Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  FIGURE 8. Whale Ship Arrivals at Hawaiian Ports, 1824–1880. Sources: Theodore Morgan, Hawaii: A Century of Economic Change, 1778–1876 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 225–26; Marshall Sahlins (with Dorothy B. Barrère), Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii: Volume One, Historical Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 103. Compiled by the author.

  Imagine that for every foreign ship that arrived in a Hawaiian port at mid-century three to five Hawaiian men signed up for work and shipped out on multiyear-long voyages. Even just one peak year, with five hundred ships visiting the islands, would mean thousands of Hawaiian men leaving their families, abandoning their farms, moving to cities, and in some cases moving as far away as other continents. Historians have long debated how many Hawaiians took this journey. Some have suggested that Hawaiians comprised as many as one in three, or even one in two, of all crewmembers on American whaling ships at various moments. No one has ever attempted to calculate the cumulative number of Hawaiians who worked in the global whaling industry. An accurate enumeration is likely impossible.48

  Primary data is fragmentary, but it begins to fill in some of the gaps in the quantitative history as well as providing a raw sense of just how momentous this grand dance was. According to one Hawaiian government source, for example, between January 1, 1843 and June 1, 1844—in one seventeen-month period—an estimated 550 Hawaiians shipped out of Hawaiʻi. They went to Alta California, Kamchatka, China, the Columbia River, Valparaiso, Mazatlán. This data includes all emigrants, so only some of these were whale workers.49 Further data on Hawaiian maritime labor is available for a twelve-month period from August 1845 to August 1846. In this period, based on reports of the minister of the interior of the Hawaiian Kingdom, at least 651 Hawaiians shipped out on whaling vessels. Compared to the 550 Hawaiians who left in 1843–1844, this was a marked increase in labor migration, from 32 migrants per month in 1843–1844 to 54 per month in 1845–1846. The 1846 report of the minister of the interior also claimed that one in every five Hawaiian young men then alive was currently employed either abroad or on ships at sea. This represented a total number of approximately 3,000 Hawaiian men, although not all were involved in whaling. That same year the Hawaiian newspaper The Polynesian estimated that at least 700 Hawaiians had served on whaling vessels in the previous year (1845). But this estimate seems extraordinarily low. There were over 700 American whaling vessels cruising the Pacific Ocean in 1846. This estimate would suggest that only one Hawaiian, on average, served on each ship. That does not conform with all available evidence, which points to a much higher rate of Hawaiian service on American whaling vessels.50

  More concrete data is available for a slightly later period thanks to the records of the Honolulu Harbormaster. For example, the Harbormaster’s records show that approximately 1,000 Hawaiian men shipped out of Honolulu in just one year (1859). In the following years, 650 men shipped out in 1860; 371 men in 1861; 352 men in 1862; 480 men in 1863; and 762 men in 1864. These data were recorded during a historic slump in the whaling industry, due primarily to the American Civil War. This would suggest that the number of Hawaiian men annually shipping out on foreign vessels in the years previous to 1859 likely numbered well into the thousands.51

  The mid-nineteenth century was a period of unprecedented mobility for Hawaiians, both inside and out of Hawaiʻi. By linking histories of transoceanic migration to internal migration within Hawaiʻi, we can see that whaling capitalism not only rearranged the Pacific World but also played upon an internal proletarian dance in which makaʻāinana shed their connection to the land and became an untethered wage-working class. This is readily apparent by looking at changes in the archipelago’s principal port city, Honolulu. The urban population had grown rapidly to approximately 14,000 persons by mid-century, but this number fluctuated literally by the thousands every season as ships arrived in spring and fall and then vacated for various whaling grounds in summer and winter. Imagine the scene, in spring and fall of any given year in the 1850s, when over two hundred whaling ships visited the port, unloaded men, and took on new ones. Imagine the thousands of sailors released on liberty or lost to desertion, both Native and haole, who clogged the streets, and all the Native bartenders, prostitutes, and hoodwinkers who were there to greet them. This was a society and economy in flux, as changes in the countryside paralleled the emergence of a global whaling economy, resulting in rapid urbanization, emigration, and social upheaval.52

  Hawaiʻi’s cities experienced phenomenal growth at mid-century, but especially Honolulu. This went against the overall trend of population decline across the archipelago from the late eighteenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. Note, for example, that the rural population of the island of Oʻahu fell from over 16,000 to below 6,000 in just forty years. Meanwhile, the city’s share of the island’s population rose from 45 percent in 1831–32 to 72 percent in 1872. The Hawaiian government fretted nervously over these numbers. As shown previously, the Kingdom had begun managing labor emigration in 1841 with laws requiring foreign ships to post bonds guaranteeing the safe return of Native sailors, and guaranteeing Hawaiian seamen a cash advance and a minimum wage. In 1847, the Kingdom passed further legislation concerning its indigenous workers. This new law targeted workers themselves, requiring Hawaiian men shipping out on foreign ships to post a bond to support their wives and families back home. Apparently there were too many cases of men like Anakala who came back empty-handed after spending their entire lays on tobacco and clothing; but more likely, the intended target of the law was the 50 percent of men who never returned at all, who resettled in Mexican California or in Oregon Territory or who died at sea, leaving wives and children behind. Overall, Hawaiʻi’s total population was in free fall, but population loss was not equal across the archipelago. Honolulu and other cities continued to grow even as rural areas were emptied out by disease and internal migration. In the mid-nineteenth century, Hawaiʻi experienced an immense rural-to-urban migration unlike anything in its history.53

  FIGURE 9. Oʻahu Urban vs. Rural Population, 1831–1872. Source: Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1977), 12. Compiled by the author.

  The result of massive rural-to-urban migration was that hundreds if not thousands of Hawaiians yearly abandoned their agricultural labor in the interior for opportunities afforded by wage labor in the cities and in distant lands only reached through Hawaiian ports. Marshall Sahlins has argued that cities like Honolulu were not prepared to receive the thousands of rural, unskilled, migrant workers from the mountains and valleys who descended looking for work. There simply were not enough jobs for this newly visible underclass; as a result, vagrancy, prostitution, and other social “disorders” manifested. The service/supply economies of Honolulu and Lāhainā boomed in the 1840s, but, as Sahlins put it, while the Hawaiian nobility and their Euro-American merchant allies were profiting, “capitalism was leaving [everyday] Hawaiians in its wake.” Commoners’ rural-to-urban migration in the 1840s was also, he argues, an act of resistance. It was a manifestation of resistance against the oppressive, hierarchical social structure they had long lived under in the countryside. By the 1840s the amount of corvée labor demanded of Hawaiian commoners had risen out of proportion to their traditional makaʻāinana responsibilities. Aliʻi basically bowed out and handed over the responsibilities of securing and utilizing makaʻāinana labor to exploitative konohiki (land managers) who used sandalwood labor techniques of mass turnout to intensify agricultural production in the interior. As a result, the makaʻāinana came to owe labor to an increasing array of overlapping officials, from local luna (bosses) and konohiki to the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi itself.54

  Wage labor, even contract labor, was a type of freedom for these men and women, freedom from the tyranny of land tenantry. If migration to the cities was an act of resistance, then it also represented perhaps the major turning point in Hawaiian commoners’ evoluti
on from makaʻāinana (people of the land) to a new, modern status as wage workers. When makaʻāinana turned their back on the land and headed to cities with no property but their own labor to sell, they thus unchained themselves from ka ʻāina, the very land that had for centuries defined their identity and social status. Cities, and the ocean beyond, represented new opportunities for these formerly rural commoners. Work aboard a whaling ship meant selling one’s labor in exchange for a lay, a much better deal, some Hawaiians believed, than having to give their labor to upper-class Hawaiians simply to maintain the right to live on the land.55

  These changes, of course, were part and parcel of the Māhele, the land reforms enacted in the late 1840s. Except that we know, from looking at whaling labor, that despite the Kingdom’s efforts to proletarianize the makaʻāinana, the reality is that the makaʻāinana engaged with the capitalist economy on their own terms. In Marx’s famous analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the peasantry first face enclosure, then dispossession, then proletarianization.56 But in nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi, thousands of Hawaiian men pursued wage labor and contract labor at sea and abroad even before the Māhele had begun, and certainly before it was complete in the mid-1850s. Rather than waiting for dispossession, makaʻāinana left for cities and signed onto foreign ships as wage workers in defiance of the efforts of aliʻi, haole, and the state to bind them to the land. Mobility was resistance. Call it a proletarian whale dance. Opportunities for wages and adventure beckoned offshore, and thousands of Native people took up this challenge, migrating from the countryside to cities, and then from cities onto ships.

  Captain Gray did not die. And so, following his death-wish dance, Make returned to regular duties aboard the Hannibal. They continued northward into the icy waters in and around the Bering Strait in the summer of 1850. The Hannibal hunted whales all summer and then, in early October, arrived in Lāhainā, Maui, and six days later docked in Honolulu for a month of provisioning and refreshment. On November 5, as the Hannibal was readying to depart the Islands once more, the Hawaiian worker John Bull made his last stand for freedom. “John Bull the Kanacker, and a native here, is missing. I think we shall not see him again soon.” He broke contract. He jumped ship. Meanwhile, “Make, another Kanacker, the Capt has discharged, on paying him 78 dollars. not half his just due.”57

  Make’s dance had taken him across the world’s oceans from New London to Honolulu. He had chased whales in the North Pacific as a whale rider. His captain beat him. John Bull had had enough and deserted ship, while Make was not paid fairly for fourteen months of work. Hawaiian whale workers labored for lays, wages, advances, and often ended up in debt. They followed whales to where the squid and zooplankton were. They loaded and unloaded ships in tempo with global markets and got onto and off of ships in tune with nature’s seasons and the rhythmic changes of ocean and air temperatures and human and nonhuman migrations. Make was just one of thousands of Hawaiian men who left the countryside for the city, or the city for the ship; in his own case, he ended up halfway around the world in the newly emerging whale world of New London, Connecticut. All these movements and circulations were interrelated. This is what nineteenth-century whaling—and, by extension, capitalism—looked and felt like.

  THREE

  Kealoha in the Arctic

  WHALE BLUBBER AND HUMAN BODIES

  CHARLES EDWARD KEALOHA LIKELY KNEW a thing or two about the Arctic even before going there. Hawaiian whale workers sang songs about the North, about its geography, its wonders, its dangers. Whaling mele (songs) traveled to Honolulu in whalemen’s mouths, then went out again with the migrant workers heading back north. Kealoha probably knew the one that mentioned the “beautiful” places in the Arctic: “Hudson Bay has a beauty all its own,” the song intones. “Beautiful, too, is Baffin Bay and Kaliona. Greater still is . . . Aukaki. Those are the places loved by the sailors.” This song praises locations in northern Canada, even bordering Greenland, as well as Aukaki, a place near the Bering Strait where most Hawaiian whale workers spent their days and nights. These were “the places loved by the sailors.” Theirs was a wide and sprawling Pacific World—a world made by Hawaiian migrant labor.1

  But the song that most came to Kealoha’s mind when he came back from the Arctic was one that included this line: “Famous is the cold of the Arctic, overwhelming the entire body.” Kealoha’s experience of the Arctic was a bodily one. His ship, the Desmond, was lost in sea ice on the North Slope of Alaska in September 1876. He was stranded and was not rescued until eleven months later. Many other comrades had perished. Kealoha spent nearly one year in the Arctic. He and other Polynesian migrant workers lived side-by-side with the Native Inupiat people of this land. He lived through a winter without light. As a bodily experience—as a “tropical” worker in an Arctic environment—Kealoha and other Hawaiian whale workers challenged every established nineteenth-century idea about race, nature, environment, and the human body. Whale bodies and human bodies came into contact in this place, as did Hawaiian and Alaskan peoples, as a trans-Pacific whaling economy drew disparate peoples, places, and processes together into a web of global capitalism.2

  Through participation in an Arctic industry in the period from 1848 to 1876, Hawaiian workers confronted and challenged a dominant Euro-American discourse that held that Hawaiian bodies were not fit for work in cold climates. Euro-Americans believed that Hawaiian bodies were fixed, immutable, and only suitable for work in tropical settings. By the 1870s, however, Hawaiian whale workers proved them wrong. They excelled at work in the Arctic, even proving more useful than their Euro-American counterparts. In the Arctic work environment, the Hawaiian male body was both a site of individual experience as well as a vehicle for collective resistance. Furthermore, it was through their bodies that Hawaiian workers experienced the cold, ice, and snow of Arctic nature. Men’s bodies were integral to local experiences of whaling and masculinity in the North, but women’s bodies were equally important back home. Returning whalemen frequently patronized prostitutes, and local women in turn received the “boys of the cold seas” (as Hawaiian Arctic whale men were known) and the stories, and diseases, they carried with them. Whale bodies, too, mattered. On the whaling ship, Hawaiian workers cut, chopped, boiled, and fried parts of the whale carcass. Some Hawaiians ate whale blubber. And some Hawaiians, even back home in Hawaiʻi, began to fundamentally rethink their relationship with whales and with the wider world beyond their shores.

  BOYS OF THE COLD SEAS

  Like Kealoha and the whaling songs he knew that circulated the ocean, Arctic worlds lived inside Hawaiʻi. Northern experiences animated daily life in Honolulu as well as in the countryside, impacting gender relations, as well as changing ideas about, and material relations with, whales and the wider ocean. The Arctic first came to Hawaiʻi when a Honolulu-based newspaper, The Friend, broke news of the discovery of a new whaling ground north of the 70th parallel in 1848. The news spread quickly, and after one ship broke through in 1848, the following year 50 ships plied the Bering Strait in search of whales. Arctic whaling peaked in 1852 as 224 ships visited these seas.3

  Hawaiian workers traveled north on Arctic whaling ships. In fact, some Hawaiian men worked onboard Hawaiian-owned vessels as an independent whaling fleet based in Honolulu flourished in the Arctic trade in the 1850s. By 1852, four Hawaiian whaling ships were active in the Arctic; by 1858, nineteen Honolulu ships sailed in northern waters. Hawaiʻi’s fleet decreased in the following decades, yet it still comprised anywhere between two and ten vessels throughout the 1870s. Hawaiian ships were notorious for engaging in contraband trade supplying Alaskan and Eurasian indigenous peoples with arms and liquor. These were the very things that the U.S. government administering the territory (post-1867) desperately wanted to keep out of Native hands.4 Most Hawaiians, however, continued to work onboard American ships.

  They were called nā keiki o nā kai anuanu, the “boys of the cold seas.” Thousands of Hawaiian Arctic whalemen came home from the hun
t in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. They brought knowledge and experiences back to Hawaiʻi, and they surely brought back great stories and songs, too. They were ambassadors of the far northern wing of the Hawaiian diaspora, bridging the ocean between their homeland and its migrant workers abroad; they were the “children of the sea” (nā keiki o ke kai) living thousands of miles away from home. But returning Arctic whalemen were not always given a hero’s welcome. For many Hawaiians, returning whalemen were a nuisance and a danger, frequently threatening to disrupt the peace and quiet—and the supposed moral purity—of their communities. For most Hawaiians, this is how they knew the Arctic: through returning whalemen’s bodies and behaviors.

  Honolulu and Lāhainā—the two most important Hawaiian whaling ports in the nineteenth century—consistently erupted in bedlam in these years, with rioting, fornication, and public intoxication frequent scenes of city life. Even as early as 1840, Charles Pickering of the U.S. Exploring Expedition described Honolulu as an uncultured place with “a superfluity of Taverns, Bowling Allies, Billiard Tables,” and other lowbrow amusements for the sailors. Returning Arctic whalemen made these scenes yet more riotous. For example, the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Nupepa Kuokoa reported in 1866 that in Honolulu there was a “breaking up in masses of the kanaka [Hawaiian men] on Nuuanu [Nuʻuanu] Street, [and by] recognition of their general appearance, it looked like the boys of the Cold seas of the Arctic and Aukakina, have returned and are watch-jumping on shore here.” By calling them “boys of the Cold seas,” the paper was taking note of their status as Arctic whale workers. “Watch-jumping” [a lele uwaki ana] is an ambiguous phrase, but it may refer to what Americans called liberty. The logbook of the whaleship Adeline demonstrates that each day at port either the larboard watch or the starboard watch (terms that refer to the labor division of the ship’s crew) were allowed liberty onshore. Thus the term “watch-jumping” possibly refers to this daily alternation of two watches receiving liberty. Or perhaps the term suggests the act of “jumping ship,” an act that each watch engaged in when ashore. Either way, the newspaper reported that the ships (and their Hawaiian labor) arrived in “masses” and swarmed Nuʻuanu Street in Honolulu. This street must have housed all the establishments favored by the whalemen. That the news was printed under the headline “The Town Is Dense with People” gives a sense of the overcrowding and general disorder occasioned by the whalemen’s sudden return in autumn, as the northern seas turned to ice.5