Like kaikai strings between the fingers there are invisible cords between the members of a family:

"4 March 1779. The British ships are again at Kaua'i, their last days in the islands, some thirteen months since their initial visit. A number of Hawaiian men come on board and under the direction of their women, who remain alongside in the canoes, the men deposit navel cords of newborn children in cracks of the ships' decks (Beaglehole 1967:1225).

For an analogous behavior observed by the missionary Fison on the Polynesian island of Rotuma, see Frazer (1911, 1:184). Hawaiians are connected to ancestors (auumakua), as well as to living kinsmen and descendants, by several cords emanating from various parts of the body but alike called piko, 'umbilical cord'. In this connection, Mrs. Pukui discusses the incident at Kaua'i:

I have seen many old people with small containers for the umbilical cords... One grandmother took the cords of her four grandchildren and dropped them into Alenuihaha channel. 'I want my granddaughters to travel across the sea!' she told me.

Mrs. Pukui believes that the story of women hiding their babies' pikos in Captain Cook's ship is probably true.

Cook was first thought to be the god Lono, and his ship his 'floating island'. What woman wouldn't want her baby's piko there?" (Pukui et al. 1972, 1:184)" (Islands of History)

... Yet even more dramatic conditions are imposed on the sovereignity at the time of the ruler's accession. Hocart observes that the Fijian chief is ritually reborn on this occasion; that is, as a domestic god. If so, someone must have killed him as a dangerous outsider. He is indeed killed by the indigenous people at the very moment of his consecration, by the offering of kava that conveys the land to his authority (lewaa). Grown from the leprous body of a sacrificed child of the native people, the kava the chief drinks poisons him ...

Sacred product of the people's agriculture, the installation kava is brought forth in Lau by a representative of the native owners (mataqali Taqalevu), who proceeds to separate the main root in no ordinary way but by the violent thrusts of a sharp implement (probably, in the old time, a spear). Thus killed, the root (child of the land) is then passed to young men (warriors) of royal descent who, under the direction of a priest of the land, prepare and serve the ruler's cup ...

...the tuu yaqona or cupbearer on this occasion should be a vasu i taukei e loma ni koro, 'sister´s son of the native owners in the center of the village'... Traditionally, remark, the kava root was chewed to make the infusion: The sacrificed child of the people is cannibalized by the young chiefs.

The water of the kava, however, has a different symbolic provenance. The classic Cakaudrove kava chant, performed at the Lau installation rites, refers to it as sacred rain water from the heavens... This male and chiefly water (semen) in the womb of a kava bowl whose feet are called 'breasts' (sucu),

(pictures from Lindqvist showing very old Chinese cooking vessels)

and from the front of which, tied to the upper part of an inverted triangle, a sacred cord stretches out toward the chief ... 

The cord is decorated with small white cowries, not only a sign of chieftainship but by name, buli leka, a continuation of the metaphor of birth - buli, 'to form', refers in Fijian procreation theory to the conceptual acception of the male in the body of the woman. The sacrificed child of the people will thus give birth to the chief.

But only after the chief, ferocious outside cannibal who consumes the cannibalized victim, has himself been sacrificed by it. For when the ruler drinks the sacred offering, he is in the state of intoxication Fijians call 'dead from' (mateni) or 'dead from kava' (mate ni yaqona), to recover from which is explicitly 'to live' (bula). This accounts for the second cup the chief is alone accorded, the cup of fresh water. The god is immediately revived, brought again to life - in a transformed state ...

(Islands of History)