Lahaina, Hawaii
Seen from a short distance offshore, LAHAINA is one of the prettiest towns in all Hawaii, still recognizable as the peaceful, tropical village it used to be. Its main oceanfront street is lined with timber-frame buildings; a tall-masted sailing ship bobs in the harbor; coconut palms sway to either side of the central banyan tree; surfers swirl into the thin fringe of beach to the south; and the mountains of West Maui dominate the skyline, ringed as often as not by beautiful rainbows. Up close, however, many of Lahaina's decrepit-looking structures turn out to be mere fakes, housing T-shirt stores and tacky themed restaurants, and the crowds and congestion along Front Street can seem all too reminiscent of Waikiki.
Even so, Lahaina makes an attractive base, sandwiched in a long thin strip between the ever-fascinating ocean and equally spellbinding hills. Early evening is especially unforgettable, with the sun casting a rich glow on the mountains as it sets behind the island of Lanai. Lahaina is lively and by Maui standards inexpensive, with a huge range of activities and little rainfall, but above all it's the only town on Maui to offer lodging, sightseeing, nightlife and an abundance of restaurants within easy walking distance of each other.
Although there's little left to show for it nowadays – you can easily see all the town has to offer in a couple of hours – Lahaina boasts a colorful past. By the time the first foreigners came to Hawaii, it was already the residence of the high ali'i of Maui. Kamehameha the Great sealed his conquest of Maui by sacking the town in 1795, then returned in 1802 and spent a year preparing for what was to be an unsuccessful invasion of Kauai. His successors, Kamehameha II and III, made Lahaina their capital between the 1820s and 1840s, ruling from the island of Moku'ula, in a lake in what is now Malu 'ulu o Lele Park, south of downtown.
When whaling ships started to put in during the 1820s, seeking to recuperate from their grueling Pacific peregrinations, fierce struggles between the sailors and Lahaina's Christian missionaries became commonplace. Whaling crews, incensed by missionary attempts to control drinking and prostitution, repeatedly attacked the home of Rev William Richards, but in due course chose to head instead for the fleshpots of Honolulu. In the 1840s, however, following the death of Maui's devout Governor Hoapili, the whalemen returned en masse to Lahaina. For the next two decades, it was a lawless and rip-roaring frontier town, described by another missionary as "one of the breathing holes of Hell."
Surprisingly, Lahaina has never been a true deep-water port. Its prosperity was based on its calm, shallow roadstead, sheltered by the islands of Molokai and Lanai. For the most part, sailing ships simply anchored anything from a couple of hundred yards to three miles offshore, and sent their crews ashore by rowboat. During the nineteenth century, in fact, a long covered marketplace lined the banks of a canal parallel to the seafront, enabling seamen to buy all they needed without ever leaving their boats.
With the decline in whaling, Lahaina turned towards agriculture. Sugar arrived in 1862, when the Pioneer Mill Company was established, while pineapples followed early in the twentieth century. The roadstead had never been quite as safe as the sailors had liked to imagine, and a new harbor was constructed in 1922 at Mala Wharf, just north of town. Unfortunately it proved to be dangerously storm-prone, and Lahaina is no longer a port of call for ships of any size.
Devastated by a huge fire in 1919 and by the state-wide tsunami of 1946, Lahaina remained a sleepy backwater until the 1970s. Only with the success of the Pioneer Mill Company's resort development at neighboring Ka'anapali did it return to prominence, as the hectic tourist destination of today. The mill itself, meanwhile, quietly closed down in 1999.