Hawaii Place Names: Shores, Beaches, and Surf Sites

Preface

ix Preface In 1966 the University of Hawai‘i Press published the first edition of Place Names of Hawai‘i. Written by Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert, it contained 1,125 entries, all of which were place names in the Hawaiian language. In 1974 the press published the second edition by Pukui, Elbert, and Esther T. Mo‘okini. It contained some four thousand entries, and this time it included place names in English and other languages. This edition, in the words of the authors, provided “a glossary of important place names in the State, including names of valleys, streams, mountains , land sections, surfing areas, towns, villages, and Honolulu streets and buildings.” During the years that have followed its publication, the second edition of Place Names of Hawai‘i has become a standard reference in the literature of Hawai‘i. In May 1972, I began gathering information for a book that I had decided to write about O‘ahu’s beaches. My idea was to identify every beach on the island and describe its physical characteristics , including its dangers, its use as a recreational resource, and its value as a historic and cultural site. As a result, the University of Hawai‘i Press published The Beaches of O‘ahu in 1977, The Beaches of Maui County in 1980, Beaches of the Big Island in 1985, Beaches of Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau in 1990, and Hawai‘i’s Best Beaches in 1999. My original idea for a book on O‘ahu’s beaches evolved into the beaches of Hawai‘i series that inventories and describes every beach in the Hawaiian Islands. During the course of writing these books, I interviewed hundreds of informants to gather information, many of whom were native Hawaiians. I soon realized that many of the place names I was collecting were not in standard references such as Place Names of Hawai‘i and that much of the anecdotal information I was being given to describe the shores and beaches was not recorded. In an effort to preserve some of this information, I put as much as I thought appropriate into the beaches of Hawai‘i books, but a significant amount still remained only in my notebooks and in my memory. I have always Preface x thought that the glossary approach in Place Names of Hawai‘i is a good format for presenting and consolidating large amounts of diverse information, so in 1998 I asked the University of Hawai‘i Press if they would be interested in a shores and beaches supplement to Place Names of Hawai‘i. In it I proposed to include all of the information that I have gathered from researching the beaches of Hawai‘i series and from spending a lifetime swimming and surfing on Hawai‘i’s beaches. They agreed, and the result is this volume, Hawai‘i Place Names: Shores, Beaches, and Surf Sites. During the last century, more new place names were added to Hawai‘i’s collective body of place names than at any other time in the postcontact period—the period beginning in 1778, the year of Captain Cook’s arrival. The twentieth century was a time of phenomenal growth in population and infrastructure in the Hawaiian Islands. Streets, subdivisions, homes, hotels, condominiums , office buildings, boat ramps, harbors, military bases, pineapple canneries, sugar mills, and myriad other structures built across the Islands made lasting marks on the land and gave us thousands of place names. Street names on the island of O‘ahu alone now number over seven thousand. All of these land-based names have been recorded in telephone books, maps, magazines, newspapers, construction plans, land sale contracts, and other similar documents. In addition, the use of computers and the development of the Internet have revolutionized record keeping and made records and names accessible to everyone. At the same time that Hawai‘i experienced its explosive growth of population and infrastructure on land, an equally explosive growth took place in the ocean. The Hawaiian Islands offer almost every type of ocean recreation activity in the world, so new residents and visitors followed the Hawaiians into the ocean. Hawai‘i saw the rise of swimming and the rebirth of surfing in the early 1900s, the development of outrigger canoe racing in the 1930s, the introduction of scuba diving and the rise of bodysurfing during the 1950s, the international explosion of surfing in the 1960s with the introduction of mass-produced foam surfboards , the rise of the spin...