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February 10, 2019 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Lighting Strikes Twice

Hawai‘i’s whaling era began in 1819 when two New England ships became the first whaling ships to arrive in the Hawaiian Islands.

At that time, whale products were in high demand; whale oil was used for heating, lamps and in industrial machinery; whale bone was used in corsets, skirt hoops, umbrellas and buggy whips.

In the early 19th century, whaling voyages often took two years or more.

George Pollard was captain of the Essex, a Nantucket whaling vessel that sank in 1821 after being rammed by a sperm whale in the South Pacific.

The Essex’s epic tale inspired Herman Melville’s classic novel “Moby-Dick;” however, the author isn’t believed to have used Pollard as the basis for the book’s notorious Captain Ahab.

After the tragedy of the Essex, Captain George Pollard and other survivors endured a 95-day journey in small boats that resulted in sickness, starvation, and, ultimately, cannibalism. However, this dramatic experience was not the final chapter in Pollard’s career as a whaling captain.

Despite the Essex tragedy, Pollard was offered another captaincy soon after, this time of the Two Brothers; before departing, Pollard had said he believed “lightning never strikes in the same place twice.”

Such was not the case.

The Two Brothers set sail for the Pacific, leaving Nantucket on November 26, 1821. By winter 1822, the ship had rounded the tip of South America. The crew was on its way to newly discovered whaling grounds near Japan; she made her way around Cape Horn, then up the west coast of South America.

On the night of February 11, 1823, the Two Brothers hit a shallow reef at French Frigate Shoals (nearly six hundred miles northwest of Honolulu in what is now the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.)

The ship broke apart in the heavy surf. Stunned by the disaster and by his horrible misfortune, Captain Pollard was reluctant to abandon the ship. The crew pleaded with their captain to get into the small boats, to which they clung for survival throughout the night.

The entire crew of Two Brothers was rescued by an accompanying ship, the Martha, and they headed back to Oʻahu.

In 2008, a team of NOAA maritime archaeologists made an exciting discovery at French Frigate Shoals. Following over three weeks of successful survey in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the team began to explore for new shipwreck sites at French Frigate Shoals using tow board surveys in an area near a historic anchorage.

Within minutes of the first tow, the divers spotted a large anchor in approximately 15-feet of water. The age and size of this anchor gave the impression that it was not simply left as a mooring in an anchorage.

After snorkeling around in the area, the team came across the first clue that this site was more than a lone anchor: a blubber pot set into a hole in the reef top. This discovery initiated a larger survey of the area, and soon two more was found.

At the time, researchers did not know the identity of the find. Three whaling ships, all American vessels, have been reported lost at French Frigate Shoals: the South Seaman, wrecked in 1859; the Daniel Wood, wrecked in 1867; and the Two Brothers.

It wasn’t until May of 2010 when a small team was able to return to the site that maritime archaeologists began to believe they were indeed looking at the scattered remains of the Two Brothers.

During the 2010 inspection, the team uncovered more tools of whaling on the seafloor, including four more whaling harpoon tips (for a total of five), four whaling lances, ceramics, glass, and a sounding lead (among dozens of other artifacts) all dating to an 1820s time period.

The preponderance of evidence suggested to the team that they were looking at the Two Brothers, the only American whaler lost at French Frigate Shoals in the 1820s.

Pollard gave up whaling, though he was just in his mid-30s, and returned to Nantucket, Mass., where he became a night watchman – a position of considerably lower status in the whaling town than captain.

This and other American whaling ships lost in Papahānaumokuākea are the material remains of a time when America possessed over 700 whaling vessels and over one fifth of the United States whaling fleet may have been composed of Pacific Islanders.

The whaling shipwreck sites in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands help tell this part of Hawaiian and Pacific history, and remind us about the way that this remote part of the United States is connected with small communities in New England half way around the world.

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A sketch by Thomas Nickerson depicting the attack and sinking of the ship Essex-(NOAA)
A sketch by Thomas Nickerson depicting the attack and sinking of the ship Essex-(NOAA)
Two-Brothers-Ginger-Jar-(NationalGeographic)
Two-Brothers-Ginger-Jar-(NationalGeographic)
Two-Brothers-Cooking-Pot-(NationalGeographic)
Two-Brothers-Cooking-Pot-(NationalGeographic)
Two-Brothers-Blubber-Hook-(NationalGeographic)
Two-Brothers-Blubber-Hook-(NationalGeographic)
Two-Brothers-Anchor-(NationalGeographic)
Two-Brothers-Anchor-(NationalGeographic)
The sinking of the Essex was the inspiration for Melville's Moby-Dick
The sinking of the Essex was the inspiration for Melville’s Moby-Dick
Two_Brothers-(sott-net)
Two_Brothers-(sott-net)
French_Frigate_Shoals-(NOAA)
French_Frigate_Shoals-(NOAA)
Site plan of the southern section of the Two Brothers shipwreck site completed 2010-(NOAA)

Filed Under: Place Names, Sailing, Shipping & Shipwrecks Tagged With: Hawaii, French Frigate Shoals, Shipwreck, Moby Dick, Two Brothers

February 6, 2019 by Peter T Young 2 Comments

Laysan Island Cyclorama

“Almost exactly in the middle of the Pacific, midway between our Pacific coast and Japan, there is a small island, a coral atoll with a surface of about three and a half square miles, which supports perhaps the most dense bird population in the world”.

“Here, on a level plain from which every vestige of vegetation has been worn away, is a mass of these great birds nearly a square mile in extent. He may have seen birds before by the thousand, perhaps by tens of thousands; but surely not literally by the million!”

“(A)lbatrosses, some two million of them, are by no means the most numerous bird inhabitants of this great oceanic aviary. Most of the surface, save that just described, is covered with a coarse, sedge-like, tufted grass among which several millions of terns of about six species, have their homes.”

“In another place is an exceedingly picturesque bit of rocky scenery in which the immaculately white “love birds” have established a rookery. These, unlike other terns are silent birds, and hover like great white butterflies close above the visitor, silently inspecting him without either fear or anger.”

“A very different scene presents itself in the rookery of the great, greenblack ‘man-o-war birds,’ the outcasts and pirates of this oceanic aviary. Graceful beyond compare while on the wing, they have a particularly savage and cruel aspect when seen at close quarters on their nests.”

“But any description of the scene would be inexcusably defective were we to omit mention of the weird color effects produced by the combination of the snow white coral sand, the dark green vegetation, and the intense blue of the tropic sky …”

“… often mottled with purple clouds; while embracing all is the thundering surf of intense green, white crested waves near shore, and, further out, the wonderful deep blue of the Pacific.”

“Try as we may; this scene can not be described, and as day after day the wonder of it grew and deepened, the writer found constantly recurring and intensifying the great desire to have it reproduced as a masterpiece of art for the benefit of the State University and the people of Iowa.”

“And then the ‘Laysan Island scheme’ had its birth.”

“To any one who has seen a really good cyclorama, such as that of the “Battle of Gettysburg,” where the observer gazes upon hundreds of thousands of men and miles of space, a veritable miracle of vast numbers in intense action …”

“… the actual figures in the foreground so skillfully joined to the painted background as to deceive the very elect, the ‘Laysan Island’ scheme will make an immediate appeal.”

“The plan is, briefly, to construct in our new museum a cyclorama of Laysan Island. … It was with the Laysan idea in view that room was reserved for this exhibit in the north end of ‘Bird Hall’ in the new museum, and marked ‘Laysan Room’ in the plans.” (Nutting; Iowa Alumnus, 1909)

“Laysan Island Cyclorama offers a 360-degree view of Laysan, an outpost of the Hawaiian atoll and a bird sanctuary, at its heyday, when it boasted 8 million birds of 22 different species in 1.5 square miles.”

“In 1902 Charles Nutting, director of the UI Museum of Natural History, first traveled to Laysan as a scientific advisor to a government expedition. He was so inspired by the multitudes of terns, albatrosses, finches, boobies, and other birds that he vowed to re-create the scene in Iowa City.”

“Nutting led the UI in a nine-year fundraising campaign. Laysan frequently made headlines in The Daily Iowan. In 1909, the football team even performed a skit at a lecture on Hawaii to raise funds for the trip.”

“In 1911, Nutting sent Homer Dill, who managed the museum’s bird and mammal collections, along with UI students Horace Young and Clarence Albrecht and muralist Charles Corwin back to Laysan to gather specimens for an exhibit.”

“The party found the island very different from the paradise Nutting had described almost a decade earlier. In addition to evidence of feather poaching, rabbits introduced by a guano miner in 1903 had overwhelmed the island, stripping it of its vegetation and decimating insect populations.”

“Lacking food and shelter, some seabirds took flight to other islands, but land birds were unable to fly the long distances to other islands.”

“Despite this, Dill returned to Iowa City with 36 large crates of specimens (total of 398 birds representing 23 species), including plants and sand. Museum studies students handcrafted thousands of wax leaves for the display, and Corwin painted a 138-foot-long backdrop.” (The mounting of the 106 birds and installation of the cyclorama foreground required nearly three years.)

“When it opened, the cyclorama was one of the first in the world to feature a natural theme and is one of a handful of cycloramas still existing today.”

“In 1912, UI sophomore Alfred Bailey returned to the island, but ran out of poison and ammunition, barely affecting the rabbit population.”

“In 1923 the Tanager Expedition killed the last of the rabbits on Laysan Island — too late for the Laysan rail, Laysan honeycreeper and Laysan millerbird, which went extinct due to the devastation. Two more species, the Laysan finch and the Laysan duck, remain endangered. All of these species are featured in the Cyclorama.”

“No major modifications have been made to the cyclorama, but renovations in the early 2000s included the addition of interpretive signs and a soundtrack of bird calls of all 22 living and extinct species that have inhabited the island. While museum staff have hand-cleaned parts of the background mural, no major conservation work has been done.” (U of Iowa)

Over 100-years later, Laysan Island Cyclorama, on the third Floor, West End of Hageboeck Hall of Birds in the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, is still open.

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Laysan Island Cyclorama-Laysan Albatrosses-UIowa
Laysan Island Cyclorama-Laysan Albatrosses-UIowa
Laysan Island Cyclorama-Fairy Terns-UIowa
Laysan Island Cyclorama-Fairy Terns-UIowa
Laysan Island Cyclorama-Black-footed Albatrosses-UIowa
Laysan Island Cyclorama-Black-footed Albatrosses-UIowa
Laysan Island Cyclorama-Laysan Duck-UIowa
Laysan Island Cyclorama-Laysan Duck-UIowa
Laysan Island Cyclorama-Terns on Laysan-UIowa
Laysan Island Cyclorama-Terns on Laysan-UIowa
Laysan Island Cyclorama-Great Frigatebirds Nesting-UIowa
Laysan Island Cyclorama-Great Frigatebirds Nesting-UIowa
Laysan-albatrosses
Laysan-albatrosses
Laysan_Island_Munro_June-1891-(DenverMuseum)
Laysan_Island_Munro_June-1891-(DenverMuseum)
Laysan-Island-Munro-June_1891-(DenverMuseum)
Laysan-Island-Munro-June_1891-(DenverMuseum)
Layan-shed
Layan-shed
Homes Dill (rear) preparing bird skins with Student Clarence Albrecht-Laysan-1911
Homes Dill (rear) preparing bird skins with Student Clarence Albrecht-Laysan-1911
Gathering Albatross Eggs-Laysan
Gathering Albatross Eggs-Laysan

Filed Under: Economy, General, Place Names Tagged With: Cyclorama, Laysan, Laysan Island Cyclorama, Hawaii

January 25, 2019 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Sky Ranch

It’s not clear when it opened, but in the 1940s and ‘50s, there is clear evidence of the “Kailua Airport” on the Windward side of O‘ahu, reportedly, privately-owned and operated by Bob Whittinghill.

When work was started in 1948 on the new airport in Kailua-Kona, to avoid confusion with the Kailua Airport on Oʻahu, the Big Island’s airport was named “Kona Airport.”

In 1954 it was “enlarged and improved to handle an expected resurgence of prospective fliers. (T)he airport is prepared to offer flying lessons under a complete ‘pay-as-you-fly’ program.” (Advertiser, May 23, 1954)

It was generally referred to as ‘Sky Ranch’ and “was a grass field in Kailua, windward side of Oahu. It was located parallel to the southern fence of Kaneohe Marine Base, near the Mōkapu gate to the base, and west of Mōkapu Boulevard.”

“The runway was where the east/west portion of ‘Aikahi Loop is now. It would have appeared in any sectional published pre-1960. It had a 200′ asphalt strip & about 1,800′ of grass, and power lines at the East end, along Mōkapu Blvd.”

“There was a large Quonset hut as a hangar, shop combination, and a small raised house that served as the office & bathroom. There was a gasoline-powered pump & 3,500 gallon tank of 80/87 avgas.”

“The field was operated by Robert Whittinghill, who was an instructor at the state aircraft mechanic school at Honolulu Airport.” (Hurd; Freeman)

“One man who’s licked the commuting problem over the Pali is Bob King of Kailua who lives a block away from the Kailua Sky Ranch landing strip and works at Honolulu airport. He usually flies to work.”

“It takes him an average of seven minutes over the Pali, about 16 minutes by way of Koko head. He claims flying is six time safer that driving a car, 12 times safer than driving across the Pali.” (Krauss, March 2, 1959)

Besides recreational and commuter flying, there were other aviation activities there. “(N)ews has arrived from Hawaii of the formation of the Hawaii Soaring Club with Woody Brown as President.”

“Plans call for the operation of Pratt-Reads from Kailua Sky Ranch on Oahu with Kipapa Field as a secondary base of operations. We are glad to hear these beautiful islands which have in the past been the site of some interesting soaring flights will once again be the scene of soaring activity.” (Soaring, Jan-Feb, 1959)

Likewise, “Parachuting is rapidly becoming a very popular sport. Quite ordinary young men – and women – are jumping from aircraft every weekend all over the United States, including Hawaii.”

The Aloha Sky Divers “meets every Sunday at the Kailua Sky Ranch, a short walk from the Pali Palms. Its members, floating down under colored canopies, have become a familiar sight in these parts.” Star Bulletin, July 14, 1961)

In addition, “Oahu’s only Air Scout squadron has been launched at Kailua Sky ranch, where a model plane meet is scheduled. … a clubhouse with work shop has been made available for both the Boy Scouts and the model plane enthusiast of Windward Oahu.”

“Bob Whittinghill is adviser for the aero squadron, composed of Boy Scouts 14 and over … the model plane meet set for today is the third held by Kailua Sky ranch. The two earlier meets drew about 1,000 persons at each event”. (Advertiser, May 24, 1954)

“Robert Whittinghill (leased) Kailua Sky Ranch from Kaneohe Ranch Company on a short-notice basis.” (Star-Bulletin, October 29, 1956) While pressure was building to keep the air field for recreational flights, ultimately, pressure for residential home development overcame that.

“About 15 planes will leave this weekend on a final, nostalgic flight from the Kailua Sky Ranch, Oahu’s only remaining private airport for light planes.”

“The planes will head for temporary quarters at busy Honolulu Airport as bulldozers move in to plow the Sky Ranch airstrip for a housing subdivision.” (Star-Bulletin, July 20, 1961)

“‘Aikahi Park, a prestige home development designed for families growing in stature and size, is being opened this Labor Day weekend by Centex-Trousdale.” (Prices ranged from $25,050 to $27,350, “on low rent Kaneohe Ranch Co 55-year leasehold land.”)

“Homes in the park have been designed by Vladimir Ossipoff, FAIA, who has won many architectural awards for local residences. They are in Hawaiian styles with three and four bedrooms, the latter containing fireplaces.” (Star-Bulletin, September 2, 1962)

Whittinghill also ran (since 1947) the Aero-Tech Division of Honolulu Technical School, a State education arm for training aviation mechanics, situated in a hanger at Honolulu International Airport. (Advertiser, September 18, 1963)

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Kailua-Mokapu-Aerial-(2444)-1952-(portion-Kailua-Airfield)
Kailua-Mokapu-Aerial-(2444)-1952-(portion-Kailua-Airfield)
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Kailua-Mokapu-Aerial-(4290)-1963-(mass_grading_Aikahi_Park_takes_out_the_Kailua-Airfield)
Kailua-Mokapu-Aerial-(2508)-1959-(portion_noting_Kailua-Airfield)
Kailua-Mokapu-Aerial-(2508)-1959-(portion_noting_Kailua-Airfield)
Kailua-Mokapu-Aerial-(2444)-1952-(portion_noting_Kailua-Airfield)
Kailua-Mokapu-Aerial-(2444)-1952-(portion_noting_Kailua-Airfield)
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Kailua Sky Ranch-Aikahi
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Sky Ranch0O_Mokapu_1969-Portion
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Airfields_HI_Oahu_N_htm_480a3116

Filed Under: General, Place Names, Economy Tagged With: Hawaii, Kailua, Koolaupoko, Mokapu, Kailua Airfield, Sky Ranch

January 24, 2019 by Peter T Young 1 Comment

Lanihau

“I started looking for property in Kona in 1921 when I graduated from Yale [University] and I think between then and 1932, why, I must have seen every beach property from Milolii to Kawaihae, no matter how you got to it–by air or by sea or by boat or by donkey or by mule or on foot.”

“And I finally decided on [William] Doc Hill’s place down at Keauhou as being the ideal spot that I wanted to live in but through a long combination of funny circumstances, why, I didn’t get it.”

“I’d inquired about this place from Mr. Childs who was then local head of American Factors. He said, ‘Oh hell, that property’s so tied up with owners you never could clear title.’”

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘you live here’ – and he was a big shot of the community at the time. ‘Tell you what I’ll do. If you can clear the titles, I’ll put up the money and we’ll subdivide the thing into large pieces and go fifty-fifty on it.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s fair enough. That doesn’t cost me anything.’”

“So I waited seven years and nothing happened. Then I happened to meet an old-timer from up here who’d been in the tax office and knew land problems–who my father helped to keep out of jail–and he was very fond of the Thurstons.”

“So I said, ‘Who owns that property next to Factors?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that belongs to so-and-so and so-and-so. You want to buy it?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know whether I can afford it or not.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the girl right at this moment needs money badly, I know, and I’m quite sure she would sell.’”

“So, this was four in the afternoon and at 9:30 the next morning I got a call and he said, ‘If you’ll have so much money available by eleven o’clock, I can buy her half-interest in thirty-eight acres.’”

“So I said, ‘Well, I don’t know where I’m going to get the money but I’ll have it.’ I did. Five years later, for five times as much, I bought the other half. So that brings us up to about 1938 and going into 1939.”

“An old kahuna who lived down at Kahaluu – I can’t remember his name at the moment but it’ll come to me – through his grandson who worked for [Theo. H.] Davies and Company, said that his grandfather wanted to come see me.”

“His grandfather had known my great-grandfather as a little boy and his great-grandfather was, at that time, in his late nineties and Asa [Thurston] died when he was well along in the eighties, so there is quite a span there. So I said I’d be delighted.”

“So the old man came over and his grandfather … he was ashamed to speak English so he spoke in Hawaiian and I spoke English. I could understand him and he could understand me. So he said, ‘I would like to know what Mr. Thurston’s plans are for the development of this property,’ which was translated duly.”

“And I replied and gave him a general idea of what I was trying to accomplish here. We’d planted quite a few trees at that time.
So the old man sat here for quite a long time and just nodded his head; and then he started in talking Hawaiian very rapidly and he talked for about ten minutes without taking a breath.”

“So the old man thanked me with tears in his eyes and we talked a little bit about his remembering my grandfather. He was a young man at the time. And he died, oh, within two or three months after that down at Kailua.”

“The name of this place is Lanihau. L-A-N-I-H-A-U. There’s Lanihau-nui which is next door and this is Lanihau-iki, meaning little Lanihau, and Lanihau-nui is back of it [and means large or great Lanihau]. That belongs to the Greenwells.”

“The name puzzled me. Lani means heavenly; beauty. Hau–H-A-U–is normally the tree from which they make the Hawaiian outriggers or the amas [float for canoe outrigger] or ‘iako [canoe outrigger]. H-A-0 is iron or steel or very strong.”

“So I submitted this to John Lane, who was then alive, and Mary Pukui, who’s still alive, and Reverend Henry Judd and two others … and asked them what this name meant, because many times Hawaiian meanings were hidden.”

“They asked a great many questions about the place. Was it on a point? Yes. You had a beautiful view up and down the coast? Yes. You had a beautiful view of the ocean? Yes. And the surf? Yes.”

“And out on the point at times it’s enormous; and is there a current that comes past that you can see sometimes? Yes, you can see it coming down the coast, coming around the point. And you have a beautiful view of the sunrise and of the sunset?”

“They finally came up with this hidden meaning which I think is very interesting; Lanihau is the place where the forces of the heavens and of the earth meet and all is quiet and peaceful. The moonlight and the sunshine, the waves, the grand weather, the storms, and so on, which is rather interesting, I think.”

“I would say that you are really in a very blessed spot.”

“I started to work here on the 28th of December of 1939. It was all just lava, nothing else. And this place evolved as a result of exposure and watching the surf and studying and seeing what one could do.”

“I always wanted a harbor for a boat to go fishing and to go swimming. And so, this gradually evolved and then I began to find out things about it.”

“Kamehameha the Great lived right here for some time – seven years – prior to his death. This is where he slept and over there was where he ate and over where the guest house is, is where his servants lived; and over at the far end there, beyond the entrance to the pond – going into the King Kamehameha [Hotel] lot – was the old heiau.”

“So he was self -contained and nobody was allowed on this place in the old days. You had to go around it. It was tabu. … Sacred.”

Back to the old man and his grandfather … “His grandson laughed when the old man ran down and said, ‘Well, my grandfather has said quite a few things. I will try to translate.’”

“In essence, what he said was this, that he will now die happy and he now understands why the good Lord never let anybody buy this over all the years.”

“He said, ‘He was waiting till you could come – till you had the money to come – and till you could develop this place, which certainly is even farther than Kamehameha would have been able to had he chosen to do it, and it will become a place of great beauty.’”

“‘I will now die happy because this property is in the hands of the man the Lord intended it to go to.’” (Lorrin P Thurston; Watumull Oral History)

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Kailua_Bay-Ahuena_Heiau_and_Vicinity-HenryEPKekuhuna-SP_201856
Kailua_Bay-Ahuena_Heiau_and_Vicinity-HenryEPKekuhuna-SP_201856
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Filed Under: Hawaiian Traditions, Place Names, Ali'i / Chiefs / Governance, Missionaries / Churches / Religious Buildings Tagged With: Hawaii, Hawaii Island, Kona, Kailua-Kona, Lanihau, Lorrin P Thurston

January 21, 2019 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Scotch Coast

Answering a recruiting call from Hawai‘i for teachers, Marsue McGinnis McShane arrived at Laupahoehoe School in September of 1945. … “We were invited to all the parties and they gave a big party for us, the plantation.”

“(W)e went up to the [plantation] manager’s house. They were expecting us and we had tea and everything. [The area] was called the Scotch Coast, [because] a lot of the people were real Scotsmen.”

“And there were these Scotsmen and I remember they put on their kilts for us and did the dances. One guy, the one who was head of the sugar processing, the raw sugar, played the bagpipes.” (McShane)

“It has been said that ‘Scotland’s greatest export product is Scotsmen’ and many of them turned up in Hawaii beginning with the two Scots aboard Capt. James Cook’s Resolution when he discovered Hawaii for the West.” (LA Times)

“One well-known Scotsman was Capt. Alexander Adams, a wide-ranging navigator and friend of Hawaii’s first monarch King Kamehameha I.”

“In the 19th century a Scot, Robert Crichton Wyllie of Ayeshire, was Minister of Foreign Affairs under Kings Kamehameha III and IV.”

“From Edinburgh came Archibald Scott Cleghorn, who became governor of Oahu and husband of Princess Likelike. He was also father of a famous beauty, Princess Kaiulani, to whom another Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, dedicated a poem.”

“The Hawaiian island that drew the most Scots was the Big Island of Hawaii. Some Scots undoubtedly found pleasure in settling in the island’s Waimea-Kohala area because its cool, misty upland climate reminded them of their own misty isles.” (LA Times)

“Unlike other large ethnic groups, the Scots never came in large groups or by the shipload. And in a society where ethnicity was easily identified, the Scots were simply part of the ‘haoles’”. (Orange County Register)

“The Scots came for various reasons. Some came for the pleasure of Hawaii. Others followed kinsmen already in Hawaii when economic conditions became poor in Scotland.”

“The Scottish emigrants came mostly from rural areas of Scotland and settled in country areas of Hawaii, particularly on the sugar plantations.”

“Eventually, so many Scots settled on the plantations along the Hamakua Coast that the area became known as the ‘Scotch Coast.’”

“On Saturday nights the Scots came into Hilo, the island’s main city, and congregated at the end of the railroad line at the corner of Kamehameha Street and Waianuenue Avenue. It was eventually known as the ‘Scotsmen’s corner.’” (LA Times)

“The Scots kept their ties to the mother country by letter, and by occasionally recruiting kinsmen to come to the islands to join them. They kept their traditional foods, as did other ethnic groups, and scones, oatmeal and shortbread were common on the island.”

“But the Scots also were canny enough to assimilate, or at least acculturate. An observer of the Scots in Hawaii, George Mair, described what a new Scot did when he arrived on the Island of Hawaii.

“‘He would get outfitted, learn about cane, learn pidgin.’ Only a few Scots maintained their British citizenship and most quickly worked at becoming American citizens.” (Orange County Register)

“A period of intense emigration was 1880 to 1930, when many of the Scots on the island sent back to Scotland for friends and relatives.”

“Most came from eastern Scotland – Kirriemuir, Aberdeen, Portknockie, Inverness, Angus and Perth. A few came from the Highlands.” (LA Times) “On the plantations the Scots worked quickly into managerial positions.” (Orange Coast Register)

“The calibre of these men were recorded by others, in particular the plantation owners. John T Moir said, ‘They were reliable men and whenever they were given a job to do, they saw it through. There was no slacking.’”

“At one time there were 26 sugar plantations along the ‘Scotch Coast’ and every one had Scots at some managerial level.” (LA Times)

“Over the Big Island, with Hawaiian Air Lines – ‘You’re now flying over the Hamakua coast, better known as the Scotch coast,’ said our purser. ‘Below us is the most productive soil in the world. As much as 300,000 pounds of sugar cane have been grown per acre on these plantations.’”

“He could have added that from an 180-mile square area, slightly larger than that of New York City, Hawaii produces over a 1,000,000 tons of sugar, manufactured in the US,’ pointed out my fellow passenger, Roy Leffingwell, of the Hawaii Sugar Plantations association. ‘It’s Hawaii’s main industry ….’” (Burns; Medford Mail Tribune)

Large coastal sugar promoter Theo H Davies hired as manager a Scotch engineer then operating a small Hilo foundry. The new manager was Alexander Young with whom Davies joined forces to organize Waiakea Mill Company.

Years later Davies was a stockholder with Young in the organization of von Hamm-Young Company, forerunner of The Hawaii Corporation. Principals were Young’s son Archibald, and Conrad C. von Hamm. An early project was the Alexander Young Hotel. (Greaney)

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Portable sugar cane flumes in field near Kukuihaele, Hawaii, looking toward Waipio-(BM)
Portable sugar cane flumes in field near Kukuihaele, Hawaii, looking toward Waipio-(BM)
Hamakua Sugar Worker-Christensen
Hamakua Sugar Worker-Christensen
Hamakua_Mill_Paauilo-1935-(bishopmuseum)
Hamakua_Mill_Paauilo-1935-(bishopmuseum)
Sugar cane flume, Hamakua Hawaii-(BM)
Sugar cane flume, Hamakua Hawaii-(BM)
Laupahoehoe_Point-1885
Laupahoehoe_Point-1885
Hamakua Sugar
Hamakua Sugar
Koholalele Landing-Paauilo Landing-1900
Koholalele Landing-Paauilo Landing-1900
SS Helene loading sugar at Koholalele Landing-Nelson
SS Helene loading sugar at Koholalele Landing-Nelson
Sugar coming down the wire at Kukuihaele Landing-Nelson
Sugar coming down the wire at Kukuihaele Landing-Nelson
Sugar on a car coming down the wire at Koholalele Landing-Nelson
Sugar on a car coming down the wire at Koholalele Landing-Nelson

Filed Under: General, Place Names, Economy Tagged With: Hawaii, Hawaii Island, Hamakua, Scotch Coast

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