Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii
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Residents took Paulet’s threat of violence seriously. When an empty brig was towed out to shelter British residents, “the streets were crowded with carts containing money chests, Book Safes, Trunks, Personal Clothing, &c. all hastening toward the wharfs to be placed on board of the ships.”11 At the same time an eighteen-gun American sloop-of-war, the USS Boston, offered asylum to American residents, the commander having no instructions about what to do in such an event. The king pointed out that he had ministers in London to negotiate all such matters at that very time, a fact that carried equally little weight.
“Some of the demands which you have laid before us,” the king wrote coldly, “are of a nature calculated seriously to embarrass our feeble government, by contravening the laws established for the benefit of all.… We shall comply with your demands, but we must do so under protest.” Flushed with victory (notwithstanding the king’s sending a personal note of protest to Queen Victoria), Acting Consul Simpson then added new demands: one hundred thousand dollars in indemnity, reversal of court verdicts by royal decree without retrial, the king’s personal endorsement of Charlton’s lease, and more.
While much commentary has assessed the French bullying and thuggery, Laura Judd was equally shocked by Lord Paulet’s conduct:
Daily interviews with the king were demanded, and granted, only to pour upon him insult upon insult. Decisions in the courts were required to be reversed; claims to large tracts of valuable land to be confirmed; and a great amount of hypothetical damages demanded. The king was neither judge nor constable, and was utterly ignorant of the facts in many of the cases brought before him.… The demands which the defenseless king was obliged to acknowledge, ran up in a few days to about eighty thousand dollars, quite enough to cripple the nation. The ship-of-war was brought around, so that the mouths of her guns yawned continually upon the town.12
Nearly two weeks after the Carysfort’s arrival, it became obvious that what Simpson wanted, with Paulet’s guns behind him, was for the king to cede the islands to Great Britain. The cabinet split over what to do. Some urged defiance: “Let them fire.” Others wondered who would pay for the American property that was sure to be destroyed. They considered ceding the country to France, but that was an even uglier prospect; perhaps they could place the country in trust with France and the United States jointly, but either case would only provoke a forcible seizure by Britain. Or rather, a seizure by Simpson and Paulet, which surely the British government would not allow—and that was where it rested. They would have to depend on London to redress this hideous conduct. After much anguish Kamehameha III pronounced, “I will not die by piecemeal.… I will yield the breath of my kingdom, and trust … to the magnanimity of the British government to redress the wrong and restore my rights.”13 Even this step the king felt he had to clear with Paulet, and on the evening of February 24 Paulet agreed that if the islands were ceded provisionally, he would not consider an appeal to London to be a hostile act.14
A ceremony was agreed for the next day, at the fort. In making the news public it was ironic, almost comical, that Kauikeaouli used the high oratory of the ancient chiefs to express his own powerlessness. “Hear ye! I make known to you that I am in perplexity by reason of difficulties into which I have been brought without cause. Therefore, I have given away the life of the land … but my rule over you, my people, will continue, for I have hope that the life of the land will be restored when my conduct is justified.” Simpson and Paulet were furious with him. The Hawaiian flag was lowered, and the Carysfort’s band played “God Save the Queen” as the Union Jack was raised. Then, at the special request of a female British resident, they also played “Isle of Beauty, Fare Thee Well,” which Laura Judd took as “a refined cruelty, which could only emanate from a woman.”15
After the cession, Kamehameha III repaired to Maui in grief. “Every avenue of communication with the king or foreign countries was most jealously watched and guarded by his lordship,” and Paulet prevented any criticism of his coup reaching the outside world. He made himself head of a government commission, in conjunction with the king or his deputy, which proved to be Dr. Judd, and others named by Paulet. He, however, proved to be a less accomplished plotter than he imagined. He requisitioned three Hawaiian government schooners to undertake his business. One of them, the Hooikaika, renamed Albert, he sent to the fleet at San Blas, Panama, with Simpson on board to flesh out the written report to Adm. Richard Darton Thomas, the squadron chief. The Hooikaika belonged to Ladd & Co., which agreed to place the vessel at the disposal of Paulet’s commission if he would allow them to carry out a previously chartered errand to return specie to them from San Blas, and allow their agent on board to accompany it.
Paulet readily agreed, never suspecting that Ladd & Co.’s agent, James F. B. Marshall, would really be in the service of the king. With Dr. Judd involved in the scheme, “dispatches, prepared in the silence of midnight in the royal tomb, with Ka‘ahumanu’s coffin for a table, were sent off in canoes from distant points of the island; and once, when the king’s signature was required, he came down in a schooner and landed incognito at Waikiki.” By such means information of the takeover was sent to Washington, London, and the British squadron chief, but throughout the spring and half the summer Judd and the cabinet had no word what effect their effort might have had.
Paulet’s commission, meanwhile, assumed a ham-handed sort of government. More than 150 trials were reversed, with natives put off their land as it was awarded to English residents. Paulet recruited a new native constabulary, named it the Queen’s Regiment, and ordered Judd to pay them out of local finances, which Judd declined to do, provoking a new crisis; Judd resigned, and the king declined to name a replacement, placing the entire responsibility in English hands. To all the Calvinists, the nadir of Paulet’s visitation was his constructive decriminalizing of prostitution, which, according to the American seamen’s chaplain, “resulted in a veritable flood of immorality” at the fort16 (perhaps one reason that Paulet’s sailors, according to an observer a few years before, were devoted to him). The humiliated king had no choice but to allow it.
Finally, on July 25, residents in Honolulu saw the native alert from Diamond Head of a sail sighted, and soon, “an immense man-of-war hove in sight, floating the flag of an English rear admiral.”17 She was HMS Dublin, a ship of the line mounting fifty guns, the flag was that of Adm. Richard Thomas, commander in chief of the British Pacific Fleet. Thomas was sixty-five, having served in the Royal Navy since 1790. After making suitable inquiries, and with Lord Aberdeen’s more enlightened statement of policy in hand, Admiral Thomas wrote the king that
the Commander-in-Chief of Her Britannic Majesty’s ships and vessels in the Pacific … as the highest local representative … hereby declares and makes manifest that he does not accept of the Provisional Cession of the Hawaiian Islands, but that he considers His Majesty Kamehameha III the legitimate King of those islands: and he assures His Majesty that the sentiments of his Sovereign towards him are those of unvarying friendship and esteem, that Her Majesty sincerely desires King Kamehameha to be treated as an independent sovereign, leaving the administration of justice in his own hands.18
At 9:30 in the morning of July 31, 1843, Thomas and his entourage met the king and his entourage at the fort, where the British flag was lowered and the Hawaiian flag once again raised to thundering cannons and pealing bells. Paulet, most pointedly not invited to the ceremony, had destroyed all the Hawaiian flags he could confiscate, so Thomas had a new one sewn together on board the Dublin.19 The speeches were not recorded, but one of the king’s sentiments was subsequently rendered, Ua mau ka ea o ka aina i ka pono, or, “The life of the land is preserved in righteousness,” which many years later became the motto of the state of Hawaii. Given the vagaries of translating from Hawaiian, other shades of meaning may be equally valid, especially that of Hawaii’s first chief justice, William Little Lee, who rendered a slightly different version: “The life of the land is preserved b
y righteousness.” About ten thousand people witnessed the ceremony. “The soldiers had made sure to take care of their actions … twice they encircled the King, with beloved acknowledgment to him. They saluted him often with gunfire, marching here and there.”20
Afternoon saw a service of thanksgiving at the missionaries’ Kawaiaha‘o Church, which had undergone a stunning transformation. It stood on the site of a former spring that belonged to a high chiefess named Ha‘o—Ka wai a Ha‘o, the “water of Ha‘o.” Built to the design of Hiram Bingham, beginning in 1836 and finishing in 1842 in place of the grass church rose a monumental edifice of fourteen thousand half-ton blocks of coral cut from the Honolulu reef. Reminiscent of medieval peasants laboring for years on the great cathedrals of Europe, kanakas had dived from ten to twenty feet deep with hand tools to chisel the blocks, and raise and transport them to the mission compound. It was a suitably magnificent structure in which to celebrate the redemption of the kingdom.
Ceremonies done, the court retired to the king’s new summer house, Kaniakapupu, a substantial residence of lava-rock walls built high in the Nu‘uanu Valley above Honolulu. There the event was celebrated with a gargantuan luau attended by at least two thousand people. In the forest the tables bearing the food were chronicled as thirty-two fathoms long and two fathoms wide, and they creaked beneath sixty pigs, three hundred chickens, forty turkeys, fifty-three ducks, and about seven hundred fish, in addition to poi, sweet potatoes, coconuts, and fruit—all supplied by the chiefs, both the king’s vassals and those of Kekuanaoa. Gerrit Judd, now one of the landed class, contributed two pigs, eight fish, and seven measures of poi.21 Part of the fun at the luau was a performance of a “Restoration Anthem,” contributed by Rev. Edwin Oscar Hall of the Seventh Company of missionaries, sung to “God Save the King.” It had three verses, one praising the king, one praising Admiral Thomas (“Quick o’er the wave”), and the third one praising God.22 Before Thomas and the Dublin sailed away, he hosted the king at a review of the ships in the harbor, with thundering cannon salutes all around. In perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the importance of the occasion, the king was seen to be happy—and sober.
* * *
This hopeful chapter of Hawaiian history had yet one sour note that was largely missed in the general jubilation. There is evidence that Admiral Thomas, while accepting the homage of the islanders, had effected the restoration less out of outrage at what Paulet had done, or from a sense of justice. Likely he acted more out of pique that Paulet, an upstart young enough to be his son, had gained such an inflated view of his own importance that he undertook to correspond directly with London rather than through the fleet commander—himself. When William Richards returned to Hawai‘i he imparted to Samuel Castle that he had been told—he did not remember if by Lord Aberdeen himself or by his undersecretary—“that if Admiral Thomas had not restored the flag, the British government would not have done so.”23
Independence now seemed even more precious, and it became even clearer what kind of imperial bullet Hawai‘i had dodged when word came of the fate of Tahiti—the French had seized it and declared a protectorate. “Poor Queen Pomare,” committed Laura Judd to her journal, “is dispossessed of power and property. The people are strongly attached to the Protestant faith, and numbers refuse submission to Roman Catholic masters, and have fled to the mountains. They will doubtless be hunted down and compelled to surrender.”24 She proved to be correct but had no idea that it would take the French four years and heavy losses to secure their empire in the South Pacific.
The American commissioner, George Brown, newly on station, echoed her sentiments when
the French frigate Boussole arrived from Tahiti … with the news of the taking possession of the Society Islands by the French, in complete sovereignty, & the dethronement of the Queen. Poor soul I pity her, but this never would have happened had the English government & Eng missionaries done what they were in duty bound to do. It seems that the French admiral arrived there with a squadron on the 2d Octr with the expressed intention of landing the French Commissioner, and informing the Queen that the French King had accepted the Protectorate of her islands. But the Queen refusing to haul down the flag which had been given her by the Capt of the Eng frigate Vindictive, the French admiral chose to consider it an insult, and she still refusing, after representations & threats were made to her, he landed his troops & took possession of all the islands.25
It seemed as though the Pacific had gone mad with imperial seizure.
9. A Nation Among Nations
The Honolulu of the mid-1840s, at the height of the American whaling boom, was a far cry from the dusty fishing village of a half century before. On January 9, 1847, the Polynesian published an assay of the city that was more detailed than a census would have been. They counted 1,347 residential dwellings, 875 of grass, 345 of adobe, and 127 of wood, stone (which meant cut coral), or a mixture of both. None of them were of brick; Hawaiian clay lacked the binder necessary for brickmaking so adobe was substituted, and those walls had to be maintained, because they melted beneath the rain, leaving piles of formless goo “ankle-deep” around their perimeters. Of the twelve finest stone houses, two belonged to the former missionaries who entered government service, Gerrit Judd and William Richards. Most of the rest were owned by chiefs.
The Polynesian estimated the population of the city at ten thousand, of whom 617 were “foreigners,” mostly American, followed by British, about a dozen French, and a scattering of other nationalities, plus 472 foreign-born who had become naturalized subjects of the king. In addition there were about a hundred members of a new class of people loosely called “floaters,” native Hawaiians who had abandoned their sharecropping for the chiefs to move into the city, work for wages, and discover a kind of independence they had never known before. For those who could afford it, foreign and native, there were four hotels located mauka of Hotel Street, where a comfortable room and board cost seven dollars a week, somewhat less than in a private boardinghouse.
Centered in the city’s commercial district, the foreigners’ various occupations made Honolulu, apart from being the only city in the central Pacific, a cosmopolitan crossroads worthy of its geographical importance. There were thirty-eight carpenters, twelve masons, and five painters, who stayed busy from the $170,000 of new construction that was under way. Professionally there were five doctors, five lawyers, two watchmakers, ten printers, and a bookbinder. Eight tailors, nine tinkers, and two barbers kept the public looking good; seven blacksmiths kept them mounted or rolling. Two pilots got the ships through the reef and into the harbor, to disgorge their cargoes at five commercial wharves and one government wharf, much of it destined for the eight commercial warehouses, most of which touted red fireproof slate roofs.
Also crowding the city were the “country people,” the rural kanakas who came to vend their wares. The Honolulu police arrest record tells an interesting tale of the relationship between these natives and the law, actual crime as opposed to moral crime, and the kanakas’ success in bridging that gulf: Between April 1846 and April 1847, the police arrested 2 natives for polluting a stream with human bones, 4 for attempting to pray others to death, 3 for blasphemy, 39 for breaking the Sabbath, 43 for drunkenness, 48 for fighting, 57 for gambling, 211 for theft, and 806 for fornication. But when the natives were not stealing or trying to have sex, their vending stalls were located makai (on the seaward side) of what became King Street, or they just importuned pedestrians. Their chickens averaged thirty cents each, ducks fifty cents, turkeys up to a dollar depending on their size. Local produce was cheap—Irish potatoes as little as two dollars a barrel, oranges two cents each—but dairy products were dear: milk twenty-five cents per half gallon, butter thirty cents a pound, eggs averaging fifty cents per dozen. Fresh beef, though, was just six cents per pound, about half the cost of mutton.
For construction, lumber came in all precut sizes from the Pacific Northwest, as did premilled doors, windows, and moldings, kegs of nai
ls, and window weights—enough iron to make a precontact native faint. Mariners also found boathooks, whale line, blubber hooks, sail canvas and huge curving needles to mend them, even anchors. Seamen who came into port sick or hurt found treatment in the American Hospital, which treated 156 of them in the previous year, or the British Hospital, which doctored 63. French sailors doubtless preferred the French Hospital, which treated 9.
Of consumer goods, there were hats and caps as disparate as Glengarry and Guayaquil; dry goods from Chinese satin to Scottish cambric to English wool to American duck; and a world market of ladies’ fashion, including unmentionables of the finest make. Gentlemen could purchase cigars from Manila or even Havana, and if they could withstand the missionary glare they could choose wine from Bordeaux, Madeira, Sicily, and more—or carbonated sodas for the temperate. The general stores were a riot of playing cards, bath salts, writing paper, steel pens, lead pencils, sealing wax, riding tack, including bridles and whips, soap, glue, spermaceti candles, and Jew’s harps.1
To administer the cosmopolitan new capital the king provided a vastly modernized government, but that had been a hard study and he had not done it alone. In fact, it was Hawai‘i’s good fortune that during this time the chiefs still held real power. After his adolescent rebellion against the oversight of Kina‘u, they eventually had enough of his self-indulgence. They jailed his Tahitian favorite, Kaomi, for a time, and in other ways impressed on the king that it was time to live up to his responsibilities. Once broken to harness, and even while he was suffering varying degrees of lovesickness for his sister, he undertook the transition from Kauikeaouli to King Kamehameha III.