The Kalaupapa National Historical Park is one of its best places to visit and discover, and the family has spent a wonderful day visiting the island and flying over it.
Molokai is the fifth most populated of the eight major islands that make up the Hawaiian Islands archipelago in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is 38 by 16 km in size at its extreme length and width, with a usable land area of 673.40 km2. It lies east of Oʻahu across the 40 km wide Kaʻiwi Channel and north of Lānaʻi, separated from it by the Kalohi Channel.
The island is an agrarian society, where the economy has been driven primarily by cattle ranching, pineapple production, and sugar cane production, and small-scale farms. Tourism comprises a small fraction of the island's economy, and much of the infrastructure related to tourism was closed and barricaded in the early 2000s as the primary landowner, Molokai Ranch, closed operations due to substantial revenue losses.
In Kalawao County, on the Kalaupapa Peninsula on the north coast, settlements were established in 1866 for quarantined treatment of persons with leprosy; these operated until 1969.
The Kalaupapa National Historical Park now preserves this entire county and area. Several other islands are visible from the shores of Molokaʻi, including Oʻahu from the west shores; Lānaʻi from the south shores, and Maui from the south and east shores.
The island is known under several names by the local population: Molokaʻi ʻĀina Momona (land of abundance), Molokaʻi Pule Oʻo (powerful prayer), and Molokaʻi Nui A Hina (of the goddess Hina).
Both the form Molokai (without an ʻokina) and Molokaʻi (with) have long been used by native speakers of Hawaiian, and there is debate as to which is the original form, with conflicting claims as to which the elders used. The USGS uses the form with the ʻokina.
Molokaʻi developed from two distinct shield volcanoes known as East Molokaʻi and the much smaller West Molokaʻi. The highest point is Kamakou on East Molokaʻi, at 1,510 m.
More information: Visit Molokai
Today, East Molokaʻi volcano, like the Koʻolau Range on Oʻahu, is what remains of the southern half of the original mountain. The northern half suffered a catastrophic collapse about 1.5 million years ago and now lies as a debris field scattered northward across the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. What remains of the volcano on the island include the highest sea cliffs in the world. The south shore of Molokaʻi boasts the longest fringing reef in the U.S. and its holdings -nearly 40 km long.
It used to be thought that Molokaʻi was first settled around AD 650 by indigenous peoples, most likely from the Marquesas Islands. However, a 2010 study using revised, high-precision radiocarbon dating based on more reliable samples has established that the period of eastern Polynesian colonization of the Marquesas Islands took place much later, in a shorter time frame of two waves: the earliest in the Society Islands c. 1025–1120, four centuries later than previously assumed; then after 70–265 years, dispersal continued in one major pulse to all remaining islands c. 1190–1290. Later migrants likely came from Tahiti and other south Pacific islands.
Although Captain James Cook recorded sighting Molokaʻi in 1778, the first European sailor to visit the island was Captain George Dixon of the British Royal Navy in 1786. The first significant European influence came in 1832 when a Protestant mission was established at Kaluaʻaha on the East End of the island by Reverend Harvey Hitchcock. The first farmer on Molokaʻi to grow, produce and mill sugar and coffee commercially was Rudolph Wilhelm Meyer, an immigrant from Germany who arrived in 1850. He built the first and only sugar mill on the island in 1878, which is now a museum.
Ranching began on Molokaʻi in the first half of the 19th century when King Kamehameha V set up a country estate on the island, which was managed by Meyer and became what is now the Molokai Ranch.
In the late 1800s, Kamehameha V built a vacation home in Kaunakakai and ordered the planting of over 1,000 coconut trees in Kapuaiwa Coconut Grove.
Leprosy, also known as Hansen's disease, was among Eurasian diseases introduced to the Hawaiian islands by traders, sailors, workers and others who lived in societies where these diseases were endemic.
Because of the islanders' lack of immunity to the new diseases, they suffered high rates of infection and death from smallpox, cholera and whooping cough, as well as leprosy. Sugar planters were worried about the effects on their labor force and pressured the government to take action to control the spread of leprosy.
The legislature passed a control act requiring quarantine of people with leprosy. The government established Kalawao located on the isolated Kalaupapa peninsula on the northern side of Molokaʻi, followed by Kalaupapa as the sites of a leper colony that operated from 1866 to 1969. Because Kalaupapa had a better climate and sea access, it developed as the main community. A research hospital was developed at Kalawao. The population of these settlements reached a peak of 1100 shortly after the beginning of the 20th century.
In total over the decades, more than 8500 men, women and children living throughout the Hawaiian islands and diagnosed with leprosy were exiled to the colony by the Hawaiian government and legally declared dead. This public health measure was continued after the Kingdom became a U.S. territory. Patients were not allowed to leave the settlement nor have visitors, and had to live out their days here.
In 1969 the century-old laws of forced quarantine were abolished. Former patients living in Kalaupapa today have chosen to remain here, most, for the rest of their lives.
In the 21st century, there are no persons on the island with active cases of leprosy, which has been controlled through medication, but some former patients chose to continue to live in the settlement after its official closure.
More information: Go Hawaii
and then make it a sanctuary,
I think we could truly find paradise on Earth.
Alexandra Stoddard
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