Everyone knows the postcard. Few people know what lies just beyond its edges.
The Version You Were Sold
The brochures are very good at their job. Turquoise water. White sand. A mai tai arriving at precisely the right moment.
The word “paradise” appears so often in Hawaiian tourism materials that it has been essentially divorced from meaning.
But pull back from the resort strip on O’ahu. Look at a satellite map of the entire Hawaiian archipelago – not the eight islands that appear in travel guides, but all 137 islands, atolls, and reefs that constitute the chain. Look at what the brochure leaves out.
There is an island visible from the beaches of Maui, close enough to see clearly, where the ground is still considered too dangerous to walk on freely.
There is an island 17 miles from Kauai’s resort coast where no outsider has been permitted to set foot without specific permission for over 160 years.
And then, stretching 2,000 kilometres northwest across the Pacific – further than most people realise Hawaii extends – there is a chain of remote atolls that appears, from aerial photographs, to be among the most pristine wildlife sanctuaries on Earth.
What those photographs cannot show you is what lies on the beaches when you land.
These are the islands Hawaii does not put in the brochure.
Kaho’olawe: The Island Built to Be Destroyed
On clear days, visitors on the southern shore of Maui can see the silhouette of a small, brownish island on the horizon.
It is about the same size as the island of Lanai. It is the closest of the main Hawaiian islands to where they are standing. It is also the most heavily bombed piece of land in the entire Pacific Ocean.
Kaho’olawe is home to nearly 3,000 archaeological sites – evidence of Hawaiian settlement dating back to at least 400 AD.
The island was considered sacred. Its name, in ancient Hawaiian tradition, was associated with the god Kanaloa and with navigation – it was a landmark for canoe voyagers crossing between islands, a place of spiritual significance for a culture that had lived with it for a thousand years.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States declared martial law in Hawaii and Kaho’olawe – a place considered sacred to Native Hawaiians – was transformed into a bombing range.
Weapons testing started almost immediately with ship-to-shore bombardment and later with American submarines testing torpedoes by firing them at shoreline cliffs. Over the decades, the wars changed but bombing continued.
In 1965, the infamous “Sailor Hat” tests were conducted on the island: three separate detonations of 500 tons of TNT, designed to simulate the blast effects of nuclear weapons on shipboard weapon systems.
Half a million pounds of high explosive, detonated on a sacred island, on three separate occasions, as an experiment.
The bombing continued for nearly fifty years. President George H.W. Bush ordered a permanent end to the bombing in 1990 and the State of Hawai’i was given back control in 1994. What it received back was not the island that had been taken.
Congress authorised $400 million for the cleanup effort. The goal was to clear at least 100% of the surface and 25% of the subsurface, but due to the dangers and complexities involved, only about 75% of the surface and less than 10% of the subsurface were deemed safe by the time cleanup efforts officially ended in 2003. Much of the island remains off-limits for public access due to these lingering dangers.
After bombing ceased, the Navy spent $344 million to clear unexploded ordnance. But just 75% of the ordnance on the island’s surface was removed, and since then, relentless erosion has revealed even more shells and bombs.
Because Kaho’olawe’s surrounding waters weren’t cleared, additional ordnance sometimes washes up on the beaches.
Because of the high concentrations of iron ore in the basaltic rock, the use of metal detectors is rendered ineffective for finding leftover ordnance.
Subsurface removal of ordnance has been adjudged impossible, leaving the island extremely unsafe.
The ominous-looking signs posted around the island’s perimeter are unambiguous: “WARNING! The Kaho’olawe Island Reserve contains dangerous unexploded ordnance as well as cultural and natural resources which require protection. Unauthorised entrance into and activities within the Reserve are prohibited.”
The island is slowly being restored. Native species are being replanted. Native Hawaiians conduct cultural ceremonies there under supervision. The sacred sites that survived the bombs are being mapped and protected.
But the ground beneath remains a minefield, and it likely always will be. An island that existed for a thousand years before the first bomb fell has been fundamentally, irreversibly altered by fifty years of warfare. The silence over Kaho’olawe is the silence of a place that is still, in some deep geological sense, at war.
Ni’ihau: The Forbidden Island and the Promise Made in Gold
Seventeen miles from the resort-lined coast of Kauai, there is an island where no outsider may go without specific invitation.
There are no hotels, no ferries, no scheduled tours, no internet connections. The primary language spoken by its residents is a form of Hawaiian that has not been significantly influenced by English – making it the last place on Earth where that particular version of the language is the everyday tongue of a living community.
In the 1860s, the wealthy Sinclair-Robinson-Gay family arrived in Hawai’i looking to purchase land to start a ranch.
King Kamehameha IV recommended they look at Ni’ihau. After his death, his brother, King Kamehameha V, finalised the sale.
The final price was $10,000. But more than that, a promise was made to protect the island and its inhabitants as a way of preserving traditional Hawaiian life.
The island has no paved roads and no police stations. Its residents rely on rainwater catchment systems for water, solar panels for electricity, and hunt, fish, and farm for food. The Robinson family – descendants of the original purchasers, who own the island to this day – supply residents with basic necessities and medical insurance, and provide access to Kauai for healthcare and education when needed. Most residents choose to return.
The question that hangs over Ni’ihau is one that does not have a comfortable answer: is this preservation or paternalism?
The Robinson family rejected the colonisation of the Hawaiian islands by westerners, and when in 1893 the Americans ousted the indigenous monarchy and banned the Hawaiian language, Ni’ihau remained the one place where that language survived as a living, daily reality.
There is genuine value in what has been preserved. There is also the uncomfortable fact of a single family controlling the lives of an entire community, with no outside oversight, operating under rules that no government authority enforces.
The Robinsons describe their role as custodianship. Critics describe it as feudalism. Both descriptions contain some truth.
What is not in dispute is the result: a community of approximately 70 to 130 people living as their great-grandparents lived, in a world that has otherwise entirely changed around them.
The Day the War Came to Paradise
On the afternoon of December 7th, 1941 – a few hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor – a Japanese Zero fighter plane trailing smoke descended out of the sky and crash-landed in a field on Ni’ihau.
The pilot, Airman First Class Shigenori Nishikaichi, had launched from the carrier Hiryu as part of the second wave of the Pearl Harbor attack.
His A6M2 Zero had been damaged by ground fire. The Imperial Japanese Navy had marked Ni’ihau as uninhabited on its maps – a place where downed pilots could land and wait for submarine rescue. The maps were wrong.
Hawila Kaleohano was standing in the field when the Zero skidded to a stop beside him. He had no telephone, no electricity, and no way of knowing that the pilot climbing from the wreckage had just helped bomb Pearl Harbor.
What he did know – from newspapers that arrived by boat – was that relations between the United States and Japan were deteriorating. So before the pilot could reach for it, Kaleohano grabbed his pistol and his papers.
The islanders, unaware of the attack, treated Nishikaichi with traditional Hawaiian hospitality. That evening, the Hawaiians hosted a luau to celebrate his arrival.
The pilot reportedly played guitar and sang along with the islanders. This mood would be short-lived as news reached via ham radio of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Niihauans had a change of heart regarding their visiting pilot.
What followed was six days of escalating confrontation. The handful of non-native residents included three of Japanese ancestry, and two of them – Yoshio and Irene Harada, who were Japanese-American – chose to side with the pilot.
Nishikaichi demanded the return of his weapons and papers. When it became clear he would not receive them, the situation turned violent.
The pilot was eventually killed by a Native Hawaiian named Ben Kanahele, who had been shot three times by Nishikaichi and responded by lifting the pilot and throwing him against a stone wall.
Yoshio Harada died by suicide. Irene Harada survived and was interned for the duration of the war.
The incident shook American military intelligence. The island that was supposed to be uninhabited – the safe house for downed pilots – had turned out to have 136 residents, a strong community identity, and no inclination whatsoever to assist the enemy. The Imperial Japanese Navy’s map of Ni’ihau was, in every way that mattered, completely wrong.
Papahānaumokuākea: The Garden of Abundance That Eats Plastic
Stretch northwest from the main Hawaiian islands and you travel through 2,000 kilometres of open ocean before reaching a long, scattered chain of low-lying atolls and coral islands that most people do not know exists.
These are the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands – uninhabited except for rotating teams of scientists and wildlife managers – and they form the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, one of the largest protected marine areas on Earth.
“Papahānaumokuākea is both a biologically rich and culturally sacred place,” said Athline Clark, NOAA’s superintendent for the monument. “The Hawaiians call it a place of abundance, or aina momona.”
The wildlife here is genuinely extraordinary. Millions of seabirds nest on these tiny islands. Endangered Hawaiian monk seals haul out on beaches that have never seen a tourist. Green sea turtles return to the same sand year after year. The coral reefs surrounding the atolls host species found nowhere else on Earth.
And then there is Midway Atoll – site of the decisive 1942 naval battle that turned the tide of the Pacific War, now a wildlife refuge – which sits at the centre of something else entirely.
Midway is at the centre of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast area of floating plastic collected by circulating ocean currents.
The Hawaiian Islands act like a comb that gathers debris as it floats across the Pacific. Midway is littered with bird skeletons that have brightly coloured plastic protruding from their decomposing bellies. Bottle caps, toothbrushes, and cigarette lighters sit in the centres of their feathery carcasses.
Scientists estimate that about 5 tons of plastic arrive on Midway every year in the stomachs of albatross alone – birds that mistake floating plastic for food and carry it back to feed their chicks. “The estimates are that there’s about 57,000 pounds of marine debris that washes ashore within this part of the archipelago annually,” Clark said. “There isn’t a bird that doesn’t have some plastic,” Clark said.
This is the paradox at the heart of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands: a place so remote that no human being has ever permanently settled there, so protected that access requires government permits and scientific justification, so wild that species exist here that have been lost everywhere else – and it is being systematically contaminated by plastic generated by billions of people who will never see it, carried here by currents that do not respect the boundaries of marine monuments.
The abandoned military bunkers and runways of Midway, now being swallowed by vegetation, are one kind of ruin.
The beaches covered in plastic from the entire Pacific Rim are another kind entirely. One represents what we did deliberately. The other represents what we are doing without thinking about it at all.
The Curse That Keeps Getting Letters
There is one more layer to Hawaii’s hidden story – and it operates in a register that is neither military history nor ecological catastrophe, but something older and stranger.
Ancient Hawaiian tradition holds that the volcanic rock of the islands is sacred to the goddess Pele – creator of the islands, keeper of the volcanoes, a force to be respected rather than taken.
Removing rock, sand, or lava from the Hawaiian islands, the tradition says, is an invitation to misfortune.
Most people who encounter this belief in a gift shop, printed on a small laminated card beside the lava rock magnets, dismiss it as a charming local colour. Then they take a rock home. And then, sometimes, the letters start.
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park receives packages every year – dozens of them, sometimes hundreds – containing rocks and sand sent back by tourists who experienced what they describe, in letters ranging from sheepish to desperate, as a sustained run of bad luck following their return home.
Job losses. Accidents. Divorces. Illnesses. The packages arrive with notes asking the rangers to return the rock to the volcano, to undo whatever has been set in motion. The rangers return the rocks. Whether Pele is satisfied is not recorded.
More than the curse itself, what is remarkable is the consistency of the behaviour it produces: people from every culture, every background, every level of scepticism about the supernatural, who took a rock as a souvenir and found themselves, months later, carefully packaging it up and writing an apologetic letter to a national park.
Whatever one believes about the metaphysics involved, the pattern is real – and the park’s collection of returned rocks and apologetic correspondence is one of the stranger archives in the American national park system.
The Silhouette on the Horizon
The next time you stand on the beach in Maui and watch the sunset, you may notice a dark shape on the southern horizon.
It is Kaho’olawe – the island you cannot visit, the island still being untangled from fifty years of war, the sacred place that was turned into a target and returned, damaged beyond full repair, to the people who had always understood its value.
Seventeen miles in another direction, invisible from Maui but visible in the imagination, is Ni’ihau – an island sealed in 1864 by a promise and a payment in gold, where the last speakers of a particular form of Hawaiian go about their days in the only community on Earth where that language is simply the language, unremarked and ordinary.
And stretching northwest for 2,000 kilometres, past the edge of any tourist map, are the atolls of Papahānaumokuākea – a world of extraordinary biological richness, patrolled by monk seals and albatross, accumulating plastic from every coast of the Pacific at the rate of 57,000 pounds a year.
Hawaii is paradise. The brochure is not lying about that. But paradise, in the original sense of the word, was not a place without darkness. It was a walled garden. And like all walled gardens, what it keeps out says as much about it as what grows within.
Sources and Further Reading:
- Hawaii News Now – The bombing of Kaho’olawe went on for decades. The clean-up will last generations
- Honolulu Civil Beat – Promised Land: The Navy and the Damage Done
- Honolulu Civil Beat – A Glimpse Inside Hawaii’s Forbidden Island
- All That’s Interesting – Exploring Niihau, The Forbidden Hawaiian Island
- Maui Ocean Center – Why Is the Island of Ni’ihau Forbidden?
- Wikipedia – The Ni’ihau Incident
- War History Online – After Pearl Harbor, a Japanese Pilot Landed His Damaged Zero on a Tiny Hawaiian Island
- Associated Press / Hawaii Public Radio – Plastic From Ocean Garbage Patch Plagues Island Sanctuary
- US Fish & Wildlife Service – Oceans of Trash: Midway Atoll
- NOAA – Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument
