The Hawaiian cowboy, the paniolo, is also a direct descendant of the vaquero of California and Mexico. Experts in Hawaiian etymology believe “Paniolo” is a Hawaiianized pronunciation of español. (The Hawaiian language has no / s / sound, and all syllables and words must end in a vowel.) Paniolo, like cowboys on the mainland of North America, learned their skills from Mexican vaqueros. Other theories of word origin suggest Paniolo was derived from panuelo (Spanish for handkerchief) or possibly from a Hawai’ian language word meaning “hold firmly and sway gracefully.”
Captain George Vancouver brought cattle and sheep in 1793 as a gift to Kamehameha I, monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom. For 10 years, Kamehameha forbade killing of cattle, and the death penalty on anyone who violated his edict. As a result, numbers multiplied astonishingly, and were wreaking havoc throughout the countryside. By the reign of Kamehameha III the number of wild cattle were becoming a problem, so in 1832 he sent an emissary to California, then still a part of Mexico. He was impressed with the skill of the vaqueros, and invited three to Hawai’i to teach the Hawaiian people how to work cattle.
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