February 19, 2018 • 29 mins
The story of the Menehune is one that's been handed down through oral history for generations. But can the roots of this mythological group of people be traced to real-world events?
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Go well, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So, um,
I went on vacation and I found out about a thing,
and then I came back and I don't want vacation
(00:23):
to be over. So we're gonna talk about that. This
happens to both of us from time to time. Even
if I go on vacation and I think, Okay, I'm
just gonna take a breather and not not think about
work related things. Oh yeah, I'll be walking around and
find some fascinating thing that then becomes an episode of
(00:43):
the podcast. Yeah, that is exactly what happened. I was
so sworn because there's been a lot of stuff going on.
I've been very busy and very stressed, and I was
so sworn that I was not going to deal with
work stuff for the week that we were away, and
then about three days and I was like, oh day,
I'm totally doing it. So, uh, my beloved and I
(01:05):
recently went to Hawaii. Yeah, it's one of my favorite
places on Earth. I'm very attached to it. I cry
when I leave um and the resort that we were
at had a lot of Mannahuna theming, because you're a
Disney's Alanie, they have a whole thing about it. And
there are these little figures that are everywhere in playful poses,
and they're kind of hidden in plants and in corners.
(01:27):
And we had been talking to one of the staff
about other things, and my husband asked about it, and
that gentlemen described the manahuna as Hawaii's leprechns. And then
one of his colleagues it was nearby, was like, that
is way too simple, Like that's not really right. You're
telling these people something that they're gonna not understand later.
(01:47):
So then I was like, okay, break down. Uh. And
then I wanted to go do a bunch of reading
about it. So here's the thing. This becomes one of
those history pieces that is very tricky to examine for
a couple of reasons. For one, the minhune will tell
you exactly what they are, and I shouldn't have used
the word exactly because there is no exact but they're
(02:09):
part of an oral history, and of course that in
and of itself is sort of a place where it's
easy for facts to get a little shifty, and then
once it starts to appear in books and other media
that's written by outsiders, this whole thing is often sensationalized
or misinterpreted. UM. For example, of their episodes of shows
(02:30):
like Finding Bigfoot, the talk about the Minnuhune and I'm
not throwing any shade of that show if you love it,
but that is definitely more geared towards enticing viewers with
tantalizing miss stories that are framed as possibly real uh
more than maybe sort of really delving into like anthropological
reasons for for mythology and whatnot. And there was actually
another show and I'm forgetting the name of it that
(02:52):
I found on the History Channel that kind of had
the same even impetus point as me, where it's like
we're at Disney sound LANDI and then these things and
we're gonna search it out. But even so it wasn't
uh and which seemed lovely, but again it gets into
this weird interpretation thing where you want to get viewers in,
and so you may be like, there their cuts to
commercial clearly where all cliffhangers about these little people were real,
(03:16):
So we don't want to do that. The other problem
is that this story has also been used as part
of tourism branding. It's even Minnahune have even appeared on
like product branding, and it's part of this sort of
casual storytelling that gets told. If you go to any
like Hawaii uh tourism site, they probably have something about it,
(03:36):
and so it gets kind of put in this um
narrative that's about being really fun, but that sort of
steps it farther and farther away from any sort of
historical record that we actually have. So I thought it
would be fun to actually really delve into this sort
of legend and myth area and talk about why it
continues to be a thing, how it has shifted, etcetera.
(03:59):
So that's what we're doing to a you guys get
to come on Holly's extended I can't bear to be
back in Reality Vacation episodes. So first we'll talk about
the legend of the Minna June. It's estimated that the
Hawaiian Islands were first occupied by humans somewhere between three
(04:19):
hundred and eight hundred cees. So these earliest inhabitants arrived
in canoes, having traveled from the Marquess Islands, which is
about twenty three hundred miles south of the Hawaiian Islands.
So also they're in the Pacific Ocean for a sense
of distance right as a modern day flight that would
still take hours and hours and hours, and that is
with the benefit of UH modern technology and guidance systems.
(04:44):
So this journey by canoe from the Marqueses Islands, presumably
navigating via the stars, would have been no joke whatsoever.
And those early settlers landed on Hawaii's Big Island and
then using the plants and other resources that they brought
with them, they set up in agrarian culture. A second
wave of Polynesian people's is believed to have arrived in
(05:07):
the Hawaiian Islands around eleven hundred and this wave was
from Tahiti, and sometimes it's described as an invasion there.
Their arrival is characterized as one in which the newcomers
conquered the inhabitants who were descended from that earlier group
from the Marquess Islands. Yes, sometimes uh it sounds like
there was some aggression, and other times it's just described
(05:29):
as uh that previous group was basically terrified of these
newcomers and kind of ran but According to the legend,
the tiny people known as the Minnahune were on Hawaii
before either of the mar Causes or the Tahitian Islanders.
And we're going to talk about how these three groups
actually all tied together in this myth a little bit
later in the show. So, these tiny folks who described
(05:53):
as being two or three feet tall, very approximately a meter. Yeah,
you'll see a range in there too. Some will say
as small as six inches even, but most of the
averages are between two and three feet. Yeah, And they're
said to have lived on the Hawaiian Islands before any
humans arrived there. Sometimes they're described as an ongoing hidden
(06:15):
forest culture that still exists today, with sightings still being
reported from time to time. And there are a number
of different stories about how the Manahuna may have arrived
in the islands. Many of them involved some kind of
nature linked polytheistic spiritual stories that are common in the
Hawaiian religion. While the minnahan are sometimes described as a
sort of Hawaiian analog to creatures like lepre cons as
(06:38):
I mentioned in the intro, or elves, fairies, or gnomes,
there is a really significant distinction, and it's that Manahuna
are not generally described as having any sort of magical powers.
They are just small people who live in the forest
and have an incredible work ethic, and the manahuna are
described as skilled craftspeople. According to Led, they build at
(07:00):
night and if anyone were to see them at work,
the work would be abandoned. So this really reminds me
for an analog that is maybe not so far off base,
the story of the shoemaker and the elves very similar.
While the most extreme versions of this late night work
myths say that the many Hune would build entire structures overnight,
other versions merely suggest that they just worked at night,
(07:22):
but there could be successive nights of labor on a
given project. Yeah, it kind of depends who, uh you know. Obviously.
Some of the older, more deeply mythological ones suggests that
they had like one night complete huge things, uh that
strange credulity um, and they have been credited with building
everything from temples to canoes. But we're going to talk
(07:44):
about four specific sites that are attributed to them. Uh.
Two will kind of talk about very briefly, the third
a little bit longer, and than the fourth will get
into more detail, but at the end of those four
you will see why those are the ones we chose.
The first is Neck Island. On Necker Island, which is
a small northwestern island in Hawaii, there are thirty three
(08:06):
shrines that are made of stone, and they're often called
artifacts of the Minnehune. According to legend, Necker Island was
the last refuge of the Minnehune as they fled other
Polynesian peoples who had moved to the islands. Necker Island
was added to the National Register of Historic Places and
on the Big Island, uh Cahaluu Bay is famed as
(08:30):
a surfing center, but it has its own connection to
the Minnehune. There is a breakwater in the bay called
the Kappaka Menehune. I have probably pronounced that wrong, even
though I had people from Hawaii pronounced it for me
while I was uh And this is a long line
of stonework rock formations that may have at one point
extended to completely close off the bay, and according to legend,
(08:54):
the Manahune wanted to make the bay into one big
fish pond, but a high priest, wanting preserve the great
surfing there in the bay, tricked the Mannahune into halting
their work by having a rooster crow in the night,
and so, according to this story, the Mannahune, having heard
the rooster, believed that the morning had arrived, and so
they left their labor, never to return to it. In
(09:17):
nineteen seventy four, the area around the bay was added
to the National Register of Historic Places. Also, the third
spot is the ale Coco fish Pond, and that's about
a half mile inland from uh Nowhelie Wheely Harbor on
the southeast coast to the island of Kawaii. And this
pond represents early fish farming. It is made up of
a dirt wall with a stone face that cuts off
(09:39):
our river bend and creates a fish pond. It's really
quite clever, uh. And the wall extends about five ft
uh you know, a little less than two meters above
the water, and it's four ft so like one point
three meters wide. It's believed that this pond is more
than a thousand years old, and that stone faced wall,
according to legend, was built by the many Hune. It's
(10:01):
the oldest fish pond on the island of Kauai and
it's described in its National Register application as quote, the
best example of an inland fish pond in the entire state.
So that document, by the way, also mentions the many
hune Is its builders. And this lush, vegetation friendly ali
Coco fish pond, which is also known as the Manahunai
(10:23):
fish pond, was added to the National Register of Historic
Places in ninety three. We're going to talk about a
structure that sometimes used as evidence of Manahune construction. But
before we get to that, we are going to pause
and have a quick word from one of our sponsors. So,
(10:45):
also on the island of Kawaii is perhaps the most
famous of the manahune Is attributed works, and that is
the kiki Aola Ditch in Weemeya. And this irrigation ditch
sits at the meeting point of two rivers, the Wameya
and the Makaile, and it's about seven thousand feet inland.
This ditch was built again according to an application for
(11:06):
it to be made a National Historic Site in ur
as a means of irrigating tarot crops. Taro root is
used as one of the mainstays of Hawaiian food. Poi
is made from beating the root into a paste after
it's been baked. If you have never had poi, it's fascinating.
I love it, not everybody does. It's one of those
things you can add a lot of other stuff too.
(11:27):
We went on a really fun um sailing canoe while
we were there, and we ended up in a whole
big discussion with the crew about poi and how they
each eat it, which was hilarious because some of them
grossed each other out with their choices. Um And according
to legend, this project, the kikia Ola Ditch was built
by the Mane June under a directive from King Olah
(11:49):
of Waimea, and his name is the Ola and kiki Ola.
And while it is called a ditch that is maybe
conjuring not the correct images, it is actually an interesting
feat of engineering. So not only did this causeway transport
water at a level above that of the river, but
it also turns a corner at a cliff's edge in
(12:09):
the process. And this construction uses a jointed stone dry
masonry technique that isn't like anything else in the area.
The stones used for it are cut with squared off
smooth edges and they fit together really tightly without using
any mortar. The legend is that the men a Hune
lined up side by side over a seven mile stretch
(12:31):
to hand each of the stones down the line, sort
of like a bucket brigade from the quarry site to
the construction location of the actual ditch, and all likelihood
whoever built the ditch to use stone that was closer
to the actual area. Yeah, this is one of those
things that there was like a survey that was published
in the early part of the twentieth century that was like,
(12:51):
the closest match to this stone is seven miles away.
But even in that same document it's like, well there's
also some that's closer, but I guess it was maybe
not as good as of a match. Um. But the
ditch was first referenced in writing in sevent and it
is mentioned in the diary of Captain George Vancouver, who
(13:14):
traveled through the way Maya Valley that year, and based
on his writing, he and his team were really quite
impressed with this structure. They wrote, quote, as we proceeded,
our attention was arrested by an object that greatly excited
our admiration, and at once put an end to all
conjecture on the means to which the natives resorted for
the watering of their plantations. A lofty perpendicular cliff now
(13:37):
presented itself, which, by rising immediately from the river, would
effectively have stopped our further progress into the country, had
it not been for an exceedingly well constructed wall of
stones and clay, about twenty four ft high, raised from
the bottom by the side of the cliff, which not
only served as a pass into the country, but also
as an aqueduct to convey the water brought thither by
(13:59):
great labor from a considerable distance the place where the
river descends from the mountains, affording the planters an abundant
stream for the purpose to which it is so advantageously applied.
This wall did not less credit to the mind of
the projector than to the skill of the builder. Terminated
the extent of our walk from whence we returned through
(14:20):
the plantations, whose highly improved state impressed us with a
very favorable opinion of the industry and ingenuity of the inhabitants.
By the late eighteen hundreds, the nickname many who name
Ditch was being used in reference to this structure, and
as a random aside. In a book about historical Irrigation
that was written in nineteen thirty three. Holly found an
(14:41):
off hand mentioned of a theory that our Russian military
detachment in a fort near the mouth of the river
built the ditch in eighteen seventeen. The same book points
out that since Vancouver's description predates that by a couple
of decades, this theory doesn't hold water. I'm sorry, I
apologizing for the punt tons, and yet there it is.
(15:05):
That was my fault. Yeah, it's interesting. I had not
seen that Russian military detachment theory anywhere else, and it
just kind of popped up in this really sort of
obscure book about Hawaiian irrigation history. I was like, what what.
I couldn't find anything else on it. So Uh. One
account of this ditch's creation, written by Westerner William Hyde
(15:27):
Rice in his book Hawaiian Legends, Uh says, quote olah
the king obtained the promise of the Manahune that they
would build a water lead at Why Maya. If all
the people stayed in their houses, the dogs muzzled and
the chickens shut in calabashes, so that there would be
no sound on the appointed night. This was done, and
(15:49):
the Manahune completed the water course before daybreak. Only a
hundred feet or about thirty point five meters of the
seven thousand foot length of this ditch shows this ancient
stone work. There's another hundred feet of burmed ditch that
is also believed to be from the original work on
the structure, but it doesn't have that stone work. A
(16:10):
road was built along the ditch in nineteen twenty and
during that time a lot of modifications were made, really
without regard to historical preservation. Additionally, there are pieces of
stone work that we're taken by residents and construction workers
who were working on that road to use them for
other uses, so significant pieces of the original ditch have
been lost. The ditch does still function as a form
(16:32):
of irrigation though, and as we mentioned a moment ago,
an application was filed in four for this ditch to
be added to the National Register of Historic Locations, and
that application was approved. So that keeps coming up, and
if you're counting, that makes four sites on the National
Register that are attributed either in part or in total
(16:52):
to the work of the Minahune. So this is really impressive.
We don't generally see a lot of applications for official
historical designations that credit uh an element of mythology for
their creation, Like that's not a thing that comes up
over and over. Um. But there are a couple of
explanations that have been offered to explain this whole myth
(17:16):
from the perspective of what really happened. And UM, I
will say, before we get into these explanations, they're not
ultra satisfying, So just brace UM. So. One theory that
lends the Menouni myth a little bit of real world validation, though,
is that it may have been bolstered by encounters with
Japanese travelers to Hawaii. In a two thousand nine article
(17:40):
written for Smithsonian by oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer and journalist Eric Sigliano,
the pair describe how currents of the Pacific have been
landing Japanese mariners at unintended locations for thousands of years,
and the course of the article they write quote the
Japanese presence in Hawaii may go back much further Hawaii
and legend recounts that the first Polynesian settlers they're encountered
(18:04):
diminutive mine June, little people, marvelous craftsmen who still dwell
in deep forests and secret valleys. At the time, the
Japanese were more than a foot shorter than the average
Polynesians and adept at many strange technologies, from firing pottery
and spinning silk to forging metal that might indeed have
(18:24):
seemed like marvels. So it's possible that this myth may
have been bolstered by at least sightings of these lost
Japanese mariners who were maybe camping or trying to make
their way, But that still seems like a really unlikely
source for this whole idea. That seems like a little
bit of a stretch. In a moment, we're going to
talk about an intriguing recent discovery that's often related as
(18:47):
part of the evidence for the Many June, but we're
going to take another quick sponsor break before we get
to that. A recent addition to efforts to corroborate stories
of the Minna June is Homo flora Sciences. This is
also sometimes called the Hobbit. This is a recently discovered
(19:09):
early human skeletal remains were discovered on the island of
Flora's in Indonesia in two thousand three, and that discovery
was made public in two thousand four. So this species
was tiny, about three and a half feet tall, just
a little over a meter. They had small brains about
the size of an orange, large teeth, and large feet,
which is how they got this hobbit nickname. Fossil evidence
(19:31):
indicates that they used stone tools and they hunted, and
tools found at the site have been dated back as
far as a hundred and ninety thousand years ago. They
might have used fire for cooking based on charred stegged
on bones that were found in the cave and the
female skeleton that was found in two thousand three by
a team that was actually they're trying to track Homo
sapiens migration from Asia to Australia was named LB one.
(19:56):
That's after leong Bua Cave where it was found, and
that skeleton was dated to about eighty thousand years ago.
And since the discovery of LB one as part of
that bigger thing, it wasn't like these happened way later.
They were all kind of in a in a big
discovery arc uh. Remains of another twelve separate individuals have
also been recovered, with dating ranging from one thousand to
(20:19):
sixty thousand years of age. For the various specimens, but
the only place that Homo floresciences has been found is
in that one cave, so we don't know if this
was a species that evolved in isolation, or if they
traveled elsewhere or anything. And this was again in Indonesia, naturally,
though this has raised ideas that Homo floresciences might be
(20:41):
linked to the manahuna in some way. Because this discovery
is still quite new, there is a lot of debate
about to find about its meaning in the Earth's timeline. Initially,
it was believed that these people were wiped out by
a volcanic eruption about twelve thousand years ago. More recently,
it's been suggested that it was really modern humans traveling
(21:03):
through Indonesia as far back as fifty thousand years ago
that led to their extinction. And there are we should say,
scientists that believe that classifying this discovery as a new
species is in fact wrong, and that this is a
case of modern human society that had a mutation or
a disorder in the small isolated gene pool that they
(21:24):
had just living on this one island. There is also
on that same island of species of pygmy elephant that
similarly had uh, you know, a an adaptation or a
mutation depending on how you want to look at it,
from being isolated. So they kind of used that as
evidence of like, hey, this was probably also happening with
these humans here. So there are lots of stories and
(21:48):
myths that are connected to the Minnehune, and a lot
of them are really compelling. These explanations of Japanese travelers
and homofluoresciensis offer some you know, pretty interesting ideas connected
to the story. Yeah, there are interesting ways to rationalize it,
but the problem that keeps coming up is that there
is literally no hard evidence of an actual two to
(22:11):
three foot tall race of forest people on the Hawaiian Islands.
The evidence has often used as proof of the existence
of the Menna June in that form is real and
that it exists, so like that pond and that ditch
that are named after them, those are real structures, but
there hasn't ever been any evidence or finds that show
actual short forest dwelling humans on the Hawaiian Islands. One
(22:35):
possibility that I think is really interesting is that these
stories actually predate human arrival from the Hawaiian Islands and
they traveled along with Hawaii's early settlers as part of
their own cultural history. So they are like a belief
that goes so far back that it came to Hawaii
with its first human inhabitants. Yeah, and there's also a
(22:55):
theory that that first wave of Marqueses Island settlers built
those various structs that have been attributed to the Manahune,
and that when the second wave of settlers from Tahiti
arrived on the island several hundred years later, they found
that stonework ditch, the stone wall, etcetera. And they developed
the myth of the Manahune over time to explain the
existence of them. One of the other aspects to unraveling
(23:18):
this myth is linguistic. There were three clearly delineated classes
in both Hawaiian and Tahitian early history. Tahiti's lowest class
was called Manahune. Since that Tahitian wave of settlers, it's
usually described as taking over the lands of the original
group who first came to Hawaii. It's also possible that
(23:40):
there's this multi layered aspect to the blurring of the
Manahune story. It's likely that they considered the people they
conquered to be manahune or the lowest status, so it's
not too far of a jump to consider that over
the years and over all the retellings, especially as in
an oral history context, this meaning of lower transformed uh
(24:00):
and to referring to their height instead of to their
social class, leading to the idea that they were physically
smaller people. But perhaps the most likely and something that
some historians really put forth as the actual source of
all of this is the theory that the oral history
was probably misinterpreted when it was retold by outsiders who
(24:22):
were wishing to transfer it to the written record. For example,
in that book we referenced earlier called Hawaiian Legends by
William Hyde Rice that we referenced um, the Manahuna are
described in pretty quaint storytelling style terms, and while the
author is clearly intending to relay a myth, the manner
in which he writes also makes it seem as though
(24:43):
he's stating facts. So here's an excerpt. The Manahuna were
small people, but they were broad and muscular and possessed
great strength. Contrary to common belief, they were not possessed
of any supernatural powers. But it was solely the account
of their tremendous strength and energy, and they're great numbers
that they were a well to accomplish the wonderful things
they did. These Pygmy people were both obedient and industrious,
(25:05):
always obeying their leaders. To further complicate matters, Rice then
goes on to describe all the places that you can see,
the paths and trails and other structures of the Manna June,
and this blend of fact and fiction writing style seems
to have fed back into the modern version of the myth. Yeah,
I mean it's it struck me so strongly reading his
(25:27):
his account that he doesn't delineate between when he is
telling the story and when he is relaying factual evidence,
and it gets really blurry. This reminds me of that
episode we did that was all about ghost ships and
how there was a fictionalized version of one of those
ghost ships stories that people interpreted its fact and even
(25:51):
now like you find the facts, facts and quotation marks
from that fictional story as the description of how it
happen bend. Yeah. And it's also worth noting that Rice
was one of the men who combined business in politics
and the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, so his retelling
of these myths was, whether consciously or unconsciously, almost certainly
(26:13):
colored by his perceptions of the Hawaiian people, as he
himself was a member of an Anglo family that was
living on the islands and acquiring a great deal of
land and power, often at the expense of the native islanders.
So it does not seem likely that there was a
literal race of tiny, nocturnal people living in the forests
of Hawaii building things in the middle of the night.
(26:35):
But there may well have been a group of skilled
laborers whose work was attributed to a mythical people. I mean,
someone built all these structures that we talked about earlier
in the episode. Yeah, to me, it makes the most
sense that that uh, that Tahitian word manna june has
shifted over time and caused this confusion between lower class
(27:00):
and lower height. But again, we'll probably never know. This
is so far back in history, And I don't want
to rob anyone of the fun of the stories of
the mine because it's very very endearing stuff, and it's
really charming and fun and every I mean mythology is
like wonderful and powerful and has great meaning. But it
is some of those things that merits a little bit
(27:21):
of examination. I think. Do you also have a listener
mail for us? I do. It's listener mail that kind
of cracked me up. Uh. This is from our listener, Kristen.
She writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, I just listened to
your podcast about Pauline Sabin. You mentioned that Pauline outlived
multiple husbands and was buried next to her second husband
and not her third. I had to giggle at your
(27:42):
discussion over how to choose which husband to be buried
next to. My great grandmother solved this dilemma in the
most delightful way. When her first husband died, burial plots
were purchased for her whole family, which included her and
their young son. She remarried a few years later and
eventually outlived that husband and as well already owning burial plots.
(28:02):
Her second husband was interred at the other end of
the row of three. So when my grandmother passed, she
was laid to rest in the plot between the two.
I can't imagine a more clever solution than to choose both. Uh. Incidentally,
she says, I live in Nebraska. Her child goes to
an elementary school that is named after Pauline's grandfather, j
Sterling Morton. That's a really fun story. It is one
(28:25):
of those things that I always wonder about. Um, it's
a discussion that has come up in my family from
time to time and we kind of giggle about it.
Then people feel uncomfortable and shut it down. So I'm
glad to hear how somebody else's family handled it, uh,
and that there's this cool connection to the story of
Pauline save in there. So thank you, Kristen. If you
would like to write to us, you can do so
(28:46):
at History Podcast at how Stone works dot com. UH.
You can find this across the spectrum of social media.
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(29:07):
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on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Go well, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So, um,
I went on vacation and I found out about a thing,
and then I came back and I don't want vacation
(00:23):
to be over. So we're gonna talk about that. This
happens to both of us from time to time. Even
if I go on vacation and I think, Okay, I'm
just gonna take a breather and not not think about
work related things. Oh yeah, I'll be walking around and
find some fascinating thing that then becomes an episode of
(00:43):
the podcast. Yeah, that is exactly what happened. I was
so sworn because there's been a lot of stuff going on.
I've been very busy and very stressed, and I was
so sworn that I was not going to deal with
work stuff for the week that we were away, and
then about three days and I was like, oh day,
I'm totally doing it. So, uh, my beloved and I
(01:05):
recently went to Hawaii. Yeah, it's one of my favorite
places on Earth. I'm very attached to it. I cry
when I leave um and the resort that we were
at had a lot of Mannahuna theming, because you're a
Disney's Alanie, they have a whole thing about it. And
there are these little figures that are everywhere in playful poses,
and they're kind of hidden in plants and in corners.
(01:27):
And we had been talking to one of the staff
about other things, and my husband asked about it, and
that gentlemen described the manahuna as Hawaii's leprechns. And then
one of his colleagues it was nearby, was like, that
is way too simple, Like that's not really right. You're
telling these people something that they're gonna not understand later.
(01:47):
So then I was like, okay, break down. Uh. And
then I wanted to go do a bunch of reading
about it. So here's the thing. This becomes one of
those history pieces that is very tricky to examine for
a couple of reasons. For one, the minhune will tell
you exactly what they are, and I shouldn't have used
the word exactly because there is no exact but they're
(02:09):
part of an oral history, and of course that in
and of itself is sort of a place where it's
easy for facts to get a little shifty, and then
once it starts to appear in books and other media
that's written by outsiders, this whole thing is often sensationalized
or misinterpreted. UM. For example, of their episodes of shows
(02:30):
like Finding Bigfoot, the talk about the Minnuhune and I'm
not throwing any shade of that show if you love it,
but that is definitely more geared towards enticing viewers with
tantalizing miss stories that are framed as possibly real uh
more than maybe sort of really delving into like anthropological
reasons for for mythology and whatnot. And there was actually
another show and I'm forgetting the name of it that
(02:52):
I found on the History Channel that kind of had
the same even impetus point as me, where it's like
we're at Disney sound LANDI and then these things and
we're gonna search it out. But even so it wasn't
uh and which seemed lovely, but again it gets into
this weird interpretation thing where you want to get viewers in,
and so you may be like, there their cuts to
commercial clearly where all cliffhangers about these little people were real,
(03:16):
So we don't want to do that. The other problem
is that this story has also been used as part
of tourism branding. It's even Minnahune have even appeared on
like product branding, and it's part of this sort of
casual storytelling that gets told. If you go to any
like Hawaii uh tourism site, they probably have something about it,
(03:36):
and so it gets kind of put in this um
narrative that's about being really fun, but that sort of
steps it farther and farther away from any sort of
historical record that we actually have. So I thought it
would be fun to actually really delve into this sort
of legend and myth area and talk about why it
continues to be a thing, how it has shifted, etcetera.
(03:59):
So that's what we're doing to a you guys get
to come on Holly's extended I can't bear to be
back in Reality Vacation episodes. So first we'll talk about
the legend of the Minna June. It's estimated that the
Hawaiian Islands were first occupied by humans somewhere between three
(04:19):
hundred and eight hundred cees. So these earliest inhabitants arrived
in canoes, having traveled from the Marquess Islands, which is
about twenty three hundred miles south of the Hawaiian Islands.
So also they're in the Pacific Ocean for a sense
of distance right as a modern day flight that would
still take hours and hours and hours, and that is
with the benefit of UH modern technology and guidance systems.
(04:44):
So this journey by canoe from the Marqueses Islands, presumably
navigating via the stars, would have been no joke whatsoever.
And those early settlers landed on Hawaii's Big Island and
then using the plants and other resources that they brought
with them, they set up in agrarian culture. A second
wave of Polynesian people's is believed to have arrived in
(05:07):
the Hawaiian Islands around eleven hundred and this wave was
from Tahiti, and sometimes it's described as an invasion there.
Their arrival is characterized as one in which the newcomers
conquered the inhabitants who were descended from that earlier group
from the Marquess Islands. Yes, sometimes uh it sounds like
there was some aggression, and other times it's just described
(05:29):
as uh that previous group was basically terrified of these
newcomers and kind of ran but According to the legend,
the tiny people known as the Minnahune were on Hawaii
before either of the mar Causes or the Tahitian Islanders.
And we're going to talk about how these three groups
actually all tied together in this myth a little bit
later in the show. So, these tiny folks who described
(05:53):
as being two or three feet tall, very approximately a meter. Yeah,
you'll see a range in there too. Some will say
as small as six inches even, but most of the
averages are between two and three feet. Yeah, And they're
said to have lived on the Hawaiian Islands before any
humans arrived there. Sometimes they're described as an ongoing hidden
(06:15):
forest culture that still exists today, with sightings still being
reported from time to time. And there are a number
of different stories about how the Manahuna may have arrived
in the islands. Many of them involved some kind of
nature linked polytheistic spiritual stories that are common in the
Hawaiian religion. While the minnahan are sometimes described as a
sort of Hawaiian analog to creatures like lepre cons as
(06:38):
I mentioned in the intro, or elves, fairies, or gnomes,
there is a really significant distinction, and it's that Manahuna
are not generally described as having any sort of magical powers.
They are just small people who live in the forest
and have an incredible work ethic, and the manahuna are
described as skilled craftspeople. According to Led, they build at
(07:00):
night and if anyone were to see them at work,
the work would be abandoned. So this really reminds me
for an analog that is maybe not so far off base,
the story of the shoemaker and the elves very similar.
While the most extreme versions of this late night work
myths say that the many Hune would build entire structures overnight,
other versions merely suggest that they just worked at night,
(07:22):
but there could be successive nights of labor on a
given project. Yeah, it kind of depends who, uh you know. Obviously.
Some of the older, more deeply mythological ones suggests that
they had like one night complete huge things, uh that
strange credulity um, and they have been credited with building
everything from temples to canoes. But we're going to talk
(07:44):
about four specific sites that are attributed to them. Uh.
Two will kind of talk about very briefly, the third
a little bit longer, and than the fourth will get
into more detail, but at the end of those four
you will see why those are the ones we chose.
The first is Neck Island. On Necker Island, which is
a small northwestern island in Hawaii, there are thirty three
(08:06):
shrines that are made of stone, and they're often called
artifacts of the Minnehune. According to legend, Necker Island was
the last refuge of the Minnehune as they fled other
Polynesian peoples who had moved to the islands. Necker Island
was added to the National Register of Historic Places and
on the Big Island, uh Cahaluu Bay is famed as
(08:30):
a surfing center, but it has its own connection to
the Minnehune. There is a breakwater in the bay called
the Kappaka Menehune. I have probably pronounced that wrong, even
though I had people from Hawaii pronounced it for me
while I was uh And this is a long line
of stonework rock formations that may have at one point
extended to completely close off the bay, and according to legend,
(08:54):
the Manahune wanted to make the bay into one big
fish pond, but a high priest, wanting preserve the great
surfing there in the bay, tricked the Mannahune into halting
their work by having a rooster crow in the night,
and so, according to this story, the Mannahune, having heard
the rooster, believed that the morning had arrived, and so
they left their labor, never to return to it. In
(09:17):
nineteen seventy four, the area around the bay was added
to the National Register of Historic Places. Also, the third
spot is the ale Coco fish Pond, and that's about
a half mile inland from uh Nowhelie Wheely Harbor on
the southeast coast to the island of Kawaii. And this
pond represents early fish farming. It is made up of
a dirt wall with a stone face that cuts off
(09:39):
our river bend and creates a fish pond. It's really
quite clever, uh. And the wall extends about five ft
uh you know, a little less than two meters above
the water, and it's four ft so like one point
three meters wide. It's believed that this pond is more
than a thousand years old, and that stone faced wall,
according to legend, was built by the many Hune. It's
(10:01):
the oldest fish pond on the island of Kauai and
it's described in its National Register application as quote, the
best example of an inland fish pond in the entire state.
So that document, by the way, also mentions the many
hune Is its builders. And this lush, vegetation friendly ali
Coco fish pond, which is also known as the Manahunai
(10:23):
fish pond, was added to the National Register of Historic
Places in ninety three. We're going to talk about a
structure that sometimes used as evidence of Manahune construction. But
before we get to that, we are going to pause
and have a quick word from one of our sponsors. So,
(10:45):
also on the island of Kawaii is perhaps the most
famous of the manahune Is attributed works, and that is
the kiki Aola Ditch in Weemeya. And this irrigation ditch
sits at the meeting point of two rivers, the Wameya
and the Makaile, and it's about seven thousand feet inland.
This ditch was built again according to an application for
(11:06):
it to be made a National Historic Site in ur
as a means of irrigating tarot crops. Taro root is
used as one of the mainstays of Hawaiian food. Poi
is made from beating the root into a paste after
it's been baked. If you have never had poi, it's fascinating.
I love it, not everybody does. It's one of those
things you can add a lot of other stuff too.
(11:27):
We went on a really fun um sailing canoe while
we were there, and we ended up in a whole
big discussion with the crew about poi and how they
each eat it, which was hilarious because some of them
grossed each other out with their choices. Um And according
to legend, this project, the kikia Ola Ditch was built
by the Mane June under a directive from King Olah
(11:49):
of Waimea, and his name is the Ola and kiki Ola.
And while it is called a ditch that is maybe
conjuring not the correct images, it is actually an interesting
feat of engineering. So not only did this causeway transport
water at a level above that of the river, but
it also turns a corner at a cliff's edge in
(12:09):
the process. And this construction uses a jointed stone dry
masonry technique that isn't like anything else in the area.
The stones used for it are cut with squared off
smooth edges and they fit together really tightly without using
any mortar. The legend is that the men a Hune
lined up side by side over a seven mile stretch
(12:31):
to hand each of the stones down the line, sort
of like a bucket brigade from the quarry site to
the construction location of the actual ditch, and all likelihood
whoever built the ditch to use stone that was closer
to the actual area. Yeah, this is one of those
things that there was like a survey that was published
in the early part of the twentieth century that was like,
(12:51):
the closest match to this stone is seven miles away.
But even in that same document it's like, well there's
also some that's closer, but I guess it was maybe
not as good as of a match. Um. But the
ditch was first referenced in writing in sevent and it
is mentioned in the diary of Captain George Vancouver, who
(13:14):
traveled through the way Maya Valley that year, and based
on his writing, he and his team were really quite
impressed with this structure. They wrote, quote, as we proceeded,
our attention was arrested by an object that greatly excited
our admiration, and at once put an end to all
conjecture on the means to which the natives resorted for
the watering of their plantations. A lofty perpendicular cliff now
(13:37):
presented itself, which, by rising immediately from the river, would
effectively have stopped our further progress into the country, had
it not been for an exceedingly well constructed wall of
stones and clay, about twenty four ft high, raised from
the bottom by the side of the cliff, which not
only served as a pass into the country, but also
as an aqueduct to convey the water brought thither by
(13:59):
great labor from a considerable distance the place where the
river descends from the mountains, affording the planters an abundant
stream for the purpose to which it is so advantageously applied.
This wall did not less credit to the mind of
the projector than to the skill of the builder. Terminated
the extent of our walk from whence we returned through
(14:20):
the plantations, whose highly improved state impressed us with a
very favorable opinion of the industry and ingenuity of the inhabitants.
By the late eighteen hundreds, the nickname many who name
Ditch was being used in reference to this structure, and
as a random aside. In a book about historical Irrigation
that was written in nineteen thirty three. Holly found an
(14:41):
off hand mentioned of a theory that our Russian military
detachment in a fort near the mouth of the river
built the ditch in eighteen seventeen. The same book points
out that since Vancouver's description predates that by a couple
of decades, this theory doesn't hold water. I'm sorry, I
apologizing for the punt tons, and yet there it is.
(15:05):
That was my fault. Yeah, it's interesting. I had not
seen that Russian military detachment theory anywhere else, and it
just kind of popped up in this really sort of
obscure book about Hawaiian irrigation history. I was like, what what.
I couldn't find anything else on it. So Uh. One
account of this ditch's creation, written by Westerner William Hyde
(15:27):
Rice in his book Hawaiian Legends, Uh says, quote olah
the king obtained the promise of the Manahune that they
would build a water lead at Why Maya. If all
the people stayed in their houses, the dogs muzzled and
the chickens shut in calabashes, so that there would be
no sound on the appointed night. This was done, and
(15:49):
the Manahune completed the water course before daybreak. Only a
hundred feet or about thirty point five meters of the
seven thousand foot length of this ditch shows this ancient
stone work. There's another hundred feet of burmed ditch that
is also believed to be from the original work on
the structure, but it doesn't have that stone work. A
(16:10):
road was built along the ditch in nineteen twenty and
during that time a lot of modifications were made, really
without regard to historical preservation. Additionally, there are pieces of
stone work that we're taken by residents and construction workers
who were working on that road to use them for
other uses, so significant pieces of the original ditch have
been lost. The ditch does still function as a form
(16:32):
of irrigation though, and as we mentioned a moment ago,
an application was filed in four for this ditch to
be added to the National Register of Historic Locations, and
that application was approved. So that keeps coming up, and
if you're counting, that makes four sites on the National
Register that are attributed either in part or in total
(16:52):
to the work of the Minahune. So this is really impressive.
We don't generally see a lot of applications for official
historical designations that credit uh an element of mythology for
their creation, Like that's not a thing that comes up
over and over. Um. But there are a couple of
explanations that have been offered to explain this whole myth
(17:16):
from the perspective of what really happened. And UM, I
will say, before we get into these explanations, they're not
ultra satisfying, So just brace UM. So. One theory that
lends the Menouni myth a little bit of real world validation, though,
is that it may have been bolstered by encounters with
Japanese travelers to Hawaii. In a two thousand nine article
(17:40):
written for Smithsonian by oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer and journalist Eric Sigliano,
the pair describe how currents of the Pacific have been
landing Japanese mariners at unintended locations for thousands of years,
and the course of the article they write quote the
Japanese presence in Hawaii may go back much further Hawaii
and legend recounts that the first Polynesian settlers they're encountered
(18:04):
diminutive mine June, little people, marvelous craftsmen who still dwell
in deep forests and secret valleys. At the time, the
Japanese were more than a foot shorter than the average
Polynesians and adept at many strange technologies, from firing pottery
and spinning silk to forging metal that might indeed have
(18:24):
seemed like marvels. So it's possible that this myth may
have been bolstered by at least sightings of these lost
Japanese mariners who were maybe camping or trying to make
their way, But that still seems like a really unlikely
source for this whole idea. That seems like a little
bit of a stretch. In a moment, we're going to
talk about an intriguing recent discovery that's often related as
(18:47):
part of the evidence for the Many June, but we're
going to take another quick sponsor break before we get
to that. A recent addition to efforts to corroborate stories
of the Minna June is Homo flora Sciences. This is
also sometimes called the Hobbit. This is a recently discovered
(19:09):
early human skeletal remains were discovered on the island of
Flora's in Indonesia in two thousand three, and that discovery
was made public in two thousand four. So this species
was tiny, about three and a half feet tall, just
a little over a meter. They had small brains about
the size of an orange, large teeth, and large feet,
which is how they got this hobbit nickname. Fossil evidence
(19:31):
indicates that they used stone tools and they hunted, and
tools found at the site have been dated back as
far as a hundred and ninety thousand years ago. They
might have used fire for cooking based on charred stegged
on bones that were found in the cave and the
female skeleton that was found in two thousand three by
a team that was actually they're trying to track Homo
sapiens migration from Asia to Australia was named LB one.
(19:56):
That's after leong Bua Cave where it was found, and
that skeleton was dated to about eighty thousand years ago.
And since the discovery of LB one as part of
that bigger thing, it wasn't like these happened way later.
They were all kind of in a in a big
discovery arc uh. Remains of another twelve separate individuals have
also been recovered, with dating ranging from one thousand to
(20:19):
sixty thousand years of age. For the various specimens, but
the only place that Homo floresciences has been found is
in that one cave, so we don't know if this
was a species that evolved in isolation, or if they
traveled elsewhere or anything. And this was again in Indonesia, naturally,
though this has raised ideas that Homo floresciences might be
(20:41):
linked to the manahuna in some way. Because this discovery
is still quite new, there is a lot of debate
about to find about its meaning in the Earth's timeline. Initially,
it was believed that these people were wiped out by
a volcanic eruption about twelve thousand years ago. More recently,
it's been suggested that it was really modern humans traveling
(21:03):
through Indonesia as far back as fifty thousand years ago
that led to their extinction. And there are we should say,
scientists that believe that classifying this discovery as a new
species is in fact wrong, and that this is a
case of modern human society that had a mutation or
a disorder in the small isolated gene pool that they
(21:24):
had just living on this one island. There is also
on that same island of species of pygmy elephant that
similarly had uh, you know, a an adaptation or a
mutation depending on how you want to look at it,
from being isolated. So they kind of used that as
evidence of like, hey, this was probably also happening with
these humans here. So there are lots of stories and
(21:48):
myths that are connected to the Minnehune, and a lot
of them are really compelling. These explanations of Japanese travelers
and homofluoresciensis offer some you know, pretty interesting ideas connected
to the story. Yeah, there are interesting ways to rationalize it,
but the problem that keeps coming up is that there
is literally no hard evidence of an actual two to
(22:11):
three foot tall race of forest people on the Hawaiian Islands.
The evidence has often used as proof of the existence
of the Menna June in that form is real and
that it exists, so like that pond and that ditch
that are named after them, those are real structures, but
there hasn't ever been any evidence or finds that show
actual short forest dwelling humans on the Hawaiian Islands. One
(22:35):
possibility that I think is really interesting is that these
stories actually predate human arrival from the Hawaiian Islands and
they traveled along with Hawaii's early settlers as part of
their own cultural history. So they are like a belief
that goes so far back that it came to Hawaii
with its first human inhabitants. Yeah, and there's also a
(22:55):
theory that that first wave of Marqueses Island settlers built
those various structs that have been attributed to the Manahune,
and that when the second wave of settlers from Tahiti
arrived on the island several hundred years later, they found
that stonework ditch, the stone wall, etcetera. And they developed
the myth of the Manahune over time to explain the
existence of them. One of the other aspects to unraveling
(23:18):
this myth is linguistic. There were three clearly delineated classes
in both Hawaiian and Tahitian early history. Tahiti's lowest class
was called Manahune. Since that Tahitian wave of settlers, it's
usually described as taking over the lands of the original
group who first came to Hawaii. It's also possible that
(23:40):
there's this multi layered aspect to the blurring of the
Manahune story. It's likely that they considered the people they
conquered to be manahune or the lowest status, so it's
not too far of a jump to consider that over
the years and over all the retellings, especially as in
an oral history context, this meaning of lower transformed uh
(24:00):
and to referring to their height instead of to their
social class, leading to the idea that they were physically
smaller people. But perhaps the most likely and something that
some historians really put forth as the actual source of
all of this is the theory that the oral history
was probably misinterpreted when it was retold by outsiders who
(24:22):
were wishing to transfer it to the written record. For example,
in that book we referenced earlier called Hawaiian Legends by
William Hyde Rice that we referenced um, the Manahuna are
described in pretty quaint storytelling style terms, and while the
author is clearly intending to relay a myth, the manner
in which he writes also makes it seem as though
(24:43):
he's stating facts. So here's an excerpt. The Manahuna were
small people, but they were broad and muscular and possessed
great strength. Contrary to common belief, they were not possessed
of any supernatural powers. But it was solely the account
of their tremendous strength and energy, and they're great numbers
that they were a well to accomplish the wonderful things
they did. These Pygmy people were both obedient and industrious,
(25:05):
always obeying their leaders. To further complicate matters, Rice then
goes on to describe all the places that you can see,
the paths and trails and other structures of the Manna June,
and this blend of fact and fiction writing style seems
to have fed back into the modern version of the myth. Yeah,
I mean it's it struck me so strongly reading his
(25:27):
his account that he doesn't delineate between when he is
telling the story and when he is relaying factual evidence,
and it gets really blurry. This reminds me of that
episode we did that was all about ghost ships and
how there was a fictionalized version of one of those
ghost ships stories that people interpreted its fact and even
(25:51):
now like you find the facts, facts and quotation marks
from that fictional story as the description of how it
happen bend. Yeah. And it's also worth noting that Rice
was one of the men who combined business in politics
and the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, so his retelling
of these myths was, whether consciously or unconsciously, almost certainly
(26:13):
colored by his perceptions of the Hawaiian people, as he
himself was a member of an Anglo family that was
living on the islands and acquiring a great deal of
land and power, often at the expense of the native islanders.
So it does not seem likely that there was a
literal race of tiny, nocturnal people living in the forests
of Hawaii building things in the middle of the night.
(26:35):
But there may well have been a group of skilled
laborers whose work was attributed to a mythical people. I mean,
someone built all these structures that we talked about earlier
in the episode. Yeah, to me, it makes the most
sense that that uh, that Tahitian word manna june has
shifted over time and caused this confusion between lower class
(27:00):
and lower height. But again, we'll probably never know. This
is so far back in history, And I don't want
to rob anyone of the fun of the stories of
the mine because it's very very endearing stuff, and it's
really charming and fun and every I mean mythology is
like wonderful and powerful and has great meaning. But it
is some of those things that merits a little bit
(27:21):
of examination. I think. Do you also have a listener
mail for us? I do. It's listener mail that kind
of cracked me up. Uh. This is from our listener, Kristen.
She writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, I just listened to
your podcast about Pauline Sabin. You mentioned that Pauline outlived
multiple husbands and was buried next to her second husband
and not her third. I had to giggle at your
(27:42):
discussion over how to choose which husband to be buried
next to. My great grandmother solved this dilemma in the
most delightful way. When her first husband died, burial plots
were purchased for her whole family, which included her and
their young son. She remarried a few years later and
eventually outlived that husband and as well already owning burial plots.
(28:02):
Her second husband was interred at the other end of
the row of three. So when my grandmother passed, she
was laid to rest in the plot between the two.
I can't imagine a more clever solution than to choose both. Uh. Incidentally,
she says, I live in Nebraska. Her child goes to
an elementary school that is named after Pauline's grandfather, j
Sterling Morton. That's a really fun story. It is one
(28:25):
of those things that I always wonder about. Um, it's
a discussion that has come up in my family from
time to time and we kind of giggle about it.
Then people feel uncomfortable and shut it down. So I'm
glad to hear how somebody else's family handled it, uh,
and that there's this cool connection to the story of
Pauline save in there. So thank you, Kristen. If you
would like to write to us, you can do so
(28:46):
at History Podcast at how Stone works dot com. UH.
You can find this across the spectrum of social media.
As Missed in History, we are on the web as
Missed in History dot com. That's our website where you
can visit all of the archive of every episode of
the show ever of all time wait before Tracy and
I were ever here. But if you look at the
shows that Tracy and I worked on, there will be
(29:07):
show notes on those ones as well, So you can
look at our sources. If you want to do a
little extra reading for yourself, we encourage you come and
visit us at mist in history dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff
works dot com.
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