The Curse of Lono - By Hunter S. Thompson Page 0,6

go. We would be in Honolulu sometime around sunrise. Over the top of my book I could see him half-asleep but constantly scratching his arm. His eyes were closed, but the fingers of his clean hand were wide awake and his spastic movements were beginning to get on my nerves.

The stewardess came up to have a look at us, but the sight of Ackerman's arm made her face quiver and she quickly went back down the stairs. We had a small icebox full of Miller High Life and a whole selection of mini-bottles in the liquor drawer, so there was no need to do anything but keep a wary eye on Ackerman.

Finally he seemed to be asleep. The dome was dark, except for the small glow of table lights, and I settled back on the couch to ponder my research material.

The main impression I recall from what I read in those hours is that the Hawaiian Islands had no written history at all beyond the past two hundred years, when the first missionaries and sea captains began trying to interpret a chronology of some kind by listening to tales told by natives. Nobody even knew where the islands themselves had come from, much less the people.

On the gray afternoon of January 16, 1779, Captain James Cook, the greatest explorer of his age, sailed the two ships of his Third Pacific Expedition into the tiny rock-walled shelter of Kealakekua Bay on the west coast of a previously uncharted mid-Pacific island called "Owhyhee" by the natives, and found his place in history as the first white man to officially "discover" the Hawaiian Islands.

The bay inside the channel was shrouded in fog and surrounded by a wall of sheer cliffs, 500 feet high. It looked more like a tomb than a harbor, and -- despite the desperate condition of his ships and his crews after ten days in a killer monsoon -- Cook was reluctant to enter. But he had no choice: his crew was threatening mutiny, scurvy was rampant, his ships were coming apart beneath his feet, and the morale of his whole Expedition had collapsed after six months at sea in the Arctic. . . And now, after sailing straight south from Alaska in a condition of genuine hysteria, the mere sight of land made them crazy.

So Cook took them in. Kealakekua Bay wasn't the kind of safe anchorage he wanted. But it was the only one available in what turned out to be his last storm.

Early on the morning of 16 January [1779], Cook said to his master, "Mr. Bligh, be so good as to take a boat, well armed, and take soundings." They could both make out what Cook called "the appearance of a bay."

"It seems promising, sir, and the indians friendly enough," said Bligh.

Cook spoke harshly. "Whatever the nature of the indians, if it is a safe anchorage, I shall resolve to anchor in it. This has been a poor island for shelter and our need to refit is very great."

Bligh, accompanied by Edgar in a boat from the Discovery, set his men to row on a north-easterly heading for a deep cup cut into the cliffs, meeting on the way a great armada of canoes of many sizes, all bustling towards the ships at twice their own speed and waving their paddles and streamers and singing out as they passed.

As Bligh closed the shore he became more than ever confident that this would be a safe anchorage for them. It appeared protected from all points, except the south-west, and from his recent observations gales from this quarter were unlikely. The dominant feature of this bay was a cliff like a knife-cut through black volcanic rock in a slight curve, falling from some 400 feet at the eastern extremity to a point a mile to the west where it shelved into gently rising land from the western promontory of the bay. This cliff, this black insurmountable barrier to the hinterland, appeared to fall directly to the sea, but as the day wore on and the tide ebbed, Bligh observed that there was a narrow beach at its base -- black rocks and pebbles. As they were to learn later, the name of this bay, Kealakekua (Karakakooa, Cook called it) means "path of the gods," deriving from this great slide in the hill to the sea.

Richard Hough

The Last Voyage of Captain James Cook

I was still reading when the stewardess appeared to announce that we'd be landing in thirty minutes.