Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  But the Hawaiians in Vernon could not completely avoid capitalist intervention in their lives. On April 4, 1868, Kapu wrote to Ka Nupepa Kuokoa to complain about the tax system in California. In precapitalist Hawaiʻi, access to common lands and waters were controlled by land managers known as konohiki who acted as middlemen between the makaʻāinana (commoners who grew food and caught fish) and the aliʻi (the ruling class who lived off of makaʻāinana labor). California, Kapu wrote, had its own konohiki. When you fish the rivers, he explained, you must withhold some fish “for the Konohiki, because that side and this side of the entire River is held by haole.” In the early days of the Gold Rush, rivers were common property. But, rapidly, mining claims were extended to cover the mineral resources within river and streambeds, and eventually even the water flowing through these beds was claimed. Kapu had perhaps expected twenty-five miles north of Sacramento that Hawaiians could find a fishing commons to live by, but instead he found that every riverbank was the private property of white men.59

  Kapu’s access to fish was not only threatened by the enclosure of this riparian commons, but also by long-term ecological transformations in the Sacramento River. Decades of mining upstream had left the Sacramento River watershed clogged with sediment and mining sludge. As a result, several fish species were extirpated from the Sacramento, including the once-numerous salmon. By the 1870s decades of mining had, according to one historian, “rendered the American and Feather tributaries [of the Sacramento] all but useless for salmon production.” Apparently, Hawaiian fishermen were still catching pike and sturgeon, but by the 1870s their commons, both in the river and on the lands surrounding it, was fast disappearing.60

  Between 1868 and 1870, more Hawaiians—including Nahoa—arrived at Vernon. The small community was thriving, and John Kapu was extending his business interests beyond fishing. As early as the summer of 1872, some Hawaiians began to grow opium in Sutter County. A Sacramento Daily Union article reported a “Kanaka company” raising the poppy at Butte slough in the northern part of Sutter County. John Kapu also began opium production in Vernon. In June 1873, the Daily Alta California reported that Kapu owned a ranch near Vernon on which he was growing “two acres of opium poppies.” The paper reported the climate in Sutter County was favorable for opium production and that the Hawaiian farmer would likely harvest a marketable product. Meanwhile, fishing continued at Vernon, and some Hawaiian men may have worked on the river boats plying up and down the Sacramento. Even as the community dwindled in the 1870s, in 1877, a California newspaper reported “a colony” of “Kanaka fishermen . . . [who] ply net and line” in the Sacramento River near Vernon, but the paper only mentioned these men to substantiate a local rumor accusing the Hawaiians of having quietly buried a drowned man’s corpse on “Wilcox’s Island.” As much as the Hawaiians in Vernon desired to live apart from the white man’s ways, they were still seen as transgressors by the Euro-American community. By 1880, only fifteen Hawaiians continued to fish at Vernon. They lived among four separate residences, and over half of them were under the age of eighteen, six of whom were not even born in Hawaiʻi; they were American-born Hawaiians. Vernon had become a community in transition, where stories of old Hawaiʻi, of trans-Pacific migrations and diaspora, and of a generation of hard work in the gold mines were the stuff of memory rather than lived experience.61

  Henry Nahoa never lived to see Hawaiʻi again. After moving to Vernon, he did, however, do something quite extraordinary. On September 3, 1871, he traveled to the Sacramento County courthouse with fellow Hawaiian Abel Mapuowai, also of Vernon, to become a naturalized citizen of the United States. He was not alone. On September 1, six Hawaiian men, including John Kapu, became naturalized, and on September 4, five more Hawaiian men were naturalized, making thirteen new Hawaiian-Americans in all. One wonders what motivated these men to become U.S. citizens. Were they renouncing their status as Hawaiians? Were they hoping to gain greater opportunities as Americans? It is strange to consider these men choosing to become American citizens, when just a generation later, following U.S. annexation, tens of thousands of Hawaiian men and women became U.S. citizens against their will. But men such as Henry Nahoa had lived nearly their entire adult lives in the United States. They had come to California as immigrants just as Euro-Americans had come following the Mexican-American War. They had worked alongside people of all races in the mines, and staked their claims to Californian soil as much as any other man. Perhaps it was their “color” that persuaded them to become citizens. They lived in a California in the 1870s increasingly dominated by discourses of race and racism. They had witnessed African-Americans granted full citizenship following the U.S. Civil War, and yet they simultaneously saw white working-class men and women organize vehemently, and sometimes violently, against Chinese workers. Their own racial status was confused at best. Census enumerators in 1870 reported most Hawaiians in California as “white” (53 percent) but others were listed as “black” (19 percent), “mulatto” (4 percent), and “Indian” (1 percent), and even at times they were assigned made-up categories not officially recognized by the census, such as “Colored” (12 percent), “P” (for Polynesian?) (7 percent), and “K” (for Kanaka?) (3 percent). Nahoa and his fellow fishermen were listed as “black” in the 1870 census. As a “black” man in race-sensitive California, did Nahoa seek citizenship to overcome racial oppression?62

  FIGURE 17. Portrait of Jennie Mahuka, Ellen Mahuka, and Serrah Keaala, Vernon, California, c. 1880. [SC30090] MSS 160 Dorothy M. Hill Collection, Meriam Library Special Collections, California State University, Chico.

  Nahoa was not an American for long before he suffered a debilitating injury. He was admitted to the Sacramento County hospital on June 3, 1873. He gave his name as “Henry,” and told the hospital “that he [had] hurt his arm by being thrown from a horse some months since, and that he worked at the Lambard Mills.” Whether his injury was work-related—related to a job at the Lambard Flour Mills in downtown Sacramento, a line of work not at all revealed by the title “fisherman” in the U.S. census—is unknown. But after injuring his arm, Nahoa had apparently failed to seek treatment until June. The doctors were forced to amputate his arm “about three inches from the shoulder joint.”

  Nahoa never left Sacramento County hospital. He spent eight days without an arm and then died of pyemia on June 11, 1873.63

  Henry Nahoa’s life story offers a window into a new history of California as an essential node in the nineteenth-century Hawaiian Pacific World. Hawaiians came to California as early as the late eighteenth century and kept coming throughout the nineteenth century. Hawaiians in the Mexican era took on Hispanicized names, worked on the margins of the cattle industry, hunted sea otters, married locals, and some even converted to Catholicism. Nahoa came to California as a young boy, probably just ten years old. He passed through San Francisco in 1850, which just years earlier had been a fairly Hawaiianized city: migrant Hawaiians served as stevedores and as domestic laborers; some even owned land. Later, as San Francisco continued to grow into a major Pacific metropolis, Hawaiians were more likely to be found begging in the streets or languishing in prisons. Those who never made it home to Hawaiʻi became part of California’s emerging lumpenproletariat—a permanent underclass of surplus labor, deindustrialized bodies. Nahoa himself made the move from mountainous mining to urban industrial labor. He was, at times, evicted from his dwellings, and he worked for a time as a fisherman, escaping from the capitalist economy in search of the last vestiges of California’s rural commons. Hawaiians did it all. They were landowners and wage laborers; they were unemployed and homeless; they were farmers and fishermen; some went off to live with Native American families, and some became U.S. citizens.

  The declining work opportunities available to Hawaiian men in California mirrored a process playing out all across the Pacific World in the 1860s and 1870s. Extractive industries such as gold mining, guano mining, and whaling were all fast disappearing. For nearly a century, the Kingdom of
Hawaiʻi had been a net exporter of human labor. Now the tides were turning. In place of a transpacific extractive economy dependent on Hawaiian migrant labor, a new mode of production was emerging: the monocultural plantation complex. In Hawaiʻi, all eyes turned toward sugar. Hawaiian workers were encouraged to come home and work in the cane fields. They would ultimately find that their labor was no longer needed there, as well.

  SIX

  Beckwith’s Pilikia

  “KANAKAS” AND “COOLIES” ON HAIKU PLANTATION

  “WE ARE LIKELY TO BE VERY PILIKIA [troubled] for want of sufficient cattle,” George Beckwith wrote to a company agent on April 5, 1865. But cows were not his only problem. One year later he wrote, “Worms, as well as dry weather, are upon us. Food is very scarce, much sickness prevails among the men, and we have no judge for the delinquents.” Out of frustration, or perhaps exasperation, Beckwith threw all his problems into just two sentences: worms, dry weather, lack of food, sick workers, delinquent workers. Running a sugar plantation was more pilikia (trouble) than he had asked for.1

  Beckwith’s pilikia—his challenge—was to manage and discipline both labor and environment on the Haiku Sugar Company plantation in East Maui in the 1860s.2 Human bodies and sugarcane agroecology shaped the contours of intense racial and class struggle in the second half of the nineteenth century in Hawaiʻi. Plantation managers such as Beckwith were often displeased with their Native workers and sought to import Chinese “coolies” to take their place.3 The ultimate triumph of coolies over kanakas in Hawaiʻi was the consequence of a twenty-five-year process of experimentation, shifting racial categorizations, and the increasing use of legal and extralegal means to discipline workers’ bodies. Beckwith’s letters from Haʻikū are the perfect case study for understanding how Hawaiian and Chinese workers, alongside worms, cows, and soil, in a world of labor contracts, police raids, courthouses, and prisons, came together to make plantation life very pilikia indeed for capitalists and their surrogates.

  Moreover, Beckwith’s trials and tribulations at Haʻikū show how macro-level global transformations regarding land, labor, and trade across the Pacific World influenced the micro-narratives of one small place in East Maui. In the wake of free trade and free labor victories in both China and Hawaiʻi, workers were uncoupled from the land and began to move in new directions across the Pacific World.4 The first coolies came to Hawaiʻi in 1852. At Haʻikū, Beckwith fought on two fronts as he simultaneously sought to acquire coolie labor from China but also struggled against local Hawaiians who controlled the nearby land and their own bodily labor. Feeding workers and getting the plantation’s products to market involved a transoceanic network of labor, capital, and nature from across the Pacific World, tying Hawaiʻi even tighter into the capitalist net of the world economy.

  This is the story of how Chinese migrant workers displaced and replaced indigenous workers not just in Hawaiʻi but throughout the Pacific, closing the book on a century of economic, demographic, and cultural changes that had made the Hawaiian Pacific World. By 1880, the majority of workers in Hawaiʻi were no longer Hawaiian, and coolies rather than kanakas were sought the world over for their labor.

  FROM TANGSHI TO COOLIES

  In 1861, J.A. Kaelemakule, a supporter of Hawaiʻi’s sugar industry, wrote in a local newspaper that sugar was nothing new to Hawaiians. Cane, or kō, had flourished in the archipelago for over one thousand years. The first Polynesian settlers intentionally brought it with them from the South Pacific. While Hawaiians did not traditionally mill or process kō, it was still a useful plant. “The value of sugar at that time,” Kaelemakule wrote, was as “a medical item, a kapa dye, a rum, and as food.”5

  People of Chinese descent in Hawaiʻi claim a different origin story for the cultivation of sugarcane. In 1802, a Chinese tangshi (sugar master) remembered as Wong Tze-Chun arrived in the Islands. He took passage on a foreign sandalwood-trading ship from Guangzhou. He carried a stone mill and boilers, and upon arrival set up shop on Lānaʻi, one of the driest islands in the archipelago, a place where all attempts at sugar cultivation in the nineteenth century would fail. Wong tried his hand at milling the wild kō that grew on the island. He is said to have returned to China one year later. He is often credited with being the first person to mill sugarcane in Hawaiʻi.6

  Chinese sugar masters like Wong helped pioneer Hawaiʻi’s early sugar industry. In 1828, two Chinese migrants, Ahung and Atai, established a company, Hungtai Company, and erected a sugar mill at Wailuku, Maui. Another Chinese-run company, Samsing & Company based in Honolulu, established cane plantations on the islands of Hawaiʻi and Maui. In the late 1820s, there were approximately thirty to forty Chinese migrants living in the Hawaiian Islands. Samsing’s plantations employed Chinese tangshi as managers and an all-Hawaiian workforce in the fields.7

  Boki even had a mill and plantation in Oʻahu’s Mānoa valley. After leasing his operation to four Euro-Americans, one of these men, William French, began operating his own cane mill in 1835 at Waimea, Kauaʻi. French employed Chinese sugar masters to design and manage the mill. He did not establish a plantation; rather, he counted on local Hawaiians to harvest wild cane or grow their own cane to bring to the mill for processing. That same year, three Euro-American men of the firm Ladd & Company established a rival sugar operation at nearby Kōloa, Kauaʻi. Significantly, Ladd & Co. worked 980 acres of good land at Kōloa that was leased by the mōʻī, Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III), on which Ladd & Co. established not only a mill—as many had before them—but also a large-scale plantation. They were forced to hire significant numbers of Native workers to grow and harvest cane. When they started, the company’s plantation manager at Kōloa, a haole named William Hooper, hired twenty-five Hawaiians to work as field laborers.8

  The two rival sugar companies on Kauaʻi advanced rapidly. By March 1838, anywhere from one hundred to four hundred Hawaiians were employed on the Ladd & Co. plantation in Kōloa. Meanwhile, William French was “paying the Chinese at Waimea 10 dolls. per month” to work his Chinese-style mill. By comparison, the average Native field worker on the Kōloa plantation made 12.5 cents per day (approximately $3.25 per month). In this battle between two haole-run sugar companies—French’s Waimea mill focused on boiling and milling, recruited Chinese tangshi and employed Chinese technologies, but relied on the harvesting of wild cane; while Ladd & Co.’s plantation at Kōloa focused on cane cultivation, relied on Native wage labor, but neglected milling—it was the latter company, under Hooper’s management at Kōloa, that ended up on top. By the end of 1838, French’s mill had closed. It was Hooper’s focus on cultivating Hawaiian workers that proved more successful than French’s cultivation of Chinese expertise.9

  Ladd & Co.’s operation in Kōloa had two advantages. One, they grew their own sugar. While French’s Chinese-run operation followed a more Guangdong-based model of sugar manufacture—cane cultivation and milling were undertaken by separate entities—this model did not result in commercial success in Hawaiʻi, probably because the Hawaiian makaʻāinana could not be induced to harvest as much cane individually as Ladd & Co. could produce collectively by means of the plantation system. Two, Ladd & Co. had steamed ahead of French’s operation by replacing their mill’s Chinese-style vertical rollers with new horizontal iron rollers. While the Chinese double-roller mill remained the most commonly used technology in Hawaiʻi until the early 1850s, eventually steam-driven iron rollers, like the ones on William Hooper’s plantation, became the norm, and the technologies of the Chinese sugar master became obsolete.10

  In the 1840s, the role of the Chinese tangshi faded into the not-so-distant past as plantations emerged that were wholly reliant on Euro-American and Hawaiian labor alone, the former providing skilled labor, the latter unskilled. By 1850, the sugar industry had reached a turning point. Only a handful of mills were in operation in 1849 when the California Gold Rush created a huge and sudden demand for foodstuffs, including sugar, which gold miners put into their coffee and tea. The Gold Rush
sent planters scrambling to assemble the Hawaiian labor and resources necessary to supply the burgeoning North American market. New plantations were established in the early 1850s, and although two Chinese-run plantations still operated in the archipelago by 1855, there were also now hundreds of Chinese coolies on Hawaiian shores. The era of skilled Chinese labor in Hawaiʻi was over. They were replaced by the unskilled masses. The role of Chinese in the Hawaiian sugar industry went from tangshi to coolies, from sugar masters to sugar workers. Tens of thousands of common Chinese would come to work in the Hawaiian cane fields.11

  To manage kanaka and coolie labor, as well as revolutionize the political economy of land, labor, and law in the Hawaiian Islands, an elite group of haole merchants and government officials held a meeting in April 1850 to discuss “the formation of a society for the promotion of Hawaiian agriculture.” The majority of Hawaiʻi’s farmers, the makaʻāinana, did not attend and were not invited. Rather, those who came were planter-capitalists with little to no practical experience in farming. They were mostly foreigners intrigued by the profitability of expanding sugar production in Hawaiʻi. They met to discuss issues such as property rights, labor management, and the latest agricultural science.12

  They called themselves the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society (RHAS). In June they published a circular announcing a more formal meeting to be held in August. The circular stated in no uncertain terms that a great age was dawning for Hawaiʻi. The once-mighty trade at Guangzhou had dried up, but a new market for Hawaiian goods was manifest in Gold Rush California. “Within the last two years . . . a great and sudden change has taken place in the prospects of this group [archipelago],” the circular stated. “The extension of the territory and government of the United States to the borders of the Pacific, the wonderful discoveries in California, and the consequent almost instantaneous creation of a mighty state on ‘the western front of the American Union,’ has, as it were, with the wand of a magician, drawn this little group into the very focus of civilization and prosperity.” Amidst this moment, however, Hawaiian export agriculture was “checked and embarrassed by the insufficiency of the four great requisites of capital, experience, proper implements and labor.” Capital could be encouraged to migrate from the eastern United States. Experience and technology could be procured from the Caribbean (as it once had been from the tangshi of South China). But what about labor? It was a “subject of great importance before this association.” “The introduction of Coolie labor from China to supply the places of the rapidly decreasing native population is a question that is already agitated among us, and should such a step become necessary, the aid of such an association in accomplishing this object would be of great benefit.”13