Besides the cold, Arctic wind also presented a frequent hazard to whaling ships and whalemen. The Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Nupepa Kuokoa reported in 1868 on the whaleship Hae Hawaii, destroyed by winds on the North Slope of Alaska. “We have heard, this whaling ship sailing under the Star Flag [ka Hae Hoku, the American Stars and Stripes] has perished, on the day September 23, in the Arctic Ocean,” the newspaper reported. “The reason of this disaster, it was overwhelmed by the storm wind [ka makani ino], that’s the wind that is called here by men, a ‘gale’ wind [makani gale].”38 Gale winds had pushed the Hae Hawaii into the sandy shores of the Seahorse Islands off of the North Slope of Alaska where the ship crashed and was completely destroyed.39
Ice—and its capacity to quickly expand and surround a ship—presented yet another hazard for whale ships and whalemen. Ka Nupepa Kuokoa reported in 1868 of a terrible disaster in the Arctic in which scores of whaleships were caught in rapidly expanding sea ice. “On the day July 12,” reported the paper, “the ships altogether [were] 52, [and] only 51 Whales were obtained by them.” They had caught less than one whale per ship—a very poor catch. But “the Arctic sea [had been] greatly lacking in ice, until the first of July, and the Whaling ships numerously sailed there.” Even so, “not one Whale [was] obtained there, and from that moment on, the ice came, and every one of the Whaling ships received this trouble.” The trouble was ice. The air became suddenly colder, and the ice grew. This was unusual for early July—so unusual that, according to Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, it even shocked the whales: “The ships were greatly afflicted because of the cold, and the Whales were truly frightened by the ice, too.” Perhaps this explains why so few whales were caught that summer. While whales swam to safety underneath the sea ice, the whaleships were surrounded and fastened by it. As the ice continued to expand, it began to tear the ships apart: “of the great majority of the ships, the metals of the bow of the ship were all completely unfastened, and also on one occasion, were completely [torn off] with the wood because of the clinging of the ice.” Arctic whaling vessels were fitted with metal sheeting along the front to help plow through ice, but here the sea ice fought back, ripping the metal sheeting away from the wood of the ship. The ice finally let up, and in the end this was not a major disaster for the fleet. But it was still bad. According to Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, of some ships, “the[ir] rudders were a little bit broken,” and others “were very leaky”; overall, only “four, or only five ships perhaps were [completely] free from misfortune.” This was only a foreshadowing, however, of the misfortunes that would befall the Arctic whaling fleet in the 1870s. Later that year, in late October 1868, Ka Nupepa Kuokoa reported that the ships were returning from the Arctic “almost entirely completely full with oil.” The whalers had experienced “a type of true luck this season . . . , [it was] certainly not like the one that predicted disaster here, [that predicted] they will return lacking.”40
Sometimes the dangers of wind and ice combined to bring peril to whaleships and whalemen in the Arctic. The Hawaiian newspaper Ka Lahui Hawaii reported of such an instance in the summer of 1875. “The bark Arctic, captain Whitney,” was stopped “at the bay of Wamwright [Wainwright Inlet],” on the North Slope of Alaska, when, according to the paper, a “strong sudden burst of wind struck at the western horizon, and that wind pushed on with iciness and strength, and fell upon the ship Arctic.” “After the losing of the schooner’s two big anchors, it [the Arctic] received the problem of unfastening/discharging itself out of the ice,” which it finally did “by means of shattering.” But the bark was not yet free. “The Arctic [was] tossed inside of 11 feet the depth of the sea,” suggesting that although it had freed itself from the ice, the ship also likely grounded in the shallow Wainwright Inlet. So, “the captain worked hard at the removal of the entire cargo, and in the lightening of the ship, [it] unfastened again.”41 Despite these difficulties, the Arctic went on to extract 140 barrels of oil from Arctic whales that summer. That was not much, but it was at least something to make up for all the crew’s hard work.
As Charles Kealoha and his Tahitian friend Kenela lived among the Inupiat of Alaska’s North Slope in 1876–1877, they encountered a place and people that was eerily Hawaiian. Migrant workers from Hawaiʻi had been coming to the Arctic Ocean for over twenty-five years. Just as there was a little bit of the North in Hawaiʻi, so there was a bit of tropical Hawaiʻi resident in Alaska. There was a point on the southeast corner of Wrangell Island in the Chukchi Sea, for example—today it is part of Russia—that an American whaling captain named “Cape Hawaii.” Other Hawaiian terms were incorporated into this Arctic soundscape. Among foreign whalemen, traders, and their indigenous Alaskan and Eurasian trading partners, a pidgin language developed on the coasts that incorporated various Hawaiian loanwords, including pau (“not or none”); hana-hana (“work”); puni-puni (“sexual intercourse,” probably based on the Hawaiian panipani); and wahini (“woman,” based on the Hawaiian wahine). Yupik, Inupiat, and Chukchi peoples speaking Hawaiian was just one of the ways that whale workers helped weave a Hawaiian Pacific World in every corner of this ocean.42
Meanwhile, in July 1877, a rescue ship William H. Allen was on its way to Kealoha and Kenela, but the rescuers met their own match in the waters off of the Diomedes Islands and Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska, in the Bering Strait. Becalmed there, the William H. Allen found itself boarded by local Inupiat traders desirous to barter fox skins for any liquor the brig might offer. The Inupiat were given whisky and then sent on their way. But the next morning they returned desiring even more whisky, even though they had brought nothing this time to exchange for it. The twenty-four-person crew of the brig comprised mostly Hawaiians who the captain described as “a peaceable lot to get along with, unless something turns up to make them mad.” Something did turn up: a crew of drunken Native Alaskans. Charles Brower wrote years later of the event: “When [Captain] Gilley refused them [the Inupiat], they got ugly, shoving the crew around, thinking that they were in their power.” “The [Hawaiian] crew stood the shoving around for a long time, all the time trying to get their anchor and get away from the drunken Eskimo [Inupiat]. Things went from bad to worse, the Eskimo getting worse all the time. At last the mate struck one of them[.] Another at once drew his knife stabbing the mate, killing instantly.” From this a melee ensued, with Hawaiian crewmembers inflicting great violence upon the inebriated Inupiat traders. “The crew went crazy,” Brower wrote, “with axes, spades, or anything they could lay their hands on. They started for the drunken natives, driving those still uninjured and the wounded ones forward under the forecastle head[.] From there they pulled them out with boathooks[,] knocked them over the head with anything they could get their hands on, throwing the bodies into the boat along side, then turned the boat adrift.”43
This account of Hawaiian migrant workers exacting horrific violence against local indigenous people aboard the William H. Allen is shocking. But the account must be read carefully. It reflects the perspective of one man, the haole Charles Brower, who heard the story from the lips of the captain of the William H. Allen but did not pen the tale until nearly ten years later. A Hawaiian crewmember on the William H. Allen, J. Polapola, actually wrote about this violent encounter, as well. By his own admission, he took part in the violence. His narrative offers a Native Hawaiian perspective on Hawaiian–Inupiat violence, unbiased by Euro-American conceptions of Hawaiian men as—in Brower’s words—“a peaceable lot to get along with, unless something turns up to make them mad,” or as a group that “went crazy” upon the poor Inupiat with uncontrolled violence. In his narrative, Polapola noted that the Inupiat were the ones who started the conflict. The “Nakulu [Inupiat] chief fiercely grabbed the Captain by the throat.” They started fighting over rum, Polapola wrote. It was when “[the chief] was roughly attempting to grab the Captain’s gun, and the same was happening to the ship’s mate,” that Polapola decided to act. Holding a “large piece of wood in my right hand,” he wrote, “I flung the wood at the
neck of the chief’s younger brother and he fell down dead upon the deck.” After that, fighting broke out between the Hawaiians and the Native Alaskans, and “on deck, the Hawaiians, along with the Nakulu were dropping all over.” Polapola described poignantly the death of a Hawaiian crewmember by an Inupiat fighter’s sword. As the Hawaiian named Honuailealea fell, he exclaimed “e! make au” (“Alas! I have been killed!”).44
The most violent moment in Brower’s narrative is related in nearly the exact same language by Polapola. This concerns the moment when those remaining Inupiat who had survived the melee were caught, one by one, “with the boat hook, and pulled out,” as Polapola phrased it. “They were all shot with pistols and thrown overboard into the sea.” Those that survived the slaughter threw themselves over the edge of the ship and into the ocean. But as Polapola noted, these men’s bodies were nothing like Hawaiian men’s bodies: “there was no trace of their bodies because they are a people who do not know how to swim.”45
In Polapola’s narrative, the crew of the William H. Allen had engaged in “battle” against indigenous Alaskans and the Hawaiians were “victorious.” There was also another battle that Hawaiian whalemen were fighting. This was against a racist, emasculating Euro-American discourse that held that Hawaiian bodies were unfit for work in cold climates. As early as the 1830s, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., who was a friend to many Hawaiian migrant workers in Mexican California, wrote that Hawaiians are “good hands in warm weather,” but “in high latitudes . . . they are useless in cold weather.” This narrative of Hawaiians’ presumed unfitness for the cold was a product of Euro-American discourse on race and labor. Meanwhile, it was repeated over and over again in the nineteenth century, as when U.S. Navy commodore Henry Erben, writing from Honolulu in 1874–1875, noted that “the Kanakas (natives) are fast dying out—and it is estimated that within 40 years they will cease to exist”—adding that “they are improvident, lazy and unreliable, doing work only upon the water”—yet, he admitted that “as whalemen they stood the rigors of an Arctic winter, in season, better than the white-men—though they are natives of the tropics.” This came as somewhat of a surprise to Erben, who like most Euro-Americans in the nineteenth century believed that Hawaiian men’s usefulness was limited to tropical and marine environments that they were inherently fit for. But in the Arctic, Hawaiian whalemen proved their manly determination and perseverance in the face of supposedly natural inabilities, forcing Erben to reconfigure his perceptions regarding Hawaiian men’s bodies. Later, in January 1875, Erben’s comments were recycled into an official “Report concerning Honolulu” for the U.S. Navy. In this report he stated that “this [Honolulu] is the principal depot for whalers in the Pacific; here they leave their oil and bone for shipment, and find Kanakas to man their ships; and though born in the tropics, these Kanakas have been found to stand the cold of the arctic regions much better than white men from cold climates.” Thus, in the mid-1870s, it was entered into the official record of the U.S. government that Hawaiian men were actually more fit for work in Arctic environments than anyone had previously allowed.46
In this sense, Polapola’s account of Hawaiian heroics in battle against Alaska Natives echoed the manliness-discourse of both Henry Erben’s naval account of the 1870s as well as Charles Kealoha’s story of his incredible survival among the Inupiat in 1876–1877. For Erben, Hawaiian men’s bodies were supposed to be limited by their tropicality. Hawaiian labor was well suited for maritime work, especially in tropical waters, but it was not fit for the cold, icy, windy Arctic. However, by the 1870s, Hawaiian men had proved Erben wrong and he was forced to admit that Hawaiian men’s bodies withstood the hardships of the Arctic Ocean better than most Euro-American men’s bodies. Similarly, Charles Kealoha sought to challenge the Euro-American discourse of Hawaiian men’s fitness by sharing his own personal tale of survival among the Inupiat of Alaska’s North Slope. For Hawaiian readers back home, Kealoha’s narrative evoked a Hawaiian masculinity reclaimed through the whale worker’s engagement in physically demanding and risk-taking labor. Furthermore, J. Polapola’s story of saving his captain’s life through violence, of a Hawaiian people “victorious” in battle against another “other” was about reclaiming Hawaiian masculinity through work, and proving once again that there was no place on Earth where Hawaiian men could not succeed in demonstrating strength, bravery, and manliness.
Kealoha’s and Polapola’s stories from the Arctic Ocean were the Hawaiian whale workers’ swan song. The discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859, joined with the global economic disruptions of the American Civil War (1861–1865), led to a rapid decrease in the market value of whale products in the 1860s. According to economic historian Theodore Morgan, the average price of whale oil began a steady decline in 1864, while sperm oil followed suit in 1866.47 Meanwhile, the U.S. government appropriated scores of commercial whaleships and sunk them to barricade northern ports. Arctic whalers, too, fell prey to a far-reaching Confederate navy. At least 34, but perhaps as many as 46, American whaleships were destroyed by Confederate naval vessels over the course of the war. Hawaiian whale workers were taken hostage in this conflict; some of them ended up stranded in San Francisco, and stories and songs of the infamous Kenedoa (the Confederate war ship Shenandoah) entered Hawaiian diasporic print and oral cultures.48 “The number of whaling ships is presently very quickly diminishing,” wrote the newspaper Ka Hae Hawaii in 1861. “The number that arrive now are only a fraction. Concerning the lack of growth the basis of this perhaps are the whales in the northern ocean.”49 Indeed, Arctic whales were overhunted in the 1850s and 1860s, so much so that by the time of Kealoha’s misadventure in the 1870s, overfishing in the industry had likely reduced the Arctic bowhead population to just one-third of what it had been three decades earlier in 1848. For indigenous Arctic peoples who relied on whale meat and blubber as a source of food, the ravages of this industry resulted in severe famines in northern Alaska in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The Arctic whaling industry was collapsing upon itself.50
When Kealoha sailed into the Arctic in 1876, he was, as it turns out, engaging in the last gasps of what was once the most significant extractive industry in the Hawaiian Pacific World. Arctic whaling was a bodily experience for Hawaiian workers. Kealoha felt it in the cold air getting underneath his skin. Hawaiian men also experienced it when employers marked their bodies as tropical, and when newspapers back home wrote of them as the boys of the cold seas, those men who rampaged through the city streets, patronizing brothels and taverns. Hawaiian workers experienced the whale in bodily ways, too. They chased it, looked deep into its jaws, rolled on top of it, butchered it, fried it, ate it. Work itself encompassed bodily toil: biting down on one’s knife or getting splashed with burning whale oil. As imagined bodies, the Arctic environment presented a battleground of ideas about the fitness of Hawaiian men’s bodies for work in these cold climates. Hawaiian workers understood this as a battle over both gender and race, and in this battle they were victorious, as symbolized by the workers’ “victory” over the violent Inupiat, over the death-defying weather, and over the expectations of Hawaiians and haole alike who put them down and imagined them as unable to succeed. But the Arctic was only one harsh environment among many that tested Hawaiian workers’ resolve. Barren, isolated islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean were another.
FOUR
Kailiopio and the Tropicbird
LIFE AND LABOR ON A GUANO ISLAND
J.M. KAILIOPIO HAD COME FROM HAWAIʻI, nearly two thousand miles away, to a desolate island along the equator to labor for just “one ten dollar bill perhaps of G.P. Judd,” a Euro-American missionary doctor and capitalist who had invested in the global guano industry. After a year of hard labor on Baker Island, Kailiopio wrote home to the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Nupepa Kuokoa in 1866 that “my humble conscience has drifted to scatter away to these places of little specks of scattered dust”—the latter word (lepo) also meaning “feces,” an apt descriptor for this
malodorous place. He dreamed of the day when he could return to “live there [where] the sun rises at Haehae [Haʻehaʻe], and greatly rises away to the setting of the sun at the horizon of Lehua,” tracing the rise and fall of the sun from the eastern shore of Hawaiʻi to the archipelago’s western terminus at ocean’s edge. Kailiopio missed home.1
Approximately five years earlier, a red-tailed tropicbird was dragged to the shore of nearby Howland Island and placed in captivity aboard a nearby ship. This vessel then traveled over thirty miles to Baker Island, the same place where Kailiopio later languished. One morning, members of the ship’s crew held down the tropicbird and tied a small piece of cloth around its ankle. Then they set it free. The red-tailed tropicbird flew back all the way to Howland Island, returning to its nest. Later, guano workers discovered it and the cloth was removed and delivered to the island’s luna (overseer). The red-tailed tropicbird would be employed like this again, “as occasion demanded, [bringing] back messages, proving useful in the absence of other means of communication.”2
Kailiopio and the tropicbird both worked for the global guano industry. The tropicbird was employed by a guano company to ferry messages back and forth between islands. Kailiopio was employed by a similar company to dig, bag, and haul fossilized bird droppings. This intersection of human and avian work experiences suggests that these places were what historian Thomas Andrews calls a workscape. A workscape is “not just an essentially static scene or setting neatly contained within borders,” he writes, “but a constellation of unruly and ever-unfolding relationships—not simply land, but also air and water, bodies and organisms, as well as the language people use to understand the world, and the lens of culture through which they make sense of and act on their surroundings.” On nineteenth-century guano islands, interdependent relationships between human and avian environments were conditioned by the fact that seabirds outnumbered humans by the millions. Seabirds like the working tropicbird were arguably more influential in shaping this workscape than Kailiopio and his comrades’ human labor. It was a lopsided relationship. This was an environment in which bountiful birds forced hundreds of Hawaiian workers to accept the messy, nonlinear bounds between their work and the nature inside and all around them.3
Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World Page 14