Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  In addition to coral rock, windblown calcareous sands and a few plants have taken root, but otherwise, for tens of millions of years the only organic input to the construction and maintenance of these islands has come from the seabirds themselves: their bones and their feces. When seabird feces interact with the coral rock beneath the birds’ feet, it thus creates a new type of substrate we call guano. Therefore seabirds, like the red-tailed tropicbird, corporeally made the world in which they lived. They maintained their island’s ecology by bringing fish and squid in their bellies back from distant corners of the ocean, and then translated their digestions into life-giving food for their young, and into island-making guano for the ground beneath them. These birds courted, fought, and were witness to birth, death, and the struggles of survival. They lived in a massive, crowded colony. They lived for scores of years and knew the ocean world in a way that humans did not. Most important of all, they were part of history. Their unique individual lives were infrequently documented, but we do have remnants. We have the story of one red-tailed tropicbird from around 1860, and we have other anecdotes about particular sooty terns, frigatebirds, and other birds. We can hardly know any one bird’s whole biography from birth to death. Yet through human-produced texts and images, as well as through the archeological remains of bones and guano left behind by each seabird on his or her journey, untold stories are just waiting to be revealed.14

  TO THE EQUATOR

  In July 1866, Kailiopio wrote from Baker Island of “periods without food.” Here, “the body is taxed, and the people [that] head straight down the path of no return are very numerous.” Some workers had recently fallen ill; others had died. Life and labor for Hawaiian migrant workers was no different than that experienced by the seabirds. Both seemingly straddled two worlds: the isolated island and the great moana (ocean) beyond. For Kailiopio, Hawaiʻi called out from beyond the horizon, while Baker Island was like a prison. Now that he was on the equator, all he wanted to do was go home.15

  But even getting to the equator in the first place was a challenge. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Hawaiian men experienced the passage. Men from every corner of the Kingdom assembled at Honolulu Harbor to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the guano industry. Perhaps they had heard about ke kuano (guano) in Ka Hae Hawaii, the islands’ Hawaiian-language newspaper weekly, or perhaps they just needed the work, and they waited where firms and agents could find them. At Honolulu, men piled into ships like the Josephine and the Sadoga for their southern journey. They were E. Mookini from Molokaʻi, W. Kaawa from Kauaʻi, C.D. Kahina from Maui, George Kahea from Hawaiʻi, and others.16

  While Hawaiian men were recruited primarily in Honolulu for this industry, in actuality they came from all over the archipelago, and from all across the Pacific World, to work on the guano islands. Some recruiters, like the Honolulu-based firm D.C. Waterman and Company, meticulously calculated the demand and supply of labor in the equatorial islands and shipped men accordingly. In October 1862, William Chisholm, Howland Island agent for the United States Guano Company (based in New York), wrote to D.C. Waterman with news of “seven men which have been on the Island over a year[,] which you will forward to San-francisco at the least possible expense.” At the same time, Chisholm reported that one Captain Penhallow was “expected to go to Honolulu” the month before “& bring a crew of Kanackas down to the Island.” This back and forth transshipment of kanaka bodies involved a myriad of business partners. There was D.C. Waterman in Honolulu, ship captains like Penhallow writing from abroad, local agents such as Mr. Chisholm, and then other firms, such as Flint, Peabody & Company in San Francisco, which in 1864 requested that D.C. Waterman “please engage, say for six months or a year, ten (10) good reliable Kanaka laborers who will stand by Capt Chisholm in any emergency, and send them to Howland’s Island by this ship.” All firms and agents were ostensibly acting on behalf of the best wishes of the distant United States Guano Company. At the same time, the Hawaiian men were like commodities shifting hands across the Pacific World, lining the pockets of various business partners and middlemen.17

  As in whaling, demand for guano labor frequently followed the rhythm of the seasons. All mining ceased during wet weather, as the rain leached guano of its precious nutrients. The firm Glidden & Williams of Boston acknowledged this fact when they wrote in November 1862 to D.C. Waterman advising the company “to take only a small force [to Howland Island], as we should work the Island but slowly during the Winter months, our object being not to land more than one Ship at a time there.” Yet in the same letter, they expressed the need for further recruitment of “Kanackas”: “we would have you send an additional number by this vessel—say 10 or 15 with supplies for them.” And, “in the Spring we shall want an additional number sent.” Glidden & Williams’s correspondence also highlights another aspect of Hawaiian labor recruitment for the guano islands: different islands were owned and operated by different companies, and each company was thus frequently in competition with the others for Hawaiian men. In particular, Glidden & Williams warned D.C. Waterman of the aggressive behavior of G.P. Judd, the Euro-American missionary-doctor and agent for the rival American Guano Company. “Some people think that Mr. Judd has such control over the natives,” the letter warned, “& he being in the interest of the Am Guano Co, would try to prevent their going to work for other parties.”18

  The movement of Hawaiian workers’ bodies was often directed from afar, such as in the case of Captain Penhallow, who from San Francisco frequently requested D.C. Waterman to move Hawaiian workers to and from the guano islands, as well as to and from Hawaiʻi and San Francisco. On March 17, 1862, Penhallow wrote “requesting you to have laborers from Howland’s, if it was necessary to do so, forwarded to San Francisco at as little expense as possible.” The transoceanic transshipment of both guano and men linked Hawaiʻi, California, and the equatorial islands in a new iteration of the triangular trade, a new geographic manifestation of an interwoven Pacific World.19

  It is not clear how Hawaiian workers themselves experienced recruitment. In fact, even middlemen like Captain Penhallow had no idea what Hawaiian workers experienced, writing in late 1862 to D.C. Waterman that he should “engage say twelve Kanaka laborers to work upon said island for a term of time not over one year, or in the usual way for Guano island laborers, with a supply of their customary food,” whatever that was.20 Workers themselves knew that recruitment began with signing a contract. The Honolulu Harbormaster collected copies of these, listing the names of workers shipping for the guano islands and the conditions of their labor. These contracts were written in a set, typewritten language including terminology and details designed for maritime work such as trading and whaling—not exactly the conditions that workers would encounter on the guano islands. Therefore, workers’ contracts were frequently scribbled all over with amendments: phrases scratched out, new words penciled in. (A sample contract is reproduced in the Appendix.)21

  In the 1860s, workers’ contracts were often bilingual. In fact, this was the case with all Hawaiian shipping articles in the 1860s, whether for trading, whaling, or guano work. However, when an employer made amendments to a contract, these amendments were usually made only in English; the Hawaiian language version was not only left unchanged but was often not even completed with the necessary information including the date of the voyage, the terms of service, or even the name of the company the men would be working for. While most Hawaiians were literate, including workers, very few could read English. This meant that when pressured to sign labor contracts, their eyes had to dart back and forth between the amended English and the incomplete, unamended Hawaiian. They could only hope to make sense of it all before affixing an X next to their name on the document, signaling their consent to the contract’s terms.22

  The journey from Honolulu to the islands could last anywhere from one week to as many as twenty days, depending on the winds and weather. The two-thousand-mile voyage was a necessary part of the workers’ exp
erience; indeed, in some cases these men were required to work their way down to the equator, as in the case of the Hawaiian men hired by the Phoenix Islands Guano Company. Their contract noted in the margins that “wages to commence from the day the [ship] ‘Active’ leaves this Harbor[.] The within named men agree to work the said schooner ‘Active’ down [illegible] [to the] Phoenix Group.” The American Guano Company’s policy was the exact opposite, noting in one of their contracts that “the Agent of the American Guano Co . . . will find them [the workers] a free passage from Honolulu to Bakers Island and from thence back to Honolulu after the expiration of a years service on said Island.” In the former case, laborers were required to work as seamen aboard ship and then as miners onshore; in the latter case, the men were only paid for their work onshore, meaning that the many weeks they spent in transit went unpaid.23

  The passage from Hawaiʻi to the equator was not only unpredictable due to wind and weather, but also due to the rough character of the ships they traveled in. The American Guano Company’s Josephine, for example, regularly traveled between Honolulu and the guano islands, ferrying supplies and freshly recruited workers to the islands. But in at least one instance, the Honolulu Harbormaster, an appointee of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, was compelled to write G.P. Judd, the missionary/doctor/guano capitalist, to complain that the Josephine was not fit for sail. “I have been on board the Brig Josephine,” the Harbormaster wrote in 1859, “and find that there are no chain cables on board, and that it is not safe, nor is she ready, to haul away from the wharf.” It is possible that the Josephine had been operating in this manner for some time, ferrying workers to and from the islands without satisfying the Kingdom’s requirements for workers’ safety.24

  Once on the island, guano laborers shared diverse perspectives on work, body, and environment. S.W.B. Kaulainamoku was a loquacious guano laborer from Honolulu who often praised the working conditions. He tended to paint a rosy picture of life and labor in nā ʻāina kūkae manu (the guano lands). On the other hand, Kailiopio wrote with a witty and incisive pen, attempting to warn potential recruits not to sign up for the dangerous guano work. According to both of them, passage to the equator was one thing, but life and labor on a guano island was like being transported into a whole new world.

  THE WORKSCAPE

  One of the first lessons that Hawaiian migrant workers learned upon reaching the guano islands was that the language written in their contracts actually meant nothing. As Kailiopio explained in 1866 from Baker Island: “The work rules of ours are just things that are not true/representative of our working, for the Luna is really able to change the rules” as he sees fit. The luna was the foreman or overseer of the guano work, often a haole who lived on the island with his family. The labor contract was just a “thing,” he explained, while in reality the luna had nearly unlimited power. On the other hand, many luna complained that they were the ones constrained by the demands of the workers. The wife of one Jarvis Island luna complained that the workers were organized and even manipulative. “The workers are all very anxious to go home for a visit,” she wrote, “but will stay for $12.” “They say they will [only] come back by and by.” Her exasperation demonstrates the power that Hawaiian workers wielded through organization, and through real threats of undisciplined mobility.25

  Workers’ demands for $12/month were not unusual. However, contracts in the industry almost always pegged workers’ uku malama (monthly wage) at a lower standard: generally $10/month, not $12. Table 3 shows the range of cash advances (paid to workers at the outset of their labor) and monthly wages in the industry in the mid-1860s. This data covers 581 Hawaiians who worked for various guano companies in the equatorial Pacific Ocean over a five-year period. While almost all men were hired simply as “Laborers,” for an average of $10/month, on some islands these men received as much as $14/month while elsewhere they received as little as $5/month. A few Hawaiian men worked as skilled workers, as smiths and as carpenters, earning higher wages, while at least one Hawaiian was listed as a servant to a luna and his family; this domestic laborer received only $5/month. The data also records at least one Hawaiian woman who labored in the guano work. She was recorded next to her husband, listed simply as “his wife.” She received the exact same advance and wage as her husband did, indicating that their collective employer, the Phoenix Islands Guano Company, saw both husband and wife as equally valuable to the industry. Her presence on the islands was extremely unusual.

  TABLE 3 Data on 581 Hawaiian guano workers, their titles and compensation, from shipping records for the period 1862–1867

  During their time in the guano islands, Hawaiian men lived in communal housing in close proximity to their workspace. A map of Baker Island drawn by the resident luna in 1859 depicts the “Natives house” just south of the railroad track where the laborers daily pushed and pulled railcars filled with bagged guano. The luna’s house, in marked distinction, was located on the opposite side of the tracks at a greater remove from the men’s work. Guano laborer S.W.B. Kaulainamoku described Jarvis Island’s “Natives house” in an 1859 letter. He said that the luna Samuel Wilder and George Wilcox had built the Hawaiian men a new dormitory. It was 54 feet long, 22 feet wide, 10 feet high, and “the interior has been decorated well.” There were two lamps, and a sizeable number of puneʻe (movable day beds) for the men to sleep on. The flooring was simply comprised of “small stones,” but all “inside has been covered and made very beautiful with good mattresses and sleeping cushions.” “The construction of this building was genuinely beautiful, and its entrance is turned to the harbor where the ships dock.” The picture Kaulainamoku paints for Ka Hae Hawaii readers is one of comfort and bodily pleasures. Yet the dormitory’s planned view of the sparkling blue harbor was surely not meant to please the workers’ eyes so much as reveal particular labor cues—the arrival of ships, for example—that defined the syncopated rhythms and dispersed spaces of the men’s workscape. Through the production of workers’ rest and relaxation spaces, luna ensured that their Hawaiian workers could never fully escape from their roles, responsibilities, and identities as human labor. The guano island workscape was omnipresent.26

  The luna not only attempted to control laborers’ work space, but also their work time. The Hawaiian men’s daily rhythms were organized according to the demands of the luna. Often certain quantities of bagged guano had to be prepared within defined measures of time. On Jarvis Island in 1858, the luna measured work time according to the clock. The men’s workday began promptly at 6 or 7am. They were sometimes even forced to dig and haul guano before eating breakfast. The men were frequently pau hana—done with work for the day—by 3 or 4pm, unless needed for irregular tasks such as storing provisions.

  Hawaiian workers would not have necessarily disagreed with their luna’s conception of the space/time parameters of the workscape, but they also knew this place differently and more intimately than their supervisors did. According to Kaulainamoku, on Jarvis Island the Hawaiian men divided into specialized tasks, with various men perfecting different skills, and each experiencing work through a unique space/time perspective. Twelve men were tasked with loading the guano into bags. These men dug the guano out of the ground with shovels, risking not only pulling out their backs but also breathing in the guano dust that their shovels released into the air. Another six men were employed with wheelbarrows to collect the bagged guano, ten bags per man per shift. Sometimes their company-issued shovels and wheelbarrows provided the men with extra hardship; as the wife of one luna reported in 1859, “the wheelbarrows are a failure; too short and easily broken.” These men carted the bags of guano from the mining site to the weighing and inspection station alongside the railroad track. Standing beside the rail were “separate people that hold open the mouths of the bags,” Kaulainamoku wrote, “and other people that hoist the bags into the large cars manned by four people, two on one side, two on the other side.” In sum, Kaulainamoku described a labor force of twenty to thirty men producin
g sixty bags of guano in one shift.27

  Sometimes the nature of the guano islands did not cooperate with the desires of foreign companies for increased extraction and output. William Chisholm frequently wrote to Honolulu from Howland Island with complaints about the conditions on the ground. The “Guano on the north end is getting far from landing & thin at that,” while “the Guano on the South end is getting far from the landing, but got two ships cargo pretty handy in its native bed.” He indicated a widening gap between sites of guano extraction and sites along the coast where ships could safely approach for pickup. Thus the very act of mining the guano shifted the geography of the island, rapidly making some infrastructure obsolete as the center of extraction moved across the island over time. Inputs of rain and dirt further complicated the extraction of guano, making the work hard to impossible. “About two feet of dirt to one of Guano. Rather slow work,” Chisholm wrote in 1863, while the following summer he complained of the “wet weather,” with rain almost every day leaving the “Guano like mush.” As a co-production of human labor and nature’s agency, the guano island’s topography itself was transformed as workers dug out feces and consequently left the island pockmarked with holes like the surface of the moon. This meant that during rainy periods, such as in October 1864, Chisholm could report seeing “2 feet of fresh water on the Island in places,” presumably in the holes that workers themselves had made.28

  The wetness meant that “some days [the workers] do nothing [but] trying to dry.” This meant that during dry seasons Hawaiian men had to work that much harder to make up for missed days and missed shipments. Even when the guano was dry, though, a full bag of the substance usually weighed at least one hundred pounds, and one guano laborer even boasted of carrying a bag in excess of 189 pounds. This meant that hoisting bags of guano into railcars was no easy task. While Kaulainamoku wrote that everyone received a forty-five-minute break after completing their tasks, the daily output of guano in any given day upon Baker and Jarvis Islands during this period suggests that these men had no such time for rest. Some accounts suggest that the men loaded as many as one hundred tons, or in another instance as many as 2,640 bags, of guano each day onto ships anchored offshore. The weight of each bag varied considerably, and the 2,640-bag figure was accomplished by a workforce three to four times larger than the one Kaulainamoku described; even so, Kaulainamoku’s men would have had to repeat the above-described work sequence forty-four times per day in order to process that much guano. These figures strongly suggest that, at least on some workdays, the Hawaiian men worked much harder than Kaulainamoku lets on. Some of the laborers upon Jarvis Island made this clear by referring to their island as Paukeaho, literally meaning “out of breath” or “exhausted.” “Out of breath” defined the workers’ environment as they experienced it: through their work and through their bodies.29