The Royal Dinner That Ended Hawaiʻi's Kapu

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In the autumn of 1819, on the beach at Kailua on the island of Hawaiʻi, a young king sat down to dinner. That was all he did. He ate, in public, with women. And with that meal a religious and legal order that had governed the islands for centuries came apart, ended by the very people it had been built to exalt. Today: the free eating, and the two queens who arranged it.

Welcome to Hidden History. Take a break from the modern world and journey into the Hawaiian Islands, in the months after the death of their great king.

Start with the rule itself. Under the kapu system, the sacred and the ordinary were kept apart by law, and one of the sharpest lines ran through mealtime. Men and women did not eat together. A man ate in his own eating house, called the mua, and his food was cooked in a separate oven from his wife's. Certain foods belonged to men and to the gods: pork, bananas, coconuts, turtle, shark, and a list of prized fish. The Hawaiian scholar David Malo, writing a generation later, set it down plainly. A woman caught eating any of these was put to death.

Other kapu protected the chiefs; commoners lay face down when a sacred chief passed. The system held up the priests who declared the restrictions and the chiefs whose rank they protected. Malo called it an ancient law that bore equally on men and women. The forbidden foods, though, were all on the women's side of the table.

Kamehameha, the warrior who had united the islands under one rule, kept these laws faithfully until he died at Kailua in May 1819. His heir was his son Liholiho, about twenty-one years old, raised from childhood to perform the temple rites.

But Kamehameha left a second arrangement. His favorite wife, Kaʻahumanu, was to govern beside the boy. When the chiefs gathered to install the new king, Liholiho came out in a red coat trimmed with gold lace, a gift from England, with a feather cloak over his shoulders. Kaʻahumanu met him and spoke the old king's commands. Here are the chiefs, she said, here are the people of your ancestors; here are your guns; here are your lands. Then she added a line of her own: "But we two shall share the rule over the land." Liholiho agreed.

The second woman in this story outranked everyone present. Keōpūolani was Liholiho's mother, a chiefess of such sacred rank that, according to the Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau, even Kamehameha had to strip off his loincloth in her presence. If anyone had reason to preserve the kapu, it was Keōpūolani. The system was built around people like her.

Kamakau records that on the afternoon after Kamehameha died, Keōpūolani ate coconuts, which were forbidden to women, and ate with the men. "He who guarded the god is dead," she said, "and it is right that we should eat together freely."

This was less shocking than it sounds, at first. Hawaiian tradition allowed a period of license after the death of a beloved ruler. Women entered temples and ate forbidden food. Then the mourning ended, and the new ruler put the land back under kapu. Everyone expected that to happen again.

It almost did. On the day Liholiho was proclaimed, Keōpūolani looked at her son and put her hand to her mouth, the sign to come and eat. He refused. That evening she sat down and ate with his little brother, Kauikeaouli, who was about five. The young king had a cousin, Kekuaokalani, to whom Kamehameha had entrusted the family's war god, and Kekuaokalani had warned him: if the chiefs want you to eat freely, do not consent. Liholiho went off to Kawaihae and returned to prayers and sacrifices.

But doubts had been accumulating. Foreign sailors and traders had been coming ashore for forty years and kept none of these rules. And when people ate forbidden food during the mourning, one early Hawaiian account noted, the gods brought no evil consequences.

Then Kaʻahumanu sent a messenger to the king. Your guardian says, the man told him, that your god is to receive the ti leaf when you reach Kailua. The ti leaf was a sign asking the gods to take the kapu back to themselves and leave people free. Liholiho bowed his head, thought it over, and agreed.

What he did next was not heroic. He sent for rum. For two days he sailed up and down the Kona coast in his two-masted canoe, drinking and sending ashore for more. Meanwhile, in Kailua, the women were preparing a feast of every forbidden food. When the wind died and the king's canoe sat becalmed, Kaʻahumanu sent a double canoe with paddlers to tow him in.

He came ashore, and Kaʻahumanu's sister Kaheiheimālie opened the oven. That night Liholiho ate dog meat reserved for chiefesses and walked into the women's eating house. Soon the king and the male and female chiefs were eating together openly. Messengers carried the news island by island, as far as Kauaʻi. Pork went out to the countryside to be eaten by men and women alike. The high priest, Hewahewa, went along with it. Temple sacrifices stopped, and temple images were burned.

Not everyone accepted it. Kekuaokalani refused to eat freely and gathered priests and followers at Kaʻawaloa, down the coast. Talks failed, and the king's forces met his at Kuamoʻo. Kekuaokalani was shot and died fighting, and his wife, Manono, who fought beside him, was killed with him.

At the end of March 1820, a brig from Boston called the Thaddeus came around the northern tip of Hawaiʻi carrying the first American missionaries. A boat sent ashore came back with news they could hardly believe: Kamehameha was dead, his son was king, the kapu were abolished, and the images were destroyed. The people they had come to convert had already taken down the state religion themselves, without them.

Why the queens did it is still debated. Kamakau called it strange that Keōpūolani should act against her own interests and those of her children. She had lived as something close to a goddess; afterward, he wrote, she became a meek woman, and chiefs and people mingled more as equals. Kaʻahumanu's motives look more practical. Kapu law had kept women away from priestly power and the king's table. With it gone, she could govern openly, and she did, for thirteen more years, outliving Liholiho, who died of measles in London in 1824.

The old ways did not vanish in a night; people kept household gods for years. But the first break came from inside, from two women at the top of the system who decided they would rather eat together. They changed the islands with a meal.