In 1875, King David Kalakaua traveled to Washington, D.C., on a mission to convince the United States to lower or eliminate taxes on products to and from Hawaii, specifically sugar.
A number of supporting documents were shared with Congress and President Ulysses S. Grant, and one stood out. It was a Pacific Ocean map. Most world maps put Hawaii at the far right or left side of the chart. Hawaii was invisible and inconsequential.
Kalakaua’s chart did something different. It put Hawaii and the Pacific Ocean in the center of the world map. The Americas were on the right, Asia on the left. It was a map from Hawaii’s point of view. It was eye-opening.
At the time, the United States was considering a canal cut through the jungles of Central America. Congress and the president looked at the new map in awe.
If a canal opened, all the shipping to Asia would have to cross the vast Pacific Ocean, and there was really just one place to stop for supplies and fuel: Hawaii.
Kalakaua and his mission used a motto to show Hawaii’s importance. Our islands were at the “Crossroads of the Pacific,” a phrase you still hear today.
The U.S. was impressed. Hawaii was not some tiny speck of land in the vast Pacific. We were strategically important. We were vital.
Kalakaua and the president signed a Reciprocity Treaty. It eliminated export taxes, and our sugar industry, for the first time, took off. Workers came from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Portugal and Puerto Rico, and their descendants make up more than half of our population today. All because of one map.
Flash forward 140 years. Many people in the U.S. today see Hawaii as a place for fun in the sun, a place to curl up under a palm tree with a mai tai.
Hawaii is a lightweight in the vast scheme of things, many believe, where islanders are more inclined to hang loose than engage in serious scientific study and research.
We’re thought of as tiny speck of inconsequential land in the midst of a vast ocean. Way, way off to the side.
But it isn’t true. The state has a gravitas, a significance, that greatly outweighs our laid-back appearance. Island residents have had a huge impact far beyond our shores.
Here then are 23 more facts about Hawaii that will change the way we see ourselves and are seen by the world.
Nobel Prizes
2. Hawaii is a place for scientific study. In 2020, two local women won Nobel Prizes. Jennifer Doudna, a Hilo High School graduate, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for co-inventing CRISPR, a gene-editing tool that is revolutionizing medicine.
Andrea Ghez won a Nobel Prize in physics for research that revealed the Milky Way galaxy has a black hole in its center. She’s lived on Hawaii island since 1995 and uses the Mauna Kea Observatories.
Education
3. Hawaii had schools before California, Oregon, Nevada and all the other states west of the Mississippi. California and Russia sent some of its children to Hawaii to be educated after our first schools opened in 1831.
Around the world
4. King Kalakaua was the first head of state of any country to make an around-the-world journey in 1881. He was the first head of state to be given a state dinner at the White House.
Electricity
5. Hawaii’s Iolani Palace had electricity before the White House. King Kalakaua asked Thomas Edison to bring it to Hawaii, and Iolani Palace had electric lights in 1886. The White House did not have them until 1891.
Better dressed
6. When the missionaries arrived in 1820, the alii (chiefs) dressed better than they did. The Rev. Hiram Bingham described the first one they met.
Kalanimoku and his retinue came out in a double canoe propelled by a score of athletic men. He wore “a white dimity (lightweight cotton) roundabout, a black silk vest, yellow Nankeen pants (yellow cotton), shoes, white cotton hose, plaid cravat, and fur hat.”
Mrs. Thurston was impressed and surprised by his dignity and culture. Kalanimoku shook hands with the men and bowed to the women, saying “Aloha” to each. He stayed aboard, chatted and dined with the missionaries. Four young Hawaiian men traveled home with the missionaries and acted as interpreters.
Most literate nation
7. The missionaries learned the Hawaiian language quickly and turned it into a written form within two years. Soon, most of the adults in the islands attended makeshift schools with books reproduced on a new printing press. This made Hawaii one of the most literate nations in the world by 1840.
Top athletes
8. In the first half of the 20th century, the top swimmers in the world, led by Duke Kahanamoku, were from Hawaii. Our little leaguers often win World Series, and our volleyball teams win NCAA championships.
Charity
9. Every Hawaiian monarch, except one who died young, left a business, hospital, school or charity that is still around doing good work 150-200 years later. One (Kamehameha Schools) is worth over $13 billion and is one of the largest trusts in the U.S.
WWII military service
10. The combined 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Bat- talion is the most decorated regiment in U.S. history. It was composed mostly of second-generation Americans of Japanese ancestry, many of whom left internment camps to enlist and fight.
These “Go for Broke” soldiers rescued the Texas National Guard “Lost Battalion” when it was surrounded by German forces in 1944. In less than two years, they earned over 4,000 Purple Hearts and 4,000 Bronze Stars.
Codebreakers
11. Cryptanalysts at Pearl Harbor broke the Japanese code, which resulted in our winning the Battle of Midway in 1942. In the sixth month of the war, the tide had turned in our favor.
4 sports
12. People with ties to Hawaii played a role in creating four major sports: surfing, baseball, basketball and volleyball.
Hawaiians were surfing when Capt. Cook first came to Hawaii in 1778. The father of baseball, Alexander Joy Cartwright, lived most of his life in Hawaii. He was a co-founder of our first library and was our first fire chief.
Luther Gulick Jr. graduated from Punahou and left Hawaii in the 1890s to teach physical education at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass. He encouraged his students to create fitness activities or games that could be played in a gym in winter.
They created two sports. James Naismith created basketball in 1891. Five years after that, William Morgan created what became volleyball.
Saving lives
13. Duke Kahanamoku was at a party on the beach in Corona Del Mar, Calif., in 1925 when a rogue wave overturned a boat with 29 aboard. Duke grabbed his surfboard and rescued eight men and women, and his friends saved four more. This inspired lifeguards to use surfboards and is estimated to have saved millions of lives.
Hampton Institute
14. Maui-born Samuel Armstrong enlisted in the Civil War and fought off Gen. George Pickett’s Confederate charge at Gettysburg. Promoted to colonel, he commanded the Union’s 9th Regiment of “colored” troops. By the end of the war, he was a brigadier general at Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. After the war he founded Virginia’s Hampton Institute to educate newly freed black slaves to survive and compete after the war.
One of his students took over the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Both schools used a vocational model developed at the Hilo Boarding School.
Casual Fridays
15. Casual Fridays on the mainland evolved out of Aloha Friday, which started in Hawaii in the summer of 1964 with the wearing of aloha shirts and muumuus.
Music
16. Bing Crosby’s recording of the local song “Sweet Leilani” was his first gold record and won an Academy Award. Selling over 25 million copies, it is credited with saving the U.S. recording industry during the Great Depression.
17. Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole’s rendition of “Over the Rainbow” has been used in hundreds of commercials. It reached No. 1 in France, Italy, Belgium and Portugal in 2010 and was used for Queen Elizabeth’s 60th Jubilee in 2012.
18. In the 1950s and 1960s, dozens of mainland singers rushed to record Hawaiian songs, such as “I’ll Remember You” and the “Hawaiian Wedding Song.”
19. Hawaii gave the world the ukulele, steel guitar and hula.
20. From the 1940s through the 1970s, nearly every large city in the U.S. had a Hawaiian or Polynesian-themed bar or restaurant.
Cowboys
21. Hawaii had cowboys — we call them paniolo — before Texas. Mexican vaqueros trained islanders to handle horses and cattle as early as 1832. Texas’ cowboy traditions date to 1849 — 17 years later.
Machu Picchu
22. Son of missionaries, Hiram Bingham III was the first Westerner to discover the “Lost City of the Incas,” Machu Picchu, in 1911.
Longest life span
23. If you are born in Hawaii, on average you will live 80.7 years, the longest in the country and three years more than the national average.
Hawaii might be a fun-in-the-sun place. We’re also a force to be reckoned with.
———
Bob Sigall is the author of the five “The Companies We Keep” books. Contact him at Sigall@Yahoo.com or sign up for his free email newsletter at RearviewMirrorInsider.com.
