Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  When Kalakaua was on his world tour, much talk in the country centered on the construction of the new ‘Iolani Palace in Honolulu, which was being built to replace the old frame pavilions. Ruth, who preferred living on her Kona estate, decided to have a town house, Keoua Hale, built in Honolulu to reside there. Ruth used a different architect from the palace’s, Charles J. Hardy of Chicago, then employed at a lumber mill in Honolulu, but the style—late Victorian Italianate with a Pacific accent—was so similar that the two dwellings could have come from the same drawing board. But where the palace repeated the mistake of the first ‘Iolani Palace by being intended almost entirely for ceremonial purposes with a dearth of actual living space, Keoua Hale was designed for sumptuous, gracious living. As the house took shape, people saw a mighty stone edifice, its corners fully rusticated in the best Italian fashion, broad flights of steps surmounting a raised basement to a piano nobile, a second floor above that, a mansard roof with dormer windows above that, and a tower above that. Wings sprouted from the central bloc; there were bay windows, balconies, broad lanais on the first and second stories; and inside, plasterers sculpted the coat of arms of the kingdom in the ceiling of the grand drawing room.

  Gossip flowed freely around Honolulu that Ruth had deliberately built Keoua Hale to outshine the just-completed ‘Iolani Palace, pouring money into the gargantuan villa to spite Kalakaua,8 and not coincidentally demonstrating that she was still vastly more wealthy than he—and that she did not owe the sugar planters for it. Nor could it have been a coincidence that Ruth inaugurated the grand home with a luau for a thousand people and an evening ball on February 9, 1882, perfectly timed to upstage the new palace and the eighth anniversary of the king’s investiture.9 The beautifully engraved invitations, not to make too fine a point, were surmounted by a generic-looking crown, and headed “Ka Mea Kiekie, Ka Alii Ruth Keelikolani: ‘Her Royal Highness, the Chiefess Ruth Keelikolani.’”10

  Not long after the vast mansion was finished, there was a small echo of the contest with Claus Spreckels when the sugar baron’s son John insisted on showing off his new mansion to Queen Dowager Emma. As their carriage passed the Ali‘iolani Hale, where the sugar barons were dining with Kalakaua, Emma lowered the veil from the brim of her hat, which Spreckels “firmly demanded that I open.” Spreckels, whose father the sugar cabal regarded with increasing venom, wanted them to see what exalted company he was keeping. Emma was offended by the incident, kept her veil down, and later pronounced Ruth’s Keoua Hale “much nicer from top to bottom” than the Spreckels mansion.11

  Ruth paid for her grand gesture, though. After hosting in the vast house, her health began to decline. She returned to her favorite residence, the Hale Pili on the grounds of the Hulihe‘e Palace in Kailua Kona, where she was most comfortable. She didn’t know how sick she was. Not until some of her servants wrote to Bernice Bishop, entreating her to send a doctor, did the country learn of her condition. Bernice alerted Queen Dowager Emma, and together they hastened from Honolulu to her bedside, but upon arriving in Kailua Kona found the Hale Pili crowded with visitors, and Ruth propped up on her favored yellow cushions, laughing and holding court. She became quite provoked at the servants who had mailed Bernice the alarming letter, and she asked for the news from the capital. Kalakaua put into Kailua when he heard of her illness, and continued on to Hilo upon being assured that she was in no danger. That evening found her, according to Emma, “so cheerful and full of jokes” that her precipitous overnight decline took everyone by surprise.

  She took a high fever, and both Bernice and Emma were with her when she died, “at 9 o’clock precisely on the morning of the 24th, Queen Victoria’s birthday.”12 Ruth’s body was taken to Honolulu, where she lay in state for three weeks in her magnificent Keoua Hale, with six men fanning her casket with kahili. It was an awkward time, for by custom the vigil was to be kept jointly by all nobles, and Bernice and Emma, the principal mourners, were seated with Lili‘uokalani and Miriam Likelike. At the funeral Emma was given precedence, and the crown princess made no complaint, at least in public; Ruth was laid to rest in the Kamehameha crypt at Mauna ‘Ala.

  In her will Ruth provided land for a half dozen favored tenants living on her properties, but they were for life tenure only; at their deaths the lands would revert to her estate, the entirety of which she bequeathed to her much-loved cousin Bernice.13 Ruth’s concern was to keep the vast royal patrimony—some 353,000 acres, or nearly 10 percent of the entire country—intact. Bernice, too, honored this intent, and the Kamehameha lands became the nucleus of the trust that funds the Kamehameha Schools to this day.

  To the Americans and American-Hawaiians intent on the country’s cultural Westernization and economic grafting to the United States, Ruth Ke‘elikolani had been a somewhat comical figure—crude, ungainly, primitive. But to the native people, both the kanakas who looked to her as Ku‘u Haku, and her peers who understood her abilities and her intentions, she was a protectress of the island culture. She spent her life championing the language, the customs, and the heritage, and when she died her huge estate, which she had shrewdly managed and maintained intact, became the single greatest guarantee of their survival. That was a powerful legacy that has not been sufficiently appreciated.

  16. Queen at Last

  After the death of Princess Ruth, Bernice took up residence in the cavernous Keoua Hale, which her cousin had left her. Five years younger than Ruth, she also entered a decline. A voyage to San Francisco to consult a specialist resulted in a diagnosis of breast cancer, and she submitted to an operation to treat it. She returned to Hawai‘i in the company of Likelike, took up residence first at her Waikiki retreat and then once more in Keoua Hale, but her mortality could not be stayed, and she died on October 16, 1884. Bernice’s birth parents had been the hanai parents of Lili‘uokalani, and despite the dynastic tension the two women had remained close. In her will Bernice left her numerous properties. Kalakaua benefited nothing from the Kamehameha lands, leaving him to finance his lifestyle and the government on his own, which meant increasing debt to the pro-American sugar industry. With increasing concern over his debts, he requested his sister to turn some of her lands over to him, and she caused something of a family rift when she refused.

  No sooner had Bernice Pauahi passed from the scene than Dowager Queen Emma began to fail noticeably. Only forty-nine, she had suffered a series of small strokes over the previous year, which may have affected her behavior,1 and she died six months after Bernice, on April 24, 1885. After her death, as was the custom, she lay in state, at the capacious Rooke House, where her father had practiced medicine and entertained on the first floor as the family lived on the second, and which had been her principal residence her whole life. She was laid out in white silk trimmed with gold, a jeweled circlet on her brow. Four weeks was the usual time for a royal wake, but an incident occurred, almost stunning in its bad taste, that exhibited the reach if not the impudence of American arrogance. Early in the course of the vigil over Emma, her business manager, Alexander Cartwright, and several others spirited her remains away to Kawaiaha‘o, the church of the American Congregationalists and the last place in the country that Emma would have wished to lie. Their justification was that Rooke House was not large enough to accommodate the throngs of mourners that they expected; that made sense, insofar that the Anglican cathedral for which Emma had raised money had barely begun construction, but the incident aroused the indignation of her “Emmaite” partisans and the sympathy even of others such as Lili‘uokalani, who despite their differences regarded her with great respect.

  Kalakaua had shown himself perhaps the most agnostic of all the monarchs, but that was less the cause of his discredit with the American and English element than his self-indulgent reign. He had proved himself a capable representative of the kingdom when abroad, but at home he was a profligate gambler and capacious drinker who should have been more careful about the friends he kept. He finally parted with Claus Spreckels, not over Spreckels’s
near-monopoly on the sugar industry, but because one night at cards when Kalakaua demanded to know where a missing king was, Spreckels carelessly remarked that he was the other king. It was an expensive divorce, but the king obtained it. After appointing Walter Murray Gibson to the house of nobles and then to a succession of cabinet posts, he had an able servant to deliver his legislative needs, but every time Gibson acted it seemed to cost the king haole support.

  There may actually, though, have been a religious figure who was involved in Kalakaua’s slow downfall—a mysterious man who appeared on the scene probably late in 1886, and enjoyed enormous influence over the king for the next year. That was Abraham Rosenberg, who claimed to be a rabbi and traveled with a Torah scroll and splendid silver yad, or pointer. As far as anyone could have known, during their long nighttime hours together Rosenberg was instructing the king in Jewish tradition and history, but he was almost universally known as the king’s soothsayer.

  One scholar has noted something salient about the effect that Jewish ritual would have had on Kalakaua. “Anyone who has heard such chanting must be struck by the remarkable similarity to Hawaiian chanting,”2 an art form at which the king was highly proficient. And Rosenberg, whether he was actually a rabbi or merely a man versed in Jewish learning, could have augmented Bible stories with which Kalakaua was familiar with Talmudic commentary on their meaning, which would have made him seem (perhaps not inaccurately) more knowledgeable about them than the missionaries whom the king disdained. And Kalakaua could certainly have noticed the structural similarities between Hebrew and Hawaiian that struck Henry Opukaha‘ia seventy years before. The political lobbies scoffed at Rosenberg, and the newspapers referred to him as “Holy Moses,” but he held the king in thrall until his sudden decampment just weeks before the business element finally moved against the king.

  It was singular how this upper echelon of the ali‘i, no less than the commoners, kept one ear open to the call of the old ways. Praying someone to death, while long nominally debunked, was still feared and had been illegal for many years. Princess Ruth of course had never adopted Christianity, but even Queen Emma, who was the most devout of them, weakened to its charms at least once. Nearly two years after the queen dowager lost the bitter election to Kalakaua, one of Ruth’s servants went to Emma with a recipe for hexing him and his whole clan to death. As Emma admitted in a letter to her cousin Peter Ka‘eo, after a regimen of fasting and praying “that God would please place me on the Hawaiian Throne,” a young lamb was sacrificed, and she drank a glass of brandy containing three drops of its gall and three drops of blood from its heart.3 It is difficult to imagine a letter showing Emma in a worse light, but the fact that the ritual came from Ruth’s kahuna, Kaiu, and was relayed by one of Ruth’s servants, eloquently answers the question of how passively that formidable lady had been brooking Kalakaua’s repeated insults.

  Kalakaua was untroubled by spells cast in lamb’s blood and brandy, but his expansive lifestyle, his rusticated palace with its electric lights and telephone and indoor plumbing, his entertaining and his gambling, left him in helpless need of money. The planters and factors could give it to him, but their terms became harder. Like an ant that had broken the edge of an ant lion’s trap, Kalakaua sank into the cone of sugar. He had given them the reciprocity treaty he promised, and the sugar industry became gigantic. The 8,800 tons that Hawai‘i exported in 1866 after the ramp-up to supply California during the Civil War seemed like a lot at the time. The industry’s transformation after the United States ratified the reciprocity agreement in 1875, however, was stunning—the 9,400 tons that were exported in 1870 increased to 12,500 tons the year of the treaty, to 31,800 tons in 1880, on its way to nearly 130,000 tons in 1890. There were fifty-four major plantations in operation in 1879: twenty-four on Hawai‘i, thirteen on Maui, seven each on Kaua‘i and O‘ahu, and three on Moloka‘i. The larger among them covered as much as three thousand acres and employed a thousand or more workers. Irrigation now played a major role; rainfall on the islands was distributed so unevenly between windward and leeward sides that either artesian wells or channels diverting water from high in the forest on the wet sides to more arid regions were required to bring previously unsuitable lands into full cultivation. The shrewd Scotsman James Campbell, husband of Abigail Kuaihelani, took his profit from selling the Pioneer Mill and purchased land on the arid Ewa Plain on the dry side of O‘ahu, twenty miles west of Honolulu. By drilling artesian wells he quadrupled his money in sugarcane.4 Even more dramatically, in the year after reciprocity the firm of Alexander & Baldwin—another one owned by missionary descendents—engineered a seventeen-mile irrigation ditch on Maui, from the wet, windward side of Haleakala to their acreage between Pa‘ia and Makawa‘o. Partner H. P. Baldwin proved himself indefatigable in getting it done. Despite having lost an arm in a mill accident, he shamed workers into finishing work in the dangerous Maliko Gorge by lowering himself on a rope with his one arm for daily inspections.5 The ditch cost the extravagant sum of eighty thousand dollars, but delivered forty million gallons of water every day. That success led them to acquire more land and more mills until they became recognized as one of the so-called Big Five sugar combines.

  Concentration of sugar production into fewer hands was the natural process of capitalism as larger companies acquired smaller ones, but the overall planted acreage continued to increase. Some others of what became the Big Five, such as Castle & Cooke, backed into sugar growing by having been the factor for plantations they eventually took over. Another one was H. Hackfeld & Co., founded by a German immigrant who marketed the sugar from the original Ladd & Co. plantation at Koloa. Another major player was Starkey, Janion & Co., British merchants who had run a store in Honolulu since 1846; one of their employees, Theo Davies, raised capital and assumed control of the company and its mercantiles, insurance business, and began buying plantations. The oldest of what became the Big Five had roots that extended all the way back to the sandalwood trade, which employed Henry Peirce, who eventually retired to become the American minister to the kingdom, as the company evolved into C. Brewer & Co., with Peirce’s son as a partner—which made Henry Peirce something more than a disinterested bystander in the effort at reciprocity.

  One important aspect of the plantation system at this time was mutual cooperation. With the American market apparently able to absorb all the sugar they could produce, there was no need to feel competitive against one another. So they shared irrigation networks where practicable, and agreed on slates of local officials who should be appointed, for instance district court judges, who could be counted on to decide contract-labor disputes in their favor. An even more serious effect of the spreading plantations was the eradication of local villages, with their remaining possibility of subsistence agriculture, forcing more kanakas to hang about the plantations for some kind of work.6

  After 1879 Chinese immigration into Hawai‘i under the controversial labor contracts increased to an average of some three thousand people a year. They presented one set of issues to the government, and other considerations to the planters. In China in 1881 Kalakaua had tried to limit immigration to those Chinese men who came with their wives. The native Hawaiian population was still in free fall, and it only exacerbated the problem when Chinese bachelors took Hawaiian wives and began having hapa pake (half Chinese) children. To the good side, somewhat more than half the coolies returned to China at the expiration of their contracts. The others presented a problem for the white element because, having hoarded their slender wages, they moved to the cities, went into business, and being shrewd and hardworking, undercut white-owned businesses. Sun De Zhang, for instance, more widely known as Sun Mei and the older brother by twelve years of Chinese republican leader Sun Yat-sen, came to Hawai‘i in 1871 to work in his uncle’s store, and by 1885 was the principal merchant on Maui, owned a six-thousand-acre ranch, and was known as the “King of Maui.”7 Sun Yat-sen himself lived in Hawai‘i from 1879 to 1883 under his brother’s sponsorship, but he
was more interested in education than labor.8 Chun Afong, for another case, one of the first Chinese to arrive back in 1849, opened a mercantile in Honolulu, folded his profits into real estate, and became that community’s first millionaire. Perhaps most frightening to the haole community were men like Tong Yee, who made a fortune with his own Paukaa sugar plantation north of Hilo, married a chiefess on the Big Island—most Hawaiian women thought no worse of marrying a Chinese than an American, a notion the latter community had some trouble accepting—and had a daughter, Emma Aima, who became a leader in the fight against annexation.9

  Overall the Chinese population in Hawai‘i, which had stood at 2,038 in 1872, tripled to 6,045 in 1878, and tripled again to 18,254 in 1884—one-quarter of the population of the entire kingdom, before the government stepped in to regulate the flood. By 1886 Honolulu’s “Chinatown” alone teemed with six to eight thousand residents, such a tightly packed warren of houses, shops, shacks, and lean-tos that a fire that year could not be extinguished before devastating most of it.10 Plantation wages for them had increased to fourteen dollars per month, and still, despite Kalakaua’s effort to limit the number of bachelors coming to the islands, sixteen Chinese immigrant men out of seventeen were unmarried.11

  In 1881 both the Chinese government, newly alert to abuses in the coolie trade, and the Hawaiian government, fearful of being displaced from its own islands, each moved in its own way to restrict Chinese immigration, causing the planters to scout the globe for other ethnicities to bring to Hawai‘i. As Kamehameha IV had envisioned, there was an attempt to recruit workers from elsewhere in Polynesia, with whom intermarriage would be less of an issue, but as laborers they proved to be not much more energetic than native Hawaiians. The Portuguese worked hard, settled with their families, and knew their place, but being white (albeit swarthy) they tended to want white wages, so the planters began to look elsewhere after bringing over several thousand.12 In 1882 the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act; that did not directly affect Chinese contract labor in Hawai‘i—except among those who foresaw a problem with annexation if the kingdom were overrun with people that the Americans would shun as undesirable. Still, it caused attention to turn to Japan, whose laborers also came mostly as single men but, unlike the Chinese, preferred to shop for wives in picture albums from home than seek out the diminishing number of native women.