Despite the denials of Hawaiians that their ancestors ever ate the flesh of men, it is admitted that a large company of cannibals, strong, dark, tattooed, and speaking a strange language, were storm-blown to Kauai in the seventeenth century. It is guessed that they were Papuans. The daughter of Kokoa, their chief, a beautiful girl of eighteen or so, with braided hair that almost touched the ground, and strings of pearls at her neck and ankles, found an admirer and a husband in an island chief who tried to instruct her in the taboo, for he had seen with horror and apprehension that the new-comers allowed their women to eat bananas, cocoanuts, and certain fish, and even to take them from the dishes used by the men. The bride promised to reform and live on poi, but she had not been bred to this sort of victual, and had never been reproved by the gods for eating other, so it was almost inevitable that she should backslide in her virtuous intention, and when she so far defied public opinion, and thunders, and earthquakes as to eat a banana in view of the priests, the public arose as one man and demanded punishment. The chief begged that he might be allowed to send her back to her father, but the high priest told him that the gods had been flouted beyond endurance, and would be satisfied only with her death. The beautiful and hapless woman was therefore torn from the arms of her afflicted husband, strangled, and thrown into the sea,—a warning to all the sex against forbidden fruit.

Then trouble began. Women’s appetites might be restrained, but not those of men,—especially the appetite for blood. Kokoa revenged himself for his daughter’s murder by killing a relative of her husband and serving him hot to an eager, because long abstemious, congregation. The taste of Hawaiian chops and shoulders revived a greed for this sort of meat, and they preyed openly on the populace of Kauai until those who remained arose as several men and drove them out of the island. The cannibals fled in haste to Oahu, taking possession of the plateau of Halemanu, which was high, reachable by only one or two paths, and those of steepness, difficulty, and under constant guard, and here they established themselves as a sort of Doone band, literally living upon the people in the country below. They had their temple,—oh, yes, indeed, they could pray as long and as loud as any one,—and a creditable piece of masonry it was, with its walls two hundred feet by sixty, and seven yards high. Near it was an oven where five human bodies could be roasted at a time, and a carving stone six feet long, lightly hollowed, where the hungry were served, Kokoa claiming the hearts and livers as a chief’s right.

It did not take long for the Oahuans to become bashful about visiting the neighborhood of Halemanu, and the man-eaters then took to eating one another. One big, savage fellow, named Lotu, began to kill off his wife’s relatives. This roused one of her brothers to revenge. He strengthened himself in exercises of all kinds until his muscles were like steel, and encountered with Lotu on the edge of the precipice near the principal path. They fought hand-to-hand until both were covered with blood, then, finding that he was about to be forced over the brink, Lotu clasped his brother-in-law and enemy about the neck and both went to their death together. The wife and sister of the two combatants either fainted at the verge and fell or wilfully cast herself from the same cliff. It is not recorded whether these victims of an unruly passion were interred in earth or conveniently disposed of otherwise, but the affair created such a gloom in the neighborhood that the cannibal colony moved away to parts unknown, to the vast relief of the community in the more peaceful districts.