Kanemilohai Coast

The waters of Kānemilohaʻi surround the reef now also known as French Frigate Shoals, in the northwestern Hawaiian chain. Hawaiian traditions associate Kānemilohaʻi with the family of Pele, giving this remote ocean landscape a place within a wider sacred geography. Low sand islands, coral shallows and the conspicuous volcanic rock made a scattered boundary between deep water and dangerous reef.

On the night of 6 November 1786, the French expedition of Jean-François de La Pérouse nearly struck these shoals while sailing from Monterey toward Macao. His ships, Boussole and Astrolabe, encountered breakers at close range and turned away. After daybreak the expedition returned to examine the rock and sandbanks, surveying only part of the reef. La Pérouse named it Basse des Frégates Françaises in reference to his ships. The encounter brought the shoals into European charting as a navigational hazard. Its limited survey also illustrates how a named feature on an ocean chart could remain only partly understood by the voyagers who recorded it.