By Christine Hitt
February 25, 2010
While looking through the 1921 archives of Paradise of the Pacific, I ran across an article by George Mellen titled “Deserted, Nameless and Forgotten.” It was about a deserted village that he had run across by foot between Makapuu and Waimanalo—there was no automobile access through this area at the time.
The picture shows ruined walls of dwellings and compounds and two parallel lines of the sole remaining section of the “ancient King’s Highway,” as it was called in Mellen’s time. He also mentions finding a graveyard and heiau. Can you figure out where this is at? Answer: It’s the parcel of land where Sea Life Park now resides and has been since 1964.
Many of the old walls are overgrown with vines and bushes.
Mellen wrote a follow-up article to his 1921 story in 1922 after he found out more information about the land in an article titled “It Was Called Kaupo.” Below are some excerpts of what he learned of the land from a Hawaiian man named A. D. Toomey, a keeper of the “Diamond Head Light”:
“’That old village has a wonderful history,’ Toomey began. ‘I got it from a very old Hawaiian man—he’s dead now—who was born there more than a hundred years ago. He was the last survivor of the once populous community which included Awawawawamalu on the Koko Head side, where the old man lived in one of the ruined huts on which he had patched a roof of drift wood and old tin as the original grass thatch yielded to the tooth of time and disappeared. He told me of the lively, but reasonably peaceful, times at Kaupo—which was the name of the village on the Waimanalo side which you mention—and at Awawawawamalu when he was a youngster; its history prior to that as it came to him from his elders.
“‘You may perhaps wonder why a village ever existed at Kaupo. There is no land there for taro, and no water except what may be caught from the infrequent rains. Yet Kaupo was a busy and important town because it was the port at which all canoes coming from Molokai, Maui, Lanai and Hawaii landed. They never came to Honolulu, but discharged their freight and passengers at Kaupo. Transportation from there to Honolulu was over land. It was for that purpose the wide, paved road was built, some portions of which remain in good repair today. You surmise it was built by Kamehameha. It was repaired by him, but built many years before his time—how long ago none may say.
Where this great cliff meets the sea marks the end of the automobile road to Kaupo.
Mellen goes on to explain the meaning of the name Kaupo by Toomey:
“’He [Toomey] couldn’t put it into one word, but he said it signified ‘the unknown.’ Kau, in this sense means a shelf or recess, and po means night. So Kaupo literally means the ‘Shelf of Night.’ It was by no means certain, he said, that when a party left Maui for Oahu—which was then known as Kakuhihiwa—he might ever return to the bosom of his family. Landing at Kaupo usually meant battle, principally with bands of robbers who laid in wait along the road to Honolulu, and no citizen of another island was foolish to attempt a landing on these shores without plenty of company.’”
And, Mellen continues in the article to tell Toomey’s story about the day Kamehameha’s army came to Oahu, in the words of the old Hawaiian man before him:
“..on one of those crystal clear mornings which bring Molokai so close that one can make out the white line of its surf, the lookout on Makapuu saw a great brown patch detach itself from the headlands [of Molokai] and float slowly towards Oahu… In due time, he found out. The patch was composed of canoes…. Maui was apparently moving to Oahu lock, stock and barrel. Racing down the trail from the station, the lookout reported that all the canoes in the world were approaching. The mayor of Kaupo thought the lookout was exaggerating, and told him so, but lost no time in appointing a reception committee in case its services were required…
According to our centenarian’s report, which came to him from one who officiated at the reception and lived to tell the tale because a stone from a Maui sling put him sufficiently out of business to be not included in the mopping up proceedings, the battle was neither long nor elaborate, albeit quite thorough. He came to, in time to view the hordes of the conqueror swarming over the trail toward Honolulu. But not till after the warriors of Oahu had been driven up the Nuuanu Valley and over the knife edge cliff of the Pali… This all happened 126 years ago.”
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