Koholā: the humpback whale in Hawaiian culture and Lahaina history

Koholā

The Hawaiian word for the humpback is koholā. Palaoa is the sperm whale, and also whale ivory. Whales appear in the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation chant, which names the palaoa among the creatures of the sea born in the early ages of the world, and in moʻolelo (stories) where whales carry people between islands or appear as kinolau, physical forms, of the gods, most often Kanaloa, god of the ocean.

The arrival of the whales each winter coincided with Makahiki, the four-month season of peace, tribute and games beginning with the rising of the Pleiades in November. Whales, like the rains and the Makahiki itself, belonged to the god Lono’s time of year.

The Olowalu petroglyphs

Above the Olowalu valley, a few miles south of Lahaina, a rock face called Puʻu Kīlea carries one of Maui’s largest groups of kiʻi pōhaku, petroglyphs. Among the human figures, sails and animals are carvings that archaeologists read as whales, and figures that appear to ride or stand on whales. Similar whale carvings are found on Lānaʻi, at a place called Palaoa Hill, and on Hawaiʻi Island. They are the oldest record of people watching the whales in this channel.

Lei niho palaoa

The most important ornament a Hawaiian chief could wear was the lei niho palaoa: a hooked, tongue-shaped pendant carved from a whale’s tooth and hung on hundreds of braided strands of human hair. The tooth came from the sperm whale, drift-stranded on a beach, because Hawaiians did not hunt whales. The ivory held mana, spiritual power, and the pendants passed down through chiefly lines. The hooked shape may represent a tongue, a symbol of speech and authority, and only the highest-ranking aliʻi wore them.

Lahaina and the whaling fleet

From the 1820s to the 1860s Lahaina was, with Honolulu, the main port of the Pacific whaling fleet. The ships were not hunting Maui’s humpbacks; they were Yankee whalers from New Bedford and Nantucket chasing sperm whales in the Japan grounds and bowheads in the Arctic, and Lahaina was where they spent the winter: resupplying, repairing, recruiting Hawaiian sailors, and raising hell. In the peak year, 1846, almost 400 ships anchored in the Lahaina roadstead. The town’s missionaries and the sailors fought a running battle for thirty years; the cannon that once stood on the Lahaina waterfront were put there after whalers fired on the mission house.

The fleet collapsed in the 1860s, finished off by petroleum, the Civil War and the loss of 33 ships in the Arctic ice in 1871. Lahaina became a plantation town. The humpbacks, never the target, kept coming.

The hunt that nearly ended them

Industrial whaling in the twentieth century, with fast catcher boats and explosive harpoons, did reach the humpbacks of the North Pacific. By the time the International Whaling Commission banned humpback hunting in 1966, the population was down to perhaps 1,400 animals, and whales were a rare sight off Maui. The recovery since, to more than 10,000 in Hawaiʻi alone, is one of the great conservation stories of the century. In 1992 Congress created the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, co-managed with the State of Hawaiʻi, to protect the breeding grounds; its West Maui waters run from Māʻalaea to Kapalua.

Today

On Maui the whales are part of the winter calendar the way the rains and the big surf are. World Whale Day, started by Pacific Whale Foundation in 1980, fills Kalama Park in Kīhei each February. The Great Whale Count and the Sanctuary Ocean Count put more than a thousand volunteers on the shore to count them. And in the harbor and on the beaches, Hawaiian cultural practitioners still open the season with an oli, a chant, to welcome the koholā home.