Alohato you

A walk, about an hour

Duke's Waikīkī

Waikīkī was wetland before it was a beach. Streams came down off Mānoa and Pālolo into taro terraces, fishponds and duck ponds, and the Kahanamoku and Paoa families lived on that ground. Most of what follows is no longer there. The walk is west along the sand from the statue, and it is about a mile and a half at the far end.

  1. One

    The stones beside the statue

    Kūhiō Beach, a few steps from the bronze

    Four large stones sit in an enclosure next to the statue, older than everything else on this beach by a long way. They are treated as sacred and they are not a photo prop. Whatever you do at the statue, do something quieter here.

  2. Two

    The Moana, and the club that had to be invented

    Moana Surfrider, about 350 metres west along the sand

    The Outrigger Canoe Club was founded in 1908 by Alexander Hume Ford, who promoted Hawaiʻi in print as a land of opportunity for the quick, courageous white man. Ford asked Duke to teach him to surf. The club would not have Duke as a member.

    So Duke and his friends started their own, Hui Nalu, the club of the waves, organised around the bath house here at the Moana. Hawaiian-run, racially mixed, and better in the water. He was eventually admitted to the Outrigger, after Olympic gold, which is a coda rather than a resolution.

    Sources give both 1908 and 1911 for Hui Nalu's founding. We have not resolved it.

  3. Three

    Where the water used to go

    The Ala Wai Canal, inland, about ten minutes on foot

    Between 1921 and 1928 the canal was dug and the wetlands behind this beach were drained and filled. The men who wanted the land called it swamp. Hawaiian farmers who had worked it lost the ground and the living.

    Duke was in his thirties and world-famous while this happened. The Waikīkī that made him an emblem was built by removing the Waikīkī he grew up in.

  4. Four

    Kālia

    Around the Hilton Hawaiian Village, about 1.5 km west

    Kālia is the ʻili, the smaller land division, where the family lived from 1893. His mother's people, the Paoa family, held land here. There were nine children.

    The hotel sits on it. There is a lagoon and a stretch of beach carrying his name a short distance from where the house stood, which is either fitting or the opposite depending on how you look at it.

  5. Five

    The water itself

    Anywhere along here

    The reef off this beach is shallow a long way out and breaks in shapes a child could learn by the time he was ten. That is the one thing on this walk that has not been replaced.

If you only do one thing

Stand at the second stop and think about a man being refused membership of a surf club on the beach he grew up on, and going off to start a better one. Most of what is said about Duke is about grace. That is the part where you can see what the grace cost.