Kawelo

The giant came down the slope carrying a tree. Not a club shaped out of koa, but the koa itself, roots and crown together, hauled whole from the forest at Kahihikolo with birds still perched in the branches and still singing. Kauahoa stood a hundred and twenty feet by the reckoning of the tellers, with the strength of three hundred and twenty men in him, and he had been waiting for this since the two of them were boys with kites. Kawelo, who had won that contest, watched him come and felt his heart go quiet in the wrong way.

What saved him was his wife. Kanewahineikiaoha stood off to the side holding an ikoi, a weighted stick on a long cord, and when the tree came down she threw it into the branches and twisted the crown aside. Kawelo had already told his men to watch the patches of sunlight falling through the leaves and to jump for them as the thing landed. While the giant bent over the tangle, working his weapon loose, Kawelo came round behind him and split him with one stroke of Kūʻikaʻa.

He had been building toward that stroke since infancy, though nobody planned it that way. The accounts disagree about where he began. One version has three sons born to Maihuna and Malaiakalani at Wailua, each pregnancy craving satisfied by the little Menehune and Mu people, who fetched ice from the mountains of Hawaiʻi and honey from blossoms that grow on no other island. Another gives the family five children at Hanamāʻulu. Several tellings insert an older brother born deformed in a thunderstorm, wrapped in tapa, put into a small gourd and hung in the roof under a feather cloak; when the father reached for it there was nothing but a whirl of red feathers, rain on the leaves outside, a rainbow standing in the doorway, and rats running over the thatch. That child could take the shape of man, bird, fish or rat, and Martha Beckwith suspected the shape-changing had originally belonged to Kawelo himself before the tellers split it off into a brother.

His grandparents raised him, and the small daily business of that household says more about him than any description of his face. They would go inland to their gardens, leaving calabashes of poi and ovens full of food, and come home to find the leaves lying empty in the imu and the boy explaining that little people with rat whiskers had eaten everything and carried his new canoe down to the river. So he paddled. All day, every day, up and down, until no one on Kauaʻi could handle a canoe like him.

Aikanaka, born the same day as Kawelo and raised alongside him, became ruling chief and turned jealous. Warned, Kawelo went to Oʻahu. There he did the unglamorous work: farming, fishing, wrestling, boxing, and then, at last, hula, which is what finally got people to take him seriously. He killed a champion boxer from Halemanu with a single return blow and gave the body to the chief of Oʻahu for the temple at Waiʻanae. He married Kanewahineikiaoha and sent her to her father, Kalonaikahailaau, the finest weapons master alive, to ask that Kawelo be taught. The old man taught him the club and the spear and every stroke he knew. He held one art back.

Then there was the uhu. Uhumākaʻikaʻi was a parrotfish the size of a disaster, and Kawelo went out after it with a round deep net and a fisherman who spent the entire episode begging him to cut the line. The fish towed them past Waiʻanae, out along Kauaʻi and Niʻihau to Nīhoa, two days of open water. It was chanting and the invoked ancestors that finally killed it, not the net.

When the summons came from Kauaʻi, his parents had been driven off their land and were living on fleas and popolo berries. Kawelo built a temple, made his offerings to Kāne-i-ka-pualena, took his warrior wife, his brother Kamalama, two adopted sons and a handful of spearmen, and sailed. At Wailua he had himself tied in a mat and carried ashore like a corpse, then stood up out of it with the club in his hand. Kahakaloa, the best club fighter in the islands, knocked him down and got his arm broken by the upward stroke of a man already falling. Then Kauahoa, and the koa tree, and the end of the war. Kawelo divided Kauaʻi among his people and gave Hanalei to his wife for her courage with the cord.

The trouble came from inside. His adopted son Kaʻeleha married Aikanaka’s daughter, and told her the one thing that mattered: Kawelo had never learned to fight stones. His father-in-law had withheld exactly that art. They stacked the stones in piles behind a barricade of canoes at Hanapepe and set women and children to gathering more, and when Kawelo came they threw until he could no longer dodge one without walking into the next. He went down. They beat the body with clubs until it was cold and no breath moved in it, then carried him to a new temple at Maulili to be the first human sacrifice on its altar, laid him in the enclosure under banana leaves, and went home for the night.

One of the two watchmen was a relative. He found Kawelo breathing, told him what the morning held, covered him again and set the war club by his hand.

His gifts all follow from the same source and so do his limits. The strength is real but it is trained, and every version insists on the training: canoe, spear, club, lua, the correct prayer said in the correct order by a man who has built the temple first. He is protected while the family god is with him and blind when his brother carries it back to Oʻahu. He can dodge seven spears at once and catch them in the end of his malo, and he can be buried four times in stones. His weakness is not a flaw of nerve or nature but a gap in his education that another man chose to leave in him, and it is opened by someone he adopted and fed. He never learned to fight stones.

The stories will not settle how he ended. One says he ruled to a good old age at Wailua and nobody knows where he is buried. Two others say his own people, when he was old and feeble, threw him off a cliff. What survives more reliably than his death is his spear, which he is supposed to have driven through the mountain ridge at Anahola on Kauaʻi, leaving a hole with the sky showing through it. Other tellers give that hole to a supernatural bird, or to Kamehameha throwing from Oʻahu in a rage. Beckwith, who read six versions and compared them line by line, concluded that the whole legend is better taken as fiction in the kupua-hero mold than as history, even though a real Kawelomahamahaia sits in the Kauaʻi genealogies as an actual ruling chief who was worshipped as a shark after his death. The newspapers went on printing it anyway, from Ka Hoku o ka Pakipika in 1861 through the Territorial years, because the point of Kawelo was never whether he happened.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Kawelo in Hawaiian mythology?

Kawelo, or Kaweloleimakua, is the kupua warrior hero of Kauaʻi, a chief’s son who was raised at Wailua, exiled to Oʻahu by his jealous relative Aikanaka, and returned with a small war party to take the island back. He is claimed as an ancestor by the Kauaʻi ruling line, including Kaumualiʻi and Kapiʻolani. His story was one of the most frequently printed epics in the Hawaiian-language newspapers.

How did Kawelo kill the giant Kauahoa?

Kauahoa fought with an entire uprooted koa tree as a club, and Kawelo’s wife Kanewahineikiaoha caught the branches with her ikoi, a weighted stick on a cord, and pulled the tree aside. While the giant struggled to free it, Kawelo went around behind him and killed him with his war club Kūʻikaʻa. Kawelo had also told his warriors to leap into the patches of sunlight showing through the leaves as the tree came down.

What was Kawelo’s weakness?

Kawelo had never been taught to fight with stones. His father-in-law and weapons master, Kalonaikahailaau, taught him the club and the spear but deliberately held that one art back, and Kawelo’s adopted son Kaʻeleha later betrayed the gap to Aikanaka. They stoned him until he collapsed and beat the body until it was cold.

Did Kawelo come back from the dead?

In the legends he survives the stoning. His enemies laid him in the enclosure of a new temple at Maulili to be its first human sacrifice, but one of the two watchmen was a relative, found him breathing, and left the war club beside him. When the crowd assembled the next morning Kawelo threw off the banana leaves and killed the rebels.

What is the hole in the mountain at Anahola?

It is a gap in the ridge on Kauaʻi that several traditions explain, and one of them credits Kawelo with driving his spear clean through the rock during his war against Aikanaka. Other accounts give the hole to a supernatural bird, or to Kamehameha hurling a spear from Oʻahu. The stories do not agree, and the site is still pointed out.

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