Once There Was Fire

"This is a memoir of the way of our people before the coming of the haole: before the first English explorers arrived in their tall ships; before the Congregationalist missionaries descended upon us from New England with their religious tracts and their severe moral judgments; before the arrival of the whalers and the merchants and their like."

So begins this account of the life of Kamehameha the Great, the legendary founder of the Hawaiian Kingdom, as told by his surviving nephew, Nāmākēha‘okalani.

The son Kamehameha’s favorite brother, Nāmākēha relates the story of Kamehameha’s rise to power as he heard it from his father, and from his own memories of Kamehameha. Writing in 1858, Nāmākēha begins his chronicle with Kamehameha’s ill-starred birth on Hawaii’s Big Island in 1748 and ends it with an eye-witness description of startling events that followed Kamehameha’s death in 1819. Along the way, Nāmākēha recounts Kamehameha’s lengthy struggles with rivals for rule of the Big Island, and later the rest of the Hawaiian Islands, a tale punctuated by the isolated Hawaiian people’s momentous first encounter with Europeans when English explorer James Cook arrives in 1778-79.

Nāmākēha writes of a people who live close to nature, worship multiple gods and goddesses, submit to unforgiving laws (kapu)—including a ban against men and women eating together, love freely without shame, and fight periodic, bloody struggles for land and power. He makes no apology for the bloody fighting that marks Kamehameha’s conquest of the Hawaiian Islands.

“We were violent, when necessary—as bloodthirsty in war-making as we were lusty in lovemaking. Bloody conflict was a constant among us as our chiefs contended for dominion. But in this respect,” Nāmākēha says, “we were no worse than the haole themselves.”

An epic tale told from a Hawaiian viewpoint; Once There Was Fire is the story of Hawaii James Michener never told.

(Author’s revised edition, copyright 2023)