Beyond Hawai'i Native Labor in the Pacific World

by Gregory Rosenthal

  23. “Ma ko lakou aina he mauu ka nui o ka lole, a me ka loihi o ka lauoho, ina lakou e hana okoa, e oki i ka lauoha alaila, ua henehene ia lakou, a he mea hilahila loa ia, e like me kakou nei ina hele wale no aole kapa, he mea hilahila. A pela hoi ka lole. A i ko’u he mea maikai pono no ia, no ka mea he oluolu maoli ka lole he alualu, he oleloa na lole o ka haole he pilikia hana ia a pili loa i na uha, o ka Pake ua imi i ka oluolu, o ka haole ua imi i ka nani o ka hookano.” Ibid.

  24. “Ina hooneleia ka Laiki, ua like pu, me ke kanaka ke nele i ka poi.” Ibid.

  25. L.L. Torbert to Mr. [Richard] Armstrong, September 23, 1858, “1858 Beginning Haiku Sugar Maui,” Castle & Cooke Business Papers, 1850–1915, Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi.

  26. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy [1867] (New York: Modern Library, 1906), 784–848. On fences, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England [1983] (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 127–56.

  27. “E Ka poe hui Kanuko ma Haiku”; “Eia Ko’u manao ia oukou na’u no e huli ina Pau no Ko oukou pa Uwea ma Haiku eha haneri pou ohia Alii pololei maikai mai Ka ha ai Kalima iniha ke amawaena a ehiku Kapua[?] ai ka loa e lawe no au i Kai me Ka hoai keohi i ke kumu Kahi Komo ai iloko o Kalepo a ewehe no i Ka ili a pau loa.” M. Kapihe to “Ka poe hui Kanuko ma Haiku” [the Haiku Sugar Company], February 17, 1859, “Haiku, Maui 1859,” Castle & Cooke Business Papers, 1850–1915, Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi.

  28. “no na Kahu o ka ahahuikanuko, o Haiku”; “na heluheluia kau palapala. Feb. 17 iho nei, imua o na Kahu o Ka ahahuimahiai ma Haiku Maui i Ka halawai o makou”; “nau no no e huli i pou, no ka pauwea o makou ma Haiku, eha haneri, e like me ke ano o Kau palapala; e hau[?] no nae na pou i Kai”; “Ia wa no e uku no makou ia ae, no keia hana; aia hau na laau i kai”; “Ua pono keia.” “Limaikaika” to E.M. Kapihe, March 13, 1859, “Haiku, Maui 1859,” Castle & Cooke Business Papers, 1850–1915, Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi.

  29. G.E. Beckwith to Rev. R. Armstrong, December 27, 1859, “Haiku, Maui 1859,” Castle & Cooke Business Papers, 1850–1915, Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. Hawaiian remained the language of business at Haʻikū well into the 1860s. See G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, November 12, 1866, “Haiku, Maui 1866 Managers letter Beckwith (a few Goodale),” ibid., in which Beckwith requests “1 copy Andrews Hawaiian Dictionary” be shipped to the plantation for his use.

  30. G.E. Beckwith to Directors of the Haiku Sugar Co[mpany], February 17, 1863, “Haiku, Maui 1863,” ibid. On the impact of the U.S. Civil War, see Theodore Morgan, Hawaii: A Century of Economic Change, 1778–1876 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 180–81; Whitehead, “Noncontiguous Wests,” 324; Jung, Coolies and Cane, 48, 63. For further global repercussions, see Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage, 2015), 242–73.

  31. Report on the “Committee appointed to investigate the affairs of the Haiku Sugar Coy [Company],” [1863], “Haiku, Maui 1863,” Castle & Cooke Business Papers, 1850–1915, Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi.

  32. Desertion records from “Volume 7, 1859–1862” and “Volume 8, 1860–61; 1866–67,” Collector General of Customs Seamen’s Records, Record Group 88, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Honolulu.

  33. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, August 29, 1864, “Haiku, Maui 1864 July-Sept,” Castle & Cooke Business Papers, 1850–1915, Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi.

  34. M.B. Beckwith to S. Savidge, July 20, 1865 and August 9, 1865, “Haiku, 1865 Managers letters Beckwith,” ibid.

  35. G.E. Beckwith to “The Sec. of the H.S.Co.,” February 6, 1860, “Haiku, Maui 1860” and G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, September 26, 1864, “Haiku, Maui 1864 July-Sept,” ibid. On Hawaiians and salmon, see Jean Barman and Bruce Watson, Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787–1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2006), 47, 99; Lissa K. Wadewitz, The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 36–38.

  36. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, April 5, 1865, “Haiku, 1865 Managers letters Beckwith,” Castle & Cooke Business Papers, 1850–1915, Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. On geographically distant ecologies linked through the consumption of food, see Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003).

  37. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, April 5, 1865 and April 19, 1865, and M.B. Beckwith to S. Savidge, July 10, 1865, “Haiku, 1865 Managers letters Beckwith,” Castle & Cooke Business Papers, 1850–1915, Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi.

  38. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, January 3, 1865, “Haiku, 1865 Managers letters Beckwith,” ibid.

  39. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, April 5, 1865 and June 14, 1865, “Haiku, 1865 Managers letters Beckwith,” ibid.

  40. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, May 29, 1865, June 29, 1865, August 19, 1865, and August 28, 1865, “Haiku, 1865 Managers letters Beckwith,” ibid.

  41. Histories of Hansen’s disease include Pennie Moblo, “Blessed Damien of Molokaʻi: The Critical Analysis of Contemporary Myth,” Ethnohistory 44, no. 4 (1997): 691–726; R.D.K. Herman, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Out of Power: Leprosy, Race and Colonization in Hawaiʻi,” Journal of Historical Geography 27, no. 3 (2001): 319–37; Michelle T. Moran, Colonizing Leprosy: Imperialism and the Politics of Public Health in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Michelle T. Moran, “Telling Tales of Koʻolau: Containing and Mobilizing Disease in Colonial Hawaiʻi,” in Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire, ed. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 315–33; Kerri A. Inglis, Maʻi Lepera: Disease and Displacement in Nineteenth-Century Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2013).

  42. On scientific racism in the Pacific, see Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, eds., Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race, 1750–1940 (Canberra, Australia: ANU Press, 2008); James Belich, “Race,” in Pacific Histories, 263–81. On eugenicist efforts in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, see brief accounts in Moon-Kie Jung, Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaiʻi’s Interracial Labor Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 80; J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 82. Kauanui’s discussion is important for underscoring how Westerners in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries understood racial identity as a matter of blood quantum, whereas many Hawaiians saw (and continue to see) their identity as defined by ancestry and genealogy rather than blood quantum.

  43. “Ua lahaia ma Lahaina nei i kekahi mai, i kapaia ka inoa he ‘Mai Pake.’ He mai inoino loa i ka nana ana’ku, he hakumakuma manoanoa ma na maka, na papalina, ka ihu, a me ka lae, a me na wahi e pili ana.” “He mai Pake [Chinese disease],” Ka Hae Hawaii, May 2, 1860. Moblo, “Blessed Damien of Molokaʻi,” 697, argues that Hansen’s disease did, in fact, come from China, but that government officials and wealthy planters in Hawaiʻi hesitated to acknowledge this fact as it threatened their goal of importing more Chinese labor. Some contemporary observers, however, were less sure regarding the disease’s origins; see Nathaniel Bright Emerson, “Ahia, the first leper in Honolulu” [c. 1882], EMR 155 and “How is Leprosy Communicated? [c. 1880], EMR 165, Box 5, Nathaniel Bright Emerson Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Inglis, Maʻi Lepera, 33–34.

  44. “A ina i loihi loa ka wa i loaa ai keia mai, ua kiokio inoino launa ole mai; ua aneane e weliweli no ke nana aku. Oia no ke akua pehu o Moaula la! Hoomakau lua!”; “Ua olelo wale ia e ka poe i. ike, he mai ola ole. O ka ai iho la no ka ia a hiki i ka la e make ai.” “He mai Pake [Chinese disease],” Ka
Hae Hawaii, May 2, 1860.

  45. “ke hana ma kela mea keia mea e pono ai. I pono paha ilaila. O ka poe puni nani nae la, aole e pono, ua hele ka pili mua.” Ibid.

  46. “He mai lele no hoi keia, mai kekahi kanaka a i kekahi mea e. Aole nae he lele hiki wawe, he akahele loa no.” Ibid. “Aole no e hiki ia makou i keia manawa ke hai akaka aku i kekahi mea maopopo loa no keia mai”; “e noonoo no ka Papa Ola no keia mai, a e hooholo no lakou i ka mea kupono.” “Mai Pake [Chinese Disease],” Ka Hoku o Ka Pakipika, November 28, 1861.

  47. “o keia anoano ino loa, e ulu mai nei ma kela wahi keia wahi o ka aina”; “Eia ua anoano ino la o ka mai puupuu pake”; “Eia nae ka mea makau loa, o ka hana ana mai o kela mai pake keia mai pake i ka ai maauauwa, me ko lakou kawili ana i ke ehu ino o ka mai iloko o ka ai, a lawe mai i ke kulanakauhale nei, i kahi o ka lehulehu e kuai ai me ka poe maikai.” J.H. Kaonowai, “No ka poe mai ino Pake [Concerning the people with the wicked Chinese disease],” Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, March 9, 1865.

  48. I have interpreted the nineteenth-century term “ehu” as ʻehu, rather than ehu; the latter signifies, more directly, “dust.” For even more nuanced definitions of ʻehu, see Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary: Hawaiian-English, English-Hawaiian, rev. ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1986), 38. Also see Moran, Colonizing Leprosy, 4, for a scientific explanation of the “respiratory droplets” (ʻehu?) believed to spread Mycobacterium leprae bacillus.

  49. “O keia mai he pake, he mai ino loa, he mai aa-i loa no hoi. Pela mai kekahi ‘Pake’ waiwai i olelo mai ai i na mea o ko lakou aina ma Kina i loaahia ia e keia mai ino.” Kaonowai, “No ka poe mai ino Pake [Concerning the people with the wicked Chinese disease],” Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, March 9, 1865.

  50. “e pono e hoomalu loa ia ka poe i loaa i ka mai pake.—‘Aohe pono ia lakou ke lawe mai i ka ai ma keia kulanakauhale.’” Ibid; “Ka Mai Pake [Chinese Disease],” Ke Au Okoa, June 26, 1865; Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1977), 72–75; Inglis, Maʻi Lepera, 33, 35. Jack London’s famous story, “Koolau the Leper,” is based on the true history of Hawaiian militant resistance to the government’s quarantine policy in the 1890s; see Jack London, Tales of the Pacific (New York: Penguin, 1989), 135–50; Moran, “Telling Tales of Koʻolau.”

  51. “ka aina o ka poe iwi-maloo.” Siloama, “Ua Auhauia na mai Lepera! [The Lepers are Taxed!]” Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, December 11, 1875.

  52. On the role of human reproduction in American slavery, see Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). On scientific racism and eugenics, see note 42.

  53. David Kalākaua, statement on behalf of “ka Papa Hoopae Lima Hana [The Board to Land Laborers],” Ke Au Okoa, July 24, 1865. Also see Wm. [William] Hillebrand, Report on Supply of Labor, Etc. (Honolulu: Government Press, 1867), 27; Beechert, Working in Hawaii, 62; Jung, Coolies and Cane.

  54. “Ua loaa mai na palapala i ka Papa Hoopae Luina Hana mai ia Hon. W. Hilibarani mai Kina mai; ua kakauia ua mau palapala la ma Hongkong i ka la 14 o Iune, 1865. Ua hai mai o Kauka Hilibarani i ka holo pono o kana hana e pili ana i ka hoouna ana mai o na Coolies, (Pake Limahana,) i Hawaii nei, a ua manaolana ia e hiki ana ia ke hoouna mai i 500 Pake Limahana, he iwakalua a he kanakolu paha wahine iloko o ka haneri hookahi”; “Oiai he inoa ino a he inaina ia ka poe e pili ana i ke kuai Pake Limahana ana, ina na kekahi poe kaokoa e lawelawe, aka, ina na ke Aupuni, aohe e hoopoho ko lakou manao, i ke kaa ana iloko o kona lima a malalo o kona mana.” Kalākaua, statement on behalf of “ka Papa Hoopae Lima Hana [The Board to Land Laborers],” Ke Au Okoa, July 24, 1865.

  55. “Ke kahea aku nei ka Papa Hoopae Lima Hana, i ka poe e makemake ana i mau Limahana Pake, no ka mahi ko, kanaka hana, a kauwa lawelawe paha, e hookaawaleia no no lakou, ma ke noi ana mai i ka Papa, a me ka hookaa e ana mai no hoi i na dala he umi mamua, no kela Kauwa keia Kauwa Pake kane a wahine paha.” Kalākaua, statement on behalf of “ka Papa Hoopae Lima Hana [The Board to Land Laborers],” Ke Au Okoa, July 24, 1865. On kauā as a term for African slaves, see “Ka Hoomainoino i na Pake [The Abuse of the Chinese],” Ka Hae Hawaii, September 19, 1860. The aforementioned coolies were indeed “distributed” among several plantations within a few months of their arrival to Hawaiʻi; see C. de Varigny to J. Whittall, October 17, 1865, Folder 202, Box 12, Correspondence with Hawaiian Officials Abroad, 1842–1900, Record Group 404, Hawaiʻi State Archives, Honolulu.

  56. Prince Liholiho, “Report on Labor and Population,” 104.

  57. William Hillebrand, “Report on Labor and Population,” Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 2, no. 2 (1855): 77. See also Hillebrand, Report on Supply of Labor.

  58. “he poe kanaka kauwa lakou, a ua kuaiia aku lakou me he mea waiwai la e like me na nika ma na aina hema o Amerikahui”; “he poe kolohe lakou a me ka aihue kekahi”; “Ina ua halalo aku kekahi i ka poe lawehala e noho nei iloko o ka Halepaahao ma Honolulu nei, e akaka ai no ia mea ia lakou, no ka mea, he nui na Pake i hoopaahaoia. Ua panaia ia poe he ‘Pake kinikiu.’ Aka, o ka poe Pake kalepa, he poe kanaka okoa no lakou, he noho malie a me ka malama nui i na Kanawai o ka aina, a ua kapaia ia poe, he ‘Pake kanekona.’” “Ka Hoomainoino i na Pake [The Abuse of the Chinese],” Ka Hae Hawaii, September 19, 1860.

  59. “The Coolie System Improved,” The Friend, July 7, 1868.

  60. “The Labor Question,” The Friend, November 1, 1869.

  61. In the 1880s—a decade of global “yellow peril” that saw both the United States and the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi pass anti-Chinese laws—the search for a cognate race in Hawaiʻi shifted from Chinese to Japanese immigrants. See Char, Sandalwood Mountains, 74; Jung, Reworking Race, 70; Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood, 91–96; Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, ch. 5.

  62. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, September 27, 1865, “Haiku, 1865 Managers letters Beckwith,” Castle & Cooke Business Papers, 1850–1915, Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi.

  63. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, October 6, 1865, “Haiku, 1865 Managers letters Beckwith,” ibid.

  64. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, October 7, 1865, “Haiku, 1865 Managers letters Beckwith,” ibid.

  65. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, October 21, 1865, October 30, 1865, November 6–7, 1865 and November 30, 1865, “Haiku, 1865 Managers letters Beckwith,” ibid.

  66. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, November 6–7, 1865, “Haiku, 1865 Managers letters Beckwith,” ibid.

  67. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, January 31, 1866 and March 14, 1866, “Haiku, Maui 1866 Managers letters Beckwith (a few Goodale),” ibid.

  68. Ibid. See references to paʻi ʻai in “Haiku, Maui 1865 Oct-Dec,” ibid.

  69. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, January 11, 1866, March 14, 1866, and July 26, 1866, “Haiku, Maui 1866 Managers letters Beckwith (a few Goodale),” ibid.

  70. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, March 14, 1866, April 18, 1866, and May 8, 1866, “Haiku, Maui 1866 Managers letters Beckwith (a few Goodale),” ibid.

  71. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, November 30, 1865, “Haiku, 1865 Managers letters Beckwith,” ibid.; Yun, The Coolie Speaks, 143–50. In early 1868, some of Haiku’s coolies even “murdered one & perhaps two natives [Hawaiians]”; see W. Goodale to S.M. Castle, January 13, 1868, “Haiku, Maui Goodale letters Jan—June 1868,” Castle & Cooke Business Papers, 1850–1915, Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. On the Hawaiian government’s fears of “combined action between the Coolies” in which the state is unable to restore “order and discipline,” 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.

  72. G.E. Beckwith to S. Savidge, May 23, 1866, “Haiku, Maui 1866 Managers letters Beckwith (a few Goodale),” Castle & Cooke Business Papers, 1850–1915, Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi; Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi,
appendix A.

  73. George H. Dole, “Agriculture on Hawaii nei,” March 7, 1860, HM 57920, George H. Dole Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; George H. and Clara Rowell Dole, Diaries, 1873, February 11, 1873, HM 76340, Dole Family Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. On the Treaty of Reciprocity, 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), 102–5; Jung, Reworking Race, 12, 68.

  74. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 8–9, 25. Note that while the total population of the archipelago began to increase in 1876 (and continues to grow to this day), the indigenous population declined until 1910, when it reached a nadir of 38,547 individuals.

  75. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 90–91, 97–98, 122, 359; Beechert, Working in Hawaii, 60, 86; McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks, 33–34; Jung, Reworking Race, 68.

  76. “Ka Book Hoike La no Ka poe Kanaka Hana o Lihue Plantation E Hoomaka ana ma Feberuary 1866 [The Exhibition Book of the Working Kanaka Personnel of Lihue Plantation Commencing in February 1866],” Lihue Plantation Company, Time Book, Feb 1866—June 1867, LPC 0–1/5, Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association Archive, Hawaiian Collection, Hamilton Library, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; “Time Book of Lihue Plantation Company,” Lihue Plantation, Time Book, May 1870—Feb 1871, LPC PV.1, ibid; Records for 1874 from Lihue Plantation Company, Payroll Book July 1874—Dec 1879, LPC PV.2, ibid. I use the contemporary spelling “Līhu‘e” when referring to the place on Kauaʻi, but the older spelling “Lihue” when referring to the eponymously named nineteenth-century company.

  77. “Pay day of Chinese & Bolabola & Guano & Spanish in Employ of Lihue Plantation,” June 5, 1876, ibid.

  78. See records from June 17, 1876 to end, ibid. By mid-1878 the company was using the term “Chinese &c” to describe the old “Chinese”/ “Bolabola” / “Guano” /“Spanish” category.