Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

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Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World Page 30

by Gregory Rosenthal


  30. Beyond sandalwood, these included aloeswood and agarwood (chenxiang); see Kieschnick, Impact of Buddhism, 277–78; Chan, “Joss Stick Manufacturing,” 94–95; Iu Kow-Choy, “The Cultivation of the ‘Incence Tree’ (Aquilaria Sinensis),” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 23 (1983): 247–49.

  31. Hill, Journal and Log of Two Voyages, 5, 88, Samuel Hill Papers, New York Public Library. On use-value versus exchange-value, see Marx, Capital, 41–96.

  32. On the exchange of “Moku (forests) for Moku (boats),” see Denise Noelani Arista, “Histories of Unequal Measure: Euro-American Encounters with Hawaiian Governance and Law, 1793–1827” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2010), 105–12.

  33. Hill, Journal and Log of Two Voyages, 92, Samuel Hill Papers, New York Public Library; Isaiah Lewis to Messrs. Bordman & Pope, December 21, 1819, Isaiah Lewis Letter Book, 1819–1821, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts; “Pages from James Hunnewell’s Journal,” entry for April 8, 1821, Folder 1a, Box 13 (Volume 25 1817–1840), James Hunnewell, Business Papers, 1823–1883, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts; Charles B. Bullard to William Sturgis, November 1, 1821, Charles B. Bullard Letterbook, 1821–1823, Ms. N-1962, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Sahlins, “Cosmologies of Capitalism.”

  34. Kenneth Wiggins Porter, “John Jacob Astor and the Sandalwood Trade of the Hawaiian Islands, 1816–1828,” Journal of Economic and Business History 2 (1930): 495–519; Agnes C. Conrad, “Hawaiian Registered Vessels,” Hawaiian Journal of History 3 (1969): 31–41; Beechert, Honolulu, 26–27, 30; Cottrell, “Splinters of Sandalwood,” 33–34; Couper, Sailors and Traders, 84.

  35. Hill, Journal and Log of Two Voyages, 231, 243, Samuel Hill Papers, New York Public Library; Levant (ship) Logbook, entries for June 16–24, 1820, New York Public Library; James B. Ames, Diary, 1829–1830, November 2, 1830, New-York Historical Society; Ellis, Journal of William Ellis, 430–31; Beechert, Honolulu, 42–43; Cottrell, “Splinters of Sandalwood,” 46–47; Mills, Hawaiʻi’s Russian Adventure, 24–25, 116. Also see “Ka Hae Hawaii [The Hawaiian Flag],” Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, January 1, 1862.

  36. Isaiah Lewis, instructions for John Scovill, 2nd Officer of the ship Arab, April 1820, Isaiah Lewis Letter Book, 1819–1821, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts.

  37. James Hunnewell to Capt Andrew Blanchard, October 6, 1821, Folder 4: Waste Book, Brig Thaddeus, 1821, 1822, 1823, & 1824, Box 13 (Volume 25 1817–1840), James Hunnewell, Business Papers, 1823–1883, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts.

  38. Cottrell, “Splinters of Sandalwood,” 106; Shineberg, They Came for Sandalwood, 82–83.

  39. Ellis, Journal of William Ellis, 299–300; Bullard quoted in Charles H. Hammatt, Ships, Furs, and Sandalwood: A Yankee Trader in Hawaiʻi, 1823–1825, ed. Sandra Wagner-Wright (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1999), xxiv.

  40. Ellis, Journal of William Ellis, 69–70, 299–300, 400, 404–6; Kamakau, Ruling Chiefs, 204; Sahlins, Anahulu, 82–84; Cottrell, “Splinters of Sandalwood,” 34–36, 51–52, 114, 139.

  41. Stewart, Journal of a Residence, 365; Sahlins, Anahulu, 50–51.

  42. Ellis, Journal of William Ellis, 405–6; Cottrell, “Splinters of Sandalwood,” 34; Merlin and VanRavenswaay, “History of Human Impact,” 52.

  43. Kamakau, Ruling Chiefs, 286; Stephen Reynolds, Journal of Stephen Reynolds, Volume I, 1823–1829, ed. Pauline King (Honolulu: Ku Paʻa Inc.; Salem, MA: Peabody Museum, 1989), 28–29.

  44. “Pages from James Hunnewell’s Journal,” entries for September 4–11, 1818, and October 31, 1820, Folder 1a, Box 13 (Volume 25 1817–1840), James Hunnewell, Business Papers, 1823–1883, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts; “Tax Wood general account Dr [debit] to James Hunnewell for the following Expences Paid by him,” Folder 17: Early papers found in a large book, 1820–1830, Box 13 (Volume 25 1817–1840), James Hunnewell, Business Papers, 1823–1883, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts.

  45. Hill, Journal and Log of Two Voyages, 85–88, 91–92, Samuel Hill Papers, New York Public Library.

  46. Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 140, 170. On the re-imagination of pono in post-1819 Hawaiʻi, see also Kameʻeleihiwa, ch. 6.

  47. Reynolds, Journal of Stephen Reynolds, 123–28; Hiram Bingham, A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands (Hartford, CT: H. Huntington; New York: S. Converse, 1847), 283–89; Daws, “High Chief Boki,” 70–71. On the increasing U.S. naval presence in the Pacific Ocean during the 1820s, see Donald D. Johnson (with Gary Dean Best), The United States in the Pacific: Private Interests and Public Policies, 1784–1899 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995).

  48. Reynolds, Journal of Stephen Reynolds, 110, 142, 149, 169; Mark Rifkin, “Debt and the Transnationalization of Hawaiʻi,” American Quarterly 60 (2008): 43–66.

  49. Morgan, Hawaii, 66; Sahlins, Anahulu, 84; Cottrell, “Splinters of Sandalwood,” 61–63.

  50. Reynolds, Journal of Stephen Reynolds, 185; Jacobus Boelen, A Merchant’s Perspective: Captain Jacobus Boelen’s Narrative of his Visit to Hawaiʻi in 1828, ed. and trans. Frank K.A. Broeze (Honolulu: Hawaiian Historical Society, 1988), 76. On the extent of actual sandalwood deforestation in Hawaiʻi during this period, which remains inconclusive, see Merlin and VanRavenswaay, “History of Human Impact.”

  51. James B. Ames, Diary, 1829–1830, November 2, 1830, New-York Historical Society.

  52. On “blame the aliʻi” interpretations, Cottrell offers a succinct discussion in “Splinters of Sandalwood,” 133–57. On “blame the haole,” see Rifkin, “Debt and the Transnationalization of Hawaiʻi.” An important study of the controversial historiography of land and resource use by indigenous peoples is Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).

  53. James Hunnewell to Capt Andrew Blanchard, November 20, 1821, Folder 4: Waste Book, Brig Thaddeus, 1821, 1822, 1823, & 1824, Box 13 (Volume 25 1817–1840), James Hunnewell, Business Papers, 1823–1883, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts.

  54. Downs, Golden Ghetto, 67–70, 105–8; Marks, Origins of the Modern World, 112–14. On the Macartney embassy, see George Macartney, An Embassy to China; being the journal kept by Lord Macartney during his embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-lung, 1793–1794, ed. J.L. Cranmer-Byng (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1963); James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).

  55. Marks, Origins of the Modern World, 123–30.

  56. James B. Ames, Diary, 1829–1830, November 2, 1830, and November 16, 1830, New-York Historical Society.

  57. Kelly, “Changes in Land Tenure,” 100; Morgan, Hawaii, 67; Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1977), 369.

  58. George H. Dole, “A Ride from Lihue to Waioli” [c. 1855–1862], HM 57933, George H. Dole Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Charles Bernhard Richard, Travel Sketches, being a Narrative of his Travels from 1846 to 1849, 153, New-York Historical Society; Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 369.

  59. Kauikeaouli et al to anonymous [ABCFM], August 23, 1836, in both English and Hawaiian, Volume 8: Sandwich Islands Mission. General Letters and Documents, 1836–1843, Series 19.1, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Pacific Islands Missions Records, 1819–1960 (ABC 19), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  60. Morgan, Hawaii, 66; Marks, Origins of the Modern World, 115, 123–53; Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 47–127; Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 168–74; Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Se
as, Peoples, and Cultures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 202–9. On events leading up to the Opium War, also see Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 143–64; James M. Polachek, The Inner Opium War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 149–74.

  61. Beechert, Working in Hawaii, 25–29.

  62. Morgan, Hawaii, 118–19; Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi, 82–83. For comparison, see Marx, Capital, 805–14, on laws against homelessness and idleness as a catalyst for proletarianization.

  63. Morgan, Hawaii, 66; Beechert, Honolulu, 55; Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 183–85; Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 37. Kauikeaouli’s statement is today, ironically, the state motto of U.S.-controlled Hawaiʻi.

  64. Charles Bernhard Richard, Travel Sketches, being a Narrative of his Travels from 1846 to 1849, New-York Historical Society; Steven W. Hackel, “Land, Labor, and Production: The Colonial Economy of Spanish and Mexican California,” in Contested Eden: California Before the Gold Rush, ed. Ramon A. Gutierrez and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 111–46, esp. 136–37; Banner, Possessing the Pacific, chs. 5–7; Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). On the environmental legacies of the demarcation of a Pacific Ocean border between the United States and Canada, see Lissa K. Wadewitz, The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012).

  65. Banner, Possessing the Pacific, 1, 128–62.

  66. William Little Lee to Simon Greenleaf, November 2, 1847, William Little Lee letters, 1847–1850, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 193–97; Sahlins, Anahulu, 129–37.

  67. Lee quoted in Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 215.

  68. Ibid., 209, 227. Also, David W. Forbes, An Act to Prohibit Hawaiians from Emigrating to California “Where They May Die in Misery.” 1850 (San Francisco: Paul Markham Khan, 1986); Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 58; Beechert, Working in Hawaii, 29–33; Robert C. Schmitt and Eleanor C. Nordyke, “Death in Hawaiʻi: The Epidemics of 1848–1849,” Hawaiian Journal of History 35 (2001): 1–13; Seth Archer, “Epidemics and Culture in Hawaiʻi, 1778–1840” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Riverside, 2015). William Little Lee described the outbreak of disease in a letter to Simon Greenleaf, March 3, 1849, William Little Lee letters, 1847–1850, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

  69. On relationships among enclosure, dispossession, and proletarianization, see Marx, Capital, 784–848.

  70. Beechert, Working in Hawaii, 42–48; Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi, 97–98. Full text of the Masters and Servants Act in both English and Hawaiian is available at the website of the Center for Labor Education & Research (CLEAR), http://www.hawaii.edu/uhwo/clear/home/NaHakuamekaKauwa.html (accessed June 20, 2016).

  71. Beechert, Working in Hawaii, 33–34; Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 209, 295–97; Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi, 94–95.

  72. Sahlins, Anahulu, 136; Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi, 94.

  73. William Little Lee to Simon Greenleaf, March 3, 1849, William Little Lee letters, 1847–1850, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

  CHAPTER TWO. MAKE’S DANCE

  1. Hannibal (ship), Journal 1849 September 6—1851 March 20, Log 862, G.W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecticut.

  2. On the story of the whale rider, see Susan A. Lebo, “A Local Perspective on Hawaii’s Whaling Economy: Whale Traditions and Government Regulation of the Kingdom’s Native Seamen and Whale Fishery,” CORIOLIS 1, no. 1 (2010): 3–37, esp. 5; modern iterations include Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider (Auckland, New Zealand: Reed Books, 1987) and the film version, Whale Rider, directed by Niki Caro (Los Angeles: Newmarket Films, 2003), DVD.

  3. Theodore Morgan, Hawaii: A Century of Economic Change, 1778–1876 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 76; Arrell Morgan Gibson (with John S. Whitehead), Yankees in Paradise: The Pacific Basin Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 138. Morgan states that the earliest American whalers visited Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawaiʻi in 1819. They were from New Bedford, Massachusetts. On the sex trade, see David Chappell, “Shipboard Relations between Pacific Island Women and Euroamerican Men, 1767–1887,” Journal of Pacific History 27, no. 2 (1992), 131–49.

  4. Morgan, Hawaii, 76.

  5. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale [1851] (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 98. On commodities and value, see Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy [1867] (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 41–96. On the commodification of nature, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), esp. chs. 3–5. On the consumption of nature, see Matthew Klingle, “Spaces of Consumption in Environmental History,” History and Theory 42, no. 4 (December 2003): 94–110.

  6. Morgan, Hawaii, 219; Gibson, Yankees in Paradise, 132. On the role of cattle, see John Ryan Fischer, Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawaiʻi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). On New England and the industrial revolution, see Chad Montrie, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 13–34; Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (2nd ed.; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 55–70.

  7. Melville, Moby-Dick, 172. On the alienation of labor, see Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.; New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 66–125, esp. 70–81.

  8. Gibson, Yankees in Paradise, 132–33. On baleen as nineteenth-century plastic, see J.R. McNeill, “Of Rats and Men: A Synoptic Environmental History of the Island Pacific,” Journal of World History 5, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 320. On women’s consumption of nature, see Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), esp. ch. 2.

  9. Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life [1846] (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 128. On European and Euro-American perceptions of Pacific Islands and Islanders as Edens and noble savages, see Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 222–44, 316–28. On American romanticism and the Industrial Revolution, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964) and Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).

  10. Campbell quoted in Morgan, Hawaii, 45–46. The use of kukui nuts is also mentioned in William Ellis, Journal of William Ellis: A Narrative of an 1823 Tour Through Hawaiʻi [1825] (Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 2004), 380–81; and Jacobus Boelen, A Merchant’s Perspective: Captain Jacobus Boelen’s Narrative of his Visit to Hawaiʻi in 1828, ed. and trans. Frank K.A. Broeze (Honolulu: Hawaiian Historical Society, 1988), 66. Also see Alan Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, Ecology, and Evolution (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002), 247–49, 330–31.

  11. On mana and whale teeth, see Samuel Hill, Journal and Log of Two Voyages, 5, 8, Samuel Hill Papers, New York Public Library; also, Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

  12. Ryan Tucker Jones, “Running into Whales: The History of the North Pacific from below the Waves,” American Historical Review 118, no. 2 (April 2013): 349–77. On workscapes, see Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 125. On the study of oceans as historical space, see Ben Finney, “The Other One-Third of the Globe,” Journal of World History 5, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 273–97; and
Jerry H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,” The Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1999): 215–24.

  13. On sperm whale feeding behavior and geographical distribution, see L. Harrison Matthews, The Natural History of the Whale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 70–72, 126–27; Hal Whitehead, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 12, 33–38, 45, 53–55, 79–80. On the Humboldt Current in environmental history, see Kristin Wintersteen, “Fishing for Food and Fodder: The Transnational Environmental History of Humboldt Current Fisheries in Peru and Chile since 1945” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2011); Edward D. Melillo, “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840–1930,” American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (October 2012): 1028–1060; and Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For an interesting global historical perspective on ENSO (the El Niño–Southern Oscillation phenomenon), see also Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2001).

  14. On the ecology of right and bowhead whales, see Matthews, Natural History of the Whale, 43, 64, 117, 126. On zooplankton biogeography, see Todd D. O’Brien, COPEPOD: The Global Plankton Database. An overview of the 2010 database contents, processing methods, and access interface, U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA Technical Memorandum, NMFS-F/ST-36, December 2010; accessible at http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/plankton/ (accessed May 31, 2016).

  15. Maury’s Whale Chart is available in various locations and formats. I first witnessed the map in 2010 at the exhibition “On the Water” at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., http://americanhistory.si.edu/onthewater/exhibition/3_7.html (accessed May 31, 2016). On Maury’s contributions to the science of oceanography, see Helen M. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Maury’s attempted simplification (and rationalization) of complex nature in the service of industrial capitalism was a common aspect of American science in the nineteenth century. See Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis; Steinberg, Down to Earth.

 

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