Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  This time the French list of demands had ten items, from grand concepts such as renewed guarantee of the freedom of religion, all the way down to refunding twenty-five dollars to a French whaling ship taxed for entering the harbor with alcoholic spirits, and punishing certain schoolboys who had disrupted Mass. Some of the demands seemed gratuitous—the removal of Kekuanaoa as governor of O‘ahu for allowing police to make an arrest in the priests’ residence—and even touched on the bizarre, requiring installation of French as an official language of commerce in the country. Catherine Lee, wife of Chief Justice William Little Lee, wrote indignantly: “There are not a dozen French on all Hawaii, and to grant this claim would not only require a host of interpreters, but would afford every other nation a right to make a similar demand.”13 Two of those resident dozen Frenchmen were merchants, one of them a tavernkeeper, but no French commercial vessel had dropped anchor in five years to supply them. The outrageous nature of this last particular demand may have had a more personal impetus. Of all the things in Hawai‘i that offended Dillon, none was worse than Foreign Minister Wyllie, whom the French consul characterized as an adventurer and, “so long as he is in office, a permanent insult to France.” Wyllie was not fluent in French, and Dillon wrote his windy invective only in French, which Wyllie had to labor after hours to translate. Insisting on French as an official commercial language was a sure way to get under his skin.14

  The impasse grew angrier, and Kauikeaouli ordered that no resistance be offered if the French started shooting, that everyone be cautioned to say nothing that could be taken as another insult. But there was to be no cooperation, either, even to opening a door. His officials should “allow the French, if they choose, to take the keys out of their pockets, but on no account to give them voluntarily.”

  On August 25, Dillon lowered the flag from his consulate, threatening retribution if any damage was done in his absence, and boarded the Poursuivante for safety during the coming action. On board USS Preble, Cmdr. James Glynn observed Gassendi train her guns on the fort, and realized an errant shot from the ship could land among his stricken sailors at the armory. Glynn quickly interposed his vessel between Gassendi and the fort, threatening to maul the corvette if she opened fire—it was a bold bluff, for Glynn did not have enough men left to operate the guns. But it worked. Instead, Tromelin landed boatloads of armed sailors and marines. They stormed the fort and had an easy victory, as it had been evacuated and was tended only by Kekuanaoa and the marshal of the kingdom, Warren Goodale. The marines made patriotic work of spiking the cannons, smashing firearms, and throwing a huge store of gunpowder into the harbor, which blackened the water. King and cabinet waited out the storm in the palace, uncertain whether they were to be raided as well. That did not happen, but the French marines utterly vandalized Kekuanaoa’s house, which was located within the fort, despoiling it even of keepsakes of his late wife, Kina‘u.

  In the meantime, through the French fathers, Tromelin had handbills posted in Hawaiian, announcing that he had come in peace to discuss why the terms of the previous agreement were not being observed, but he had been obliged by intransigence and insults of the Hawaiian government to vindicate the honor of France. When Tromelin finally sailed away he took as prizes a number of ancient artifacts, and the king’s yacht, Kamehameha. The entirety of the foreign community was appalled. “These gallant Franks,” fumed Catherine Lee, “perpetrated their outrage without a finger being raised against them.… Every foreign Consul sent in a protest against their proceedings, and they left loaded with the execration of the entire community not excepting their own countrymen.”15 At least when Tromelin sailed, he took Dillon with him, so some good came from the visitation. A travel writer on the scene a few years later accurately assessed the incident when he wrote that the French “affected to spring out of a misunderstanding … but, in reality, [they were] to gratify the consummate vanity of France in the extension of her territory in the Pacific Ocean.”16

  The bill for the French vandalism surpassed a hundred thousand dollars. A surprised French government was at first disposed to consider it sympathetically, but then changed its mind and never compensated Hawai‘i for the destruction. Dillon, at least, was cashiered for wrecking the rapprochement that the government had been trying to effect with the islands.

  * * *

  Upon reflection, it occurred to king and council that since Richards’s and Ha‘alilio’s mission to Europe and the United States to win recognition had been so successful, perhaps a new effort could get to the bottom of the French trouble and collect the hundred thousand dollars in damage that Tromelin had wrought. Accordingly the government dispatched the valuable Gerrit Judd, taking with him the king’s two eldest nephews, Lot Kapuaiwa, eighteen, and Alexander Liholiho, fourteen, the first two (their older brother having died) in line for the throne. They were veterans of the Royal School, and such a trip would broaden their education in ways that the Boston Parlor could not.

  Months in Paris brought no result, and then the unthinkable happened. On December 13, 1850, with Judd and the princes still abroad, residents of Honolulu awoke to find another French warship, the corvette La Sérieuse, with a new French commissioner, Louis-Émile Perrin, on board, threatening to resort to the “extraordinary powers” of France if certain demands were not met. It was becoming surreal. This time negotiations dragged on for nearly three months, during which time a new U.S. consul arrived, Luther Severance, but he had no instructions on dealing with renewed French bullying. Neither did the British consul, William Miller. An American warship in the harbor, the aging but creditable sloop-of-war USS Vandalia, eighteen guns, was asked to delay its sailing to protect American interests in case the French started shooting.

  Miller’s response, when he had one, grievously disappointed the king and council. Britain’s 1843 treaty obligations with France, he said, made it unlikely that they could protect the kingdom from French enforcement of their demands. Miller had, however, conferred with Perrin (which the king likely did not regard as good news) and been assured that France had no intent to seize the islands. King and cabinet were not comforted. Of the three great powers netted in Hawaiian affairs, France seemed insane, Britain had acted honorably in restoring the kingdom after the Paulet outrage but was now proving unreliable. That left the United States, which had already recast much of society in its own image and had imparted a constitutional government, but had never made any move to seize the country. And Kamehameha had in his back pocket the statement of the American secretary of state, John M. Clayton, that the United States would protect the islands, even unto war. The very evening of their last frustrating interview with Miller, the king signed a new decree placing the country under the protection and flag of the United States—but only provisionally. The document was shown to Luther Severance before being sealed and given to him, to open officially in the event he observed the American flag flying over the fort.

  Miller, upon learning of their intention, imparted that the entire direction of the events made him suspect an American plot to get their flag over the islands. He warned the king against even considering annexation to the United States. They are, he said darkly, “very hard upon the natives of the countries they obtain.”17 Miller did not succeed in getting the proclamation withdrawn, but he did succeed in angering the cabinet. Perrin, when he realized he had been outflanked and outgunned, signed an interim agreement with Wyllie and quit the country, returning to France for fresh instruction.

  The fact that Kamehameha III first raised the possibility, indeed his willingness, to place the country under U.S. protection, even to be annexed to the United States if need be, ignited energetic discussion on the subject in the United States. Commissioner Severance loaded the American consul, Elisha Allen, with dispatches and sent him to Washington to get the best clarification he could on the U.S. posture toward Hawai‘i. The prospect of extending Manifest Destiny halfway across the Pacific enthralled some newspapers, especially on the West Coast. The Millard
Fillmore administration wanted no such thing, however. Daniel Webster was back at the State Department, having succeeded Clayton, and he issued a policy statement that the United States still honored its 1842 agreement with Hawai‘i in recognizing its independence, and had no territorial ambition there. At the same time, he wrote, the United States “can never consent to see those islands taken possession of by either of the great commercial powers of Europe.” And Webster bound the United States to maintain its Pacific Fleet at such strength and readiness as to vindicate Hawaiian integrity, if called upon.

  In the conquest of paradise, much has been written of American avarice in annexing Hawai‘i later in the century. Much less has been written of the fact that here, in the first instance, it was French thuggery and British vacillation that drove Hawai‘i into American arms.

  10. The Great Mahele

  R. C. Wyllie took time from his duties as foreign minister to contribute to other civic endeavors, one of which was assembling the nucleus of a national archive. One document that fell into his possession was the diary of Francisco de Paula Marín. Wyllie became so taken with Marín’s botanical legacy that he helped to establish the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society, contributed papers, and himself established a plantation at Hanalei Bay, the most sheltered spot on the north shore of Kaua‘i. It was a spectacular property, backed by 4,400-foot Namolokama and nineteen waterfalls that cascaded from the surrounding mountains. There Wyllie erected a comfortable estate, hired an Austrian manager, and began planting coffee. The soil and climate, however, were against him, and when the coffee venture failed he turned to sugarcane.

  Even more than agriculture, Wyllie was devoted to history, and his efforts to collate the papers of the nation were invaluable. For years “every scrap of paper that came to him or emanated from him … was preserved and backed and sorted into its proper repository, the whole, at his death, forming a voluminous portion of the Government records.”1 And Wyllie had a full sense of his own importance, keeping a journal and letter books of such mass—at least fifty-eight numbered volumes by the end of his career—as only a Victorian could generate.2 He fully expected a biography of himself to be written one day, and he committed pages and pages of notes to paper every day, although his handwriting was universally held to be execrable. Kamehameha III and the next two kings relied on him, but the American missionary faction came to revile him, and sensed in him a mortal danger to the Hawai‘i they were trying to create.

  And the Industrial Age with both its wonders and its pleasures was changing Hawai‘i before their eyes. A lighthouse, small and primitive but the kingdom’s first, went into operation at Lahaina in the fall of 1840. A sight equally bizarre shocked them late in that year when Hannah Holmes entertained a party of American officers with the ascent of a large hot-air balloon. Also in 1840 the king put his new public school system into operation. To protect public health, a new law went into effect requiring contagious diseases to be reported to the government within twenty-four hours; another one banned unauthorized burials in Honolulu. Some time after, the missionary doctor Dwight Baldwin treated a chief for a curious combination of symptoms; it was the kingdom’s first case of leprosy, but he didn’t know what it was. A start was made at a public waterworks in Honolulu when fresh water was piped from a source a short distance above the town to a tank near the harbor. Its water was ladled by buckets into the city’s first pumping fire engine, and a volunteer fire department was formed.

  1845 saw mail service undertaken from San Francisco to Honolulu, although it was spotty; occasioning greater comment was Theophilus Metcalf’s opening a daguerreotype studio in the capital, providing patrons with precise photographic likenesses before such a service was available in most of western North America. An even greater commotion greeted the arrival of the first paddle-wheeled steamship, HMS Cormorant, in May 1847. The sight of a vessel entering Honolulu Harbor without benefit of sail, slow and stately, its towering wheels barely moving, put the natives “in a state of great excitement,” according to one observer.3

  1847, as a measure of the limits on the influence of the missionaries, also witnessed the inauguration of the 275-seat Thespian Theater, the kingdom’s first professional company. As a double bill on September 11 they presented both the melodrama The Adopted Child and the farce Fortune’s Frolic4—although a histrionic drama that turned on adoption must have been a curious subject for a population to whom adoption was part of normal daily life. The company folded in only four months, but was quickly replaced by the Royal Hawaiian Theater, which successfully occupied its premises for decades, surrounded by a fence plastered with playbills. For those not so bold as to be seen in a theater, the reading collection in the Seamen’s Bethel had now become a functioning public library of more than three hundred books, with a quiet reading room. It was a welcome refuge because the harbors were busier than ever—whale hunting peaked in 1846, when some 746 vessels called at either Honolulu or Lahaina.

  Visiting naval and marine officers whose character was elevated above the waterfront nevertheless enjoyed dancing, and a growing urban commercial class, unattached to the scowling missionaries, was happy to provide social occasions for them. And with the missionaries’ own proliferating broods of children reaching ages to want to experience more of the world, those Calvinists of the first generation found themselves waging a fighting retreat on the matter of musical entertainment. Foreign Minister Wyllie made himself particularly troublesome to them, hosting the kingdom’s first fancy-dress ball at his comfortable Nu‘uanu estate, Rosebank. It was a brilliant evening: French chef, German musicians. Governor Kekuanaoa came, incongruously, in Highland attire, but the evening’s most splendid costume was counted as that of the Catholic bishop of Honolulu—clothed in his own vestments.

  Wyllie sparkled in conversation, he was classically read and witty, but his formidable preparedness for intellectual repartee, while not wasted in Hawai‘i, was of limited utility in his international diplomacy because of the kingdom’s sheer isolation. He had a chance to shine at the visit of the Danish corvette Galathea, which was circumnavigating the globe in furtherance of science and Denmark’s commercial interests. Capt. Carl Steen-Andersen Bille was authorized to appoint Danish consuls, and his instructions took particular note of Hawai‘i’s trade potential. Taking a liberal view of his instructions and favorably impressed by king and court, Bille negotiated an amity and commerce treaty, subject to his government’s approval. It contained none of the assumptions of superiority that the British and French kept loading into their documents, and it became a template for treaties that followed with the Hanseatic free cities of Bremen and Hamburg.5

  Usually, however, Wyllie found it necessary to instruct emissaries and send them abroad with powers to negotiate. Undertaking careful diplomatic minuets from his corner of the globe and making sure that complete understandings had been reached would have been prohibitively time consuming. Mail service still moved at the caprice of wind and wave—and at the sufferance of distracted mariners. Chief Justice William Little Lee discovered that a newspaper sent him by a friend in Buffalo, New York, had undertaken a remarkable journey before reaching him: “From the U.S. it [rounded] Cape Horn and first landed at Valparaiso. From thence it took passage on a Chilean vessel for Tahiti. At Tahiti it exchanged the Chilean vessel for a French Man-of-War, the ‘Sarcelle,’ and went to Callao and the city of Lima in Peru, and then by the same vessel came with a large American mail to Honolulu. But the stupid Frenchman, forgetting that he had a mail on board, sailed without landing it, and carried the newspaper to Christmas Island, where after an absence of a month, it returned to Honolulu and made a safe landing, all ‘tattered and torn.’” But Lee confessed that to his amazement, “I have never had any letters directed to me at the Sandwich Islands miscarry,” which was a comfort because, “to lose letters at this distance from home is provoking beyond all measure.”6

  Interisland mail, at least, was soon put on a more regularized basis; in 1851 Hawai‘i
followed the United States by only four years in the issuance of prepaid postage stamps, an innovation first introduced by the British in 1840. The rate was thirteen cents to send a letter home: five cents for postal handling in Hawai‘i, two cents for the ship’s captain, and six cents for forwarding in the United States.7 That paid for letters up to one-half ounce in weight—hence the habit of several missionaries to write two pages of text on one sheet, one written at a right angle to the other, to save paper and avoid additional postage, but they could be maddening to try to read.

  When free domestic postage ended in that year, the missionaries saw to it that the legislation provided for natives to continue sending letters without charge, as an encouragement to practice their skills in reading and writing. The postal service was placed under the interior minister, who at that time was Prince Lot Kapuaiwa, who agreed that despite some financial burden to the government, he would endorse free postage for the islanders as “contributing in some degree to the advancement of the nation in civilization.” The native Hawaiians, employing their often-demonstrated skill at descrying loopholes, began using the postal service to ship large parcels such as sacks of fruit, with the expectation that the attached letter qualified the whole lot to post for free. A new civil code was enacted in 1859 that imposed a two-cent postal rate for all domestic correspondence, and despite the missionaries’ fears that native letter writing would be discouraged, postal use increased steadily.8

  Hawai‘i’s increasing cultural amenities and maturing social life, nicely appointed as they were, were secondary in importance to the program of governmental reforms that Kamehameha III pursued doggedly under the tutelage of his American ex-missionary advisers. The changes that he undertook in the 1839 Declaration of Rights and the 1840 constitution articulated basic changes in the hierarchical structure of the society, but they had to be given effect with a whole program of enabling legislation that would earn the respect of the great powers. First came the creation of a treasury board in May 1842, composed of John Papa ‘I‘i, kahu of the Royal School; the king’s secretary, Timothy Ha‘alilio; and the trusted Dr. Judd. It took them four years to do it, but organizing the country’s finances cleared the national debt. The treasury board also had the job of taking the first steps toward a vast reordering of land tenure in the kingdom.