Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  16. George Brown Goode, The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887), plate 183.

  17. Italy (ship), Account book, 1854–1857, New-York Historical Society.

  18. On “in-between” or liminal spaces in maritime history, see David Chappell, Double Ghosts: Oceanian Voyagers on Euroamerican Ships (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), xv, 6–10; and Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774–1880 (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1988), 157.

  19. Edward Beechert, Honolulu: Crossroads of the Pacific (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991); Marshall Sahlins (with Dorothy B. Barrère), Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii: Volume One, Historical Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 102; Gibson, Yankees in Paradise, 138–140.

  20. Adeline (ship) Logbook, New York Public Library.

  21. Italy (ship) Account book, 1854–1857, New-York Historical Society. For further examples, see Log of the ship Hillman (1851–54), HM 16764, and Log of the ship Reindeer (1856–58), HM 16596, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

  22. See shipping articles of the bark Helen Snow (1864) in Box 1, Folder 1, “Shipping Articles 1864”; the bark Coral (1862) in Box 5, Folder 1, “Shipping Articles 1862–1863”; the brig Victoria (1863) in ibid.; and the bark Martha (1863) in ibid., all in Harbormaster’s Shipping Articles, 1862–1900, Record Group 89, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Honolulu. Note that historian Denise Noelani Arista has argued that the 1819 abolition of the kapu marked the end of a way of organizing space and time in the early Hawaiian world, and that the arrival of whaling ships the next year marked the beginning of a new way of organizing space and time bound to the comings and goings of ships; see Arista, “Histories of Unequal Measure: Euro-American Encounters with Hawaiian Governance and Law, 1793–1827” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2010), 168–69. On the relationship between capitalism and time, see E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38, no. 1 (1967): 56–97.

  23. On desertion, see Margaret Creighton, Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830–1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 144–46. Records of Hawaiian deserters are in Volume 3, 1858–1867, Collector General of Customs Seamen’s Records, Record Group 88, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Honolulu. On the Bounty, see Jennifer Newell, Trading Nature: Tahitians, Europeans, and Ecological Exchange (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2010), 141–70.

  24. John C. Jones, Jr. to Lieut. John Percival, April 13, 1826, John Percival Papers, 1826–1841, Ms. N-691, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. On the many-headed hydra, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).

  25. Italy (ship) Account book, 1854–1857, New-York Historical Society.

  26. Charles S. Stewart, Journal of a Residence in the Sandwich Islands, During the Years 1823, 1824, and 1825 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1970), 157; Eleanor C. Nordyke, “Blacks in Hawaiʻi: A Demographic and Historical Perspective,” Hawaiian Journal of History 22 (1988): 241–55; Chappell, Double Ghosts, 41; W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Nancy Shoemaker, Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

  27. Italy (ship) Account book, 1854–1857, New-York Historical Society. Creighton states that the average size of a whaling crew in the nineteenth century was approximately thirty men. Creighton, Rites and Passages, 27–28.

  28. Stewart, Journal of a Residence, 233–34; James B. Ames, Diary, 1829–1830, November 2, 1830, New-York Historical Society. On roots and routes, see James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

  29. See shipping articles for the ship Isaac Howland (1862–63), in Box 5, Folder 1, “Shipping Articles 1862–1863”; the ship Gustavo (1864), in Box 5, Folder 2, “Shipping Articles 1864, 1866, 1867”; the bark Jno Howland (1868), in Box 5, Folder 3, “Shipping Articles Jan-Dec 1868”; and the ship California (1868), in Box 5, Folder 3, all in Harbormaster’s Shipping Articles, 1862–1900, Record Group 89, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Honolulu.

  30. Boelen, A Merchant’s Perspective, 72–74, 80.

  31. Shipping articles for the ships Zoe and Catherine (1863), in Box 5, Folder 1, “Shipping Articles 1862–1863,” in Harbormaster’s Shipping Articles, 1862–1900, Record Group 89, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Honolulu. Further examples are the shipping articles for the brigs Kohola and Victoria (1863), in ibid.

  32. Melville, Moby-Dick, 107, 375; Creighton, Rites and Passages, 143.

  33. Melville, Moby-Dick, 107.

  34. Ibid., 38–39; Chappell, Double Ghosts, xv, 6–10, 42.

  35. Thomas Hazard Roe, “Journal of a voyage to the Pacific in the Whale Ship Chelsea,” July 17, 1831, Chelsea (ship), Journal 1831 Jun—1834 Jun, Log 1004, G.W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecticut. Also see Morgan, Hawaii, 220–21; Creighton, Rites and Passages, 125–27.

  36. On seamen’s life in the forecastle, see Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea [1840] (New York: Modern Library, 2001). On corporal punishment, see Creighton, Rites and Passages, 94–96, 108–11. On mutinies, see somewhat conflicting accounts in Chappell, Double Ghosts, 71; and Alastair Couper, Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2009), 129–32.

  37. See shipping articles for the ships Emily Morgan (1866) and Alpha (1866), in Box 5, Folder 2, “Shipping Articles 1864, 1866, 1867,” in Harbormaster’s Shipping Articles, 1862–1900, Record Group 89, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Honolulu. Also, Melville, Moby-Dick, 77, 85; Creighton, Rites and Passages, 143; Chappell, Double Ghosts, 44, 57–58. According to Creighton, the average lay for a boatsteerer (whose duties included harpooning) in the nineteenth century was 1/90. The average lays for seamen, depending on their level of skill, ranged from 1/190 to 1/150. Creighton, Rites and Passages, 27–30.

  38. Italy (ship) Account book, 1854–1857, New-York Historical Society.

  39. Shipping articles for the bark Coral (1862), Box 5, Folder 1, “Shipping Articles 1862–1863”; and the brigantine April (1868), Box 5, Folder 3, “Shipping Articles Jan-Dec 1868,” all in Harbormaster’s Shipping Articles, 1862–1900, Record Group 89, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Honolulu.

  40. Italy (ship) Account book, 1854–1857, New-York Historical Society.

  41. Ibid.; Chappell, Double Ghosts, 58. On debt, see the records of the “Seamen discharged before Harbor Master under the Act of June 25, 1855,” in Volume 2, Oct 1853–Aug 1866, Collector General of Customs Seamen’s Records, Record Group 88, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Honolulu.

  42. Charles H. Hammatt, Ships, Furs, and Sandalwood: A Yankee Trader in Hawaiʻi, 1823–1825, ed. Sandra Wagner-Wright (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1999), 29; O.A. Bushnell, The Gifts of Civilization: Germs and Genocide in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1993), 50.

  43. Dwight Baldwin to Rev. R. Anderson, August 18, 1837, Volume 14, Series 19.1, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Pacific Islands Missions Records, 1819–1960, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts; Marion Kelly, “Changes in Land Tenure in Hawaii, 1778–1850” (M.A. thesis, University of Hawaiʻi, 1956), 116; Sahlins, Anahulu, 102. Also see Morgan, Hawaii, 81; and John S. Whitehead, “Noncontiguous Wests: Alaska and Hawaiʻi,” in Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity, ed. David M. Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 321.

  44. “Ua hoopomaikai nui ia mai mamua keia pae moku o na moku kohola, no ko lakou holo ana mai ia nei e hoolako ai, a oia no ke kumu makamua nana i hookahua ai i ke kanu nui ana
o ka uala. Ua hele nui mai hoi na haole kalepa a noho ma na kulanakauhale awa ku moku e hoopukapuka ai me na mokukohola, a kawowo aku la na kahua oia mau kulanakauhale a akea loa, a ua kukuluia na hale paa a me ka maikai hoi, a mahuahua malie mai la ka waiwai o kanaka, a ua hooluoluia ka noho ana o kekahi no ka loaa ana mai i na mea e kuonoono ai; a ma ia mau wahi hoi, ua loaa i na mea mahiai, kahi e kuai aku i na mea a lakou i kanu ai. A mahope wale mai o ke ku ana mai o na mokukohola, nee mai la ke kau Kaliponia, a ua hookikina hou ia na mea mahi uala e hoomahuahua i ke kanu ana, no ke akaka lea o ka makepono o ka hana. Nani ka hooikaika ana o na mea kanu, a nani no hoi ka lilelile mai o na dala hulali i loaa mai ma o ua hana la; kahiko iho la na kane i na paa lole paina, a ‘hao no a linohau’ na wahine i ke kilika . . .” “Ke emi wawe loa nei ka nui o na mokukohola . . . [The number of whaling ships is presently very quickly diminishing . . . ],” Ka Hae Hawaii, April 17, 1861.

  45. Melville, Moby-Dick, 41; Richard A. Greer, “Wandering Kamaʻainas: Notes on Hawaiian Emigration Before 1848,” Journal of the West 6, no. 2 (1967): 221–25; Chappell, Double Ghosts, 132; Edward D. Melillo, “Making Sea Cucumbers out of Whales’ Teeth: Nantucket Castaways and Encounters of Value in Nineteenth-Century Fiji,” Environmental History 20, no. 3 (2015): 449–74, esp. 464–65.

  46. New London Crew Lists Index, 1803–1878, G.W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecticut; U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office, 1860 Manuscript Census, population schedules, familysearch.org, http://familysearch.org (accessed June 13, 2016). In the New London Crew List database, I found 144 instances of men of Hawaiian ancestry departing New London on American whaling ships. Of these, approximately 120 distinct men are represented because some of these men departed multiple times over the course of their careers. The data in figure 7 includes all 144 New London departures.

  47. Giles Waldo to George Waldo, November 2, 1845, HM 17463, Letters of Giles Waldo, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Sahlins, Anahulu, 101–2. For a sense of the numbers of American seamen visiting the Hawaiian Islands at this time, note U.S. consul to the Hawaiian Kingdom John Turrill’s 1848 report that over the past two and a half years (1846–1848) “some thirty or forty thousand [American] Seamen have visited these Islands.” J. Turrill to James Buchanan, Secretary of State, Dec. 22, 1848, Volume 1, Letter books of the U.S. Consul in Hawaii, MS Vault 62, California Historical Society, San Francisco.

  48. See competing analyses in Chappell, Double Ghosts, xiii, 42, 186n5; and Gary Y. Okihiro, Island World: A History of Hawaiʻi and the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 154.

  49. Greer, “Wandering Kamaʻainas,” 222–23; Morgan, Hawaii, 140; Okihiro, Island World, 156. Hawaiian Minister of Foreign Affairs Robert C. Wyllie is the original source of the “550 emigrants” figure. See Wyllie, section 59 titled “Native Seamen,” in “Notes, on the Shipping, Trade, Agriculture, Climate . . . ,” The Friend, September 4, 1844. Wyllie’s data showed 275 emigrants leaving Honolulu during that period, and so he estimated that another 275 probably left from Lāhainā. Of the actual 275 emigrants recorded, 114 left on whaling ships (41 percent); 63 on ships going to California (23 percent); 50 on trading ships to the Columbia River; 18 left on ships to various Pacific Islands; 10 to Mazatlán, Mexico; 9 to Valparaiso, Chile; 6 to Kamchatka, Russia; and 5 to China.

  50. Morgan, Hawaii, 148n21; Sahlins, Anahulu, 103n6; Chappell, Double Ghosts, xi, 17; Gibson, Yankees in Paradise, 148; Beechert, Honolulu, 52.

  51. Data compiled from “Native Seamen shipped before the Harbor Master in the year 1859,” Volume 3, 1858–1867; and Volume 4, 1859–1865, Collector General of Customs Seamen’s Records, Record Group 88, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Honolulu.

  52. Sahlins, Anahulu, 106.

  53. Ibid.; Chappell, Double Ghosts, 163; Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1977), 8, 12, 16. On the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi’s concern over population decline in the late 1840s, also see 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). On relationships between internal migration and overseas migration, see Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), as a useful model.

  54. Sahlins, Anahulu, 107–108, 111–12.

  55. Ibid., 108, 112–15.

  56. Marx, Capital, 784–848.

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

  CHAPTER THREE. KEALOHA IN THE ARCTIC

  1. “Makemake nā au e ʻike iā Kaleponi/I ka ʻāina o ka nani a me ka maikaʻi./Maikaʻi ʻokoʻa no ke kai kūono o Hukekona/He nani Papine me Kaliona./Ka ʻoi loa aku nā o ka Lae Hao me Aukaki./He home i aloha ʻia na nā holokahiki. . . .” Nā Mele Welo: Songs of Our Heritage, trans. Mary Kawena Pukui (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1995), 206–9. Translation by Pukui.

  For references to Aukaki (or Aukakina), see “Lau Kanaka Ke Kaona Nei [The Town Is Dense with People],” Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, November 3, 1866; “Na keiki o ke kai [The Boys of the Sea],” Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, October 31, 1868; “He lono mai ke Kai Anu o Alika [News from the Cold Sea of the Arctic],” Ka Lahui Hawaii, October 7, 1875.

  2. “Kaulana ke anu i Alika, ka lalawe i ka ili a puni.” On Kealoha’s journey, see Charles Edward Kealoha, “He Moolelo Walohia! Ka noho pio ana iwaena o ka Lahui Naguru ma Alika! Ka ike hou ana i ka aina! [A Heartwrenching Tale! Living as a captive amongst the Naguru people in the Arctic! Seeing Land Again!],” Ka Lahui Hawaii, November 8 and 15, 1877; Susan A. Lebo, “Native Hawaiian Seamen’s Accounts of the 1876 Arctic Whaling Disaster and the 1877 Massacre of Alaskan Natives from Cape Prince of Wales,” Hawaiian Journal of History 40 (2006): 99–129. Translation by Lebo with slight modification.

  3. Edward Brinley, Jr. to Francis W. Brinley [November 1849], Edward Brinley, Jr. Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Theodore Morgan, Hawaii: A Century of Economic Change, 1778–1876 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 76; John R. Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers in the Far North: The Contest among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 260–61.

  4. Morgan, Hawaii, 146; Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers, 327; Bathsheba Demuth, “The Power of Place: Ideology and Ecology in the Bering Strait, 1848–1988” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2016), 31, 36–37. On the U.S. adminstration of Alaska, see Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), ch. 9.

  5. “i ka haki nua o na kanaka ma ke Alanui Nuuanu, i ka hoomaopoopo ana aku i ko lakou mau hiohiona, ua ike ia aku o na keiki o na kai Anuanu o Arita a me Aukakina, ua hoi mai a lele uwaki ana mauka nei.” “Lau Kanaka Ke Kaona Nei [The Town Is Dense with People],” Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, November 3, 1866; Adeline (ship) Logbook, New York Public Library; “Journal by C. Pickering. In his handwriting, kept by him while on the United States Exploring Expedition, Wilkes, Commander,” entry for November 7, 1840, Charles Pickering Journal, 1838–1841, Microfilm P-118, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. On seamen’s understandings of “liberty,” see Paul A. Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

  6. “Aole no e nalo ko kai keiki a aohe no hoi e nalo ko ke kaona keiki. O ke aho no o na keiki o ke kai o ke kau mai o na lei ma ka ai a ma ke poo, hoonuanua kela ke ike aku”; “ka loaa ae la no o ka uhauha aku la noia. O ko kanaka mau no o ka hoomaeo.” All quotes from “Lau Kanaka Ke Kaona Nei [The Town Is Dense with People],” Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, November 3, 1866.

  7. “I keia mau aluna ahiahi a me keia mau po konane a ka mahina, ua halawai pinepine mai makou me na keiki o na kai anu o Arita a me Aukakina, e lele waki ana ma ko kakou mau Alanui, oiai akahi no a loaa ia kakou he lelewaki honua, mai
ka wa aku a lakou i kau ai maluna o ko lakou mau hale holo moana a hiki i ka hoi ana mai i ka aina nei.” “Na keiki o ke kai [The Boys of the Sea],” Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, October 31, 1868.

  8. “e mahuahua ana na barela, a e ulumahiehie hou ana na keiki o ke kai. He mau la koe a halulu ana i ke kai malino o Kou nei, a hehi hou i ke noe o Kakuhihewa.” “He lono mai ke Kai Anu o Alika [News from the Cold Sea of the Arctic],” Ka Lahui Hawaii, October 7, 1875.

  9. Marshall Sahlins (with Dorothy B. Barrère), Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii: Volume One, Historical Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 107–8; David A. Chappell, “Shipboard Relations between Pacific Island Women and Euroamerican Men, 1767–1887,” Journal of Pacific History 27, no. 2 (1992): 131–49.

  10. Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 42, 221, 226–27, 242–43.

  11. “I ko’u hele ana a ku ma kekahi mau hale ma Puueo, no ko’u ike nui i na wahine me ka lakou mau kane no ka moku Okohola mai, i hele wale a hapaupau i ka aila o ke kai Aukaki; ia’u e noho ana ma ka hale o kekahi kamaaina, ike iho la au i ka nui mai o na haole a me na kanaka kupa o keia aina hanau”; “Ua like pu me na wahine o Honolulu i lawe i ka laikini, pela maanei a’u i ike iho nei. Aloha ino na kaikamahine maka-palupalu e luaiele ia ana i-o ia nei.” J.A.K. Halaulani, “Ke holo nei ka Hookamakama o na wahine o Hilo [The going-on of Prostitution of the women of Hilo],” Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, April 27, 1865.