With the Pacific World from China to New Zealand to Tahiti to Mexico to the northwest coast of North America falling into the hands of foreign empires, Hawaiian leaders sought to secure their Kingdom’s sovereignty by extraordinary means. Historian Stuart Banner has argued that Hawaiians knew they were next on the list to be colonized, and that the only way to secure their land under colonial rule was to secure title to the land as private property. Banner calls this “preparing to be colonized.” He argues that Hawaiians knew that when British and American imperialists moved to colonize indigenous peoples’ lands that they generally took control of everything except privately held property. Common lands, a traditional feature of Hawaiian land tenure in the ahupuaʻa, were not recognized as belonging to anyone in this new Anglophone Pacific World. Hawaiians had to act quickly to claim legal title to their lands before the imperialists arrived to take the land from them.65
Thus, the greatest revolution in all of Hawaiian history began as the government enacted a plan to convert millions of acres of common lands into private property. It was called Ka Māhele (The Division). The makaʻāinana by and large resisted this revolution. As early as 1845, the first year of the Māhele, scores of petitions arrived from makaʻāinana pleading with Kauikeaouli to stop listening to his foreign advisors and resist these reforms. One petition, from residents on the island of Hawaiʻi, stated in fear that if the Māhele takes place, “we believe we will soon end as homeless people.” Kauikeaouli’s haole advisors believed otherwise. They contended that if common Hawaiians could own their own land as private property, they would no longer be subject to abuse by aliʻi and konohiki (land managers). They could use their own land for profit, including alienating the ʻāina as a commodity to lease and sell on the market. On the other hand, makaʻāinana petitioners believed that the Māhele would simply transfer lands from aliʻi to haole hands. A petition from Lāhainā, Maui, with the signatures of 1,600 residents on it, ended with this ominous prediction of a post-Māhele world: “we shall be the servants of the foreigners.”66
William Little Lee, a Harvard-educated American appointed as the president of the Kingdom’s Board of Commissioners to Quiet Land Titles, thought that Hawaiʻi’s commoners were just simply ignorant of what the Māhele would do for them. “I cannot say that the great Mass of your Nation are fully prepared to receive so great an Emancipation,” he wrote to Kauikeaouli. “They may spurn this proffered freedom. But I do most sincerely believe, that this great measure, by raising the Hawaiian Nation, from a state of hereditary servitude, to that of a free & independent right in the soil they cultivate, will promote industry and agriculture, check depopulation, and ultimately prove the Salvation of Your People.”67
That was December 1847. Over the next few months, in early 1848, the Māhele began with land claims awarded to the mōʻī and to 252 individual aliʻi. Among these 253 people, the Board of Commissioners divided the lands of Hawaiʻi into three large categories: the mōʻī’s private lands; the private lands of the aliʻi; and government lands belonging to the Kingdom. In 1848, no lands were awarded to any makaʻāinana. As if to mock Lee’s prediction that the Māhele would “check depopulation, and ultimately prove the Salvation” of Hawaiians, the archipelago was struck with a series of disease epidemics that year, including whooping cough, measles, and influenza. Out of a total population of roughly 85,000, historians now believe that within just one year as many as 10,000 Hawaiians died from these diseases. It seems that Lee’s imagined Māhele could not come fast enough.68
In 1850, common Hawaiians finally got the Māhele they were promised, but not before the Hawaiian legislature passed another revision to the Kingdom’s labor laws. Enacted in June 1850, “An Act for the Government of Masters and Servants,” also known as the Masters and Servants Act, was intended to provide various mechanisms of control over Hawaiʻi’s newly “freed” working class. No longer makaʻāinana, no longer wedded to the ʻāina (the land), the Hawaiian state realized that just as they had alienated land by converting it into a commodity, so they must also alienate the people’s labor by turning it into a commodity. In old Hawaiʻi, labor and land were wedded in pono, in harmony. Hawaiians worked for their own subsistence but also provided ritual hoʻokupu to the aliʻi to honor the gods and maintain the pono of the land. In new Hawaiʻi, the land was a commodity; it could be bought, traded, leased, sold. Thus, the world was pulled out from under the feet of the makaʻāinana. Now they were a landless people, a proletariat. The state could still control their labor through penal law, but short of criminalizing the entire population, the Kingdom had no other laws governing relations between Hawaiʻi’s new working class (many tens of thousands of people) and its nascent capitalist class (coming to power on the wealth of alienated land). The 1850 Masters and Servants Act codified this new relationship between labor and capital in the Kingdom.69
The Masters and Servants Act provided a legal basis for contract labor. It gave employers and employees permission to negotiate contracts governing the terms of labor. Specifically, it allowed Hawaiian men over twenty years old the right to sign contracts with employers for up to five years of servitude. The law imposed stiff penalties on workers who violated their contracts, including convict labor or automatic extension of their contracts. Hawaiian migrant workers had already engaged in contract labor for decades, but that was on foreign ships and at work sites abroad, not in Hawaiʻi. The 1850 labor law was tied to the land reforms. The state had made a landless people, and now they needed to discipline the people’s labor and mobility.70
In July 1850, the Hawaiian legislature amended the laws governing the Māhele to allow aliʻi to sell their lands directly to foreigners. In the next month, Hawaiʻi’s working class got their day in court when the legislature finally passed the Kuleana Act, a law allowing commoners to claim title to Hawaiian land. Of course, most of the lands in Hawaiʻi had already been awarded to the mōʻī and aliʻi. On top of that, the process for claiming title to the land was complicated. As a result, the majority of Hawaiian commoners failed to receive any land from the Māhele. As Lilikalā Kameʻeleihiwa has shown, of approximately 29,220 males over the age of eighteen in Hawaiʻi in 1850, only 14,195 (less than half) presented claims to the government. Of these, only 8,421 claims were awarded by the Board of Commissioners. Therefore, just 29 percent of eligible Hawaiian males (and only 9 percent of all Hawaiians, if women and children are included) were awarded title to lands in the archipelago. The other 71–91 percent of Hawaiians, who received no land, were completely dispossessed. Of the 8,421 claims awarded, the total acreage amounted to just 28,658 acres, or 2.7 acres of land per claimant. This represented less than 1 percent of all land in the Kingdom.71
If their status was uncertain in earlier decades, the Māhele without doubt sealed the transition of the makaʻāinana into a proletariat. Over 70 percent of Hawaiian families could no longer practice subsistence agriculture; they had no land. Of those with access to land, their parcels were on average too small for practical use. The Kuleana Act also changed Hawaiian laws governing the commons. In old Hawaiʻi, makaʻāinana lived in ahupuaʻa that stretched from the mountains to the sea. These districts had “ecological coherence” and provided Hawaiians with access to all of the resources necessary for survival. The Māhele destroyed this ahupuaʻa system and forced commoners onto small plots of land (or into port cities or abroad) without access to all they had once held in common. The Kuleana Act sought to remedy this situation by granting commoners the right to collect “firewood, house timber, aho cord, thatch, ti [ki] leaf, drinking water, and running water” from outside the bounds of their own property. The law also granted commoners the right of way over private lands in order to access these resources. In essence, the Kuleana Act made clear that although the ʻāina was alienable and could be bought and sold, not all of the products of the land could be turned into commodities. The law argued for a usufruct commons in which certain products of the land were understood as belonging to all. This was an impo
rtant concession to Hawaiʻi’s working class, but it could not make up for the sea change that the Māhele had unleashed upon the Hawaiian people.72
When Boki glanced at his reflection in the “hanging mirrors with gilded frames” inside his home in 1828, what did he see? Did he see a leader who would never let foreign businessmen and creditors get the best of him? Or did he see a cosmopolitan consumer, a global trader? When his eyes caught sight of sandalwood logs piled high above the horizon line in storehouses along the shore, what did he see? Did he see an aromatic tree indigenous to Hawaiian material culture? Or did he see vases, furniture, clothing, and foreign ships, the exchangeability and mutability of all things in the global marketplace? Boki’s predicament provides a useful introduction to Hawaiian capitalism. The process by which Hawaiian people and products became “enmeshed in the capitalist net” was extremely complex. For Hawaiian workers, it was first experienced through sea otters and salt. Hundreds of men went to the northwest coast of North America to hunt marine mammals, while thousands worked at Āliapaʻakai producing salt for foreign export. Over the course of ten to fifteen years, Hawaiian workers also experienced major shifts in sandalwood’s mode of production: independent harvesting overlapped with corvée labor while some workers received wages for stevedoring and shipboard labor in local harbors. Hawaiian workers also experienced the globalization of the economy as foreign empires and free-trade ideology overcame Pacific peoples and revolutionized indigenous land tenure, integrating disparate peoples and places into a U.S. and European-dominated world economy.
By 1850, the great majority of Hawaiians were now landless, part of an emerging wage-working proletariat, a Hawaiian working class. One year earlier, the American expatriate judge William Little Lee wrote from Hawaiʻi that “the mighty wave of emigration that is now rolling over the Rocky Mountains [toward California], will soon reach us; and Heaven grant it may not sweep the Hawaiian into the ocean.”73 Lee was prophetic. It would be nearly a half-century before American settlers would formally take control of Hawaiʻi, but waves of change were already sweeping Hawaiian men and women “into the ocean.” The convergences of dispossession and proletarianization at home with the increasing labor needs of maritime extractive industries across the Pacific Ocean—from whaling to marine mammal hunting to guano and gold mining—meant that thousands of Hawaiian men left the Islands in the middle of the nineteenth century to work abroad and at sea as migrant laborers. Their lives and experiences led to increasing entanglements between Hawaiʻi’s culture, economy, and ecology and that of the greater world. Out of this emerged a Hawaiian Pacific World.
TWO
Make’s Dance
MIGRANT WORKERS AND MIGRATORY ANIMALS
SIX WEEKS OUT OF NEW LONDON, CONNECTICUT, on a whaling ship bound for the North Pacific and Arctic Oceans, Captain Sluman L. Gray “kicked and pounded John Bull (a Kanacker)” for two straight hours. The Hawaiian worker was so sore from his beating that he now “cannot turn himself in his berth.” Three months later, in the sea off of Indonesia, Captain Gray attacked the poor man again. He whipped John Bull “with a peice of rope until his body was all covered with ridges. This is the 3 time he has beat this man at the wheel. once laying him up for several days.” The following day, John Bull complained to the ship’s first mate, protesting that he was too weak to work. To which the first mate replied “good enough for you, you d__n nigger.”
John Bull was not the only Hawaiian to feel Captain Gray’s wrath aboard the whale ship Hannibal in 1850. Make was another Hawaiian sailor aboard the vessel. On May 28, “The Capt kicked Make (a Kanacker) while at the wheel this afternoon, and broke the bridge of his nose. and the skin of his face in several places. His face and nose bled so as to leave the blood in puddles round the wheel. was so much disfigured that no body would know him.” The captain had beat Make just two days earlier, too. One week later, off of the chilly coast of Kamchatka in the Russian North Pacific, the captain’s wife, “Mrs Grey [Gray] came on deck and said her husband was dying.” The news was premature and untrue, but when Make heard of the captain’s sickness he could not hold back. “Make, the Kanacker, danced. threw up his hat. and jumped and danced on that. & kept saying in broken English. good. good. good.”1
Make’s dance is an apt metaphor, in microcosm, for the experiences of thousands of Hawaiian migrant workers in the nineteenth-century whaling industry. Violence, danger, exploitation, and resistance were part and parcel of this trade. But movement above all else defined the whale worker’s experience. Make jumped, danced, and threw his hat up into the air. His movements mirrored the ways that Hawaiian workers regularly used movement and mobility—signing onto ships, deserting contracts, engaging in mutinies, moving to port cities, and traveling the world’s oceans—as a means of exerting their agency in a global capitalist economy.
Workers like Make were not the only ones that moved. Whaling was a grand dance encompassing a vast trans-Pacific arena of space and time. Global economic transformations along the commodity chain from production to consumption linked Hawaiian labor to New England industrialization to Euro-American conspicuous consumption. Ecological changes in the ocean, and the migrations of whales, co-created the maritime world that Hawaiian whalemen experienced. Like the Polynesian myths of people who traveled across the ocean upon the backs of whales, Hawaiian whale workers were modern-day “whale riders,” following cetaceans’ transoceanic migrations across the world’s oceans. As whale riders, Hawaiian migrant workers discovered the coast of Japan, the Russian Far East, Alaska, and the Arctic Ocean, all in pursuit of whales.2
Men like Make also pursued wages. Local and global economic and ecological factors shaped the geography of where whale ships ventured, who was recruited to work on ship, and where those workers ended up. Nineteenth-century whaling created local “whale worlds” in port cities such as Lāhainā, Maui and New London, Connecticut. Hawaiians moved between these places with great frequency, while spending the majority of their time on the ocean itself, in a liminal space defined not just by the isolation of maritime labor but also by an isolation engendered by racial difference and labor exploitation. Transoceanic migrations reverberated in parallel with a massive exodus of internal migrants from the Hawaiian countryside who flooded into Hawaiʻi’s port cities and in turn flooded onto ships. Hawaiians left Hawaiʻi in record numbers during this period of proletarianization and peak whaling.
Make’s death-wish dance was just one movement in a sprawling symphony of migrations and circulations that spiraled out of nineteenth-century Pacific whaling. What follows are six more movements: a commodity-chain dance; a beneath-the-waves dance; a getting-onto-and-off-of-ships dance; a working dance; a globalization dance; and a proletarian dance. Each vignette shows, in various pitches and tempos, how Hawaiian workers experienced whaling through movement, mobility, and motion across space and time.
WORLDS OF PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION
In the period from 1820 to 1860, whaling rapidly and drastically expanded the scope of the Hawaiian Pacific World. Geographies of transit—the movement of whales, whale ships, migrant workers, whale oil, whalebone products—drew Hawaiians into relationships with distant peoples, places, and processes. In the age of Pacific whaling, recruitment of Hawaiian labor by foreign employers increased to levels never seen during the era of sandalwood extraction and sea otter hunting. Whale ships came to rely on Hawaiian port cities and their service/supply economies so intensely that visits to these ports not only affected economic and political paradigms but also altered ecological relationships in and around Hawaiʻi. Most significantly, whaling set Hawaiian commoners on the move, from the countryside to the cities and from port cities onto foreign ships. The American whaling industry provided new shape to a fledgling Hawaiian diaspora, sending Hawaiian men to the limits of the Pacific World.
All these changes were set in motion in 1820. At that time, thousands of miles west of Hawaiʻi, American whalers discovered a new whale fishery, the Japan whale grounds,
a large swath of ocean southeast of the Japanese archipelago. Because Japan was then off-limits to foreign ships (and would be until 1854), American whaling vessels needed a nearby port, or series of ports, to use as a base for provisioning. About forty days’ sail east of Japan, the Hawaiian Islands beckoned. When American whalers discovered sperm whales off of Japan, they thus also discovered Honolulu. Approximately thirty American ships visited the Japan grounds in 1822, increasing to sixty ships in 1823; meanwhile, more and more ships visited Honolulu for fresh food, fresh water, and fresh Hawaiian bodies—men to serve on ships and women for sexual pleasure.3
As new whale grounds opened up, they were like radial spokes emanating from Hawaiʻi’s central place in the middle of the ocean. For example, in 1838, thirty days’ sail to the east of Hawaiʻi, American whalers discovered a new whaling ground near Kodiak Island and the northwest coast of North America. In 1848, New England whaling ships discovered yet another whaling ground, in the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait. Each new whale ground connected back to Hawaiʻi for provisions and labor. Nineteenth-century geographies of whales and whaling expanded the reach of the Hawaiian Pacific World to the farthest limits of the ocean.4
Beyond Hawai'i Page 7
