by Sarah Vowell
Six or seven members of the Dolphin’s crew burst into a religious service Bingham was conducting at a chief’s house and threatened him with clubs. Then they went off and broke some windows at the mission house. When the captain arrived on the scene, rather than apologize for his men’s threats and vandalism he purported that “he had rather have his hands tied behind him, or even cut off, and go home to the United States mutilated, than to have it said, that the privilege of having prostitutes on board his vessel was denied him.”
Some of the chiefs, scared or fed up with the conflict, secretly spirited a few willing ladies on board the ship anyway. At which point, the report concedes, “in the dusk of the evening, a shout ran from one deck to another as if a glorious victory had been achieved.” That night, the report admits, “Hell rejoiced, and angels covered their faces in grief.”
The same report notes that Honolulu Harbor received more than a hundred ships that year. The presence of a couple of thousand sailors loitering on shore resulted in horse races, card playing, and a return “to the songs and dances of former times.” Nevertheless, the account goes on to boast, the Sandwich Islands Mission printed ten thousand copies of a book of hymns that year. So take that, songs of former times.
A year later, in Lahaina, the governor of Maui—Hoapili, the late Queen Keopuolani’s final husband—held the American captain of the English whaler John Palmer until his crew returned native women who were on board breaking the law forbidding prostitution. The crew, writes the ABCFM’s Rufus Anderson, “opened a fire upon the town, throwing five cannon-balls into it, all in the direction of the mission-house.” Luckily nothing but feelings were hurt in the incident.
The whalers stopped over in Hawaii mainly in the fall and spring. This seasonal schedule tended to exaggerate the moral backsliding the missionaries constantly complained about, especially in Lahaina. The Maui Mission Station reports in the 1830s are rife with church members being suspended for adultery and drunkenness. One man exhibited “general unchristian deportment and contempt of those who went to converse with him.” One report notes that because of the ship traffic, “The children of Lahaina, while they have enjoyed superior advantages, have also superior temptations to encounter.”
The Nantucket whaling captain’s wife, Eliza Brock, captured Lahaina’s contradictions in her journal. The streets, she noticed on a stopover in 1854, were “thronged all day long with . . . sailors on shore on liberty.” Nevertheless, she attended a church service led by the ABCFM’s missionary Dwight Baldwin and was “quite delighted their worship is very solemn.”
Mrs. Brock’s journal also noted that her husband’s whale hunt, like all whale hunts in the 1850s, was progressing slowly because the creatures “are not easily captured as in times gone by.” Whaling’s triumph was the root of its demise. The New Englanders had slaughtered so many whales that quarry was becoming ever more scarce.
In 1850, a Honolulu newspaper for sailors, The Friend, published an odd letter supposedly written by a polar whale. Pondering his kind’s impending annihilation at the hands of “whale killing monsters” from New Bedford, Sag Harbor, and New London, the whale pleads, “I write on behalf of my butchered and dying species. . . . Must we all be murdered in cold blood? Must our race become extinct?”
When I took my nephew Owen to the Whalers Village Museum in Lahaina, he kept coming up to me to issue irate outbursts. “They shouldn’t kill whales!” and “I can’t believe they killed so many whales!” He looked at the harpoons hanging on the wall and shook his head. I told him to cheer up, that soon enough the whales would be in luck because the whole world was about to go ape for fossil fuels. “Good!” he said.
The Pennsylvania petroleum boom of the 1860s slowed down sperm whales’ extinction. A political cartoon in an 1861 issue of Vanity Fair shows whales dressed up in tuxedos and ball gowns, sipping champagne under banners proclaiming “Oils well that ends well” and “We wail no more for our blubber.” The caption reads: “Grand ball given by the whales in honor of the discovery of the oil wells in Pennsylvania.”
Hawaii’s commercial fortunes would have suffered along with whaling’s decline if not for the triumphant rise of sugar agriculture spurred on by the American Civil War. It’s poetic that some of the early Hawaiian sugar entrepreneurs boiled their cane in iron try-pots the whalers left behind. I once spotted some try-pots repurposed yet again on the grounds of a plush resort on Maui—as planters full of exotic foliage. Nearly two centuries of Hawaiian economics bloomed from that kettle, from whaling, to sugar, to tourism.
WHEN KAMEHAMEHA’S HEIR, Liholiho, decided to make his ill-fated state visit to Great Britain in 1823, he sailed on an English whaleship captained by Valentine Starbuck, a member of a venerable Nantucket whaling family (whose name Melville would appropriate for the Pequod’s first mate in Moby-Dick). In 1825, Liholiho and his wife, struck dead by measles, returned home to Hawaii in ornate coffins on HMS Blonde, a British Royal Navy frigate under the command of the seventh Lord Byron, cousin of the sixth Lord Byron, the late poet. Along with the royals’ remains, the ship brought tidings from King George IV denying British control of Hawaiian internal affairs but promising the islands friendship and protection.
Robert Dampier, an artist aboard the Blonde, described the Honolulu funeral procession for the royal couple. The coffins were rowed ashore from the frigate in small boats. Cannons were fired and a Hawaiian honor guard bearing muskets lined the road to the mission church. “They were all clothed in English dresses of various date, size, and manufacture,” wrote Dampier, “and many lacking in that essential part of a soldier’s accoutrements, a pair of Trousers.”
The procession “was headed by nine Sandwichers accoutered in their beautiful war cloaks” bearing standards, followed by the band from the Blonde playing a death march; the American missionaries; the ship’s chaplain and surgeon; forty noble pallbearers lugging the coffins; the young King Kauikeaouli; his little sister, Princess Nahi‘ena‘ena (on the arm of Lord Byron); Kaahumanu (on the arm of the British first lieutenant); more chiefs; and the naval officers, “clad in their dress uniforms.” Dampier opined that “As they all tramped thus solemnly along, the whole group formed a striking and interesting Spectacle.” Indeed, a pageant of Polynesian royalty, a brass band, pantsless guards, and Lord Byron’s cousin seems like a fanciful tableau from some arcane folk ballad Joan Baez might have recorded in 1962.
The published account, Voyage of H.M.S. Blonde to the Sandwich Islands, written by Lord Byron and his shipmates, remarks that “We could not help reflecting on the strange combination of circumstances here before us: every thing native-born and ancient in the Isles was passing away.”
At a somber gathering at Prime Minister Kalanimoku’s house, described in Voyage of the H.M.S. Blonde, King Kauikeaouli and Princess Nahi‘ena‘ena observed the proceedings from a sofa. The boy was between ten and twelve years old and his sister a couple of years younger. They were “in European suits of mourning, and seated on a beautiful feather garment, which some of the affectionate natives had woven [for the princess].”
Hawaiian feather-work like the twenty-foot-long sarong the princess was sitting on was—and is—revered for its magnificence. The feather capes and cloaks made for the chiefs, composed of elegant geometric designs in yellow, black, and red, are masterpieces of design and handicraft.
“The feathers of birds were the most valued possessions of the ancient Hawaiians,” wrote David Malo. The ruling class employed bird catchers to trap birds like the mamo and the o‘o to pluck their feathers. These feathers were tied into netting to construct the nobles’ capes and feather helmets, which they wore on ceremonial occasions and in battle. The gorgeous yellow cloak woven of nearly half a million mamo feathers that belonged to Kamehameha the Great and is now in the collection of Honolulu’s Bishop Museum is a Hawaiian national treasure.
As John Dominis Holt wrote in his 1964 meditation On Being Hawaiian, “I am filled with an aesthetic pleasure when I think of
tall chiefs wearing feather covered helmets; great cloaks and capes—again, of feathers—draped across their shoulders, or covering the full length of their frames as they walked across the land.”
On Being Hawaiian was one of the early landmarks of a movement in the 1960s and seventies now called the Hawaiian Renaissance, a reawakening of appreciation for and interest in Hawaiian language and culture. In his remarkable paragraph on the feather-work, Holt manages a museumgoer’s rare feat: truly seeing an artifact on display. He appreciates the sociology of the textiles—their fascinating political, cultural, and ecological context—but he does that without forgetting to look upon them as art. Art is made by individuals, not societies. Holt proclaims, “I see these objects in the Bishop Museum today, and marvel at the workmanship of Neolithic craftsmen, and the artistic insight that led to the conceptualization of the feather cloak and helmet as garments of state. The element of extreme grace is apparent in the Hawaiian feather-work objects.”
According to David Malo, Kamehameha issued an order to the trappers to protect these species to ensure they would survive to adorn his children: “ ‘When you catch the birds do not strangle them. Take what feathers you want and let them go to grow more.’ ” Holt alludes to this in his essay, remarking, “All the lore of bird-catchers, which tells of their methods of taking feathers from live birds, is manifest of a sophisticated understanding of conservation, which extended throughout the whole of classic Hawaiian Society.”
As the plumage on the o‘o was overwhelmingly black, the catchers were able to extract a bird’s small number of yellow feathers and set it free. I say “were” because the o‘o and the mamo are now extinct, due to a number of factors, including hunting, changes in their Big Island habitat brought about by cattle ranching, and diseases that may have been borne by invasive species like the mosquito that arrived as stowaways on foreign ships.
In Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, Liliuokalani describes three pairs of o‘o birds she sent to friends on Kauai, hoping to replenish the species “under whose wings may be found the choice yellow feathers used in the manufacture of cloaks or collars exclusively pertaining to the Hawaiian chiefs of high rank.” Delighted to hear that one pair of the birds was “thriving,” she attributed their vigor to a flowering mimosa shrub near her friends’ house. “They are true Hawaiians,” she wrote of the birds. “Flowers are necessary for their very life.”
The queen hoped that the birds would continue to flourish. But the feather-work birds were already nearly extinct by 1898, the year her book was published to argue against American annexation. The queen’s contemporary, the ornithologist Henry Wetherbee Henshaw cited 1898 as the point of no return for the o‘o; it was also the year the birdwatcher spotted the last mamo he ever saw.
The Bishop Museum safeguards the o‘o feather skirt of Nahi‘ena‘ena in a climate-controlled storage facility. It can only be seen by special appointment. When I was ushered into the cold, white room where the skirt was partially unfurled, a security guard watched over me. I had only seen examples of old feather-work on cloaks secured behind glass in the museum’s Hawaiian Hall or on display in Iolani Palace. Up close, its texture is downright luscious, a field of legal-pad yellow ever so flecked with hints of black and red. One edge is decorated with black and red triangles that used to line each end. (After the princess’s death, it was cut in half and sewn back together and used to drape over the caskets of kings. There are photographs of it blanketing the coffin of King Kalakaua in 1891.)
Nahi‘ena‘ena’s skirt, the longest piece of feather-work ever made, was a symbol of her unique status, a tribute to her power. Artisans constructed her feather skirt for her to wear to meet her brother Liholiho upon his return from England. In The Journal of the Polynesian Society, John Charlot argues persuasively that the idea was, she would greet her brother in the fetching garment to signify their impending procreation. If the weavers’ intent was to beguile the king, then I can report that it takes all my decorum, all the archival protocol drilled into me during the museum internships of my youth, to restrain myself from running my hands over the skirt’s downy surface. I tell the guard that it looks so soft and inviting I want to curl up in it and take a nap. He tells me not to.
A chant about the hoped-for coupling of Nahi‘ena‘ena and Liholiho proposes, “Clinging chiefs, laid down in delight. / The chief clings, this earth endures.” This was the weight bearing down on the little girl’s narrow shoulders: she must bear her brother’s children to save the Hawaiian world.
The Hawaiian population in 1778 when Captain Cook landed in Kauai has been estimated at over 300,000. The 1890 census recorded 34,436 pure Hawaiians. As with natives of the Americas after European contact, the runaway death rate can be attributed to outbreaks of smallpox, cholera, influenza, typhoid (which killed Henry Obookiah), measles (which killed Liholiho and his wife), and venereal disease.
In 1825, the year of Liholiho’s funeral, missionary wife Mercy Whitney bemoaned the situation: “The mortality of this nation is a motive which ought to excite us to steady persevering and selfdenying labors for their good.”
On the one hand, the missionaries’ crusade to prohibit Hawaiian women from engaging in prostitution and fornication with visiting disease-ridden seamen probably saved lives. On the other hand, since their countrymen started dropping like flies after the haoles showed up, some natives suspected the missionaries’ religion was to blame for the higher body count. In an essay in the Bishop Museum archives entitled “Mistaken Ideas Concerning the Missionaries,” written by an unidentified Lahaina student in 1842, the essayist takes a look back at initial fears about the New Englanders. After Hiram Bingham built the first church on Oahu, the student recalls, “When it was completed some of the natives said among themselves, ‘That house of worship built by the haoles is a place in which they will pray us all to death. It is meant to kill us.’ ”
In her book about the missionary wives, Pilgrim Path, Mary Zwiep describes the zeitgeist of the 1820s, arguing that some Hawaiians feared that “disease or death was the price being exacted for their association with the missionaries.” When William Richards wrote from Lahaina in June 1824 that ten out of thirty high chiefs had died within the past two years, he admitted: “Some say it is the palapala.” Palapala means papers, books, and learning in general but especially the Bible.
Richards, who accompanied Princess Nahi‘ena‘ena on a tour of Maui when she was thirteen, wrote down her remarks to her subjects in a remote east coast village where the inhabitants were wary of their new school. Addressing the villagers’ fears of the Scriptures, she compared the more autocratic ancient high chiefs to those of her generation. “Formerly we were the terror of the country—when visiting your district we should perhaps have bidden you erect a heiau, and after being worn out with this labor, we should have sacrificed you in it. Now we bring you the palapala—the word of God. Why should you fear it?”
When the princess’s feather skirt was unveiled in 1825, even grumpy Hiram Bingham could appreciate its beauty, if not its intent, describing it as “a splendid yellow feather pau, or robe, nine yards in length and one in breadth, manufactured with skill and taste, at great expense.”
Calling the pa‘u a “robe” as Bingham did is a mistake I made myself in a conversation with Noelle Kahanu, who works in the education department at the Bishop Museum. “It’s a skirt!” she corrected me.
The skirt, as a covering for the hips and genitals, represents the princess’s power to procreate, to continue the royal line.
The princess understood this, which is why at the gathering attended by sailors from the Blonde she was sitting on top of the feathers, wearing a stiff black dress instead. The Blonde arrived in 1825, two years after her mother, Queen Keopuolani, issued deathbed instructions that Nahi‘ena‘ena should be taught to love and obey Christ. So the princess had spent a lot of time in the company of the missionaries in Lahaina. However, most of her guardians and entourage were Hawaiian traditionali
sts. Much like an immigrant’s daughter, she lived in two worlds and daily moved between them.
The Lahaina missionaries, especially William Richards, lectured the princess that the Bible forbids giving birth to sons and daughters who were also her nieces and nephews. Richards, a native of Plainfield, Massachusetts, graduated from Williams College (where the Haystack Meeting would spark what became the ABCFM) and Andover Seminary (where Bingham and Thurston studied and where Yale’s Timothy Dwight preached the founding sermon that proclaimed, “the islands of the sea, already wait for his law”). Thus at the very moment the princess was heeding a voice trained in the elite epicenters of New England Protestantism, Lahaina artists were weaving a million feathers into a twenty-five-foot-long fertility symbol so she could prolong the ancient Hawaiian way of life.
Traditional Hawaiian skirts were worn topless. Nahi‘ena‘ena was only comfortable in haole attire, and not only for moral reasons. Western clothing had been a fad among the Hawaiians, especially the high chiefs, since the arrival of Captain Cook. Which is why the prime minister, Kalanimoku, greeted the missionaries on the Thaddeus in yellow silk pants he had acquired from Western sailors. According to Voyage of H.M.S. Blonde, Lord Byron presented Nahi‘ena‘ena’s brother, the king, with a British military uniform and the boy “instantly put it on, and strutted about the whole morning in ecstasy.”
The missionary Charles Stewart recounted that when the princess was presented with the feather skirt, she ran away from it, escaping to the mission house. He wrote, “She wept so as scarcely to be pacified by us, and returned to the chiefs only in time to take her seat, and have it thrown carelessly about her over her European dress.” The Blonde report concurs, noting, “The little girl has been so long under the tuition of the missionaries, that she . . . absolutely refuses ever to appear in the native costume; so that the pau was used to-day merely as a covering for her seat.”