How a captured trading ship helped Kamehameha begin uniting Hawaii
In 1790 a feud between a Hawaiian chief and an American fur trader ended with the schooner Fair American seized off the Kona coast. Kamehameha took the ship, its cannon and its lone surviving sailor. Within months those guns were firing on Maui, an early step toward the first kingdom spanning the islands.
Even Kamehameha's birth year is disputed, with estimates ranging from 1736 to 1761. One early source hints at 1758 because it coincides with a visit of Halley's Comet, and rumours about his true father were dismissed by the later King Kalākaua as jealous gossip. What is agreed is that his father died when he was small and he grew up at the court of his uncle Kalaniʻōpuʻu, ruler of Hawaiʻi Island.
When that uncle died in 1782, the kingship passed to his son Kīwalaʻō, while Kamehameha became keeper of the war god Kūkaʻilimoku and lord of Waipiʻo Valley. The cousins soon fell out, and five chiefs from the Kona district rallied behind Kamehameha. Tradition held that whoever could lift the massive Naha Stone would unite the islands; his supporters counted him as the fulfiller of that prophecy, though several rival chiefs refused to accept it.
Foreign trade tipped the balance. British and American merchants sold him guns and ammunition, and a trader named William Brown promised gunpowder from China and explained how to make it from sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal, all plentiful locally. After a Hawaiian chief's revenge attack on the Fair American, whose captain's father had struck him with a rope, Kamehameha protected the survivor Isaac Davis. Davis and another Westerner, John Young, married Hawaiian women and became his advisers, helping him defeat Maui's army at Kepaniwai in 1790.
Rivals kept pushing back. Kahekili of Maui retook his island and tried an invasion of Hawaiʻi in 1791 but lost a naval battle near Waipiʻo. Keōua Kūʻahuʻula, raiding in Kamehameha's absence, lost many warriors when Kīlauea erupted as they passed. Invited in 1791 to the newly finished temple of Puʻukoholā, Keōua was killed as he came ashore, leaving Kamehameha king of the whole island. He went on to found the Kingdom of Hawaii and died in 1819.
Source: Kamehameha I
