HAPAI KO ! and other terms of Sugarcane’s Past… Old Plantation Days, May 2015

There are many terms and phrases that are common to Old Plantation Days jargon but unfamiliar to those outside of the sugarcane industry.  One of them is Hapai Ko or translated, “Carry Sugarcane”.  I have written several time in the past or included photos of the impressive flume systems that brought the cane down to the mills along the ocean.  First off the cane had to stripped of leaves, hand cut into lengths, tied into manageable bundles and the CARRIED to the flume system some many yards away.  The stripping crew was largely wahines who preceded the cane knife wielding harvesting men.  They would be dressed head to foot in clothing to protect them from the sharp leaves and silica hair of the cane sheaths.  Outside of the Plantation Museum in Papaikou is a wonderful mural of plantation life by Kathleen Kam.  I encourage readers to come visit the museum and see this mural that shows wahine strippers (pun intended), hand cutter kane’s, and flumes in the backround.

Carrying cane was an arduous task but an absolutely needed one to get the cane coursing down the flume system.  Flume systems started out with small 14” V-flumes that were laid temporarily in the harvest field.  From those it transitioned to a larger more permanent flume and then form there into the Main line system some 3 to 4 feet wide where it would end at the knives of the mill.

At Hilo Sugar Company there were three mainlines, the Piihonua to Puueo main on the south, the Wainaku main going straight up hill from the mill, and the Kaiwiki Main that came from the North.  You can still see remnants of these flumes over Wainaku Street and the Hawaii Belt Highway was large concrete overpasses.

Another sugarcane term that has oddly transitioned into other crop language is “LiliKo”.  This term refers to the sugarcane shorts or small pieces of cane left over from harvesting.  There was a whole crew established to gather the small pieces of cane and get them to the flume or during machine harvesting to the roadside for loading into the trucks.  In mechanical operations the pushrakes and cranes just could not pick up these short segments of cane.  The gleaning or final pick up round of harvesting was called “LiliKo”.  After sugarcane operations ended and I moved into management of Macadamia and more recently coffee, I noted the field crews referring to the final clean up round of nuts under the trees or the stragglers of coffee cherry on the trees as the Liliko round.  “Get not too much nuts Mr. Cross, you know, ‘dis “liliko”….  I would chuckle inside thinking of what they were saying about sugarcane, but knowing they were referring to a completely different crop.  I have also heard the use of the phrase with sweet potatoes and ginger fields that abound on the Hamakua coast.

How about some other unique sugarcane terms:  “Pani Paper”, that’s plastic sheeting that was used to dam up the irrigation canals or flume intakes, Pani is Hawaiian for a Dam, thus Plastic sheet was called Pani-paper.  How about HanaWai Man, I’ve used that term in past articles.  That’s an irrigation man, one who “works water”…Hana Wai.  “The Hanawai man directed water in the ditch using panipaper and many panipins”, (panipins were 36” stakes used in conjunction with the plastic).