to humans of any of O‘ahu’s offshore islands. This fact seems to explain to an important degree the breeding of several species there that do not nest on any other of Oahu’s offshore islands.

Due to the challenging accessibility onto the island, it is rarely visited by unauthorized persons and not often by others (it is prohibited by law to go onto the island without a permit.)

During the last century or more, when the bird populations of more accessible offshore islands were depleted by man, and domestic plants and mammals sometimes introduced, Moku Manu remained relatively free from such influences.

The much longer canoe trip (there are no beaches near the head of Mōkapu Peninsula opposite Moku Manu,) the rough channel, and the uncertainty of being able to get on the island must have combined to keep even the old Hawaiians away much of the time. (Richardson & Fisher, 1950)

I grew up on Kaneohe Bay (on the other side of Mōkapu Peninsula from Moku Manu). No one sailed in our family. Except, as a pre-/early-teen, we did get a car-toppable Sunfish that I used to sail by myself in the Bay, usually in the main basin of the Bay.

However, one day I cruised to Coral Island, then ventured a bit more out the Crash Boat Channel to Turtle Back. And, from there, in the distance, I saw another target, Moku Manu.

After a while, and about halfway to Moku Manu, I realized this was probably not a good idea; folks at home thought I was leisurely cruising in the Bay, now I was in blue water, well outside the Bay.

No one knowing, no life jacket, no radio … a kid with no brains. However, the challenge was there and I eventually circled the island, and its birds, and safely headed home.

February 14, 2026 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Valentine’s Day

For this was on Saint Valentine’s day,
When every fowl comes there his mate to take,
Of every species that men know, I say,
And then so huge a crowd did they make
(Parliament of Fowles, Chaucer, 1382 – LH Phillips Memorial Public Library)

“Parlement of Foules” is the apparent first surviving record of a connection between Valentine’s Day and romantic love. Chaucer probably composed the poem in 1381–82. The date suggests that Chaucer wrote “Parlement of Foules” to honor the first anniversary of the engagement of the English King to Princess Anne of Bohemia.

Saint Valentine’s Day, or simply Valentine’s Day, is celebrated on the 14^th of February, almost internationally but primarily in western societies. It is a commemorative Christian feast for some but a secular occasion for others who see it as a day to celebrate affection in all of its forms but primarily romantic love. (World History Encyclopedia)

The day may have taken its name from a priest who was martyred about 270 CE by the emperor Claudius II Gothicus. According to legend, the priest signed a letter “from your Valentine” to his jailer’s daughter.

Other accounts hold that it was St. Valentine of Terni, a bishop, for whom the holiday was named, though it is possible the two saints were actually one person. Another common legend states that St. Valentine defied the emperor’s orders and secretly married couples to spare the husbands from war. It is for this reason that his feast day is associated with love. (Britannica)

February had been very important for the Romans; and the celebration of the pagan festival of Lupercalia, dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, and to Romulus and Remus, the mythological founders of Rome.

The name presumably derives its etymology from lupus, meaning wolf and perhaps referring to the she-wolf, which, according to one form of the legend of Romulus, raised the two boys who founded the city.

The festival involved the sacrifice of a goat and a dog; the goat’s hide would be cut into strips and dipped in its blood, and priests, called Luperci, would then carry these strips and gently slap crop fields and women with them, with the latter being eager for this treatment as they believed that it would make them more fertile in the coming year.

Young women would then proceed to put their names in a large urn from which bachelors would take one and be bonded to that woman for the whole year. They could participate in all forms of physical relationship, and most but not all of these relationships would end in marriage. (World History Encyclopedia)

When the Roman Empire was Christianized, such pagan activities were deemed unacceptable. Many pagan celebrations were replaced with Christian holidays, and thus Lupercalia (if it was indeed practiced this way and in February) may have also transformed into something more acceptable to the church.

The original purpose that Saint Valentine’s Day served is not clear; it may be a toned down elements of Lupercalia or it was a commemorative day for the martyrs of the early Christian era. (World History Encyclopedia)

Formal messages, or valentines, appeared in the 1500s, and by the late 1700s commercially printed cards were being used. The first commercial valentines in the United States were printed in the mid-1800s. (Britannica)

London’s relationship with Valentine’s Day cards goes back at least two hundred years. By the mid 1820s, an estimated 200,000 valentines circulated annually within London.

In 1840, the Post Office introduced a new service where letters could be sent across the country for one penny using the first postage stamp, known as the Penny Black. The number of Valentine’s Day cards sent then skyrocketed. By the late 1840s the number was reported to have doubled, and had doubled again by the 1860s. (London Museum)

Valentines commonly depict Cupid, the Roman god of love, along with hearts, traditionally the seat of emotion. Because it was thought that the avian mating season begins in mid-February, birds also became a symbol of the day. Traditional gifts include candy and flowers, particularly red roses, a symbol of beauty and love. (Britannica)

February 13, 2026 by Peter T Young 2 Comments

Louis Henri Jean Charlot

Born in Paris, Louis Henri Jean Charlot was descended from “sundry exotic ancestors.” His father, Henri, was a French businessman, free-thinker and Bolshevik sympathizer born and reared in Russia. Anna, his mother, an artist and a devout Catholic, was the daughter of Louis Goupil, a native of Mexico City.

Goupil, of French and Mexican Indian stock, married Sarah Louise (Luisita) Melendez, a Jewish woman of Spanish descent and subsequently moved from Mexico to Paris in the late 1860s. (Thompson)

Charlot admiringly describes his maternal grandfather in his earlier years as “… a fine rider, a coleador who could hold a running bull by passing its tail between his knee and the saddle of his galloping horse”.

Also living in Paris was Jean Charlot’s great-uncle, Eugène Goupil, a collector of Mexican works of art. Jean, who began to draw around age two, grew up surrounded by pre-Hispanic antiquities. (Thompson)

In his teens, Charlot had become one of a Catholic group that called itself Gilde Notre-Dame (“Parisian adolescents (who) used to gather in a crypt”) made up of sculptors, stained glass makers, embroiderers and decorators.

The resumption after the war of what Charlot calls his “career as a French liturgical artist” was cut short by the cancellation of the commission for the church mural just after he had completed the scale drawings.

This “first heartbreak at the realization that a born mural painter is helpless without a wall ….” was one of the factors that precipitated a journey to Mexico in 1920. “On this first trip to Mexico I did nothing at all. I was stuck aesthetically in 18th century France.” (Thompson)

“My life in France was on the whole rational, national, obeying this often heard dictum that a Frenchman is a man who ignores geography. There were though, simultaneously, un-French elements at work. Russian, sephardim, Aztec ancestors, warmed my blood to adventure.” (Charlot; Thompson)

After this Mexican trip, in 1928, Charlot and his mother moved to New York where he rented a small apartment on the top floor of 42 Union Square from the artist Morris Kantor. The apartment was unheated, which probably contributed to the death of his mother from pneumonia in January, 1929.

On a brief trip to Mexico in 1931, Charlot met his future wife, Dorothy Zohmah Day. During a visit to Zohmah in Los Angeles in 1933, Charlot met the printer Lynton R Kistler and produced Picture Book, “a repertory of motifs I had used up to then.” Returning to New York, teaching and lecturing occupied much of Charlot’s time.

In May 1939, Jean Charlot and Zohmah Day were married in San Francisco. “It was a long courtship,” commented Charlot. “Eight years. We were always in different places”.

The years from 1941-44 were spent as artist-in-residence at the University of Georgia, Athens, and instructor in art history at the University of California, Berkeley and artist-in-residence at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. (Thompson)

Then he had a chance to come to Hawaiʻi – and he stayed. An invitation to create a fresco at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, brought Charlot to Honolulu in 1949 where he painted Relation of Man and Nature in Old Hawai’i at Bachman Hall.

He accepted a position as professor of art at the University, and Hawai’i became the Charlot family’s permanent home. Attracted to the culture of the native Hawaiian, just as he had been interested in the folk aspects of the residents of rural France and the indigenous peoples of Mexico, he studied Hawaiian history, customs and religion, and learned the Hawaiian language.

From 1949 to 1979 Charlot created almost six hundred easel paintings, several hundred prints, and thirty-six works of art in public places in fresco, ceramic tile and sculpture. He taught summer sessions at several schools, among them San Diego State College (1950), Arizona State University (1951) and the University of Notre Dame (1955 and 1956). In 1950 he was made faculty advisor to the Newman Club, the Catholic student organization of the University of Hawai’i. (Thompson)

Charlot retired from the University of Hawai’i as Senior Professor Emeritus in 1966. Two years later, he traveled to France for the first time since 1921 and, at Malzéville and Paris, created a series of lithographs.

In 1968 the Jean Charlot Foundation was established in Honolulu to collect source materials relating to the life, work, art, philosophy, and values of Jean Charlot and promote publication of Charlot material – and, the “development of interest in the arts, encouragement of artists, and study of art.” (Thompson)

There are very few artists of Jean Charlot’s caliber in Hawaiʻi or the world. From 1958 until his death, Jean Charlot lived in Hawaiʻi in his ‘dream house’ on Wai’alae Country Club. Here, he conducted most of his work in this house and more particularly in his 2nd floor studio.

This was the final period of Charlot’s life, when he reached the peak of his artistic powers and was able to synthesize the esthetics of Europe, Mexico and Pacific Islands, the places he lived and influenced his art. His career spanned these places.

He was an early participant in the revival of liturgical art in France. He was a pioneer of the Mexican Mural Renaissance. He also worked as an archaeologist, moving to Washington D.C. to complete the publication of the report of the Carnegie Institution’s Chichen Itza expedition.

He completed numerous monumental art works in Hawaiʻi, Fiji and elsewhere. His artwork in public places number 74 in his lifetime, over 30 planned in the house, including the large ceramic tile mural on the School Street facade of the United Public Workers Building in Honolulu.

Jean Charlot was primarily a muralist and was also a prolific writer, producing numerous scholarly books and articles along with poetry and drama. He also illustrated over 50 books. Many works and scholarly resources are now housed in the Jean Charlot Collection of the Hamilton Library, University of Hawaiʻi. (NPS)

Among the honors bestowed on Charlot was the election by the Royal Society of Art, London, as a Benjamin Franklin Fellow in 1972. In 1976, the Hawai’i State Legislature presented Charlot with the Order of Distinction for Cultural Leadership. As well as being recognized as a ‘Living Treasure’ by Honpa Hongwanji Mission.

In 1974, Charlot was diagnosed as having cancer of the prostate. Radiation treatments and chemotherapy would keep the disease under control for the next four years. Confined to a wheelchair during the last months of his life, Charlot remained active as an artist and a scholar until his death on March 20, 1979. (Thompson)

February 12, 2026 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Greek Artillery

Ua makaukau pono ʻo Liliʻu
Ma na poka ʻAhi Helene. …
Noho hou o Liliʻu i ke Kalaunu.

Liliʻu is readily prepared
With her Greek artillery fire. …
Return again Liliʻu to the throne.
(Hawaiʻi Holomua, February 11, 1893; Chapin)

Greek sailors found their way to the Islands on whalers and trading vessels after 1830. Beginning in the late 1870s, some forty men from the small Mediterranean country migrated and settled on the Big Island and O‘ahu.

They set up produce-growing and shipping operations, cafés, bars, rooming houses, and hotels. (Greek Festival Hawaiʻi)

In 1883, Peter Camarinos, originally from Sparta, opened the California Fruit Market on King Street, near Alakea, in Honolulu, and in 1891, established the Pearl City Fruit Company with other Hawaiian-based businessmen, inspiring relatives and others to venture here. (Lucas)

They were pioneers in exporting pineapples and bananas and other exotic fruits to California markets. He installed refrigeration containers on ships that can hold up to 2,000 lbs. of fruit. Camarinos transported their own goods to market and allowed other businesses to use their refrigeration containers for a fee. (Lucas)

George Lycurgus, known as Uncle George, was a cousin of Camarinos who came to Hawaiʻi in 1887 and played an important role in the development of the San Souci, Hilo Hotel and Kilauea Volcano House. (Gonser)

Migration from Greece in the last third of the 19th Century was primarily due to crop failures and a surplus population that caused wide-spread poverty. A Western technological revolution of cheap and fast steamship and rail travel, along with rapid industrialization, made feasible large scale emigration to America and, on a smaller scale, to Hawaiʻi.

The Greeks came into direct conflict with that small but powerful group of American businessmen who effectively weakened Kalakaua’s government by means of the ‘Bayonet Constitution’ of 1887.

Later, there was a revolution against Queen Liliʻuokalani’s constitutional monarchy and in 1895 a subsequent counter-revolution that attempted to restore her to the throne.

From January 6 to January 9, 1895, patriots of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi and the forces that had overthrown the constitutional Hawaiian monarchy were engaged in a war that consisted of three battles on the island of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi.

This has frequently been referred to as the “Counter-revolution”. It has also been called the Second Wilcox Rebellion of 1895, the Revolution of 1895, the Hawaiian Counter-revolution of 1895, the 1895 Uprising in Hawaiʻi, the Hawaiian Civil War, the 1895 Uprising Against the Provisional Government or the Uprising of 1895.

In their attempt to return Queen Liliʻuokalani to the throne, it was the last major military operation by royalists who opposed the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. The goal of the rebellion failed.

It turns out several of the Greek businessmen were royalists and were implicated in getting guns past customs officials, notably, Lycurgus at the San Souci in Waikiki.

Lycurgus was a royalist and was implicated with other counter-revolutionists in supplying arms (1895.) He was arrested, thirteen counts of treason were filed against him and he was held at ‘The Reef’ (Oʻahu Prison) for 52-days. (Chapin)

The beginning chant in this post appeared in Hawaii Holomua shortly after Queen Lili’uokalani’s removal in early 1893; it expressed a strong desire that she regain her throne.

“Greek artillery fire” was a classical and heroic allusion by the poet, but it was also, as events turned out, appropriate in that Greek men in Hawaiʻi during the Revolution and Counterrevolution were loyal to her.

During those years, a dozen or so natives of Greece who were Hawaiʻi residents were involved in the prolonged and ultimately futile struggle to preserve the monarchy. Seven men were active participants, and the rest were royalist sympathizers. (Chapin)

February 11, 2026 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Land Divisions

In discussing ancient land divisions, we typically hear of Mokupuni (island,) Moku (district,) Ahupuaʻa (generally watershed units) and ʻIli (strips of land.) Kalana and ʻOkana are often less-heard-of land divisions.

“In very ancient times, the lands were not divided and an island was left without divisions such as kalana, ʻokana, ahupuaʻa, and ʻili, but in the time when the lands became filled with people, the lands were divided, with the proper names for this place and that place so that they could be known.” (Kamakau)

Each of the larger divisions of this group, like Hawaiʻi, Maui and the others, is called a mokupuni (moku, cut off, and puni, surrounded.)

Six districts on the islands of O‘ahu and Hawai‘i, and the system of developing smaller manageable units of land became formalized by the early 1600s, in the reigns of ʻUmi-a-Līloa and Māʻilikūkahi. (Maly)

“The island (moku that is surrounded by water) is the main division, like, Hawai’i, Maui and the rest of the island chain. (Islands) were divided up into sections inside of the island, called moku o loko, like such places as Kona on Hawai’i island, and Hana on Mäui island, and such divisions on these islands.” (Malo)

Over the centuries, as the ancient Hawaiian population grew, land use and resource management also evolved. The moku puni or islands were subdivided into land units of varying sizes.

Each island was divided into several Moku ʻĀina (moku-o-loko (district – literally: interior island)) (Moku) or Districts. The Moku and Kalana (similar to the Moku) were divided into ʻokana (divisions within a Moku or Kalana) and Ahupuaʻa.

There sections were further divided into subdivision called ʻokana, or kalana. On the intermediate level, some kalana/moku were subdivided into ʻokana, some ʻokana were apparently independent of any moku/kalana, and moku and kalana were not always synonymous but appear in some cases to have been units nested within each other. (Beamer)

“(A) poko is a subdivision of a ʻokana. These sections were further divided into smaller divisions called Ahupua’a, and sections smaller than an Ahupua’a were called ‘ili ‘āina.” (Malo)

There is a district called Kona on the lee side, and one called Koʻolau on the windward side of almost every island. On Maui there are some sub-districts called ʻokana, of which there are five in the Hana district, while Lahaina is termed a Kalana. (Alexander)

Despite the diversity and complexity of the system, it appears that the ahupua’a became the most important division in the resource administration of the Hawaiian Kingdom, both as a unit and as a reference for the location of smaller properties. (Beamer)

Ahupuaʻa are subdivisions of land that were usually marked by an altar with an image or representation of a pig placed upon it (thus the name ahu-puaʻa or pig altar.)

In their configuration, the ahupua‘a may be compared to wedge-shaped pieces of land that radiate out from the center of the island, extending to the ocean fisheries fronting the land unit.

Their boundaries are generally defined by topography and geological features such as pu‘u (hills), ridges, gullies, valleys, craters, or areas of a particular vegetation growth.

The ahupua‘a, like the larger districts they belonged to, were also divided into smaller manageable parcels. Among the smaller land units that were identified by the ancient Hawaiians were the: ‘ili lele and ‘ili kupono. (Maly)

A peculiarity of the ‘Ili, on Oʻahu at least, is that it often consists of several distinct sections of land in different parts of the Ahupua’a, which are called lele, i.e. ‘jumps.’

Thus many lands in Waikiki have their corresponding patches of taro land and forest in Waikiki and Manoa valleys. The taro lands of Wailupe are found in Palolo valley. In Kalihi, and also in the district of ʻEwa, are ʻili which consist of eight or ten scattered lele apiece, included under one title. (Alexander)

ʻIli were detached parcels with resources in various environmental zones; kihāpai, both lo‘i (pond fields) and dry gardens; māla, dryland agricultural systems; and kōʻele, agricultural parcels worked by commoners for the chiefs.

These smaller parcels were inhabited and managed by the makaʻāinana (people of the land) and their extended families. In each ahupua‘a—from mountain slopes to the ocean—the common people were generally allowed access to all of the various natural resources within a given ahupua‘a. (Maly)

Land Divisions include, generally:

• Mokupuni – The island groups (such as our current county system)
• Moku – The major districts of each individual island
• Kalana – The significant divisions within each Moku
• ʻOkana – Division of the Moku or Kalana
• Ahupua‘a – Individual watershed regions within each Kalana
• ʻIli – functional subdivisions of an Ahupua‘a