by Margaret Mair

Created on: July 25, 2008   Last Updated: April 18, 2011

Maui's story is one of travel, conflict, and change. Polynesians settled here first, sailing their canoes from Tahiti and the Marquesas. They built huts and temples and fishponds and cultivated taro fields edged with sugar cane on Maui's fertile lands.

Their leaders established kingdoms and fought each other. For a time the fifteenth century King Piilani ruled the whole island. While he, his sons and his grandson ruled great temples were finished, the stone King's Highway circling the island was built and irrigation fields were extended. But by the 18th century other leaders were fighting over Maui's kingdoms. Then the white man came.

In 1788 James Cook 'discovered' Maui. Others followed - traders, whalers and missionaries. They brought powerful tools and weapons, unfamiliar ideas and new diseases, and changed the islanders' way of life forever. King Kamehameha used their guns and cannons to conquer Maui in 1790 at the battle of Iao, and eventually all Hawaii. He chose the port of Lahaina in Maui for his first capital in 1802.

The first missionaries arrived in 1823, after the King's death. They found unrest in Maui caused by Queen Kaahumanu's decision to break the system of kapu, the rules and taboos which had guided Hawaian life. The missionaries worked hard to instill their own rules and taboos - advised the royal family, built schools and churches, printed newspapers and textbooks, introduced Western style medicine and assailed customs they considered sinful.

In the 1850s Hawaii's capital moved to Honolulu. Fewer ships called at Lahaina, the whaling industry declined and the island grew less prosperous. Then the commercial cultivation of sugar cane was introduced and growing exports of sugar restored the island's economy, helped by the Sugar Reciprocity Treaty with the United States negotiated by King Kalakaua in 1876. When more workers were needed for the expanding sugar plantations they were brought in from China, Japan, Korea, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The new immigrants brought even more changes.

By 1891 sugar was king and the sugar planters reigned. In 1893 a group of Americans and Europeans deposed Hawaii's last queen, Liliuokalani, and made Hawaii a republic. Seven years later Hawaii became an American territory. Pineapple cultivation began in 1912 and became an important part of Maui's economy.

Then in 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The United States imposed martial law on Hawaii and used Maui as a staging ground and place of rest for

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