Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  6. Becoming Little Americans

  After her conversion, the late queen regent had made a progress around O‘ahu in the company of Levi Chamberlain, the mission’s commercial agent in Honolulu, “to encourage the people to learn to read and write, to instruct the land agents to take care of the teachers, and use the resources of the chiefs’ lands to maintain the teachers, and not overburden them.”1

  The missionaries knew very well that all their best preaching would prove ephemeral unless they reinforced it with a strong system of education. And they knew from their experience with Opukaha‘ia how readily these people could learn. He had died before finishing his grammar of the “Owhyhee” language, but others had completed it, and in January 1822, the printing press brought in the Thaddeus cranked out five hundred copies of an eight-leaf presentation of the alphabet, numbers, and simple readings. This pi-a-pa for years was the natives’ first step to literacy.

  By phonetically redacting the Hawaiian language to just twelve letters (whose inconsistencies and regionalisms were ironed out and standardized by 1826), and by concentrating on the preparation of native instructors, the missionaries succeeded far beyond their dreams in giving Hawai‘i a written language and a literate population. They established common schools for elementary education; they were intended for children, but eager adults could not be kept away. By 1824 there were some two thousand pupils; by 1826, four hundred native teachers were giving lessons to twenty-five thousand; by 1831, there were eleven hundred schools teaching 40 percent of the population. The teaching effort made an important advance with the arrival of the Eighth Company of missionaries on board the Mary Frazier on April 9, 1837. Of the fifteen married couples and two single women, eight of the men and the two single women were teachers. Learning came with religious instruction, of course, so commingled that the Hawaiians could hardly discern the difference between the palapala (literacy) and the pule (religion). In fact the people came so to associate learning with the written word that they called it palapala, their word for the impressions stamped onto tapa cloth, which reminded them of the printing press.2 By 1840 the government stepped in with a law that every community maintain a school, and royal adviser Davida Malo was given the superintendency.

  If utilizing native teachers could spread education like a grass fire, how much better could the gospel be spread by Hawaiian evangelists? Those who returned from New England proved, mostly, to be disappointments. John Honoli‘i was faithful, but like so many of his kindred, died young. Prince George Kaumuali‘i, who himself had never professed faith but had been very useful in promoting good relations, died a frustrated prisoner on O‘ahu. William Kanui had turned to drink and been thrown out of the Kailua church within three months of its starting, although he would be rehabilitated in his later years. Kamehameha III in his wild period was a bad influence on Thomas Hopu, where the missionaries had entertained the opposite hope. He grew disaffected and later left for California. What was needed was a seminary to train native preachers, there in the islands.

  Repairing to Lahaina, Maui, where William Richards had served as missionary since 1823, Lorrin Andrews of the Third Company began organizing the intended school, and the first classes at the Lahainaluna Seminary began for twenty-five chosen students on September 5, 1831, in a cluster of traditional grass houses. The first class included some of Hawai‘i’s brightest hopes: Davida Malo, the royal adviser who would warn the king about the danger of predatory fishes, and who later wrote a valuable history; Timothy Ha‘alilio, the son of the governor of Moloka‘i, who became Hawai‘i’s first international diplomat; and Boaz Mahune, secretary to Kamehameha III and later a contributor to if not the principal author of the Hawaiian Declaration of Rights and then the constitution.3 Following soon after was the cultural historian Samuel Kamakau, whose “Ka Mo‘olelo Hawai‘i” caused a furor by publishing the islands’ history for anyone to read in Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, thus destroying the old kahunas’ monopoly on a subject they had previously declared sacred as part of their means of social control.

  More substantial than the grass houses was the coral-and-timber Hale Pa‘i, the “house of printing,” in which was installed that expected second printing press in 1834, which began turning out a school newspaper and later Hawai‘i’s first paper money. (A reprint of the currency had to follow, with secret marks, after a student was expelled for counterfeiting.4) The ABCFM underwrote an expansion in 1836, including a new building and additional faculty. In 1842, of its 158 graduates, 140 were either teachers or in government service.5 After launching the seminary at Lahainaluna, the missionaries busied themselves with new institutions of learning—the Oahu Charity School for foreigners’ hapa haole children by Hawaiian wives in 1833; boarding schools for boys and girls at Hilo in 1836 and 1838, respectively, which emphasized homemaking for the girls and agriculture for the boys, which they took a step further with a school at Waialua that they meant to become self-supporting; a female seminary on Maui in 1837—all this in addition to the hundreds of common schools, which had never ceased functioning.

  * * *

  The new Calvinist morality—so utterly foreign to the Hawaiian heritage of easy sex and breezy relationships—came into the most anguished conflict over the matter of the young king getting an heir. He was twenty-six years old by 1839, and it was time to secure the succession.

  By mid-nineteenth century the foreign diseases to which the natives had no immunity had reduced the native population by more than half, to about 150,000. Chiefs fell as well as commoners, but these ali‘i faced an even greater obstacle: After centuries of incest they had inbred themselves into enervation and infertility.6 Kamehameha had been a protean figure, but the first of his dynasty was also the last to produce any (legitimate) children who lived to adulthood. Keopuolani had been a granddaughter of Kalaniopu‘u, so she was the Conqueror’s cousin once removed on her father’s side, and also his niece on her mother’s—a distant-enough relation that three of their four children survived. But Liholiho and Kamamalu had died childless. The exalted baby of Kamehameha III and Nahi‘ena‘ena lived only a few hours. He and Kalama were not related, but both of their children died in infancy, thus there were no direct heirs. So, after consultation with court genealogists, the king drew up a detailed prospectus for the succession, beginning with remaining grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Conqueror:

  Heading the list were the children of Kina‘u, herself the Conqueror’s daughter by Ka‘ahumanu’s sister. She had successfully defied the queen regent by marrying not her half brother the boy king but Mataio Kekuanaoa; her children numbered the eldest, Prince Moses Kekuaiwa; then Prince Lot Kapuaiwa (later Kamehameha V); his younger brother, Prince Alexander Liholiho (later Kamehameha IV); and their younger sister, Princess Victoria Kamamalu, a future kuhina nui. Because of them the descent would remain direct through at least one preferred line. After them the succession should have fallen to Princess Ruth Ke‘elikolani, and her case gave the king some pause. She was the Conqueror’s great-granddaughter through a minor wife, but Ruth was also po‘olua; her mother had left her husband and gone with a lover just about the time she would have conceived, which called Ruth’s legitimacy into question. In traditional Hawaiian mores this would have caused no more doubt of her rights than it did with that most celebrated of all po‘olua, the Conqueror himself. The missionaries had changed all that—a turning point in the Americanization of Hawai‘i. But with Ruth there was still another consideration: As a baby she had been given in hanai to Ka‘ahumanu, herself childless. At her death the queen regent bequeathed her vast landholdings, which amounted to about 10 percent of the entire kingdom, to her hanai daughter, making Ruth far and away the richest young woman in the country. Ruth also defied the times and refused to become a Christian, as Kamehameha III himself no doubt often wished he could have done. Whatever his own feelings were, he made Christian profession a requirement of eligibility, and he scratched Ruth out of the line of succession. The missionaries’ notion of Ch
ristian morals, marriage, and legitimacy had robbed Kamehameha III of happiness with his beloved sister, and now the removal of Ruth Ke‘elikolani from the succession shoved to the background a force of nature who, whatever commanding kind of queen she might have been, still managed in her time to dramatically alter Hawai‘i’s history.

  After Ruth the succession fell to her cousin, Princess Bernice Pauahi, the last child in direct descent from the Conqueror.7 Seven years old when the list was made, as she grew she enjoyed dressing in fashion, but she was also an avid outdoorswoman who became an expert rider. Every inch an ali‘i who knew and followed her own mind, she also developed the tact to do so diplomatically. With no more hopeful record than the clan had amassed in having children, Kamehameha III extended eligibility beyond direct descent. The Conqueror’s younger brother, Keli‘imaika‘i, the “good chief,” had two great-great-grandchildren who were cousins, Princess Emma Na‘ea, later queen consort of Kamehameha IV, and her cousin Prince Peter Young Ka‘eo, later notable as the only royal to contract leprosy and be exiled to Moloka‘i. And there was a last-minute addition, Emma’s half sister, Princess Mary “Polly” Pa‘a‘aina. Accepting that the Conqueror’s father was indeed Keoua, the king also included Princess Elizabeth La‘anui, descended from Keoua’s elder brother, and descended from Keoua’s younger brother, Prince (and later King) William Charles Lunalilo. Casting his net still wider brought in descendants of two of Keoua’s cousins—Kame‘eiamoku’s great-great-grandchildren, the siblings James Kaliokalani, David Kalakaua, and later Lydia (Lili‘uokalani) Kamaka‘eha, the latter two being the last two sovereigns of the nation; and finally Kahekili’s descendants, the half sisters Abigail Maheha and Jane Loeau, daughters of Liliha. By the end of the century Kamehameha III’s entire list of possibilities would be exhausted.

  Having delineated a line of succession, the king determined to give them a Western education, and so brought about the Chiefs’ Children’s School. The chiefs passed a request to the Sandwich Islands Mission in June 1839, which engendered uncomfortable discussion. It accentuated the missionaries’ position, which they had always found delicate: needing to continue good relations with the nobility but disliking to enable their chiefly prerogatives by providing special education for their children alone. As with creature comforts in the precontact days, as with sandalwood, as with the new religion, the first instinct of the ali‘i was to hoard for themselves. “The miserable policy of the chiefs,” wrote Gerrit Judd four years earlier, “is to monopolize all the talent … for the purpose of maintaining their own power.… Almost all the teachers of worth, on whom the labors of this station have been expended, are kept by Kina‘u constantly about her person.” But, they needed her, and they knew it.8

  The prospect of educating the children of the ali‘i nui raised a whole different spectrum of issues, largely centering on discipline. Noble children were not born to inherit their station, they were recognized in their station, and its prerogatives, from the moment they drew breath: They were, in a phrase, spoiled rotten. Rev. Charles Stewart was stunned to see such pampered and uncontrolled toddlers: “I have seen a young chief, apparently not three years old, walking the streets … as naked as when born, (with the exception of a pair of green morocco shoes on his feet), followed by ten or twelve stout men, and as many boys, carrying umbrellas, and kahiles, and spit boxes, and fans, and the various trappings of chieftainship. The young noble was evidently under no control but his own will, and enjoyed already the privileges of his birth … doing whatever he pleased.”9

  Despite the missionaries’ misgivings, the cornerstone for the Chiefs’ Children’s School was laid on June 28, 1839, at the site of the present ‘Iolani Palace barracks. Chosen to preside over the new school were Amos Starr Cooke and his wife, the former Juliette Montague, of the Eighth Company, which had arrived in 1837. He was from Connecticut, she from Massachusetts, and like many of the missionaries, they had married only a month before they set sail for Hawai‘i. He was not a teacher by profession, but after two years among them he was the one whom the chiefs requested be placed over their children. Cooke accepted, on the two conditions that a school be built and, aware of the children’s awful reputation, that the chiefs give him complete authority over them, which they agreed to.

  For the task of kahu, a sort of governor and minder of the noble children, the Cookes decided upon forty-year-old John Papa ‘I‘i, trained from childhood as the companion of the king’s late brother Kamehameha II. He was a perfect choice, descended from a long line of minor chiefs whose roles had been kahu to the ali‘i. Still attached to the royal household, ‘I‘i had long since distinguished himself for thoughtful and loyal service. At that moment he was at Lahaina in the royal suite, and William Richards was dispatched with a letter asking him to take the appointment. Richards approached ‘I‘i in company with a new kuhina nui. After Kina‘u’s death the office passed to her half sister Kekauluohi, forty-six, who was deeply nested in the Kamehameha clan—cousin and stepdaughter of the Conqueror, and widow of both him and Liholiho. ‘I‘i agreed to be the children’s governor on condition that the king and chiefs allow him to enroll his ward, the king’s niece Victoria Kamamalu, who was barely two.

  The missionaries had, discreetly, already cleared his appointment with the king, who engaged ‘I‘i in casual conversation at a luau before raising the real business. ‘I‘i repeated his wish to the king; the little girl had been extraordinarily dear to her mother, Kina‘u, who had disregarded the hanai custom and nursed her herself. Kina‘u had desired a Christian education for her daughter. “You go there with your child,” replied the king, “and take my keiki [nephews] with you. If you do not go there, neither will my keiki.”10 Such an expression of the king’s confidence led Papa ‘I‘i not only to take the job but to act boldly in overruling certain chiefs who hesitated before committing their own children to something as foreign to their way of life as a boarding school. Charge of the young ali‘i, day and night, was almost like a second hanai, and they were not convinced that it was good for them. Among them was Kekuanaoa, the birth father of the heirs to the throne. He was content to obey the king on their account, but with tears in his eyes asked ‘I‘i to hold back his youngest, Victoria Kamamalu. ‘I‘i cited both the wishes of her mother, and Kamamalu’s destiny as a future kuhina nui to refuse.

  A much more dramatic confrontation arose with the grandmother of the Conqueror’s collateral heirs David Kalakaua and Lydia Kamaka‘eha. After once allowing their elder brother, James Kaliokalani, to attend the school, she withdrew him for the reason that he had been required to water plants in the yard, which was a servant’s job. In the ensuing argument, ‘I‘i maintained that all the boys, and he himself, and the teachers took turns watering plants, for the exercise, which benefited them. “You have no right in the matter,” he scolded her, and placed his left foot on her thigh as he forcibly removed James from her lap—a stunning affront to a high chiefess. She complained to Kekuanaoa, who she knew was close to the king. “I have tried,” he told her, “without success. He has the power from the chiefs, so here we are.”11 (James Kaliokalani continued at the school, and was sixteen or seventeen when he died in an epidemic of measles, leaving the succession to his brother and sister.)

  Papa ‘I‘i became, effectively, vice principal of the school. It was the first of many important advancements for him; over the next thirty years he became an extraordinarily influential voice in Hawaiian affairs, and an important bridge between the two cultures, both of which he respected. The first important decision taken in regard to the children, although it seems very harsh to modern sensibilities, was to separate them almost completely from their previous lives. What made this necessary was that when school started, the children came each attended by as many as two dozen lackeys, shading them with umbrellas, holding out boxes into which to spit, obeying their every whim. No progress was possible with such children, absent the shock of isolation. Eventually their attendants had to be banned because they loi
tered about, carping over how their precious were being treated. School convened in early May 1840, with eleven noble children ranging in age from three to eleven; the other chosen ones entered as they became old enough. Among them were four future kings, a queen regnant, a queen consort, and a kuhina nui. It was a scarifying time for the children, several of whom cried themselves to sleep. “Now all are asleep but one,” wrote an exhausted Juliette Cooke on May 5, 1840, “and he is calling for the steward to come and sleep with him. It is a very trying time for them and for us, too.”12

  The school building was erected on the site of the first ‘Iolani Palace barracks, just northeast of the royal residence and in the approximate location of the present Hawai‘i Capitol. It was in the shape of a hollow square surrounding a courtyard with a well. The entrance was in the center of the south side, with the boys’ and girls’ classrooms to the left and the kitchen and dining room to the right. The Cookes’ apartment was on the east side, one room for them and one for their children. Three boys’ dormitory rooms were on the west side, and two girls’ rooms on the north opposite the entrance. Papa ‘I‘i’s apartment was at the northwest corner, strategically placed between the girls and boys, but a location from where, ultimately, he was not successful in keeping the precocious young people apart.

  About six months after the school opened, the Cookes were informed that a condemned man, a murderer imprisoned in the fort and soon to be hanged, had asked to see David Kalakaua, who was only six. Thinking that such an interview would be a good object lesson on the biblical principle of an eye for an eye, they permitted it. They learned only later that the doomed man was High Chief Kamanawa II, sentenced to death for having his former wife poisoned so he would be free to remarry. Kalakaua was his grandson; the future king witnessed the execution of his grandfather—a traumatic event for the little boy that cannot help but have shaped his internal conflict between the old life and the new that played out so painfully during his later seventeen years as monarch. For common Hawaiians the double execution—Kamanawa was hanged with his accomplice—was no less shocking. For generations the high chiefs had held life-or-death power over kanakas, and here was one of them, the grandson of no less than Kame‘eiamoku the Conqueror’s right hand, dangling lifeless at the end of a rope by the will of the white missionaries. What a precipitous change in power that was, with the gallows the new heiau, and those who violated the new kapu were the new sacrifices, even high chiefs. Thus to the persuasion of the pulpit was added the compulsion of the noose.