Molokai Links & Resources
BEST MAP OF MOLOKAI
With 7,000 words of text on an extremely easy to read, highly detailed map this is a comprehensive guide to the island.
TRANSPORTATION
INTERISLAND AIRLINES
MOLOKAI PRINCESS FERRY TO LAHAINA, MAUI
CAR RENTALS
REWORK THIS INTO LINKS
For the next three months I researched Molokai. I learned it was the site of an infamous leper colony where a priest named Father Damien was launched towards sainthood by caring for the inhabitants, eventually succumbing to leprosy himself. How unlucky that he happened to be included in the 2% of the world’s population that lacks a genetic mutation that makes the other 98% of the world immune to leprosy, or as it is now called Hansen’s Disease. I read The Colony by John Tayman an exhaustively researched history that also included quite a bit of Hawaiian history.
I wrote a paper for a class I was taking on how missionaries from Boston brought the first printing press to Hawaii, devised the written form of the Hawaiian language, and how within five years there was an 80% literacy rate on the islands and dozens of books written by Hawaiian authors were being printed yearly.
I learned about Mele, the ancient chants that were often thousands of lines long and included genealogy, history, religion, and, according to one scholar, even directions on how to sail nearly three thousand miles over empty open ocean from Hawaii to Tahiti using the stars as guides.
I read Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen by Queen Liliuokalani, the last sovereign of Hawaii before it was taken over by the U.S. at the behest of the children of those nice Boston missionaries who now owned sugar cane and pineapple plantations and wanted to become a U.S. territory to avoid import tariffs when selling their crops on the mainland.
I watched the movie Molokai that was actually filmed on site and used local Hawaiian actors. I was fascinated by the towering cliffs that cut the residents of the leper colony off from any hope of escaping the tiny peninsula they were restricted to and left the colony deep in shadow while just off shore the sun beat down on the pounding waves.
I watched nature shows about heroic conservationists climbing those same cliffs, the highest sea cliffs in the world, to hand pollinate endangered plants. I was thrilled when the narrator said that the cliffs look exactly the same now as when the Polynesians first discovered the islands.
I learned that according to legend the Hula was invented in Molokai.
In February I went to a slack key guitar festival at the Somerville Theater. The audience was full of Hawaiian expatriates in Boston for school or work. The local Hawaiian social club threw the musicians a party before the show and a dancer living in Boston got up on stage and performed a beautiful hula, her silk Anne Taylor A-line skirt swirling as gracefully as a grass skirt around her legs. When the show ended with Aloha `Oe (Farewell to Thee) and the audience all stood and held hands, swaying and singing along, I knew it was one of hundreds of songs written by Queen Liliuokalani while she was imprisoned for treason in her own palace by the nice missionaries’ children.