The coronation of Kalakaua and Kapi‘olani nine years into his reign provoked criticism, even disgust, from the sugar boys in a way that emphasized the differences between them and their missionary parents and grandparents. Their justification was an issue of public morals, but the real issue was financial waste. William N. Castle, son of the missionary Samuel Castle and now one of Hawaii’s leading sugar factors—banker, business agent, and marketer—filed criminal obscenity charges against one of Kalakaua’s aides, William Auld, and Robert Grieve, the printer of the Hawaiian Gazette, who had printed the program that accompanied the hula performances. The judge had the court cleared as witnesses clarified the meanings of the verses in Hawaiian that were chanted in praise of certain body parts. Both defendants were convicted and fined, but Grieve’s sentence was overturned on appeal, on the grounds that he had taken the program in good faith to be printed, and was unaware of the meanings of the native-language content.23
Restoration of hula was a hallmark of Kalakaua’s reign, as part of a broader regime to restore the native culture. The many traditional forms of hula could be performed to act out the nation’s oral history, or as part of the ceremonies in a heiau, where the worship could be spoiled by a single mistake among the company. Some hula indeed was danced just as a venting of celebration. Both men and women had their regimen of hula, but the missionaries fixated on the women’s, and could not think past the naked limbs and swaying or even thrusting hips. Some Americans, while finding it tantalizing, could also appreciate it as an art form. “At night they feasted and the girls danced the lascivious hula-hula,” wrote Mark Twain in 1866. “It was performed by a circle of girls with no raiment on them to speak of … placed in a straight line, hands, arms, bodies, limbs, and heads waved, swayed, gesticulated, bowed, stooped, whirled, squirmed, twisted and undulated as if they were part and parcel of a single individual.” However, Twain added, the authorities had clamped down on it, requiring payment of a ten-dollar permit. “There are few girls nowadays able to dance this ancient national dance in the highest perfection of the art.”24
There was a second point of contention between the king and his sugar creditors, and that was the rise to power early in the reign, of the unsavory Walter Murray Gibson. While the king was traveling the world, Gibson showed his care for the native people by publishing a health manual, Sanitary Instructions for Hawaiians.25 He encouraged the king’s steps in resurrecting native customs and sports, including the hula, which angered the American community. Kalakaua made him foreign minister, and Gibson sought the cooperation of various Pacific kingdoms in unifying under Kalakaua as emperor. The effort came to nothing, but Gibson managed to play to the king’s vanity, validate the Americans’ worst suspicions about him, and unify the Hawaiian business interests against him.
If the end point of this process was not obvious to those who participated in it, it was obvious to one outsider who surveyed it with a writer’s eye. Hawai‘i, wrote Anthony Trollope after only two days, must end as “the property of American or English sugar-growers, and the work on the plantations would be done by Chinese or coolie immigrants,” the whole result being “very much opposed to the theory of those who have wished to build up an Hawaiian monarchy.”26
15. A Voice Like Distant Thunder
David Kalakaua was keenly aware that when the legislature voted him the crown, he was not the candidate most qualified by blood. Kamehamehas III and V had excluded Ruth Ke‘elikolani from consideration for different reasons, Bernice Pauahi was not interested, and Emma he had defeated, with some well-placed promises to legislators and a few companies of British and American marines to quash the outrage that his scheming produced.
Kalakaua completed the change of dynasty by stripping the honor of “royal highness” from the last two Kamehamehas, Bernice and Ruth. The latter felt the greater sting, for she was close friends with Kalakaua’s mother and sisters, so much so that she was the hanai mother of the new crown prince, who was named for Ruth’s first husband, William Pitt Leleiohoku I. Kalakaua also replaced her as royal governor of Hawai‘i Island, a post she had held since 1855 and been reappointed to by Kamehameha V and Lunalilo. Whatever personal satisfaction Kalakaua might have gained by pushing the last of the Kamehamehas away from the throne, it was a move of colossal stupidity. In her will Ruth bequeathed her vast Kamehameha lands to her hanai son, who died in 1877 aged just twenty-three. If Kalakaua had only shown her some respect, she might have been content for those lands to pass to the royal family, thus making them financially independent. After his repeated slights, however, she took him to court, recovered her lands, and left Kalakaua to beg, borrow, and plead throughout his reign for money from sugar barons, leading to the disaster of the Bayonet Constitution in 1887.
Usually only glossed over in books of Hawai‘i history, Princess Ruth actually provides an intriguing glimpse into the what-ifs, had the monarchy pursued a more native path to development. Kalakaua’s effort to diminish Ruth’s standing was a hot coal that really came back to rest on his own brow, for people continued to address her by titles not less equal for being unofficial: Ku‘u Lani, “My Royal One”; Ke Ano Lani, “The Heavenly Reverence”; and most often Ku‘u Haku, “My Leader.”1
It was a devotion occasioned only in part by her high station; it was more the result of her lifetime of championing the native culture in defiance of the country’s inexorable transformation in to a Western exponent. In her obstinacy she was not alone, indeed the Calvinist Church begun with such energy in the early 1820s was, if anything, in decline. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions had long since cut the Hawaiian church loose, allowing it to sail its own way. By 1870, thirty-nine of its fifty-eight churches in the kingdom were served by native ministers, well ordained, but commanding the allegiance of only one-quarter of the people. They now had not only Christian alternatives—Catholic, Anglican, and Mormon—but many cast an eye back to older ways. It was noticed in some quarters that where tavernkeepers could barely eke out a living after paying for their thousand-dollar-per-year liquor license, native purveyors of the traditional ‘awa easily afforded their eight-hundred-dollar license fees and lived high. Even the most devout of the ali‘i, such as the queen dowager, cherished collections of cultural artifacts, and the less devout such as Kalakaua had long advocated the survival of the ancient ways.2
Especially in the towns, the rock-ribbed Congregationalists were seen as increasingly out of touch and anachronistic. Mark Twain, during his sojourn in 1866, took their measure with deadly accuracy when he characterized them as “pious; hard-working; hard-praying; self-sacrificing; hospitable; devoted to the well-being of this people and the interests of Protestantism; bigoted; puritanical; slow; ignorant of all white human nature and natural ways of men … fifty years behind the age; uncharitable toward the weaknesses of the flesh … and having no mercy and no forgiveness for such.”3 Among the natives who felt overwhelmed by the Calvinists’ purity, Ruth found a natural constituency.
Princess Ke‘elikolani—the name meant “Leafbud of Heaven”—was born on February 9, 1826, almost six years into the missionary era. Her mother, High Chiefess Kalani Pauahi, was twenty-two, the Conqueror’s granddaughter, and died giving birth to her. The first of her po‘olua fathers was the Conqueror’s nephew, who died before she was a year old. The second, with whom Pauahi was living at the time of the birth, Mataio Kekuanaoa, raised her fully as his own. She was given in hanai to the powerful queen regent, Ka‘ahumanu, who doted on her but died when Ke‘elikolani was six. After Pauahi’s death, Kekuanaoa married Elizabeth Kina‘u, and after the queen regent’s death they raised Ke‘elikolani themselves—stability at last in a childhood with too much sadness and loss.
Always large, she was considered attractive and her heritage, having both Ka‘ahumanu and Kina‘u for mothers, made her a catch no matter her looks. Her inheritance from the queen regent totaled nearly a tenth of the entire kingdom; she was the richest woman in the country. At fifteen she ma
rried the son of the great Kalanimoku, William Pitt Leleiohoku, who fathered her first son, John William Pitt Kina‘u, before dying in the measles epidemic of 1848. This son was one of the students at the Royal School, only two years old and the last to be admitted. Kamehameha III had excluded Ruth from the succession, but her son’s stature—the Conqueror’s only great-great-grandson, and descent from Kalanimoku and the kings of Maui on his father’s side—overrode Christian legitimacy and merited his inclusion. In church processions he was often paired with Lydia Kamaka‘eha, and by the time the Royal School folded he was considered one of the brightest lights of his young generation. His death of an unexplained accident in Kohala on the Big Island at the age of sixteen sent Ruth into an agony of mourning. The boy having died on September 9, 1859, the funeral was not until November 7, two months during which his lead coffin lay in his pagan mother’s house, attended with unceasing chanting. In him Hawai‘i might have lost a superb monarch. To the comfort of the Christian community, John had himself become a Christian, and his funeral at Kawaiaha‘o Church drew a crowd of thousands.
Ruth’s second husband, Isaac Young Davis, was the tall and handsome grandson of the British captive-gone-native. Their marriage was tempestuous to the point of physical battery. Ruth’s face was disfigured when an infection in the end of her bulbous nose required its amputation—the result, gossip had it, of Young having broken her nose during one of their brawls. There was communal confidence, however, that she gave out better than she got; in her full flower the Leafbud of Heaven was well over six feet tall and weighed 440 pounds. From this vivid marriage came her second son, Keolaokalani Davis, born in the spring of 1863, whom she gave in hanai to her beloved first cousin Bernice Pauahi. Isaac Davis opposed the hanai vigorously, and the baby’s death six months later helped seal the end of the marriage.
Ruth did not remarry. Of all her vast properties, she preferred living by the sea in Kona, in a spacious but not huge lava-rock mansion called the Hulihe‘e Palace. Originally built by Governor John Adams Kuakini, he left it to his hanai son, who left it to his son Leleiohoku, who left it to his son, who left it to his mother. In this enchanting location, she eschewed the rock mansion for a traditional grass house, the Hale Pili, on the grounds, closer to the languorous sea breezes. And that love of the old life was what, in her maturity, presented the royal family with a dilemma. “Legitimacy” was a value judgment imposed by the Christian newcomers, but questioning her legitimacy may only have been a convenient and somewhat easy to dispose of her, because she presented the court with other problems. Some of it had to do with the court’s image: At a time when all the Hawaiian royal ladies were trying their best to look Western, Princess Ruth had little choice but to embrace her startlingly Polynesian appearance. Her demeanor was often fierce, and one who knew her likened her voice to the rumble of distant thunder. More likely the need to marginalize her was rooted in her being vehemently anti-Western. She never converted to Christianity; she was eloquent in English but refused to speak it, forcing haoles who desired an audience to bring an interpreter. She therefore became something of a standard-bearer for anti-American sentiment among the natives, which was an embarrassment to Kamehameha III, who had given up his resistance to the haoles.
The king tried to make it up to her by naming her royal governor of Hawai‘i Island in 1855, an office she held for nineteen years, which may explain at least in part why Kalakaua felt so threatened by her. He was a high chief of Kona, one district on the Big Island, the whole of which she had been royal governor for nearly twenty years, to the adoration of her people. At the change of dynasty, even an illegitimate Kamehameha might be able to make a claim to precedence over him—and perhaps, unreconstructed creature as she was held to be, she might like Liliha before her prepare to make a fight of it. But once secure on the throne Kalakaua displaced her as governor of Hawai‘i Island, naming in her stead a crony from the legislature, Samuel Kipi.
* * *
Because of her bulk and her traditional ways, the white business community took to regarding Ruth as primitive and stupid. Over many years she had shown herself loving and loyal to her family, and at social occasions such as the luau that Lydia Kamaka‘eha gave for the Duke of Edinburgh, she showed herself hearty and fun loving. But the Americans chose to characterize her by her looks, and on this sentiment Ruth took her own measure of revenge.
After Kalakaua was able to present the sugar growers with a reciprocity treaty, sugar growing itself underwent an interesting change. Many of the plantations had undertaken to run the whole process from start to finish, including refining their own sugar. This put them in competition with a rather large sugar-refining establishment in California, and the industry leader there was a German immigrant-entrepreneur named Claus Spreckels. In this era of laissez-faire capitalism, the early years of what Mark Twain came to call the Gilded Age, when ruthless tycoons rose to fabulous wealth on the ruin of their competitors, Spreckels became a master player. What Cornelius Vanderbilt did with transportation and Andrew Carnegie with steel, Spreckels did with sugar. After reciprocity Spreckels took ship for Hawai‘i. The growers in the islands would find it more profitable, he said, not to finish refining their sugar themselves. They could just ship it to him in its raw state, and his mills in California would finish the job. His mills were soon the destination for some seven thousand tons of Hawaiian raw sugar. (Of course, he was also experimenting with sugar beets at home, just in case.) He also befriended King Kalakaua, lending him forty thousand dollars to pay down his debts.
But then, being a believer in vertical integration, he used part of his fortune to acquire a whole or half interest in forty thousand acres of Hawaiian government land, which he then wanted government permission to irrigate. When the ministers were slow with their approval—perhaps they were beginning to realize just who they were dealing with—the king had them awakened in the wee hours of the morning to receive their resignations.4 Perhaps no man of commerce in the islands changed from best friend to bête noire so quickly.
Ruth Ke‘elikolani was among those who found him the essence of everything they despised about haole businessmen. Spreckels knew that she owned more land than anyone else in the country. After pointed negotiations, he thought he had tricked her into a disastrous deal to sell him all her “right, title and interest” in the vast crown lands for only ten thousand dollars. She told him she thought it was half hers. Spreckels paid her willingly, only to learn later that the crown lands were the exclusive domain of the sovereign, and Ke‘elikolani had no interest in them whatever: The crown lands had nothing to do with her personal holdings. Ruth outsmarted him and made an easy ten thousand dollars. (Spreckels, however, went to the government and received fee-simple title to a 24,000-acre ahupua‘a on Maui in settlement for his interest, whatever that was, in the remainder of the crown lands).5
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On November 5, 1880, Mauna Loa erupted with a powerful effluence of lava, which gave rise to an incident in which Princess Ruth’s participation became legendary, though the legend has been called into question in more recent years. During the spring of 1881 the eruption continued, feeding a lava flow that made its way eastward, but heavy jungle impeded its progress toward the city of Hilo. By late summer the lava had burnt through most of the forest, and it became apparent that Hilo would be consumed. Prayer meetings were held; Lili‘uokalani sailed down from Honolulu, arriving on August 4. Urgent plans were made to try to save the city by diverting the lava either by erecting an earthen barricade or by dynamiting a diversion channel, but still the lava advanced.
Hawai‘i’s now sixty years of Christianization had left many pockets of people who, though many could read and write, never converted to any Christian denomination. (Visitors could still be unnerved by the islanders’ frankness about sex: Dr. Nelson Bird, arriving in 1880 on the steamer Australia and finding the hotels full, rented a room in a commoner’s house. Great was his consternation when his host “offered me any one of the women down
stairs as a bed fellow, and wondered at my refusal. His wife smiled also at my innocence and offended … virtue.”6) On the Big Island especially, people still feared Pele though there were no kahunas to continue her cult. The residents of Hilo went to their island’s former governor, relying on her as the only royal who had never betrayed the traditional gods with a profession of Christianity, and implored her to make a sacrifice to Pele and stop the lava. Exactly what Ruth did is no longer known, for accounts of it, like a medieval miracle play, became exaggerated with retelling. Some have her progressing to the edge of the lava with chants and sacrificing ‘ohelo berries into the burning stream, which would make sense because those were known to be sacred to Pele. Other descriptions have her sacrificing a pig, or a bottle of brandy, and/or thirty red handkerchiefs, having raided Hilo merchants of all they had. One account had her laying down her 440-pound body for the night in the lava’s path.
All that is known with certainty is that the lava halted on August 9. Ralph Kuykendall, Hawai‘i’s leading English-language historian, wrote in 1967 that the whole incident may have been apocryphal, for no contemporary newspaper accounts mention it. The Bishop Museum, however, preserves a couple of documents of the time that do. “Many thanks,” wrote Hawai‘i resident Ursula Emerson to her son, for his “account of the lava flow, or what had been the flow and had caused so much anxiety.… Keelikolani is not like the Kapiolani of olden time, who was so steadfast in her trust in Jehovah.… I fear she has not her piety.” Kuykendall also wrote that Lili‘uokalani made no mention of such an incident in her memoirs, but then, she hardly would have after having journeyed to Hilo for prayer meetings and consultations with her civil engineers, and been so thoroughly shown up.7
In spite of her ferocity, Ruth was known to be capable of great tenderness. When Miriam Likelike bore Victoria Ka‘iulani to continue the Kalakaua dynasty, Ruth acted as her godmother and gave her ten acres of her Waikiki lands, which became the new heiress apparent’s ‘Ainahau estate in downtown Waikiki. Ruth watched over her upbringing, advocating that she receive the education that would best fit her for monarchical responsibility, despite her own exclusion. Ka‘iulani grew up addressing her as Mama Nui, her “Great Mother.”
Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii Page 29