The Heart, the Hands

by K. B. Thomas
All Rights Reserved

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“Mr. Vancouver came back with orders for Mr. King to return on-board, after giving the islanders to understand, that if the body was not returned the next morning, the town should be destroyed.”
-Captain King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean… 
Cook’s Third Voyage, 1776 – 1780

Owahoo, the Sandwich Islands, February, 1779

They dragged the body from the surf of Kealakekua Bay. Some say he stumbled ashore of his own power, fending off slashing blows from the steely pointed weapons he himself had brought to the islands. His lungs and kidneys were punctured, his forearms cut into ribbons of skin and sinew. The blue fabric of his coat absorbed some of the blood, the frothy blue salt water of the Pacific drank in more. 

The corpse was pulled into a thicket of brambles and loa trees and the women, fierce only minutes earlier when they had plunged sharp knives into the body, looked to their children. Warriors remained on the beach, keeping away from the water, and the women helped the old people take cover when the cannons began firing from the great ships lying at anchor in the bay.

Along the Kaawaloa trail the warriors carried the remains on a litter woven of palm fronds. Already the body had been stripped of belt, knife, and shoes. One man wore the captain’s hat, sweating beneath the heavy felt. The men climbed their way up the thousand vertical feet of Mauna Loa, bearing the dead captain for several hundred yards and then resting, only to begin again, taking the white man ever higher, ever further from the sea. 

Torches led the way to the imu pit. The whole village of Kaawaloa had followed and hundreds of others joined them, surefooted in the dark, the women singing like birds. Nu’ah, the man who had been the first to pierce the flesh of the captain, took for himself the four metal buttons remaining on the tattered blue Royal Navy jacket. It was stiff with dried blood and salt and no one picked it up from the ground after Nu’ah had thrown it aside. 

Nu’ah held the buttons tightly in his hand and told again and again how he had held the blade and stabbed. The white man had fallen with his face in the water. As the mesquite fires burned, heating the rocks for the imu pit, Nu’ah kept close to the body, pointing at the area he’d impaled, the torso so bloody and torn that the incision made by Nu’ah lay indistinguishable, one wound flowering among many. 

King Kalaniopuu arrived with his wives and youngest children. He was old, and the climb up from the village had tired him. He hadn’t hurried, knowing that the rocks must be heated, knowing that the three other chiefs of the island had been sent for and they would not hurry. He gave instructions to his wives and lay down on a mat they had carried for him, and fell asleep.

The women cut off the captain’s hands and pulled the bones from the flesh. Each finger, the limp sacks of skin that had been his palms, were packed with sea salt. The hands were to be kept, forever, by the descendents of King Kalaniopuu in the village of Kaawaloa. When the stones in the great fire were hot enough, the men used poles cut from the Pukiawe shrubs to roll them into the pit. 

When the other chiefs arrived the body had roasted in the pit for six hours. The sun had not yet reached the height of Mauna Loa and the breeze still carried the night scent of wild ginger. King Kalaniopuu arose from his bed and ate pieces of dried fish that his wives had brought with them. 

To honor the great man they had killed, the drums, the small pa ipu and puniu, began. The four chiefs sat in a circle. The women fell back, babies cradled against warm skin, older children hushed with a single warning glance. The imu pit was opened and the heart of the white man was brought to the chiefs. They divided the bruised and tortured organ and laid the flesh in their mouths. 

King Kalaniopuu touched the heart to his tongue and thought of the great ships, the guns, the wondrously hard metal knives and hammers, chisels and tongs kept on board. He thought of the strong canvas sails and the now dead man who had commanded the ships and ruled over all those who lived upon them. The king was humbled before the strength and courage of a man who would travel through such deep water without knowing how to swim. 

King Kalaniopuu tried to recall a time when he did not know how to swim, when he was afraid to dive into the pounding surf. He moved the small piece of the dead man’s heart around in his mouth and swallowed it. He could not remember such a time. 

After the death of Captain Cook, the village of Kawaaloa was abandoned. King Kalaniopuu retreated to the deep carved cliff-side caves of Mauna Loa while the heavy guns from the ships in the bay pounded his village into dust, into ruin. The guns spoke a language of destruction. Their bloody message was retribution, their only purpose, revenge. 

The ships in Kealakekua Bay did not leave. Men paced the decks, men in blue jackets and men in red. Barefoot men climbed the rigging, lowered buckets into the sea below them, scrubbed the rails and decks, baked their already brown skin under the February sun.

The small boats set out each day from the ships and white men with muskets asked in their strange and awkward way to see King Kalaniopuu. They gestured with their hands and drew pictures in the sand with sticks. The king, newly returned from the caves of the great cliff, gave them two of his largest pigs and twenty woven baskets of coconuts, plantains and sugar cane. 

The white men demanded the remains of their captain. They demonstrated with gestures that more fire would come, more guns would spew death, huts and canoes would be splintered beyond repair, if their desire was not satisfied. 

The king, knowing what they wanted without the use of words or pictures, gave them fresh water and a canoe laden with fruit. 

Days passed. His oldest and wisest wife took him aside. “Give them what they ask for. His heart and greatness reside in you,” she said, eyeing the ruined huts, the smoking village. “Better to make gifts of the hands and bones than to give away all of your pigs. Better to give the hands and bones and all of your pigs than to have them stay in the bay forever.”

The strongest men from the ruined village rowed out to the ships. They carried aloft a square of bleached bark, held high on a pu hala branch, mimicking a white flag of truce.

They brought with them, wrapped in a fine cloth and rolled in a cape decorated with black and white feathers, a scalp, the hair cut short and the ears still attached. They brought with them arm bones with skin hanging and marked with the scars of the imu pit. In the bundle were femur and shin bones, complete with sinew but lacking the feet. Two hands, stuffed with salt, a crescent shaped scar visible on the right hand, lying between the thumb and index finger. 

The warriors did not board the ship. The white men lifted the package to the deck and the natives rowed back to the beach where their king waited, standing waist deep in the salty caress of Kealakekua Bay. 

The bay was marked taboo for the funeral ceremony. Of the thousand canoes that had greeted Captain Cook upon his entrance, none would witness his leaving. 

The great guns of the ships Resolution and Discovery sounded together as the coffin filled with bones and skin was pushed from the rail and broke the surface of the water below. Weighted with shot, it sank easily and disappeared, where it came to rest forever, to remain forever, beyond the fathomable reaches of man.