Textos de los años 1929-1936

Among the early victims of kahuna terrorism and one of the most prominent, Daniel L. Naone presented the Honolulu police with a cause celebre that rippled from one end of the seagirt territory to the other.

Collaboration with the white-skinned enemies of Hawaiian autonomy was an old habit of Dan Naone's. When the Honolulu Annexation Club was formed early in 1893, Naone was the first Hawaiian to join it. This club, which quickly elected the turncoat Hawaiian to membership on its seventeen-member Board of Directors, was instigated by a coterie of leading American insurgents, such as Dr. John S. McGrew, President of the Republic Sanford B. Dole, Benjamin F. Dillingham, and Lorrin A.

Thurston, who was made Chairman of the Board.

My researches unearthed no evidence that Naone was in bad health at the time he was first addressed on the street by a mauna, or fingerman of the kahuna. That incident occurred in mid-December of 1900, of record, three weeks prior to Naone's last day on earth. Daniel Naone was a well-born pure Hawaiian, an imposing physical specimen of his race—educated and articulate, with a reputation for great personal cour-age. Reared in the Congregational faith, he had been taught by his haole missionary teachers to scoff at such pagan superstitions as being prayed to death by a kahuna. But a week after the kahuna started to work on him, he went to bed with a complaint that he felt paralysis creeping into his right side. He had been told by the kahuna courier (ke kane mauna) that he had a red devil on his right shoulder.

Naone took the advice of a close friend and called in Dr. Charles B.

Cooper, a tough-minded, no-nonsense physician who professed no fear of kahuna incantations. Dr. Cooper assured the frightened Hawaiian that he welcomed this chance to pit his skills against the heathen witchcraft of the kahuna. A white nurse came to live in during the crisis.

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64 The Kahuna Sorcerers of Hawaii, Past and Present Three days later the white doctor had Naone out of bed and laughing at the idea of a man as vigorous as himself becoming paralyzed through a sorcerer's spell. He had recovered his accustomed zest for living and decided to go back soon to his business office.

When leaving his house the next mforning, Naone nearly collided with an old, red-eyed kahuna at the threshold. According to his nurse, the old priest pointed a bony finger at Naone's right shoulder and muttered:

"Naone, you paakiki and lolo [stubborn and idiotic] kanaka, I see the red devil still sitting there on your shoulder. This devil tells me Naone's days are numbered. He says that in two weeks he'll have your soul—

unless you go back to the party of your people."

When the kahuna told him the red devil was still with him, Naone lost his desire to go downtown to his office. He went into the house to consider the ultimatum and to think over the matter of his breaking off with the rank outsiders' party. He was followed by the kahuna, who pushed him into his bedroom and locked the door on the nurse. There is no way of telling just what transpired in Naone's bedroom, but, when the nurse entered later, she found a bottle half-filled with a dark, vile-smelling decoction under his pillow. In spite of Naone's tearful protests that it contained only medicine that could prevent his death, the nurse carried the phial to Dr. Cooper, who could not identify the contents and tossed them out.1

Naone sank rapidly after the loss of his precious kahuna medicine, on which he had pinned his last hope of recovery. Dr. Cooper, who attended him to the end, testified to his colleagues that his patient was never acutely sick, that his life forces simply ebbed gently away until he breathed his last exactly three weeks from the day he first confronted the red devil.

Hearings over the death of Daniel Naone by the sheriff's homicide squad and a coroner's jury extended for months into the following year.

There was a storm of bitter partisan recriminations. Angry fellow mem-bers of the Annexation Party held that the distinguished Hawaiian maver-ick was prayed to death at the instigation of enemies among his own people. Most of the Hawaiian voters thought Naone got his just desserts;

they took his death as a warning from the gods of old, manifested through kahuna emissaries, that they must vote as the kahuna dictated, or get the red devil on their right shoulder.

Captain Robert Quinton, who sailed the Pacific for more than thirty years and whose memoirs reflect his keen and objective powers of observation, was much in Hawaii during the early 1880s and throughout much of the fin de siecle years of annexation and early territorial times.

From his manuscript notes for a book Captain Quinton was preparing for publication in 1912, the following excerpts are selected, which reveal

The Kahuna 65 something of kahuna practices in the decade after Daniel Naone met his strange fate:

"Although the missionaries have converted nearly all the Hawaiians to at least a nominal acceptance of Christianity, many of them still retain a strong affection for their old heathenism, and are still under the sway of the kahunas. In olden times, these dignitaries reigned supreme, and no one thought of undertaking any enterprise without consulting one of them. The kahuna who was supposed to represent the god, always promised a degree of success in proportion to the value of the fee which he received; and if the promised success failed to materialize, it was always owing to some mistake on the part of the client in following the directions of the kahuna. The kahunas of the present day are considered inferior to those of ancient days, but their power over the people is still greater than is commonly supposed.

"The following incident, which occurred in Hawaii only about a year ago, is a fair sample of their exercise of power. A regular physician under-took to treat a native who was sick and would doubtless have restored him to health, but the native and his wife had far greater confidence in the incantations of the local kahuna than in the medicine of the white doctor.

Accordingly, the wife of the sick man brought the kahuna, who first examined the fee which he was about to receive and next proceeded to examine the patient whom he was expected to cure. After a critical examination, he declared that a devil had entered into the sick man, though this information seemed rather superfluous in view of the fact that a kahuna always pronounces the same diagnosis, no matter what the complaint may be.

"They all admit that the Christian religion is more powerful than their heathenism, but they like to stand well on both sides and in this case; therefore, the kahuna concluded to compromise matters by using a family Bible in conjunction with his heathen rites. Accordingly the wife of the patient borrowed a large family Bible; and while the kahuna howled and yelled at the evil spirit, commanding him to leave his patient, he endeavored to enforce his commands by beating the sick man with the heavy Bible on the ground that evil spirits were afraid of the Good Book, and that this was the best way to impress them with due respect for its weight. When the kahuna wearied of this exercise, the patient's wife came to the rescue and continued the treatment by beating her husband vigorously on the head with the Bible, till, between them, they beat out his brains and killed him. The kahuna then declared that the devil had been driven out of the sick man, and departed with his fee; but the authorities arrested him and held him in $500 bonds for manslaughter on the ground that the Bible was not intended for external use as war-club.

66 The Kahuna Sorcerers of Hawaii, Past and Present

"The natives believe that the kahunas can control the messenger gods and when a kahuna is engaged to perform ana'ana (praying any person to death), he calls upon a familiar spirit to go to the spirit of the victim within his reach. The kahuna then catches the spirit, and the victim thus deprived of his spirit is sure to pine away and die in a short time. The goddess who assists the sorcerers in luring spirits to destruction is Hiiaka i ka poli o Pele, the sister of Pe/e, the goddess of fire and vol-canoes. They believe that any one may cause the death of another by scraping the wood of a very poisonous tree, called Kalaipahoa, and blowing the dust which they scrape off toward the enemy whom they wish to destroy, while they repeat the incantation, 'E, Kalaipahoa, ee oe e pepehi ia Meal' (O Kalaipahoa, go and destroy), naming the enemy whose death is desired."

Also among the pages the canny old mariner devoted to Hawaiian lore is an account of the exploits of Kanalo'a, the Polynesian Lucifer, in which is described what he did not attempt to interpret as the ancient sighting of a spaceship, but which today must be reexamined in a new light!

"Many centuries before the coming of the haole (white people) a large war canoe from one of the other islands was sailing along the south-ern coast of Oahu one dark night when the crew sighted the strangest light they had ever seen shining from the top of Leahi (Diamond Head).

The strange light shone with such a variety of the most beautiful rainbow colors that at first the crew were frightened and supposed that one of the gods must have come down."

It remained for our contemporary writer, Mr. Erich Von Daniken, to suggest, in his amazing work Chariots of the Gods?, that such antique myths might actually record the appearance of astronauts from another star.

I recommend to the reader who seeks further anecdotes on the workings of kahuna forces in twentieth-century Hawaii, the best work of an old friend of my 1930s' years in Hawaii, the late Dr. Clifford Gessler, entitled Hawaii (Appleton-Century Co., 1938). Profusely illustrated by the noted California artist, E. H. Suydam, this fascinating and authorita-tive collection of vignettes includes nearly a score of kahuna stories and supernatural happenings which appear under the chapter heading

"Haunted Islands."

The first of the following two stories, which are recounted verbatim because they are classics, actually was told to Gessler by Auntie Florence Butler, sculptress and raconteur par excellence, intimate of Jack London, granddaughter of Gen. Thomas J. Rodman, who invented the first sixteen-inch cannon, and cousin of the late Rear Admiral Hugh Rodman, who wrote the first navigational guide to Hawaiian waters, and cruised with

The Kahuna 6 7

Prof. Alexander Agassiz aboard the old U.S.S. Hartford through the South Seas in 1883. (See Yarns of a Kentucky Admiral, Bobbs-Merrill, 1928).

". . . There was for instance, the carved image at the Captain Cook Sesquicentennial celebration of 1928. I saw it made; hewn patiently out of a log, after the likeness of a famous museum piece, by no Hawaiian at all but by an art and craft man from Hollywood. Hawaiians and others watched the grimacing features grow out of the lifeless wood.

" 'Be careful,' they warned the maker. 'Do not let your god become too powerful. Drape a wreath around his neck, if you will, but do not feed him too much lest he grow too strong and do you harm.'

"After the pageant, the director, the late James A. (Kimo) Wilder, took the image home as a souvenir. Time passed and the image was forgotten. In a leaky shed, rain sifted down upon the grinning face and crested head. That too, was not good, old Hawaiians muttered. The gods would take vengeance for this neglect.

"The director sailed away, for he was a world traveler. When he returned several months later he was stricken just before his ship reached port. They carried him down the gangplank and he never walked again.

The old Hawaiians pointed to the wooden god."

When an informal history of the family, written by Kinau, the re-markable daughter of the ill-fated Kimo appeared in the spring of 1978 (The Wilders of Waikiki, Topgallant Press, Honolulu), many were dis-appointed to see that she had left out the story of the wooden idol. That Kimo Wilder, artist, playwright, bon vivant, whose chief claim to fame was his founding of the International Sea Scouts, was a grandson of an early medical missionary to Hawaii, Dr. G. P. Judd, may have had much to do with his skepticism over the cause of his crippling stroke. Perhaps his rejection of the occult was passed on to his daughter. And now Dr.

Gessler's other classic:

"When the naval dry-dock was built at Pearl Harbor old Hawaiians warned: 'You are trespassing upon the domain of the shark god. Offer a sacrifice of poi, that the thing you are building may stand.'

". . . Work went forward for nearly five years. In 1913, on the third attempt to unwater the coffer-dam, the whole five years' construction blew up.

" 'Hydraulic pressure,' was the engineers' explanation.

" 'The shark god,' said Hawaiians.

"The revised plans for rebuilding did not mention the shark god, but the story in the islands is that poi was duly, if inconspicuously offered.

This time the dock stood, and is said to bo the only one of its kind on a coral foundation."

12 The Author's Views