Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  It takes a volcanic mountain like those underpinning Baker and Jarvis Islands something like sixty to seventy million years to rise and fall, to become nothing but a speck of coral sand where once rose a great mountain spewing molten lava. Some seabird species have existed in their current anatomical form in the Pacific, also, for sixty to seventy million years. Islands, atolls, and seabirds evolved for millions of years over a slowly shifting oceanscape. This is a place where seabirds learned to be seabirds in the context of the space/time-world that lava, coral, wind, waves, underwater mountains, fish, and squid made. Just like Andrews’s concept of the workscape as more than a fixed, static backdrop for human behavior, but rather “a place shaped by the interplay of human labor and natural processes,” the seabirds’ world was similarly co-constructed. There were never any fixed environments here in the longue durée of seabird history. No cut-out stage set appeared when the curtain rose sixty to seventy million years ago and the first seabirds made their grand entrance. Rather, seabirds made this world as it made them.

  Then, very suddenly in the past five thousand years, countless communities of nesting seabirds made contact with humans for the first time. Yet it was not until the nineteenth century that remote Baker, Jarvis, and Howland Islands became the site of sustained and recorded encounters between seabirds and humans. The reports from Hawaiian migrant workers living and laboring on these islands in the 1850s and 1860s thus is a window into an encounter that had occurred many times over, across many millennia, on so many islands, when humans and seabirds first met.45

  Kailiopio and the tropicbird co-inhabited and co-produced the guano islands as a mid-nineteenth-century Pacific Ocean workscape. In their own microcosmic worlds, they engaged in parallel forms of work, feeding, play, and rest. They both worked to feed themselves and their loved ones; the only difference was that Kailiopio worked for a wage which he then hoped to cash in for material rewards back home—if he ever made it back to Hawaiʻi. Both men and birds spent the majority of their time somewhere else. Baker, Jarvis, and Howland Islands were pit stops in their life journeys: a safe place to raise a chick but a rather dangerous place to make a buck. Migrant workers and migratory seabirds both contributed to this world. Seabird bodies made the ground underneath their feet, and they shaped the ecology of these remote islands. Workers remade the ground by digging it up. They remade the air by throwing guano dust into the wind. They remade the water through the construction of wharfs and the destruction of sunken ships. Both man and bird knew this world through their bodies, through work, and through the ecological relationships they formed with the greater world around them. Both man and bird connected these “little specks of scattered dust” in the middle of the world’s largest ocean to the global capitalist economy swirling around them: an economy that they felt at the bodily level and that they shaped through their own actions. Some Hawaiian guano miners even participated in one of the world’s most famous capitalist bonanzas—one of the most famous mining episodes in world history: the California Gold Rush.

  FIVE

  Nahoa’s Tears

  GOLD, DREAMS, AND DIASPORA IN CALIFORNIA

  HENRY NAHOA, A YOUNG MAN, possibly eighteen years old, wrote a letter to his family in Hawaiʻi. They lived on the island of Maui. He lived in a mining camp in the Sierra foothills of California. Nahoa had been on this side of the ocean for eight long years, and not a single letter had arrived from home. Here is “a little clarifying thought of mine for my people on the body/self,” he wrote in his letter, which was published in the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Hae Hawaii. “Perhaps [they] are living, perhaps not, this is the eighth year of my living in California here, [I have] not received one letter, I am setting out letter[s] for them, [they] have perhaps arrived perhaps not, I think death has transpired.” Nahoa wrote these words on May 24, 1858. He sent this letter out across the great ocean with a bundle of others, via steamship post, thousands of miles west to Hawaiʻi. Approximately six weeks later, Ka Hae Hawaii printed Nahoa’s letter along with those of fellow California compatriots S. Wahaulaula, B.E. Kamae, and Iosepa Opunui.1

  “Here are the names of them,” Nahoa continued, calling out each of his family members in turn. “Maau my sister, her place of living is at Lahaina, Maikai a woman, their place of living, [is] Kapahumanamana, Kaiwi my father, his place of living is Oloalu, perhaps [he] is living perhaps not, would that you are all living.” Why had they not written to Nahoa in eight long years? He finished his letter, “Aloha with tears, it is I here Nahoa your son, your brother, they fail to recognize, it is I here in California, here at Irish Creek.” Nahoa’s tears were not alone. Each letter in that bundle sent off to Ka Hae Hawaii was soaked with migrant workers’ aloha me ka waimaka (aloha with tears). B.E. Kamae, after calling on his friends and family in Hawaiʻi to “pray with determination to God to reach him to release this heavy baggage from us,” ended his letter: “Oia ka manao aloha me ka waimaka pu kekahi [That’s the loving thoughts with tears of someone].” S. Wahaulaula, after calling out his two older brothers in Honolulu for never writing to him in California, ended his letter: “Owau no o ko olua pokii aloha me ka waimaka [It is I your younger brother[,] aloha with tears].” And Iosepa Opunui, right before listing the names of the recently deceased, wrote: “A he nui no hoi ko’u aloha ia lakou me ka waimaka [Our aloha for them with tears is extremely great].”2

  In this middle ground between isolation and transoceanic connection—where workers cried over the lack of attention from family members back home in Hawaiʻi, yet their written words traveled thousands of miles across a sprawling diaspora connected through the reading, writing, and oral transmission of nū hou (news)—Hawaiian migrant workers experienced California as both a land of opportunity and a place of loneliness and suffering. Love (aloha) and tears (waimaka) were the twin poles of the Hawaiian migrant workers’ experience.

  Hawaiians interfaced with California amid ever-shifting terrains and temporalities of work, exploitation, and opportunity. Some Hawaiians cured cattle hides on a beach near San Diego, while others “pacified” Native Americans in the interior. Some worked as boatmen and stevedores in San Francisco, while others skinned sea otters in the Channel Islands. Some mined for gold as independent and collective entrepreneurs, while others worked for wages in gold mining’s increasingly industrial mode of production. Some fled for the cities, or stayed put in cities, panhandling, prostituting, shoe shining, rabble-rousing. Some lived in jails and in prisons, others on boats; some lived in tents; others, homeless, lived on the streets. Some Hawaiians worked in factories, while others worked on farms. Spatially, Hawaiian migrants lived and labored all across California, from the shores to the Sierras. Temporally, they similarly straddled many boundaries. Hawaiians came to California under Spanish conquest, then Mexican rule, then U.S. occupation. Some came for gold; most likely came and stayed for something else. Most workers’ lives transcend simple classifications. These were not just gold miners. They were first and foremost workers—laborers in a global capitalist economy. But also, many Hawaiians transitioned from a wage-working proletariat into something more like a lumpenproletariat in California’s post–Gold Rush economy. Out of work, homeless, begging on the streets, the deindustrialization of California in the 1850s and 1860s was mirrored in the deindustrialization of Hawaiian men’s bodies. They became surplus labor, no longer necessary, trapped in a cycle of poverty, dislocation, and abandonment. This is the story, then, of not only how hundreds of Hawaiians came to California and made this place a diasporic home, but also how a global capitalist economy shaped the geographies, temporalities, and livelihoods of an ever-precarious Hawaiian migrant workforce.3

  WORKING THE COASTLINE

  Hawaiian-Californian connections long predate the Gold Rush. Historian David Igler has shown that between the years 1786 and 1848, 953 foreign vessels visited California, and of those ships, 42 percent also alighted in Hawaiʻi. Ecological relationships piggybacked on these economic connections. The first cows to
arrive in Hawaiʻi—the origins of a ranching economy that still thrives today—came from Spanish California in the 1790s. The first mosquitoes came on a whaling ship from San Blas, Mexico, in the 1820s. Even measles is said to have come to Hawaiʻi from Mazatlán, Mexico, on an American naval ship during the Mexican-American War. To see things the other way around, an aliʻi from the island of Niʻihau visited the port city of San Blas as early as 1789; he was likely the first Hawaiian to visit Latin America. Apparently his hosts tried to convert him to Catholicism, but he refused. In the early 1800s, scores of Hawaiian sailors worked on ships off of California’s shores, hunting sea otter furs, harvesting sealskins, and conducting trade with local villages. In 1806, several Hawaiian sailors deserted ship and fled into the mountains above San Buenaventura mission. The following year, a sixty-year-old Hawaiian performed traditional burial rites for a young Hawaiian comrade on the island of Cerros [Cedros] off of Baja California. And on July 4, 1808, Hawaiian workers in Baja California helped their American captain celebrate U.S. independence by roasting a pig “bak’d in the ground in the Sandwich Island manner” on the Benito Islands [Islas San Benito]. Hawaiians brought their culture, and their labor, to Spanish California.4

  Thirteen years later, Mexico declared its independence from Spain. In the decades that followed, Hawaiians were everywhere in Mexican Alta California. They worked on the shores of San Diego, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco Bay; they labored in the Channel Islands; they interacted with Catholic missions; they helped pioneer and found a major settlement in the interior. One of the best sources for this period comes from Richard Henry Dana, Jr. who detailed the lives of several Hawaiians living on a beach near San Diego in the mid-1830s in his book Two Years Before the Mast.

  FIGURE 13. William H. Meyers, Hide Houses at San Diego, California, c. 1841–44. From William H. Meyers, Journal of a Cruise to California and the Sandwich Islands in the United States Sloop-of-War Cyane, 1841–1844 (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1955). Image #94562d, New-York Historical Society. Photography © New-York Historical Society.

  There was “Mr. Mannini,” who explained to the captain of the American brig Pilgrim in broken English how he and his fellow men felt about wage work. “Aole! Aole make makou i ka hana. Now, got plenty money; no good, work. Mamule, money pau—all gone. Ah! Very good, work!—maikai, hana nui!” Instead of working, Mr. Mannini said, “Oh, we play cards, get drunk, smoke—do anything we’re a mind to.” When their money is pau (all gone), “then Kanaka work plenty.” As many as twenty Hawaiians shared the beach with Mr. Mannini. They squatted in an abandoned brick bread oven. They were part of a surprisingly large floating population of Hawaiian migrant workers living up and down the coast of Alta California in the Mexican period. Before reaching San Diego, Dana had reported Hawaiian men working onshore near both the settlements of Monterey and Santa Barbara. He referred to the Santa Barbara settlement as a “little dark-looking town, a mile from the beach; and not a sound to be heard, or anything to be seen, but Sandwich Islanders, hides, and tallow-bags.” Dana noted that the Hawaiian language was common on this shore, and he himself was learning bits and pieces “of the Sandwich island tongue which is singular enough.”5

  Dana met and befriended other Hawaiian workers on the beach near San Diego. One was named Tom Davis. He could read and write, and spoke good English. He had also previously visited the United States. He took the name Tom Davis because it was the name of a sea captain, his first Euro-American employer. Dana also met Hope, whose name originated with the name of a vessel he had previously served on. For Tom Davis and Hope and other Hawaiian men in California, personal work histories were inscribed in their names. English-language names may have signified a certain pride in one’s cosmopolitanism, but they also functioned as a curriculum vitae. Hope could not read or write, yet he asked questions about Boston often, demonstrating a knowledge of distant interconnected nodes of the global economy. Dana was disturbed when, after having left San Diego for a few months, he returned to find Hope lying in the abandoned bread oven, sickened by disease. He pleaded with the captain of the Pilgrim to visit the dying Hawaiian, saying “but he has worked four years for our vessels, and has been in the employ of our owners, both on shore and aboard.” The captain replied, “Oh! He be d—d!” If Hope ever saw Hawaiʻi again, or if he died in the abandoned brick oven, we do not know.6

  The work available to Mr. Mannini, Tom Davis, and Hope was largely in processing cattle hides and tallow. These men found themselves in the middle of Alta California’s most profitable pre–Gold Rush industry, the hide and tallow trade. Following colonization of Alta California in the 1770s, Spanish authorities had established missions along the coast, and imported cattle to “civilize” the native Indians by teaching them the art of animal husbandry. It was only after Mexican Independence, however, that the hide and tallow trade really took off as Mexican authorities privatized former mission lands and legalized foreign trade along the coastline.7 Cattle hides were in great demand among early nineteenth-century United States consumers. California cow skins became Boston men’s shoes and the belting inside New England factories. There was an ironic circularity to this transformation of cow skin, as Dana noted, for “many of them, very probably, in the end, [were] brought back again to California in the shape of shoes, and worn out in pursuit of other bullocks, or in the curing of other hides.” Tallow, on the other hand, provided raw material for candle production, for illuminating American homes (until whale oil took precedence). It was this global trade in hides and tallow that put Alta California in the U.S. orbit, as Yankee ships dominated Alta California’s economy, and California resources became integral to the United States’ Industrial Revolution. It was also at this time that California became part of the Hawaiian Pacific World, for the hide and tallow trade amplified the movement of Hawaiians across the ocean.8

  Hawaiian workers performed the maritime aspects of this trade, tasks that landlubbing white men were either unable or unwilling to do. “They are complete water-dogs,” Dana remarked of the Hawaiians, “and therefore very good in boating. It is for this reason that there are so many of them on the coast of California; they being very good hands in the surf.” The most important task of the Hawaiians was to transport processed cattle hides and bags of tallow from the beach to ships waiting offshore, which meant that they carried hides one or two at a time upon their heads as they waded through surf. They wore “thick woolen caps” to protect their heads from the hides’ rough textures. They carried these products as high above their heads as possible to avoid soaking them. It was a delicate task and one that Dana and other Euro-Americans believed suited the men’s nature as “amphibious” labor.9

  Yet despite being typecast for maritime work, these men’s experiences of labor on the beach—on terra firma—were just as significant as their work in the surf. In 1835 Dana and four Hawaiian men shared the responsibility of curing cattle hides. Their work was both time consuming and body punishing. From the California interior, cattle hides came to the shore, sometimes drawn by mule or oxcart, sometimes flung by the strength of men who chucked them off of towering precipices onto the beach. The men got to work puncturing holes on either side of the hide so that the skin could be suspended above the sand on sticks to dry in the sunshine (and get “as stiff as boards”). Once dry, they were staked near the shore at low tide so that incoming seawater could soak them. They processed one hundred and fifty hides a day. After soaking for forty-eight hours, the men then rolled up the hides and soaked them in vats of brine (seawater plus extra salt) for another forty-eight hours. Then the men stretched and staked the hides to dry in the sun again for twenty-four hours. Stretched like this, they then went to work with knives cutting off the “bad” parts—a laborious task because “the Spaniards are very careless in skinning their cattle.” They had to completely cut and shave the skins before noon because as the sun rose the hides became too stiff to clean. They spent their afternoons using scrapers to remove grease from the
hides. Dana tells us that the sun’s rays drew the grease right out. Following more days of drying, the men then staked and beat the hides with flails in the open air to remove dust. Then, at last, the hides were ready for storage and transport. In all these ways, Hawaiian men came to know nature through work. They learned about cattle through the animals’ skin, through the grease that seeped out of it, through the smell and texture of bovine bodies. The Hawaiian men also learned about Californian nature through their experiences of the workscape: the sun, surf, wind, and waves, and the characteristics of an unusual life lived out in an abandoned brick bread oven on a California beach.10

  FIGURE 14. E. Boyd Smith, Hide Droghing, 1911. From Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Two Years Before the Mast (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911). Courtesy, Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.