As a commodity, Hawaiian salt was alienated from the ʻāina and from the Hawaiian labor that extracted it. It was buyable, sellable, exchangeable. Its value was determined, in part, by the cost of its production but also by the ups and downs of Hawaiʻi’s unprecedented relationship to a global capitalist economy. In all these ways, the story of salt prefigures the story of sandalwood. Salt provided eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Hawaiians with some sense of what it might feel like to link their labor and environment to the supplies and demands of a global marketplace. Indeed, demand for Hawaiian salt was dependent on the success of sea otter harvests along North American shores and on the consumption patterns of Chinese fur wearers in northern China. The triangular nature of this trade prefigured the triangular nature of sandalwood production, distribution, and consumption. Salt, also like sandalwood, was a source of economic power for the Hawaiian ruling class. By 1802, John Turnbull, visiting Hawaiʻi, noted that salt was becoming scarce and expensive. “The natives,” having recognized the advantages of this scarcity, “learned to affix a proper value to the productions of their country.”13
Much of Hawaiʻi’s salt exports came from one site on Oʻahu, a place about four miles west of Honolulu Harbor that the haole called “Salt Lake” and Hawaiians called Āliapaʻakai (literally, “salt encrustation”). In 1824, Euro-American missionary Charles Stewart visited the site, describing “a lake or pond, in which large quantities of salt are continually forming.” The abundant salt crystals sparkling on the lake’s surface seemed like “a frozen pond” to this New Yorker’s eyes. Upon reaching Salt Lake, Stewart was able to reach down and pick up crystals from among the “twigs, grass, and pebbles, over which the water had flowed.” He mused of the minimal labor needed for resource extraction: “From this natural work alone, immense quantities of salt might be exported.”14
But by the 1820s, Hawaiians were not just extracting salt from Āliapaʻakai; they were producing it. “The natives manufacture large quantities from sea water by evaporation,” Stewart wrote. “There are in many places along the shore, a succession of artificial vats of clay for this purpose, into which the salt water is let at high tide, and converted into salt by the power of the sun.” To make so much salt required massive amounts of human labor. Stewart did not report on how many workers produced salt at Āliapaʻakai, but later sources from the 1830s through the mid-nineteenth century describe makaʻāinana labor in the thousands (as many as two thousand workers in one instance) working in and around the lake making crystals for export to passing ships. By 1840, according to Charles Pickering who visited the Islands with the U.S. Exploring Expedition, a scientific endeavor, “Salt is now exported to Chili, to Oregon, Kamtchatka & the Russian settlements, and some to California.” Salt connected Hawaiʻi with every corner of the Pacific World.15
Hawaiʻi’s emergence as a center of trans-Pacific trade in furs and salt was built upon more than just economic and ecological change. Political transformations also facilitated a change in the mode of production and helped to align Hawaiian labor and resources with the global economy. One man, Kamehameha (r. 1795–1819), almost singlehandedly did all of this: unifying the Hawaiian archipelago; promoting international trade; and encouraging increased economic production throughout the Islands. He was able to do this partly due to strong networks with foreign traders as well as through the acquisition of foreign goods, including European ships and arms. In other words, labor and nature from Hawaiʻi not only supported the growth of trans-Pacific capitalism in the late eighteenth century, but trans-Pacific capitalism supported the foundations of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi (c. 1810) and the creation of a modern nation-state in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the early nineteenth century.16
Kamehameha made the trans-Pacific economy work for him. By generously giving fresh food and water to passing European and Euro-American ships, he was able to acquire a wealth of foreign goods, including military technologies. Kamehameha, more so than any other Hawaiian, mastered the art of this exchange. He captured European and American ships, and even more importantly, captured haole labor, making two foreigners—John Young of England and Isaac Davis of Wales—his “white aliʻi.” With foreign labor, ships, and guns, and an army of makaʻāinana foot soldiers, Kamehameha solidified monarchical rule over the islands. New relationships forged between Hawaiians and the global marketplace helped Kamehameha accumulate mana (divine power). As mōʻī (monarch) over a nascent empire, Kamehameha claimed the ʻāina and its productions and the labor upon it all as his own. He furthermore placed a royal kapu (“taboo”; restriction) on trade so that he alone held the reins over Hawaiian participation in the global economy. By uniting the islands, Kamehameha not only founded a monarchy, but also a monopoly.17
Of course, various actors on all sides challenged Kamehameha’s monopolization of land and labor. Foreign traders often sought to play island rulers off of one another, albeit largely unsuccessfully. Makaʻāinana also resisted. Sometimes they engaged in illegal trade with foreigners, such as when Isaac Iselin of New York visited Hawaiʻi in 1801 and purchased “116 prime hogs—at $2—piece” from “the King of the Isles” (Kamehameha), but also discreetly purchased pearls from unnamed “Sandwich Islanders” and other goods from American merchants living and working on the beach. Iselin’s exchanges document that not every Hawaiian (or foreigner) obeyed Kamehameha’s kapu on trade.18
Six years later, Iselin returned to Hawaiʻi. “I hope we shall anchor in 25 days from this, and find an ample supply of those excellent refreshments that have been so much extolled by many circumnavigators.” Twenty years after the beginning of the trans-Pacific fur-and-tea trade, by 1807, the world—including Iselin—knew of Hawaiʻi and its “excellent refreshments.” Sailors longed to stop there to dally with Native women. Captains sought to anchor there to refuel provisions of fresh food and water. Ships from Britain, France, the United States, and Russia sought salt there, and Hawaiian salt was put to use curing animal products across the great ocean, from Kamchatka to Alaska to California to Tahiti. Almost everything ended up in the market at Guangzhou. From 1786 to the 1810s, the Hawaiian Islands moved to the rhythms of this new trans-Pacific economy. In the words of historian Nicholas Thomas, Hawaiʻi had become the most important “staging post” in the entire Pacific Ocean. The archipelago’s abundant arable land and makaʻāinana labor, plus Kamehameha’s centralization of power, resulted in the production of enormous quantities of provisions for visiting ships. Hawaiʻi’s economy was growing. By the 1810s, foreigners had discovered yet another good besides sea otter furs that Chinese merchants in Guangzhou were willing to buy. As it happened, this thing grew abundantly in the forests of the Hawaiian Islands: sandalwood.19
OF MATERIALITY AND MANA
According to trans-Pacific trader James Hunnewell, Boki was a thief. On December 17, 1817, he noted in his journal that he “had some visits from the natives but no trade Bokee stole a peace [piece of] shirting.” Two days later: “recovered the peace of shirting stolen by Bokee.” Several months later, Hunnewell accused Boki of also supporting thievery among the commoners. “I find the indian that stole our Goods Is liberated and what is more taken into favour by the head chief of the Land (Bokee).” As we have seen, Boki loved stuff, and he tried to pay for it all with sandalwood. Captain Isaiah Lewis of the ship Arab noted such an arrangement in April 1820, writing to a subordinate that he had “Govn Pocka’s [Boki] written promise” that “5892 ½ Piculs” of sandalwood will be “delivered, on or before the 1st day of November next ensuing to you as my agent & the same promise specefies that it shall be of merchantable quality.”20
The trade of sandalwood for clothing, sandalwood for furniture, and sandalwood as credit not only signaled Hawaiʻi’s emergence within global capitalism, but also pointed toward massive transformations in the ways that people thought about stuff. The materiality of sandalwood was highly mutable: it was a tree; it was labor; now it is incense; now it is debt. For many Hawaiians it was tied to the co
ncept of mana (divine power). Objects had mana, and wearing and owning fine things—particularly foreign and exotic items—was an expression of one’s own mana. Within capitalism, however, things also had an exchange-value. One mana-rich object could, strangely, be equal to so many sticks of sandalwood, or equal to so many dollars. Hawaiian mana thus came into conflict with Western concepts of value. Transformations in materiality and mana are one of the early ways that Hawaiians experienced capitalism.21
Hawaiian sandalwood—seven species in all—thrives in a variety of habitats. It grows in differing soil compositions, varying quantities of rainfall, and at elevations ranging from valley floors to mountainsides. Generally, sandalwood thrives throughout the middle-elevation regions of the Hawaiian Islands and up to a maximum elevation of 2,500 feet above sea level. One of the reasons for the tree’s success in so many habitats is its method of nutrition. As the tree grows it develops what are called haustoria, parasitic siphons that penetrate the roots of other neighboring plants. These haustoria suck out water and nutrients from other plants to feed the sandalwood. When a sandalwood tree reaches fifteen years old, on average, its inner core begins a transformation into what is called heartwood. Following this stage, the sandalwood produces approximately one kilogram of heartwood annually. On average, a tree is ripe with fragrant heartwood by its thirtieth year, but this moment is only marked by those humans who would use it for oil. Untouched, a sandalwood tree will continue to grow as high as eighty feet tall or for one hundred years.22
Before the nineteenth century, Hawaiians utilized sandalwood in a variety of ways. They applied ʻiliahi (sandalwood) powder to treat dandruff and eradicate head lice, and they mixed it with liquids to treat genital diseases. Most importantly, they used it as a perfume. Sandalwood’s fragrance was well known to early Hawaiians and they acknowledged this characteristic by sometimes referring to the wood as lāʻau ʻala, or “fragrant wood.” Used as a perfume, the heartwood of the sandalwood tree was ground into powder or into chips that were applied to kapa cloth. The finest kapa were perfumed by hammering the sandalwood powder or chips into cloth, releasing fragrant oil onto the kapa, or by marinating sandalwood chips in vegetable oil and then applying this aromatic spread to the material. The application of sandalwood oil also served to waterproof the fabric.23
Samuel Manaiakalani Kamakau, perhaps the most famous Hawaiian historian of the nineteenth century, proudly proclaimed of precontact Hawaiians that “my people were fond of honors, fond of fine things, fond of things to be proud of, fond of bedecking themselves, fond of fragrant things, of kapa that were perfumed.”24 But kapa was only one of many items that were perfumed, and sandalwood was only one source of ʻala, or fragrance, in Hawaiian material culture. Other sources include the fruit of the mokihana plant; maile leaves; puaniu (coconut flowers); ʻolapa bark; the flowers and sap of kamani; the leaves of lauaʻe (a fern); ʻawapuhi (wild ginger) root; the leaves and root of kūpaoa (a type of tree, but the Hawaiian word kūpaoa can also refer to any “strong permeating fragrance”). Many of these plants, especially those with fragrant flowers, are still used in making lei (flower necklaces). Fragrances, even today, hold great significance in Hawaiian culture.
Sandalwood has an equally long history in China. The use of incense in China dates back as early as the Zhou Dynasty (1045–256 BCE), while the consumption of sandalwood incense probably originated with the arrival of Indian Buddhism during the first centuries of the Common Era.25 The earliest Chinese sandalwood consumers most likely adopted Indian Buddhist ideas about sandalwood as much as they adopted the foreign wood itself. These ideas may have included the belief that sandalwood smoke had the ability to create a favorable environment, known as a xiangshi, or “incense room,” for the earthly manifestation of the Buddha. Although this particular belief has roots in Indian Buddhism, it was also practiced in China.26
Foreign traveler W.W. Wood, exploring the cities and landscapes of China’s Pearl River Delta in the late 1820s, noticed all around him a sustained interest in incense consumption among the Chinese, despite the modernizations and commercializations of Chinese life and consumer habits during the Qing dynasty. Wood was astounded by the size of the “idolatry” industry that supported incense consumption throughout the Guangzhou area. By rough estimate, Wood suggested that the Pearl River Delta region alone employed 2,000 “makers of gilt paper”; 400 “shrinemakers”; about 10,000 “makers of candles”; and at least 10,000 “makers of jos-stick,” or incense.27
“Part of the market purchases of a Chinese,” Wood remarked of Guangzhou consumers, are “the odiriferous matches, oil, and small sacrificing candles made of wax filled with tallow, and having a wooden wick.” These “odiriferous matches” that Wood noticed in the markets of Guangzhou were incense. Many were likely made of powdered Hawaiian tanxiang (Chinese for “sandalwood”). When Wood documented religious rituals practiced by Chinese consumers, he specifically noted the role of incense in the material cultures of both elites and commoners. In the homes of the wealthiest Chinese, he noted “an ancient copper censer, for burning sandal wood, or odiriferous matches . . . constitute the most frequent decoration of the oratories or small temples, which are placed at the entrances of houses, and in the chambers.” Not just confined to the wealthy few, however, “the superstitions with regard to evil spirits, are very prevalent among all classes,” Wood noted, “and no house or boat is seen at night undefended by small odoriferous matches.” As Wood walked the city streets he found that “every evening are bunches of jos-stick stuck about the doorways [of homes], and the light carefully attended to which burns in the small temple or oratory with which every Chinese house is provided, under the idea that these ceremonies will prevent the ingress of evil spirits.”28
Wood’s comments point to yet further meanings embodied in the fragrance of incense. While the use of sandalwood, in particular, may have been confined to wealthier classes of Chinese consumers, both elites and even common sampan residents (boat-dwelling people) appear to have used incense in similar ways: to ward off “evil genii” and “evil spirits.” Elites and commoners alike carefully placed incense sticks at doorways and at entrances, barring the entrance of angry or inauspicious supernatural beings into their places of home and rest. Incense sticks were also lit at even the smallest altars, within the home or in the temple or on the sampan. Chinese incense consumption appears to have been unusually egalitarian and incredibly profuse. Whether understood as a medium for recapturing the Buddha or as protection against evil spirits or simply as part of ancestor worship, the act of burning incense had profound meanings in Chinese material culture. This material culture was the driving force behind Chinese incense consumption, and hence sandalwood consumption. Furthermore, Chinese consumers and the religious beliefs and practices that informed their consumption were correspondingly an indirect force behind transformations in the Hawaiian countryside thousands of miles away.
The meeting place of Hawaiian sandalwood and Chinese consumers, where Hawaiian ʻiliahi became Chinese tanxiang—where sandalwood shifted hands and meanings—was China’s Pearl River Delta. Here, the landscape itself seemingly memorializes a long history of buying, selling, producing, and consuming aromatics. Traveling north up the delta, sailors saw Xiangshan, or the “fragrant hills,” to their west. To their east they saw an island called Xianggang, or the “fragrant port” (Hong Kong). Deep in the hull of their own ships emanated the odor of tanxiang, “fragrant sandalwood.” These words all utilize the Chinese character xiang, which has two meanings, “fragrance” and “incense.” This dual meaning appropriately signifies the long-term historical interrelationship between consumer demands (for fragrance) and the actual consumption of material resources to satisfy those demands (such as incense) in Chinese history. The Hawaiian wood that regularly arrived in the Pearl River Delta in the early nineteenth century was part of this history of converting exotic aromatic materials into commodities essential to the maintenance of Chinese material culture.29
/> Chinese incense consumers frequently chose from among a global selection of imported aromatic woods.30 During the early nineteenth century, British East India Company ships and private British vessels brought to Guangzhou sandalwoods from India, Bengal, and elsewhere in South Asia and Southeast Asia, while American ships transported sandalwood from Fiji, the Marquesas Islands, and Hawaiʻi. By the early 1820s, however, Hawaiian sandalwood was practically the only wood carried by American ships, and at the same time, American trading companies were the leading exporters of sandalwood to China. Chinese incense consumers were therefore increasingly purchasing Hawaiian wood in the 1820s.
FIGURE 1. Sandalwood Imports at Guangzhou, 1804–1834. Source: Charles Gutzlaff , A Sketch of Chinese History, Ancient and Modern; comprising a Retrospect of the Foreign Intercourse and Trade with China (New York: John P. Haven, 1834), vol. II, appendices II–IV, VI–XI. Compiled by the author.
This all explains Hawaiian sandalwood’s materiality, but what of its mana—its power? If the makaʻāinana experienced sandalwood in the forests, and Chinese consumers experienced it through the consumption of incense, then Hawaiian aliʻi experienced it through its mutability—its ability to become something else: a chair, a vase, a ship. Workers and consumers experienced sandalwood as a material thing, but aliʻi primarily experienced the wood’s exchange-value, its exchangeability for other goods in the global marketplace. When Samuel Hill went to the Pacific aboard the Ophelia in 1815, his employers told him to collect whale teeth along the way, for aliʻi loved these items. “In Proceeding to Canton you will Visit the Gallapagos Islands for the Purpose of procuring Whale teeth . . . collect all of them you can find to be used in the Collection of Sandalwood.” Whale teeth were necessary for obtaining sandalwood in the Marquesas Islands and in Hawaiʻi. But by the 1810s, trading partners in Hawaiʻi were no longer willing to value their wood as equal to that of a mere whale tooth—a very mana-rich object indeed, but nothing compared to the European and Chinese manufactured goods that later decorated Boki’s home. “He would talk of nothing but a Brig or Schooner in exchange for Sandal wood,” Hill wrote, referring to Kamehameha. And “as this was an Article with which I Could not furnish him it appeared to me useless to talk more on the Subject.”31
Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World Page 4