Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  In October 1825, three months after this somber reminder of mortality, Kapi‘olani was baptized. Within the church her fierce nature began to soften as she demonstrated charity to the fate-stricken and the needy. But she was still a high chiefess and guardian of her culture, as she proved in 1829. Just south of the City of Refuge at Honaunau was perhaps the holiest site on the Big Island, a log-walled mausoleum containing the bones of Hawaii’s ancestral kings extending back to the 1600s. It was called the Hale o Keawe, the House of Keawe, named for the Conqueror’s great-grandfather who had had it constructed. It measured about sixteen feet by twenty-four, set in a palisade studded with the most ferocious idols that the culture could conceive, with eyes of mother-of-pearl and grimaces of sharks’ teeth. In the earliest days of conversion, Reverend Ellis was allowed to visit the place and peek inside, but not enter. The hair stood up on his neck, not just from the perceived savagery of the place, or the overpowering sense of history to see the bones of dead kings neatly tied up and visible to the viewer. More than that, at its construction and with each interment, Hale o Keawe was drenched in human sacrifice. “At the setting of every post and the placing of every rafter, and at the thatching of every ‘wa’ (or intervening space), a human sacrifice had been offered.” Until Liholiho had abandoned the practice in services for the dead Conqueror, every stage of preparing a royal corpse, “at the removal of the flesh, at the putting up of the bones, at the putting on of the tapa, at the winding on of the sennit,” was accompanied by more ritual death.9

  At a place of such crushing awe in that culture, it had been a signal concession to the new religion in 1825 when Ka‘ahumanu had allowed officers of the Blonde to remove many of the ki‘i, the ferocious idols, and take them to England for display. But with the removal of the guardians the place fell into disrepair. In 1829 news of its condition occasioned a visit by Naihe and Kapi‘olani; when she, accompanied by Mrs. Judd, entered the hale they were the first women who had ever been allowed to do so. The sight of the few rotting offerings left to the piles of neglected bones overcame Kapi‘olani, who wept in grief. Later, after consulting with Ka‘ahumanu, she rescued the bones of the Hawaiian kings and high chiefs. Eleven sets of remains were placed in one large coffin, and twelve in another, and they were carefully hidden in a cave, in the old way, and the entrance rocked over. Then, with the precious relics removed, the mausoleum and its court were pulled down so that not a trace remained.

  Kapi‘olani lived a dozen more years as a devout Christian; in fact her first American biographer considered that her life’s significance was that it was, “in its essence, the tale of every life of spiritual aspiration” among the islanders.10 Kapi‘olani was surely an example to her people, but one other incident associated with her, not related by later writers, must have had its influence in the spread of Christianity in Hawai‘i. Some years after her conversion, she was visiting with Laura Judd, who asked her how, specifically, her servant Mau, who had procured bananas for her during her childhood, met his end. Kapi‘olani did not know, but sent for the kahuna, who was still alive, to further explain the incident. When he arrived he answered that the boy was taken into the heiau at Honaunau and strangled at the altar. That was the traditional mode of dispatch for sacrificial victims. “Those were dark days,” he further admitted to Mrs. Judd and the high chiefess, “though we priests knew better all the time. It was power we sought over the minds of the people to influence and control them.”11 Pu‘uonua o Honaunau, temple and City of Refuge, was one of the most important heiaus of the Big Island. For one of its kahunas to admit that the whole regimen of kapu was nothing more than a con to manipulate the people was a shattering admission, and a powerful weapon to hand the missionaries.

  * * *

  With the hostile Boki back in the country, the Calvinists—who had now grown accustomed to having their sermons backed by handbilled notices giving legal effect to some of God’s laws—began to encounter more vocal opposition. It was a tension that the officers of HMS Blonde were quick to notice, and in currying their own relationship with the Hawaiians, they tried to give them a more congenial alternative to New England Congregationalism. Lord Byron, captain of the Blonde (and recent inheritor of the title from his cousin the poet), was particularly irked by Hiram Bingham. “This man is, we have no doubt, truly zealous in the cause of religion; but … he has in a manner thrust himself into all the political affairs of the island, and acts as secretary of state, as governor of the young princes, director of consciences, comptroller of amusements, &c an interference that some may regard as political, and tending to establish an American interest in the islands.”12

  Lord Byron prevented Bingham from attending the royal funeral, which Bingham resented,13 but after the greatest mourning had passed and the officers of the Blonde staged a Saturday-evening lantern-slide presentation for the entertainment of the natives, Bingham used his influence to discourage attendance. Saturday, it seemed, was the day before the Sabbath, when their attention should be more profitably given to preparing for the next day’s worship. Among the gifts that the British Crown sent to their Hawaiian counterparts was an elegant silver teapot for Ka‘ahumanu. Lord Byron noted that the Hawaiian ladies “have adopted tea, and almost rival the Chinese in their love of it.” However, he griped, “the Americans, who chiefly supply them, have taken care that they shall have no experience of the best kinds.” That, apparently, would be too pleasurable.14

  Nevertheless the missionaries gained ground. By November 1825, the station at Hilo had made astonishing progress since the time Ka‘ahumanu’s namesake pig had scattered one of the early meetings. “The house of public worship will not contain half that assemble to hear the Word of Life,” Joseph Goodrich of the Second Company wrote to the ABCFM in appealing for increased aid. “The chiefs have lately begun to build a new meeting-house of much larger dimensions. I am unable to supply one-twentieth part of the calls for books.… Nearly thirty thousand souls have open ears to hear the Gospel. Must they be left to perish because American Christians have exhausted their charities?”15 Their school, Goodrich added, had been in operation only ten months, and already some natives had assimilated such urgency with their learning that they left to preach in more remote areas.

  From the half year and more that it took such reports to reach New England, it was impossible for the Board of Foreign Missions to know whether the effort to Christianize—and perforce Americanize—the natives was indeed such a blazing success, or whether the missionaries’ laudable zeal might be leading them to overestimate their influence. But it was clear that something remarkable was happening, and they marshaled increasing resources for the effort in Hawai‘i. It had now been two and a half years since Goodrich and the reinforcement missionaries had arrived on the Thames, and while his appeal did not fall on deaf ears, it took another two and a half years before a third influx arrived. On March 30, 1828, the Parthian dropped anchor, carrying Mary Ward, twenty-nine, a spinster teacher; Rev. Peter Gulick and his wife, Fanny; Rev. Jonathan Smith Green and his partner in good works, Theodosia Arnold; and two men who would profoundly shape Hawai‘i’s future: Rev. Lorrin Andrews was thirty-three; he accelerated native conversion by establishing the Lahainaluna Seminary, and he bequeathed to the country his grandson, Lorrin Andrews Thurston—a name to remember for future years. And then there was Dr. Gerrit P. Judd. He was a month short of twenty-five, a graduate of Fairfield Medical College, married only six months to Laura Fish of his own Oneida County, New York. He established a medical practice treating natives—a ministry critically needed in a country as disease ridden as Hawai‘i. His earnestness and skill helped him to navigate his wife through nine pregnancies, and eventually his dedication earned him the intimacy of the royal family and a second career, unsought, as their adviser, diplomat, and as one observer wrote with some exasperation, “Minister of Everything.”

  Eventually there were no fewer than eleven infusions of reinforcements for the original pioneers of the Thaddeus, totaling mo
re than 120 men and women, spaced over the next twenty years, the last arriving at the end of February 1848. The two most important were the fifth, when the Averick disembarked a dozen preachers, teachers, doctors, and a printer in 1832; and the eighth, when the Mary Frasier disgorged nearly double that number in 1837, including Amos Starr Cooke and his wife, Juliette, later noted as founders and headmasters of the Royal School, and Samuel Northrup Castle, remembered mostly because his children combined with those of the Cookes to begin the march toward a sugar monopoly.16

  That last evil effect lay in the future, however, and for now the missionaries taught and doctored and ministered as best they knew how, sincerely, doggedly. Behind all their efforts loomed the enormous figure of the queen regent, Ka‘ahumanu, shrewd, calculating, watchful for cause and effect, and the missionaries never lost sight of the fact that they depended upon her favor. She never let them forget it, either. Once when she dispatched servants laden with food to help the Americans host a dinner, and they thanked her and acknowledged they were indebted to her for the meal, she raised an eyebrow and teased, “Just this one?” To a certain extent she adopted Christianity similarly to Constantine in the fifth century: She was willing for her people to put their eternal faith in God, but she also expected it to cement their earthly loyalty to herself. Her interest in learning and the religion was genuine, but she never forgot her position for a moment. She attended church, but arrived in a great carriage pulled, in default of horses, by a dozen puffing lackeys. (Other royals attended, arriving in a gaudy parade of improvised litters and sedan chairs.)

  When for reasons of state she acted outside Christian expectations, the missionaries learned to stay out of her way. Bingham, after long association with her, recognized her complexity. “This woman,” he wrote, “with all her haughtiness and selfishness, possessed, perhaps, as true a regard for the safety of the state, as her late husband or his high chiefs.”17 They witnessed a case in point when, after several rumblings of renewed defiance by old Kaumuali‘i of Kaua‘i, she had Liholiho sail to Kaua‘i, ostensibly on a journey of friendship to renew the existing agreement. Bingham went with him, and had an opportunity to see the new king in a more official and favorable light than he was accustomed to, and he also took in an object lesson on Hawaiian oratory and native politics—that what one heard was not necessarily what was meant. The errand nearly came to grief; the trade wind through the notorious Kaua‘i Channel was roaring, but the king refused all entreaties to delay the trip, and the ship reached the point of foundering numerous times during the sixty-mile crossing.

  Kaumuali‘i renewed his allegiance, and after a lengthy sojourn, Liholiho invited his host to return to O‘ahu with him. To outside ears it might have sounded like an invitation that could be declined, but it could not. Kaumual‘i was now a prisoner of state, and once ensnared on O‘ahu he was kept under close watch and then compelled to marry Ka‘ahumanu to renew his fealty.18 Then to seal the arrangement, and probably at least get some pleasure out of the situation, the queen regent also compelled his son to marry her, not Prince George Kaumuali‘i who the missionaries had returned to his father, but a younger and more handsome one—Prince Keali‘iahonui, twenty-one, six feet six, athletic, and “one of the handsomest chiefs in the islands.” As it turned out, her distrust of the family was shrewd, as George had entered into a life of dissolution, and after his father’s death he made a clumsy attempt to reestablish the independence of Kaua‘i. He and some allied chiefs stole guns and powder from a fortification on August 8, 1824, but failed to capture the fort. Ten days later Kalanimoku had an army on Kaua‘i, ran him to ground, and hauled him to O‘ahu, where he lived under a kind of house arrest until he died of influenza the next year.19

  Human sacrifice was now banned, but the difference in their fate would hardly have been noticeable to the disloyal. From that rebellion on Kaua‘i, Reverend Stewart noticed that “one of the rebel chiefs, a fine looking young man, was made captive.… He requested to be shot, but was bound hand and foot, according to the custom of the country, and carried on board the pilot-boat. Mr. Bingham saw him in the evening, after they had put to sea, seated against the timbers of the vessel in her main hold. In the morning, the prisoner was gone; and on inquiry, the captain without speaking, but by very significant pantomime, made known his fate; he had been thrown overboard in the dead of night, with his cords upon him.”20 Simple execution, it seemed, was an adequate substitute for sacrifice.

  To the missionary wives Ka‘ahumanu learned to relate in a different and entirely womanly way than she did to the male preachers. “Ka‘ahumanu treated us like pet children,” wrote Laura Judd, who met the queen regent the very day they disembarked from the Thames. She “criticised our dress, remarking the difference between our fashions and those of the pioneer ladies, who still wear short waists and tight sleeves, instead of the present long waists, full skirts, and leg-of-mutton sleeves. She says that one of our number must belong exclusively to her, live with her, teach her, make dresses for her.… As the choice is likely to fall on me, I am well pleased, for I have taken a great fancy to the old lady.” Like those before them, the women of the reinforcement were as overawed by her huge size as they were touched by her maternal affection. Ka‘ahumanu, wrote Laura Judd, “could dandle any of us in her lap, as she would a little child, which she often takes the liberty of doing.”21

  The remarkable thing about Laura Judd’s writing was not just that she was game for the adventure. She was a missionary’s wife and believed that the way of life they offered the Hawaiians was superior to what they already had. But what buffed her memoir was her genuine respect and affection for the native people. The same could not be said for all of them. Lucia Ruggles, one of the original Thaddeus contingent, was frequently aghast at the people before them. “Finally I do not know how to describe their manners,” she wrote, “for should I make use of language as indelicate and uncouth as they really appear, which I must do to give you any correct idea of their manners, you must be disgusted.” Of their servants: “We have as many men and women servants as we please, and it will cost us nothing but the vexation of having them about, which is more than I can bear.”22 Nor was she fond of being pulled into the queen regent’s lap.

  * * *

  Like Cook and others before them, the missionaries were struck by the difference in size between the ali‘i lords and the multitude of common kanakas who outnumbered them by several hundred to one. The chiefs “seem indeed in size and stature to be almost a distinct race,” wrote Charles Stewart of the first company of reinforcements who arrived three years after the Thaddeus pioneers. “They are all large in their frame, and often excessively corpulent; while the common people are scarce of the ordinary height of Europeans, and of a thin rather than full habit.” As exceptions he could point out only the sacred queen mother and the king of Kaua‘i, but otherwise he could well have believed that nobles and commoners descended from conquering and conquered ethnic stock.23

  As they had with the arrival of iron with Captain Cook, and with the monopoly of sandalwood, the ali‘i were keen to make certain that any good things that foreigners brought with them were reserved for their own use, alone, not for the kanakas. The missionaries acquiesced in this to a degree, as when they devoted extra time and attention to instructing the chiefs and royal family, but they made it plain that God’s message of salvation was for everyone. The missionaries’ concern for the commoners as much as the ali‘i manifested itself in a particular crusade that receives scant attention now, against the native practice of infanticide. Culturally sensitive modern scholars give the subject a wide berth, either omitting it altogether, mentioning it only in passing,24 or dispensing with it quickly and matter-of-factly without lingering on its moral valence.25 But to the newly arrived Americans, the realization that overworked or sometimes merely disinterested native mothers thought little of throttling unwanted newborns, or more commonly burying them alive barely outside their houses, was unspeakable. The Englishma
n William Ellis would have been less shocked, for he would have been aware of the practice on Tahiti. “We have been told by some of the chiefs, on whose word we can depend, that they have known parents to murder three or four infants where they have spared one.” Ellis was even more disturbed by the reason: “The principal motive with the greater part of those who practice it, is idleness; and the reason most frequently assigned, even by the parents themselves, for the murder of their children, is the trouble of bringing them up [emphasis in original].” He related the story of one mother who grew weary of her baby’s crying, who “stopped its cries by thrusting a piece of tapa in its mouth, and digging a hole in the floor of the house, perhaps within a few yards of her bed,… buried, in the untimely grave, her helpless babe.”26

  William Ellis may have seen it all before but Charles Stewart, writing two years later, was aghast, asserting that “we have the clearest proof, that in those parts of the islands where the influence of the Mission has not yet extended, two-thirds of the infants born, perish by the hands of their own parents before obtaining their first or second year of age! [emphasis in original] … my soul often melts within me: and I cannot but think, how little … the inhabitants of Christian countries are aware.”27 Ultimately Kalanimoku endorsed the missionaries’ remonstrations against killing babies, and Ka‘ahumanu proscribed infanticide in 1824, reinforced by statute in 1835.