Unfamiliar Fishes

by Sarah Vowell

  European expeditions, such as those of Cook and La Pérouse, often employed artists to document the people and landscapes encountered at sea. The ship’s artist of the Blonde, Robert Dampier, convinced some of the chiefs to sit for portraits. He had the following “difficulty to wrestle with. I wished my Friends to array themselves in their Country’s Costume; this desire they treated as most unreasonable, and came decked out in their best black silk gowns.” In the striking pair of paintings he made of King Kauikeaouli and Princess Nahi‘ena‘ena now hanging in the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Dampier nevertheless draped the young royals in traditional red, yellow, and black feather cloaks.

  Americans get blamed for the Americanization of Hawaii, and deservedly so. But the gentlemen from the Blonde, eyeball witnesses of the transition, testify to the Hawaiian chiefs’ willful collaboration in that process. Dampier, the English painter, faked his portraits of the royal siblings to make them look more Hawaiian, painting them in traditional feather cloaks even though they were wearing fashionable silk and wool. Decades before the missionaries’ offspring plotted to end the Hawaiian Kingdom, the Hawaiian ruling class voluntarily dropped some of the old ways. For instance, Kaahumanu issued an edict forbidding the hula in 1830 (though people ignored it after she died, a couple of years later).

  Still, in the 1820s, even the most pro-Christian, silk-clad chiefs still clung mightily to this tradition: the celebration of royal incest.

  At the time of their brother’s funeral, Kauikeaouli was around twelve years old and the princess was eight to ten. There is much gossip (but no evidence) that by this early age brother and sister were already sleeping together, per the Hawaiian custom. Previously, the mission’s printer, Elisha Loomis, commented that the royal children’s incestuous romance “would appear extraordinary in America, as the prince is but ten years of age and the princess less than 7 or 8. It should be remembered, however, that the persons arrive at the age of puberty here much sooner than in a colder climate.” He adds, “Chastity is not a recommendation” for Hawaiian boys and girls, “the sexes associating without restraint almost from infancy.”

  Now that their brother the king had died, the two children were the islands’ two highest-ranking of the high chiefs, the only surviving offspring of Kamehameha the Great and his sacred wife, Keopuolani, daughter of a brother-sister marriage. According to the old ways, the royal siblings’ union was to be applauded. A marriage between them was hoped for, planned on. In fact, the chiefs held a meeting in Lahaina in 1824 to debate the propriety of a marriage between the siblings in light of the missionaries’ pleas against it.

  Elisha Loomis took part in the discussion. He reported that the generally Christian-leaning Kalanimoku

  asked me if it was proper for a brother and sister to live together as man and wife. Of course I told him it was not. He said it was a common practice in this country. I informed him and the others present that it was forbidden in the word of God, it was disallowed in civilised communities, and that barrenness or weak and sickly children were effects of such improper connexions, an effect which might be noticed even in the beasts of the field. They all seemed to admit of the correctness of these remarks. . . . They feel a difficulty in regard to the case in hand. There are no two persons of suitable age of equal rank with the princess. . . . Kaikeoeua said the offspring of two such Chiefs as the prince and princess would be an “[alii] nui roa,” a very great chief. We replied, “True, but if they (a brother and a sister) are united, it is highly probable they will have no children.” We asked them if they had ever known an instance where children had sprung from the union of a brother and sister. They mentioned Keopuolani, mother of the prince and princess, she being the child of parents who were brother and sister. We told them we knew of that fact, but that Keopuolani was an only child and weakly. She finally died at an early age. The prince is looked upon as successor to [Liholiho] and it is thought desirable he should have a wife of high rank, that the royal blood may not be contaminated.

  Noelle Kahanu from the Bishop Museum told me, “Theirs was the last sibling marriage ever proposed in the history of our kingdom. I think it’s important to not judge the decisions of our [chiefs] by today’s standards—that’s the easy thing. What’s difficult is putting ourselves in their place—we can’t even begin to imagine the difficulties, the challenges, the hardships. They did the best they could, and they made decisions and choices that they thought were best for themselves and their people.”

  Here is a snippet of a conversation I had with a Honolulu-born friend in which I confessed that the image of an eight-year-old Nahi‘ena‘ena sleeping with her brother made me want to call a social worker.

  Her: We don’t have to say, “That’s good, that’s bad,” just, “That’s so totally different.”

  Me: I think it’s a little bad.

  Her: Well, I do too. But they were decent people.

  The foundation of royalty is the notion that one family’s blood is better than any other’s and therefore needs to be protected from being, as that Hawaiian chief put it, “contaminated.” The way said contamination is prevented is through inbreeding, which, of course, is often the genetic cause of a royal dynasty’s demise through sterility, miscarriages, stillbirths, and sickliness. That would be true of the heirs of Keopuolani just as it was true of the House of Hapsburg. Nahi‘ena‘ena’s brother probably fathered the one child she would bear, and that infant lived only a few hours, and she herself died a couple of months after that.

  Nahi‘ena‘ena embodies what Hawaii became: pulled apart. Queen Liliuokalani, born in 1838, two years after Nahi‘ena‘ena’s death, thus came of age in the hybrid Hawaii and would manage to balance her Christian beliefs and native pride with authority. But Nahi‘ena‘ena spent her short conflicted life lurching back and forth between the old ways and those of the New Englanders, sometimes taking refuge in the Church, sometimes in her brother’s arms, and, more and more as she got older, in liquor. She even had two weddings—a traditional ceremony in which she wedded her brother in the presence of the highest chiefs, and a Christian service in which she gave her hand to a man the missionaries approved of. During her pregnancy, she chose to stay with her brother, and went to Honolulu, where the old guard awaited the birth of the heir, a little boy who died the day he was born. When Nahi‘ena‘ena died, soon thereafter, she was only around twenty years old.

  The missionaries had hovered over the princess’s deathbed, hoping to coax her final repentance. In his remembrance of her, Hiram Bingham, while inferring she was under Satan’s spell, could not conceal his fondness for the deceased. He wrote, “This beautiful flower, once the pride of the nation, and once the joy of the infant church of Lahaina, having been blighted, through the power of the great enemy, was now cut down, and passed away.”

  The chance for a royal child of sacred rank died with her. Her brother was the last surviving chief to hold that rank. Noelle Kahanu told me, “Kauikeaouli was indeed the last divine king, the last who lived like his ancestors.”

  At Nahi‘ena‘ena’s Honolulu funeral, her feather skirt was displayed atop her coffin, just as it would one day swaddle the casket of Kalakaua, the last king, fifty-five years later.

  I have a hula dancer friend from Maui, John-Mario Sevilla, who told me about viewing the princess’s skirt at the Bishop Museum as part of a hula conference. He said that when he and his fellow dancers saw it, “The Hawaiians in the group wept.” Nahi‘ena‘ena’s skirt was woven as a symbol of fertility and birth, but because of her sad, short life, and because the Kamehameha line would die out and the monarchy was overthrown, it is now a fluffy yellow symbol of loss.

  WHEN THE LAHAINA church excommunicated Nahi‘ena‘ena in 1835, the clergy dispatched David Malo to break the news to the princess. According to Levi Chamberlain, Malo found her on board a ship, drinking—her increasing drunkenness being one of the reasons the church was severing its ties. Given the demands upon her soul, who wouldn’t choose liquor’s oblivion? She w
ould be dead within a year. Malo and the princess, both of them protégés of the missionary William Richards, personify the upheaval of their changing times. But if the princess lost herself somewhere in all the jostling, David Malo, commuting between worlds, found his voice.

  Leimana Brimeyer, one of Malo’s descendants, told me, “David Malo was twenty-seven at the time of the ‘Western invasion’ in 1820, but he already had an insatiable quest for knowledge. Meeting new people from a faraway land just added fuel to the fire. He met Reverend William Richards in 1823. He essentially took David Malo under his wing and taught him how to read and write. Although David Malo never quite mastered the English language, he became an avid reader of all publications written in the Hawaiian language. His most renowned book, Mo‘olelo Hawai‘i (Hawaiian Antiquities) was completed in 1839 and written entirely in Hawaiian. So within the span of eight years, from when he met Reverend Richards to his enrollment at Lahainaluna Seminary, he had already learned to read and write and even published a few smaller publications before starting on his book.”

  The missionaries founded Lahainaluna School, uphill from downtown Lahaina, in 1831. Ken Kimura, of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation, told me, “They had opened it as a seminary.” The school’s original purpose was to train Hawaiian men—David Malo was one of them—to be ministers. Kimura continues, “But within a year or so they started to invite the local kids up, and so they were running a regular school and a seminary in parallel. Overall, the missionaries accomplished a huge feat in getting the literacy rate up to a super high amount because the royalty was behind it.” (By 1831, the missionaries’ educational initiatives had the full support of Kaahumanu and King Kauikeaouli.) “The people wanted it,” Kimura continues. “They had classrooms everywhere, classes in royalty’s houses. It was regarded very highly to have an education.”

  Malo was born on the Big Island, near Kealakekua Bay, around 1793. His parents were habitués of the high chiefs’ courts in Kamehameha’s glory days, and so Malo grew up observing the rituals and customs of the nobility and learning the genealogies, dances, and chants of the Hawaiian oral tradition.

  Malo’s book Hawaiian Antiquities, a compendium of classical Hawaiian customs, beliefs, and vocabulary is intricate and wideranging. Malo details the impressive variety of fish hooks; burial practices; the codes and rituals of the ruling class; the names of a long list of gods, differentiating the god worshipped by robbers from the god worshipped by thieves; birth rituals; the kapu system; hula, sports, and games; chants and genealogies; how (and why) to build a house; fascinating and poetic delineations of time and phases of the moon—“the time when the plume of the sugar-cane began to unsheath itself” or the time when “the sharp points of the moon’s horns are hidden.” He records the words for sarcasm, intimidation, and bitterness. He reports that when choosing a tree from which to build a new canoe, if a priest has a dream about a naked man, then that tree is rotten and so the canoe should be built out of another tree.

  If I were looking for one word to describe the Hawaiian people, “lucky” would not be it, but they were fortunate that the first real writer in the Hawaiian language happened to be one of the most knowledgeable keepers of the oral tradition. Malo was surely under the sway of the ministers. In Hawaiian Antiquities he proclaims, “The book that contains the word of Jehovah is of a value above every other treasure because it contains salvation for the soul.” Still, by collecting and presenting the old chants and prayers, Malo made a tacit argument for their value and preservation during an era when missionaries were trying to eradicate the ancient rituals, especially the hula. He included the incantation recited when a chief was sick. He recorded, as well, the religious rites of fishermen as they prayed for a safe return from the sea: it was a call-and-response affair, the priest calling out to the fishermen’s god, “Save us from night-mare, from bad-luck-dreams, from omens of ill,” the fishermen responding, “Defend us!” Even in the English translation it’s clear that Malo takes pleasure in vocabulary, in the old rhythms of mystical songs.

  One of Malo’s most beautiful writings, a poem mourning the death of his friend Queen Kaahumanu in 1832, laments her passing as the end of conversation. Malo recalls their talks as treasure hunts. He has taken pen to paper as the ministers taught him but uses pen and paper to praise the power of speech, writing, “The voice is the staff that love leans upon.”

  Dwight Baldwin, one of the ABCFM’s missionaries in Lahaina, said, “David Malo has, perhaps, the strongest mind of any man in the nation.” After graduating from Lahainaluna Seminary, Malo stayed on to teach there, later becoming the first Hawaiian ordained to preach, as well as serving as Hawaii’s first superintendent of schools.

  Lahainaluna was the first public school in Hawaii (indeed, west of the Rockies), and it remains a thriving public high school to this day. The ringing school bell interrupts my conversation with Ken Kimura as he shows me around Hale Pa‘i, the “house of printing,” now a museum next to the school. Getting to the museum’s front door involves weaving through groups of chatting, texting teenagers.

  Inside the barnlike old building, Kimura says, “This is the print shop that the missionaries ran when the school first opened as a seminary. The school opened in 1831, and in 1834 they started printing. This was a support facility for creating materials for the school.”

  Pointing to the museum’s Ramage printing press, he continues, “This is a working replica. We fire it up for school groups, and it is very similar to Benjamin Franklin’s press, just a little bit smaller. It’s still useable today. If we were to have a nuclear holocaust, I could still be printing newsletters on this thing.”

  Kimura notes, “The first paper money ever printed in Hawaii was printed in this shop. Only for use of the school, in exchange for the students’ work. Unfortunately, Hale Pa‘i is also known for the first counterfeit money ever printed in Hawaii, by the same people. They were expelled eventually.”

  He shows me a Temperance Map printed at Lahainaluna in 1843 after the social movement against alcohol arrived in Hawaii. It is a beautiful, if preachy, chart meant to steer the viewer away from the pitfalls of hooch. Kimura says, “The gist of it is that you start off on the Ocean of Animal Appetite. Hopefully you don’t fall into the island of Poverty, Murder, Larceny, Brutality, or drown in Wine Lake, Beer Lake, Rum Lake, or Whiskey Lake. If you travel the high road in life, you might end up in the land of Industry, Improvement, Prosperity, Enjoyment. And eventually you might get over to the Ocean of Eternity.”

  “This is our claim to fame,” Kimura says, drawing my attention to one of the display cases full of printed matter. “This is Ka Lama Hawaii, the first newspaper west of the Rockies.”

  Lorrin Andrews, the missionary who was Lahainaluna’s first principal, reported to the ABCFM in 1834 of his intent to give the students “the idea of a newspaper—to show them how information of various kinds was circulated.” Ka Lama Hawaii, Andrews wrote, “was designed as a channel through which the scholars might communicate their own opinions freely on any subject they chose.”

  Which sounds liberating, but in her history of Hawaiian newspapers, Shaping History, Helen Geracimos Chapin noted that the paper “spoke to the ‘superiority’ of American culture, the Christian religion, and the Protestant work ethic. . . . By such ‘truth in attractive form’ were Hawaiian readers indoctrinated into the new culture.”

  Indoctrination was certainly the order of the day—Lahainaluna and its publications were supported by the ABCFM in Boston until 1848, when the Hawaiian Kingdom’s government took over its administration. But the paper contained secular content as well. Chapin mentions the paper’s publication of a series of woodblock illustrations of “forty four-footed beasts like the lion, camel, zebra, buffalo, and reindeer, all of which except for the dog and horse were unknown to the Hawaiians.” It is a slight relief that the missionaries’ educational discourse wasn’t confined entirely to xenophobic, biblical diatribes. At least some of the information they impart
ed involved the simple presentation of new facts along the lines of Guess what? Reindeer!

  The paper, distributed free of charge in Lahaina, only lasted about a year. “Then they had to focus back on their books,” Kimura said. “They did a lot of textbook printing—history, math and science, all in Hawaiian.”

  Drawing my eye to a book on display written and published by Lahainaluna students in 1838, he says, “We have some original books here. This is of particular interest. It is called Mo‘olelo Hawaii. It’s the first history of Hawaii by Hawaiians in Hawaiian.” David Malo and Samuel Kamakau, another important native historian, were among the students contributing to the book. Kimura points out that the book “continues to be printed today, in Honolulu, all in Hawaiian as a reference for immersion schools and Hawaiian studies.”

  A few days before Kimura and I spoke, about 150 Maui parents and other citizens staged a demonstration. Paia Elementary School, on the island’s northern coast, had so many students sign up for its kindergarten Hawaiian-language immersion program that administrators planned to institute a lottery system to award enrollment by luck of the draw. The rally’s organizers complained to the Maui News “that the lottery admission system denies children the right to Hawaiian language education and restricts the revitalization of Hawaiian language in communities.”

  After the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani, Sanford Dole’s regime passed a law in 1896 stating, “The English language shall be the medium and basis of instruction in all public and private schools.” Hawaiian was not taught, and many schools prohibited speaking it, and students were punished for doing so well past statehood. Consequently, the language’s usage dwindled and was on its way to becoming endangered until its revival during the Hawaiian Renaissance Movement of the 1960s and seventies.