“Kamilo has been unaffectionately referred to as ‘Plastic Beach,’ and in some instances as ‘Trash Beach,’ and has even featured in headlines from the last few years as ‘one of the dirtiest places in the world.’” (Case)

A Hawaiian ‘Ōlelo Noeau tells  us, “Ka wahine alualu pu hala o Kamilo.” (The hala-pursuing woman of Kamilo.) It tells us that a current comes to Kamilo in Ka‘u from Halaaniani in Puna; whatever is tossed in the sea at Halaaniani floats into Kamilo.

As the story goes, Papua once left her husband in Puna and went to Ka’ū. He missed her so badly that he decided to send her a pretty loincloth she had made him. This might make her think of him and come back.

He wrapped the malo around a stem of a hala cluster, tied it securely in place with a cord, and tossed it into the sea. A few days later some women went fishing at Kamilo and noticed a hala cluster bobbing in the water.

Eagerly they tried to seize it until one of the women succeeded. Kapua watched as the string was untied and the malo unfolded. She knew that it was her husband’s plea to come home, so she returned to Puna.  (Bishop Museum)

This proverb and the experience at Kamilo are  examples “of what can surface when we take time to pay attention to our oceanic spaces, recognizing them as active places of meaning.”

“The sea, according to Michelle Huang, is ‘always heaving things up and hurling them back … [and] resists its role as the passive repository for all that humans think we have ‘tossed overboard or left behind.’’ … In conventional understandings, waste is what is ‘thrown away’ but Kamilo reminds us that there is no ‘away.’” (Case)

The Puna-Kamilo connection was tested in February 2021.  Andy Baker launched a small batch of custom orange plastic drifters into the outgoing ocean tide from the Puna District on the Big Island of Hawaii.

He wanted to test the story of Kapua and Papua and assembled 22 drifters made of durable plastic shapes collected from Kamilo Beach, with a fresh orange plate affixed stamped in raised letters with a request if found to text him.

After launching, we expected that beach clean-up crews at Kamilo would find them about two weeks later. But none of the drifters were reported found in the next two weeks, or even in the next two months.

However, 72-days later a vacationing beachcomber on Kauai texted that she found Orange Drifter #2 (OD2) among driftwood behind the Pono Kai Resort on the east coast of Kauai Island in Kapa’a.

Is this a unique improbable drift, or is there also a Kamilo-Kauai communication connection?

Whatever it is, it also reminds us of the multitude of other ocean currents that circle in, around and through the Pacific.

We are generally aware of the extensive use and nature of stone tools that the Hawaiians had and used.  But did they also have and use iron tools – if so, how did they get them?

It turns out iron knives were found in the hands of Hawaiians on Kauai on Captain Cook’s first visit in 1778.  Iron, crafted into various shapes, was observed on other islands, as well.

Cook noted that the people he met on Kauai were not “acquainted with our commodities, except iron; which however, it was plain, they had … in some quantity, brought to them at some distant period. … They asked for it by the name of hamaite.”  It is interesting to note that a Spanish word for iron ore is “Hematitas”.

“The only iron tools, or rather bits of iron, seen amongst them, and which they had before our arrival, were a piece of iron hoop about two inches long, fitted into a wooden handle, and another edge tool, which our people guessed to be made of the point of a broadsword.”  (Cook’s Journal)

Captain Clerke’s record (Jan. 23, 1778) notes, “This morning one of the midshipmen purchased of the natives a piece of iron lashed into a handle for a cutting instrument; it seems to me a piece of the blade of a cutlass; it has by no means the appearance of a modern acquisition …”

“… it looks to have been a good deal used and long in its present state; the midshipman … demanded of the man where he got it; the Indian pointed away to the SE ward, where he says there is an island called Tai, from whence it came.”  (Stokes)

Referring back to the midshipman’s information, it may be noted that there is no island named Tai to the south-east of Waimea, Kauai, where the matter was discussed, and since tai (kai) is the term for “sea” and the current sweeps up to Waimea from the south-east, it therefore appears that the implement was floated in, from the sea.

It was the reference that “people guessed to be made of the point of a broadsword” that caught the attention of Stokes (former Curator of Polynesian Ethnology and Curator-in-charge of the Bernice P Bishop Museum,) who speculated that rather than the end of a broadsword, the Hawaiians may have had a deba bocho (a Japanese fish-knife.)

Stokes noted that swords generally break straight across, making it difficult (impossible) to be “lashed into a handle.”  Rather, the deba bocho has a tang that is driven into a wooden handle.

The tang would have been concealed from view by Cook’s crew and “These men, ‘accustomed to the sword,’ would naturally think first in terms of weapons. It is certain they were unfamiliar with Japanese domestic utensils because Japan had then been isolated from foreigners for more than a century.” (Stokes)

Whether it actually was a knife and whether it drifted in on wreckage or was brought by a Japanese fisherman (before Cook’s arrival in the Islands) is not clear.

Japanese junks have been blown to sea, and finally stranded with their occupants upon distant islands, and have reached even the continent of America, in the 46th degree of north latitude.  (Jarves)

In 1806, the ‘Inawaka Maru,’ a small Japanese cargo ship, was shipwrecked off Japan and remained adrift in the Pacific for more than seventy days.  An American trading vessel, the Tabour, sailing eastward in the northern Pacific on her return voyage from China, rescued the emaciated crew of the Inawaka-maru and brought them to O‘ahu on May 5, 1806.  (Kona & Sinoto)

“On the second day after their arrival, the building of a house for the Japanese was started, probably on orders of the chief. More than fifty persons were engaged in cutting trees from the mountains and building a house with a thatched roof. Only four days after their arrival, the house was completed, and the eight Japanese moved in.”

The Japanese remained in Hawai’i for more than three months until an American ship offered to take them home; on August 17, 1806, all eight Japanese left O‘ahu aboard the Perseverance.  (Kona & Sinoto)

This was not the only early contact Japanese had with the Islands; in December, 1832, a Japanese junk was wrecked on O‘ahu, after having been tossed upon the ocean for eleven months.  But four, out of a crew of nine, survived.  Similar accidents, no doubt, happened centuries since.  (Jarves)

Today, we still find glass balls (fishing floats used by fishers in the Western Pacific).  By 1939, millions of Japanese glass floats were being used; although Japanese glass fishing floats are no longer being manufactured for fishing, there are thousands still floating in the Pacific Ocean. (By the 1940s, glass had replaced wood or cork throughout much of Europe, Russia, North America and Japan.)

Today most of the glass floats remaining in the ocean are stuck in a circular pattern of ocean currents in the North Pacific Gyre.

Off the east coast of Taiwan, the Kuroshio Current starts as a northern branch of the western-flowing North Equatorial Current.  It flows past Japan and meets the arctic waters of the Oyashio Current.

At this junction, the North Pacific Current (or Drift) is formed which travels east across the Pacific before slowing down in the Gulf of Alaska.

As it turns south, the California Current pushes the water into the North Equatorial Current once again, and the cycle continues.

Although the number of glass floats is decreasing steadily, many floats are still drifting on these ocean currents. Occasionally, storms or certain tidal conditions will break some floats from this circular pattern and bring them to ashore.

They most often end up on the beaches of Hawaiʻi, Alaska, Washington or Oregon in the United States, Taiwan or Canada.

Today, most of the remaining glass floats originated in Japan because it had a large deep-sea fishing industry which made extensive use of the floats; some were made by Taiwan, Korea and China.

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