It's 1794. For the last four years,
Kamehameha has been building his great fleet and amassing muskets through trade with western ships.
With his power ascendant, he now faces not just the king of Maui,
but an alliance of all the other islands.
♪♪ Actraiser OST - Birth of The People (Arrangement) ♪♪
Already this alliance has tried to depose him with an invasion,
but he met their fleet of cannon-armed war canoes with his own,
defeating them in a fierce naval engagement off the coast northwest of Hawai'i.
Finally, the moment arrived.
Two western merchant men brought him vital intelligence.
The old King of Maui was dead.
His son, Kalanikūpule, now ruled from O'ahu.
This was the same man that Kamehameha had defeated in his first attempt to conquer Maui,
and now his position was even less secure.
His forces were reduced from warring with his relatives,
and he feared Kamehameha's naval power so much,
that he boarded the two western vessels and tried unsuccessfully to impress them into his own fleet.
The time was right.
Kamehameha made for Maui and Moloka'i,
securing both islands in a series of brutal amphibious assaults before moving on to the enemy's base on O'ahu.
Six hundred war canoes bore down on O'ahu's south shore,
their sails rigged in the western style that could travel upwind.
Under the guns of two western ships,
one built with British aid,
Kamehameha lands 16,000 Hawaiian warriors,
and his troops sweep through O'ahu, forcing Kalanikūpule's men out of their fortified temples.
The allied army broke,
fleeing to make a last stand with a thousand-foot cliff at their backs.
Kamehameha's warriors formed ranks and drove them over the side.
With the conquest of O'ahu complete,
Kamehameha now ruled all the Islands apart from Kaua'i and Ni'ihau.
Before moving on, he needs to secure his power base.
Within months, he would capture and sacrifice Kalanikūpule and crush a small rebellion back on Hawai'i.
Kamehameha hunted his enemies, and he particularly wanted to find two men.
A decade before, he had attacked a party of unarmed fishermen, but gotten his foot stuck in a rock fissure.
The fishermen, seeing him helpless, had knocked Kamehameha senseless with a canoe paddle.
Then they had fled, leaving him concussed next to the broken oar.
These two men were soon found.
To merely touch an ali'i meant death.
So, when they entered the King's presence, they were resigned to execution.
But, to their shock,
Kamehameha apologized to them.
He had wronged them by attacking without cause, and they had been right to defend themselves.
Indeed he would declare a new law:
The Law of the Splintered Paddle,
stating that all people young and old should lie by the roadside in safety without fear of armies or brigands.
Violate this....
and die!
This edict is considered one of the oldest human rights laws,
and it's still enshrined in the Hawai'i State Constitution,
but it also declared an end to the days of raids and warfare.
Kamehameha wanted a stable system, after all, not one riven by conflict.
His first priority was reform.
Years of war had ravaged Hawaiian agriculture,
With farmers leaving their taro fields fallow, or failing to repair fish ponds.
Kamehameha toured O'ahu, personally working fields to set an example and drafting the populace to repair public works.
He also reformed Hawai'i's system of land division, making the parcels less self-sufficient
so that the ruling ali'i couldn't build a power base to oppose him.
The new system also granted use of the land, rather than ownership.
Kamehameha could strip rights to the land away should a chief displease him.
Strangely, Kamehameha's reforms always seemed to grant more power to Kamehameha.
In order to administer this new empire, Kamehameha hand picked men from his inner circle and installed them as governors of each island.
He also established a flourishing court, which showed his greatness and legitimacy.
He rewarded loyal chiefs, and kept rival ali'i under his eye. He wanted no more rebellions.
But Kamehameha also discovered something that he liked more than war: trade.
Kamehameha's interest in commerce had taken root well before his invasion of O'ahu,
and he had obtained most of his weapons by trading with western ships.
Shortly before the invasion, Kamehameha had hosted the British explorer George Vancouver,
setting him up as Great Britain's semi-official partner in the region.
For his part, Kamehameha had sought protection from the Royal Navy, hoping that the British would lend military aid and protect them if other nations invaded.
But Vancouver had misinterpreted this as Kamehameha ceding the islands to the UK.
Neither prospect really went anywhere, but it started Hawai'i's first diplomatic and trading relationship,
and Kamehameha had a commodity that foreigners desired:
sandalwood,
prized in China for making boxes and incense.
Since Hawai'i had become a stop on the China route, selling sandalwood made sense.
Trade boomed, to the point that Kamehameha had to place a kapu, or sacred prohibition, on young sandalwood trees
to make sure that wood poachers didn't drive them extinct.
Sandalwood made Hawai'i a major trade center. Traffic at Honolulu Harbor exploded.
Once just a moderately-sized village, the burgeoning town of Honolulu soon had 200 houses and a thriving dock yard.
Hawaiian authorities collected docking and harbor pilot fees and encouraged locals to start warehouses and repair facilities to serve the western ships.
Kamehameha specifically courted these western traders.
He met ship captains while dressed in western clothes, and became the first Hawaiian to ride a horse.
But this contact with Europe also planted in his head western ideas about monarchy.
Kamehameha particularly admired King George III, and exchanged letters and gifts with his government.
This contact with Britain would create an enduring legacy -
future Hawaiian monarchs would attend parties with Queen Victoria -
but this westernization would also separate them from both their traditions and the Hawaiian populace.
Yet, as Kamehameha accepted western ways, he never touched the Hawaiian religion,
believing that it held society together.
The kapu system, which designated places, people, and things sacred to varying levels of degree,
not only told each person their place in the world,
but told people where to fish and when, and the proper time to rotate crops.
It was repressive, but it kept balance.
But outside forces were taking a toll on native life. Farmers abandoned their taro and cut sandalwood.
Ali'i exploited the commoners in search of profit.
Worst of all, western diseases sent the population into freefall.
Measles swept through Kamehameha's army, aborting his second attempt to invade Kaua'i.
He himself was laid low with the disease.
As he struggled to recover, he felt the weight of mortality, and worried that his great unification would never come to pass.
Yet, the king of Kaua'i saw which way the winds were blowing.
In 1810, fifteen years after Kamehameha took O'ahu,
the two kings met on a neutral ship to finalize a diplomatic arrangement.
The king of Kaua'i would declare himself a vassal of Kamehameha, and thereby keep all his rights and privileges.
Kamehameha was now the first undisputed ruler of the Kingdom of Hawai'i, a burgeoning maritime state at the heart of the Pacific.
But soon, the kingdom faced its first diplomatic crisis: its two largest trading partners, Britain and the United States, were at war.
There was a real possibility of Hawaiian ports becoming a war zone.
Worse still, Kamehameha was about to launch Hawai'i's first trade expedition to China,
and he was afraid that his ship might be mistakenly attacked.
Hawai'i needed a flag, something identifiable that declared the island neutral territory and a friend to all.
It had a British Union Jack in one corner, and stripes like the U.S. flags, one for each island.
The colors would be red, white, and blue, to mirror the flags of British, American, French, and Russian ships that docked in Honolulu Harbor.
Despite the overthrow of the kingdom, that same flag flies over Hawai'i to this day.
However, opening Hawaii to foreigners meant opening it to foreign interests, and soon the kingdom experienced its first brush with colonial occupation.
A mission from the Russian governor of Alaska landed in Honolulu and began building an armed fort,
plotting to depose Kamehameha in a coup.
He dispatched armed warriors to peacefully but firmly expel the Russians, then took over the fort and armed it for his own use.
It turned out that the Russian government hadn't sanctioned this plot,
but it taught Kamehameha to keep a tight rein on foreigners who wanted to use Hawaiian soil.
He became cautious about who he let use Hawaiian land, and, apart from his favorites, he tried to keep outsiders from amassing too much power.
For the last few years of his life, Kamehameha was at the height of his political power.
He had a well-drilled army, thriving ports, and no challengers.
His favorite wife, Ka'ahumanu, a savvy politician with generals and priests in her pocket,
helped him administer the state, but diseases were eating away at his people, and foreign pressures were mounting.
1819. A great king lies dying.
To his son Liholiho, he leaves his kingdom and his political power. To his favorite wife and councilor Ka'ahumanu, he gives the role of chief advisor.
"Endless is the good I have given you to enjoy," he says, and then dies.
His bones are hidden in the mountains in accordance with the old ways.
Kamehameha united not just a country, but a people.
From this point on, islanders wouldn't say "I'm from Maui," or "I'm from O'ahu,"
They would say, "I am Hawaiian."
But the nation that Kamehameha forged with gunpowder would begin to unravel under his heirs.
His son Liholiho would become a puppet of the powerful Ka'ahumanu.
In an attempt to hold on to power and reform the state, the pair would shatter the already-weakened kapu system,
dismantling Kamehameha's beloved temples, and burning the gods.
Amid this religious chaos a new force would arrive to fill the vacuum: Calvinist missionaries.
And when these men of God step ashore, they will set off a chain reaction that will eventually lead to the overthrow of Kamehameha's Kingdom.
[End music]