Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  “Ina ua makaukau lakou i na lole kupono, na palule a me na kihei huluhipa, na mea i makemake ole ia ma ko lakou aina hanau, o na mea hoi i hiki ole ke hooneleia ma ia aina; alaila, pono ia lakou e holo i Kaliponia. Ina imi lakou i hana oi ka luhi, i haku oi ka hookaumaha ana, i ola kaumaha, oluolu ole, a me ka pilikia o ka malihini i hoowahawaha ia no kona ili eleele, alaila, pono ia lakou e holo wikiwiki i Kaliponia.

  “A eia ka hope, ina i ike lakou, ua lohi pono ole ka emi ana o ko lakou lahui, ua pau ke kalo ono o na awawa maikai o ko lakou aina, ua pau na ia o ke kai i ka holo aku he hapa uuku na ino i lawe ia mai e na haole; alaila, e wiki lakou i ka holo aku i ka aina kahi e loaa’i ia lakou na ino o ka naau a me ke kino e pau koke lakou i ka hoowalewaleia . . .” “He mau wahi olelo no ka holo ana o na kanaka maoli i Kaliponia [A few words on the going of Hawaiians to California],” Ka Hae Hawaii, April 17, 1861.

  41. “I keia mau makahiki e noho ia nei, o ka poe a pau e noho ana ma na kuahiwi, e eli ana i ke gula, aole i loaa ka uku kupono no ka hana ana. O ke kapalili o ka houpo kai pono i kahi ai a me kahi ia, oia kahi mea i loaa mai”; “Ka hana hoolimalima me na haku haole, ua pili aku no i ke ano o na kauwa hooluhi”; “Ua lawe mai kekahi haole o Coneki, i kekahi poe kanaka mai ka aina mai, he kanalima paha ka nui o lakou”; “Aole i loaa iki mai kekauwahi uku iki o ko lakou luhi ana. Haalele iho la lakou, a hele aku la kela mea keia mea ma kana wahi i manao ai”; “Pela no ke ano nui o na hana hoolimalima i keia manawa. Loaa kekahi wahi hapa iki, o ka nui aku, aole i loaa mai.” All quotes from T.B. Kamipele, “No Kalifonia Mai [From California],” Ka Hae Hawaii, July 3, 1861.

  42. “Aole he pilikia ma na mea aahu, ua nui na palule huluhulu e mehana ai no ka wa anu, e waiho ana ma hale kuai ma na wahi a pau o Kalifonia nei, a me ka huluhulu no ka moe ana i ka po”; Kamipele, “No Kalifonia Mai [From California],” Ka Hae Hawaii, July 3, 1861.

  43. “Aole no hoi he wi no ka ai, ua nui ka ai ma na wahi a pau”; “Ka mai, aole he mai nui ma Kalifonia nei, e like me ka aina la, ka nui o ka mai. Ua maikai ka noho ana maanei no ka mai ole”; “A ua ikaika na lala a pau e kokua ana i ke kino; nolaila, holo maikai ka hana i na la a pau me ka eha ole mai o ke kino.” All quotes from Kamipele, “No Kalifonia Mai [From California],” Ka Hae Hawaii, July 3, 1861. Hawaiian migrants’ food options were not always to everyone’s liking; see Moses Nahora’s letter from Coloma describing his struggle to replicate poi by mixing flour with boiling water. M. Nahora, “He Poi Palaoa [Flour Poi],” Ka Hae Hawaii, March 16, 1859.

  44. “List of Letters Remaining in the Post Office at Sacramento for the month of February, 1859,” Sacramento Daily Union, February 25, 1859; “City Intelligence: Arrests,” Sacramento Daily Union, March 4, 1859; “City Intelligence: Police Court,” Sacramento Daily Union, March 21, 1859; “Ejectment Suits in the Sixth District Court: Suits by John C. Reilly,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 2, 1868.

  45. Alexander Liholiho to Elizabeth Kinau Judd, c. 1850, as quoted in Elizabeth Leslie Wight, ed., The Memoirs of Elizabeth Kinau Wilder (Honolulu: Paradise of the Pacific Press, 1909), 86; Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, xxiv-xxvi. On Hawaiian export trade to California during the Gold Rush, see Chas [Charles] Brewer to Henry A. Peirce, October 2 and 9, 1848, Volume 46 (1848–1852), Box 24, James Hunnewell, Business Papers, 1823–1883, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts; Louis J. Rasmussen, San Francisco Ship Passenger Lists: Volume II (Colma, CA: San Francisco Historic Records, 1966), 5–6, 9, 12, 17, 39, 58, 73–74, 80; Delgado, To California by Sea, 74–75. On ecological relationships between cities and countrysides, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991).

  46. “Health of the City,” Sacramento Transcript, October 25, 1850; “Cholera at San Francisco,” Sacramento Transcript, October 26, 1850; “Coroner’s Inquisition,” Sacramento Transcript, October 26, 1850; Delgado, To California by Sea, 79–87; Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, 76. On perceptions of disease in early California, see Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 16–48.

  47. Edward Brinley, Jr., to Francis W. Brinley, November 4, 1849 and [November 1849], HM 74031–74033, Edward Brinley, Jr. Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; G. Oldfield to R.C. Wyllie, September 1, 1850, Folder 575, Box 35, Correspondence with Hawaiian Officials Abroad, 1842–1900, Record Group 404, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Honolulu. Underscoring in the original.

  48. Edward Brinley, Jr., to Francis W. Brinley [November 1849], HM 74033, Edward Brinley, Jr. Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; “City Intelligence: Coroner’s Inquests,” Daily Alta California, March 16, 1851; “Local Matters: Body Found,” Daily Alta California, August 11, 1853.

  49. “Items from the Bay: ‘Monte’ Dealer Thrashed,” Sacramento Transcript, January 15, 1851; “A Kanaka in Trouble,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 24, 1851; “City Intelligence: Robbery,” Daily Alta California, May 25, 1851; “Local Matters: Assault with a Deadly Weapon,” Daily Alta California, May 13, 1852.

  50. “The City: A Stubborn Evening,” Sacramento Daily Union, August 13, 1853; “Local Affairs: City Bath House,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 20, 1852.

  51. “City Items: Interesting from the Sandwich Islands,” Daily Alta California, July 30, 1857.

  52. C.[harles] Hitchcock to “Friend Wyllie” [R.C. Wyllie], July 21, 1862; C. Hitchcock to “Friend Wyllie,” September 27, 1862, Folder 582, Box 36, Correspondence with Hawaiian Officials Abroad, 1842–1900, Record Group 404, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Honolulu; C. De Varigny to Charles E. Hitchcock, October 21, 1865, Folder 584, Box 36, ibid.

  53. “City Intelligence: The Destitute Kanaka,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 26, 1860; “City Intelligence: The Imbecile Kanaka,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 27, 1860.

  54. “o ka hapa o kona leta ma ka olelo Hawaii, a o ka hapa ma ka olelo haole”; “he nui no na kanaka ma kela aina e imi ana i ke dala iloko o ka lepo o ka honua, a eono wale no ma kulanakauhale o Sacramento. Eia ko lakou mau inoa, R.H. Nahoa, Davida, L.A. Maikai, Elia Waikane, Kapua, Kae.” “Na Palapala no ka Hae [Letters for ka Hae],” Ka Hae Hawaii, August 22, 1860.

  55. U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office, 1870 Manuscript Census, Vernon Township, Sutter County, California, population schedule, pp. 7–8, familysearch.org, https://www.familysearch.org (accessed March 10, 2012).

  56. Of 49 Hawaiian women in California in 1870, 19 (or 39 percent) are listed as married in the U.S. census. (By way of comparison, only 24 percent of Hawaiian men are listed as married.) U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office, 1870 Manuscript Census, California, population schedules, familysearch.org, https://www.familysearch.org (accessed March 10, 2012). For more information on the census data, see note 31. On prostitution, see “Conviction of a Keeper of a House of Ill-Fame,” Daily Alta California, November 16, 1871.

  57. Isenberg, Mining California; Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods; David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). On immigrant contributions to Californian agriculture, also see Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Cecilia M. Tsu, Garden of the World: Asian Immigrants and the Making of Agriculture in California’s Santa Clara Valley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

  58. “He mau wahi olelo no ka holo ana o na kanaka maoli i Kaliponia [A few words on the going of Hawaiians to California],” Ka Hae Hawaii, April 17, 1861; Kamipele, “No Kalifonia Mai [From California],” Ka Hae Hawaii, July 3, 1861; J. Kapu, “No ka mai Colera [Concerning the Cholera sickness],” Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, November 30, 1867. The Friend’s 1868 coverage is described in Dillon, “Kanaka Colonies in California,” 21–22.

  59. “ka paa hoi i na Konohiki, no ka mea o kela aoao a me keia aoao o ka Muliwai holookoa ua paa i na haole.” Quote from J. Kap
u, “Palapala mai Kaleponi mai: No Ka Auhau Ana o Na Holoholona Ma Calefonia Mei, a me Na Pili [Letter from California: Concerning the Taxing of Animals in California, and Grass],” Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, July 11, 1868. On konohiki and taxation systems in early Hawaiʻi, see Beechert, Working in Hawaii, 6–10, 26–27; 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), 29–33. On the fishing commons and enclosure movement in California, see Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

  60. McEvoy, Fisherman’s Problem, 47–48, 83–84; Isenberg, Mining California, 43–45.

  61. “Pacific Coast Items,” Sacramento Daily Union, July 30, 1872; “Interior Items,” Daily Alta California, June 9, 1873; “A Mystery of the River,” Daily Alta California, January 20, 1877; U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office, 1880 Manuscript Census, Vernon Township, Sutter County, California, population schedule, ancestry.com, http://www.ancestry.com (accessed March 10, 2012). Further reflections on the Hawaiian community at Vernon are in Margaret A. Ramsland and Henry Keʻaʻaʻla Azbill, “The Forgotten Californians” (unpublished manuscript, 1974), MSS 75/8 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

  62. “State and County Statistics: Court Business for 1871: Naturalizations,” Sacramento Daily Union, January 1, 1872; U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office, 1870 Manuscript Census, California, population schedules, familysearch.org, https://www.familysearch.org (accessed March 10, 2012). For more information on the census data, see note 31. On the politics of race and labor in nineteenth-century California, see Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 369–402. On American racializations of Hawaiians as “black” or “negro,” see also Barman and Watson, Leaving Paradise, 14, 136–38; David A. Chang, The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 178–83; Chang, “Borderlands in a World at Sea,” 402. The first American census in California, conducted by occupying forces during the Mexican-American War in 1847, included the category “Sandwich Islanders,” but every census after that in the nineteenth century did not include an appropriate category for Hawaiians. “Documents for the History of California 1846–9 Presented by Dr. George McKinstry of San Diego to the Bancroft Library 1872,” 27, Papers on the History of California, MSS C-B 84, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

  63. “City Intelligence: Brief Reference,” Sacramento Daily Union, June 10, 1873; “City Intelligence: County Hospital,” Sacramento Daily Union, July 2, 1873. Pyemia is septicemia, a bacterial infection.

  CHAPTER SIX. BECKWITH’S PILIKIA

  1. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, April 5, 1865, “Haiku, 1865 Managers letters Beckwith” and G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, May 15, 1866, “Haiku, Maui 1866 Managers letter Beckwith (a few Goodale),” Castle & Cooke Business Papers, 1850–1915, Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi.

  2. I use the contemporary spelling “Haʻikū” when referring to the place on Maui, but the older spelling “Haiku” when referring to the eponymously named nineteenth-century company.

  3. On the discursive construction of the “coolie,” see Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006); Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves of Cuba (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).

  4. On Chinese immigration to Hawaiʻi, see Tin-Yuke Char, The Sandalwood Mountains: Readings and Stories of the Early Chinese in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1975); Clarence E. Glick, Sojourners and Settlers: Chinese Migrants in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1980); Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

  5. “a o ka waiwai o ke ko i kela wa i manao ia, he mea lapaau, a he mea hooluu kapa, he rama, a he mea ai.” J.A. Kaelemakule, “No ka Mahi ko [Concerning the Sugar Plantation],” Ka Hoku o Ka Pakipika, December 26, 1861. See also Robert L. Cushing, “The Beginnings of Sugar Production in Hawaiʻi,” Hawaiian Journal of History 19 (1985): 17–34, esp. 17–18; Alan Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, Ecology, and Evolution (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002), 322–325.

  6. Historians debate whether Wong really existed. See Char, Sandalwood Mountains, 54; Glick, Sojourners and Settlers, 2; Cushing, “Beginnings of Sugar Production,” 19–23; McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks, 33. On the origins of South China’s sugar industry and its tangshi, see Sucheta Mazumdar, Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology, and the World Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  7. Char, Sandalwood Mountains, 54; Glick, Sojourners and Settlers, 2–3; Cushing, “Beginnings of Sugar Production,” 27–29.

  8. Stephen Reynolds, Journal of Stephen Reynolds, Volume I, 1823–1829, ed. Pauline King (Honolulu: Ku Paʻa Inc.; Salem, MA: Peabody Museum, 1989), 83, 100, 177, 189; Char, Sandalwood Mountains, 54; Glick, Sojourners and Settlers, 3–4; Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1983), 3–6; Edward D. Beechert, Working in Hawaii: A Labor History (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1985), 22; Cushing, “Beginnings of Sugar Production,” 29–31.

  9. Wai-Jane Char, “Three Chinese Stores in Early Honolulu,” Hawaiian Journal of History 8 (1974): 11–38, esp. 14–16; Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1977), 359; Takaki, Pau Hana, 8, 13; Christian Daniels and Nicholas K. Menzies, Biology and Biological Technology, vol. 6, no. 3, Joseph Needham, gen. ed., Science and Civilisation in China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 417.

  10. On technologies and methods of sugar production in South China, see Daniels and Menzies, Biology and Biological Technology, 43; Mazumdar, Sugar and Society, 123, 147, 152–61, 180–81, 237, 277, 283.

  11. Char, “Three Chinese Stores,” 33; Glick, Sojourners and Settlers, 6, 9; Beechert, Working in Hawaii, 58–60; Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 157.

  12. “Proceedings of Preliminary Meeting,” Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1, no. 1 (1850): 4–5.

  13. “Circular,” Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1, no. 1 (1850): 5–8. On the important role of the California market at this time, see 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), 315–41, esp. 323.

  14. On discourses of indigenous extinction, see Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982); Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

  15. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Jonathan D. Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 107–52; Adam McKeown, “Chinese Emigration in Global Context, 1850–1940,” Journal of Global History 5 (2010): 95–124; Adam McKeown, “Movement,” in Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People, ed. David Armitage and Alison Bashford (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 143–65.

  16. Robert J. Hollingsworth to the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society, August 14, 1851, published in Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1, no. 2 (1851): 99–103; Stephen Reynolds, “Report on the Committee on Labor,” Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1, no. 3 (1852):
69–71.

  17. Prince [Alexander] Liholiho, “Report on Labor and Population,” Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 2, no. 1 (1854): 101–5. Emphasis in the original.

  18. Reynolds, “Report on the Committee on Labor,” 69–70. On the 1852 arrival of the first coolies, see Char, Sandalwood Mountains, 60; Glick, Sojourners and Settlers, 9; McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks, 33.

  19. “Proceedings of the Royal Agricultural Society,” Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1, no. 2 (1851): 4–9; “Report of the Committee on Labor,” Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1, no. 2 (1851): 90–92; Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi, 271–73. On suicide as a form of resistance, see Yun, The Coolie Speaks, 143–50.

  20. Prince Liholiho, “Report on Labor and Population,” 103–4. On the Hawaiian environment as “analogous” to that of South China’s and thus appropriate for Chinese workers’ bodies, see C. De Varigny to J. Whittall, August 4, 1866, Folder 203, Box 12, Correspondence with Hawaiian Officials Abroad, 1842–1900, Record Group 404, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Honolulu.

  21. “He kanaka kahiko loa keia, ua komo ko lakou inoa, a me na inoa o na wahi nui o ko lakou aina i ka moolelo ma ka palapala hemolele no na aina kahiko, a me ka hana a na ‘lii me na kanaka a pau o Europa a pau, kau pinepine ko kakou maka maluna o lakou me he ano kupainaha loa lakou”; “a o ka launa me ka holoholona ko lakou pono, akaaka kakou i ko lakou kamailio a me ke ano e iwaena o kakou.” “Kekahi Mau Ano o Ka Poe Pake [Some Ways of the Chinese People],” Ka Hae Hawaii, July 23, 1856.

  22. “Noonoo kakou, heaha la ka mea i alualu ai ko lakou lole wawae, a heaha ka mea i hookoeia ai ka lauoho o ke poo ma kahi uuku, a kahe ia ka nui. He ano ‘e io no lakou aka, aole pono ke hai wale i keia mau mea me ke ike ole i ke kumu.” Ibid.