First From Sea, Niihau Is the ‘Last’ Island

NIIHAU, Hawaii —  It’s called the last Hawaiian island, although it was one of the first to emerge from the sea.

It’s also called the Forbidden Island because it is populated by pure-blooded Hawaiians who consider it their private home, open only to their invited guests and, of course, to the family that has owned the island since the last century.

Try to camp on their pristine beaches and they’ll likely run a herd of cattle over your tent.

This is Niihau (NEE-ee-how), a small (23 miles long and 3 to 6 miles wide), scrubby piece of land that seems to cling as tenuously to the Earth as its people do to their traditional way of life, a life devoid of public utilities, paved roads, indoor plumbing, refrigeration and Big Macs.

Rumors say the island has a few TV sets (powered by generators), one VCR and enough disposable diapers to last a week--just until the next supply ship docks.

What it doesn’t have is the hustle and bustle and grand-scale hotels of Honolulu, or even the burgeoning development of its nearest island neighbor, Kauai, 18 miles across the channel.

This is the Hawaii missionaries saw 100 years ago. The 200 or so people who inhabit the island live a simple, even primitive life. Only recently have they traded their little grass shacks for wooden, plantation-style homes. They fish their shores and spend hours making the prized Niihau shell leis--which can cost thousands of dollars in jewelry stores on neighboring islands.

Family Owned Island

Most of the men are ranchers who work for the Robinson family, which has owned Niihau since ancestor Eliza Sinclair bought it for $10,000 from King Kamehameha V in 1864. She turned down his offer of what is now Waikiki Beach, thinking it too swampy for cattle ranching.

Niihau is not a moneymaker for great-great-grandson Bruce Robinson, in whose care the island is entrusted now.

During the week Robinson works for family owned Gay & Robinson, a sugar cane and land management company on Kauai. Weekends, he’s on Niihau, mingling with its people, who accept him as their link between a world gone by and a world that daily seeks to encroach upon them.

Although it would seem that the islanders live at the whim of each Robinson generation, caring for the people of Niihau and ensuring their survival is instilled in all Robinson offspring.

Robinson has four children ranging from preschool to teen-age. The eldest helps work the Niihau ranch, and will one day carry on the fight to keep Niihau from being absorbed by developers and tourists.

There are those who say that threat has already begun. Last June, Niihau Helicopters began offering tours of the island, piloted by Robinson family friend Tom Mishler. Mishler takes off several times a week from a private helipad on Kauai.

Once chopper tours have begun, can Waikiki Beach II be far behind? Mishler, who could be a stand-in for Hawaii’s adopted son, Tom Selleck, shakes his head. That will never happen, he insists. “Our flights are designed not to intrude on the people of the island,” Mishler says. “I consider this more like a National Geographic tour.”

Ironically, Mishler says that even a National Geographic reporter has not been allowed to meet the villagers of Niihau.

Tours Pay for Helicopter

But the goal of the Niihau Helicopter tours is not to open the last Hawaiian island to Don Ho fans, Mishler says. The purpose of buying the chopper was to serve as medical transport for people who have no hospital, no clinic, not even a doctor on the island. The purpose of the tours was to pay for the twin-engine chopper that has already saved lives.

Since Christmas Eve, 1986, when the Italian-made helicopter arrived, Mishler has made five emergency medical transports from Niihau to Kauai, including two children with rampant infections and an old man with a bad leg. The gangrenous leg was amputated on Kauai.

“They wait until they’re really sick,” Mishler says.

Pregnant women are transported monthly to Kauai for prenatal check-ups, and are taken to Kauai hospitals a week before their due dates to await delivery of their babies.

It was the Niihau people who wanted the helicopter, Mishler says. For the $185 fee the tourist not only doesn’t meet his island hosts but Mishler doesn’t fly within five miles of the Niihau village of Puuwai, where most of the people live. He lands only on the distant north shore and won’t allow his passengers to trek into the village.

Alerted by what Mishler smilingly calls the “coconut wireless,” the Hawaiians make themselves scarce when they see him coming with a copter load of tourists. Only their livestock--cattle, sheep and some wild turkeys--are visible from the landing place.

Stark Attraction

Niihau Helicopter tours are a stark attraction compared with the breathtaking airborne panoramas offered on Kauai, where choppers swoop and soar over the lush island while passengers relax wearing headsets blaring themes such as “Superman,” “Chariots of Fire” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Mishler’s passengers make the 15-minute flight across the channel wearing headsets to drown out the din of helicopter engines, but his cassettes offer only traditional Hawaiian music.

The view is also stark. While Kauai boasts the wettest spot on Earth--Mt. Waialeale, with an average annual rainfall of 450 inches--Niihau is caught between rain belts and receives scant bounty from Mother Nature.

The last four years have spelled drought for the island. A lake that once supplied drinking water is parched. Robinson’s farm machinery tried to dredge up ground water but unearthed only peat moss. The roofs of village homes collect what little rain does fall and deposit it into cisterns.

The result is land that looks like Oklahoma or Texas--splotches of green against rusty red earth and scrub kiawe trees that shiver when the wind blows. The shores are black from volcanic ash deposited thousands of years ago by nearby Lehua Island, a sunken volcanic crater. The beaches are rough and rocky, but covered in pure white sand coveted by developers on Waikiki Beach, whose shores are eroding.

Waikiki has offered to buy sand from the Niihau people, Mishler says, but they have refused, preferring to preserve all that is theirs. Archeologists and wildlife experts too have been shunned for fear that they would open the floodgates to the outside world.

Wildlife Haven

But if the wildlife experts do not appreciate the closed society, the wildlife does. Standing on shore, his helicopter cooling behind him, Mishler points out two Hawaiian monk seals happily sunning on offshore rocks. These scarce beasts once ventured onto the shores of Oahu, he says, but were scared off by swarms of tourists.

Now Niihau is the only place on Earth where the monk seal lives in any number. Instinctively, it seems, they know they will be protected here, much as Robinson protects the Hawaiians.

Mostly, the Hawaiians are protected from progress --a word that on the other islands means hotels, kayak rides, minivan tours, Reeboks tramping through pineapple and sugar cane fields, Kentucky Fried Chicken and chasing the endangered nee-nee bird around Haleakala Crater at sunrise.

But if mainlanders seeking renditions of “The Hawaiian Wedding Song” on guitar and ukulele are disappointed by the Niihau tour, their hosts are not scrambling to accommodate them. To them, their primitive life is nothing less than paradise.

“They love their life style,” Mishler says.

They also love--or at least deeply respect--Bruce Robinson. He is their benevolent spectator. When he is on the island he is one of them, living as simply and in the same type of house as the islanders do.

Trusted Friend

Mishler too is one of the handful of non-Hawaiians to be accepted by the people of Niihau. He says they believe he was brought to them by divine providence. On his last birthday he was presented with a lei made of precious kahalilani shells worth about $8,000.

The Hawaiians call him “family.” And yet he has never been invited into a private home on the island nor would he presume to ask, he says. He and his family live on Kauai.

The people of Niihau believe that they are a special people watched over by God, Mishler says. They are devoutly Protestant and scorn their pagan and cannibalistic ancestors. Alcohol and drugs are forbidden, and residents who have used drugs have been asked to leave the island.

There is no crime and apparently little social conflict on Niihau. Decisions are made by chiefs and by consensus. On a larger scale, residents abide by the laws of the state of Hawaii and of the United States, pay taxes and receive welfare when needed. They are, for the most part, left alone by outsiders, who have an unwritten agreement to respect their life style.

Some of the young people intermarry, Mishler says, and some leave to start new lives on other islands or on the mainland.

The Niihau population has remained stable for many years, he says. Residents range in age from newborns to an 80-year-old woman. Some young people who leave find themselves drawn back, unable or unwilling to deal with a world that moves at another speed.

One girl who frequently visits Kauai always returns to Niihau, Mishler says. “You don’t need money here,” she says.

Mishler is unswerving in his belief that the Robinsons and their descendants will always be able to hold back the hordes that could engulf Niihau and its living past.

He climbs back into the pilot’s seat and revs up his two engines. The propeller atop the helicopter begins to whip sand into a frenzy around him. “It’s so ingrained in them to preserve it,” he says, “the Robinsons will keep Niihau as the last Hawaiian island.”

To reserve a Niihau Helicopter tour, write to P.O. Box 370, Makaweli, Kauai, Hawaii 96769, or call (808) 338-1234 or (808) 335-3500.