Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  Of all the reforms espoused in the declaration and constitution, none was more fundamental than the idea that the king held the land not for himself but in trust for the whole people. That was a sea change from the days of the Conqueror and before, when each king distributed the land as he pleased. Looking toward a day not of revocable tenancy but of widespread ownership of land on the Western model, the treasury board began ferreting out which lands the king would retain as his personal property, and which would pass to the government.

  Working on another front, Attorney General Ricord prepared a series of “Organic Acts” to regularize a permanent government structure. The first, which began operating in March 1846, established the executive branch of five portfolios, with a minister for each: Finance, Foreign Relations, Interior, Law, and Public Instruction. Those ministers, with the four governors, would comprise the king’s privy council, assisted by others that he might appoint. The second Organic Act took another step toward land reform in establishing the Board of Commissioners to Quiet Land Titles—in short address, the Land Commission—to oversee the country’s transition from mass tenancy to fee-simple ownership.

  The great flaw in the Hawaiian land system that had remained uncorrected up to this date was the fundamental insecurity of land tenure: Every level of occupancy could still be overthrown at the whim of the next higher lord; the chief could evict the kanaka tenants; the high chief could evict the chiefs; the king could evict the high chiefs. In fact a prudent chief diversified his holdings under the favor of different high chiefs, so that if one turned on him and seized one ahupua‘a, he could avoid penury by taking refuge on another parcel under the governance of a different high chief.9 The whole was a powerful disincentive to development, but the chiefs clung to it in the belief that the power to evict their inferiors was critical to controlling them. As one chief told William Richards in 1841 regarding his tenants, “If we cannot take away their lands, what will they care for us? They will be as rich as we are.”10 There was a complicated but ill-defined etiquette when it came to a high chief dispossessing a lesser chief. As with the arrest of Kaumuali‘i or other unpleasant matters, all was framed with courtesy, but resistance was futile. Generally “chiefs acted entirely at their own caprice, and it was always considered that a chief could revoke his grants.”11 Indeed, the chiefs’ behavior in sometimes arbitrarily seizing the produce of tenants who did show initiative in working their land harder than their neighbors led kanakas to scoff at the idea of wearing themselves out to improve their circumstances. Thus many were reinforced in lives of cynical indolence.

  Yet there was broad agreement that something had to be done for the common people. Under Kamehameha III they no longer faced the prospect of warfare and mayhem among feuding chiefs, but their labor was in many cases preempted by the command to search for sandalwood or perform some other service for the chiefs they supported, in addition to raising their own sustenance. In an economy that functioned for centuries without currency, they still paid their taxes in produce and a certain number of days’ labor, and during the 1830s “the lot of the common people was harder.… than it had been during the time of Kamehameha I.”12 The Western concept of working for wages began to crack the system in the mid-1830s, as exemplified by the Ladd & Co. sugar plantation on Kaua‘i, freeing the kanakas from the grip of the chiefs. As the practice spread, it led to the creation of a new class of native Hawaiians who handed up no tribute, the “floaters,” which began to supply the towns with a labor force.

  Under the authority of the Land Commission the entirety of the kingdom began to be apportioned and the results entered in a voluminous log called the Mahele (Division) Book. The Crown Lands, retained by the king as his personal possession, totaled nearly a million acres. The remainder of the land that he had formerly controlled as his personal property, rather more than half, he surrendered as public domain, which became known as Government Lands. The chiefs, now recognized as konohiki, or landlords, were required to register claims for the lands they wished to keep and pay a commutation fee to register their titles. Lacking cash, they often paid in land less dear to them, which was added to the pool of Government Lands. At the end, the 235 chiefs kept for themselves about 1.5 million acres, or about ten square miles each, on average—rather a generous settlement on a class of masters who, themselves, had done little more than order their kanakas about for as long as anyone could remember. In other revolutions in other times, such a class might simply have been eliminated, or told to pick up a hoe and dig some taro for themselves. But even then the chiefs retarded the process. Their ingrained sense of entitlement was difficult to shed; they were lackadaisical in registering their lands, as they had never been required to establish their ownership before and saw no emergency to do so now. Filing deadlines were repeatedly missed and had to be extended with new legislation, as late even as 1892.

  And then there was the question of the surveys, which were disorganized, duplicative, and inconsistent. At various times some thirty-three surveyors worked for the Land Commission; some were thorough and exacting, some were careless to the point of dereliction; some had faulty compasses, some saw no fault in setting pins a distance beyond the end of the chain to give the grantee a little extra land.13 The result was a chaos of gaps and overlaps.

  Finally, last in line, not eligible for land until passage of the Kuleana Act of August 6, 1850, were the maka‘ainana, the “people of the land” themselves. The foreign community in the islands warmly espoused the concept of giving people the fishponds and taro patches they had tended for decades, not just for the inherent justice of the act but as a means to arrest the alarming decline in native population. The prospect of becoming a freeholding yeomanry could not but have a salutary effect on the beaten-down and disease-ridden kanakas. British consul Miller had once gotten so carried away on the subject that he proposed a plan to the king to promote childbearing: that commoners be freed from the labor tax on the birth of a first child, and that they be given land title on the birth of a second, the size of their plot to increase with the size of the family.

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  Especially during and after 1848, increasing the number of natives was a topic of acute concern, owing to the onset of crushing epidemics. “Much sickness prevails here at the present time,” reported the Polynesian on October 14. “The whooping cough made its appearance a few weeks since, and during the last week several cases of the measles have occurred in town. By an arrival from Hilo, we learn that the measles prevail extensively among the native population of Hilo.” In the first two months of the siege, nearly seven hundred people were reported dead in Honolulu alone, and that number was surely underreported. After a year the Missionary Herald reported “whole neighborhoods, even whole villages, prostrate at once … there not being enough persons in health to prepare food for the sick.” Whooping cough wreaked such havoc in the countryside that in some areas, nine in ten newborns and infants were carried away. And then influenza came for the very old: “The aged have almost all disappeared from among us,” the missionaries sadly reported.

  The doctors among the missionaries worked themselves to exhaustion. In his nearly seventeen years in the islands since arriving with the Fourth Company, Dr. Dwight Baldwin of Maui had seen nothing like it. “Never was I driven so to distraction, week after week & month after month, with no respite—& probably never did I lie down at night” without being wracked with frustration that some suffering family had sent for him, “but whom I c’d not reach before night overtook me, or c’d not find, owing to a large part of Lahaina being without roads.”14 So many factors ran against them. The weather took an unseasonable and relentless bend toward cold and rain. Stocks of medicine ran out; Amos Cooke noted in his journal that he and John Papa ‘I‘i had helped Edmund Rogers of the Fifth Company make ipecac and calomel pills to treat diarrhea. Some began using native herbs. Even their closer communication with the outside world worked against them: In the old days it took half a year or more before a shi
p reached the islands, and infected people died at sea or recovered before ever touching shore. Now with California only some two weeks away, new disease was only a new arrival away—which was how measles first landed at Hilo in 1848.

  Native schools were suspended, some church congregations decimated. Naturally the missionaries’ first instinct was to turn to their faith. The king appointed December 6, 1848, “as a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer to Almighty God,” but it took another six months for the pestilence to lift. When it did, some ten thousand native Hawaiians had died, perhaps 10 percent of the remaining population. The native chronicler Samuel Kamakau believed the total to be much higher, up to 30 percent,15 but no accurate count could be made. That the epidemics were underreported is certain, and given that in remote areas whole families might die unrecorded, he may have been closer to the truth. In any event it was the worst siege of disease since the 1804 oku‘u thwarted the Conqueror’s intended second invasion of Kaua‘i. And the most terrifying pestilence—smallpox—was yet to come.

  The plummeting population colored every other consideration in the islands. It was a large factor in turning to imported Asian labor for the sugar plantations. One reason Kamehameha III was willing to entertain ceding his country to the United States was that he believed his own race was headed toward extinction. Thus the humanitarian aspects of the Kuleana Act, to get Hawaiian natives in possession of their own land and give them a reason to hang on, were quite real.

  Once they were eligible, some ten thousand kanakas applied for ownership of the plots they had long been cultivating, and at the end of the day, the total of all such land distributed to the maka‘ainana was only about thirty thousand acres. This was less a miscarriage than it seems at first, for the few acres of one kuleana given to a kanaka was fertile, arable land, whereas vast tracts of the chiefly or royal lands were taken up with lava flows, escarpments, or other features that were not materially productive.

  Thus the first assay of the Great Mahele was that in a real sense it was the “great division” of the lands, with the net result that some ten thousand commoners actually owned land, a prospect that would have been unthinkable a generation before. But if the road to hell was paved with good intentions, then the road to a completely Americanized Hawai‘i was paved with the Great Mahele. At the outset virtually everyone agreed that its effect would be to transform the class of kanaka tenants into landowning stakeholders in their own country, but its actual effect, disastrously, was the opposite.

  For the individual commoners the biggest factor involved in receiving desirable land was luck, and many of them wound up with less land than was actually needed to support their families. A busy government commissioner might assign one family a plot containing a taro patch of only two or three acres. But taro depletes the soil, and a patch must lie fallow for at least two years before being replanted; an agent who understood this awarded larger tracts. The luckiest commoners were those for whom the missionaries acted as commissioners, especially those missionaries who came to understand the tension between the tenants and the chiefs, whose disregard for the kanakas could be quite heartless. Such a missionary was willing to bite deeper into the chiefly lands and might award a kuleana of thirty acres or even more16 to insure that the maka‘ainana really did become self-sufficient. Chief Justice William Little Lee, during his stint as chairman of the Land Commission, received many letters from commoners so anxious for sustainable tracts of land that they even addressed him as their Pu‘uhonua, their City of Refuge, to whom they looked for a new beginning in life.17

  But the real poison pill that doomed the Great Mahele was not the small size of average plots awarded to kanaka families. It was the passage, a few weeks before the Kuleana Act, of the Alien Land Ownership Act. During the preceding decades, international interest in Hawai‘i had surged; its potential for trade and imperial defense were widely noticed, but the remnant feudal system of land tenure had proved a potent discouragement to foreign investment in the islands’ economy. American and European capitalists were deeply wary of sinking money into agricultural ventures (and large-scale development required vast sums of money) without some guarantee more binding than the chiefs’ smiling assurance of goodwill that their investment was secure. The provision of a Western-style constitution and courts set a system in place by which redress could be sought, but it was still illegal for foreigners to own Hawaiian land in fee simple.

  Widespread misunderstanding of the Hawaiian concept of a lease had in the past been at the root of many ugly conflicts with foreign residents, European consuls in particular, but not limited to them. To Western minds one leased the whole of a property—land and improvements together. The chiefs, however, considered that one leased the improvements on the land, and enjoyed the use of the land, but they never entertained a notion that they had alienated the land itself, even for a period of time. Passage of the Alien Land Ownership Act of July 10, 1850, opened the floodgate of foreign capital, which filled the land just as thousands of native commoners found themselves in possession of real estate, however modest their acreage, that they were free to sell. Freedom to sell they understood very well, and the most sinister factor in the failure of the Great Mahele was that the kanakas, similar to American Indians at the time of forced severalty (individual ownership), had little understanding of the nature or responsibilities of ownership. Whether because of that, or because they owned parcels too small to support their families anyway, or whether they needed quick cash to doctor or bury victims of the hideous epidemics, or whether, acting on caprice, they seized a chance to have a good time in town, or to get to town and investigate making an urban living—whatever the combination of factors, the Great Mahele had the net effect of evicting thousands of native Hawaiians from the countryside and leaving them worse off than they were before.

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  Even as the Great Mahele matured over time into a feast of unintended consequences, so too did a second momentous development of 1848: After twenty-eight years of support and oversight, the ABCFM cut the Hawaiian Mission loose. It was not unexpected, as for several years a philosophical rift had been quietly but earnestly widening between Boston and the islands. As far back as 1832 the “foreign minister” of the ABCFM had been Rufus Anderson, a Maine man now of fifty-two. Like many of the missionaries he was a product of Andover Theological Seminary; unlike them, he nursed a tightly held vision of missionary work that was purely evangelical in nature: Preach, move on, and preach again. Their business, as he was wont to say, was with the unbelievers, not the believers. Teaching, doctoring, and pastoring were not their concern—high irony as it was for the issue to reach a boil during the epidemics. Natives were to be trained as rapidly as possible to take charge of native congregations. Hiram Bingham led the others to Hawai‘i twelve years before Anderson took charge, Anderson had been spurring them for a further sixteen years, and even then Hawai‘i had only a couple of seminaries and a handful of native Christian graduates.18

  It was all tidy theorizing from a man who had never served in a mission station (he had wanted to go to India but the church kept him in a secretarial capacity). Had his model been followed, the Congregationalist missions in Hawai‘i would have been not just failures but abject failures. The more than one hundred missionaries and wives taught and doctored and pastored because that was what was required for Christianity to take root in the islands. William Kanui and Prince Kaumuali‘i had been examples of giving responsibility to native converts too soon. Moreover the missionaries enmeshed themselves in the lives of the islanders because they cared for them. In 1820 they encountered a native culture that practiced human sacrifice and infanticide, in which the multitude of commoners were beholden to and terrorized by a tiny caste of chiefs. Modern scholars criticize the missionaries for their equating Boston morality with Christian virtues, and they have a point—apart from a heavy dose of “presentism” (that is, the fallacy of judging nineteenth-century people through twenty-first century sensibilities).
But those who rhapsodize over the natives’ lost innocence and languorous sensuality also gloss over the horrors of precontact life. The change that the missionaries wrought, turning it within a generation into a constitutional monarchy with one of the highest literacy rates in the world, was stunning. The habits of centuries could not have been broken with a couple of sermons and a lecture series.

  But Rufus Anderson was certain that he knew best. Others in the ABCFM knew that his patience was wearing thin. “Whatever methods may be adopted,” one of the Boston insiders warned them in 1844, “you must pursue this object of raising up … successors in the gospel ministry.… Think as favorably as you can of those whom you have brought forward, confide in them as much as you can … and in this manner aim to make them … respect themselves.” The issue was considered in Honolulu; they had been licensing native preachers since 1841, and they took steps to increase the pace, but it did not happen fast enough, and Anderson lowered the boom in April 1846. “The great point is,” he wrote them, “to get a NATIVE MINISTRY. In this I understand you to have failed.”

  To Anderson’s credit, so far from desiring the Americanization of the islands, he did regard the expeditious training of native clergy as essential to the future independence of the kingdom. “I believe that if the churches are officered by foreigners, the offices of the government will continue to have foreign occupants. Nothing will save the native government but a native ministry placed over the native churches.… It is better to have a very imperfect native ministry,” he insisted, “than to have none at all.… The most effectual rebuke for ambitious foreigners in the civil government, will be … creating native pastors for all the native churches.… When the natives see that you are putting them forward in the churches, they will feel an impulse … to become qualified for the posts … and an upward direction will be given to the native mind.”19