Referencing Tad's post, "haole," which is pronounced "how-lee," is the Hawaiian word for "white," and it's the local term for caucasians. It's not an insult--- everyone in Hawaii refers to a white person, including themselves if they're white, as a haole.
You can turn it into an insult by context and inflection, as in "goddamn haole bugger," but referring in normal conversation to a person as being a haole is totally acceptable.
So the term "haole sampan" started out as meaining a local boat built by haoles for fishing. So the inference is that it's not quite as "genuine" a local boat as a local boat built by locals (which the big aku boats were).
Regarding Al's comment above about the internals of the aku boats, I recall seeing as a youngster a terrific black and white movie about the building of an aku boat in the late 1940s. The movie covered (superficially) the whole process, from laying the keel to sea trialing the boat. I don't know why the movie was made or who made it. I just remember watching it and (being an ignorant kid) being amazed at the complex process of making a wooden boat like this.
I'd give almost anything to get my hands on this film and have it transferred to a digital file. I suspect it was this movie, plus seeing the boats coming and going and unloading almost every day as I went to school and later, to work, that put them in the "favorite boat" position in my mind.
A detail about the tuna industry in Hawaii in those days I will never forget:
A narrow road ran between the cannery buildings (behind the dockside buildings in the color photo I posted earlier). It was how one got out to the point of land beyond them. All manner of pipes ran over the road between the buildings, I guess for steam, water, perhaps fish guts, etc. I drove that road on occasion for various reasons, and the thing I'll never forget is that no matter what time of day one drove down that road there were MONSTER rats using the pipes to get back and forth between the buildings. I mean huge, shaggy Norway rats strolling across the pipe, seemingly as big as cats.
One of the times we went out and filmed on an aku boat, I had to walk down that road for some reason. Perhaps to get or take something to the production van. But I remember watching these huge rats crossing above me. If I stopped, they stopped and stared down at me as if to say, "Hey haole boy, you want a piece of me? Huh? Come on up here you as*hole, and we'll see who walks away."
Rats were a pretty common creature in Honolulu in those days, and most of us who lived there were pretty used to seeing them around, so the sight of one was not anything special. But the cannery rats were something else. I've never seen anything like them since.
Sorry for the nostalgic thread creep, but the whole tuna industry in Kewalo Basin, from the boats and crews to the canning process, was fascinating to me first as a kid and later as a working adult. I still can't believe I lived there that whole time and never took a single photo.