Hawaii

by James Michener

  One of his own sons was first to speak, saying, "If God had wanted the water to fall on these dry lands, He would have ordered it, and any action contrary to God's wish seems to me a reflection on His infinite wisdom."

  Dr. Whipple looked at his son and replied, "I can only cite you the parable of the talents. God never wants potential gifts to lie idle."

  One of the Janders boys, a profound conservative, argued: "J & W is overextended. There's no money for chancy adventures."

  "A good firm is always overextended," Whipple replied, but seeing that the younger men would surely vote against his using J & W funds, he quickly added, "I don't want you to put up any of your own money, but I'm surely going to gamble all of mine. All I want from you is lease rights to your worthless land on the dry side."

  When he had control of six thousand acres of barren soil, he hired two hundred men and many teams of mules and with his own money launched the venture that was to transform his part of Oahu from a desert into a lush, succulent sugar plantation. With shovels and mule-drawn sledges, he dug out an irrigation ditch eleven miles long, maintaining a constant fall which swept the water down from high mountainsides and onto the arid cactus lands. When his ditch faced some deep valley that could not be avoided, he channeled his water into a narrow mouth and poured it into a large pipe which dropped down to the valley floor and climbed back up to the required elevation on the other side, where it emptied out into the continuation of the ditch. Water, seeking its former level, rushed down the pipe and surged back up the other side without requiring pumps.

  When the ditch was finished and its effect upon the Whipple fortunes evident, he convened the J & W men and showed them the map of Oahu, with arable areas marked in green. "We're bringing water about as far as we can in ditches. Yet look at this map. We're using less than twenty per cent of our potential land. Ninety per cent of our rainfall still runs back into the ocean. Gentlemen, long after I'm dead somebody will think of a way to pierce these mountains and bring that water over to this side, where it's needed. I beg of you," the white-haired scientist pleaded, "when the project becomes feasible, and sooner or later it must, don't hesitate. Pool your funds. Go into debt if necessary. Because the man who controls that water will control Hawaii."

  One of the more conservative Janderses, who chafed at working under Whipple, whispered, "They always get dotty in their old age." And the firm became so preoccupied with making money from John Whipple's ditches that they quite forgot his vision of a tunnel through the heart of the mountains.

  WHILE NYUK TSIN and her husband were suffering reversals in the manufacture of poi, they observed that difficulties were also visiting their favorite guest. Captain Rafer Hoxworth, when he dined at the Whipples, showed in his face the strain that had overtaken him with the illness of his gracious wife, Noelani, the tall and stately Hawaiian lady whose charm was so much appreciated by the Chinese. In 1869 it became apparent to Nyuk Tsin, as she served the big dinners, that Mrs. Hoxworth needed medical care, and as the year progressed, the tall Hawaiian woman grew steadily less able to sit through a long dinner without showing signs of exhaustion, and Nyuk Tsin grieved for her.

  The haoles, as Caucasians were called in the islands, were not able to understand what had brought their beloved friend so close to death, but the kanakas, as the Hawaiians were known, understood. Of their declining sister they said, "Ho'olana i ka wai ke ola.--Her life floats upon the water." But if Noelani herself was aware of this sentence, she betrayed her reactions to no one. She gave the appearance of a placid, pleased Hawaiian woman, graceful in motion and relaxed in countenance. She seemed like a secure brown rock facing the sea and richly clothed in sunlight; about her whispered the waves of her husband's affection and that of her friends.

  Like a true alii, Noelani slept a good deal during the day in order to conserve her strength, but as evening approached she came alive, and when her two-horse carriage with its imported English coachman drove up to the big Hoxworth house on Beretania Street she displayed all the excitement of a child. Stepping grandly into the carriage she commanded the Englishman: "You may take me to the Whipples. But hurry." When she arrived she was a figure of striking beauty. Already tall, she accentuated the fact by wearing high tortoise-shell combs in her silvery white, piled-up hair and a dress with a train of at least three feet which trailed as she entered. In the middle of this train was sewn a loop which could be passed over the fingers of her left hand, the kanaka loop it was called, and guests enjoyed watching how deftly Noelani could kick her train with her right foot, catching the kanaka loop with her left hand. Her dresses were made of stiff brocade edged with delicate Brussels lace. She wore jade beads that blended marvelously with her dark skin, jade rings and jade bracelets, all purchased in Peking. Near her heart she wore a thin gold watch from Geneva, pinned into place by a jeweled butterfly from Paris, while in her right hand she customarily carried a Cantonese fan made of feathers and pale ivory. Over all, she wore her Shanghai stole, four feet wide, embroidered in red roses that stood off from the fabric, and edged with a two-foot fringe of Peking knots. Captain Hoxworth, who loved buying her gifts, once said, "A smaller woman would be dwarfed by such an outfit, but Noelani's always been a giant." When she entered a room, her dark eyes flashing, she was a very noble lady, the symbol of a valiant race. And she was dying.

  She loved her clothes and parties and having her children about her, for if an evening passed when less than a dozen friends were in attendance, she felt lonely, as if in her last days her Hawaiian friends had deserted her. Then she would tell her husband, "Rafer, drive down to Auntie Mele's and see if there's anyone having a talk." And if there was, the entire group would be brought up to the Hoxworths' to visit with Noelani, who found breathing increasingly difficult.

  Her children had married well, and she found great delight in her fourteen grandchildren. Malama, her oldest daughter; had of course married brilliant Micah Hale. Bromley and Jerusha had each married one of the Whipple children, while Iliki had married a Janders, so that when the Hoxworths were assembled, most of the great island families were represented, and there was much talk of Lahaina in the good old days. In these autumnal hours Noelani enjoyed most her discussions with Micah Hale, who now played such an important role in Hawaii, for he was not only head of H & H, he was also a nobleman with a seat in the upper house of the legislature, a member of the Privy Council, and the administrator of the Department of Interior. Often Noelani reminded him: "I was recalling our first conversation, Micah, on that Sunday in San Francisco, when you and I were both so certain that America would absorb our islands. Well, it hasn't happened yet, nor will it in my lifetime. Kamahameha V will not sell one foot of land to the United States."

  "We will unite," her bearded son-in-law assured her. "I am more positive than ever, Noelani, that our destiny will be achieved shortly."

  "You've been telling me that for twenty years and look what's happened. Your country has been torn apart by civil war, and mine has drifted happily along, just as it always was."

  "Do not believe it, Noelani," Micah reproved, stroking his copious beard as if he were addressing a legislature. "Each wave that reaches the shores of these islands brings new evidence that we will shortly be one land. I expect it to happen within ten years."

  "Why are you so sure?" Noelani pressed.

  "For one simple reason. America will need our sugar. In order to safeguard the supply, she will have to rake over the islands."

  "Are you working for that purpose, Micah?" the elderly woman asked.

  "Indeed, as are all men of good sense."

  "Does the king know this?"

  "He appreciates the problem better than I do. He prays that Hawaii will remain independent, but if it cannot, he prefers that the United States absorb the islands."

  "I'm glad I shall not live to see it," Noelani said wearily as the Chinese servants began bringing in the food.

  When the Hoxworths dined with the Whipples the thing that impressed Nyuk
Tsin was the extraordinary gentleness with which Captain Rafer cared for his wife. Throughout the Chinese community he was the favorite haole, for although he had abused the coolies on their voyage to Hawaii, and cursed them for leaving the plantations, in other respects he had proved a just friend. The man whose face he had kicked in got a good job, and the one whose ankle was broken when he was pitched into the hold was given money to import a wife into the islands. Whenever an H & H ship arrived with cargo of special food for the Chinese, Captain Hoxworth was there to supervise the unloading, for he loved the smell of faraway places, and he was a familiar visitor to both the Punti and the Hakka stores. He slapped women on the backside and joked with men. If he happened to be carrying a bottle of whiskey, which he often was, he would knock off the cork, take a swig, wipe the bottle with his wrist, pass it to the Chinese, and then take another swig when it returned to him. He had a free and easy way that the Chinese appreciated and a capacity for suddenly imposing his will upon them which they respected. In private he railed against the Chinese peril; in public he treated them decently.

  It was his obvious love for his Hawaiian wife which impressed them most, and the tall, rugged old captain with his white sideburns never looked more appealing than when he was gently helping Noelani into her carriage for a visit to some friend's for dinner. At such times he hurried before her to the carriage carrying her cashmere blanket, which he fixed on the rear seat. Then he waited and held out his strong right arm for her to lean on as she climbed painfully into the conveyance. Next he tucked the blanket about her feet and then adjusted her stole over her shoulders. Then he walked sedately in front of the horses--never around the rear of the carriage--and patted them on the flanks and on the noses. Then he came back to the rear door of the carriage and climbed in beside his tall Hawaiian wife. Giving his English driver a signal, he would sit back with her and nod to the evening strollers while his horses pranced through the dusty streets. Apart from the king, Captain Hoxworth was the most dignified and memorable man in Hawaii, and he knew it.

  November nights can be cold in Hawaii, for then the days are short and the sun is low in the heavens, and as November, 1869, progressed, it became obvious to all that Noelani must soon be confined permanently to bed in her last lingering illness, for Dr. Whipple said, "I can't find what's wrong, but obviously she ought to stop going out so much." To this, Captain Hoxworth replied, "Noelani's not an ordinary woman. She is the Alii Nui of these islands and she will continue to ride with me as long as her strength permits, for she thinks it proper to move about among her people."

  The nights grew colder and Captain Hoxworth wrapped his wife in more shawls. Once, when she seemed extremely weak and bordering on collapse, he asked her, "Would you prefer, my dear, to stay at home this night?"

  "No," she said. "Why should I?"

  So he helped her into the carriage and they drove not directly down Beretania but by way of King Street and Nuuanu and he pointed out various sights to her, as if she were a tourist seeing Honolulu for the first time. "That's where we're building the new H & H receiving warehouses," he explained, "and I propose buying land here for our office building. Over there's where the Chinese are opening a store for vegetables and meat."

  He kept his sensitive finger on the pulse of Honolulu as it throbbed toward new life, but at the same time he kept close to his wife as she spent her last energies. At dinner that night, at the Hewletts', he altered the seating arrangements so that he could stay near her, and when she faltered he said calmly, "This may be the last time Lady Noelani will dine with friends." But she had rallied, and as December came she told her husband that she enjoyed more than anything else her evening drives with him, so on the eighth night in December he had the carriage roll up to take her to the Whipples' for dinner, but when Nyuk Tsin saw her enter the dining room, like a tall, shrunken brown ghost, she gasped.

  At dinner that evening Captain Hoxworth shocked everyone but Noelani by saying a terrible thing: "When Noelani's mother, the great Alii Nui of Maui lay dying, her husband used to creep in to see her on his hands and knees, bringing her maile from the hills. I think it a shame and lacking in dignity to see a sweet Hawaiian lady with no maile chains about her, so I have asked some of my men to fetch us maile from the hills, and I should like to bring it to my Alii Nui."

  He went to the door and whistled loudly for his coachman, and the Englishman ran up with maile chains and Captain Hoxworth placed the fragrant vines about his wife's shoulders. Then he took a chair far from her and said slowly, "The first time I saw Noelani must have been in 1820, when she was a girl. And I saw her on a surfboard, standing up with not a stitch of clothes on, riding toward the shore like a goddess. And do you know when I saw her next? In 1833. I walked out to her home, knocked on the door, and the first words I ever said to her were, 'Noelani, I've come to find me a wife.' And do you know what her first words to me were? 'Captain Hoxworth, I will go with you to the ship.' So we went aboard the Carthaginian, and she never left." He smiled at his wife and said, "Looking at the way people get engaged and married today, I'd say they had very little romance in their bones." He winked at her and then looked at the guests.

  "To you young men who aren't married, I've only one bit of advice. Hang around the shore till you see a beautiful Hawaiian girl surfing in, completely naked. Marry that one, and you'll never regret it."

  He took the sick woman home that night, and she never appeared on the streets of Honolulu again. Her death was a strange passing, a mysterious disappearance. No doctor could explain why she was dying, but it was obvious that she intended to do so. Like the poetic race of which she was the noblest part, she drifted casually away, and in late December she announced: "I will die in early January." The sad news spread through the Hawaiian community, so that all during the festivities of that season big women appeared at the Hoxworth door, barefooted and with flowers, explaining: "We have come to grieve with our sister." For hours they would sit about her bed, saying nothing, and at dusk, like ponderous, doomed creatures, they would slip away, leaving their flowers behind. Before Noelani died she summoned her son-in-law, dark-bearded Micah Hale of the Privy Council, and she directed him: "Look after Hawaii, Micah. Give the king good advice."

  "Each time, before I counsel with him, I pray that God will direct me in the right way," he assured her.

  "I don't want you merely to be pious," she said. "I want you to be right."

  "It is only through prayer that I can discern the right," he countered.

  "Are you as determined as ever to take Hawaii into the Union?" she asked.

  "I will see it happen," he insisted.

  Noelani began to weep and said, "It will be a sad day for the Hawaiians. On your day of triumph, Micah, be gentle and understanding with your wife. Malama will support you, of course, but on the day you exterminate the Hawaiian kingdom, she will also hate you."

  Austere Micah Hale wanted to be lenient at this moment, the last during which he would see his powerful mother-in-law, but like a prophet from the Old Testament he was forced to add, "In the affairs of nations there is a destiny, Noelani, and it cannot be avoided."

  She replied, "In the affairs of races there is a destiny, too, and ours has not been a happy one." He bowed and started to leave, but she called him to her bedside and said, "I should like to pray with you, Micah." He kneeled and she intoned: "God, survey the actions of this headstrong young man with the beard. Inspire him with gentleness as well as rectitude."

  At her funeral in the old Makiki burial grounds Captain Hoxworth caused excitement by refusing to leave her grave. He remained there for several hours, not weeping or carrying on, but standing beside the grave and looking down across Honolulu toward the ships and out to Diamond Head. At Waikiki the surf was rolling in, and he could see the little figures of men riding upon the waves, and the skies were blue with cloud racks piled upon the horizon, and below lay the sea, the restless, turbulent sea upon which his life had been led.

  "How wonderfu
l it's been," he thought. "I wouldn't change a day of it. Even now, somewhere out there, the sperm whales are breeding, and I'm part of them. Go to it, whales! Soon enough somebody like me'll come along and stick a harpoon in you. Have fun while you can!"

  Captain Hoxworth had never taken great pleasure in his children, allowing them to develop as they would, but now with Noelani gone he suddenly transformed himself into the benevolent old head of the family, and it became his habit to convene his son and his three daughters with their families and to sit benignly at the head of his table, dispensing charm and affection. He spoke of the old days in the South Pacific and of his adventures in China. It was his opinion that a man had to wait until he was dead to know the meaning of God, unless he happened to have known the sea in his youth.

  "To sail before the mast when you're thirteen, to know the abuse of wind and foul captains, to find the spiritual solace that arises from the fo'c's'l, arid then to drive yourself inch by inch to the captaincy and then the ownership of the vessel, these are the ultimate tests of a man. It's in such contests with fate that a man comes to know exactly how he stands with God. And don't you forget it, you young men who came to your positions the easy way," and he looked sharply at his son Bromley and his sons-in-law: Janders, Whipple, Hale.

  He had already spotted Micah as by far the ablest of the group, and at his family dinners, to which the younger men willingly came, he talked more and more to Micah. "Any enterprise of moment is like commanding a ship, Micah. There are plots against the captain, and he's got to put them down ruthlessly. You may not like to kick a man in the face, I never did, but it may be the only way you can maintain control of your ship. And that's what's important. Control."

  It was his opinion that the next decade would produce a series of fundamental crises which would determine the future of Hawaii, and, more important, the future of the powerful firms that sought to control the business enterprise of Hawaii. "Disregard the dear, fat, old kings. They are of no consequence whatever and should be kept around to amuse the people. The important thing is Hoxworth & Hale and Janders & Whipple and Hewlett's. Keep them on the right track, and the kings'll have to follow suit."