What did Kamehameha do after his pond was filled in by Pele? 

So Pelehonuamea is the elemental energy or force of active flowing lava. Things on the surface are deemed feminine in current Hawaiian thought, and things underground are masculine. So Pelehonuamea because we see her on the surface. Pelehonua is earth and mea is a reference to red and, you know, the red color of flowing lava. So Pelehonuamea would’ve been the one responsible for causing the lava to flow, and for the red flowing lava. After that lava stops flowing, it is pōhaku. It’s a rock, it’s a stone.

Kamehameha tried to appease Pele by offering her apparently a lock of his hair at the edge of the pond and the lava flow. And she apparently stopped, but it was too late already, because his beloved Pāʻaiea was already filled. Some people say that the reason the fishpond was filled in in the first place is that Pele appeared in various guises to different people of the region, including to one of the caretakers of the pond. She asked for food. She appeared as an old creaky woman and asked to be fed and was told, “No, we don’t have anything for people like you. Get out of here.”

And then she later appeared to two girls roasting breadfruit in the uplands near where the vents were or are. And she asked them, and they said, “Yes, come and share our food.” And then she told them, “This is what you need to do. You need to mark the edges of your property with white kapa strips and tie them to the ti leaves that are growing there, because tonight something is going to happen.” And so the girls obeyed. They did that and their place was spared up mauka. But because down below one of the caretakers was mean and stingy and didn’t want to feed this old woman, she said, “Well, too bad for you. Here I come.”

So after Pāʻaiea was filled—and of course there are many, many different versions of these stories, mine is one of several. Depending on who you talk to, what family you talk to, they’ll have a different opinion, different version. After Pāʻaiea was filled in 1801, by 1810 Kamehameha had decided that he needed to replace it with another pond. So he went up the coast to a place called Kīholo, where there apparently was another pond that he had rehabilitated. That’s one version of the story. Otherwise, he caused a brand new pond to be built up there, similar to Pāʻaiea but smaller. And that was completed in, I believe, 1812. So within a year or two, the refurbishment of that pond took place, and that pond was known as the pond of Kīholo, the Kīholo pond of Kamehameha.

And then a little bit north of the pond at Kīholo was another pond, Wainānāliʻi. And that may be why he decided to reinvigorate Kīholo, because Wainānāliʻi was also up there, also another aliʻi pond. So Kamehameha was able to move on and marshal his resources of people and food for the workers. That was the main problem because all of the pond walls were made of rock. They were just pōhaku, stacked pōhaku—stones that people knew how to construct in a way that locked the stones together so they wouldn’t move during battering by high surf.

Like I described earlier, the hand-to-hand passing of rocks to build out the walls would’ve been relatively easy but labor intensive. The pond at Kīholo could have been refurbished relatively quickly if in fact that’s what happened. And if not, the pond wall, the pond at Kīholo was, I believe, a mile and a half or two and a half miles in circumference, with an opening maybe a half mile wide. That would’ve been manageable, I think.

And then Kamehameha died in 1819, just after the Kīholo work was done. And then in 1859, Mauna Loa erupted and filled in the ponds at Kīholo and at Wainānāliʻi. So Pele was very active on that side of the island. In 1801 she filled in Pāʻaiea. In 1859 she filled in Kīholo.