Show Stopper: View from the Kona side of the Big Island. Photo credit Kuma/Shutterstock.

I didn’t want to go to Hawaii the first time; I got coerced. Why go where everybody else goes? Why go to a cliché of ukuleles and leis? And then, of course, I found out the truth, so the 20 or 30 times I’ve returned have been entirely my idea. I start to feel it, a craving, like that hour before Thanksgiving dinner, and know it’s time to buy a plane ticket. Time to smell ti leaves and watch the skies for pueo, the local owl species.

But even after so many visits, what I mostly do is hang out on Oahu—eating kalua pig at the restaurant I love on the North Shore and letting my friends take me to overlooks that most tourists never see, the vast ocean spread out like a jigsaw, the waves the lines between puzzle pieces. Or the Big Island—losing myself in the volcanoes, looking for where the earth bleeds fire between patches of pahoehoe and a’a lava formations.

And so I make a simple resolve: to mix a trip of places I know and love with places I’ve never been. Ten days, four islands.

Which turns out to be like going to four entirely different worlds.

Moving from island to island in Hawaii is both surprisingly easy—inter-island flights leave about every 10 minutes—and a major pain in the butt if you don’t like to fly.

I don’t like to fly.

The original Polynesians moved around by boat, and for reasons of my own, I’ve spent the past five years looking at traditional canoes all around the Pacific. So I want water. The problem is, thanks to local politics and a relatively obscure law known as the Jones Act, Hawaii is without an inter-island ferry system. So that means a very, very small cruise ship run by InnerSea Discoveries: 100 feet, 25 other passengers, somebody else to do the cooking. I’m OK with that. And I’m really OK with an itinerary that puts me back on two islands I know well—the Big Island and Maui—and two I’ve never seen before, Lanai and Molokai.

Berry Best: Kona is renowned for its spectacular coffee.

Traveling to the Big Island is always like going back to an old friend. Or maybe two friends, since the opposite halves of the island are so different: the wet, jungly Hilo side and the dry, almost stark Kona side, where about all that grows is coffee on very tiny plantations (two acres is a pretty big outfit) and flowers roughly the size of serving platters that seem to be there just for the fun of it.

My traveling companion, Daz, sees the convertible at the rental place, and I know we’ll be doing the Big Island topless. I was here last year; she hasn’t been since she was a teenager, but it takes no time at all to agree on what to do: Head south, towards the last thing Captain Cook saw. Stories vary, but we can be sure of this: There was a scuffle, and Cook came out on the wrong side of it. The man who had sailed more of the globe than anyone else had his final view of the world at the Big Island’s Kealakekua Bay. And when we get there, I think that’s not a bad last thing to see: an arc of cliffs protecting the land while spinner dolphins live up to their name, catching sunlight and turning their reflections into corkscrews, wild as Daz’s hair as we drive the highway with the top down.

A Different Hawaii The Saturday Evening Post

Photo by The Obama-Biden Transition Project, via Wikimedia Commons

We’ll try not to make too much about it, but the basic fact is undeniable:

A 1958 article from The Saturday Evening Post is responsible for President Barack Obama’s father coming to the United States. If it hadn’t been for this article, Obama’s father might never have come to this country; he certainly wouldn’t have met his American wife; and his son—our president—would never have been born.

What was so special about this magazine article?

Not so much on the face of it. It was a travel story about Hawaii. It began as just another assignment for Frank J. Taylor—one of 82 articles he wrote for the Post. His idea was to cover the 50th anniversary of the University of Hawaii, and get some vacation time in his beloved Hawaii.

As David Maraniss points out in his book Barack Obama: The Story (Simon and Schuster, 2012), Editor Ben Hibbs approved the story. “I think it will make a rather unusual education piece for us,” he told Taylor.

These coeds represented only a few of the Islands

Betty Mooney, who ran the library, read the article and passed it along to a Kenyan student, Barack Obama, the father of the man who would become the future president. She knew Obama was interested in studying in America, but was worried about racial unrest in the states. The University of Hawaii, as described by Taylor, seemed an ideal alternative.

From his first paragraph, Taylor emphasized the multicultural atmosphere the University nurtured. Following is an excerpt:

The physical setting itself is picturesque enough, but what really sets the University of Hawaii apart is the multi-racial make-up of its student body.

Physicist Walter Steiger lectures in an aloha shirt.

Because the undergraduates come from so many different racial strains, new students were for some years asked on the entrance blank to indicate their ethnic background—Polynesian (Hawaiian or otherwise), Caucasian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Filipino.

Every so often, however, a card would turn up on which a student had checked not one, but perhaps four or five of the races named. At first the registrar suspected undergraduate levity, but upon making cautious inquiry, he discovered it was nothing of the kind. Some students were indeed a blend of several races.

The university rose to the occasion. It added a new race, Cosmopolitan, and stopped keeping records of racial background.

Beach party at Waikiki. The hula is basic training for island-raised girls, and many of the coeds are experts.

The students, however, found the idea of a seventh race much too good to pass up, and the Cosmopolitan category is perpetuated in an annual … beauty contest staged by the editors of the student yearbook.

As the happy Hawaiians see it, only a campus insensible to the finer things of life would settle for a single beauty queen when there’s a perfectly good excuse to have seven of them in a row.

Accordingly, the … contest elects a separate queen for each of the seven different racial groups.

These campus-queen contests … on what is known locally as the Rainbow Campus, help point up the fact that the university’s 6,700 day students, plus 7,000 adults in night classes, in effect, bridge the Pacific racially.

The University had also been successful in building a diverse faculty.

Caption from 1958: "Few other campuses offer such exotic extracurricular activities as sailing off Diamond Head in February."

These latter students proved to be intent on their studies.

Students in the Sinclair library.

Indeed, the university’s students are such dedicated scholars that the faculty worries about them and conspires to divert them from book learning now and then.”In mainland colleges, you’re always putting the brakes on student exuberance,” explained Susan Daniels, the lively New Englander who supervises student activities. “Out here it’s just the opposite. It is such a cherished privilege to have an education that these young people have to be prodded into having fun.”

Obama, Sr., was duly impressed. A magazine article had pointed to a unique educational opportunity. He enrolled at the University of Hawaii in 1959. In 1960, he met Stanley Ann Dunham. They married in 1961. Their son, Barack Obama II, was born in Honolulu in 1961 and, 47 years later, was sworn in as the 44th president.

We’re all aware that the Post is an influential magazine. But sometimes the magnitude of its influence stuns even those of us who work here!

The Post Produces a President The Saturday Evening Post

Sweet Hawaiian Mini Burgers The Saturday Evening Post

Aloha from Hawaii! This is the second part of my previous posting from Maui in which I wrote about Ben Franklin’s attempt to raise enough money to sponsor a second voyage to the South Pacific for Captain James Cook (Part I). That effort failed, but the Royal Navy subsequently sent Cook to the Pacific for two more voyages of discovery. The last cruise occurred during the American Revolutionary War, an era when England and her former North American colonies were sinking each others’ ships in the North Atlantic.

Around that time, English scientists became concerned that hostilities on the high seas between British and American warships might spill over and involve Cook’s vessels as they crossed the Atlantic on their way home. The scientists prevailed on Franklin our nation’s envoy to France to ensure safe passage for Captain Cook. Franklin willingly obliged: His 1779 safe passage document, “Passport for Captain Cook,” addressed “to all Captains and Commanders of American armed Ships,” remains one of his best known pronouncements.

Franklin informed his countrymen that Cook’s expedition was “an Undertaking truly laudable in itself, as the Increase of Geographical Knowledge facilitates the Communication between distant nations, in the Exchange of useful Products and Manufactures, and the Extension of Arts, whereby the common Enjoyments of human Life are multiply’d and augmented, and Science of other kinds increased to the benefit of Mankind in general.”

If an American ship encountered one of Cook’s vessels, Franklin asked that American captains “not consider her as an Enemy, nor suffer any Plunder to be made of the Effects contain’d in her, nor obstruct her immediate Return to England.” Instead, they should provide “all the Assistance in your Power” if needed.

As it turned out, James Cook never had the opportunity to enjoy the hospitality of American seamen. He was killed during a scuffle with Hawaiians on February 17, 1779.

Cook’s demoralized crew, rather than complete their mission to find the Northwest Passage, returned home in August 1780.

Hawaii remained an independent nation until 1898, when the United States annexed it—to the chagrin of some natives. Sixty-one years later, however, when Hawaii became our 50th state, Hawaiians celebrated with great joy. To this day, Hawaii remains a tropical paradise—and a favorite vacation spot for people from around the world, myself included.

Mahalo.

Franklin and Cook, Part II: Cook’s Death The Saturday Evening Post

What would Ben Franklin say about Captain Cook’s explorations of the South Pacific? Here’s what he might say: “A great adventure full of promise.”

Cook’s return to London in 1771 after his first voyage to the South Pacific caused much celebration by the British whose empire he expanded. His description of the Maori people of New Zealand resulted in a visionary proposal by Ben Franklin (in London lobbying for American interest) and a number of his colleagues. After meeting Cook and hearing about the native peoples of the tropical islands, Benjamin Franklin, mapmaker Alexander Dalrymple, and other like-minded friends published a pamphlet, Introduction to a Plan for Benefiting the New Zealanders, to encourage private financial support for a second voyage to the Pacific islands by Captain Cook.

The pamphlet noted that, “The inhabitants of those countries, our fellow-men, have canoes only; not knowing Iron, they cannot build ships: They have little astronomy, and no knowledge of the compass to guide them; they cannot therefore come to us, or obtain any of our advantages.”

The group asked, “does not Providence, by these distinguishing favours, seem to call on us, to do something ourselves for the common interests of humanity?”

Acknowledging the less-than-honorable intent of many expeditions, the group wrote, “many voyages have been undertaken with views of profit or of plunder, or to gratify resentment; to procure some advantage to ourselves, or do some mischief to others.”

Dalrymple, Franklin, and other supporters suggested sending the mission to New Zealand “not to cheat them, not to rob them, not to seize their lands, or enslave their persons; but merely to do them good, and enable them as far as in our power lies, to live as comfortably as ourselves.”

To help sell the proposal, the group suggested that England would benefit financially because “a commercial nation particularly should wish for a general civilization of mankind, since trade is always carried on to much greater extent with people who have the arts and conveniences of life, than it can be with naked savages.”
(Here, Franklin proved himself a supporter of what we today call a free-trade agreement, the principle that aiding developing countries to improve the lot of their people simultaneously adds customers for advanced products of the more developed nations.)

The pamphlet writers were unable to raise enough money to sponsor such an expedition. The Royal Navy, however, soon sent Cook to the South Pacific to determine, once and for all, the existence or absence of a massive continent surrounding the South Pole called, at the time, Terra Australis (Southern Land), now known as Antarctica.

Cook, on his second voyage tried unsuccessfully to get through the sea ice, reaching as far south as 70 degrees south latitude, but never spotted land. This failure convinced many that no such region existed, a mistake later corrected by fearless whalers, seal hunters, and explorers of many nations.

In part two, I’ll describe another remarkable intersection between the lives of Ben Franklin and Captain James Cook, this time when their two countries were at war.

Franklin and Captain James Cook, Part I The Saturday Evening Post