Fighting Spear, Hawaiian Islands

This barbed fighting spear, or ihe laumeki, is a fine example of this scarce type of Hawaiian weapon. Ihe laumeki are well documented in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century sources. Captain James King wrote, “Their instruments of wars are spears […] the spears are of two sorts, and made of a hard solid wood, which has much the appearance of mahogany. One sort is from six to eight feet in length, finely polished, and gradually increasing in thickness from the extremity till within about half a foot of the point, which tapers suddenly, and is furnished with four or six rows of barbs. It is not improbable, that these might be used in the way of darts.” (James Cook and James King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean […] 1776-1780, London, 1784, vol. III, pp. 151-152).

Although King mentions four to six rows of barbs, there are ihe laumeki with fewer or more. There are two examples with two rows in the collection of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (inv. nos. 67-10-70/367 and 67-10-70/369); an ihe laumeki collected on Vancouver’s voyage of 1792 in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch (inv. no. E149.38) has eight rows; and the present example has seven rows. An ihe laumeki invariably has three barbs in each row, with the placement of the barbs alternating from one row to the next in a rhythmic arrangement which Giglioli states “render[ed] the weapon more dangerous.” (Enrico Hillyer Giglioli, “Notes on an Ethnographic Collection Made during the Third Voyage of Cook […]”, in Adrienne L. Kaeppler, ed., Cook Voyage Artifacts in Leningrad, Berne, and Florence Museums, Honolulu, 1978, p. 152).

Hooper notes that “traditional weapons continued in use in Hawaii into the first decade of the nineteenth century, but by 1810 Kamehameha, a powerful chief from Hawai’i Island, had managed to achieve ascendancy in all the islands through a combination of diplomacy, intimidation and conquest […]” (Steven Hooper, Power and Prestige: The Art of Clubs in Oceania, Milan, 2021, p. 127). As a consequence of this, and since “there were no ongoing wars among Hawaiians” (ibid., p. 128), it seems that by the first quarter of the 19th century the spears, daggers, shark-tooth clubs, and stones that had formed the Hawaiian arsenal fell from use.