The past presses close to the surface on the island of Hawaii, the southernmost in the archipelago, the one they call the Big Island. In 1985, during the first of what would be many trips to this massive volcanic isle, I toured its wild northern coast in a tiny bubble of a helicopter. On what seemed a whim, but probably had to do with the calm clarity of the day, the pilot decided to swing out to sea and fly alongside the pali, a stretch of vertical cliffs that rise 2,000 feet above the surf. Pointing to a hole in the face of the sheer wall, he shouted, “I can’t hang here long, so look sharp.” Inside, stark white against the tropical red earth, I saw a pile of skulls and rib bones, a burial cave untouched by the centuries. That kind of abrupt historical jolt, I have since learned, is to be expected on the geologically youngest, but very likely the historically oldest, of the Hawaiian chain.

The first East Polynesians, possibly from the Marquesas Islands, traveling in canoes and navigating by the stars, reached the Hawaiian Islands between A.D. 400 and 600. A second wave, this time from Tahiti, arrived in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in canoes big enough to carry 50 people and all their supplies across 2,000 miles of open ocean. The population had stabilized by the mid-fifteenth century; for 300 years after that, the people of the islands lived in splendid isolation, evolving into what the Society for Hawaiian Archaeology calls “the largest and perhaps most complex and politically sophisticated societies in the Pacific.” They built great stone temples where they worshiped the gods that governed their lives. Their chiefs divided the land into pie-shaped wedges called ahupuaa, each of which provided all the necessities of life: inland valleys for farming taro and sweet potatoes and beaches for fishing. Usually an ahupuaa was peopled by an ohana, or very loose family group.

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