Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  When the boys of the cold seas mentioned in Ka Nupepa Kuokoa arrived in Honolulu, their discharge brought conflict to the city streets: “The sea’s boys [the whalemen] will not disappear and also the town’s boys will not disappear,” the paper reported. Did the sea’s boys and town’s boys combine to cause mayhem on Nuʻuanu Street, or were they sparring against each other? As arriving whalemen came into town, the newspaper reported, “the line of the boys of the sea, [received] the hanging of lei on the neck and the head, that appear to be piling up.” These men engaged in other indulgences, too, for although the newspaper did not name them, they wrote nonetheless of the “wastefulness” in town that may have contributed to “the kanaka’s continuing [to be] looked at with angry eyes” by so many in the community.6

  Two years later, in October 1868, Ka Nupepa Kuokoa published another news report titled “Na keiki o ke kai” (the Boys of the Sea). “In these late afternoons and these nights brightened by the moon,” the paper wrote, “we frequently meet with the children of the cold seas of the Arctic and Aukakina, watch-jumping on our Streets, although [this was] the first time we had received a sudden watch-jump, from the time of them having settled in their seamen’s buildings until returning to the land.”7 The men’s “returning to the land” perhaps refers to their reconciliation with family members and with ka ʻāina (the land) in the countryside where many of them likely grew up. But as “boys of the cold seas,” Hawaiian whalemen were almost written of as a distinct class of worker with a unique sense of their place in the world, a geographical worldview completely different from that of the makaʻāinana, the “people of the land.” This distinction between “land” Hawaiians and “sea” Hawaiians was seen in the Nupepa Kuokoa article referring to the “sea’s boys” and the “town’s boys.” These terms sought to distinguish the whale workers and urban residents as two separate groups of workers, but in reality they were the same people: the makaʻāinana of the first half of the century had become a migrant proletariat that traveled to the farthest reaches of the ocean in the latter half of the century in search of wages.

  Concern over returning Hawaiian whalemen often focused on their bodies: on the undisciplined mobility and disorderliness of the men flooding into Nuʻuanu Street, disrupting the peace of local communities. An 1875 report in the newspaper Ka Lahui Hawaii noted the continued ruckus that whalemen were causing back home, stating that if that summer’s hunt was a great success, with each ship “increasing the[ir] barrels [of oil],” then the profits would “attractively adorn once again the boys of the sea,” who would come “roaring into the calm sea of Kou [Honolulu Harbor] here, and trample again the quiet of Kakuhihewa [the legendary king of Oʻahu].”8 There was another side to this story: the undisciplined women who received seamen’s bodies upon their return to Hawaiʻi.

  One of the most notable consequences of Hawaiian whalemen’s return each season and each year was the increased visibility of a sexual marketplace. Changes in the Hawaiian countryside, the land reforms of the Māhele, plus the rapid growth of service/supply economies in the archipelago’s main whaling ports, Honolulu and Lāhainā, had engendered the migration of thousands of rural Hawaiian men and women to port cities by mid-century. While many rural Hawaiian men found work on whaling ships, options for women were more limited. Peddling and prostitution were the two most common opportunities seized by unskilled Hawaiian women from the countryside. Both of these market activities—selling material goods and selling one’s body—occurred on the street or behind closed doors, seemingly marginal to the true business of the city. Yet while seemingly marginal, this “aloha trade,” as Marshall Sahlins terms these exchanges, was in fact a significant component of Hawaiʻi’s economy.9

  By the 1850s, the most successful Hawaiian women in Honolulu and Lāhainā were earning tremendous amounts of money as prostitutes. This was the period of peak whaling in Hawaiʻi, when hundreds of ships visited Hawaiian ports each year, and thousands of male customers were present to engage in a sexual marketplace. Historian Sally Engle Merry has argued that many makaʻāinana women benefited from the whaling industry by way of prostitution, and at first these women encountered very few laws limiting their trade. During the heyday of whaling in the 1840s, prostitution in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was not criminalized; only adultery was illegal. In other words, the Kingdom was not opposed to the commodification of sex per se, only the damage inflicted on the institution of marriage by commodified sex. This policy changed in the 1850s and 1860s as the government heightened its prosecution of prostitutes.10

  Hawaiʻi’s Christian community, ever since the 1820s, had long been opposed to prostitution on moral grounds. Yet as the number of whalemen visiting Honolulu and Lāhainā increased in the second half of the nineteenth century, the influence of missionary zeal upon Hawaiian society waned. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) stopped sending new missionaries to Hawaiʻi in the 1840s. By the 1860s, the original missionaries’ children were growing into adulthood, and many of them attained power and political influence. These “missionary children,” as they are often called, largely cared more about the health of the economy than the moral or spiritual health of Hawaiian society.

  The moralizing zeal was not dead, however, among Native Hawaiians. Hawaiians trained in mission schools carried forth a campaign against prostitution in the Hawaiian-language press. J.A.K. Halaulani wrote a letter to the newspaper Ka Nupepa Kuokoa in 1865 published under the title, “The going-on of Prostitution of the women of Hilo.” In his letter to the editor, Halaulani described Hilo—the most important whaling port on the island of Hawaiʻi, third to Honolulu and Lāhainā in overall significance—as a community undergoing rapid moral and societal decay. Worst of all, he wrote, was the degeneracy of the Hawaiian ʻohana, the family. Halaulani visited “some houses in Puueo [Puʻuʻeo; a neighborhood of Hilo], for my knowing well the women and their men of the Whaling ship[s]” there. Halaulani felt sorry for the women watching their husbands “going without recompense and shabbily for the oil of the Aukaki sea.” Whaling was hard work, and the men often came home without much to show for it. It was then spring, and the whaling ships were crowding inside Hilo’s harbor, readying to sail north for the summer with fresh labor recruits. Halaulani was in town as a guest “living in the house of a certain native-born” woman. During his stay he “saw the great number of the haole and the native kanaka born of this land.” Halaulani’s comment subtly suggests that it was in this woman’s house that he saw so many haole and Hawaiian men, presumably visiting for sex. “It was just like the women of Honolulu in carrying the license [a prostitution license], like that here I experienced,” he wrote. “What a shame [for] the tender-eyed girls living a dissipated/reckless life.”11

  In the sexual marketplace of Hawaiian port cities, the bodies of returning Arctic whalemen and local Hawaiian women came into contact. This was an economic exchange. Ship captains recognized prostitution as a necessary “liberty” for returning whale workers, and Hawaiian women saw it as an advantageous opportunity to earn income. Sex was an important niche market within the larger Arctic whaling economy. It was also a significant local and bodily experience of whaling and of the Arctic world brought home.

  Hawaiian men also brought home strange behaviors, demonstrating that these boys of the cold seas were no longer the landlubbers they had once been. In the 1850s, some Hawaiians wrote to Hawaiian-language newspapers to report seeing whale hunting taking place off the shores of Hawaiian Islands, a rare sight indeed. J.W. Kuhelemai of Lāhainā reported seeing whales off the coast of Maui butchered by newly skilled Hawaiian whalemen and “Whaler-haole” in 1858. (Another writer referred to the white whalemen as “butcher haole.”) Kuhelemai wrote to the newspaper Ka Hae Hawaii to admit that “our skepticism of the Whale is over[;] the men, the women and children have seen [them], these great fish.” People in Hawaiʻi were impressed by the work of the newly returned whalemen, who demonstrated to their Hawaiian peers “the skill of
the fishing [whaling] people.”12 J.A. Kaelemakule of Hilo also witnessed a whale hunt that year, apparently just off of Hilo Bay. A crowd gathered onshore, and upon the return of the whalemen the crowd exclaimed in cheer: “This work is Amazing.” These stories demonstrate that Hawaiian migrant whalemen returned with labor skills that impressed the local Native community. The men returned not only with new skills, but also with new cultural habits. As evidence, Kuhelemai reported that when a few of the whales were caught offshore of Maui, after the oil was tried, “their meat was eaten by the kanaka.” It was “truly delicious, according to them.” By all accounts, Hawaiians rarely, if ever, consumed whale meat, and so Kuhelemai expressed surprise at the scene. Perhaps these Hawaiian workers had been exposed to the dietary practices of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, and some chose to adopt this northern custom of eating raw whale blubber.13

  While accounts of whale hunting and even whale blubber chow-downs on the shores of Maui and Hawaiʻi were strange occurrences indeed, even stranger was the story recounted by J.M. Kalanipoo, who in 1858 wrote to Ka Hae Hawaii claiming to have come eye-to-eye with a great whale. He was out boating with friends not far offshore, when suddenly five whales appeared. “[We] Jumped up on top of a certain big Whale completely [on] its body, almost perhaps two fathoms [about four yards] up from the surface of the sea.” Teetering atop the back of this massive whale, suddenly the whale began to submerge, and “by its dropping down below with the kick of its tail and the head, it was like the sound of the cannon, with great strength, and at its site of falling down, it was breaking the waves on all sides.”14 Off of Maui and Hawaiʻi Islands, newly returned whale workers, fresh from the Arctic Ocean, brought the body of the whale closer to Hawaiian public consciousness. In the Arctic, these bodily intimacies—men’s bodies and whale bodies—were brought into even closer contact as Hawaiians engaged in a perilous hunt upon the world’s most icy waters.

  BODIES AT WORK

  Is it “an unalterable law in this fishery,” the narrator Ishmael asks in Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, “for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death’s jaws?” Between the worker’s back and the whale’s jaws, Melville highlights whaling as a bodily experience for both predator and prey.15 And for Hawaiian whale workers, the bodily experience began even before they left port, for it was there, as well as on ships, where Euro-American racial ideas about the kanaka body began influencing the work opportunities available to Hawaiian men.

  Melville had suggested some of the racial stereotypes at play in the whaling industry in Moby-Dick. Accompanying Ishmael, Captain Ahab, and the other men of European descent aboard the Pequod were also three harpooners: Queequeg, a Polynesian; Tashtego, a Native American; and, Daggoo, an African. All three men—all men of color, all assumedly closer to savagery than men of lighter skin on the ship—were hired as hunters. This association between so-called primitive men and hunting animals aligned with common Euro-American understandings of non-European peoples in the nineteenth century. Even though Polynesian men such as Queequeg did not traditionally hunt whales, they could still easily be cast in the role of hunter aboard the whaleship. (Spear fishing, common throughout Polynesia, may have led some Euro-American employers to imagine Polynesians in this role.)16

  In reality, Hawaiian men were recruited to serve in various capacities aboard American whaling ships. Many Pacific Islander recruits were employed as waisters; they had no specific duties, just dirty, grunt work for which they received little compensation. Yankee whaling captains praised Pacific Islander men for their “bravery and boat skills,” but recruited them simply because they were “cheap.” Captains also sought out men who were of “good size,” “stout” and “hefty.” Many Hawaiian men’s bodies fit that ideal. But once aboard ship, workers of color were often stripped of their masculine identities. Melville’s Daggoo was an African harpooner, but most men of African ancestry on American ships were employed as cooks and stewards. Traditionally female occupations such as cooking, cleaning, and mending were tasked to people of color. Historian Margaret Creighton suggests that this was one way of reinforcing white men’s masculine identities through the emasculation of the nonwhite “other.” Hawaiian men may have been recruited for their strong, masculine bodies, but as waisters they were often treated as “women.”17

  Perhaps more romantically, Hawaiian men were also hired as lookouts. Some Hawaiians were praised for their supposed keen eyesight, and they were enticed by tobacco bonuses given to the first person onboard ship to spot a whale. Lookouts spent long hours perched high above the main deck of the whaleship. On some ships they nestled into what was called the crow’s-nest; more often they precariously balanced upon the cross-trees, two wooden planks resting beneath their feet. It was a superb vantage for Hawaiian workers to take in the nature of the ship and the churning sea around them. In Melville’s mind, up alone on the perch the whale worker was liable to romantic daydreaming, “lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant unconscious reverie . . . by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity.” Hawaiians were less noted as daydreamers and more often praised for their careful reading of the sea. Some Polynesian lookouts knew that seabirds circling above the ocean might signal a submerged whale about to surface. A geyser of water, seemingly appearing out of nowhere, signaled the presence of a whale coming up for air. An 1883 whaling song published in the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ke Koo o Hawaii, referred to the lukau (lookout) position in the midst of an Arctic whaling scene, the singer cautioning, “You are not to escape/To the vigilance of the lookout.” While the lookout was important work, it was also thought of as a sanctuary from the more dangerous labor tasked to men below. To be a lookout was particularly more desirable than to be a boatsteerer or harpooner, as Ishmael suggests in his query about breaking his back at “death’s jaws.” But Hawaiian boatsteerers often earned a much higher lay than those men engaged in more common tasks as seamen. Furthermore, Hawaiians who took up either boatsteering or harpooning were often eligible for special bonuses. For example, Kemaha, a Hawaiian able seamen on the New Bedford whaleship Alpha in 1866, was offered the following deal, penned next to his name on his shipping article: “One season North and if he performs Boatsteerer’s duty shares 10 dollars for every whale struck by crew.” Two Hawaiian seamen on the New Bedford bark Oriole in 1869 likewise were offered “& $5 for every whale he strikes,” even though the men received seamen’s lays and not the higher lay commonly given to harpooners.18

  When a lookout spotted a whale, the captain immediately sent out whaleboats (small wooden rowboats) to begin chasing the animal. A team of seamen rowed each whaleboat while a mate navigated and the harpooner, iron weapon in hand, readied for the kill. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael wrote how one of the mates continually barked at and threatened the men to row faster as they pursued their prey. He ordered the men to bite down on their knives to mitigate the pain they felt in their backs from rowing so hard. From this grueling labor came Ishmael’s rhetorical question, whether it was “an unalterable law in this fishery . . . for an oarsman to break his own back.” The men on the whaleboat became intimately close to the cetacean body. When their rowboat pulled within striking distance of a whale, it was the harpooner’s responsibility to stand up on the end of the teetering, rickety boat, harpoon in hand, and throw a perfect shot into the whale’s body. The likely result of this javelin toss was that the whale was startled and would immediately begin swimming away, dragging the whaleboat (attached by the harpoon) across the ocean at speeds so fast that New England whalemen called this a “Nantucket sleigh ride.” J.A. Kaelemakule of Hilo, describing a whale chase off of Hawaiʻi in 1858, explained “that’s the nature of the working”: first, the “thrust/push of the harpoon, [then] the striking of the Whale, and [then] the chase out.”19

  During the sleigh ride, the injured whale eventually tired and the men were able to finish the kill. Next they had to tow the dead carcass back t
o the whaling ship, a slow and painful transport that sometimes retraced tens of miles and lasted many hours. In the case of the hunt Kaelemakule witnessed, the whale chase traversed three miles. “The beginning [of the hunt] was after lunch, [and there was] darkness when [the whaleboats finally] arrived [back] at the ship.”20