Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  The missionary effort was safest with Kalanimoku. He was more curious, sympathetic, and helpful than any others, and became the missionaries’ most valued friend. Ka‘ahumanu’s bearing was ambiguous. She was the one who caused the destruction of kapu, so naturally she was interested in whether the Americans brought a religion that could do better by her people. But she had also seen enough of Americans, with their sharp dealing and overbearing ways, to be cautious with any endorsement. Thus Bingham and the others courted her, and she was kind but noncommittal. What eventually turned her was Sybil Bingham’s nursing her through a dangerous illness, from which the queen regent emerged, to their perception, as the “new Ka‘ahumanu.”

  The distracted king went on his rum-soaked way, dividing his time. To the traditional capitals of Kailua and Honolulu he now added Lahaina, on the leeward side of Maui, which was a favorite residence of his birth mother. As his reign lengthened and he shifted the royal household, with enormous disruption, among his islands, it became increasingly apparent that he was no Conqueror. Throughout his reign Kamehameha had built a fleet, by bargaining, by extortion, by cash purchase, and by compulsion of native labor. Liholiho, by contrast, became enamored of a fancy vessel built in Salem, Cleopatra’s Barge, and bought her on credit, which probably meant sandalwood futures. Meanwhile he lost his grip on the Conqueror’s sandalwood monopoly, which put him in financial straits. Hiram Bingham got a closer look at him when, on the spur of the moment, Liholiho boarded Cleopatra’s Barge and materialized, suddenly and unannounced, in Honolulu. Cannons thundered in salute as he passed Waikiki, and by the time he entered the harbor his criers were working the town, “demanding hogs, dogs, poi, etc., to be gathered for the reception of his majesty (who was in his cups).”

  To the Americans the worst part of the cacophony was the yelping dogs, tied to poles for slaughter. The missionaries, while dependent at first upon the kindness of the ali‘i for their provisions, uniformly declined the offer of dogs, explaining that they were not part of their accustomed diet, but taking some chiding in return for their squeamishness.2

  “Calling on the king at evening,” wrote Bingham, “Mr. Thurston and myself” found Kamehameha II too drunk to talk. “We were struck, however, with the ingenuity of Kamamalu … who, in the dilemma, unexpectedly lifted the nerveless hand of her lord” to acknowledge their visit.3 But with Kalanimoku’s help, the mission prospered. They passed a milestone on January 7, 1822, when their printing press went into operation. And the following April 15 they received a boost with the arrival of William Ellis, twenty-seven, a veteran of several years’ missionary effort in Tahiti and the Society Islands. Like the Americans, he was a Congregationalist, but he was British, part of that evangelizing effort that came out of England and preached seemingly everywhere in the Pacific except Hawai‘i. Ellis’s fluency in Tahitian made it easy for him to add the Hawaiian dialect to his portfolio of vocabularies in just a few weeks. He had intended only a short visit, but the Americans prevailed upon him to stay much longer.

  Hawaiians who were not impressed with the missionaries took to referring to them lightly as haole (without breath—that is, unable to speak the language4), a term that evolved into a more dismissive epithet for any white foreigner, but particularly Americans. But most natives would listen to what they had to say. Early in their mission the Binghams and the Thurstons set out on foot to preach the first words of the gospel ever heard on the north shore of O‘ahu. Accompanied by chiefs and interpreters, they ascended the Nu‘uanu Valley, fascinated that the higher they went, the air cooled and the vegetation became more dense. The trail ascended gently from the leeward side, but on the windward side the precipitous wall of the mountain range deflects the trade winds upward, squeezing the moisture from the air and watering an almost impenetrable jungle.

  As they reached the Pali, where the remnant of Kalanikupule’s army had been driven over the cliff in 1795, the unobstructed trade winds nearly ripped the hats off their heads; Bingham was so undone by the vista of the rugged north flank of the Ko‘olau Range and the jungle that extended from its foot to the ocean that he devoted two pages of his memoirs to its majesty—“the sudden bursting on the vision as by magic … its vast amphitheatre of mountains, and beyond it, the heaving, white fringed ocean”—before getting back to the matter at hand: threading their way down the path to the later site of Kaneohe to preach.

  At their first comprehension of Bingham’s purpose—the natives heard these alien people talking sternly in the presence of their native retainers about God and what he required—the crowd became restive in the fear that some of them were about to be sacrificed.5 Of course, threatening people with hellfire in the hereafter was in reality less urgent than the possibility of being tied to a pole in a heiau and strangled, so the missionaries were already an improvement from the kanakas’ standpoint.

  A reinforcing company of about a dozen missionaries arrived on April 23, 1823, including some such as the Reverends Charles S. Stewart and William Richards, who would have an enormous impact on the country. Their goal in January 1824 was to establish the first mission at Hilo, on the verdant east coast of Hawai‘i. Departing from Honolulu, it took them nine hard days at sea to reach their destination. Hilo was to be a major mission station; Ruggles and his wife were relocating from Kaua‘i; William Ellis would join them, as would Joseph Goodrich and James Ely of the reinforcing company, and Chamberlain the farmer, most with their wives. Sailing in a little thirty-ton schooner, the Waterwitch, they put in at Lahaina to visit the Stewarts, and watched the sunrise gild the glaciers on Mauna Kea, 120 miles distant, which they took as their beacon pulling them on to the Big Island. Hilo, however, was still seven tough, seasick days away.

  At Hilo the chiefs made available to them a thirty-by-seventy-foot canoe shed, with a thatched roof and no interior walls, in which to cook and sleep. Until they could arrange for houses for themselves they would live communally. The Hilo missionary effort commenced to consternation of a different nature than personal privacy, however. The queen regent had made a thatch building available to them in which to hold services, but the inaugural effort was scattered when “a large hog, black and fat … marched in swinging her head armed with huge tusks.” The congregation surged away before her, carrying Reverend Ellis and company with them. Order was restored when the pig’s handler, “more bold or skillful than the rest, approached the animal, and by repeated gentle passes of the fingers on her bristly back, composed her to a sort of mesmeric sleep.” As the pig dozed, the congregation returned and Ellis finished his sermon. It seemed that the pig was a pet belonging to Ka‘ahumanu herself, was named for her, and was kapu to her. It gave Ellis and Ruggles some pause to reflect that in this society the queen regent’s pig—kapu, despite her having ended kapu—had more place in church than the people did.6 But people came, and they listened.

  The effort to Christianize the islands was furthered by the deathbed conversion of the queen mother. Keopuolani was about forty-five, and had lived the best and worst that kapu offered. After the missionaries arrived her interest in Christianity had been genuine, and she took a Tahitian convert as her personal teacher. In obedience to the new monogamy, she separated from the powerful Kalanimoku and kept the high chief Hoapili as her only husband. They took up residence at Lahaina, Maui, where she took evident pleasure in gaining an education. In August 1823 her health entered such a decline that relatives and nobles from around the islands were summoned to come pay their respects. By mid-September it was apparent that she was failing. To Kalanimoku, with whom she had remained friends, and separately to Hoapili she imparted similar messages: “The gods of Hawaii are false. My attachment to them is ended; but I have love to Christ. I have given myself to him. I do not wish the customs of Hawaii to be observed when I die. Put me in a coffin, and bury me in the earth in a Christian manner, and let the missionaries address the people.… Great is my desire that my children may be instructed in the religion of Christ, and know and serve God, and that
you watch over them and counsel them to avoid evil associates, and walk in the right way.… Do no evil. Love Jesus Christ, that you and I may meet in heaven.”

  To her son Liholiho she spoke more in her royal voice: “This is my charge to you: Befriend your father’s friends and mine. Take care of these lands and the people. Kindly protect the missionaries. Walk the straight path. Observe the Sabbath. Serve God.… If the people go wrong, follow them not, but lead them yourself in the right way, when your mother is gone.”

  Ellis and Ruggles arrived, and after hurried consultations about whether it was appropriate to do so, administered the sacrament of baptism. When Keopuolani expired on September 16 the outburst of native wailing was too heartfelt to stem, but otherwise perfect dignity prevailed. At the end of the funeral, Keopuolani would have been pleased that the gathered ali‘i partially disassembled a nearby heaiu and used the rocks to build a wall around her grave. They hauled the heavy stones on their own shoulders, albeit attended by lackeys who bore the feather kahilis of their rank to attest that this tribute was performed by no ordinary hands.

  British sailors, even more than visiting British dignitaries, found the American missionaries frosty and tightly laced, and the English with their easier manner stayed in the good graces of the noble class, so much so that Liholiho took it in mind to visit his brother king, George IV, in England. He chartered the British whaling vessel L’Aigle, only 114 feet long and 475 tons, and departed ten weeks after his mother’s death. Kamamalu went with him, and at the head of their retinue was Boki, the governor of O‘ahu, and his wife, Liliha. Boki was possibly the most influential voice against the missionaries and most of the Westernizing change in the islands, except on the points of alcohol, which made him a favorite companion of the king, and sandalwood, which gave him a lavish lifestyle and put him heavily in debt. It took from November to May 1824 for the suite to reach England. The outsized royal pair created a sensation, but the fashionable George IV almost wrecked the careful empire building of Cook and Vancouver when he delayed having to grant an audience to the “damn’d cannibals.” It came to make no difference. Kamamalu was stricken with measles, a disease not native to the islands and to which she had no resistance, and died on July 8; the shattered king followed six days later of the same disease. It took until March 1825 for the news to reach home.

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  The absence of the ambivalent king and the hostile Boki accelerated the missionary effort in Honolulu. Less than a month after their departure, keeping the Sabbath holy became the law; there was to be no travel or work or—the hardest blow—gambling on Sundays, and the queen regent and prime minister loaded it onto the chiefs to see that the people obeyed. That was the stick, as it were. There was also a carrot. To some extent, people still credited the existence of mana, at least of some kind, and demonstrations of spiritual power could yet go a long way toward winning their hearts.

  Near the end of the train of mourners at Keopuolani’s funeral was Kapi‘olani, niece of Kalaniopu‘u through her father, and her mother had previously been a wife of the Conqueror. She was a high chiefess of the Hilo district, in her early forties, and like the widowed queens she was ready for the old ways to end. When she was about two, her father was killed in the service of Kamehameha during his lengthy contest for control of the Big Island. Kapi‘olani was cast into brush as her father’s soldiers escaped, but she was found and sent to live with an aunt near Kealakekua Bay. Learning the strictures of kapu, she became curious what there was about bananas that they should be forbidden to women, and had a servant procure some for her. When her crime was discovered, Kapi‘olani’s life was spared on account of her tender years and high station, but the kahunas decreed that unless a suitable sacrifice were offered, she would lose her rank, live in poverty, and die unmarried. The guardian aunt offered the hapless servant in Kapi‘olani’s place. He was described as her favorite page, a youth named Mau. The priests accepted him as an offering, took him into the nearby heiau at Pu‘uhonua o Honaunau, and put him to death.7 (Ironically for Mau, this temple was among those few designated as a City of Refuge; had he escaped and made it there on his own, he could have claimed sanctuary, been purified, and departed in safety.)

  Thus chastened in the ways of kapu, Kapi‘olani grew into her station as a high chiefess. She was large (more than 250 pounds) and fierce, and the native historian Samuel Kamakau wrote that the kanakas learned to fear her. “She was not friendly with common or country women. No one durst stare at her.” Her liaisons were many and lusty, and she took for her principal husband the powerful chief Haiha Naihe. They were often attached to the royal court, and they accompanied Kamehameha when he removed to O‘ahu and marshaled his forces to attack Kaua‘i. She nearly died in the oku‘u epidemic of cholera that broke up his intended second invasion.

  After the Conqueror’s death Kapi‘olani fell in league with the queen mother and queen regent to end kapu, but the American missionaries’ first sights of her did not inspire hope: The Calvinists first beheld her, sunbathing on a beach, “like a seal or sea elephant,” rubbing herself with coconut oil. The first time a missionary called on her, she was found lying on a mat with her two husbands, all of them drunk and nearly naked. Her reform, however, was equally dramatic. She was an intimate of Liholiho’s half sister–queen, Kamamalu, and studied reading and writing with her. Before long Kapi‘olani was a committed believer.

  After Kamehameha II and Kamamalu departed for England, Kapi‘olani determined upon a dramatic demonstration of her new faith. Despite the decreed destruction of the idols across the islands, there remained pockets of resistance where the old religion was quietly kept, but nowhere more so than at Kilauea, near the south shore of the Big Island. There in the floor of a vast, barren caldera of solidified lava lay an inner crater, Halema‘uma‘u, a deep gouge into the earth’s crust at the bottom of which was a lake of boiling lava—rising, falling, emitting murderous vents of sulfurous gas, terrifying—and in traditional Hawaiian religion the home of Pele, the fire goddess.

  In earlier times Pele had been considered a minor deity in the Hawaiian pantheon, but her frightful abode, more permanent than a stone-and-thatch heiau, kept her cult alive long after the arrival of the missionaries. William Ellis had seen the place in summer of 1823, during his tour to select sites for future missions. He had arrived famished after a long trek without food, and on the slopes around the caldera he gorged on the locally abundant ‘ohelo berries, looking like cranberries in thickets of bushes up to five feet high. The fruit of the ‘ohelo was considered sacred to Pele, and no local would have dared eat them without first sacrificing some to her. After Ellis’s visit the kahunas pointed to subsequent violence from the crater as evidence of Pele’s anger.

  In February 1824 Kapi‘olani became the first high chiefess to sponsor a church—other chiefs had permitted and tolerated them, but Kapi‘olani had a thirty-by-sixty-foot house built for services, which James Ely began conducting in April. The following November Kapi‘olani determined to visit Kilauea and challenge Pele with the power of the church. Although her rank allowed her to arrive in state by double-hulled canoe at the nearby shore, the high chiefess made a sixty-mile pilgrimage, on foot, without shoes, gathering a retinue as she traveled. By the time she reached Kilauea she had an enormous throng in tow, who heard the Pele kahunas predict her destruction. Loudly proclaiming her trust in God and Jesus Christ, the high chiefess picked her way five hundred feet down the precipice of Halema‘uma‘u to meet her fate at the lake of fire.

  As the news spread, Kapi‘olani’s demonstration created a sensation around the world. Some embellishments had her casting stones tauntingly into the lava lake, or herself eating ‘ohelo berries without making a sacrifice, daring Pele to do her worst. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, composed a poem about her. To the kahunas’ mortification, she emerged from the pit triumphant, unscathed but for bruises on her feet from the sharp rocks. It was a heavy blow to the traditional religion and to kapu. (Pele was decidedly less t
olerant of missionary Gerrit Judd of the Third Company, which arrived in 1828. In the interest of science he descended into the pit of Halema‘uma‘u to collect a sample of fresh molten rock in a frying pan. Just as he reached the lake of fire there was a sudden upwelling of lava that pursued him to a vertical wall that he could not climb for its overhang. His Hawaiian companion pulled him up to safety with both hands as the lava closed beneath his feet, the heat blistering their exposed skin and burning their shirtsleeves. Another few seconds and Hawaiian history would have taken a significantly different tack.8)

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  Back in England the British accorded Hawai‘i’s royal couple, sealed in multiple caskets of lead, mahogany, and oak, greater dignity than George IV had shown them in life. Interred temporarily in the church of Saint Martin in the Fields, and guarded against a rumored theft for display in a circus, they were returned home aboard a frigate mounting forty-six guns, HMS Blonde. She dropped anchor in May 1825 at a Honolulu in profound mourning already, for an American whaler had brought the sad news. It also occasioned the elevation of Liholiho’s barely adolescent brother, Kauikeaouli, as King Kamehameha III, and not unimportantly consolidated power in the hands of Ka‘ahumanu as kuhina nui and regent.