Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  One chief cause of the Americans’ dislike of him was his influence with the royal family. He renamed his plantation Princeville in honor of the toddler Albert Edward. He encouraged Emma to open a correspondence with Queen Victoria, rather a bold suggestion because Emma was not confident of her spelling and expression—“As you know,” she once wrote her father, “I am not very good at it.”16 She ventured a letter, however, and in fact she and the British queen became affectionate if long-distance friends. Wyllie set the cabinet ministers to wearing dress uniforms, and he formalized court etiquette, both of which could be defended on the ground of establishing the nation’s dignity in foreign relations, but the American-associated newspapers ridiculed him for it.17 When he promoted the idea of a Hawaiian peerage, though, opposition was so fierce that he did not pursue it.

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  Back in England, the wheels turned slowly to establish a church in Hawai‘i. After much discussion, the bishops thought it better, since Hawai‘i was already a Christian nation, to send not a missionary but a bishop with clergy under him—a prefabricated hierarchy. Ellis reported darkly back to Honolulu that the whole effort included Anglicans who were among “the greatest … perverts to Popery.”18 The process took so long that the royal couple began planning an event to coincide with the bishop’s arrival: the baptism of the crown prince. Queen Victoria consented to be his godmother, and arranged for a proxy to bring a massive silver christening vessel. In the meantime they performed in Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the Amateur Musical Society, of which the king was a contributor and sometime stage manager. They sailed down to Kona, a place rich with their family history, and stayed at Princess Ruth’s Hulihe‘e Palace. They began arranging alternative family seats, acquiring a summer villa above Honolulu in the Nu‘uanu Valley, and a country seat above Kona on the slopes of Hualalai volcano.

  On February 11, 1862, Henry Neilson finally died, giving the king a chance to mourn him and move on. The Prince of Hawai‘i turned four, made his first appearance in the legislature, and behaved flawlessly. Many people had remarked on his sweet nature, but despite his parents’ determination not to spoil him, there were storms. One day in Kapi‘olani’s care, he threw a tantrum over a pair of shoes he did not like. Liholiho suddenly doused him with cold water to stop the display. On August 19 the boy took a fever and stomachache and deteriorated by degrees. Three days later Victoria’s proxy, William W. F. Synge, arrived to find him dying and his parents inconsolable. With an Anglican bishop and clergy not yet arrived, Ephraim Clark of the Kawaiaha‘o Church performed an Anglican baptism on the morning of August 23, and the little prince died four days later.19

  The prostrated Emma gave herself a new surname, Kaleleokalani, “Flight of the Heavenly Chief.” The king blamed himself and all but withdrew from public view; he had tortured himself for more than two years over what he had done to Henry Neilson; now this. He could not recover. The hysterical queen blamed Kapi‘olani, in whose charge the incident happened, and for the rest of her life could not bring herself (with rare state exceptions many years later) to attend a function where they might meet. The prince’s symptoms, however, were consistent with appendicitis,20 and there was probably nothing that could have been done.

  Just over three years after the movement was initiated, Bishop Thomas Nettleship Staley disembarked in Honolulu, with his wife and staff, on October 11, 1862. He was thirty-nine, a Yorkshireman, a product of Queen’s College, Cambridge, and intellectually everything that the king had asked for. King and queen were baptized and confirmed, followed by Wyllie, the king’s father Governor Kekuanaoa, David Kalakaua, and other important members of the ruling class. It was a time for the American Calvinists to lick their wounds, but in fact the death of the toddler Albert Edward was a nail in the coffin of the British future in Hawaii, and the American reclamation faced one less obstacle.

  12. Useful Marriages

  The death of the crown prince cast a final pall over the reign of Kamehameha IV. He all but withdrew from public life, although he did not neglect his state duties. He proclaimed and maintained Hawai‘i’s neutrality when the United States descended into the nightmare of the Civil War, and that developed into an interesting refinement of the Hawaiians’ understanding of the Americans’ view of them. Many of the U.S. businessmen who staked their fortunes in Hawai‘i were New Englanders, and they shared that section’s approval of the abolition of slavery. That did not extend, however, to any notion that different races were equal. Besides, the evil of slavery would have been a curious doctrine to advocate in a country whose population had once consisted of a couple of hundred chiefly families living on the tribute handed up by about four hundred thousand kanakas living in near-serfdom. Nevertheless the dominance of New England Congregationalism and, perhaps as important, the intermarriage of Yankee businessmen to native chiefesses already well schooled in noblesse oblige, created a certain sympathy for the Union cause. Despite the king’s proclamation of neutrality, three or four dozen young men from the Punahou School volunteered for the Northern cause, but what many of them discovered was the same racial schizophrenia encountered by the king when, as Prince Alexander Liholiho, he was almost forcibly ejected from the train in New York. Probably not atypical was the experience of Henry Ho‘olulu Pitman, son of Queen Emma’s bridesmaid Mary Pitman. Henry’s father was banker Benjamin Pitman of Boston, where Henry was educated. He was about eighteen when he enlisted, and notwithstanding his nationality and nobility he was assigned to a Negro regiment. The Confederacy treated black prisoners of war harshly, and Henry, captured early in the war, died on February 27, 1863, in the notorious Libby Prison at Richmond, Virginia.

  The few Hawaiians who entered Confederate service did so by quite a different route. Over the preceding decades about two thousand young kanakas had escaped their drudgery by signing aboard American whaling vessels. During the Civil War the remains of the Yankee whaling fleet became the regular prey of the dreaded Southern raider CSS Shenandoah. Captured whaling crews were given a choice between being clapped in irons below deck and then put ashore in the middle of nowhere, or joining the rebel crew. Twelve Hawaiian sailors made the latter choice.1

  Wyllie used Hawai‘i’s neutrality to expand trade with the United States. The absence of Confederate sugar in the North quintupled the price of that commodity there, a hardship that Wyllie was quick to take advantage of by encouraging increased Hawaiian production. The attempt at a reciprocity treaty in 1855 had been defeated by the influence of Southern sugar planters, and their voice was no longer heard in the Congress. While sugar consumption in the North was being throttled, California was a Union state, and the market was open for as much Hawaiian sugar as could be produced.

  As William Richards had predicted to Ellis, the Congregational establishment in Hawai‘i was hostile to the English Church preferred by the royal family and many of their retainers. That opposition did not lessen when Rufus Anderson of the ABCFM himself visited the islands in 1863 to formally turn the remaining mission establishment over to the Hawaiian Evangelical Association. The Anglican Church gained an even larger public profile when the king presented a copy of the Book of Common Prayer—his own translation into Hawaiian. But they were now not the only competition that the Calvinist missionaries had to work around.

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  In the year of Kamehameha IV’s accession the Mormons established the City of Joseph on Lana‘i. The Congregationalists found Mormon beliefs even more appalling than the rituals and costumes of the Anglicans. The Mormons, however, stole a march on them by giving the natives positions of real responsibility in the local churches, as opposed to the Calvinists’ habit of keeping them in seemingly endless pupilage. This danger of losing influence among the native believers was not unforeseen, in fact it was an important factor in Dr. Rufus Anderson’s washing his hands of them. The Mormons, however, arriving late on a scene where thousands of natives could already read and write and understood the rudiments of Christianity (thanks to the missionaries)
, were able to capitalize on one certainty in Anderson’s philosophy: that the natives would seize upon a church that made them feel important.

  The Mormons had been quietly laboring in Hawai‘i since the end of 1850, when ten young adherents abandoned the search for gold in California and came to the islands to mine souls instead. They quickly shifted their focus from white converts to native. Their most effective advocate in the islands was George Q. Cannon, English by birth but an early convert whose family was close to the heart of the movement—in fact his uncle John Taylor was wounded in the hail of bullets that killed the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith. A year after he arrived in Hawai‘i, Cannon began translating the Book of Mormon into Hawaiian, assisted ably and eagerly by one of his first native converts, Ionatana (Jonathan) Napela. Scion of a cadet branch of the ancient kings of Maui, Napela was nearly forty and a graduate of the Lahainaluna School—a shocking betrayal in the Calvinists’ eyes, and he was deprived of his Wailuku judgeship at the time of his defection.

  In 1853, when Mormons on the mainland were thinking to cloister the members of the church in a “gathering” in Utah as a bulwark against worldliness, the same sentiment led the church in Hawaii to fort up in the City of Joseph on Lana‘i. Native emigration from the kingdom was illegal, and the church persuaded Chief Levi Ha‘alelea of Lana‘i to allow them to “gather” instead on his ahupua‘a in the Palawai Valley. Renaming the land the “Valley of Ephraim,” the Mormon Church anchored itself there for more than a decade.2

  Cannon returned home after four years, and while Ionatana Napela remained a pillar of the Mormon community and an interesting figure in the history of the islands, Brigham Young’s recall of the white missionaries to help fight the “Mormon War” left the church rudderless (arguably undercutting Rufus Anderson’s theories on the efficacy of native church leadership), and prey to the machinations of a shadowy American figure, Walter Murray Gibson. He was about forty, his past was a mystery; no one knew where he was from, although the most entertaining story was that he had been born at sea to English nobility, switched at birth to a poor American family, and one day would claim his title. That melodrama alone should have alerted people that something unsavory was afoot. His utterance of pro-Confederate sentiments—not the quickest way to win friends in Hawai‘i—made people think he was from the South. He had run guns in the Caribbean, and the Dutch jailed him on Java for revolutionary activities but he escaped. He had the gift of plausibility, and upon joining the Mormon Church in Utah persuaded Brigham Young to send him to the Pacific with the splendiferous title (he claimed) of Chief President of the Islands of the Sea and of the Hawaiian Islands. He won the confidence of the Mormons on Lana‘i, who worked mightily to earn for themselves the ahupua‘a of Palawai—a tract over which Gibson could rhapsodize in cracked King James English: “I am King … of Palawai on this day of grace.… Smile sweet valley, thy baby smile, thou hast no evils of manhood. No type of man’s sins are here.… Oh smiling Palawai, thou infant hope of my glorious kingdom.”3 Only later did the faithful learn that Gibson took title to the land in his own name, not theirs or the church’s. Ionatana Napela journeyed to Utah to see if Gibson really was legitimate; the Mormon Church sent a deputation in 1864, who excommunicated him but could not get hold of his title to the 2,500 acres on Lana‘i. Gibson made himself scarce for a time, to resurface in a later reign.

  In contrast to Gibson, if there was a hero among the missionaries in Hawaii, he was not among the Americans at all, but Father Damien de Veuster, a Belgian of twenty-four who was ordained two months after he arrived in spring 1864 into the Picpus Fathers, the original Catholic order that first came to Hawai‘i (Honolulu by then had a bishop and a cathedral). At first he was sent to Kohala, where Elias Bond (informally but now ironically known as “Father Bond”) was trying to keep his people busy and in good morals on the sugar plantation. Father Damien’s calling, though, would lie in a different sphere entirely.

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  Kamehameha IV died, only twenty-nine years old, as much from a broken heart as from asthma, on November 30, 1863. Emma, still stricken by the loss of her son but performing her public duties, was almost beyond reach. The king had been unwell for two days, but none of the doctors believed there was any mortal danger. She was alone with him when he suddenly began gasping for breath and expired in her arms. Emma aided in the decision to postpone a funeral until the new royal mausoleum was completed at Mauna ‘Ala in the Nu‘uanu Valley—which meant that he lay in state in the throne room for two months—about the usual period of mourning for royalty in the old days. French consul Charles de Varigny wrote of the thousands of commoners who swamped the palace grounds, wailing in the first convulsions of grief. “The Queen,” wrote Bishop Staley, “sits almost incessantly by the coffin. She has prayers in the room night and morning, in the Hawaiian language, so that all present may understand.”4

  The day after the funeral on February 3, 1864, Emma also presided over the reburial of Albert Edward. While she stayed in a tent during the days, she slept in the burial vault every night for two weeks, until the combined urging of Lot, Kekuanaoa, Wyllie, and Staley coaxed her away. Emma now changed her name from Kaleleokalani to Kaleleonalani—the plural form, “Flight of the Heavenly Chiefs.”

  The afternoon of Liholiho’s death the council and kuhina nui proclaimed Lot Kapuaiwa king as Kamehameha V. The independent tack that his rule would take became clear when he refused to take the oath of office under the existing constitution. Toward the end of his reign Kamehameha III had granted a more liberal fundamental law than the 1840 document, and Lot wanted those royal prerogatives back. The usual time to convene the legislature was in April, but the king issued a call instead for it to assemble in July to revise the constitution. This was not the mode of amendment provided for in the existing document, as the American press demanded to know what the use of a constitution was if the king could change it at will. In July the convention deadlocked over the most controversial articles, and Lot dismissed them, abrogated the existing constitution, and said, “I will give you a Constitution.” That document, which he signed on August 20, 1864, rescinded the universal male suffrage his uncle had granted and replaced it with both literacy and property tests. He abolished the office of kuhina nui, without whose signature laws had not been valid, and he freed his ability to act from the privy council. With those steps taken, he signed the document and took the oath as king—a suddenly very powerful king—on the same day.

  For a monarch who intended to rule as well as reign, Kamehameha V chose a highly international cabinet to assist him. The former French consul Charles de Varigny took the finance portfolio, and he retained the Scot Wyllie as foreign minister. The American C. C. Harris became attorney general, Elisha Allen of long service was chief justice, and the secondary positions were just as eclectic. As with his grandfather, what was paramount was loyalty to the chief.

  In the first year of his reign Kamehameha V was compelled to deal with a new disease threat, not as imminently deadly as smallpox and not as widespread as measles or whooping cough, but a disease that was incurable and whose horror was biblically reinforced. The natives called leprosy ma‘i pake, the Chinese disease, for the prevalent belief was that they were the ones who first introduced it, but that could not be certain. Its spread, however, was alarming. “The increase of leprosy has caused me much anxiety,” the king told the legislature, “and is such as to make decisive steps imperative.” Twenty-five miles across the Kaiwi Channel from O‘ahu lay the island of Moloka‘i, on whose north shore sea cliffs, virtually unclimbable but for a single dizzying mule track, vaulted three thousand feet above the ocean. Jutting from this north shore, the small Kalaupapa Peninsula became a colony to house the diseased, who were rounded up from among the population and deported. In a few years there were just over eight hundred, a few of them Caucasian but predominantly native, including the only ali‘i to be afflicted, Emma’s cousin and correspondent Peter Ka‘eo, who early in the reign was in
the house of nobles and a privy councillor. For several years the kingdom ill supported the colony, and conditions there deteriorated in some cases to the unimaginable, although to his credit Ionatana Napela visited and tried to help. Knowing leprosy to be contagious, the Catholic Church was hesitant to assign priests, but in 1873 Father Damien went willingly, and then volunteered to stay when the church would have begun a rotation. He did not just preach and pastor; he comforted the sick, dressed their lesions, organized recreational opportunities, and finally, in a real as well as a Pauline way, became one of them in December 1884 and died just over four years later.5

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  Stubborn on the restoration of royal powers, Kamehameha V proved equally stubborn on the topic of his marriage. The Cookes’ icy destruction of his relationship with Abigail Maheha at the Royal School had worked dark damage on him, and no doubt contributed to his sour personality. From early in life he had been betrothed to Bernice Pauahi, but as the time approached for such a marriage to progress to concrete plans, she proved herself no less a Kamehameha than the men in the family. Her parents tolerated her friendship with Charles Reed Bishop, but they opposed him virulently once they found out she loved him. Lot’s father Kekuanaoa, with all the weight he brought to the discussion, sided with her parents, and demanded that Bernice recognize her royal obligations and marry the prince.

  She refused. The Cookes were in her confidence, and she let them see the letters she wrote disengaging herself. As Amos Cooke recorded,

  This afternoon Bernice wrote a letter to Lot requesting that he come to see her. She told him of the wishes of her parents and said she would marry him, in accordance with their commands, but she knew it would make her unhappy, for he did not love her and she did not love him.

  After this she wrote the governor [Kekuanaoa] and said that, if they wished her buried in a coffin, she would submit to their authority. That she would as soon they buried her as promise to marry Lot. The governor replied to it, saying she was deceiving herself.