Large Things Forgotten: The Hawaiian Monarchy’s Sailing Fleet, 1790–1840

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Pacific Maritime History: Ships and Shipwrecks" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Beginning in 1790, Hawaiian ali’i (royalty) appropriated Western sailing technology to facilitate fundamental transformations of interisland tributary systems, alliance building, exchange systems, and emergent forms of Indigenous capitalism. By 1840 ali’i had either built or purchased over 60 sailing vessels that we know the names of. Dozens of others appear in ethnohistorical accounts. A summary of available information on this fleet is presented, along with known wreck sites and foreign ports that these Indigenous-owned vessels visited. Cursory historical treatments of these vessels have often dismissed their value as examples of chiefly folly, but they were essential elements in Hawai’i’s rapidly evolving nineteenth-century political economy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Pacific Maritime History: Ships and Shipwrecks   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35695.0