Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (15 page)

Bingham’s policy of noninterference with Ka‘ahumanu’s state conduct, in the belief that a certain amount of backsliding could be tolerated when a greater good might result, proved wise. She came to faith largely through her own conviction, and inevitably her faith must become law. Such a bonus was reaped with a decree on September 21, 1829, “On Mischievous Sleeping,” which outlawed cohabitation without benefit of marriage. It was a mild law, legitimizing existing relationships as now being man and wife, while forbidding unmarried cohabitation in the future, but it was a step in the missionaries’ direction.
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She took an even bigger step the following year, when she banned performances of the hula. In fact it was a huge step, for hula was not just a dance, it was a physical expression of the national poetry, much of which was written to be danced while being sung or chanted. Polynesian history was oral history, and hula was also the repository for the ancient legends and
mo‘olelo
, their story. Like the chants dedicating a
heiau
, they were intricate and complicated, and to make a mistake was no small matter; there were teachers and schools dedicated to learning hula. To be sure it was idolatrous, dedicated to the goddess Laka, and being so embedded in the culture, hula could also be unashamedly sexual, as indeed the culture was. The highly charged dance that David Samwell witnessed in 1778 was probably the
hula ma‘i
, the dance in praise of genitals, which may have developed as the dancers’ way of ingratiating themselves with the chief. The dances in that time were fraught with meaning that escaped Westerners who merely sat mesmerized by swaying hips and swinging breasts. Not all hula was sweaty and naked and overtly sexual, but that and the idolatry doomed the art in the missionaries’ eyes. Thus when Ka‘ahumanu banned hula in 1830, she did not just outlaw the swaying pantomime familiar to generations of tourists; in what she thought was the service of her faith she struck at the heart of Hawaiian culture.

The decree “On Mischievous Sleeping” was issued over the young king’s signature, but it is doubtful whether his heart was in it. Kamehameha III had just turned sixteen, he was chafing under his stepmother’s domination, and the heart of the conflict was infinitely more vital than anything over grogshops and theaters. He had taken to dividing his time between Honolulu and Lahaina; his mother was buried there, but the magnet that pulled the young king irresistibly home was his sister, the Princess Nahi‘ena‘ena. Only daughter of the Conqueror and Keopuolani, she was so beloved of her mother that the queen defied the custom of
hanai
and nursed her herself. He was deeply in love with her, and she with him. To the native culture and the now-silenced
kahunas
it was a match of dizzying brilliance, and children born to them would have been next to the gods in elevation.
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The missionaries, however, the king’s tutors and spiritual guides, were aghast: To them nothing could so have crystallized the pollution of the native heathen.

The matter lay unresolved at the death of Ka‘ahumanu on June 5, 1832, which meant that the important office of
kuhina nui
, embracing not just prime minister but virtual coruler, had to be filled. The decision was an important one, because Kamehameha III, soon to turn nineteen, was being torn apart by conflict between the ancestral privileges and the new morality. The king turned to his older half sister and the queen regent’s niece, Elizabeth Kina‘u, daughter of Ka‘ahumanu’s sister by the Conqueror. At twenty-seven Kina‘u was in some respects as strong-willed as her aunt, and had endured some battles in establishing her own identity. The deaths of her half-brother husband, Kamehameha II, and her sister Kamamalu in London had left her in the unusual position of being a dowager queen at the age of nineteen. Her second husband died in the 1826 epidemic of whooping cough. With Kina‘u available once more, Ka‘ahumanu had embraced a plan for her to marry the then-thirteen-year-old king, thus rekindling the Conqueror’s desire that his heirs combine the line of his sacred wife with that of Ka‘ahumanu’s sister. Kina‘u defied her and instead married the much-lower-ranked Mataio (a native rendition of “Matthew”) Kekuanaoa, who was
po‘olua
, a child of shared paternity one of whose fathers was the grandson of old Alapa‘i who had placed a death sentence on the infant Kamehameha. The queen regent was furious with her, but Kina‘u and Kekuanaoa made a good marriage and had five children together, including two future kings and a
kuhina nui
.

On state business Kina‘u made a creditable prime minister, but she found the young king more interested in demonstrating his defiance of the missionaries than in tending to his duties. On March 15, 1833, Kauikeaouli decreed that he was ending the regency and was assuming absolute power; he brought back hula, he allowed Kaomi to seize land and to tax Christians to keep his debts paid, and generally mortified the chiefs. But he also took a step toward stability by confirming Kina‘u as
kuhina nui
. When she then found more of the work falling upon her, she once confided to Laura Judd, “I am in straits and heavy-hearted, and I have come to tell you my thought. I am quite discouraged and cannot bear this burden any longer. I wish to throw away my rank, and title, and responsibility together, bring my family here, and live with you; or, we will take our families and go to America. I have money.” Seizing the opportunity, Mrs. Judd praised Kina‘u for her sensibilities, asserted (oddly, for an American) that Divine Providence had raised her to her rank, and, citing the example of Esther from the Bible, encouraged her to remain strong for the sake of her people.
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One large reason that Kina‘u was overburdened was the king’s long absences, agonizing at his sister’s side over their inability to marry. The matter came to a crisis in June 1834, when Honolulu’s two best doctors, Gerrit Judd and the Englishman Thomas C. B. Rooke, were summoned urgently to Pearl River, where rumor had it the king had tried to kill himself. The fact when discovered proved to be that Nahi‘ena‘ena, who was traveling in his suite, discouraged him from returning to Maui with her, because of the hostility of the missionaries and Christian governor, Hoapili. The dismayed Kauikeaouli then made an attempt to cut his throat. To get past this agonizing stalemate, the king’s sister was betrothed to the son of Kalanimoku, whom she sullenly married on November 25, 1835, with a triumphant Rev. William Richards presiding. But when she became pregnant two months later, the king declared the exalted baby to be his, and proclaimed it heir to the throne. The child was born on September 17, 1836, but expired within hours, and Nahi‘ena‘ena sank into a dangerous condition. Rooke could not help her, and though he called in consultants, she died on December 30. Kamehameha III’s grief at losing his sister and their baby was terrifying. He sat stone-faced by her coffin for week after week, and it took three and a half months, almost twice the usual period of a royal wake, before he released her body, on April 12, 1837, to return to Maui for burial with her mother. Impelled as much by duty as by attraction, he turned for comfort to a minor chiefess of Maui named Kalama, daughter of the commander of his Honolulu ships, and married her on February 14, 1837, while Nahi‘ena‘ena’s body lay yet unburied. Kina‘u vigorously opposed the match for Kalama’s lack of royal rank, although the
kuhina nui
herself had done the same thing when she married Kekuanaoa. Now she was a fervent Christian, and probably her main objection was that Kalama had been an active part of Kauikeaouli’s mockery of the missionaries—but the Americans counted their blessings that the young king had found a wife who was not his sister, and blessed the union. The marriage lasted, but even while married to Kalama, Kamehameha III still clung to the memory of Nahi‘ena‘ena and fathered a son, Albert, by his sister’s close childhood companion, Jane Lahilahi Young.
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*   *   *

The conflicts between Kamehameha III and the missionaries over his choice of bride took place a world removed from the common
kanakas
, whose lives continued hard and poor. As the new companies of missionary reinforcements arrived every few years, they spread out to new districts yet unpreached to, and they discovered anew a squalor that reduced them to prayer, as much for their own strength and fortitude as for the natives’ souls. The most visible maladies were skin sores and ulcers, which were rampant; scabies was so ubiquitous that Charles Stewart had been on land only two days before being asked if he had anything to cure “the itch.”
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Even more demoralizing to the Americans were the lice, which became a constant battle. Infestation was known among the royalty and became more prevalent lower down the social ladder, until “as to the common people, after a call of a few minutes, we think ourselves fortunate indeed if we do not find living testimonies of their visit, on our mats and floors, and even on our clothes and persons!” But what brought them near to fainting was the sight, among the
kanakas
, that “not only do they suffer their heads and tapas to harbour these vermin; but they openly, and unblushingly,
eat them!
”
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Paradise was also full of fleas. Forest or meadow, beach or cave, there was no respite from them. Native families thought nothing of sharing their bedding with pet pigs, dogs were everywhere, and the infestation was so relentless that many visitors called attention to it in letters and memoirs. The flea was not indigenous to the islands; probably at least one species arrived with the Polynesian voyagers’ stock, but after several decades of foreign ship arrivals, there was a variety of species to torment people. A sailor on Maui who stayed at an inn with native proprietors had one vivid memory, “At 11 we droped [
sic
] on the mats … & the way the Flees & other vermin lit on us was a caution to all travilers [
sic
]. It had much more affect to keep us awake than a strong cup of tea would.”
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Surrounded by lice and licentiousness, the compound that the Honolulu missionaries lived in became a partial refuge where they could commune with a more familiar life. The large house of which the young whaler Fayerweather had complained had been built in New England, disassembled and stored in the hold of the
Thaddeus
, and then reconstructed near the harbor in Honolulu, immediately behind the large traditional grass house that first served as the Kawaiaha‘o Church. Fayerweather’s criticism was less than just, as the wood-frame structure was actually a communal residence for the whole contingent, and it was not even all that comfortable. Honolulu was on the leeward side of O‘ahu, where it was often hot and dusty, and the families papered the dining room ceiling with
tapa
to keep the upstairs grit from sifting through the floor and down into the food. The house was designed to stay snug through frigid New England winters, and the Americans sweltered in it. Ten years later the compound added the Chamberlain “House,” actually a two-story depository built of coral blocks in which they stored the supplies to be distributed to stations throughout the islands, and several years after that a separate building for the printing press to turn out Bibles, tracts, and lesson books. Even more than Gutenberg’s press revolutionized learning in the West, this simple machine changed Hawai‘i forever, as the missionaries provided the people with their first written language, which the
maka‘ainana
learned with stunning alacrity.

After Bingham, the most famous resident in the
Hale La‘au
, the “wood house,” as the islanders called it, came to be Dr. Gerrit Judd, a New York physician who came with the Third Company of missionaries on the
Parthian
, arriving in April 1828. Judd opened a medical practice, treating commoners as well as nobles in an upstairs eave room. In this large house they also hosted company—the queen regent often spent the night in the guest room—and tried to come to grips with the proposition that American Calvinist Christianity was going to be a hard sell in Polynesia. It cannot be denied that the missionaries equated, and many would say confused,
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their strict secular morality with Christian faith: In this era virtually everybody did. But this left them at a distinct disadvantage in Hawai‘i. It was an outpost of Polynesia, whose attitude toward sex was generally frank, happy, and unashamed—qualities that made this portion of the globe legendary among lonely mariners. But the missionaries found it shocking. “For a man or woman to refuse a solicitation for illicit intercourse was considered an act of meanness,” wrote Sheldon Dibble of the Fourth Company, which arrived in 1831. Any stroll by a native household would discover “emptied bottles strewn about in confusion amongst the disgusting bodies of men, women and children lying promiscuously in the deep sleep of drunkenness.”
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Reverend Whitney once asked a chief on Kaua‘i whether having seven wives did not cause him anxiety, and the chief assured him that it did: “I cannot sleep for fear some other man will get them.”
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It was also awkward to criticize sex to the natives when the missionary wives were dropping babies left, right, and center. Laura Judd had nine, and came to a stark realization of how the chiefesses felt about this when so many of them were infertile. When the Judds’ second child was born, Kina‘u begged and remonstrated to be given the baby in
hanai
, a custom that the Americans found mortifying. There were some tense moments about giving offense to such a powerful figure, before the Judds were able to convince Kina‘u that naming the child after her was considered a great honor. Indeed the baby was named Elizabeth Kina‘u Judd, and the
kuhina nui
kept an active interest in her upbringing—along with the five of her own whom she eventually bore.

In this society there was little notion of being too young or too old for sex. Children were expected to experiment as soon as they were curious. And there was no notion of what the newcomers could barely utter as the “Unmentionable Vice of the Greeks.” Indeed, among the
ali‘i
, on whose favor the missionaries depended, one particularly difficult custom to stamp out was the
aikane
relationship between a chief and his youthful male lovers. Much has been debated over the years about the actual nature of
aikane
—some denying that it had a sexual component at all, in order to make the old ways seem less scandalous to modern Western eyes, and others particularly in more recent years affirming it, to proclaim that there is nothing in the native culture to be ashamed of.
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As with other aspects of native culture, control of the narrative today goes a long way toward controlling who learns what.
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But it was no mystery to the first American in the islands. John Ledyard, the marine corporal aboard the
Resolution
, found it more an object of morbid fascination than censure, since “we had no right to attack or even disapprove of customs that differed from our own.” At first Captain Cook’s sailors could not believe their eyes. “As this was the first instance of it we had seen in our travels, we were cautious how we credited the first indications of it, and waited untill [
sic
] opportunity gave full proof.” Yet the most cursory observation made it apparent that “sodomy … is very prevalent if not universal among the chiefs.… The cohabitation is between the chiefs and the most beautiful males they can procure about 17 years old.… These youths follow them wherever they go, and are as narrowly looked after as the women in those countries, where jealousy is so predominant a passion.” Others of Captain Cook’s chroniclers were more judgmental in their assessment of
aikane
, especially of old King Kalaniopu‘u’s delight in having his young lovers ejaculate on his royal person.
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Indeed they were not mistaken in what they beheld. The native scholar Davida Malo was surprisingly frank in his assessment that “of the people about court there were few who lived in marriage. The number of those who had no legitimate relations with women were greatly in the majority. Sodomy and other unnatural vices in which men were the correspondents … were practiced about court.”
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