Destination: Honolulu : Keepers of the Hawaiian Flame : Fueled by islanders’ growing pride in their culture and history, Bishop Museum and Iolani Palace spruce up their public offerings

For Hawaii-bound tourists in search of more than a suntan, two 19th-Century Honolulu institutions, the Bishop Museum and Iolani Palace, provide fascinating and contrasting glimpses into Hawaii’s past and present.

The 105-year-old Bishop, spread across several buildings on a 12-acre campus in a residential area northwest of downtown Honolulu, is reaching out to visitors in a fresh effort to move beyond its academic underpinnings as a world-class center for Pacific studies.

And at Iolani, a downtown landmark since its completion in 1882, more than $6 million has been spent restoring the last residence of Hawaiian royalty--symbol of a Hawaiian ruler’s obsession with European pomp and circumstance, and, to some, an important site in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.

A decade ago, the Bishop inaugurated a community-outreach program that includes such popular activities as Family Sunday, a first-Sunday-of-the-month celebration when the $7.95 per-person admission charge is waived for residents, and the museum grounds are filled with picnickers, food and craft booths and local entertainers.

More recently, it has joined Hawaii’s tourism efforts to give visitors greater insight into Hawaiian culture.

Starting in January, for example, plans call for the Bishop Museum to play host to the Brothers Cazimero, popular Honolulu entertainers who will perform Hawaiian songs and dances three nights a week in the museum’s Hawaiian Hall. The same month, the museum acquires the Hawaii Maritime Center on the Honolulu waterfront, close by the newly-renovated Aloha Tower. And in a pilot program launched this summer, three rotating, Bishop-sponsored exhibits of Hawaiian culture greet visitors in the lobby of the Sheraton Waikiki Hotel. The “Share Hawaii” program will be expanded over the next few months to five other still-to-be-chosen hotels, one on Oahu and four on the Neighbor Islands .

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The Bishop Museum was founded in 1889 by merchant, banker and philanthropist Charles Reed Bishop, who’d arrived here from Newburyport, Mass., in 1846. Bishop’s inspiration was his late wife, Princess Bernice Pauahi, the last surviving direct descendant of King Kamehameha I. Once the owner of 12% of Hawaiian land, she and her husband dreamed of creating a permanent museum to preserve her extensive collection of family artifacts.

Today, many of the princess’s treasures, including capes made from thousands of tiny, tightly spaced feathers, are on display in Hawaiian Hall--a stern-looking structure with a lava rock exterior that houses the museum’s best exhibit. Dominated by a papier-mache-covered, 50-foot sperm whale that dangles from the ceiling of an open atrium, the Hawaiian Hall concentrates on the era that begins with King Kamehameha I--the warrior who conquered the islands at the beginning of the 19th Century--and continues to Queen Liliuokalani’s forced abdication (and end of the Hawaiian monarchy) in 1893. Also on display is a Hawaiian grass shack ( pili hale ), built in the 18th Century in Kauai’s Milolii Valley and reconstructed inside the Hawaiian Hall in 1902.

A display of chronology in the Bishop’s Hawaiian Hall notes that King Kamehameha IV, who ruled the islands from 1855 to 1863, was enchanted by the British monarchy and brought the trappings of the Court of St. James to Hawaii. And that deliberate borrowing is underscored at Iolani Palace, built by King Kalakaua in 1879.

The small, ornate palace, whose design has been called “American Florentine,” was constructed for the then-enormous sum of $360,000 (not counting the 225 pieces of furniture custom-made in Boston and shipped around Cape Horn). As one of the volunteer guides on the 45-minute tour noted: “This illustrates the complexity that contact with other cultures brought us.”

“Old Hawaii” is not much in evidence at Iolani, save for the stunning koa and other native woods used in banisters, paneling and some furniture. (The still-gleaming floors of imported Douglas fir, meanwhile, are preserved in part by requiring visitors to don special booties that cover their shoes.) Instead, the emphasis is on European opulence. A state dining room is set with silver and china imported from the Continent. The king’s library, where one of the city’s earliest telephones was installed, is filled with high-back, Elizabethan-style chairs.

Two gold-and-maroon thrones--one for Kalakaua, the other for his wife, Queen Kapiolani--dominate the palace’s main room. The room was once the scene of European-style balls, complete with the Royal Hawaiian Band playing on the lanai, or porch, just outside. It was also the setting for the 1895 trial of Kalakaua’s sister and successor, Queen Liliuokalani, on the charges of “knowledge of treasonable acts against the Republic.” She spent eight months within the palace--either “imprisoned” or “under house arrest,” depending on whose version of history is being told--for opposing the islands’ annexation by the United States and attempting to restore a strict monarchy.

After the monarchy fell, the palace became the capital for the republic until 1900, the territory until 1959, and finally the state until a new capitol was built in 1969. Restoration on the palace began the same year and continued slowly until 1978. Guides still ask visitors to be on the lookout for furniture that has wandered off over the years. One guide related the tale of a Midwest tourist who thought something looked familiar, returned home and found a kitchen chair she had been about to throw out. It had come--no one knows how--from Iolani Palace.

Today, 45-minute palace tours are offered Wednesdays through Saturdays, and the Royal Hawaiian Band, replete with 19th-Century-style uniforms, holds free public concerts Fridays at 12:15 p.m. at the copper-domed Coronation Pavilion on the nearby grounds. The pavilion, held up by eight concrete pillars that represent the major Hawaiian islands, was a focal point of a Hawaii Sovereignty rally in January, 1993, that drew several thousand spectators. (This January, the 100th anniversary of Queen Liliuokalani’s arrest, Iolani Palace will install a display of the quilt she worked on following her arrest.)

Iolani Palace and the Bishop Museum have attracted a significant percentage of tourists in recent years, particularly repeat visitors. But both institutions have noted sharp increases in the number of Hawaiian residents, as well--a reflection of a growing pride in Hawaiian history and culture.

The Bishop, under the decade-old leadership of former Smithsonian Museum staffer and current President W. Donald Duckworth, is making a special effort to broaden its appeal to residents and tourists alike. Attendance has soared, from about 218,000 visitors in 1984 (the year Duckworth arrived) to more than 500,000 last year.

At the Bishop’s hands-on Hall of Discovery, children can test the difference between types of lava and note how much heavier the old wooden surfboards are than their fiberglass successors; at the Hawaiian Hall, their parents can watch demonstrations of Hawaiian music and dance, quilting, flower and feather lei-making, and lau hala (mat and basket) weaving.

The fascinating Hall of Hawaiian Natural History uses its vast collection of 450,000 plant, 130,000 fish and 85,000 bird and mammal specimens (only a small fraction of which can be displayed at one time) to show how much of Hawaii’s diverse ecosystem arrived here. And at the Bishop’s Shop Pacifica, shoppers can choose from a wide range of books on the natural and cultural history of Hawaii and the Pacific and Hawaiian-made crafts and jewelry (including items made from the rare, luminescent shells gathered on the privately-owned island of Niihau).

One of the biggest draws is the museum’s Castle Memorial Building, opened in 1990 for rotating, traveling exhibits. The current show, “Nature’s Fury,” has working models that demonstrate how hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunami tidal waves are generated. Like most Castle exhibits, this one includes a Hawaiian angle: Among the blown-up photographs of Hawaiian devastation over the past century are several stunning pictures of Iniki, the hurricane that swept across Kauai two years ago.

From mid-January through early June of next year, Castle will celebrate the ancient Polynesian voyages to and from Hawaii with an exhibition about the voyaging canoe Hawai’iloa, a 57-foot sailing vessel built of traditional materials. (Since native koa wood has become scarce, the Hawai’iloa’s builders substituted with spruce logs from Alaska’s Shelikof Island.) Plans call for the canoe, with a crew of 12 aboard, to sail 4,000 miles to Tahiti and back, leaving in February and returning in May.

The journey, sponsored by the Polynesian Voyaging Society and the museum’s 5-year-old Native Hawaiian Culture and Arts Program, will commemorate the still-unsolved mysteries of why the Polynesians came to the world’s most isolated land mass sometime between AD 300 and AD 700--and where they came from, as well.

The theories are explored in a small but striking exhibit inside the museum’s planetarium rotunda. The prevailing guess, based on geology, archeology and anthropology, holds that the Polynesians came originally from Southeast Asia, arriving in Samoa and Tahiti by about AD 100. For the next several hundred years, there were repeated voyages between Tahiti and Hawaii.

In one recorded exhibit, visitors can hear the word for “bird” as manuk in Indonesian, and manu in Samoan, Tahitian, Hawaiian and Maori, the language of New Zealand’s indigenous people.

Still on the Bishop Museum’s drawing boards is a long-range improvement plan that calls for a new planetarium (the existing, 76-seat facility is the only one in the state), a renovation and expansion of the Hawaiian Hall and an expansion of after-hours activities.

“Now, (some) people say ‘I saw (the museum) in the fourth grade and there’s no sense in going back,’ ” said Duckworth. “We need to look at this afresh to convey to the community and to visitors what is truly important about Hawaiian tradition and heritage.”

GUIDEBOOK: Museum Qualities

Getting there: One of the most convenient ways to visit both institutions is by buying a $15 ticket on the Old Town Honolulu Trolley Tour. The open-air vehicles make stops at 20 Honolulu tourist attractions, and run every 15 minutes from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily. For trolley information in Honolulu, telephone 591-2561. (Area code for Hawaii is 808.)

Iolani Palace, P.O. Box 2259, Honolulu, Hawaii 96804 (King and Richard streets), tel. 522-0832. The palace is open to the public on guided tours only; they start 15 minutes apart Wednesdays through Saturdays from 9:00 a.m. to 2:15 p.m. and cost $4 per adult, $1 for children 5 to 12. Children under 5 are not permitted. Reservations are recommended; visitors should call or write at least one week in advance during summers and other holiday periods.

Bishop Museum, 1525 Bernice St., Honolulu, Hawaii 96817-0916; tel. (808) 847-3511. The museum’s main galleries are open daily (except Christmas) from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Entrance fee is $7.95 for adults and $6.95 for youths 6 to 17. Children under 6 are free.