Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  Days at the boarding school were rigorous: up at five, exercise with a ride or walk, prayers at six-thirty, an English-only breakfast at seven. Three hours of school were followed by a meal and three more hours of school, supper at five-thirty, and then evening prayers. One Bible verse was learned every day, in Hawaiian at the start of the day and in English at the close. All were in bed by eight, the younger ones at seven. Recognizing the children’s boisterous natures, the Cookes were shrewd enough to include a healthy schedule of physical activity. They rolled hoops, flew kites, swung, learned to ride. The Cookes encouraged evident talent, which for several of the children was in music, and several of them became accomplished pianists and composers. Discipline was strict; lateness to a meal was a meal missed; willful misbehavior brought corporal punishment, once unthinkable for children of such station, but preceded by a talk to explain why it was being administered.

  In time the square school building was replaced with a more substantial structure, one special feature of which was the “Boston Parlor,” an upstairs drawing room to which the missionaries committed their finest heirloom furnishings. It was a daily exercise in this chamber for the royal children to practice their English and their social graces. One view of the students’ progress was offered by the American consul George Brown, who was invited to a tea party at the school in November 1843, also attended by the other missionaries in the area. “Mrs. Cooke,” he wrote home to his family, “has a large family to take care of, over twenty children of the chiefs male & female, among which is the heir apparent. They have made good progress in their studies & some of them speak English remarkably well. Some of the girls sing & play on the Piano very well for beginners, and most of them have a taste for music.”13

  The children were not allowed trips home, but their parents were permitted to visit the school. None was more vested in the school than the king, with his four adopted children all enrolled. He actually moved in next door to the school, into a large frame house built by his brother-in-law Kekuanaoa, of timbers that Ka‘ahumanu salvaged from the Hale Keawe when it was pulled down. The king bought it from him when Kekuanaoa entered financial straits, and it became known as the first ‘Iolani (“royal hawk”) Palace.14 Kamehameha III, like many visitors, remarked on the students’ gift for music; he once heard his niece Victoria Kamamalu, still only a toddler, as she arced high in the swing during recess, belting out American songs at the top of her lungs. It was probably more than a glancing reference to her mother, Kina‘u the kuhina nui, who had disagreed with him so vociferously over foreign and religious policy, when he said to her kahu John Papa ‘I‘i, “What a loud-voiced girl. She may have as great a voice as her mother’s.”15 Kekauluohi, the present kuhina nui, had a grass house erected on the grounds so that she could sojourn in proximity with her son William Lunalilo.

  The royal students’ proficiency in English reached such a degree that one of the exercises in their notebooks was an extended fantasy on words ending in “tion:”

  MARY MODERATION’S ANS. TO TIMOTHY OBSERVATION

  Sir:

  I perused your oration with much deliberation, & with no little consternation at the great infactuation [sic] of your weak imagination to show such veneration on so slight foundation. But after examination, & serious contemplation, I suppose your admiration was the fruit of recreation.…

  It went on for several more lines before being subscribed, “I am without hesitation, yours, Mary Moderation.”16

  Nor were all their English lessons apparently in standard English. For reasons no longer obvious, the notebook of Prince Lunalilo, son of the new kuhina nui, shows him copying out the poem “The Louisiana Belle” in dialect:

  In Louisiana, dat’s de state,

  Whar ole massa eber dwell,

  He had a lubly colored gal

  Called de Louisiana Belle.

  The young ali‘i of Hawaii, their dark skin notwithstanding, were not taught English in slave dialect, indeed the New England missionaries had a pointed antipathy toward slavery. The point of teaching this poem (and “Black Jupiter,” among others) remains a mystery.17

  In 1846 the name was changed to the Royal School. “Friday evening as we about retiring, his majesty and suite called on us, accompanied by martial music. The parlor and court were filled.” They desired to hear the piano, so the children did a command performance of several songs.” “We passed cake, pie, grapes, figs, etc,. such as we happened to have on hand.… The queen is a very pleasant woman, and were it not that she is about as large as a barrel, she would be quite pretty. The children said she completely filled two chairs!!”18 The presence of the royal family next door had one unintended consequence when Queen Kalama took a fancy to her husband’s eldest nephew, Prince Moses Kekuaiwa. To the native culture, having a boy toy in the family was all in good fun, but the Cookes, when they learned of it, were horrified that the heir apparent was setting such a bad example—followed closely by his two brothers Lot and Alexander. They often slipped out at night to drink and carouse, enduring Amos Cooke’s lectures and whippings only to slip out again.

  Cooke’s stern discipline of the boys gave no hint of his own misgivings about whether that was the best way to handle them. Gerrit Judd called one morning and imparted to Juliette Cooke “that he thought we were governing too much now-a-days by force…,” Amos Cooke wrote in his diary. “I have felt very bad about it ever since.… I stayed at home. I could not eat any dinner. Have read 150 pages in ‘How Shall I Govern My School.’ … This evening I feel like giving up the ship. The children are disaffected, and I have reason to fear the parents are also, and why should I sacrifice my life, and my wife’s … for those who have no heart to improve by it.”19 The Conqueror’s grandchildren were only the most prominent offenders. Princess Jane Loeau, who was the oldest of the students, was also the most precocious,20 but all seemed to require vigilance, and the royal students’ sexual capers drove the Cookes to distraction. The Royal Council eventually ordered Moses’s expulsion from the school; his death shortly after from measles left his brother Prince Lot Kapuaiwa next in line to the throne.

  The Cookes’ contest of wills with Moses was little compared to the battles they had with Lot. At twelve, he fell heavily in love with Princess Abigail Maheha, fourteen. Being willful ali‘i children, every remonstrance, coercion, and punishment the Cookes could devise failed to keep the pair apart, and Abigail became pregnant. For her shame, she was forced to marry not just a commoner but her mother’s gardener, on February 3, 1847, and the pair was exiled to Kaua‘i, where they were warned to remain in penitent quiet.21 Lot was beside himself, and swore an oath never to marry—although he had been betrothed almost since birth to Princess Bernice Pauahi. They were first cousins once removed, but from different wives of Kamehameha I. If ever the inbred dying dynasty of the Conqueror had a chance at survival, that union would have been the likeliest possibility, but owing to Lot’s fit of rage—and later during his years as King Kamehameha V he kept his vow—he likely doomed his line to extinction. It was not the only time that the history of Hawai‘i turned on a royal tantrum—although Bernice had her own mind on the subject, announcing that she would marry Lot if commanded, but she did not like him and would as soon be buried in a coffin. (The child of Lot and Abigail did survive, and that line continues, so there remain on Kaua‘i living direct descendents of Kamehameha I. Owing, however, to the introduced concept of legitimacy, they were excluded from further consideration.)

  Such struggles at the school wore heavily on Juliette Cooke, who was also engaged in bearing and rearing her own seven children. Consul Brown found that, “Mrs. Cooke is a very interesting woman, but is not well. She has too much care … for one lady, without help. The Board ought to send out a woman to answer as housekeeper, so that she may have more time to apply to the essentials of her pupils. And it is highly important that these children, of all others, should be properly brought up, as they will have the Government of the Islands in their hands bye & bye. If Mr
s. Cooke is not relieved, she will fail, & will be a loss not easily repaired.”22

  Despite these battles royal, both the Cookes and the students could put on quite a convincing show when company came calling. “I have seldom seen better behaved children,” wrote Capt. Charles Wilkes of the U.S. Navy’s Exploring Expedition, “than those of this school. They were hardly to be distinguished from well bred children of our own country, and nearly as light in color.” No matter how fractious when among themselves, all presented a united front to the outside world. “Our teachers seek our good, sir,” one of the princesses explained to another officer, in faultless English. “They have experience and know what is best for us. We have confidence in their judgment and have no inclination to do what they disapprove.”23 Frequent resort to the rod for discipline, especially among the boys, was for internal knowledge only; the chiefs could not be expected to keep the kanakas’ respect if word got out that they allowed haoles to beat their children.

  For the decade of the Royal School’s operation, the Cookes could comfort themselves that they produced bilingual heirs and heiresses who were educated in geography, history, and the social graces, five of whom acquitted themselves as equals in the royal courts of Europe. But at what the Cookes considered to be their greater task, of producing genuinely converted, Christian youth, they admitted defeat. The children were all baptized, and marched into church every Sunday two by two for ten years, but of deeper conviction of the heart the Cookes saw no evidence. “The continual fact that there are no conversions,” Amos Cooke reported home to the ABCFM, “is exceedingly humiliating & make [sic] it apparent to all, that we fail in many things, in all come short.”24

  After ten years of schooling, the operation came to a close with what the Cookes considered a success, the marriage of their last student (and one of their more peaceable ones) Princess Bernice Pauahi to Charles Reed Bishop of New York on May 4, 1850. Modern scholarly commentary criticizes the Royal School for being inherently Anglocentric, which it was, and for its unique equating of Christian civilization with Boston, which it did. It also finds the school, and the missionaries, disrespectful of, if not oblivious to, any virtues of the native culture they encountered.25 Without the training received at the Royal School, however, its graduates would never have made the impression on, and gained the respect of, the world’s royal courts, or conducted the affairs of their nation as ably as they did. That Hawai‘i became a coveted prize of global imperialism would have occurred in any event; what consideration the royal administration did receive, from Britain, from France, from the United States, was the Royal School’s success. The school most certainly did fail in its mission to turn its pupils into little Americans, but the education they received empowered those students in their later noble or royal lives to preserve their culture, and that was the nation’s success.

  * * *

  Lahainaluna was judged a success, and the Chiefs’ Children’s School was up and going, but it left the missionaries, many of them now with growing families, in a dilemma over educating their own children. It was expensive, not to say emotionally wrenching, to send them home to boarding schools, but the Hawaiian children in the common schools were being taught in their own language, which the Americans did not think proper for their own. And there was the question of how to preserve their own children’s morals in such a vividly sexualized society. They knew how raw it was, but seldom wrote about such indelicate things. One exception was when William Ellis warned them of the danger of allowing their children to fraternize too freely with natives; down in the Society Islands, racial mixing had not gone well. Samuel Whitney sailed to Tahiti to see for himself, and when he came back his wife, Mercy, wrote a breathless report of it. Several of the missionary children there

  have been ruined.… One was confined with a bastard child by a native man, not 3 months since. Three daughters of one of the Missionaries were not long since guilty of admitting 3 native men by means of a servant to their bed chamber, & secreting them under the beds till night, when the mother hearing a noise, lit a candle & went into the room, but on seeing the men, fainted & fell & they made their escape.… Two lads, sons of Missionaries, were lately expelled [from the South Seas Academy], for illicit connections with native girls.

  Her catalog went on. Clearly, educating their growing broods in company with native children was a dangerous idea.26 The ABCFM itself was little help, discouraging an exodus of children back home with such platitudes as they would be spoiled by their grandparents, or God would use them as examples of decorum for the native children. The missionary families reached their own conclusions, some sending children home, some retaining them in the islands. Interestingly, some of the missionary wives, as their families increased, voiced their frustration at being pinned down to domestic drudgery when they had come to Hawai‘i to convert the heathen. They had hoped for a missionary appointment before they met their husbands, and married them largely for the shared ambition to venture into the world to do good. They were not too bashful to point out that they had ways to establish bonds with the native people (witness Ka‘ahumanu’s fascination with their clothes) that their preachy husbands did not, and they were not being well utilized. Mercy Whitney found her “usefulness among the heathen … greatly impeded, by having to devote so much of our time to the education & care of our children.” Others, such as Maria Chamberlain (wife of Levi, the missionaries’ commercial agent), were content to model Christian womanhood by their example, but she particularly was not enthusiastic at the prospect of providing lessons to her seven children at home.27 (Ironically, when the American ladies were able to interact with the native women and provide an example of being a good wife, it robbed the latter of “the very aspects of Hawaiian culture which afforded Hawaiian women some measure of autonomy within their own social system.”28)

  In 1841 the missionaries began to organize a school for their own at Punahou, in the cool of the Manoa Valley above Waikiki. It was on land that had been given, interestingly enough, to Hiram Bingham by Boki and Liliha, who were not otherwise great supporters of social transformation.29 The first class was held in a thatched-roof adobe building on July 11, 1842, making it the first English-language school west of the Rocky Mountains; fifteen students attended the first day, but there were more than thirty by the end of the year. The first teachers were Daniel and Emily (Ballard) Dole of Maine; he was a graduate of Bowdoin College and Bangor Theological Seminary, and they had arrived with the Ninth Company of missionaries the year before. Emily Dole died on April 27, 1844, four days after giving birth to their third son, Sanford Ballard Dole, who became an important figure in his own generation.

  The year that Mrs. Dole died, Marcia Smith of the Eighth Company was imported to help with the teaching, and William and Mary Rice of the Ninth Company transferred from Maui to supervise the boarding students. William Richards undertook to turn the school into a college where graduates of the Royal School could complete their education.30 In one guise or another, after receiving a royal charter in 1849, Punahou grew into a distinguished institution.

  7. A Sweet Taste

  Before discovery, the Hawaiian Islands contained about 2,700 species of plants, most of them “endemic,” or not found anywhere else in the world. (Introduced foreign species now outnumber them by almost two to one, resulting in many crises of botanical survival.) As islands go these were a relatively new emergence from the sea, less than ten million years old, too isolated from other landmasses to share many species with them naturally. When the first aboriginal explorers arrived from southern Polynesia, they brought with them plants associated with some of their gods: gourds and sweet potatoes for Lono, breadfruit and coconuts as emblems of Ku‘, the bananas of Kanaloa, and the taro, bamboo, and sugarcane of the most powerful god, Kane.1

  Europeans had regularly supplemented the local diet. After Cook had brought onions, pumpkins, melons, and mutton, Vancouver had brought in addition to cattle a variety of garden seeds. Observers in the early 1820
s recorded chilis, asparagus, turnips, cabbages, and horseradish, in addition to garden flowers that would have been familiar in Europe and America. When HMS Blonde arrived in 1825, it carried not just the caskets of Kamehameha II and Kamamalu but a virtual orchard of sample fruit and nut trees to begin cultivating on the islands: fig, plum, apple, cherry, peach, and walnut, and grapevines. Stopping in Rio de Janeiro, she picked up orange trees and more grapevines, and also thirty coffee plants that were offloaded and consigned to the care of Don Francisco de Paula Marín. If anyone could keep them alive, that famous farmer could.

  Sugarcane was not native to Hawai‘i. It originated in the islands of what became Indonesia, and spread with human migration through Australasia and the South Pacific. There were many different varieties of it, which cross-pollinated readily into new hybrids. The Pacific islanders did not process crystalline sugar; the canes, whose inner fibers comprised about 12 percent sugar, were cultivated to be cut and chewed for the sweet raw juice.