Vacation Rental in Princeville Kauai

and Kauai Travel Guide

©B.Pruitt 2009

History of Kauai and Hawaii

People Come to Kauai

Strangers From a Strange Land

From Force and Might Come Unity

The Russian Affair

The End of Kapu

All God’s Children Must Go to Heaven

The Whalers Tale

Add Sugar To The Mix

Kauai Timeline

A Succession of Monarchs

The Whalers Tale

In 1820, Captain Joseph Allen of Nantucket commanded the first whaling vessel to put into Honolulu harbor.  The only two ports in Hawaii that were suitable anchorages for the whaling ships were Honolulu and Lahaina, Maui.  These ships usually stocked provisions in port headed directly for whaling grounds off of Japan.  In the 1830s, the whaling grounds of the Bering, Arctic and Okhotsk Seas attracted more and more ships.  The captains were more likely to stop at Kauai as it was on the way to their northern destinations and they could find lower prices for produce than at Honolulu.  Ships would lay off-and-on at Koloa while crewmen rowed ashore for trading.  Kegs of butter, barrels of salt beef, oranges, coffee, potatoes, melons, molasses and wood for stoking the fires under try-pots used to render blubber oil at sea were all available for the whalers.  The trade filled a desperate economic need on Kaua‘i in the period when the sandalwood forests were depleted and sugar plantations were just taking root.

Crews on whaling ships lived wretched lives.  The officers were often brutal men who enjoyed an iron hold on men at sea.  After a four-year voyage, a seaman might walk away from his ship with as little as $100 for his labors.  To make a voyage more profitable, a ruthless captain might persecute a crew member to the point where he would jump ship at the next port, reverting his pay to the ship.

Most whale men that came ashore did not behave as sober, law-abiding citizens.  They had endured months of bullying and hardships at sea and were inclined to celebrate to excess.  The whalers’ ports-of-call were rife with drunkenness and prostitution.  Kauai received fewer benefits in trade with the whalers than Honolulu and Lahaina but escaped its negative influences too.

Whaling’s decline began in the 1850s owing to the scarcity of whales.  The death knell of the industry rang when the first commercially successful oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859.  Petroleum and its derivative, kerosene, proved to be a better and more cheaply produced fuel than whale oil.