In December 1824, the high chiefess Kapiʻolani travelled to Kīlauea and challenged the authority attributed to Pele, the Hawaiian volcano deity. Accounts describe warnings, a confrontation with a priestess, a descent towards the active crater and Christian prayer. Her reported return without injury became a celebrated story about religious change. It also became a story that different writers reshaped for different audiences.
This case concerns that historical encounter, not every tradition associated with Pele. A surviving narrative can establish what a writer reported and how an event was interpreted. It cannot, without further evidence, establish that a deity issued a warning, withdrew from a priestess or protected someone from lava. Nor does the absence of an injury amount to a controlled test of either Hawaiian or Christian belief.
The chiefess and the religious setting
Kapiʻolani was married to Naihe, an influential chief associated with Kona. She should not be confused with the later Queen Kapiʻolani. William Drake Westervelt’s 1916 collection, Hawaiian Legends of Volcanoes, explicitly distinguishes the chiefess from a reigning queen, although celebratory retellings sometimes use royal language loosely. Her authority and public actions are central to the story.
Westervelt places the journey within the changes following the arrival of American missionaries in 1820. His account describes Kapiʻolani welcoming instruction and becoming a Christian. It also presents her decision to visit the volcano as her own determination, opposed by people anxious for her safety. That account was published more than ninety years after the event and openly favours the missionary interpretation. It is a historical collection, not a transcript made beside the crater.
The distinction between date and publication is important here. The encounter belongs to December 1824. An account published in 1826, a missionary letter written in 1825 and Westervelt’s 1916 compilation are different stages in its transmission. Their dates should not become additional incident years merely because they preserve further versions of the same visit.
An early account from the Blonde voyage
The 1826 narrative of HMS Blonde’s voyage describes a party visiting Kīlauea in 1825. It identifies a hut used during that visit with Kapiʻolani’s earlier expedition and inserts an account of her confrontation. The visitors were not eyewitnesses to her 1824 actions. Their account is nevertheless useful evidence of how the episode was being told soon afterwards, before its later literary fame.
In this version, Kapiʻolani decides to enter the crater to demonstrate the power of her new faith. Followers hesitate and urge her to stop. The narrative gives her a conditional challenge: if she fails to return safely, they may continue their existing worship; if she returns, they should adopt her interpretation. It then describes her descent with a missionary and some companions, and an action involving a stick at the lava.
The narrator treats her survival as a decisive religious victory and asserts that offerings and reverence diminished afterwards. Those are the author’s claims. The text does not provide a population survey or an independent measure of the long-term effect on belief. Its derogatory description of Hawaiians also makes the writer’s assumptions visible. Such language should be identified as part of the source’s viewpoint, rather than carried into a modern account as neutral description.
What the later collection adds
Westervelt’s chapter “Kapiolani and Pele” gives a much fuller story. He describes a difficult journey from Kona, opposition from friends and followers, and a priestess attempting to halt the party before it reached the volcano. In his retelling, the priestess claims to convey a message from Pele using bark cloth. Kapiʻolani responds with printed reading material, including a spelling book and hymns.
That exchange makes the confrontation a contest over communication as well as divine power. Readers are told that the priestess cannot produce an intelligible message, while Kapiʻolani can read understandable words. The account’s verdict belongs to the Christian narrator. There is no independent transcript with which to test the reported speeches, the priestess’s precise words or the description of her response.
Westervelt also describes Joseph Goodrich travelling from Hilo to meet the chiefess. His version has a shelter prepared for the night, followed by a descent the next day. It incorporates statements attributed to the missionary William Richards about warnings, berries consecrated to Pele, stones thrown into the volcano and prayer. These elements should be attributed to their particular accounts instead of assembled into one supposedly verbatim scene.
The details do not all occupy the same place in every telling. The Blonde narrative emphasises entering the crater and contact with the lava; Westervelt gives more space to the priestess, printed texts and ritual prohibitions. Different emphasis does not by itself prove that no journey happened. It does mean that the most dramatic version is not automatically the most reliable guide to every action.
Following the account back towards its sources
Anthropologist Sally Engle Merry’s 2003 study of the encounter’s changing accounts examined missionary correspondence, Hawaiian historical writing and British literary treatments. She traced an early report through Levi Chamberlain, who wrote in 1825 after hearing Goodrich’s account. Chamberlain was therefore reporting information from a participant, rather than describing a scene he personally witnessed. Merry also compared a Richards account that gives the breaking of prohibitions a more prominent role.
Her comparison shows why the differences matter: later authors altered the emphasis as they addressed different readers. The literacy contest, religious conversion and heroic defiance were not equally prominent in each version. That is an argument about how a historical story was produced and reused, not a finding that confirms supernatural agency. The original comparative research is useful precisely because it keeps those layers visible.
A historical narrative becomes a literary example
Westervelt ends his chapter by reproducing Alfred Tennyson’s poem about Kapiʻolani. The poem transforms the encounter into a highly compressed heroic scene. It is evidence of the story’s later literary life, not an additional witness statement from 1824. The same caution applies when a later illustration or painting is used alongside the narrative: it may evoke a landscape without depicting the historical encounter.
The painting reproduced here is Charles Furneaux’s 1884 Kīlauea Volcano, now in the Honolulu Museum of Art. It belongs to a later period and contains no documentary record of Kapiʻolani’s actions. Its date remains part of the caption so that an atmospheric image cannot silently acquire the authority of contemporary evidence.
Pele as a living tradition
The National Park Service’s account of Pele describes an elemental force associated with the creation of volcanic landscapes, and a revered family or ancestral presence for some Hawaiians. It also notes that versions of moʻolelo vary. That account provides an essential corrective to reading missionary declarations of victory as proof that a tradition simply ended.
A modern description should not reduce all Hawaiian relationships with Pele to the fear portrayed in a conversion story. It should equally avoid converting an important cultural tradition into a verified paranormal observation. Historical testimony about worship, offerings or religious disagreement is evidence of human practices and interpretations; the additional claim of supernatural intervention remains a separate question.
Assessment and location
The historical journey and its religious significance have a substantial source trail. The appropriate outcome for the supernatural claims is insufficient evidence. The records preserve accounts shaped by committed interpreters, with no independent means to verify a divine threat, possession or protection. Kapiʻolani’s reported survival does not establish a general conclusion about which religion is true.
The map uses a rounded USGS Kīlauea summit reference at19.42°N,155.29°W. This is an approximate area marker, not a surveyed location for the priestess, shelter or descent. The crater landscape has changed. The historical episode provides no permission to repeat the descent: USGS identifies current eruption activity within a closed area, and visitors should use the National Park Service’s conditions guidance for permitted viewing.
Sources and further reading
Voyage of HMS Blonde to the Sandwich Islands,1824–1825, published 1826, printed pages186–190: an early retelling embedded in the 1825 crater visit, not an eyewitness account of the 1824 confrontation.
W.D.Westervelt, Hawaiian Legends of Volcanoes (1916), chapterXX, printed pages152–164: later compilation, attributed missionary accounts and the literary afterlife. Its partisan language requires critical reading.
Sally Engle Merry, Kapiʻolani at the brink (2003), American Ethnologist30(1),44–60: original comparative historical research. Relevant sections and reproduced early reports were reviewed; this is not a fresh inspection of the manuscript originals.
National Park Service, Pele; USGS, Kīlauea: cultural context, the geographical reference and current closure context.