Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  Following announcement of this tax, thousands of makaʻāinana men got out their axes (or bought new ones in town) and headed for the hills, engaging in a massive harvest of sandalwood from Hawaiʻi to Kauaʻi. Their labor, Boki may have reasoned, was equally exchangeable in value with his “magnificent Porcelain vase,” his “splendid twin beds,” or any of the other foreign-made items that he and other aliʻi had long bought on credit. But makaʻāinana labor was also newly transformed by the 1827 sandalwood law. The law established that any wood harvested beyond the half picul required for taxation was now the property of its independent producers; the makaʻāinana who cut the wood could own the surplus. Within six months, as many as 10,000 piculs of sandalwood were cut. By January 1828, the aliʻi had repaid at least 7,000 of the necessary 15,000 piculs owed the Americans. The difference of 3,000 piculs (piculs cut versus piculs paid) suggests that the makaʻāinana may have independently harvested the remainder. The 1827 sandalwood tax act had enabled the makaʻāinana to establish their own independent wealth while simultaneously laboring to preserve the wealth of the aliʻi.49

  It was a win-win situation, except that within a year it was apparent that the tax had made only a small dent in resolving the Kingdom’s debt crisis. Furthermore, a second problem emerged: sandalwood was fast disappearing. As visiting Dutch Captain Jacobus Boelen remarked in 1828, “it was clear . . . that in a few years’ time sandalwood would be completely exhausted on these islands.” Debt-owing aliʻi, such as Boki, recognized the consequences of this coming environmental calamity. Reynolds noted on numerous occasions that Boki attempted to stop the makaʻāinana from selling their own independently harvested wood to the Americans. Boki must have found his predicament astonishing: he, the kiaʻāina (governor) of Oʻahu, was now personally competing with previously subservient makaʻāinana for access to the last remaining stands of native sandalwood.50

  By 1828, the year Duhaut-Cilly visited Boki’s hale in Honolulu, Hawaiian workers had risen to a new position of power in the sandalwood trade. Kamehameha’s kapu on all international trade, lifted just eight years earlier, had lost its efficacy during the reign of his son, Liholiho. By the late 1820s, rival aliʻi were competing against their own makaʻāinana for access to the wealth embodied in Hawaiian forests. And Native workers were beginning to realize their role in the world economy, a world that stretched far beyond the sandalwood mountains.

  LAST TREE STANDING?

  When the sandalwood is all gone, predicted foreigner James Ames, clerk of the American trans-Pacific trading ship Edward in 1830, “the natives will have soon to go to work as their principle export.” In fact, human labor was already a principal export of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. More to the point, it is not as if the sandalwood harvest was itself free of human labor. Hawaiians in this industry were not exporting themselves, but they were exporting the alienated products of their labor. Sandalwood was the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi’s ticket to the fabled marketplace of Guangzhou. Hawaiian labor and nature together produced the wealth that traveled across the Pacific Ocean from Hawaiʻi to China to the United States and beyond.51

  If we want to know what happened to Hawaiʻi’s sandalwood industry in the late 1820s and 1830s, we have to look at changes abroad—changes in relationships among at least three states, namely the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, the United States, and the Qing Empire of China. Historians have often suggested that Hawaiʻi simply ran out of wood. For them, the collapse of Hawaiʻi’s sandalwood industry was either a case of the Natives’ mismanagement of their own natural resources (“blame the aliʻi”), or a case of economic imperialism whereby U.S. merchants intentionally engendered a debt crisis in order to destabilize the kingdom (“blame the haole”). Yet larger forces were also at work. If we are to understand what happened in Hawaiʻi in the 1820s and 1830s, we should look both to the forests and to the markets.52

  FIGURE 2. Sandalwood Imports vs. Exports, 1821–1833. Sources: 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; Christopher Cottrell, “Splinters of Sandalwood, Islands of ʻIliahi: Rethinking Deforestation in Hawaiʻi, 1811–1843” (M.A. thesis, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 2002), 109–11, tables 2–5. Cottrell’s data is culled from Stephen Reynolds, Journal of Stephen Reynolds, Volume I, 1823–1829, ed. Pauline King (Honolulu: Ku Paʻa Inc.; Salem, MA: Peabody Museum, 1989). Compiled by the author.

  Total sandalwood imports at Guangzhou—the principal market for the world’s sandalwood—reached a zenith in the years 1821–1823. Trader James Hunnewell noted as much in November 1821 when he wrote that “I am aware that the China market will be gluted [glutted] with wood this season but it will be safer there than here without any of our wood there will be 30,000 picul go to the China market from the Islands this season.” This was a period of relatively high sandalwood production in Hawaiʻi, as well. After 1823, Chinese imports of sandalwood dropped significantly and fast. This marked decrease in trade in the years 1825–1827 interestingly coincided with the decision by American gunboats to visit Hawaiʻi and press for debt payments in 1826. American merchants no doubt recognized that the decrease in imports at Guangzhou presented an excellent opportunity to flood the Chinese market with Hawaiian wood. As long as global sandalwood supplies were too low to meet previous levels of Chinese demand, Americans knew that they could receive unusually high prices for the wood—if they could only get it out of Hawaiian forests.53

  After a brief rise, sandalwood imports at Guangzhou dropped once again after 1829, suggesting that Hawaiian wood increasingly disappeared from Chinese consumers’ market purchases in the 1830s. It is not enough, however, to simply infer that Chinese sandalwood consumption decreased in the late 1820s and 1830s. The question is: what were Chinese consumers, and perhaps even more influentially, Guangzhou merchants, purchasing instead?

  For three-quarters of a century since the Canton system was implemented in 1757, foreign states had sought to overcome trade imbalances with the Chinese by offering increasingly exotic goods for exchange: sea otter furs, sea cucumbers, sandalwood. Lord Macartney of England famously traveled to Beijing in 1793 to pressure the Qianlong Emperor to open Chinese ports to British manufactures. All attempts by foreign states, diplomats, and traders to counter the West’s trade imbalance with China, however, were complete failures. In some ways, Europe and the United States were facing their own debt crisis alongside Hawaiʻi’s. While aliʻi were consuming too many goods on credit, so were Europeans and Euro-Americans consuming too much tea. Except, in this case, the Qing did not offer credit; instead they demanded payment up front, the great majority of which was given in the form of specie (Spanish-American silver).54

  Finally, a commodity was found that would tip the scales of global power between China and the West. That was opium. Grown in British India as well as in the Ottoman Empire, opium provided Europeans and Euro-Americans with a commodity that Chinese consumers could not control their consumption of—because it was addictive. The effects of the opium trade were staggering. Not only did the illegal smuggling of opium into China result in the momentous Sino-British War of 1839–1842 (the Opium War), but, as historian Robert Marks has aptly demonstrated, the opium trade affected economies and ecologies worldwide.55

  The opium trade created global waves that hit Hawaiian shores. As seen from a Hawaiian perspective, the opium trade represented a major blow to the Hawaiian elite. Opium likely confused and complicated the Kingdom’s efforts to resolve its debt crisis, for Hawaiʻi did not have another commodity (such as opium) to sell to the Chinese. All they had was sandalwood. With foreign firms turning their attention to the promises of this new (and illicit) drug trade, Hawaiian sandalwood lost some of its luster. In the 1830s the Hawaiian sandalwood trade certainly contracted, but it is far from certain what was the culprit. Likely a combination of a changing forest and a changing world economy led to sandalwood’s declining
significance.

  Reports of complete sandalwood deforestation in Hawaiʻi were almost certainly exaggerated. Despite James Ames’s pessimistic commentary in 1830 that “the sandle wood business is nearly done as they have cut the greater part of the wood from off the Islands,” his ship left Hawaiʻi two weeks later with a full cargo of wood, bound for Guangzhou. Even Christian missionaries were in on the trade, willing to “give a tract to a native for a stick of wood & then sell their wood at $7 & 8 pr cord.”56

  On the cusp of a new decade—the 1830s—Hawaiʻi’s Canton trade was not yet history, but the market that had long supported Hawaiʻi’s early nineteenth-century economic growth was about to implode. Nevertheless, sandalwood harvesting continued through the 1830s under the reign of Kauikeaouli [Kamehameha III] (r. 1825–1854). The wood was, however, of both lesser quantity and quality. Between 1836 and 1839, the Kingdom exported on average over 2,300 piculs of sandalwood per year. No data is available for either the four years before or after this period. The average annual earnings from sales of sandalwood during this period was $16,250 per year (an average rate of $7/picul). There is some evidence, though, that prices had fallen earlier in the decade to an abysmal rate of just $1.50/picul.57

  Even as late as the 1860s and 1870s, the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi continued to report intermittent sales of sandalwood. In the 1850s, a young George Dole wrote in a school essay about his explorations of the land north of the Wailua River on the windward coast of Kauaʻi where he and his friends discovered large stands of untouched sandalwood. “[We] came to a plain covered with scattering groves of koa trees,” he wrote, “among which there are a good many sandal-wood trees, towards a foot in diameter.” A few years earlier, in 1849, Charles Bernhard Richard, clerk of the USS Dale in Honolulu Harbor, noted, “sandalwood, suitable for export, is mostly exhausted, though the young wood is abundant.” The market was gone, but the wood was still there.58

  Sandalwood never disappeared, but it was overharvested. The Hawaiian aliʻi did not dig their own graves by overexploiting the forests. Instead, it is more accurate to say that the aliʻi were victims of imperial economic treachery carried out on a global scale. Thousands of miles away, British merchants were able to convert 10 percent of the Chinese population to opium addiction in the early nineteenth century. They flaunted Qing laws governing trade. They illegally smuggled tremendous amounts of opium into China. American ships got in on the trade, too, transporting opium from the Ottoman Empire to the Pearl River Delta; as they did, it made less and less sense to also carry furs and sandalwood. It was not just that Hawaiʻi needed to find a new commodity in the 1830s; they needed a new market. Poor Boki did not realize this. The winds were already shifting when he set sail for Eromanga in 1829 in search of wood. More sandalwood was not the answer.

  Economic treachery was also carried out by Euro-American merchants and officials in Honolulu. Their practices of selling goods to Hawaiian consumers on credit and then demanding repayment of debts with guns drawn were not abnormal. These were, in fact, becoming the everyday practices of global capitalism. Hawaiʻi’s sandalwood trees were just one more type of collateral in a new global system of so-called free trade.

  FREE TRADE AND FREE LABOR

  In 1836, Kauikeaouli, ruler of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, wrote to Christian missionaries in the United States suggesting that they send some people skilled in trades other than just the preaching of gospel. “Send to us additional teachers to those you have already sent, of such character as you employ in your own country in America. Viz. A carpenter A TailorA MasonA Shoe makerA WheelrightA Paper manufacturerA Type founderFarmers who can teach the cultivation of cotton, silk, and the making of sugarA manufacturer of cloth.” In short, Kauikeaouli sought to bring Hawaiʻi into the global nineteenth-century economy.59 But two aspects of Hawaiʻi’s indigenous mode of production stood in the way of the young king’s capitalist dreams. One was Hawaiʻi’s system of land tenure; the other was the class system. For Hawaiʻi to engage fully in the world economy, Kauikeaouli’s government would first have to “free” the land and “free” the makaʻāinana. As he embarked upon these revolutions in the 1840s, the Pacific World simultaneously was revolutionized by a new imperial order founded upon the Western concept of free trade.

  The revolution began in June 1839, in Guangzhou, as Qing imperial commissioner Lin Zexu dumped 21,000 chests of confiscated British opium into the Pearl River Delta. Lin’s actions enraged the British and set off the First Opium War (1839–42). Meanwhile, in 1840, Britain annexed Aotearoa (New Zealand), home of the Māori. Eastward, in the ancestral home of both the Hawaiians and Māori, the French raised their tricolor flag over the island of Tahiti in 1842. That same year, Britain finalized its victory over the Qing, concluding the Opium War with the Treaty of Nanjing. This treaty permitted so-called free trade at Guangzhou as well as four other “treaty ports” along the southeast China coast, ports that until 1842 were officially closed to foreign commerce. The British also received an indemnity payment and were granted control over the island of Xianggang, the “fragrant harbor” of Hong Kong. The British were additionally granted extraterritoriality; this meant that British offenses against Qing law on Chinese soil were not punishable by Chinese courts. Other Western powers, including the United States, rushed in to claim “most favored nation” status alongside the British; that is, they claimed access to the same rights and privileges that the Qing had granted to Britain. The United States codified this status with the Treaty of Wangxia in 1844, the first official treaty between the United States and China. These treaties signaled the end of the Canton trade, including Hawaiʻi’s place within it. Perhaps not surprisingly, the next year the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi’s Euro-American creditors decided to buy back the remainder of Hawaiʻi’s sandalwood-era debt. With just one payment of $14,000, the decades-long Hawaiian debt crisis was over.60

  Meanwhile, in Hawaiʻi, Kauikeaouli and his advisors had begun their own political economic revolution. In 1840 they authorized the Kingdom’s first constitution. This document called for the creation of a bicameral legislature with a House of Nobles (comprised of appointed aliʻi nui) and a House of Representatives (to be elected by the Hawaiian people). For the makaʻāinana, the 1840 constitution represented their transformation from subjects into citizens. The traditional class structure, governed by kapu, which maintained the pono balance between aliʻi and makaʻāinana, was formally dissolved. It had already, between 1819 and 1840, begun to disintegrate. Changes in class relations were a product of many forces, not least of all the growing number of Hawaiian workers who, through wage labor at home, at sea, and abroad, had transformed themselves from makaʻāinana into a modern working class.61

  Kauikeaouli’s government recognized that labor conditions and labor relations had changed and were continuing to change across the Pacific World. Historian Sally Engle Merry notes that the Hawaiian parliament passed a series of labor laws in the early 1840s, perhaps to codify a new class structure to replace the aliʻi-makaʻāinana paradigm. A new convict labor law, for example, made clear that penal labor could not be used to benefit the aliʻi, but could only be employed for the sake of Kingdom-wide projects such as building “roads, fences, prisons, and forts.” Convicts were segregated by gender, and women mandated to work in traditionally female labors, such as “beating tapa [kapa], braiding mats and hats, sewing, twisting fish lines, [and] weaving nets.” In 1842 the Kingdom passed new laws against idleness and loitering, including a law that if a man was found “sitting idle,” the tax collector could take him and “set him to work for the Government, and he shall work till night.” The law allowed landlords to turn in idle tenants to the Kingdom, criminalizing laziness and forcing commoners into convict labor. All of these laws defined common Hawaiians as subjects of the state rather than the aliʻi. Nevertheless, the law still recognized differences between upper-class and lower-class Hawaiians. Only aliʻi served in the House of Nobles, for example, while only commoners were criminalized for idleness.62r />
  Revolutions in free trade and free labor converged in February 1843 as a rogue British admiral, Lord George Paulet, sailed into Honolulu Harbor demanding many of the same concessions that Britain had just obtained from the Treaty of Nanjing. Paulet raised grievances against the Hawaiian government regarding British land claims and the treatment of British citizens in the Kingdom. He called for the immediate installation of a British consul at Honolulu and demanded a direct audience with the mōʻī, Kauikeaouli. Six days later, Kauikeaouli arrived from Lāhainā, Maui, but he refused to meet face-to-face with Paulet or hear his demands. Meanwhile, France and the United States made clear their own desires for imperial neutrality in Hawaiʻi; in other words, they sought a “hands off Hawaiʻi” policy for all Western powers. But on February 25, 1843, Paulet seized the port of Honolulu and declared the Hawaiian Islands a British possession. Five months of international negotiations later, the British metropole later rejected Paulet’s seizure of the islands and restored Hawaiʻi’s sovereignty on July 31. Kauikeaouli proclaimed the day a holiday (today celebrated as Ka La Hoʻihoʻi Ea, Sovereignty Restoration Day) and he spoke these famous words: “Ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono” (the sovereignty of the land is perpetuated in righteousness/in pono).63

  Paulet had sought free trade protections in Hawaiʻi, just as his country had forced upon the Qing one year earlier in Nanjing, but, at least for now, the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi had preserved its sovereignty. This was not true for other Pacific peoples and polities. One by one, British, French, and American empires expanded in the 1840s, gobbling up territory. In 1846, the United States and Britain split the northwest coast of North America into American Oregon Territory and British Columbia. The American and British state presence in both territories expanded rapidly, facilitating the transfer of lands from Native peoples into the hands of Euro-American and Euro-Canadian settlers. Meanwhile, in 1846 the United States declared war on Mexico. This was, in many ways, a Pacific war. American naval ships took control of Mexican trans-Pacific trading ports such as San Blas, Mazatlán, and further north, Monterey. When the United States finally won, they took control of Alta California, and soon enough, the sleepy port of Yerba Buena in the northern reaches of California became the great trans-Pacific trading metropolis of San Francisco.64