Posted on: Sunday, March 13, 2005

By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Staff

What people remember about sailors in Hawaiian history is riots, venereal disease and saloons. We credit missionaries and their descendants with schools, literacy, museums and the arts. Revell Carr believes that the contribution of sailors to Hawaiian culture has been neglected and underreported. I agree.

There's a tendency to forget that Abraham Fornander, who wrote the classic, "An Account of the Polynesian Race," arrived in Honolulu on a whale ship. Or that Stephen Reynolds, a cantankerous harbor pilot among other things, supported Hawai'i's first school for girls of mixed parentage.

Carr, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Santa Barbara, tells how sailors influenced Hawai'i in a different field: music.

Historians write about how missionary hymns influenced Hawaiian music, how Henry Berger's Royal Hawaiian Band provided the impetus for modern Hawaiian songs. Carr recently told a symposium on maritime archaeology in Waikiki, "The contribution of sailors to Hawaiian music has been overlooked."

He has found connections between sea chanties and Island music before the Royal Hawaiian Band. "Capstan chanties were sung by Polynesians as early as the 1830s," said Carr. He said Tahitian girls on board a ship watched sailors operating a ship's capstan while raising the anchor, pushing in rhythm to the refrain, "Heave now."

Tahitians turned the motions into courtship dance. "Heave now" became "hivinao," the name of the dance.

Carr will sing you a halyard chantey called "John Kanaka." He is convinced that the song, "Honolulu Hula Hula Heigh," attributed to Sunny Cunha but written by Joseph A'ea, who wrote "Hilo March," is based on a sea chantey. "The verse structure, the lyrics, are very close," he said.

Missionaries regarded the hula as sinful. Carr says merchants, sailors and grog shop owners helped preserve it by performances in saloons. A sailor is responsible for the first overseas hula performance in the 1790s. He was Capt. George Vancouver, who found two teenage Hawaiian girls on a fur trading ship at Nootka Sound on the Northwest Coast. They wanted to go home so he took them on board.

At Monterrey, Calif., Spanish ladies performed a dance in honor of Vancouver. In return, he asked the Hawaiian girls to dance. The Spanish women were so annoyed by the competition that they walked out.

Carr shows that Hawaiian sailors introduced the hula on the East Coast of the United States. He found accounts of the hula having been performed in New York and Boston in 1802 by Hawaiian male sailors. Hawaiian sailors danced the hula in Portland, Ore., in 1838 to raise money to buy goods to take back home.

These were serious Hawaiian dances. A hula troupe performing in California in 1862 was booed off the stage because the audience expected a cooch dance.