Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

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  Capt. Lord Byron of HMS Blonde, while critical of the missionaries’ assumption of temporal influence, allowed the sincerity of their spiritual mission, but the end of the decade found even some Americans put off by the missionaries’ cold and pompous lifestyle. In 1831 the sick whaler Abram Fayerweather was put ashore in Honolulu for treatment; he wrote a scathing assessment to his father in Connecticut—home state of the ABCFM, to which the father was a contributor. Bingham, he wrote, lived in “a new house … which in America would cost six thousand dollars,” while the kanakas subsisted in “the lowest state of degradation.” The Americans had entered into commerce, and “spend their time mostly in trading and oppressing the natives, [who] say nothing for fear of them.”28 In justice to the Congregationalists, one man’s effort at elevation and conversion another man might well see as oppression, but by the opening of the 1830s the missionary effort had taken on a different and somewhat more entitled complexion.

  Fayerweather’s charge might have borne some credence in the commercial environs of Honolulu, but probably more representative was the experience of John and Ursula Emerson, two of the Fifth Company of reinforcement missionaries assigned to Waialua on the north coast of O‘ahu in 1832. It was an area spiritually devastated by the destruction of kapu, for just to the east lay what had been perhaps the holiest valley in the kingdom. In an age when ownership of each ahupua‘a could be contested when the king died, only Waimea remained the permanent sanctuary of the kahunas. Two temples loomed over the entrance to the valley, their gods propitiated with human sacrifices, including in 1792 a lieutenant and three sailors from Vancouver’s HMS Daedalus who had dared to draw water from Waimea stream. Thus the spiritual vacuum created when the temples were wrecked on the order of Liholiho and Ka‘ahumanu was particularly acute. And then the ali‘i lording over Waialua proved to be so avaricious in pursuit of the sandalwood that grew bountifully in the jungle that he set his people to extracting every tree they could find, even at the cost of neglecting their taro patches and fishponds. When the Emersons arrived to preach salvation, they found the local kanakas “dispirited” and more than ready to listen.29 The Emersons tended their Waialua mission for the next thirty-two years.

  In the traditional culture there was a limit, however undefined, on the chiefs’ ability to abuse their commoners. Queen Lili‘uokalani later insisted that “the chief whose retainers were in any poverty or want would have felt, not only their sufferings, but, further, his own disgrace.”30 Yet the missionaries often saw the other side of it, as Reverend Stewart once recorded, “A poor man of this description by some means obtained … a pig, when too small to make a meal for his family. He secreted it at a distance from his house and fed it until it had grown.… It was then killed, and put into an oven, with the same precaution of secrecy, but when almost prepared … a caterer of the royal household unhappily came near … deliberately took a seat till the animal was cooked, and then bore off the promised banquet without hesitation or apology!”31

  In such an environment any kindness shown by the foreigners was bound to be received with little short of wonder.

  5. The New Morality

  In April 1821, almost exactly one year after the missionaries’ arrival, the United States government established an official presence, under the title Agent for Commerce and Seamen at the Sandwich Islands. John Coffin Jones, Jr., obtained the post; he was only twenty-four, the son of the speaker of the Massachusetts State House, but he was already an accomplished seaman, had previously visited the islands, and indeed had presented an oil portrait of the Conqueror to the Boston Athenaeum in 1818, the year that Opukaha‘ia died in neighboring Connecticut and kindled the whole missionary effort.1 A more symbolic choice could hardly have been imagined. In this era when American diplomats commonly combined business with official duty, most of Jones’s attention was devoted to being the agent of the Boston mercantile firm of Marshall and Wildes. Basing himself in Honolulu (a shrewd choice at a time when the royal court was still shifting among there, Lahaina, and Kona), he constructed a two-story warehouse convenient to the waterfront that did double duty as, and that the missionaries grandly referred to as, the American consulate.

  He also lost little time, to the mortification of the missionaries, in going native. In 1825 he initiated a relationship with Hannah Holmes, the hapa haole (half-white) daughter of another Yankee sailor, and then almost as quickly became the lover of Lahilahi Marín, whose Spanish father had been so well rewarded by the Conqueror for his services. Jones prospered in his sinful ways, dwelt in a comfortable house on Fort Street, and within several years also had a retreat in the cool of the Manoa hills above Waikiki. How were the missionaries to persuade the natives to forsake their traditional sensuality when the American representative presented them such an example?2 Even worse, in the growing business district near the waterfront, Jones showed the effrontery to conduct Unitarian services for seamen and ruffians who did not keep to the Calvinists’ moral standards.

  Peace, of a sort, with the waterfront was engineered with the arrival of Capt. John Diell, representing the American Seamen’s Friend Society, who constructed a bethel at the corner of King and Bethel Streets. He was not one of them, but he had similar morals, and remembering the ABCFM’s directive to keep doctrinal squabbling to a minimum, they accepted him into their circles. Plus, he had cultural possibilities; in the coral basement beneath where he held services, he began amassing a library and museum, and founded and hosted the Sandwich Islands Institute, a learned society of forty-two charter members at three dollars per year dues, each bound to deliver one scholarly paper per year or face a one-dollar fine. Diell gained credence with the missionaries for facing down the threat of a whipping from local grogshop proprietors for his habit of rounding up their patrons to attend prayer meetings; such a man deserved encouragement. Dr. Gerrit Judd of the Honolulu mission delivered one of the first treatises, which inevitably dispensed their own point of view: “Remarks on the Climate of the Sandwich Islands, and Its Probable Effects on Men of Bilious Habits.”3 The institute was a success among those with cultural aspirations, and Diell was presented with a three-hundred-pound bell to preside over their meetings, the cost subscribed by ship captains, the chiefs, and the king. In danger of being isolated from the influential element, Jones struck back, helping to organize the Oahu Amateur Theatre, whose first play, Raising the Wind, was presented on March 5, 1834. The venue was the large wood-frame ‘Iolani Palace; the stage manager was the king.

  Nothing could have shown more clearly the conflicts raging within the troubled youth Kauikeaouli, who became King Kamehameha III when he was only twelve years old, and whose early reign was dominated by the queen regent. The missionaries’ persistence netted its greatest prize on December 5, 1825, when Ka‘ahumanu submitted to baptism. As evidence that she was serious, she divested herself of her handsome recreational husband, Prince Keali‘iahonui of Kaua‘i,4 and she lived out her life in hospitable piety, sympathetic neither to others’ opposition to the Christian regimen nor to the young king being torn between the old life of unquestioned privilege and the new one of self-denial.

  Kamehameha III was more than a handful. His name, Kauikeaouli, meant “Placed in Dark Clouds,” and nothing could have been more prophetic. The Conqueror had promised him in hanai to Kuakini, Ka‘ahumanu’s youngest brother, but when it first appeared that the infant was stillborn, that chief would not accept him. The high chief Kaikio‘ewa, a secondary husband of the Conqueror’s formidable mother, sent for a kahuna, who declared that the baby would live. Prayed over and sprinkled with water, he drew breath, and Kaikio‘ewa received him in hanai.5 After serving as his mothers’ instrument in destroying kapu, he fell under the sway of the recalcitrant Boki, governor of O‘ahu, who encouraged him to insist on his ancient privileges and pursue the pleasures that were his birthright. Acquiring a favorite companion in the person of Kaomi, a Tahitian-Hawaiian hanger-on and sort of native Piers Gaveston, Kauikeaoul
i instituted a secret society called Hulumanu (Bird Feather) that was dedicated to pleasure and to bedeviling the missionaries. Some of the old life’s luster dulled with the disappearance of Boki early in the reign; his improvident use of sandalwood futures had spent him into stunning debt, prompting him to fit out two ships and set sail for the New Hebrides, which he heard contained thick forests of iliahi. He never returned; the belief was that he was lost at sea, but evidence later suggested that he established a new life on Samoa.6

  Bingham’s policy of noninterference with Ka‘ahumanu’s state conduct, in the belief that a certain amount of backsliding could be tolerated when a greater good might result, proved wise. She came to faith largely through her own conviction, and inevitably her faith must become law. Such a bonus was reaped with a decree on September 21, 1829, “On Mischievous Sleeping,” which outlawed cohabitation without benefit of marriage. It was a mild law, legitimizing existing relationships as now being man and wife, while forbidding unmarried cohabitation in the future, but it was a step in the missionaries’ direction.7 She took an even bigger step the following year, when she banned performances of the hula. In fact it was a huge step, for hula was not just a dance, it was a physical expression of the national poetry, much of which was written to be danced while being sung or chanted. Polynesian history was oral history, and hula was also the repository for the ancient legends and mo‘olelo, their story. Like the chants dedicating a heiau, they were intricate and complicated, and to make a mistake was no small matter; there were teachers and schools dedicated to learning hula. To be sure it was idolatrous, dedicated to the goddess Laka, and being so embedded in the culture, hula could also be unashamedly sexual, as indeed the culture was. The highly charged dance that David Samwell witnessed in 1778 was probably the hula ma‘i, the dance in praise of genitals, which may have developed as the dancers’ way of ingratiating themselves with the chief. The dances in that time were fraught with meaning that escaped Westerners who merely sat mesmerized by swaying hips and swinging breasts. Not all hula was sweaty and naked and overtly sexual, but that and the idolatry doomed the art in the missionaries’ eyes. Thus when Ka‘ahumanu banned hula in 1830, she did not just outlaw the swaying pantomime familiar to generations of tourists; in what she thought was the service of her faith she struck at the heart of Hawaiian culture.

  The decree “On Mischievous Sleeping” was issued over the young king’s signature, but it is doubtful whether his heart was in it. Kamehameha III had just turned sixteen, he was chafing under his stepmother’s domination, and the heart of the conflict was infinitely more vital than anything over grogshops and theaters. He had taken to dividing his time between Honolulu and Lahaina; his mother was buried there, but the magnet that pulled the young king irresistibly home was his sister, the Princess Nahi‘ena‘ena. Only daughter of the Conqueror and Keopuolani, she was so beloved of her mother that the queen defied the custom of hanai and nursed her herself. He was deeply in love with her, and she with him. To the native culture and the now-silenced kahunas it was a match of dizzying brilliance, and children born to them would have been next to the gods in elevation.8 The missionaries, however, the king’s tutors and spiritual guides, were aghast: To them nothing could so have crystallized the pollution of the native heathen.

  The matter lay unresolved at the death of Ka‘ahumanu on June 5, 1832, which meant that the important office of kuhina nui, embracing not just prime minister but virtual coruler, had to be filled. The decision was an important one, because Kamehameha III, soon to turn nineteen, was being torn apart by conflict between the ancestral privileges and the new morality. The king turned to his older half sister and the queen regent’s niece, Elizabeth Kina‘u, daughter of Ka‘ahumanu’s sister by the Conqueror. At twenty-seven Kina‘u was in some respects as strong-willed as her aunt, and had endured some battles in establishing her own identity. The deaths of her half-brother husband, Kamehameha II, and her sister Kamamalu in London had left her in the unusual position of being a dowager queen at the age of nineteen. Her second husband died in the 1826 epidemic of whooping cough. With Kina‘u available once more, Ka‘ahumanu had embraced a plan for her to marry the then-thirteen-year-old king, thus rekindling the Conqueror’s desire that his heirs combine the line of his sacred wife with that of Ka‘ahumanu’s sister. Kina‘u defied her and instead married the much-lower-ranked Mataio (a native rendition of “Matthew”) Kekuanaoa, who was po‘olua, a child of shared paternity one of whose fathers was the grandson of old Alapa‘i who had placed a death sentence on the infant Kamehameha. The queen regent was furious with her, but Kina‘u and Kekuanaoa made a good marriage and had five children together, including two future kings and a kuhina nui.

  On state business Kina‘u made a creditable prime minister, but she found the young king more interested in demonstrating his defiance of the missionaries than in tending to his duties. On March 15, 1833, Kauikeaouli decreed that he was ending the regency and was assuming absolute power; he brought back hula, he allowed Kaomi to seize land and to tax Christians to keep his debts paid, and generally mortified the chiefs. But he also took a step toward stability by confirming Kina‘u as kuhina nui. When she then found more of the work falling upon her, she once confided to Laura Judd, “I am in straits and heavy-hearted, and I have come to tell you my thought. I am quite discouraged and cannot bear this burden any longer. I wish to throw away my rank, and title, and responsibility together, bring my family here, and live with you; or, we will take our families and go to America. I have money.” Seizing the opportunity, Mrs. Judd praised Kina‘u for her sensibilities, asserted (oddly, for an American) that Divine Providence had raised her to her rank, and, citing the example of Esther from the Bible, encouraged her to remain strong for the sake of her people.9

  One large reason that Kina‘u was overburdened was the king’s long absences, agonizing at his sister’s side over their inability to marry. The matter came to a crisis in June 1834, when Honolulu’s two best doctors, Gerrit Judd and the Englishman Thomas C. B. Rooke, were summoned urgently to Pearl River, where rumor had it the king had tried to kill himself. The fact when discovered proved to be that Nahi‘ena‘ena, who was traveling in his suite, discouraged him from returning to Maui with her, because of the hostility of the missionaries and Christian governor, Hoapili. The dismayed Kauikeaouli then made an attempt to cut his throat. To get past this agonizing stalemate, the king’s sister was betrothed to the son of Kalanimoku, whom she sullenly married on November 25, 1835, with a triumphant Rev. William Richards presiding. But when she became pregnant two months later, the king declared the exalted baby to be his, and proclaimed it heir to the throne. The child was born on September 17, 1836, but expired within hours, and Nahi‘ena‘ena sank into a dangerous condition. Rooke could not help her, and though he called in consultants, she died on December 30. Kamehameha III’s grief at losing his sister and their baby was terrifying. He sat stone-faced by her coffin for week after week, and it took three and a half months, almost twice the usual period of a royal wake, before he released her body, on April 12, 1837, to return to Maui for burial with her mother. Impelled as much by duty as by attraction, he turned for comfort to a minor chiefess of Maui named Kalama, daughter of the commander of his Honolulu ships, and married her on February 14, 1837, while Nahi‘ena‘ena’s body lay yet unburied. Kina‘u vigorously opposed the match for Kalama’s lack of royal rank, although the kuhina nui herself had done the same thing when she married Kekuanaoa. Now she was a fervent Christian, and probably her main objection was that Kalama had been an active part of Kauikeaouli’s mockery of the missionaries—but the Americans counted their blessings that the young king had found a wife who was not his sister, and blessed the union. The marriage lasted, but even while married to Kalama, Kamehameha III still clung to the memory of Nahi‘ena‘ena and fathered a son, Albert, by his sister’s close childhood companion, Jane Lahilahi Young.10

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  The conflicts between Kamehameha III and the missiona
ries over his choice of bride took place a world removed from the common kanakas, whose lives continued hard and poor. As the new companies of missionary reinforcements arrived every few years, they spread out to new districts yet unpreached to, and they discovered anew a squalor that reduced them to prayer, as much for their own strength and fortitude as for the natives’ souls. The most visible maladies were skin sores and ulcers, which were rampant; scabies was so ubiquitous that Charles Stewart had been on land only two days before being asked if he had anything to cure “the itch.”11 Even more demoralizing to the Americans were the lice, which became a constant battle. Infestation was known among the royalty and became more prevalent lower down the social ladder, until “as to the common people, after a call of a few minutes, we think ourselves fortunate indeed if we do not find living testimonies of their visit, on our mats and floors, and even on our clothes and persons!” But what brought them near to fainting was the sight, among the kanakas, that “not only do they suffer their heads and tapas to harbour these vermin; but they openly, and unblushingly, eat them!”12

  Paradise was also full of fleas. Forest or meadow, beach or cave, there was no respite from them. Native families thought nothing of sharing their bedding with pet pigs, dogs were everywhere, and the infestation was so relentless that many visitors called attention to it in letters and memoirs. The flea was not indigenous to the islands; probably at least one species arrived with the Polynesian voyagers’ stock, but after several decades of foreign ship arrivals, there was a variety of species to torment people. A sailor on Maui who stayed at an inn with native proprietors had one vivid memory, “At 11 we droped [sic] on the mats … & the way the Flees & other vermin lit on us was a caution to all travilers [sic]. It had much more affect to keep us awake than a strong cup of tea would.”13