Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  Ignorant of the Olowalu massacre and unaware of the near presence of his father, whom he was searching for, Thomas Metcalfe in the Fair American called on the Kohala coast—the domain of Kame‘eiamoku. That chief and several men came aboard under the guise of trading; one account had the high chief himself presenting Metcalfe with a feather helmet. Metcalfe was in the act of setting it upon his head when Kame‘eiamoku seized him and pitched him overboard, his men doing the same with the remainder of the crew. As they floundered in the water, more warriors in canoes beat them to death with paddles. The lone survivor, a Welshman named Isaac Davis, was taken half dead into a canoe, and Kame‘eiamoku might have completed his vengeance on him, but for the intercession of another chief who cited Davis’s brave fighting and asked that he be spared. Davis, the Fair American, and its cannons were all presented to Kamehameha.

  Sometime later Simon Metcalfe, unaware of the near presence of his schooner or death of his son, entered Kealakekua Bay to see what trading he might generate there. Aware that there were other foreigners residing in the west coast’s principal settlement, Metcalfe sent ashore his English boatswain, forty-eight-year-old John Young, to make contact. Kamehameha, fearful lest the new ship learn the fate of the recently captured schooner but not knowing of the relationship of the captains, detained Young ashore, and laid a kapu against any canoes going out to the Eleanora. He also, according to a native historian, leapt at the chance to dragoon these immensely capable foreigners into his service.18

  Metcalfe waited, and then wrote a threatening letter to the foreign community ashore: “Sirs, As my Boatswain landed by your invitation if he is not returned to the Vessel consequences of an unpleasant nature must follow.… If your Word be the Law of Owhyhe as you have repeatedly told me there can be no difficulty in doing me justice in this Business, otherwise I am possessed of sufficient powers to take ample revenge which it is your duty to make the head Chief acquainted with.”19

  The standoff continued for a few days before Metcalfe weighed anchor and sailed for China, leaving John Young behind. So far as is known, Metcalfe never learned of his son’s death or its circumstances, and he never returned to New York. (He was killed, ironically, four years later when Haida Indians in the Pacific Northwest boarded the Eleanora ostensibly to trade, suddenly realized their superior numbers, and massacred all the crew save one.) But it was Metcalfe’s visit to Hawai‘i that altered the course of those islands forever; it was his self-righteous bloodlust that handed John Young and Isaac Davis over to Kamehameha. That chief now had not only the cannons and muskets from the captured Fair American, he had two white sailors to teach his warriors how to use them. To Young and Davis he gave a choice: Serve him and be richly rewarded, or be put to death. The two Britons became close friends; they attempted an escape, once, and were thwarted, before accepting their fate. Both served Kamehameha ably and faithfully for many years, and were showered with land, power, and highborn wives.

  * * *

  In the eight years since Kalaniopu‘u died, word spread in the West of the existence of the islands, and other foreign ships began to arrive: the first traders in 1785, two British warships, King George and Queen Charlotte in 1786. In that same year the French explorer the Comte de Lapérouse, an admirer of Captain Cook, arrived with an expedition in the Boussole and the Astrolabe, before continuing on to disaster. The next year one of Kamehameha’s high chiefs, Ka‘iana, left for China aboard the Nootka and returned the next year from Oregon on the Iphigenia, the first Hawaiian to travel beyond his native shores.20 The Imperial Eagle brought the first (willing) white resident, John Mackay, in 1787. The next year the trading ships Prince of Wales and Princess Royal tarried for three months. In 1789 the first American trader, Capt. Robert Gray in the Columbia (the first American vessel to circumnavigate the earth), arrived to do business, the same year that a visiting Spanish captain recommended the islands’ seizure as a strategic outpost for that empire. Most of the American ships that called were in the fur trade, such as the brigantine Hope and the brig Hancock, which came in 1791. There were other fiercely independent chiefs in Hawai‘i, but Kamehameha, because his domain was the largest, and because of his fame and history with Captain Cook, was the most sought after. Always and ever he required one currency for his trade: weapons—cannons, muskets, powder, even ships. This condition was quickly seized upon by other traders, such as the American captain John Kendrick in the Lady Washington, with a whole cargo of guns and ammunition.

  Kamehameha was quick to grasp the concept of money, and soon his storehouse contained a chest of coins, which was equally effective in trading for more armaments. And now he had Davis and Young to train his army, and they also had cannons mounted and lashed to large double-hulled canoes. Gaining in ambition, Kamehameha diverted his attention from the Big Island to trade invasions with Kahekili of Maui, who had watched his possible son grow in power. While Kamehameha failed to establish a permanent conquest of Maui at this time, he came away with a valuable possession. Thinking their cause lost and with Kahekili on the Big Island, the surviving royal family fled in canoes to Moloka‘i. There Kamehameha overtook them, strengthening his claims by marrying the highest-ranking girl in the islands, one whose kapu was almost equal to that of the gods themselves. Her name was Keopuolani, daughter of Kiwala‘o whom Kamehameha had sacrificed. The girl’s grandmother Kalola, exercising the Hawaiian woman’s wonted shrewdness, realized that the Conqueror after winning his battles would want to cement his rule by having children with the highest-ranking females he could acquire. Keopuolani was born so far above him that even he had to strip to the waist in her presence. But no one now could doubt his right to rule, or that of his children by her, who would also outrank him. She was still a girl of perhaps only twelve, and Kamehameha did not have sex with her for some years more, but she was a signal possession that ended any dispute over his lordship.

  The year that Kalaniopu‘u died, Kahekili conquered O‘ahu and added that to his domain, building the House of Bones with the skeletons of O‘ahu ali‘i who had opposed him. Looking to his own defense, he also took to actively trading for Western weapons. He and Kamehameha fought to a stalemate: In a sea battle fought in the Maui Channel both the rival kings had cannons, but Kamehameha had Davis and Young to aim and fire his, and Kahekili’s fleet was decimated. But the king of Maui was more than a match on his own island, and the two withdrew to their own kingdoms to regroup and round up more warriors to pour into the fight.

  If any natives doubted the new king’s mana, they were convinced in 1790, when Kamehameha attacked the district of Puna in the east to add it to his domain. While his back was turned the troublesome Keoua Kuahu‘ula invaded again. After conquering Puna, Kamehameha returned to suppress Keoua’s uprising. Aided with cannons and muskets from the Fair American (Keoua had also once captured firearms but was virtually helpless in how to use them) Kamehameha slowly gained the upper hand, and when Keoua retreated past Kilauea, that volcano erupted and about a third of his army perished in a cloud of poisonous gas.

  This unexpected “miracle” was a sobering portent to victors as much as victims, and Kamehameha consulted with priests how to safeguard his power. He had always been devout in his observance of kapu, and always quick to testify that his success in war was attained by the gods’ favor. At the small heiau near his family compound in Halawa, “many people were burned on the adjoining hill for breaking the kapus.”21

  Now the kahunas directed that he build a grand luakini heiau for sacrifices to the war god and dedicate all his victories to him. This Kamehameha did, at Kawaihae, on the coast some thirty-five miles north of Kona, at a place called Pu‘ukohola, the Hill of the Whale. He delegated the work to his popular brother, Keli‘imaika‘i, who organized a human chain of thousands to pass red lava rocks from the Pololu Valley, fourteen miles east of there. The gargantuan platform was completed in less than a year. Kawaihae had been old Alapa‘i’s capital; Kalaniopu‘u had located himself further north in Kohala, and now
Kamehameha determined to anchor his own kingdom here. In mid-1791 he sent emissaries down to the disaffected Keoua Kuahu‘ula to come north, meet, and discuss their differences.

  He was suspicious of Kamehameha’s motives, but with his own army sapped by years of battle and then the eruption of Kilauea, he accepted. Keoua arrived at Kawaihae in state befitting a high chief, with retainers in a great double-hulled canoe. From the harbor he could not miss seeing the colossal new heiau surmounting the Hill of the Whale, which was perhaps his first inkling that his end was at hand. Keoua gashed himself, thinking to make himself unacceptable as a sacrifice, but it did him no good, for mana resided in the bones that survived decomposition. Nor was it necessary that the victim be taken alive to the temple; the offering of a dead body was equally efficacious. At the last he hesitated, but was coaxed ashore. “Rise and come here,” Kamehameha greeted him, “that we may know each other.”22 Cut down as soon as he landed, Keoua was the first ali‘i whose body was laid on the altar of Kuka‘ilimoku, followed by those of his slaughtered retainers.

  In good part American-armed, Kamehameha was now undisputed king of Hawai‘i Island, and he could stand in his birthplace of Kohala and gaze with confidence across the thirty-mile-wide channel at Maui.

  2. “Disobey, and Die”

  Young and Davis adjusted to their captivity. They proved their loyalty, and with Kamehameha never certain when his own chiefs might turn on him, he entrusted the Englishmen with crucial administrative posts, which came with land and kanaka tenants. Young built a comfortable stone house, probably the first on the island, on the coast at Kawaihae, within sight of the sanguine temple on the Hill of the Whale. The Conqueror gave him his niece, Kaoana‘eha, for his wife,1 and created him governor of Hawai‘i Island. Not entirely marooned, Young found many opportunities to visit with English sailors, as on the visits of Capt. George Vancouver, who had first come with Captain Cook, and returned on the first of March, 1792. Tellingly, everywhere he landed the Hawaiians wanted guns, but he refused to arm any faction and departed as quickly as he arrived. He came back the following spring, having looked after British interests on the western coast of America; he was pleased to think that Kamehameha had grown into his role as king, and that “his riper years had softened that stern ferocity which his younger days had exhibited, and had changed his general deportment to … an open, cheerful, and sensible mind, combined with great generosity and goodness of disposition.” To reciprocate his hospitality Vancouver made a gift of cattle from America, which Kamehameha turned loose, protected by his kapu that they not be disturbed for ten years, to allow the herd to increase.

  Modern scholars typically prefer to emphasize Kamehameha’s generous treatment of Davis and Young after they proved their loyalty, rather than dwell on the unpleasant terms of their cooperation—service or death—which might be seen as somewhat coercive. In any event his actions prove the sophistication of Kamehameha’s governing style, of pairing punishment with reward, of the ability to maintain his focus on a distant objective that he perceived to be important to his goals. Shrewd and patient, he grew his strength. Kahekili died midway through 1794, and similarly to Kalaniopu‘u, he sought to keep the peace by dividing his kingdom: His son Kalanikupule was already lord of O‘ahu; Maui he left to his brother, Ka‘eo. Thinking to swiftly dispatch his nephew, Ka‘eo invaded O‘ahu and put him to flight; the outcome seemed all but decided when Kalanikupule managed to rearm from the trading ships Prince Lee Boo and Jackal, and then also Lady Washington, which came on the scene. The tables were suddenly turned, and Kalanikupule lured Ka‘eo into battle along the eastern loch of the Pearl River estuary, where English sailors in boats could support him with impunity. Ka‘eo was killed, and Kalanikupule found himself king of both O‘ahu and Maui. On New Year’s Day 1795, his own ambition now afire, Kalanikupule’s warriors swarmed Jackal and Prince Lee Boo, killed their captains, and made forced labor of their crews (Lady Washington escaped to Canton after an errant cannon shot from Jackal killed her captain and several others).

  As Kalanikupule indulged his dreams of glory, the first mates and crews of the captive vessels retook them and killed or ejected the natives. The king and a few chiefs, who had already boarded for the voyage of conquest, were put ashore and the ships made straight for Kawaihae. Leaving letters telling John Young all that had happened on O‘ahu, and by one native account disgorging the last of their armaments for the benefit of Kamehameha, Jackal and Prince Lee Boo made sail for Canton and left the Hawaiians to work out their mayhem for themselves.

  * * *

  Kamehameha was ready. When Vancouver returned for a third visit, Kamehameha “ceded” Hawai‘i to the British Crown, probably in his own mind for purposes of counting on their protection.2 With Kahekili dead and Maui exhausted, he invaded in 1795, with ten thousand men in twelve hundred war canoes. The campaign was short but bloody, and Maui was soon his. Now lord of all the southern islands, Kamehameha turned his attention to O‘ahu, which was still ruled by intelligent, ruthless (as the captains of the Jackal and Prince Lee Boo discovered) Kalanikupule. Well aware of the growing threat from the south, the king of O‘ahu had laid in more firearms, including artillery, from traders. To help prepare his defenses he obtained the services of a turncoat chief from Kamehameha’s army, Ka‘iana, the same who had been to China and America. Although an important ali‘i in his own right and with ambitions of his own, Ka‘iana may also have been fleeing Kamehameha’s wrath for sleeping with the king’s wife—not the sacred Keopuolani, but his favorite recreational wife, Ka‘ahumanu.3 Her relationship with the Conqueror continued devoted but tempestuous, and she took lovers when it pleased her—although they came to her at their own risk.

  Kamehameha’s men stormed ashore at Honolulu, a fishing village with a natural harbor on the south shore, and at Waikiki several miles east of there, and Kalanikupule staged a fighting retreat to higher ground inland. Northeastward from Honolulu, the Nu‘uanu Valley rose higher and higher until it crested in a precipitous overlook, the Nu‘uanu Pali, more than a thousand feet high, commanding a view of the opposite side of the island. Here Kalanikupule had his men chip gunports into the high lava ridge, making a natural castle of the heights. Kamehameha pursued the retreating army of O‘ahu until the mountaintop cannons roared to life and stopped him in his tracks. Pinned down and taking losses, Kamehameha sent part of his army to the other side of the island, where they scaled the Pali—no mean feat in itself—and put the guns out of action. Resuming the attack, Kamehameha’s army cornered Kalanikupule’s at the precipice, and some four hundred of O‘ahu’s warriors were driven over the cliff, plunging to their deaths a thousand feet below. Later Kamehameha’s men moved through the bodies at the foot of the Pali, slicing off their heads so that the mana would accrue to him. Two generations later, American hikers at the foot of the Pali found skeletons in abundance, but no skulls; their burial place was discovered generations later during highway excavation. Kalanikupule himself escaped and lived for months as a fugitive, but was eventually captured, taken to the Big Island to Kuka‘ilimoku’s heiau on the Hill of the Whale, and sacrificed.

  Present on O‘ahu during the Battle of Nu‘uanu Pali was Kamehameha’s captive child bride, Keopuolani, now old enough to fulfill her function, and the Conqueror consummated their relationship. Thereafter she lived out her life as the sacred royal wife, though little affection attended the title. The king was fastidious in respecting her prerogatives, but he chafed under her rank and they did not live together. He acquiesced that she could have her own lovers, and she accepted that his call, when he wanted her, took precedence over her other men. During her life Keopuolani bore fourteen children, four of them by Kamehameha, of whom three lived: two sons, Liholiho, born about 1797; Kauikeaouli, born probably in 1813; and a daughter, Nahi‘ena‘ena, born in 1815.4

  From O‘ahu it was some sixty miles across the Kaua‘i Channel to the remaining prize. If Western muskets and cannons were superior to clubs and spears, Western ships m
ust be superior to native canoes; basing himself in Honolulu, Kamehameha undertook construction of a forty-ton vessel. The ship and its vast flotilla of war canoes departed in about June of 1796, but soon returned in disarray. Kamehameha seems to have put it out for public consumption that his force was disabled by storms in the notoriously turbulent channel, but the story touted on Kaua‘i was that the vaunted Conqueror did land, and his warriors were defeated on the beaches. Early informants remembered a dozen of Kamehameha’s warriors, captured in the Battle of Koloa Beach (today’s Mahaulepa Beach), being taken to Kaua‘i’s Polihale heiau and sacrified to the war god.5

  Kamehameha was then recalled to Hawai‘i to suppress another rebellion, this one led by the incensed brother of the traitor Ka‘iana, who had been killed at the Pali. Learning from the behavior of restive ali‘i, the king left O‘ahu under the governance of Isaac Davis, who depended solely on him for favor and advancement, and who knew what would happen if he betrayed him. Davis had grown as content as Young in his new life, but with a different style; he “went native,” preferring grass house to stone and accepting the station of high chief. With residences at both Kailua Kona, on the west coast of the Big Island, and Waikiki, Kamehameha bided his time for seven years, strengthening his government and the economy, but never forgetting to continually build up his military might.

  During this period Kamehameha concentrated on creating a centralized government for his kingdom, and as merciless as his conquest had been, the administration he installed was stable and farsighted. He tapped the services of an able and vigorous young chief, Kalanimoku, as second in command in all things; Westerners equated his office with that of a prime minister, and even named him “Billy Pitt” after his close interest in and regard for Britain’s then–prime minister, William Pitt the Younger. He probably became attached to Kamehameha’s court when the king married Ka‘ahumanu, who was Kalanimoku’s first cousin.6 He was demonstrably as intelligent as she, quick and curious around the increasing number of foreigners, their languages, and their ways, and he became an invaluable conduit between them and the king, to whom he was intensely loyal.