Island History

Kaua‘i’s cannibal tribe

At no time in the history of the Hawaiians did they practice cannibalism.

Yet, according to King David Kalakaua’s “Legends and Myths of Hawai‘i,” non-Hawaiians practiced cannibalism on Kaua‘i for about 10 years during the latter part of the 1600s — a tribe of 200 to 300 men, women and children who’d arrived on Kaua‘i in double canoes from an unspecified island south of Hawai‘i.

Their Hawaiian hosts, not knowing that the newcomers were cannibals, welcomed them and let them settle by the mountains behind Waimea, where they at first refrained from their abhorrent practice.

In appearance, dress, manners and lifestyle they were quite similar to the Hawaiians. Their language, on the other hand, was altogether different, as were their gods, but these differences lessened as they learned the Hawaiian language and as the Hawaiians allowed them freedom of worship.

Later, the Hawaiian chief of the Waimea district met Palua, the daughter of the cannibal chief, Kokoa, and was charmed by her beauty. With her consent as well as her father’s, he brought her home as his wife.

But when she refused to follow the eating kapus of the Hawaiians, a high priest, demanding her death in appeasement to the Hawaiian gods, had her strangled and thrown into the sea.

In retaliation, her vengeful father killed a relative of the district chief and prepared a feast of his body for his tribe.

The maneaters then abandoned Waimea for a sheltered valley in the Ha‘upu Range, where they resorted to cannibalism in secrecy by feasting on solitary Hawaiians captured in remote areas.

When the Hawaiians at last discovered them roasting a victim, they sought to destroy them, but Kokoa’s spies had forewarned him of their plans and he and his followers seized several canoes and escaped to O‘ahu unscathed.