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Updated: June 9, 2025
At high water big boulders are clumsily rolled down stream and when the river is unusually high even trees are torn from the banks and carried out to sea. So the Wailuku still lives up to its name, Destroying Water. King Kamehameha the Great was a very famous warrior. His chief ambition, which he lived to realize, was to become sole ruler of all the Hawaiian Islands.
The track from Wailuku to Heiku is over a Sahara in miniature, a dreary expanse of sand and shifting sandhills, with a dismal growth in some places of thornless thistles and indigo, and a tremendous surf thunders on the margin. Trackless, glaring, choking, a guide is absolutely necessary to a stranger, for the footprints or wheel- marks of one moment are obliterated the next.
So great was Maui's disappointment at this his first failure in any important enterprise that he would not try again. He said his fish-hook had lost its charm and sorrowfully he took it away with him in his canoe. He carried it up the Wailuku River to his home behind Rainbow Falls, where he grieved for many days over the unsuccessful attempt.
Many of the names of places, specially of those compounded with wai, water, are very musical; Wailuku, "water of destruction;" Waialeale, "rippling water;" Waioli, "singing water;" Waipio, "vanquished water;" Kaiwaihae, "torn water."
The track crosses the deep, still, Wailuku River on a wooden bridge, and then after winding up a steep hill, among native houses fantastically situated, hangs on the verge of the lofty precipices which descend perpendicularly to the sea, dips into tremendous gulches, loses itself in the bright fern-fringed torrents which have cleft their way down from the mountains, and at last emerges on the delicious height on which this house is built.
Maui has also the famous Wailuku Valley, a picturesque gorge several miles deep, and giving you a very fair example of the broken, verdure-clad, and now lonely valleys of these islands; which are in reality steep, narrow cañons, worn out of the mountains by the erosion of water.
The Wailuku River is the boundary between the two great volcanoes, and its waters, it is supposed by learned men, have often flowed over heated beds of basalt, with the result of columnar formation radiating from the bottom of the stream.
Fed from the great watershed of Hawaii far up the densely wooded flanks of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea often snow-capped in winter the Wailuku River roars through the very center of Hilo, principal town of the Island of Hawaii. There are many vague stories as to why the Wailuku River was so named. In the Hawaiian tongue Wailuku means literally "destroying water."
There is a large native population in the village, along the beach, and on the heights above the Wailuku River. Frame houses with lattices, and grass houses with deep verandahs, peep out everywhere from among the mangoes and bananas. The governess of Hawaii, the Princess Keelikalani, has a house on the beach shaded by a large umbrella-tree and a magnificent clump of bamboos, 70 feet in height.
"Just to show you what faith he had in his glorious star, and, also, what sanction he had for that faith. He was a youngster at the time I had just met him when he went into a poker game at Wailuku. There was a big German in it, Schultz his name was, and he played a brutal, domineering game.
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