Unfamiliar Fishes

by Sarah Vowell

  Kalakaua had the ancient creation chant, the Kumulipo, transcribed and published; Noenoe Silva argues that the chant “can be read as a political text” in that its account of the history of Hawaii from the beginning of the universe to the genealogies of the high chiefs serves “to legitimize the existence of the nation itself.” I am beginning to realize that might be why Kekuni Blaisdell answered my question about the overthrow of the queen in 1893 by going back to the world’s creation. He was telling me the story told in the Kumulipo, beginning with the births of the taro plant and his brother the first Hawaiian, a story that extends down the generations to Liliuokalani and her brother Kalakaua’s ancestors. Maybe Blaisdell was trying to make me understand that to remove the queen from her people in 1893 was to sever a cord so long it stretched back to the beginning of time.

  As a champion of the old traditions, Kalakaua inspired a reawakening of Hawaiian nationalism. His most important cultural legacy might be his revival of the hula, the native art form despised by missionaries and outlawed by Queen Kaahumanu when she converted to Christianity. In the half century that followed, hula had gone underground. In 1883, nine years into his reign, Kalakaua organized coronation festivities for himself and his wife on the grounds of the newly built Iolani Palace. Along with luaus and the unveiling of a new statue of Kamehameha the Great, which still stands across the street from the palace, hula performances were featured prominently in the two weeks of royal shindigs.

  Kalakaua is still beloved by hula dancers, who perform and compete every year on the Big Island at the Merrie Monarch Festival named in his honor. My hula dancer friend from Maui, John-Mario Sevilla, told me that there is also “a flaired, almost flamboyant hula step named after him.” John-Mario contends, “When he placed the hula at the center of his coronation, Kalakaua made a significant gesture to the past, which is where Hawaiians traditionally looked for truth and meaning, in the face of rapid contemporary change. By challenging the foreign shame of the hula, he popularized and, therefore, politicized it. It’s as if he decided to write and publish books after all the libraries had been burned. Like surfing, he recognized that hula was organically, soulfully, metaphysically, irrepressibly Hawaiian. Because of him, today we have some of the earliest documentation of much of the hula kahiko, the ancient canon.”

  A missionary descendant, William R. Castle, held on to his forebears’ disdain for the art form and insisted that the printers who published the coronation program of the hula chants be arrested for obscenity. One of the issues was the inclusion of hula ma‘i, the traditional songs praising a chief’s genitals. Noenoe Silva points out that the sexuality of these hula was meaningful to the king and his people because the natives “had suffered depopulation caused by epidemics of foreign disease and also by childlessness.”

  If anything, the hula ma‘i performed at the coronation must have been the opposite of obscene: those songs must have seemed all the more poignant to the natives, given that Kalakaua and his wife, Kapiolani, were childless, that Kalakaua’s very election as king depended on the demise of the Kamehameha line, and that yet another smallpox outbreak, two years earlier, in 1881, had killed more than seven hundred people.

  In her memoir, Kalakaua’s sister, Liliuokalani, recalls of the coronation: “It was wise and patriotic to spend money to awaken in the people a national pride.”

  The money was a sticking point with the haole-businessmen subset of the kingdom’s taxpayers, who were growing increasingly irate about the king’s expenditures. You don’t earn the nickname “Merrie Monarch” by sticking to a budget. The attorney Sanford Dole attended the coronation with his wife, Anna, who wrote her sister, “It was a glorious day with much pageantry. Sanford did not enjoy it as much as I did because he worried about the money.”

  An editorial in Planters’ Monthly, the sugar planters’ trade periodical, complained, “The so-called Coronation of the King, with the attendant follies and extravagances, has been directly damaging to the property interests and welfare of the country. It has been demoralizing in its influence, and productive only of harm.”

  Lawyer Lorrin Thurston noted in his Memoirs of the Hawaiian Revolution, “The appropriation for the coronation of Kalakaua and Kapiolani was $10,000; but the report of the committee showed that the expenditures exceeded $33,000.” Thurston also felt that the hula performances spoke to the king’s “inherent filth of mind and utter lack of decency and moral sense.”

  In 1884, Kalakaua, perhaps chastened by complaints of government extravagance, sent a message to the legislature, advising lawmakers to cut spending appropriations “commencing from the head of the Civil List or Privy Purse,” which is to say the king’s personal allowance. His subjects were so pleased they threw the king a parade and, Kuykendall writes, “For a time, economy was the watchword,” though in the end, he adds, the king ended up approving a budget about $1.5 million in the red.

  Missionary descendants Sanford Dole and W. R. Castle were elected to the legislature in 1884, and Lorrin Thurston joined them in 1886. All three were attorneys and graduates of the Punahou School; Dole, whose father was its founding teacher, was born on the school’s grounds. Castle’s missionary father had founded the firm of Castle and Cooke together with Amos Starr Cooke of the Chiefs’ Children’s School. Thurston was missionary stock twice over, being the grandson of Asa and Lucy Thurston from the pioneer company on his father’s side as well as having as his maternal grandfather Lorrin Andrews, the founding teacher of the Lahainaluna School. All three were sent to schools in the United States—Dole to the Protestant stronghold Williams College; Castle to Oberlin College, then Harvard Law; and Thurston to Columbia University’s law school, where Theodore Roosevelt was his classmate.

  Dole, Castle, and Thurston were ringleaders in the haole political movement known variously as the Reform Party, the Independents (as in independent from the king), and, somewhat pejoratively, the Missionary Party. They were allied with the white planters scattered around the islands, but the growing opposition to the king was clearly focused within the Honolulu business community that provided supplies, legal services, and financing to the planters, spearheaded by the attorneys, and by Thurston in particular.

  In 1884, the year after Kalakaua’s coronation, another missionary descendant, Sereno E. Bishop, wrote an article in Hawaiian Monthly describing Hawaii as “a state where foreigners conducted all the business of the country, and the native race still continued to exercise the sovereignty.” Bishop concluded, “The base of the throne is decayed, and no severe shock will be awaited to topple it over.”

  The electorate, along with the legislature, was overwhelmingly Hawaiian, while haoles paid a majority of the kingdom’s taxes. Which makes sense considering they controlled a majority of the kingdom’s lands and were making the majority of the kingdom’s profits. But if history teaches us anything, upper-class white guys can be exceedingly touchy about taxation. Lorrin Thurston recalled of the election of 1886, “Of the twenty-eight elected members of the House of Representatives, only nine were independent of royal control.” That number included himself, along with Castle and Dole.

  Looking back on the rise to power of this circle of missionary descendants in Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, Liliuokalani concludes,

  Although settled among us, and drawing their wealth from our resources, they were alien to us in their customs and ideas respecting government, and desired above all things the extension of their power, and to carry out their own special plans of advancement, and to secure their own personal benefit. It may be true that they really believed us unfit to be trusted to administer the growing wealth of the Islands in a safe and proper way. But if we manifested any incompetency, it was in not foreseeing that they would be bound by no obligations, by honor, or by oath of allegiance, should an opportunity arise for seizing our country, and bringing it under the authority of the United States.

  Alas, a failure to predict the missionary boys’ capacity for treason was not the sole in
competency of Liliuokalani’s brother’s administration. The fact is, Kalakaua could be corrupt and inept.

  The historian (and son of missionaries) William De Witt Alexander asserts, “The election of 1886 was the most corrupt one ever held in this Kingdom. . . . During the canvass the country districts were flooded with cheap gin, chiefly furnished by the King, who paid for it by franking other liquor through the Custom House free of duty.” This royal liquor, nicknamed “election gin,” was ladled out in exchange for votes for legislative candidates loyal to the king.

  Though after the reciprocity treaty went into effect the kingdom had never been richer, the king’s spending habits and gambling losses put the government in debt continually, with half the deficit owed to Claus Spreckels. For his trouble, the sugar king received special treatment including kickbacks like a healthy (yet unnecessary) commission brokering the minting of Kalakaua coins in the United States, an ill-conceived vanity currency bearing the king’s head in profile.

  Kalakaua’s crony-in-chief and the executor and instigator of many of his most questionable decisions was the man he eventually appointed as his premier, the haole yes-man Walter Murray Gibson. Often described as an “adventurer,” Gibson arrived in Hawaii from Utah in 1861. A recent convert to Mormonism (or so he pretended), Gibson had been sent to the Pacific with the blessings of Brigham Young. Not that mere Mormonism could contain the multitudes of Gibson’s ambitions.

  Gibson was born in 1822, the child of English sheepherders. As a boy, he immigrated with his family to Canada, then to New York. The teenage Gibson made his way to South Carolina, where he married young. By the time he was twenty-one, he was a widower and father of three. “I wanted to fly on the wings of the wind toward the rising sun,” he later wrote. Which is a poetic way of saying he ditched his kids with his dead wife’s relatives and lit out on a life of adventure inspired by, he claimed, an uncle who had sailed to Malaysia while working for an Arab merchant. Gibson recalled, “He talked of Arabia, and of the islands of the far East: and more than all of Sumatra: of the perfumes that wafted from her shores; of the many dainty fruits, and myriad brightfeathered birds of her flowery groves.”

  Gibson’s dream was to move to a Pacific island, found his own kingdom, then start expanding his domain into an empire. To that end, he traveled to his uncle’s old stomping grounds, the Dutch colony of Sumatra. Upon arrival, Gibson wrote a letter to a local sultan, offering help if the sultan felt like rising up against his Dutch overlords. Said letter was intercepted by Dutch officials who imprisoned Gibson for treason on the island of Java. Gibson escaped and made his way back to the United States, where he wrote a flowery memoir of his incarceration, The Prisoner of Weltevreden.

  Gibson bounced around, earning a living on the lecture circuit and hounding congressmen and diplomats to help in his ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit against the government of the Netherlands. Passing through Liverpool, Gibson made such an impression on the American consul, Nathaniel Hawthorne, that Hawthorne wrote about him in his book Our Old Home, “There was an Oriental fragrance breathing through his talk and an odor of the Spice Islands still lingering in his garments.” Still, Hawthorne wasn’t sure whether Gibson’s tall tales were to be believed. Gibson claimed to have been born at sea to a noblewoman but switched at birth with a peasant baby born the same night, and so he felt robbed of the finery of his birthright. “One looks into his eyes, to see whether he is sane or no,” Hawthorne recalled.

  In Washington, when Gibson was stalking congressmen to support his claim against the Dutch, he met the Mormon delegate from Utah Territory and cooked up a scheme to resettle the Mormons, then in the throes of troubles with the American government, in the Pacific, perhaps in New Guinea, not that Gibson knew the first thing about New Guinea. Gibson wrote a letter to Brigham Young, claiming, “While I lay in a dungeon in the island of Java, a voice said to me: ‘You shall show the way to a people, who shall build up a kingdom in these isles, whose lines of power shall run around the earth.’ ”

  Gibson, now reunited with his daughter Talula, traveled to Salt Lake City in 1860 and converted to Mormonism there. He convinced Young to send him to the Pacific, starting with Japan and perhaps going on to the Philippines and Malaysia, to investigate the potential for Mormon missions and/or settlements. En route, the Gibsons stopped in Hawaii and, like a lot of people who pass through Hawaii, they fell in love with the place and stuck around.

  Mormon missionaries had been sent to Hawaii in 1850 but were recalled to Salt Lake in 1857 during the so-called Utah War, a standoff between Mormons and the U.S. Army when President Buchanan replaced Brigham Young as governor of Utah Territory with a non-Mormon.

  There were a few hundred native converts to Mormonism in the islands when Gibson arrived in 1861. Many of them had settled on the small island of Lanai in a weedy volcanic crater called the Palawai Basin. When Gibson saw Palawai for the first time, he wrote in his diary, “I said to myself I will plant my stakes here and make a home for the rest of my days.” He planned to “fill this lovely crater with corn and wine and oil and babies and love and health and brotherly rejoicing and sisterly kisses and the memory of me for evermore.” (Eventually, Gibson’s historical status did warrant a plaque on the side of the road in Palawai, but, as Kepa Maly of the Lanai Culture & Heritage Center told me, “People on Lanai today almost have no memory, no recollection of him at all.”)

  Looking upon Palawai now, a golden grassy stretch of empty land crossed by a forlorn single file of pines along a road, the depth of Gibson’s vision, or perhaps delusion, becomes clear. He dreamed that “Lines of power shall radiate from this shining crater. I set up my standard here and it goes hence to the islands of the sea. Lanai shall be famous in Malaysia, in Oceania.” To think Lanai could become the seat of a Pacific empire when it’s never even been a county seat.

  Kepa Maly told me, “Lanai has always, politically, environmentally, religiously, socially, sat in the shadow of Maui.” That is true, except for Lanai’s place in Walter Murray Gibson’s head.

  With his connection to Brigham Young, Gibson quickly took charge of the Hawaiian Mormons, joining the ones eking out a living on Lanai and attracting the others scattered around the islands. He dressed in long white robes and called himself the High Priest of Melchizedek and tried to turn Lanai into his own private Waco. He stored his copy of the Book of Mormon inside a hollow rock and told his flock God would strike them dead if they dared to touch it. “The people are poor; in pocket, in brain, in everything,” he confided in his diary. Still, he said, “It is a little kingdom of love and worship.”

  Gibson solicited donations from his flock, purchasing and leasing more and more land on Lanai, always putting the titles in his name. He also funded his real estate holdings by selling church offices to parishioners, a heresy. Salt Lake got wind of his deviations from Mormon orthodoxy. Headquarters dispatched a fact-finding team in 1864 to investigate rumors of impropriety. Once they learned of Gibson’s side business selling church titles to believers and rescued the Book of Mormon from the hollow rock (without being struck dead), they excommunicated Gibson and asked him to turn over the land titles to the church; he refused. The church then abandoned Lanai and moved to the town of Laie, in northeastern Oahu, where it continues to thrive—Brigham Young University-Hawaii has a campus there.

  Gibson stayed on Lanai for a few years, his only subjects being a flock of sheep. He became a Hawaiian citizen in 1866. In 1873, he started a bilingual newspaper published in Honolulu, Nuhou. His biographer, Jacob Adler, wrote, “Gibson cast the descendants of the missionary families and their business associates as Americanizers, basically unaccepting of a Hawaiian culture or a government under a Hawaiian king who was more than a figurehead.” Gibson had become fluent in Hawaiian back in his days as a quasi-Mormon prophet. Adler continues, “Upon himself he put the mantle of champion, the defender of the native kingdom from the Americanizers.” It says something about Gibson’s powers of persuasion that an American could
successfully cast himself as the natives’ champion opposing Americanization.

  Of course, that tactic did not endear Gibson to the haole community. Gibson threw in his lot with David Kalakaua, using his newspaper to promote Kalakaua’s election as king.

  Approving of Kalakaua’s pledge to “Increase the Nation,” a Nuhou editorial proclaimed: “Let maternity in every class be honored;—and the cries of babies be more esteemed than even the tuneful chants of churches. . . . Let King Kalakaua have children, come how they may, to fill up his Kingdom.”

  In 1878, Gibson ran for a seat in the legislature and won. He led the charge to build a new palace in Honolulu.

  In 1882, Kalakaua appointed Gibson Hawaii’s premier, the office second in importance only to that of king. Finally, at the age of sixty, Gibson’s dream of running a Pacific kingdom had come true—or close enough. And, just as he had always seen a kingdom as a stepping-stone to empire, Gibson convinced Kalakaua to think bigger than Hawaii, to ponder Hawaii as the seat of a Polynesian empire. Gibson referred to the plan as “Primacy in the Pacific.” The government dispatched envoy John E. Bush to Samoa to suss out a Samoan chief’s interest in a confederation. Nothing concrete ever came of the plan but Bush’s letters back to Honolulu that are stored in the Hawaii State Archives are interesting in that a Hawaiian government official (of Hawaiian descent) questions the Samoans’ capacity for self-government, speaking in the same patronizing tone in which American imperialists dismissed the capacity for self-government of all the island acquisitions of 1898, Hawaii included. Bush wrote Gibson, “The past history of Samoa has shown that the people cannot govern themselves in modern methods without outside help. . . . A strong native government with intelligent foreign supervision that would make good laws and have the power to enforce them would be best for Samoa.”