These shores were the heart of ʻEwa, a moku (district) counted among the political centers of Oʻahu before Kamehameha. Puʻuloa was its larder. Observers of old Hawaiʻi judged these bays the most favorable in all the islands for building loko iʻa, the walled coastal fishponds in which Hawaiians raised fish on a scale found almost nowhere else; people had tended them here since at least the mid-1400s. Shrimp, shellfish, and penned fish came out of Puʻuloa in steady abundance, and the families of ʻEwa built a settled, well-fed life around the harbor's quiet lochs.
Change came with contact. After Captain Cook reached the islands in 1778, foreign visitors learned the worth of the pearls the Hawaiians had set aside, and Kamehameha — who drew the islands together into one kingdom by 1795 — claimed the oyster beds as his own. Dredging and silt from the 1840s onward smothered the beds, and by about 1901 the pearl oysters of Wai Momi were effectively gone. The harbor's modern course was set by treaty: the Kingdom granted the United States use of the inlet under the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875, and exclusive use as a coaling and repair station in 1887, beginning the long naval era that would carry the place's name around the world.
