Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  Hill, as with other foreign traders in Hawaiʻi, had to put instructions about procuring whale teeth aside in order to figure out exactly what Hawaiian aliʻi were willing to take in exchange for sandalwood. Kamehameha, and after 1819 various other aliʻi, had learned to inflate the value of their sandalwood. They had learned to ask for more wealth from trans-Pacific trading partners. By the late 1810s and early 1820s, foreign merchants in Hawaiʻi were reporting the exchange rates listed in table 1; the final transaction, sandalwood for a ship, was one of Kamehameha’s favorites. The amount of sandalwood was calculated by digging a hole in the ground of equal measurement to the storage capacity (volume) of the ship being sold. This hole, called a lua moku ʻiliahi (sandalwood ship hole) was then filled to capacity with wood. The amount of sandalwood in the hole was exchanged for the ship.32

  TABLE 1 Sandalwood exchange rates in Honolulu, 1810s and 1820s

  (Note: 1 picul equal to approximately 133 lbs)

  Hill described one of these exchanges: “Tamahamahah [Kamehameha] has now in his Possesion about 70,000 Dollars in Specie and his mind is now so Strongly bent on the Purchase of a Vessel of Considerable Size, that he refuses to take Dollars in Exchange for Sandal wood.” He described the sale of Astor’s ship, the brig Forester, in 1816. “He bought the Privateer built Brig Forrester of Capt Ebbets while I was at Woahoo [Oʻahu], and agreed to give him as much Sandal wood as can be Stowed in the Vessel in exchange, the wood to be deli. [delivered] in 4 months from the Sale.” The popular sandalwood-for-a-ship trade even continued under Kamehameha’s son, Liholiho (Kamehameha II). Captain Isaiah Lewis of the ship Arab reported such an exchange with an aliʻi of the Island of Oʻahu in December 1819. “I have also disposed of the schooner to the same chief for sandal wood, he filling her twice with it.” In this case, one ship was exchanged for two times its volume in sandalwood, an exchange-value that occurred more than once in the 1820s. For example, trader James Hunnewell noted in 1821 “news of the sale of the Becket of Atooi [Kauaʻi] for twice full of sandal wood.” It was clear that foreign ships were mana-rich objects for the aliʻi. Trans-Pacific trader Charles Bullard noted, in 1821, that “if you want to know how Religion stands at the Islands I can tell you—All sects are tolerated but the King worships the Barge.” Sandalwood was the key to unlocking these transformations in power and meaning, what anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has referred to as “cosmologies of capitalism.”33

  When Kamehameha died in 1819, the Islands were thrown into chaos as systems of exchange and power built upon monarchical, monopolistic control over land, labor, and trade began to unravel. In the 1810s Kamehameha had accomplished much to make sandalwood Hawaiʻi’s ticket to global riches. He established the first contract with foreigners for a monopoly on the wood’s distribution at Guangzhou. Just four years later, he outfitted the first Hawaiian-owned vessel to sail to Guangzhou with wood, thereby circumventing American and European middlemen.34 He simultaneously built up Honolulu into a modern trading port, with customs charges, pilotage fees, and a national flag flying over a newly built fortress overlooking the harbor.35 In the 1810s, Kamehameha held monopoly power over Hawaiian labor, nature, and the exercise of international trade. In the wake of his death, suddenly everything changed. The kapu, which governed the traditional religious-political order, was abolished. Without these rules establishing the pono usage of land and labor, a new era of intense sandalwood extraction and makaʻāinana labor exploitation commenced.

  Kamehameha’s son, Liholiho, took control as mōʻī in 1819, but the aliʻi nui (high chiefs) of each island also assumed control of their own land and the resources thereupon. These aliʻi sought to engage in the same exchanges Kamehameha had participated in: wood for a chair; wood for a vase; wood for a ship. To achieve these ends, each aliʻi was reliant on the makaʻāinana in their own moku (district) to labor in the forests. So, when Boki promised “5892 ½ Piculs” of sandalwood to his American creditors in April 1820, he first had to get hundreds, if not thousands, of Hawaiian workers to go into the mountains and cut it.36

  INTO THE MOUNTAINS

  “They continue to keep large parties of wood cutters in the mountains,” James Hunnewell remarked from Honolulu in October 1821. The journey from agricultural lowlands to mountain forests was a process that thousands of Hawaiian workers took in the 1820s. Cutting sandalwood was unlike any other job. In some ways, laboring as wood cutters in the mountains followed earlier patterns of Hawaiian labor, particularly corvée labor meant to provide hoʻokupu to the Kingdom or to a specific aliʻi. But in important ways, the sandalwood trade simultaneously gave thousands of Hawaiian workers their first glimpses of a new system of labor under capitalism. Some resisted these work conditions; others even demanded pay for their work, foreshadowing the wage labor that would come to dominate Hawaiʻi’s political economy by mid-century.37

  The work of cutting sandalwood always began with a search through the forest. Sometimes workers used their naked eye to search for sandalwood trees. As the wood became scarce in the late 1820s, one desperate method of locating sandalwood was to light fire to the forest. As sandalwood fragrance wafted toward laborers’ noses, they followed the scent. Because the heartwood of the tree was the most valued part, a little scalding of the outer bark was not a major sacrifice.38

  Once a sandalwood tree was located, it had to be harvested, which itself required certain knowledge of the physical character of the tree as well as the particular demands of the consumer marketplace. The best indicator of the quality of a tree was its color just below the bark. Thus, “the bark and sap [were] chipped off with small adzes” to reveal the inner color, noted missionary William Ellis. American merchant Charles Bullard’s employer instructed him in 1820 to “be particular and attend to the weight of [the] wood,” but also to its color, which would affect its handling, and consequently its value. “When received in a green state allowance ought to be made for its loss in drying which will be considerable also for the sap which may remain on it & will have to be shaved off before selling at Canton.” Which part of the tree the wood came from also mattered. And while not every part of a sandalwood tree could be sold, most of it was harvested. Even the smallest or thinnest piece of wood—“small sticks not more than an inch thick and a foot and a half long”—could net some profit in the hands of a skillful trader.39

  Hawaiian workers gathered into large groups—sometimes thousands at a time—marching into the mountains to hunt for sandalwood. Sometimes whole villages of men abandoned their homes and families on the coasts and in the valleys. The manpower involved in these expeditions is suggested by accounts such as William Ellis’s report from Kawaihae, Hawaiʻi, in 1823, where he saw “between two and three thousand men” descending the mountains of Kohala, “carrying each from one to six pieces of sandal wood, according to their size and weight.” Sometimes massive harvests occurred in the middle of the night, as in 1827 when an anonymous sailor reported seeing in the mountains “a vast number of men assembled” in the darkness “each with a torch made of sandalwood which burns bright and clear.” Sandalwood harvests removed makaʻāinana men from their homes and families for extended periods of time. Interviewing a group of Hawaiian men who said it was their duty to “cut sandal wood for the king,” William Ellis was told in 1823 that “when they went for sandal wood, which was not very often, they were gone three or four days, and sometimes as many weeks.”

  Away for weeks at a time, these men left “most of the villages destitute of inhabitants, except a few women who had charge of some of the houses.” In one village on the northwest coast of the Kohala region of the island of Hawaiʻi, Ellis reported finding “only three women and two small children [who] remained in the place”; all the other inhabitants had “gone to Waimea to fetch sandal wood for Karaiomoku [Kalanimōku].” When they went into the mountains to cut wood, Hawaiians also abandoned their kalo (taro) fields at home. Even though aliʻi were supposed to reimburse laborers with fish, poi (cooked taro, thinned with water), and
kapa cloth, famines did occur. Afflicting both workers and their families, these periodic famines were a consequence of widespread farm abandonment and aliʻi negligence during periods of peak sandalwood harvesting. As Marshall Sahlins put it, “the people were dying, while the aliʻi were buying.”40

  Such famines were not only a result of the lack of agricultural productivity during periods of peak harvest, but also the result of shifting modes of governance within the ahupuaʻa. During the 1820s, more and more aliʻi nui abandoned their governing districts on neighboring islands and took up residence on Oʻahu in order to be near the vibrant, now-demonopolized trade at Honolulu. The result was that makaʻāinana on Oʻahu were increasingly burdened by providing hoʻokupu to multiple aliʻi (as well as to the mōʻī), while commoners on the other islands were left without aliʻi to honor their local gods. The results of aliʻi consolidation on Oʻahu were in evidence in 1825 when American missionary Charles Stewart was taken to a kapu fishpond on the Island of Hawaiʻi, near Hilo, overflowing with mullet. The pond belonged to an aliʻi, but “no one of rank having lived here lately,” Stewart wrote, “the whole pond is literally alive with the finest of mullet; the surface of the water is almost in a constant ripple from their motions; and hundreds can be taken at any time by a single cast of a small net.” In the absence of aliʻi, these fish—kapu to commoners—were reproducing beyond control. The overflowing pond was a manifestation of a Hawaiian agroecosystem that was now no longer pono. This was a world increasingly out of balance.41

  Even in times of famine, laborers were responsible for transporting heavy sandalwood logs from the mountains to the coasts where they were measured, valued, and loaded onto ships. Each laborer was expected to carry as much as 1 picul (approximately 133 pounds) of wood. As Ellis reported in 1823, this incredibly heavy load of wood was “generally tied on their backs by bands made of ti [ki] leaves, passed over the shoulders and under the arms, and fastened across their breast.” Workers carried over one hundred pounds of wood down mountain paths, descending sometimes thousands of feet over many miles, thereby acquiring a nickname that hinted at the enduring pain of their physical labor: kua leho, or “calloused backs.”42

  From the mountains the kua leho carried the wood to the coast where it was stored in either government buildings or in merchant warehouses. Stephen Reynolds, a resident American merchant in Honolulu and vigorous participant in the sandalwood trade, managed a general store owned by William French in the center of town where Hawaiians, mostly aliʻi, came to buy goods on credit, promising future deliveries of wood. Reynolds, just like makaʻāinana laborers in the forest, had to develop a certain familiarity with the different qualities of ʻiliahi. On any day, “the Natives” might be “bringing a lot of most miserable wood[,] which no doubt had been culled & rejected many times before. . . .” Reynolds had no choice but to reject this wood, as well. Yet, in general, Reynolds appears to have been the least discriminating of American sandalwood traders. His boss, William French, even developed a reputation among Hawaiians for extending generous credit to Hawaiian consumers and for accepting practically any wood brought to him. The Hawaiians dubbed him Hāpuku, or “Grab-all.”43

  Hawaiians were frequently also hired onshore as stevedores, loading cargoes of sandalwood onto and off of foreign ships. Here it was not uncommon for Hawaiian men to receive wages for their work, even as their comrades in the mountains were simultaneously starving amid a more traditional mode of production based on corvée. James Hunnewell reported from the beach on September 4, 1818: “All day employ with a doz natives shiping wood.” The next day he wrote: “all day employed with 11 natives shiped . . . stick wood on board the Enterprize [Enterprise].” Six days later, “commenced weighing & shiping wood on board the Ospray [Osprey] shiped 420 picul wood had a number of natives to work for us.” Hunnewell does not mention how these Hawaiian workers were compensated, but two years later, in a replay of these earlier scenes, Hunnewell was again managing Native stevedores on the shore. He noted that they had “succeeded in geting the Thaddeus [ship] into the Outer Harbour with the Help of four Double Canoes & a number of boats the natives not forgetting to demand pay for the favour.” It is not clear what pay these workers received, but by the late 1820s Native stevedores were regularly receiving about $1/day for their work storing and “shipping” sandalwood onto foreign vessels. Hunnewell noted the following exchanges: July 20, 1827 “paid 13 native [Natives] for storeing wood Dolls [dollars] 16.25”; August 1 & 2, 1827, paid “natives for Storeing Honolulu Wood 4.75 [dollars]”; February 20, 1828, paid “12 natives Labour Shipping Wood 19 [dollars]”; and on February 22 he paid “8 natives” $21.12. Carrying around wood in the mountains did not pay “cash,” but carrying wood on the shore did, and, for many Hawaiians, it was their first taste of wage labor.44

  The simultaneous presence of systems of forced labor and wage labor led to the Hawaiian government’s loss of control over the makaʻāinana. Even as early as 1816, trans-Pacific trader Samuel Hill, in conversation with Kamehameha, noted that the mōʻī seemed unable to control the rebellious makaʻāinana. Kamehameha explained that “his people were now unwilling to work as formerly,” Hill noted, “because they had not been Paid according to their agreement.” In Hill’s eyes, the makaʻāinana needed to be ruled, not paid. They increasingly engaged in theft, he wrote, and they drank alcohol and smoked tobacco excessively. “Tamahamahah [Kamehameha],” Hill mused, “is now grown Old and takes less Interest in the Conduct of his People than formerly.”45

  Into the 1820s, conflict continued over Hawaiian labor. Indeed, the first five years of the 1820s were a time of great transformation in the Kingdom’s political economy and ecology. Hawaiian historian Lilikalā Kameʻeleihiwa has suggested that the 1820s were a turning point in Hawaiian history, when the archipelago became firmly “enmeshed in the capitalist net.” Haole merchants, she argues, “seduced Hawaiian Aliʻi into capitalist cycles of never-ending debt.” However, if foreign traders “seduced” the aliʻi into consuming more goods than they could afford, it was also the aliʻi who made promises to the makaʻāinana that they could not keep. In essence, the enduring promise was to help maintain the pono of the land and the wellbeing of the people. This massive exploitation of human labor was not unprecedented in Hawaiian history. Thousands had fought in Kamehameha’s late-eighteenth-century wars, and thousands mined salt at Āliapaʻakai. But the prevalence of famine in the sandalwood era signified a lack of pono in relationships between people and nature in Hawaiʻi. This was the failure of the aliʻi. In response—and due to some prodding both from newly arrived Euro-American Christian missionaries in the 1820s as well as merchant ships willing to pay a wage—common Hawaiians began to see their labor in radically new terms.46

  If the first five years of the 1820s were trying, the following five brought the Hawaiian economy to a full-on crisis. The Kingdom’s mounting debts owed to American creditors finally led, in January 1826, to the arrival of a U.S. warship. The USS Dolphin was the first American warship to enter Hawaiian waters. It would not be the last. American resident merchants—men such as Stephen Reynolds—hoped and believed that the Dolphin and its captain, John Percival, would pressure Hawaiian aliʻi into paying their debts to American creditors. But hopes were dashed as Captain Percival instead used his political capital to convince the aliʻi to allow Hawaiian women onboard his ship for sexual exchanges. Percival even allegedly attempted to rape a young Hawaiian girl; when he failed, the girl was forced back to him by Boki who simply “gave the word and she was sent to him!!!” American merchant Stephen Reynolds noted in disgust that “several [of us] went to his [Percival’s] house, to whom he related his treatment [of this] young girl—too disgraceful to be related.”47

  Boki, however, had his reasons for giving Captain Percival what he wanted. He owed massive debts to American creditors. To Boki’s relief, Percival and the Dolphin left Honolulu without pressing for these payments, but then, in October, another U.S. gunboat, the USS Peacock, arrived i
n Honolulu Harbor and its captain, Thomas ap Catesby Jones, meant to secure American business interests once and for all. It is not clear what Captain Jones said to the aliʻi behind closed doors over the following months, but by the dawn of 1827, the aliʻi were ready to implement a serious plan for paying back their American creditors. On January 2, 1827, “at ten o’clock, the Chiefs assembled under the grove of Cocoa Nut trees—below the Fort” and announced a mandatory sandalwood tax that would affect every Hawaiian adult (over thirteen years old) in the Kingdom. As Stephen Reynolds recalled in his diary, the sandalwood tax ordered “that every man should go to the mountains and get half a picul of Sandlewood for the government, and half they got over should be their own: the Women to produce tapas [kapa] or mats or a dollar [Spanish dollar], they who choose can pay four dollars as an equivalent for their half picul.” The aliʻi also announced for the first time the severity of their debts, displaying a number that they had undoubtedly negotiated over many nights with the American merchants and the visiting naval captain: they owed the Americans 15,000 piculs (or two million pounds) of sandalwood.48