KAMEHAMEHA’S COMMANDOS
Every culture has its trained fighting forces, and within those services are elite units that train and perform at a much higher level. In Polynesian Hawaii the ali’i, the ruling class, had the na ali’i koa, or chiefly warriors. To fully appreciate the role the latter played in the history of the islands, particularly with regard to their unification, one needs to understand a bit about the archipelago’s history and culture.
Historians speculate the first settlers of the Hawaiian Islands were Polynesians who arrived sometime prior to the 13th century from the Marquesas Islands, some 2,400 miles to the south across open ocean. Using the sun, stars and sea signs to guide them, the Marquesans made the voyage in double-hulled sailing canoes loaded with crops such as taro and breadfruit, as well as pigs and chickens. These voyagers were not just exploring but looking for new lands to settle, which meant they had to be prepared for anything.
By the early 13th century another wave of Polynesian voyagers, this time from Tahiti, had reached the Hawaiian Islands. Landing at South Point on the Big Island of Hawaii, they soon spread across all the islands, setting up independent kingdoms on each.
The kingdoms often warred with one another, thus diminishing the chance for Hawaii to become a unified nation. It was the Tahitians who established the kapu (taboo) system, forbidding certain acts, foods, etc. in an effort to keep order. The code also established the sacred supremacy of the ali’i ruling class.
As the islands became increasingly populous, conflict erupted between. The advent of the system and the rise of the created a need for a specialized fighting force to protect the and act as a vanguard in actual combat. The constituted a highly trained, disciplined and wellorganized full-time unit of lesser , in contrast to the , an army of commoners called into action during wartime. Kamehameha, the who would unify the islands under his own rule, entered training as a in the 1840s when he was 7 or 8 years old.
