Rascals in Paradise

by James A. Michener

  We see St. Julian for the last time as he enters the judicial chambers of Fiji. It is said that this flamboyant man, who was totally unschooled in law, appeared in a tremendous scarlet gown, a full-bottomed wig, and all the glittering accoutrements of a proper English judge.

  Walter Murray Gibson, who became premier eight years after St. Julian died in Fiji, was apparently haunted by the Australian’s concept of what might be accomplished in the Pacific by a determined Hawaiian leader. He would be that leader. Accordingly he began to indoctrinate King Kalakaua with the idea of empire, and in 1880 the astonished United States minister at Honolulu reported to his superiors that Kalakaua’s imagination was actually “inflamed with the idea of gathering all the cognate races of the Islands of the Pacific into a great Polynesian Confederacy, over which he will reign.” On June 28, Gibson had inserted into the preamble of a resolution adopted by the Legislative Assembly a statement that “the Hawaiian kingdom by its geographic position and political status is entitled to claim a Primacy in the family of Polynesian States.” But this statement passed unnoticed by the press, and nothing further was done until Gibson came to power as head of the cabinet in 1882.

  In this year Gibson received an inquiry from the chief of Makin, one of the Gilbert Islands, concerning a possible protectorate. He answered favorably and the upshot was that this chief and one from Abiang were invited to come to Kalakaua’s coronation, but they were unable to do so.

  As might be expected, Gibson’s first overt act of empire was a disaster. Hearing that Captain A. N. Tripp, of the blackbirding ship Julia, was about to leave Honolulu for a native-stealing expedition to the New Hebrides, Gibson officially appointed him as “Special Commissioner for Central and Western Polynesia,” with the job of inquiring whether any Gilbert Islands kings wanted to affiliate with Hawaii.

  The Julia was wrecked on a Gilbert Islands reef while the captain was spying out the prospects, and the ship was a total loss; but when Special Commissioner Tripp beat his way back to Hawaii in another ship, he was quite excited about the prospects for a United Gilbert Islands nation under Hawaiian protection. The only lasting result of his mission, however, was the introduction into Hawaii of grass skirts from the Gilberts to adorn the palace hula dancers.

  Soon after sending Tripp on his mission, Gibson took the first big step toward empire on August 23, 1883, when the Hawaiian government issued, in the form of a protest to the representatives of twenty-six nations, what was really a sort of Monroe Doctrine of Oceania. It proclaimed that Hawaii as a free Polynesian state should take the lead in guiding less fortunate neighbors. Only eight nations even bothered to reply. The document had no immediate effect, except to give Gibson’s enemies a chance to ridicule the idea of his “calabash empire,” referring to the Hawaiian expression of “calabash cousin” to indicate a non-blood relationship.

  Tired of fooling around with paper measures, in 1886 Gibson decided that a likely region to begin in was the war-torn Samoan Islands, south of Hawaii, and he proposed that these islands should be taken under King Kalakaua’s protection. Accordingly, he requested a $30,000 appropriation to send a government mission to Samoa and the South Pacific to demonstrate Hawaii’s right to take the lead among Polynesian states. Opponents said it was “a policy of sentiment, show, and nonsense,” and that “it was a ridiculous farce for this one-horse kingdom to maintain consular offices in all parts of the world.” Gibson responded: “What was Rome but a one-horse state at its beginning?… The Great Powers never think of us as a one-horse state.” Using steamroller tactics, Gibson put through a final appropriation of $35,000 for the purpose, and in a gesture which he no doubt later regretted added on $100,000 for the purchase of a steamboat to overawe the other Polynesians and $50,000 for its running expenses.

  The mission, which was about to stumble blindly into the fury of Prince Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of Germany, was appointed on December 22, 1886. Its totally inadequate head, John Edward Bush, a Caucasian-Hawaiian, was created “Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the King of Tonga and High Commissioner to the Sovereign Chiefs and Peoples of Polynesia.” He was accompanied by his wife; his daughter; some servants, at least one of whom could play a guitar; Henry Poor as secretary; and the artist Joseph D. Strong, husband of Robert Louis Stevenson’s stepdaughter. Strong was commissioned to paint Polynesian portraits and scenes. The group left on Christmas Day on the S. S. Zeelandia. A fancy carriage, a gift to Malietoa, the leading chief of Samoa, was unfortunately left behind on the wharf at Honolulu.

  Rarely has a mission headed so hopefully for an arena where only disaster could result. Not only was Samoa torn by internecine strife between two claimants to power, Malietoa and Tamasese, but Great Britian, the United States and Germany were also involved in the bickering, and the last, a late-comer on the imperial scene, was determined on a showdown. Samoa would be German, or there would be war. It is pitiful to contemplate John Bush’s fumbling group as it prepared to back into the German lawn mower.

  Of all the places in the Pacific to which such a mission could have been sent, Samoa was in many respects the most appropriate, for there a heady brew of intrigue, romance, assassination and adultery was provided in a rich tropical setting, of which Stevenson’s wife was to write, “Socially, Samoa was certainly not dull. Diplomats and officials, many of them accompanied by their families, rented houses in the vicinity of Apia and entertained as they would at home. I have known Apia to be convulsed by a question of precedence between two officials from the same country, who each claimed the place of honour at public functions; burning despatches on the subject were written, and their respective governments appealed to. Well has Apia been called ‘the kindergarten of diplomacy.’ ” With the arrival of the Bush party, the children in the kindergarten were going to play rough.

  On arrival in Apia, Bush began building a spacious house that would serve as a permanent Hawaiian legation. In a show of glittering splendor he decorated Malietoa, the warring chieftain whom he had decided to support, with the “Grand Cross of the Royal Order of the Star of Oceania,” a knightly order that Gibson had whipped up in imitation of St. Julian’s abortive Order of Arossi. Bush then confided to Malietoa his breath-taking design: Samoa and Hawaii would form a federation under King Kalakaua. Then Tonga and the Cook Islands would join up, followed no doubt by Tahiti, whereupon the Gilberts would be annexed outright. In celebration, Malietoa and his supporting chiefs were given their first taste of Ambassador Bush’s secret weapon: large bottles of square-face gin. The party lasted till five in the morning.

  The Treaty of Confederation between Hawaii and Samoa was actually signed by Malietoa on February 17, 1887, and Bush celebrated the occasion with another all-night party. Stevenson, who arrived in Samoa two years later, wrote in A Footnote to History that Malietoa withdrew at an early hour, but “by those that remained, all decency appears to have been forgotten; high chiefs were seen to dance; and day found the house carpeted with slumbering grandees, who must be roused, doctored with coffee, and sent home. As a first chapter in the history of Polynesian Confederation, it was hardly cheering, and Laupepe [Malietoa] remarked to one of the embassy, ‘If you have come here to teach my people to drink, I wish you had stayed away.’ ”

  Bush went ahead to establish a virtual protectorate over the naïve Samoans. He obtained the defection of one of Malietoa’s chief enemies, the father-in-law of rival Tamasese. Of this man Poor wrote that he had become “a generous admirer of our cheap gin and has even offered me his virgin daughter.” Moreover, Tamasese’s position was greatly weakened when his wife left him, and having “become charmed with the guitar music and songs” of one of Bush’s Hawaiian servants, went to live with the latter as her paramour. In early March, Malietoa himself even proposed marriage to Bush’s daughter Molly, offering to make her Queen Molly of Samoa, but unfortunately for her own future, the young lady declined that honor.

  This extraordinary sequence of events infuriated the Germans, who had
already secretly decided to back Tamasese and under his chieftainship to incorporate Samoa directly into the German Empire. But for the present Captain Brandeis, in charge of the German manipulations, had no clear-cut commission from Bismarck, and so had to fight off the Bush mission as slyly as he could. He had reason to believe, however, that when a squadron of the German Imperial Navy reached Apia, things would be different.

  But Ambassador Bush also had a rather terrifying trump card up his sleeve. The Hawaiian fleet was about to appear in Samoan waters, and Bush felt certain that this redoubtable force would sway the balance of power definitely away from Germany and toward Hawaii.

  The fleet consisted of one wormy ship, the 171-ton British steamer Explorer, which Gibson had bought for $20,000. It had been launched in Scotland in 1871 and had since seen good service in the guano trade. The government got possession of this vessel on January 21, 1887, and for $14,000 more fitted her out ostensibly as a naval training ship. Gibson’s detractors hailed it as an expensive folly to “saddle the country with a toy ship for which she had as much need as a cow has for a diamond necklace.”

  The ship, whose name had been translated into Hawaiian as Kaimiloa, was armed with four muzzle-loading six-pounder saluting guns from Iolani Barracks, and two Gatling guns. Among the sixty-three-man crew it was decided to include twenty-four boys from the Oahu Reformatory School, twenty-one of whom would comprise a ship’s band to “awe the natives with martial strains.” Not much was known about the captain of the gunboat, George E. Gresley Jackson, except that he claimed to have been a British naval officer, was lately master of the reform school, and was indubitably one of the worst habitual drunkards in all Hawaii.

  After many delays, H.M.S. Kaimiloa departed from Honolulu on May 18. She had been commissioned March 28 by Gibson “for the Naval Service of the Kingdom.” Criticism arose against the use of the reform school boys and this vessel of the Hawaiian navy, which critics ironically predicted would “shortly strike terror into the hearts of the natives, and teach the pigmy national ships of France, Germany, and Great Britain, in those waters, a necessary lesson.”

  Even before sailing, a disturbance on board upset discipline, and led to the dismissal of three officers. A marine officer was drinking with some sailors; he refused to return to his cabin, and called his marines into action to aid him. This was the first of the Kaimiloa mutinies.

  That the Kaimiloa ever reached Apia to challenge Germany’s imperial might was a miracle, for during the first eleven days at sea Captain Jackson hid out in his cabin, blind drunk. None of the other officers knew anything about navigation, but they kept the ship in what they thought to be a southerly direction, so that when their captain finally staggered out to shoot the sun he found that his loyal crew had wasted not more than a week. A journal entry runs: “The captain took sights occasionally but never attempted to work out his longitude.”

  By some miracle, he and his crew sighted Apia on June 15, 1887, after a sickly twenty-nine-day passage. The German gunboat Adler was found at the anchorage and signaled inquiry as to the Hawaiian ship’s identity, but the Kaimiloa, unaware of naval courtesies, drove gaily onward until checked by a shot across her bows.

  The Kaimiloa’s first function was the presentation to Malietoa of a gorgeous uniform, which he wore when inspecting the ship, where a twenty-one-gun salute was offered. To everyone’s astonishment, the guns fired.

  Then came intrigue of the highest order. The German corvette Adler, which had been met in the harbor, was ordered to maintain constant vigil upon the intruding Hawaiian gunboat until the German squadron, which was on its way, had time to arrive and take command of the situation. A game of hide-and-seek developed when Ambassador Bush dispatched his warship to the neighboring island of Tutuila, where it was trailed by the suspicious Adler. But halfway to Pago Pago the Kaimiloa suddenly hove to and sent up a distress signal. Here was a chance for the Germans to board and inspect the Hawaiian menace!

  But what the Kaimiloa wanted was a doctor. Captain Jackson, after having lived exclusively on gin for weeks, had finally eaten some food and it had given him galloping dysentery. Accordingly, a German medical officer, commissioned on the spot to spy out Hawaii’s intentions, was rowed over to the wallowing Kaimiloa, where Captain Jackson was found doubled up in his bunk. For the remainder of the cruise the German officer more or less took charge.

  Early in July, the second mutiny took place on board the Kaimiloa. A gunner, returning drunk, decided to rush the magazine and blow up the ship, just for the hell of it. Since trouble seemed inevitable, three officers promptly went ashore and presented their resignations to Captain Jackson, who was drinking gin, as usual. Ambassador Bush convinced them it was their duty to stay in service and quell the mutiny. But to safeguard his navy, he took the precaution of sending Poor and Jackson on board to see what they could do to save the Kaimiloa. Apparently the peacemakers got rough handling; according to Stevenson, “for a great part of the night she was in the hands of mutineers, and the secretary lay bound upon the deck.”

  After Poor had been chained for three hours and it seemed that the ship might actually be blown up, the Germans intervened. The Adler hove alongside and restored order. Her captain warned that if the uprising did not end, he would have to take over the rebellious ship and sail it back to Honolulu with the mutineers in irons. Where Poor and Jackson had failed, the Germans succeeded, and finally quelled the disturbance on the vessel sent to overawe European gunboats in Samoan waters.

  Later Bush took the Kaimiloa on a cruise to the large island of Savaii to impress the outlying chiefs. He used up seven cases of gin, and the only result, according to one observer, was “to gratify the several chiefs visited by a sight of the ship, and by having the band sent ashore to entertain the people.”

  Now the Bush mission began to experience those heartaches which at times overtake even the best-planned operations. It was discovered that the ambassador had built his imposing legation on the wrong piece of ground and that it no longer belonged to him. Consequently a protracted lawsuit was initiated which annoyed him greatly. Then an enemy secretly reported to Gibson in Hawaii that Bush was “the most dissipated man who has held a high position at this place for many years. His associates here are mostly of the lowest kind of half-castes and whites.” Later Bush found that the instigator of this canard was his own secretary, Poor, but in a dispatch that must be unique in diplomatic history, he explained everything away by pointing out that Poor was living with Bush’s daughter Molly and had got her pregnant and was thus somewhat irritated with her father, the ambassador.

  As if the troubles ashore were not enough, the Kaimiloa now produced its third mutiny, for on July 22 the marines refused to load coal without being paid a bonus. Secretary Poor later called the vessel “a disgrace to her flag.… There was a state of continuous insubordination on the ship and utter disregard of all order and discipline. With a few exceptions the marines and white officers behaved badly, the marines continually breaking liberty by swimming ashore and disturbing the town with their drunken conduct.” In fact, impartial observers reported that, if one took into consideration the behavior of the captain, the officers and the marines, the only people aboard the Kaimiloa who behaved even reasonably decently were the reform school boys; but this was probably due to the fact that early in the visit to Samoa all the troublesome boys deserted the ship and were never heard of again.

  Ambassador Bush’s cup of trouble was brimming, for he found that his underlings had spent far more money than he could supply, and Apia merchants refused to do business on credit. The Germans were becoming stronger and more arrogant, and it seemed only a matter of time until Hawaii’s friend, Malietoa, would be thrown out of power. Consequently it was a gloomy delegation that Bush led to say farewell to Chief Malietoa on the last night ashore; but the evening was made lively by Captain Jackson, who fell into a violent attack of delirium tremens.

  That was enough. In disgust Ambassador Bush ordered the capta
in to take his warship back to Honolulu, and that, presumably, was the last of the Kaimiloa. Henry Poor wrote in his diary on August 8, “It was with a feeling of intense relief that I watched her disappear from sight.”

  But a few days later when Bush and his party, who had borrowed and scraped up enough money to pay their steamer fares back to Honolulu, reached Pago Pago on the way home, they found the Kaimiloa snugly berthed in that majestic anchorage. The enlisted men, fearing that they might have inadequate food for the trip north if their captain got drunk again and lost the way, were bartering all the ship’s muskets for pigs, while Captain Jackson, also dubious about his own comforts on what might turn out to be a long voyage, was hocking the ship’s silverware for bananas and other food.

  In later years, when the Kaimiloa—which had once defied simultaneously the three greatest nations of the earth—was an inglorious hulk rotting on the Honolulu water front, Captain George E. Gresley Jackson turned up in various American ports. He dressed like an admiral and accorded himself that title. He was utterly contemptuous of the Hawaiians as sailors. “They were,” he snorted bitterly, “far too fond of gin.”

  Thus ended Walter Murray Gibson’s boyhood dream of a South Seas empire. The recall of the Bush mission and the abandonment of “gin diplomacy” occurred just in time, for Otto von Bismarck had endured enough. Around the end of July the Iron Chancellor confided to an associate: “We should not have put up with insolence of the Hawaiians any longer; if a German squadron were at anchor before Samoa, it could sail to Hawaii, and King Kalakaua could be told that, unless he desisted from his insolent intrigues in Samoa, we should shoot his legs in two, despite his American protection.”