Unfamiliar Fishes

by Sarah Vowell

  Reading descriptions of Kalakaua as a “king-elect” does look peculiar to my American eyes, but the previous two monarchs had died without heirs and without naming successors. Hence the legislature’s election of two kings, a development that manages to combine the worst drawbacks of democracy and monarchy—the hostility of opposing parties and the unfair limitations of aristocratic bloodlines. (Naturally, only the high chiefs were eligible candidates, narrowing the options to alumni of the Chiefs’ Children’s School.)

  In Kalakaua’s case, his opponent was his former schoolmate the dowager Queen Emma, the widow of Kamehameha IV. Many Hawaiians considered Emma to be of higher rank than Kalakaua because she was more closely related to the Kamehameha line; not only had she married the grandson of Kamehameha the Great, but the first monarch was her great-great-uncle and she was also a cousin of his sacred wife, Keopuolani. Kalakaua’s ancestors had been Kamehameha’s generals; farther back, they shared some remote grandfather. Which sounds pretty semantical to me, but genealogy was—and is—serious business to Hawaiians.

  Emma’s faction was pro-British, believing in fostering deeper ties to Great Britain for its longstanding friendship and support for Hawaiian independence. In fact, the British government had been quick to restore Hawaiian sovereignty when one of its rogue naval officers claimed the islands for the British crown without authorization for a few months in 1843. (Modern Hawaiian independence activists still celebrate Sovereignty Day, the anniversary of the date the Brits apologized for the mix-up and restored Kamehameha III to full power, by holding protests against what they see as the ongoing American occupation.) The Anglophile Emma saw shoring up the islands’ cordial relationship with the United Kingdom as a way of staving off annexation by the United States. Even after she lost the election to Kalakaua, she wrote the British commissioner to Hawaii, intent on sussing out Britain’s position on accepting Hawaii as its protectorate because, as she wrote, “I consider that America is now our open enemy.” She added, “The Native Hawaiians are one with me in the love of our country, and determined not to let Hawaii become a part of the United States of America.” The British diplomat replied in the negative, pointing out that if Britain made such a move, it could lead to war with the U.S.

  Kalakaua’s side was (more or less) pro-American, in that they were devoted to nurturing economic ties with the United States, focusing on the sugar trade. Obviously, he won the support of the planters. Kalakaua saw economic prosperity as a way of sustaining Hawaiian independence, and the United States was Hawaii’s largest market by far.

  When Emma’s supporters learned that Kalakaua had won the election with thirty-nine votes (to her nine), they rioted. They rushed the courthouse and started ripping it up, breaking windows and furniture, clubbing legislators with shards of chairs and tossing one of them out a second-story window. The architect of the later overthrow, Lorrin Thurston, at the time a Punahou student who ditched class to witness the hubbub, recalled: “A rain of books, papers, chairs, tables, and other furniture poured from the doors and windows of the courthouse. . . . Some members of the Legislature crawled from the windows and hung on the outside of the building by their hands. The mob stamped on their fingers, so that they fell into the street below.”

  Kalakaua, the king-elect—that does look weird—sent messages to the British and American warships that were in the harbor requesting that they dispatch troops to help restore order. One eyewitness at the courthouse recalled that the American troops arrived first but that the rioters met the British reinforcements “with cheers” because the mob, like its candidate, was pro-British. They were disappointed when the Brits helped the Americans quiet things down.

  Sanford Dole was among the witnesses of the scuffle and he and his brother pitched in to help calm the mob. Nineteen years later, when Dole and his coconspirators overthrew Kalakaua’s sister, Liliuokalani, they colluded with the United States Minister to Hawaii to land American troops from the USS Boston, then anchored in the harbor, to provide military backup to the haoles. In Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, Liliuokalani rejects the notion that calling on foreign troops to put down the rioting Emmaites established a dangerous precedent repeated in 1893 when she was ripped from the throne. “When armed forces were landed [in 1874],” she wrote, “it was to sustain and protect the constitutional government at a mere momentary emergency from a disloyal mob.” The constitutional government of 1893, she pointed out, “absolutely protested” the American Marines’ arrival on shore.

  Her interpretation is technically correct—no question. There’s a big difference between asking foreign troops’ help in getting a few sore losers to stop throwing people out of windows and using foreign troops to facilitate a coup d’état. Still, if Kalakaua’s decision did not set a legal precedent, it did set a precedent in the wielding of power. Sanford Dole and his cronies had witnessed foreign troops intervening at government buildings in Honolulu during a politically twitchy transition. Regardless of the constitutional principle involved, foreign troops intervening at Hawaiian government buildings during twitchy transitions became thinkable.

  Hawaiian historian Jonathan Osorio observes that in calling in the foreign troops, “Kalakaua had won his victory, but it cost him dearly. His mana [divine power] would forever be based on American power and support.” In other words, Kalakaua’s first act as king-elect was to embody the deepest fears of Queen Emma’s numerous supporters. He would have to endure significant native opposition more or less until Emma’s death in 1885.

  In the first year of his reign Kalakaua traveled to Washington to lobby for a reciprocity treaty allowing Hawaiian sugar to enter the United States tax-free. Kalakaua was the first monarch who ever came to the nation’s capital. In honor of the king’s visit, President Ulysses S. Grant hosted the very first state dinner.

  The king was successful in promoting the treaty and securing Grant’s backing, though it took a couple of years for the U.S. Congress to pass the law authorizing it. If the king saw promoting Hawaiian prosperity as the way to uphold the islands’ independence, the United States Minister to Hawaii had the opposite view. He told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, “If reciprocity of commerce is established between the two countries, there cannot be a doubt that the effect will be to hold those islands with hooks of steel in the interests of the United States, and to result finally in their annexation to the United States.”

  Hawaiians had worried that a condition for reciprocity would be handing over Pearl Harbor to the United States. An editorial in the Honolulu paper Nuhou considered “the Pearl Harbor Cession as an unnecessary measure to secure Reciprocity. . . . It is the interest of America to Americanize us, and she needs no bribe to do so.” While Kalakaua retained control of Pearl (for now), he did agree to the American amendment that the treaty prohibited the king from leasing “any port, harbor, or any other territory in his dominions . . . to any other power, state, or government.” Jonathan Osorio notes, “That amendment . . . in some ways was more destructive to Hawaiian independence than the actual cession of Hawaiian territory.” He continues, “A foreign power assumed the authority to restrict the use and development of the Kingdom’s territory, thus compromising the king’s sovereignty over it.”

  Before the reciprocity treaty went into effect, Hawaii exported twenty-six million pounds of sugar a year. Within ten years of the treaty’s passage, that number had increased tenfold.

  Reciprocity also had a dramatic effect on Hawaii’s racial makeup because of the hordes of sugar laborers recruited from China, Japan, Portugal, Korea, and, eventually, the Philippines. According to Ralph Kuykendall, in 1876 Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians comprised nearly 90 percent of the population while Asians were 4.5 percent. In 1900, Asians were nearly 57 percent of the population while Hawaiians, at 26 percent, had become a minority.

  Gaylord Kubota’s paternal grandfather emigrated from Japan in 1900 at the age of sixteen to work for the Honolulu Sugar Company. Kubota is the retired director of th
e Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Museum on Maui. He said that soon after he was hired to be the museum’s director, in 1983, one of his tasks was to tour the refinery where his grandfather had worked.

  Standing in the museum he helped design, he said, “So that’s in three generations, from my grandfather to myself. There is this Japanese saying that’s really important. It’s called okage sama de. It means, ‘I am who I am because of you.’ What it reflects is the debt that you owe to previous generations laying the groundwork for what you accomplished.”

  Directing my attention to the museum’s displays on plantation life, Kubota says, “When you’re developing raw land, you have to have workers to develop it. If you’re going to bring in workers, you need to provide housing for them. Along with that you need to provide medical care and small stores. So that’s how these little plantation towns grew up. And in those days, without automobiles, they were kind of isolated. Sure, distances weren’t long by today’s standards, but they were if you had to walk. So you have little self-contained communities growing up all over the islands.”

  Planters deliberately recruited an ethnically diverse workforce, hoping the language barriers would prevent laborers from organizing. One plantation manager advised, “Keep a variety of laborers, that is different nationalities, and thus prevent any concerted action in case of strikes, for there are few, if any, cases of Japs, Chinese, and Portuguese entering into a strike as a unit.”

  Kubota acknowledges, “They were deliberately segregated.” But he hastens to add that most laborers preferred it that way. “It’s natural that you’re more comfortable with people from your own culture, speaking your own language, having your own customs, and sharing your own foods. That’s part of Hawaii’s heritage. These cultures were maintained in these camps, but they eventually started cross-fertilizing one another, to the point where they blended. One of the great equalizers was the schools. The public schools had a tremendous role because the kids of the original immigrants would mix with each other quite a bit. And they started to learn to share one another’s foods, and things like that.” He tells me about a series of oral-history interviews he conducted. In one of them, a woman he describes as “a third- or fourth-generation Portuguese-American was talking about how her family had a standing order from the Japanese neighbor lady for tofu.”

  I told him about my fondness for plate lunch. “This is called a kau kau tin,” he says, pointing to a multilayered metal lunch can. “This is the origin of the mixed plate. The staple would be put in the bottom, like rice, and your entrée would be put in the top. A tradition developed among some [workers] when they got together. They would put the top part in the center of the circle and they would partake of one another’s food.”

  Just as the sugar plantations changed the islands’ ethnic makeup, they also profoundly altered the physical landscape. We were talking about Maui’s central plain before the advent of commercial agriculture. Kubota says, “Isabella Bird, a traveler in the 1870s, described central Maui as a veritable Sahara in miniature. There were these clouds of sand and dust. That’s what central Maui looked like before. And to illustrate that I’ve taken that picture that shows you the difference between irrigation and no irrigation.”

  In the photo on display he’s referring to, there is a visible line where the irrigated land stops. There the greenery ends and the desert, complete with cactus, begins.

  “The plantations started in areas where there was a lot of rainfall,” Kubota says of the sugar industry’s formative years. In her history of Hawaiian irrigation ditches, Sugar Water, Carol Wilcox explains, “Sugar is a thirsty crop. To produce 1 pound of sugar takes 4,000 pounds of water, 500 gallons. One ton of sugar takes 4,000 tons of water, a million gallons. One million gallons of water a day is needed to irrigate 100 acres of sugarcane.”

  Central Maui, a flat plain between Mount Haleakala and the West Maui Mountains, gets plenty of sunlight but little moisture. The mountains receive plenty of rainfall and groundwater discharge but are inconveniently mountainous.

  “You can’t really move sunlight, but you can move water,” Kubota says.

  A Kauai plantation had built an aqueduct to irrigate its fields back in the 1850s. But the irrigation ditches built on Maui soon after the signing of the reciprocity treaty with the United States were as revolutionary to the ecosystem as the overthrow of the monarchy was to the political system. The ditches were probably more revolutionary; replacing a monarchy with an oligarchy is nowhere near as radical as turning a desert green.

  As engineering projects, the sugar ditches are impressive. I’ve hiked along the Waihee Ditch in the West Maui Mountains, following the manmade river uphill. The enormity of the undertaking is apparent in every tunnel, rope bridge, and crook in the trail. It obviously works beautifully—sometimes the water pours down the ditch so fast it churns white. It’s a very Book of Genesis hike—passing bamboo groves only to stare at some big pipe vomiting rainwater out of a tricky-looking tunnel; it’s obvious that man has subdued this bit of dominion.

  These days, because of cheap sugar grown in Asia, the Hawaiian sugar industry is going the way of the mamo bird. On my first trip to Kauai, I went to Waimea to see the beach where Captain Cook first met the Hawaiians in 1778. From the pier, I could see the steam rising from the Gay & Robinson sugar mill nearby. However, in 2009, G&R ended its sugar operations after 120 years. On October 31 of that year, the final cane-haul trucks drove through Waimea past the statue of Captain Cook to unload cane at the mill for the last time. G&R leased some of its cane fields to Dow AgroSciences to grow seed corn. There is talk of ethanol.

  That leaves the Maui operations of Hawaii & Commercial Sugar Company, across the street from the sugar museum, as the last operational sugar mill in the Hawaiian Islands. H&CS is a subsidiary of Alexander & Baldwin, a company founded in 1870.

  Samuel Thomas Alexander and Henry Perrine Baldwin were both sons of missionaries and Punahou School alums. Alexander married Amos Star Cooke’s daughter, and Baldwin married Alexander’s sister.

  Sam Alexander’s father, William, was the missionary portrayed by the artist from the United States Exploring Expedition preaching in that kukui grove on Kauai. Sam learned about irrigation working in the gardens of the Lahainaluna School after his father was transferred there to teach.

  In 1876, after the reciprocity treaty was signed, the Kalakaua government granted Alexander & Baldwin the license to build an irrigation ditch to transport water from Haleakala to their plantation. Baldwin had had his right arm amputated earlier that year when his hand got caught in mill machinery. When his employees balked at descending into a steep gorge to lay a pipe, only after he lowered himself down the rope with his solitary arm did the workers follow suit.

  When Gaylord Kubota and I were standing next to the display on Baldwin’s entrepreneurial derring-do, he said, “There was actual physical risk in this. The early entrepreneurs didn’t have it all easy, they didn’t automatically make a lot of money. For Alexander & Baldwin, if they hadn’t gotten the water across the ditch they would’ve lost everything. It would be Spreckels’s plantation.”

  Kubota is referring to Claus Spreckels, the “sugar king of Hawaii.” Spreckels, a German immigrant who supposedly arrived in the United States with a single coin in his pocket, eventually parlayed success as a San Francisco brewer into buying up property in California to raise sugar beets and sugarcane. At the time the reciprocity treaty with Hawaii was signed (to his dismay), he dominated sugar refining in California. Once the treaty went into effect, the opportunistic Spreckels made haste to Hawaii to get in on the coming windfall. His main strategy in insinuating himself into the Hawaiian scene was to cozy up to King Kalakaua.

  Spreckels purchased land in Central Maui and requested water rights from the government to build his own ditch. When the cabinet pledged to consider his request at some point, the impatient Spreckels made plans to speed up approval. Which is to say he made plans to play cards with the king. In the wee hou
rs of the Spreckels-Kalakaua game night, royal messengers appeared at cabinet ministers’ doors, requesting their resignations. The king appointed a new cabinet and Spreckels received his water rights within the week. Spreckels’s biographer, Jacob Adler, remarks that Kalakaua’s cashbook contains an entry for $40,000 in promissory notes to the king from Spreckels. “The date of these notes is the same as that of Spreckels’s lease of the Maui water rights.” He goes on to quote one of the justices of the Hawaii Supreme Court who called the backroom deal “the first time money has been used in this country to procure official favors.”

  Spreckels’s water rights, secured in July of 1878, entitled him to all prior rights to waters unused by that September. In other words, besides the right to build his own ditch, Spreckels could take over Alexander & Baldwin’s ditch if it wasn’t finished and in use by the September deadline. (A&B met the deadline.)

  That initial installment of $40K was only a down payment on the king’s soul. Spreckels, Adler notes, would accumulate various nicknames due to his snowballing influence over Kalakaua—from “the uncrowned king of Hawaii” and “the power behind the throne” to “His Royal Saccharinity” and “Herr Von Boss.”

  Kalakaua’s weaknesses and strengths were of a piece. The king had a decidedly antipuritanical strain that might have been a reaction against his childhood deprivation at the Chiefs’ Children’s School. Recall his sister Liliuokalani’s description of the hungry students sneaking out at night just to dig up roots to eat. Is it surprising that one of those students would grow up to host lavish banquets and parties? His aversion to the drab missionary aesthetic was double-edged. On the one hand, Kalakaua drank so much that writer Robert Louis Stevenson once witnessed the king putting away three bottles of champagne and two of brandy in a single afternoon. On the other hand, the king’s sensual bent resulted in a true devotion to what he lovingly called the “enchanted by-ways” of Hawaiian customs and folkways the missionaries disdained.