Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  That was one part of the story. The other was a sea change in the ABCFM’s policy toward the missionaries’ involvement in Hawaiian life. Until then they had been forbidden to engage in politics, and were discouraged from becoming citizens or owning property. (Judd and Richards had had to resign from the mission in order to accede to the king’s request to help him run the government.) When others of the missionaries began returning home, ostensibly to oversee their children’s education but almost certainly never to return, Anderson realized that he did not want what he called this “homeward current” either. Thus an accommodation was reached, by which the ABCFM relaxed the restrictions, making it easier for them to live in Hawai‘i as Hawaiians, and to help make the mission self-supporting as he weaned it off of home support.

  In 1847 the ABCFM reduced the Hawaiian missionaries’ salaries to five hundred dollars per year—half the level of support given those sent to China. And the timing was terrible; news of the discovery of gold in California reached Hawai‘i before becoming known in most of the United States, and starting in 1848, the diversion of goods and produce to sell in California caused prices to skyrocket in the islands. “You will like to know how we live in these times,” Castle wrote a friend soon after. “Well, I will tell you something of how we live—or, rather, how we don’t. We have not bought a bunch of bananas in many months.… much of the time we have neither Irish nor sweet potatoes.… Almost every species of fruit is beyond our means.”20

  Some of the missionaries got jobs, some took in boarders, some prepared to return home. With the closing of the Royal School, Amos and Juliette Cooke were among those who found themselves at loose ends. “Pray for me!” Cooke wrote to his New England relations. “I love to preach, but, you know, my talents are limited. I left a mercantile life to prepare to preach. Shall I now leave the prospect of preaching to return to my former life?”21 That question was answered for him when Levi Chamberlain, who had long assisted Castle in running the mission’s supply distribution, died of consumption on July 29, 1849, and one of the workers at their depository left to edit the Polynesian. Badly in need of help, Castle and Cooke, in a long night of discussion with their wives, decided to form a partnership and capitalize the mission’s supply base into a commercial mercantile. Their plan was still to sell supplies to the missionaries at cost, but then recover some profit by selling to the general public as well.

  It was not an easy plan to implement. Many of the missionaries, particularly those on the outer islands, had each believed for years that he was at the end of the line when it came to receiving badly needed supplies, and now all feared that they would be gouged, notwithstanding Castle and Cooke’s determination to pass materials along with no markup. Then the ABCFM itself weighed in, requiring the two to charge 5 percent over cost even to the several missions to pay for the company’s overhead—a condition they were in some position to make, as they offered favorable terms to Castle and Cooke to privatize the mission’s inventory of supplies. As a single exchange of letters required the better part of a year, it seemed doubtful that terms would ever be consummated. Both Castle and Cooke became naturalized subjects of the king during 1850, the new firm of Castle & Cooke obtained wholesale and retail merchants’ licenses on June 3, 1851, and the two principals signed a partnership agreement two days later. The ABCFM retained them as agents for the mission at five hundred dollars per year, allowed them to draw on the warehouse’s funds for start-up expenses, offloaded unneeded merchandise at cost, and gave them permission to open a second location if business warranted.

  As Castle & Cooke used its location in Honolulu, the center of the kingdom’s commerce, to open a multifaceted business concern, the scores of missionaries scattered across the islands were hard put to keep their operations together. At Kohala on the northern tip of the Big Island, Elias and Ellen Bond fretted for years how to keep their flock of believers faithful and out of trouble. The Bonds were from Maine, he had just turned twenty-seven when, following the pattern of so many of their predecessors, they married on September 29, 1840; he was ordained the next day, they sailed for Hawai‘i six weeks later and set to work producing their eleven children. They came with the Ninth Company, arriving in Honolulu in May 1841 in time to see the splendid Kawaiaha‘o Church being raised. Before he could entertain any visions of his own grandeur, Bond was dispatched to windy Kohala, where Isaac and Emily Bliss had been laboring in a modest thatch church for four years. By his own sweat Bond expanded the mission complex, adding a kitchen, washroom, carpenter shop, and other improvements, and he repaired the storm-battered ‘Iole Mission Station while ministering to the flock at the Conqueror’s own birthplace.

  At the time the ABCFM divested itself of the Hawai‘i Mission, Bond offered to continue with no salary if the governing body would turn over to his ownership the mission complex he had so labored on. The ABCFM, however, required five hundred dollars for it. Bond, in response, answered to his own sense of justice and was able to use the terms of the Mahele to simply acquire the property. The kingdomwide decline in population hit Kohala particularly hard, not just the mortality of disease but defections as Bond’s bored and work-averse natives departed for more interesting—and sinful—lives in Hilo and Honolulu. At length, “It came to me clear as sunshine, that it must be sugar cane.… There was no work in the district by which our people could earn a dollar … yet my figuring led me to believe implicitly that, with proper management, a plantation could be made to pay expenses, whilst retaining our people.”22 Bond journeyed to Honolulu and met with Samuel Castle, whose firm became Bond’s agent in a public offering of stock. Elias Bond did not set out to make a fortune; in fact Kohala Sugar Company once it became organized was popularly known as the Missionary Plantation. For years thereafter he plowed earnings back into the operation, and contributed profits—large soul that he had—to the ABCFM.

  Bond’s paternal ministry to his flock found its way into the plantation rules:

  1. Said company shall not distil nor manufacture any spiritous [sic] liquors from the products of the plantation.

  2. The laborers and all belonging to the plantation are requested to attend church once at least every Sunday.…

  3. There is to be no card playing.

  4. No fighting is allowed under penalty of one dollar for each offense, the money to be laid out on books and papers.

  5. No quarreling with or whipping wives is allowed under penalty of one dollar for each offense.…

  6. No tittle tattling is allowed, or gossiping.

  Much has been written of the missionary families’ success in business, and that success was largely attained in later years through exploitation of native and imported labor and devious politics. It is worth remembering that those charges are better leveled at their children and grandchildren. The missionary generation itself entered business uncertainly and unwillingly; for many of them, such as Elias Bond, the requirement for self-sufficiency was molded around their desire to continue as missionaries, and in the case of Castle & Cooke, to aid them in that effort.

  11. The Anglican Attraction

  Kamehameha III passed away on December 15, 1854, having reigned through regency and majority for nearly thirty years; he was only forty-one when he died, but he was spent. His two children with Kalama had lived but a short time. His infant son, Albert Kunuiakea, by his departed sister’s companion Jane Lahilahi, was vigorous—indeed he lived out the century—but the missionaries had introduced the concept of legitimacy, and he was never considered for a royal role. In the old days being gotten of the king’s loins was its own legitimacy, and here was one way in which the missionaries bent the course of Hawaiian history away from where it might have gone. As with the banishment of Lot’s “illegitimate” daughter and her mother, Princess Abigail Maheha, from the Royal School, and as with excluding Princess Ruth Ke‘elikolani from the succession because she was po‘olua, the missionaries unwittingly sent Hawai‘i forward with a weakened dynasty.

  Next in li
ne were his two nephews. The elder, Lot Kapuaiwa, had just turned twenty-four, but he was stubborn, hotheaded, somewhat antisocial, and the king did not think that he would make a success of ruling the country. By his will and the council’s approval the throne passed instead to the younger nephew, Alexander Liholiho, who was just twenty. The foreign enclaves welcomed the choice, for he was widely esteemed for his intelligence and handsome looks; the missionary community accepted the succession but viewed it with consternation. At the Royal School, Lot and Alexander along with their older brother the heir apparent, Moses Kekuaiwa who died in the onslaught of measles in 1848, had made life miserable for Amos and Juliette Cooke. Although he was born fourteen years into the missionary era, there was an extent to which Liholiho suffered the same cultural trauma as his uncle, caught between the old ways and the new. As a tot he showed up at the Royal School with no fewer than thirty servants. He was the son of an ardently Christian kuhina nui, but he was also the grandson of the Conqueror, and like all children of the ali‘i he was accustomed to having his way. Once his battalion of minders was sent away, Liholiho was alone in the care of Amos Cooke, who was not known for sparing the rod, and the beatings were the cost that Liholiho paid for an excellent education. Where most of his relatives tended to corpulence, he grew tall and athletic—he was gifted in music and cricket, but he also suffered from chronic asthma, whose alarming symptoms made problematic how long he might live.

  His experience in the Royal School was probably the smaller source of his dislike of Americans, for he understood the value of the education he received there. The larger source he came by more directly, on the diplomatic mission that he and Lot undertook in 1849–50 with Gerrit Judd. In Paris, President Louis-Napoleon received them cordially and expressed the hope that the tiff between France and Hawai‘i would be resolved. In London, Queen Victoria was confined with her seventh pregnancy, but Albert, the prince consort, received them. Liholiho took a liking to him, Lord Palmerston, and British society. In May 1850 they moved on to the United States, a reception by President Zachary Taylor, and exposure to real American society, which they had known only in small doses all their lives.

  Ready to board their train from Washington to New York, Judd asked Liholiho to get on first and secure their seats, as he and Lot would see to their baggage. Alexander found their berth and seated himself, and there occurred one of the pivotal moments of his life, as he came face-to-face with the reality of how Americans regarded darker-skinned people. He could still barely contain himself as he entered the experience in his diary:

  While I was sitting looking out of the window, a man came to me & told me to get out of the carriage rather uncerimoniously [sic], saying that I was in the wrong carriage. I immediately asked him what he meant. He continued his request, finally he came around by the door and I went out to me[et] him. Just as he was coming in, somebody whispered a word into his ears—by this time I came up to him, and asked him his reasons for telling me to get out of that carriage. He then told me to keep my seat.

  I took hold of his arm, and asked him his reasons, and what right he had in turning me out and talking to me in the way that he did. He replied that he had some reasons, but requested me to keep my seat. And I followed him out, but he took care to be out of my way after that. I found he was the conductor, and probably [had] taken me for somebody’s servant, just because I had a darker skin than he had. Confounded fool.

  The first time that I ever received such treatment, not in England or France, or anywhere else. But in this country I must be treated like a dog to go & come at an Americans bidding.1

  After his return to Hawai‘i, his uncle appointed him to the house of nobles and the privy council, so he was already engaged with the kingdom’s affairs at the time of his accession. Throughout his reign as Kamehameha IV, Liholiho’s judgment of Americans remained fixed: They were pompous, arrogant, overbearing, and often unjust in their treatment of others different from themselves. The American missionaries were not optimistic that their Calvinism would flourish in the new reign. At least the new king came by his disaffection honestly; even Judd had to admit that as a youth the prince had been compelled “to morning prayer meeting, Wednesday evening meeting, monthly concert, Sabbath school, long sermons, and daily exhortations,” and these on top of academic instruction. Small wonder that his heart was “hardened to a degree unknown to the heathen.”2 Judd’s judgment was too harsh, for to the Calvinists rejection of Boston morality was the equivalent of rejecting the gospel. In truth the new king did give way on some points, such as not making a holiday of Christmas, which the Congregationalists eschewed as a “pagan” observance. Instead Kamehameha IV proclaimed December 25 as a day of national thanksgiving,3 thus allowing the missionaries their point without spoiling the season for the non-Calvinist haoles. (He did tire of this annoying tittle and proclaimed Christmas a holiday six years later.) His other reproofs against the missionaries were equally measured, as when the Ministry of Public Instruction was demoted from a cabinet post. Richard Armstrong was retained to run the school system, a task at which the missionaries excelled, but they no longer had a voice at the cabinet level. They were not happy with him when he relaxed restrictions against letting even the culpable party to a divorce remarry; they preferred Governor Kekuanaoa’s understanding: Once a pillar of salt, always a pillar of salt. But the new king framed the issue in a conciliatory way as one of increasing the anemic population.4

  The year following his accession the king determined to marry, and his eye fell on Emma Na‘ea Rooke, his classmate in the Royal School, a high chiefess of the Kohala District on the Big Island, born in 18365 and raised partly in an idyllic, sheltered seaside compound at Pu‘ukohola. Thus she grew up in the morning shadow cast by the Hill of the Whale and Kamehameha’s imposing but long-silent heiau to Kuka‘ilimoku that had vouchsafed his conquests. Emma was beautiful, not just in the Polynesian sense but to Western eyes as well. She loved the outdoors, she was an expert equestrienne, and she was thoroughly bicultural: a granddaughter of John Young, she had been given in hanai to the English Dr. Thomas C. B. Rooke, and raised in luxury with an English governess even before her manners were polished in the Cookes’ Boston Parlor.6 Great-great-granddaughter of the renowned Kekuiapoiwa II, she was immensely popular and possessed of a gracious sense of noblesse oblige, which it was said she inherited from her great-grandfather, Keli‘imaika‘i, the Conqueror’s favored younger brother, whose memory was still revered in Kohala as the “good chief.”

  The match was almost universally acclaimed; the couple was elegant and charming, court life promised to be brilliant, and the only muttering against her came from mentors of other young aspirants to the matrimonial throne. Indeed Emma left one of the round of engagement parties in tears when she overheard the whispered clucking that her rank was insufficient—and she being part haole to boot—to be accepted as queen.

  Their marriage on June 19, 1856, was remarkable from numerous standpoints and showed a Hawai‘i still in transition. The short procession of carriages from palace to Kawaiaha‘o Church, with cavalry outriders, might as easily have been proceeding down the Mall in London—except for kahili bearers, and the commoners along the street, who fell on their faces as in the old days—a sight rarely seen by that time. The ceremony took place in the center of Congregationalist faith, with Richard Armstrong officiating, but at the couple’s request (and a mighty act of goodwill it was) he performed the Anglican service, to the scandalized murmuring of the Calvinists in attendance. The new queen had three bridesmaids whose presence together, unknown to any of them, packaged a whole drama of past history, future contest, and the downfall of the dynasty less than twenty years later.

  First was the king’s sister, Victoria Kamamalu, who was only sixteen but had already been serving as kuhina nui for over a year, and until there was an heir she remained second in line to the throne after Lot. As ardently as Liholiho was inclined to Anglicanism (although neither he nor Emma were yet baptized members
), Kamamalu was just as fervently Congregationalist and pro-American. When she was a toddler, Kamehameha III had remarked on her fearless singing as she arced high in a swing at the Royal School, and now she led the choir at Kawaiaha‘o Church. Wyllie had tried to get her to give up this post as unsuitable for a princess–prime minister, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Kamamalu was also, however, a Kamehameha and accustomed to taking her pleasures at will; the scandals of her private life were soon to rock the royal house. The other two bridesmaids were Mary Pitman, close friend and frequent companion of the new queen, the hapa haole daughter of wealthy Benjamin Pitman of Massachusetts and Chiefess Kino‘ole o Liliha, whose father had been one of the courtiers entrusted with hiding the bones of the Conqueror. And there was Lydia Kamaka‘eha, sister of David Kalakaua, whose father was said to be incensed that the king did not marry her instead. Lydia’s close friendship with Emma now contrasted sharply with her later sniping at her when the dynasty changed eighteen years later.

  Like many a nervous groom before him, Liholiho discovered at the critical moment of the ceremony that he had forgotten the ring, but the danger passed when Elisha Allen, now a privy councillor, slipped off his own ring and pressed it into the king’s hand.