surrounded himself with an obsequious royal Cabinet of American and other foreigners, and he dictated his measures to them and, through them, to his Parliament; and the latter institution opposed them respectfully, not to say apologetically, and passed them. This is but a sad kind of royal “figure-head.” He was not a fool. He was a wise sovereign; he had seen something of the world; he was educated and accomplished, and he tried hard to do well by his people, and succeeded.
While he was so unpretentious that he sometimes fished from a public pier, Kamehameha also insisted on a property requirement to exercise the franchise, either a hundred dollars of property or an annual income of at least seventy-five dollars, because when everyone cast a ballot “missionaries used to vote their flocks for a certain man, & then sit at home & control him.” The king insisted that “he would not have beggars voting industrious people’s money away.” In short, Kamehameha revoked “a good deal of power which his predecessors had surrendered to the people” and, “if my opinion were asked, I would say he did a wise thing.”12
Sam was no less impressed by the king’s distant cousin Prince William Charles Lunalilo, who possessed “the highest blood in the kingdom,” perhaps “higher than the King himself,” and was arguably the legitimate monarch. “Prince Bill,” as he was called, “more in affection than otherwise,” was “perhaps the only man who never feared” the king and “perhaps the only man who ever ventured to speak his whole mind about the King, in Parliament and on the hustings.” At the age of thirty-five the prince was not only a “staunch American sympathizer” but a “descendant of eleven generations of sceptered savages—a splendid fellow, with talent, genius, education, gentlemanly manners, generous instincts, and an intellect that shines as radiantly through floods of whisky as if that fluid but fed a calcium light in his head. All people in the islands know” that Prince William “stands next the throne.” He was so popular, Sam observed, “that if the kingship were put to a popular vote he would ‘walk over the track.’” Upon the death of Kamehameha in December 1872, William was selected king but died in February 1874 after a reign of only thirteen months.13
Yet all was not sweetness and light on the islands. Church and state were not separated constitutionally, as in the United States, yet each institution was divided between those whose loyalties were to America and those who favored the British. Kamehameha IV had been educated in royal schools and had imported the Anglican Church “and an English bishop, and bossed the works himself,” according to Sam. The faux church “was only a pinchbeck thing, an imitation, a bauble, an empty show. It had no power, no value for a king. It could not harry or burn or slay. . . . It was an Established Church without an Establishment; all the people were Dissenters.” While the king “was frequently on hand in the royal pew in the Royal Hawaiian Reformed Catholic Church, on Sundays,” even he found no solace in its teachings. Whenever he got into trouble “he did not fly to the cross for help—he flew to the heathen gods of his ancestors.” In his journal, Sam was even more blunt: “King is a heathen—an old sorceress has him under her thumb—picks out the fish he may eat—tells him in what house he may sleep, &c. Accompanies him in all his excursions. He was educated in a Christian school but has never submitted himself to Christianity—discovered his predilection for heathenism in youth.”14
In mid-April Sam embarked for Maui aboard an interisland schooner, planning to stay a week on the island but remaining for five. He traveled through “the blossomy gorge called the Iao Valley,” which he celebrated thirty-four years later in his sketch “My Platonic Sweetheart,” and “clattered about among the plantations”—particularly James Makee’s Rose Ranch, one of the largest sugar plantations on the islands with a thousand acres under cultivation. Located on the slopes of the extinct volcano Haleakala some two to three thousand feet above sea level, Makee’s plantation produced an average of some three tons of cane per acre and his mill processed between four and five tons of sugar daily. Unlike the silver mills of Nevada, moreover, there were no “tailings”: the refuse from the sugar mills was fed to hogs, another source of profit to the plantation. One season Makee harvested fifty tons of cane from seven acres of volcanic soil, though it had required three years to mature because “few plantations are stuck up in the air like that.” A loyalist during the Civil War with an annual income of about sixty thousand dollars, Makee had contributed generously to the Union cause by shipping hundreds of barrels of molasses to San Francisco to be sold at a price of twenty-five to thirty cents per gallon, the proceeds to benefit the U.S. Sanitary Fund. At the time of his visit to the Makee plantation, Sam rhapsodized about the fertility of the region:
A land which produces six, eight, ten, twelve, yea, even thirteen thousand pounds of sugar to the acre on unmanured soil! There are precious few acres of unmanured ground in Louisiana—none at all, perhaps—which will yield two thousand five hundred pounds of sugar; there is not an unmanured acre under cultivation in the Sandwich Islands which yields less. This country is the king of the sugar world, as far as astonishing productiveness is concerned.
Makee was also a gracious host, and his ranch featured a billiard room, tennis court, and bowling alley. Sam probably carried with him a letter of introduction from his friend Charley Stoddard, whose sister Sara was married to Parker Makee, James’s son. “I had a pleasant time of it” at the ranch, Sam reported to his mother and sister, in part because there were “two pretty & accomplished girl’s [sic] in the family.” While in the vicinity he climbed to the crater of the volcano—the vast “vacant stomach of Haleakala”—to enjoy “the sublimest spectacle I ever witnessed.” He whiled away several days at the Wailuku Plantation in early May, when he admitted to his old friend Will Bowen that he doubted he could complete his assignment for the Union satisfactorily. “I cannot go all over the eight inhabited islands of the group in less than five months & do credit to myself & them,” he explained. He had been in Hawaii for two months “& yet have only ‘done’ the island of Oahu & part of this island of Maui, & it is going to take me two weeks more to finish this one & at least a month to ‘do’ the island of Hawaii & the great volcanoes.” A few days later he wrote Mollie that “few such months” as the one he spent on Maui “come in a lifetime.” He had not written anything for publication in six weeks, but he had “never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place good-bye so regretfully. . . . I had a jolly time” and “I would not have fooled away any of it writing [travel correspondence] under any consideration whatever.” On May 22 he sailed from the Port of Lahaina, mentioned in passing in chapter 76 of Roughing It, aboard the schooner Ka Moi to return to Honolulu.15
At least on the surface, Sam expressed profound ambivalence on the subject of missionaries. On the one hand, he could be as critical of them as Herman Melville in Typee and Omoo. He thought that the Anglican and French Catholic missionaries especially had “braved a thousand privations” to make the native islanders “permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there” and “what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for a pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal summer.” He expressed sarcastic regret for “the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell!” He was contemptuous of “the Royal Hawaiian Church, otherwise the ‘Reformed Catholic Church,’ a sort of nondescript wildcat religion imported here from England.” He vilified yet another authority figure, the Episcopalian clergyman Thomas N. Staley, Lord Bishop of Honolulu, who was “shipped over here with a fully equipped ‘Established Church’ in his pocket.” Staley was “a weak, trivial minded man” appointed for no good reason, in Sam’s opinion, “to a position of rank and power,” a bishop composed “of very inferior material” compared to the clergymen he had known in Virginia City and San Francisco. Sam believed that Staley had “shown the temerity of an incautious, inexperienced and
immature judgment in rushing in here fresh from the heart and home of a high English civilization and throwing down the gauntlet of defiance before a band of stern, tenacious, unyielding, tireless, industrious, devoted old Puritan knights who have seen forty years of missionary service.”16
The comment is telling. Despite Sam’s apparently mixed feelings about missionaries in Hawaii, he was in fact far more critical of French Catholic and Anglican proselytizers like Staley, whom he considered colonizers, than American missionaries like Sam Damon who were descended from the “old Puritan knights” and seemed benign if not benevolent agents of civilization. The difference between the two groups, as he represented them in his writing, was stark and startling—a distinction that clarifies his seeming ambivalence about efforts to evangelize the natives. “Americans [missionaries] have given religion, freedom, education, written language & Bible,” he noted in his journal, whereas “England & France have given insults.”17
The distinction is crucial: The churches and missionary societies in Hawaii were riven between those loyal to U.S. and European interests. On one hand, Sam credited the American missionaries with many good works. They had, as he noted in his journal, “made honest men out of the nation of thieves: Instituted marriage; Created homes; Lifted women to same rights & privileges enjoyed elsewhere. Abolished infanticide.” He reiterated the point in his Union letters: “the missionaries have made a better people of this race than they formerly were.” While on Maui he boarded with the American missionaries Richard and Clarissa Armstrong and afterward asserted in the Union that, to their credit, the Armstrongs and other American missionaries like them had clothed the natives,
educated them, broken up the tyrannous authority of their chiefs, and given them freedom and the right to enjoy whatever the labor of their hand and brains produces, with equal laws for all and punishment for all alike who transgress them. The contrast is so strong—the wonderful benefit conferred upon this people by the missionaries is so prominent, so palpable and so unquestionable, that the frankest compliment I can pay them, and the best, is simply to point to the condition of the Sandwich Islanders of Captain Cook’s time, and their condition today. Their work speaks for itself.18
The compliments he paid the American Christians did not pass unnoticed. The secretary of the Hawaiian Evangelical Association, an American ecclesiastical organization, praised him, albeit a bit equivocally, as “a racy but low writer who . . . excited a good deal of interest in these islands in the minds of a class seldom reached.” Even six years later, upon the death of Kamehameha V, Sam extolled in the New York Tribune the efforts of the American missionaries in Hawaii who had learned the native language,
translated the Bible and other books into it, established schools, and even very complete colleges, and taught the whole nation to read and write; the princes and nobles acquired collegiate educations, and became familiar with half a dozen dead and living languages. Then, some twenty years later, the missionaries framed a constitution which became the law of the land. It lifted woman up to a level with her lord; it placed the tenantless at the mercy of his landlord; it established a just and equable system of taxation.
On the other hand, according to Sam, Bishop Staley often claimed “that the natives of these islands are morally and religiously in a worse condition to-day than they were before the American missionaries ever came here.” Sam rebutted the allegation: “Now that is not true—and in that respect the statement bears a very strong family likeness to many other of the Bishop’s remarks about our missionaries. . . . I will not go into an argument to prove that the natives have been improved by missionary labor—because facts are stronger than argument.” On the contrary, the typical British missionary was a “preacher figure of insincerity & hypocrisy.” Sam became a social pariah among the Brits for his class inferiority, moreover. “I never was cheerfully and cordially received but at 3 or 4 places on the islands,” he allowed, because “I think they must have heard of me before.”19
Despite the presence of the missionary societies and their civilizing ways, Sam regarded “the rainbow islands” for the rest of his days as a type of prelapsarian paradise. In 1881 he averred that he had “always longed for” the “privilege of living forever away up on one of those mountains in the Sandwich Islands overlooking the sea.” As late as 1889 he reminisced about the islands in a speech at Delmonico’s: “For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun, the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear.” Like Adam and Eve before the Fall, the entire native population “used to go naked, but the missionaries broke that up; in the towns the men wear clothing now, and in the country a plug hat and a breech-clout; or if they have company they put on a shirt collar and a vest. Nothing but religion and education could have wrought these admirable changes.” For all the attention Sam attracted by wearing white linen suits late in life, he expressed envy for a fellow who “dressed the way I would like to dress—dressed in the best way to dress. He was a Sandwich Islander, and he wore—let me see, it was a special occasion—a pair of spectacles.” The “human skin,” he added, “is the best thing in that line I have ever struck.” On their part, the women wore “a single loose calico gown that falls without a break from neck to heels.” The sarong worn by Hawaiian women, he elsewhere protested, “fits like a circus tent fits the tent pole.” In the rural districts of the islands he repeatedly stumbled across groups of young native women skinny-dipping in the surf “and exhibiting no very intemperate zeal in the matter of hiding their nakedness.” At least once, or so he claimed, he tried to join them, like a boy among boys at his childhood swimming hole on Bear Creek. On the Big Island in June, he came across “a party of native girls who were bathing” in the surf—such “creatures” spent “about half their time” in the buff, he conjectured—who “scampered out” when he approached “with a modesty which was not altogether genuine, I suspect, and ran, seizing their clothes as they went.” At Kealakekua Bay in July, he again observed
a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing in the sea, and went down to look at them. But with a prudery which seems to be characteristic of that sex everywhere, they all plunged in with a lying scream, and when they rose to the surface they only just poked their heads out and showed no disposition to proceed any further in the same direction. I was naturally irritated by such conduct, and therefore I piled their clothes up on a bowlder in the edge of the sea and sat down on them and kept the wenches in the water until they were pretty well used up. I had them in the door, as the missionaries say. I was comfortable, and I just let them beg. I thought I could freeze them out, may be, but it was impracticable. I finally gave it up and went away, hoping that the rebuke I had given them would not be lost upon them.
Paradoxically, Sam also judged the native women against ethnocentric, even bourgeois, standards of monogamy and modesty and found them wanting on both counts. “In the old times” before the missionaries, he noted, “there was absolutely no bar to the commerce of the sexes. To refuse the solicitations of a stranger was regarded as a contemptible thing for a girl or a woman to do.” Or as he would assert in Roughing It, “All this ameliorating cultivation has at last built up in the native women a profound respect for chastity—in other people.” As a measure of native hospitality, he reported, to “the wayfarer who visits them they freely offer their houses, food, beds, and often their wives and daughters.” The men “will have horses & saddles, & the women will fornicate—2 strong characteristics of this people.”20
His newfound respectability was especially marked in his comments about the “demoralizing” and “lascivious hula,” the “dance that was wont to set the passions of men ablaze in the old heathen days.” Sam compared it in his journal to “copulation in public.” His friend Sam Damon was one of the missionaries who had petitioned the Hawaii government in 1858 to ban the dance. It was afterward “forbidden to be performed, save at night,” privately behind closed doors, in the presence “of few spectators, and only by permis
sion duly procured from the authorities” upon payment of ten dollars for a license. That is, as James Caron notes, Sam associated hula with sex rather than as a form of political or cultural expression.21
Sam was untroubled, however, by the consumption of poi, a staple of the native diet, made from fermented taro root and sold in the local markets. It resembled “common flour paste” but “nothing is more nutritious,” he remarked. Served in communal bowls crafted from gourds, poi would reputedly “rejuvenate a man who is used up and his vitality almost annihilated by hard drinking” and “restore health after all medicines have failed.” As he wrote the Union, “If a Kanaka who has starved two days gets hold of a dollar he will spend it for poi, and then bring in his friends to help him devour it.” Poi also was an “all-powerful agent that protects the lover of whisky. Whoever eats it habitually may imbibe habitually without serious harm.” Of course, the native drink awa, made from another type of fermented root, was another story: “fearful in its effects” and more intoxicating than whiskey, it was “so terrific that mere whisky is foolishness to it. It turns a man’s skin to white fish-scales that are so tough a dog might bite him, and he would not know it till he read about it in the papers.”22
Back in Honolulu on May 23, Sam for the first time attended a session of the Hawaiian Parliament, composed of “half a dozen white men and some thirty or forty natives,” including nobles and royal ministers. “The mental caliber of the Legislative Assembly,” he observed,
The Life of Mark Twain Page 49