Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 6, Number 5, 1 May 1989 — How Many Hawaiians Lived In Pre-Western Times? [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

How Many Hawaiians Lived In Pre-Western Times?

By David E. Stannard How many people were living in Hawai'i in 1778 when Captain Cook made his fateful landfall in the islands? In a recent book, Before theHorror: The PopuIation of Hawai'i on the Eve of Western Contact, I contend that the likely number is 800,000 or more — nearly the sizeof the population today. However, the conventional belief of most scholars has long been, in the words of Hawai'i state statistician Robert Schmitt, that "the 1778 populahon . . . was not over 250,000, and possibly as low as 200,000." Some well-known writers have even claimed, to quote Sir Peter Buck, that the population at the time of Cook's arrival "was perhaps 100,000 or more, but not above 150,000." Numbers in this lower range create a problem that Schmitt, Buck, and others seem not to have noticed. They result in a population density for Hawai'i of between 16 and 39 people per square mile compared with populahon densities of between 100 and 200 people per square mile in the rest of pre-hao!e Eastern Polynesia, from Easter Island and the Mangarevas to Tahiti and the Marquesas. Why is this a problem? Because it is well known that there is a direct correlation between high population density and hierarchical political structures — and pre-1778 Hawai'i is equally well known to have had the most hierarchical political system in this part of the world. How ean a society have the most hierarchical political system in a region and, at the same time, have the lowest population density? The answer is simple: it cannot. Something clearly is wrong with the conventional population estimate. This elementary thought occurred to me a few years ago while I was beginning research on a book in whieh I will analyze the social, cultural, and political impact on native Hawaiians of the diseases that were brought to Hawai'i by Europeans, Americans, and Asians in the 18th and 19th centuries. Obviously, those impacts could not be understood until I had a better sense of what the 1778 population actually had been. So, I decided to take a brief detour in my research and to examine the numbers a little more closely. That brief detour turned into a long excursion through some scholarly pathways that previously I had hardly even known existed. The end result was a separate book on the subject, Before the Horror, just published by the University of Hawaii Press in March. The title of the book is directly derived from what I uncovered in my research— that Hawai'i's 1778 population of 800,000 or more was reduced by more than 95 percent in little more than a century. Such proportionate destruction of a people — such horror — has rarely been equalled in all of human history. The proportional destruction of Europeans during the time of the medieval Black Death does not even eome close. Neither does the proportion of Jews killed during the Nazi holocaust, nor the proportion of Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were killed by nuclear warfare. The only comparisons that eome to mind are those of other indigenous peoples from the Caribbean, from North and South America, and from other parts of the Pacific who were devastated by the same firestorms of introduced disease as those that nearly destroyed the Hawaiianpeople. Andalthough the levels of destruction varied — from the total extinction of the eight million natives of

Hispaniola less than 50 years following their first contact with the West to the slaughter of "only" about 75 percent of New Zealand's Maori population within a century— in virtually every case the pattem was the same: a strong and robust people, with no previous exposure to diseases that were eommon in Europe, had no immunities to protect them from those new infections when the protective barrier of their geographic isolation was penetrated by what Herman Melville aptly called "the fatal embrace" of the European explorer. The result, invariably, was catastrophic. In all likelihoodthe 1778 population was reduced by half even before the terrible ma'i 'ōku'u epidemic of 1804 (presumably typhoid fever) virtually destroyed Kamehameha's army and many other people on O'ahu. It probably was cut in half again by the time the missionaries arrived in 1820. And again by the early 1840s. And again by the 1870s— following disastrous epidemics of measles, whooping cough, influenza, smallpox and the then recent introduction of leprosy, now

known as Hansen's Disease. By the 1890s — the time of the overthrow and annexation — fewer than 40,000 Hawaiians remained. Less than five percent of the number who had lived in the islands' splendidly healthful environment only a little more than a century earlier. Finally, after a bubonic plague epidemic in 1899 and 1900, the Hawaiian populahon decline ground to a halt and slow new growth began. By then, however, Hawai'i had been seized by outside forces and made a territorial appendage of the United States. Less than a decade following Cook's visit to Hawai'i disease was tearing the population of the islands apart. Syphilis, gonorrhea, tuberculosis, epidemic influenza and more were wreaking havoc on a people with no previous histories of such infections. Later explorers found Hawaiians in the most remote locations — secluded places not even on the same islands contacted by Cook— being savagely attacked by the disfiguring and deadly diseases he and his crews had left behind. There was no plaee to hide. continued page 18

David Stannard is a professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and has been on the faculty there since 1979. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University, where he was associate professor of American Studies and history from 1977-79, and on the faculty there since 1974. His teaching and research interests cover American social, cultural and intellectual history, theory and method in history and social science, and social history of Hawai'i and the Pacific. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships, grants and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978-79, and the UH Regents Medal for Teaching Excellence in 1987.

A 1794 drawing of the "Village of Maeaeoupah, Owhyee" by Thomas Heddington. Previous population estimates of Hawaii's 18th century population have assumed there was no inland population, but this village— with its well tended agricultural fields in the background— was about eight miles inland in the Big lsland's district of Ka'u. Photo from "Before The Horror," courtesy Bishop Museum Photograph Collection.

How Many Hawaiians? from page 8 Mueh of this story, of course, has been known for many years. What was not known were the full dimensions of the catastrophe. But so what? By the 1890s there were less than 40,000 Hawaiians alive in their homeland. Does it matter whether in 1778 there were 100,000 or 300,000 or 800,000 or more? The answer is yes, it does matter — first, for the same reason that it matters whether 1,000,000 or 3,000,000 or 6,000,000 Jews died in Hitler's concentration camps. The sheer magnitude of the horror has an importance, and a lesson, of its own. More than the intrinsic power of the numbers, however, is what they have to say about Hawai'i and Hawaiians both before and after that cataclysmic first encounter with the West. To support a populahon of 800,000 or more required enormous organizational skill and agricultural technique, mueh greater skill and technique than most people have ever previously imagined. On the other hand, to have later survived a holocaust of such overwhelming proportion with their sense of humane kindness so intact (as when healthy Hawaiians volunteered to become kokuas — helpers and comforters — following diseased family members and friends into lifetimes of exile in the leper colony at Kalaupapa) speaks volumes about the immense courage and aloha of a people under siege. Those Hawaiians, after all, were not the same

caricatured people we encounter in the textbooks. The Hawaiians Captain Cook encountered were not the "thieves" that Gavan Daws so eontemptuously describes in his book, Shoal of Time; for the record, here is Cook himself on the subject: "No people could trade with more honesty than these people, never onee attempting to cheat us." The Hawaiians Cook encountered did not "commonly" practice infanticide, or baby-killing, as Lawrence Fuchs (among many others) contends in his book Hawai'iPono; for the record, here is David Samwell, one of Cook's surgeons, after a careful investigation: the people of Hawai'i are "totally unacquainted with" the "horrid custom" of infanticide. The Hawaiians Cook encountered did not suffer from "limited health measures," as Eleanor Nordyke claims in her book The Peopling of Hawai'i; for the record, here is Cook's lieutenant James King: The Hawaiians "are exceedingly cieanly at their meals and their mode of dressing both their animal and vegetable food was universally allowed 'to be greatly superior to ours." The Hawaiians Cook encountered were not already in a state of populahon decline, their "indigenous technological productive system" having "reached its limit," as Patrick Kirch asserts in a notorious article in Pacific Science; for the record, here is Cook's co-captain, Charles Clarke: "We never saw, nor from what we did see, could we form any idea that any Isles whatever could have so mueh provision to spare and still themselves abound, whieh is the case here."

Some day, in fact, an entire volume will have to be compiled on all this sort of misinformation — misinformation initiated by missionaries preying on the Hawaiians' weakened spirits and misinformation inexcusably repeated by historians and other writers down through subsequent decades. On the topic of this occasion, however, let one thing be simply stated: all the available evidence indicates that at the time of Western contact the population of Hawai'i was at least 800,000. The attainment of so large a population by 1778 is testimony to the enormous triumph of a people descended from those first few hardy settlers who landed in Hawai'i nearly 2000 years earlier. But it was a triumph on the threshold of almost unimaginable tragedy, as the first infectioncarrying crew members of the Resolution and Discovery so eagerly climbed ashore. This is a subject, of course, of great poliheal sensitivity. It ean give rise to outraged and uninformed cries of denial. After all, as I say in the closing paragraph of Before The Horror, "For those who bring on a holocaust, willfully or not, nothing is more desirable or sought after than historical amnesia." But the Hawaiian people know. And as they eontinue their courageous struggles of today, they have behind them the memory of their ancestors who maintained such remarkable faith and pride and strength in the face of one of the most deadly assaults any people in all of human history has had to endure.