Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World
Page 24
The company asked E.M. Kapihe, a commoner living nearby, to build the fence. Together they wrote up a contract in the Hawaiian language. This first contract between a Hawaiian farmer and a haole planter had everything to do with borders. The company wanted to build a wire fence to control the movement of cattle, but also presumably to mark the boundaries of the land. In 1859 Kapihe wrote “To the Sugar Planters’ association at Haiku”: “Here’s my suggestion to you all[,] I will search for the Posts for your wire fence at Haiku.” Kapihe made the company an offer. He would cut four hundred wooden posts in the forest, “good, straight [posts] from four to five inches in diameter to seven feet in length.” These posts, “I will haul to the sea,” he wrote, so that they can then be shipped to Haʻikū.27
“Limaikaika” (a transliteration of “Armstrong,” the surname of one of the company directors: literally lima means “arm” and ikaika means “strong”), writing “on behalf of the administrators of the Sugar Planters’ Association, of Haiku,” responded to Kapihe’s offer. We “read your letter. Feb. 17 just ago, before the administrators of the plantation company at Haiku Maui at our meeting.” The directors agreed to the offer. You “will search for the posts, for our wire fence at Haiku, four hundred, similar with the kind in your letter,” and haul those “posts to the sea.” When the work is complete, “at that time we will compensate [per] this agreement, for this work; only when the wood is [brought] to the sea.” At the bottom of the letter, Kapihe signed his name and wrote that the contract was “pono”—it was just.28
This contract evidences several key points about the business of sugar in the 1850s: one, that early business transactions were conducted in Hawaiian rather than English, a decided advantage to Native entrepreneurs like Kapihe; two, that unproletarianized homesteaders, not necessarily needing to sell their labor for a wage, had even greater advantage over the company in that they could determine when and where they labored; and, three, that fences were important business. Fences allowed Beckwith to discipline the mobility of his contracted workers, to create a desirable division between the proletariat inside the fence and the landowners outside the fence. But in getting the Haʻikū plantation off the ground, Beckwith was consistently challenged by Native landowners surrounding company land. For example, in late 1859 Beckwith wrote to one of the directors of the company complaining of a “Native who owns . . . Kalo patches” directly along the path of a proposed irrigation pipe. Beckwith reported that the Hawaiian was willing “to exchange one of his for one above had we not Better. Exchange that Piece of Land on the Opposite Side of the Gulph for the Kalo patches along side of our feed or drive pipes and give him the use of the Patches.” As in the case of Kapihe and the fence, this was a surprisingly unbalanced negotiation between a Hawaiian and the sugar company. Hawaiian commoners, by virtue of controlling both the available land and labor that the company needed, held a distinct advantage in determining the value of both that land and labor, and they held power over who could access those resources.29
Beckwith continued to negotiate and struggle with Native homesteaders surrounding company property into the early 1860s. “The natives” of East Maui, he wrote, were uncooperative in ceding their land and their bodies. Hawaiian homesteaders growing kalo were obstacles that needed to be removed and their plots replaced with fields of cane. “This portion of the land is so full of kuleanas,” Beckwith wrote, referring to properties claimed by makaʻāinana after the Kuleana Act of 1850, “that it cannot be of any great use to us without much annoyance while the portion I propose to retain lying next to the plantation is almost wholly free from kuleanas.” The land on which the Haiku Sugar Company hoped to cultivate cane was riddled with makaʻāinana land claims, thus placing Hawaiian commoners in a position of power in negotiations over land and labor with the company. All of this slowed efforts of the Haiku Sugar Company to take advantage of the new market demand occasioned by the U.S. Civil War and the disruption of sugar production in the U.S. South.30
Echoing Beckwith’s frustrations, during this same period a “committee appointed to investigate the affairs of the Haiku Sugar Coy [Company]” stated that “the position of natives in that region tends to make it rather difficult for the Coy [Company] to do it all unless they obtained labor from other islands. There are several well to do natives. But are not a good many Laborers that will work if the work is let out by contract, that would not do so for the Coy [Company].” Of course, these “well to do natives” with land had no need to sell their bodily labor for a wage; they had no need to sign labor contracts with haole employers. This was a frank assessment of the power of East Maui Hawaiians to resist the mode of production company leaders sought to force upon them.31
Because the land was riddled with Hawaiians’ small-scale farms, Beckwith struggled to find enough workers to labor for the company. More importantly, those Hawaiians who did work for the sugar company were constantly disappearing. Desertion was extremely common throughout the industry. For example, a worker named Kea, bonded to a “Hilo Plantation,” was discharged in September 1859 “to Hilo.” Presumably he was sent back to work, but only after having been imprisoned in the Harbormaster’s station house in Honolulu for several days. A similar instance, in December 1859, concerned Pahulima, a contract worker on a “Chinese plantation,” according to the Harbormaster’s records. He was arrested on December 24 and sent back on December 27 to “Hilo Plantation.” Mahoi [Mahoe], a worker at “Metcalfs Plantation,” was arrested in Honolulu in May 1860 and “Sent [back] to Hilo” two days later. Mau [Waa], of the “Brown Plantation,” was arrested and discharged on the same day in July 1860. And, in December 1860, two Hawaiian contract laborers two days in a row were arrested in Honolulu for having fled their employers. Few deserters got away with it, but by means of running away Hawaiian contract workers were able to throw a wrench into the gears of the sugar industry. By moving their bodies against the wishes of the law and against the desires of employers, Hawaiian workers exercised a form of resistance. For managers such as Beckwith, it appeared that bounding workers, just as bounding the land, was no easy task.32
At Haʻikū, local police often became involved in these conflicts, sometimes arresting workers and forcibly removing them from the plantation, at other times going after truant workers and bringing them back. “One man,” Beckwith explained, “shipped about 2 mos. [months] since under the name Kaleikuahulu, received $2500 advance & still in debt to the amount of $1658, was arrested under a warrant issued from Honolulu for having previously shipped & received an advance from some Chinaman.” A Chinese employer claimed ownership over the bodily labor of the Hawaiian worker at Haʻikū and requested that the state issue an arrest warrant because Kaleikuahulu had deserted before his contract was up. When Beckwith wrote that Kaleikuahulu had “previously shipped,” he meant that the worker had already signed a contract with the Chinese employer. “He was a good man for work,” Beckwith wrote of Kaleikuahulu. “Please see Mr. Parke about it & get him returned if possible[.] If not, please get the advance from the Shipping agent, who, according to the man arrested, was in fault.” At Haʻikū, labor was in such demand that Beckwith had to hound down the police just to retrieve one missing worker.33
The following year, one of Beckwith’s employees was arrested again. “There is a half white boy—Hiram—you know him,—so do the police men—belonging to the plantation, who was at Honolulu before I left. He has a wife here, and is some in debt, I think. He should be sent back. He has become somewhat useful on the plantation, and is needed.” Beckwith put considerable time and energy into retrieving workers detained by the police. As workers refused to respect the boundaries of labor contracts and plantation fences, slipping (rather than shipping) out to Honolulu to evade work—sometimes voluntarily, sometimes in chains—legal mechanisms were used to force these men back to work, but it was not without considerable effort. One month later, in August 1865, Hiram was returned by the Honolulu police to Haʻikū.34
In addition to
policing workers’ movements, another area where Beckwith sought control was over workers’ bodies. He was particularly concerned with the cost of feeding his Hawaiian men. Beckwith experimented over the decade with a variety of means for feeding his Hawaiian workers. In 1860 he wrote to Honolulu requesting “one of Motts Agricultural Furnaces for cooking native food.” Of course, along with the furnace he would have to hire a cook, unless he could get the Hawaiians to cook their own food. Four years later, Beckwith’s letters to company agent Samuel Savidge reveal an increasing quantity of purchases of imported and preserved foods for feeding workers. In September 1864 he requested Savidge to send to Haʻikū “½ bl. [barrel] Mackerel. I learn that good Mackerel in ½ bbls. [barrels] can be had.” “I think these would retail among the natives with profit,” Beckwith suggested, “as there are no Salmon.” Hawaiian workers liked fish, but living on the sugar plantation meant they were alienated from their traditional subsistence commons: the ocean. Workers’ alienation from the ocean was evidenced in their consumption of imported fish such as salmon. Beckwith had salmon shipped to Hawaiʻi from the distant northwest coast of North America. It was a food that Hawaiians had first encountered in the early nineteenth century when many lived and worked along the North American coast in the sea otter fur trade. Removed from the ocean as they were on the Haʻikū plantation, consumption of foreign salmon demonstrated Hawaiian workers’ increasing reliance on commodities from the global capitalist marketplace. As Beckwith stated, mackerel, just like salmon, would likely “retail among the natives with profit.” The value of these fish was not just to provide sustenance to his workers, he reasoned, but to hook them into a capitalist mode of consumption. Mackerel and salmon presented a means of luring Hawaiian workers into debt; and an indebted worker, he knew, was a worker easily coerced into renewing his contract with the company.35
Besides economic concerns, ecological ones also pervaded Beckwith’s analysis of Hawaiian workers’ bodies and their diets. The value lost or gained by supplying workers with local or global food was not just an issue of dollars and cents—it was also about understanding Hawaiian workers’ bodies as part of a larger ecology of sugar production. Beckwith frequently ordered mackerel and salmon from Honolulu suppliers, linking Maui bodies with sites of production thousands of miles away. But he also inquired into the “grasing Co. [grazing company] at Kawaihae” for providing workers with beef. He had heard that the Kawaihae company, located on Hawaiʻi Island, can “pack beef for Plantations at 3 cts. per lb., putting in nothing but clear lean meat.” He asked the company agent to “send 10 good molasses bbls [barrels] to Kawaihae for this purpose.” Beckwith planned to give Haʻikū sugar products to the meatpackers of Kawaihae in exchange for beef to feed his employees. A traditional Hawaiian diet did not include the consumption of beef; cows were not even present in the Islands until the 1790s. But Beckwith’s mind was solely focused on locating the best value, even if it meant linking the ecologies of bodies and cane at Haʻikū with that of cattle ranches and salmon fisheries hundreds and thousands of miles away.36
Beckwith also explored purchasing a “poi machine, to be taken on trial, not to be paid for unless it proves valuable.” He never described how it worked, whether it was employed, or how the Hawaiian workers perceived this contraption. As long as Hawaiian workers had access to nearby kalo paddies, or access to neighbors willing to sell their own kalo, they did not have to rely on the company store for food. This tension, between subsistence production and market purchases, upset Beckwith. He believed that workers should be coerced into spending all their wages at the company store. His brother, the secretary of the company, perceptively noted in July 1865 that “those nearest the store [are] most in debt.” This logic best explains Beckwith’s zeal for “poi machines” to do the work of food production that workers could easily have done themselves. Despite all his efforts to bound workers to the plantation economy—as both producers and consumers of company goods—workers consistently pushed back against his plans.37
Hawaiian workers at Haʻikū not only troubled Beckwith’s efforts to control their diets, but they troubled his ability to plow the fields. Local men, including some of the Haʻikū workers, held a monopoly over cattle in that part of Maui. Once again, Hawaiian property owners, in this case cattle owners, held power over the sugar company. Beckwith explained in 1865 that “there are some 10 or 12 prs. [pairs] Cattle owned by natives living on the Plantation having little patches of land. We are obliged to pasture these, & I have been accustomed to hire them at $500 per month, whenever we needed them.” Hawaiian workers were actually leasing out their cattle to the company at five dollars per month. Beckwith suggested that the company buy these cows off of the Hawaiians and remove this property from their grasp. “The demand for cattle is rapidly increasing,” he warned, fearing that Hawaiians at Haʻikū could use this demand to inflate the value of their cattle for hire.38
Later that year Beckwith wrote that “everything is moving on well” except for the cattle situation. Hawaiian cattle owners were now using their cows for their own means, to haul wood, so that the animals were not available just when Beckwith needed them. The Hawaiians were also unwilling to sell their cattle to Beckwith and cede control over this lucrative commodity. “Now our land is fenced,” Beckwith pleaded, “I think we must raise our own cattle.” He suggested going to Kona, Hawaiʻi, to “get 30 or 40 young heifers, say one cargo of heifers & steers, at $500 per head. What do you think of it? going, say, when the grinding is done.” Instead, Beckwith ended up traveling to the island of Molokaʻi to buy sixty-six cows: “53 steers and 13 heifers, at a cost of $784.00, besides expense of transportation.” The transportation expense was considerable, for he had to transport sixty-six large animals from Molokaʻi to Maui. Beckwith was forced to travel to a completely different island to acquire cattle to plow his fields, once more linking Haʻikū’s local ecology to a larger transregional economic and ecological system.39
From cattle to workers’ diets to truancy and desertion, the Haʻikū plantation complex—an uneasy marriage of capital, labor, and nature—seemed always teetering on the edge of collapse, or at least that was how Beckwith perceived it. By the summer of 1865, the Hawaiian workers had become a real thorn in his side. Beckwith wrote of mobile and missing workers ad nauseum in the mid-1860s. He reported to Savidge feeling almost paralyzed by a constant fear that he might lose his Hawaiian workforce at any moment. Their control over their own bodies, over their labor, over their land, and over their cows frightened him into submission. “I should be glad if we could turn off quite a large number of our men while the mill stops,” he wrote in May 1865, “and, if possible, materially lessen our expenses for the time, but the demand for help is so great, that we could not well send them off, without losing them.” The next month, the Hawaiian workers at Haʻikū demanded their monthly wages but Beckwith did not have the money to pay them. Forced with the options of either submitting to his workers’ power or losing them to other opportunities, Beckwith was ready, against his own better judgment, to bring on the coolies.40
THE SCIENCE OF CHINESE BODIES
In 1860, the Hawaiian-language press began to report on a new disease spreading among the Native population. They called it maʻi Pākē (“Chinese disease”). Over the next several years hundreds of Hawaiians were infected with this disease, once again leading elites to consider the fragility and unfitness of Hawaiian bodies for the modern economy. Although it remains inconclusive whether Chinese migrants were actually to blame for bringing Hansen’s disease, or leprosy, to Hawaiʻi, there is no denying that the disease influenced Hawaiian views of the Chinese and simultaneously impacted employers’ views of both groups.41 When Beckwith turned to importing coolies at Haʻikū in the mid-1860s, he did so within the context of a new science of Chinese bodies. Racial and class antagonisms, dangerous stereotypes, and flawed understandings of human biology influenced the views of many across the Hawaiian Islands. While many commoners feared the porousness
of diseased Chinese bodies, Native elites yet promoted a eugenicist program of “admixture” between Hawaiians and Chinese, calling the Chinese a “cognate race.” These dual discourses of “Chinese disease” and “race admixture” highlight the confused and contradictory approaches that the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi and its subjects took to the coolie question in the 1860s.42
The first Hawaiian-language report on the disease came in the form of an 1860 letter to the editor from Hoikeike, a resident of Lāhainā, Maui, who wrote that “a certain disease has spread in Lahaina here, called by the name ‘Chinese Disease.’” It is “a very awful disease to look at,” he wrote, characterized by “a callous pock-marking on the eyes, the cheeks, the nose, and the forehead, and the surrounding areas.” Chinese disease, he explained, had the ability to transform Hawaiian bodies. It turned smooth faces into “rough” and “callous” ones, and no part of one’s face was spared from disfiguration. Hawaiian writers such as Hoikeike never explained why or how they thought this disease was related to China. Perhaps the Hawaiian term maʻi Pākē simply referred to the fact that leprosy was common in China. But some commentators—particularly working-class Hawaiians—associated the arrival of maʻi Pākē with the arrival of the Pākē (Chinese) themselves. Perhaps this disease came to Hawaiʻi with a boatload of coolies, they thought. The disease’s sudden appearance raised urgent questions. Where had it come from? How did it get here? How did it spread? Folks wondered how this disease jumped from Chinese bodies to Hawaiian bodies, and whether there was any way to protect Hawaiians from acquiring this awful disease?43
Hoikeike explained to Ka Hae Hawaii that, once planted in a body, “if the time having this disease is very long, it wickedly spreads beyond compare” and then “it is nearly dreadful to look at.” Hoikeike compared the hunger of the disease for Hawaiian flesh to that of “the hungry akua of Moaula [Moaʻula]! Equally frightening!” (He refers to a waterfall on the windward side of the island of Molokaʻi where some Hawaiians believe an akua [a god] dwells with a “swollen” belly, hungry for human prey.) If you contract the disease, Hoikeike warned, once it reaches “down below the neck” there is nothing that can be done to stop it. “It is casually said [by] the people who know, it is not a curable disease.”44