Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (19 page)

For the decade of the Royal School’s operation, the Cookes could comfort themselves that they produced bilingual heirs and heiresses who were educated in geography, history, and the social graces, five of whom acquitted themselves as equals in the royal courts of Europe. But at what the Cookes considered to be their greater task, of producing genuinely converted, Christian youth, they admitted defeat. The children were all baptized, and marched into church every Sunday two by two for ten years, but of deeper conviction of the heart the Cookes saw no evidence. “The continual fact that there are no conversions,” Amos Cooke reported home to the ABCFM, “is exceedingly humiliating & make [
sic
] it apparent to all, that we
fail
in many things, in
all
come short.”
24

After ten years of schooling, the operation came to a close with what the Cookes considered a success, the marriage of their last student (and one of their more peaceable ones) Princess Bernice Pauahi to Charles Reed Bishop of New York on May 4, 1850. Modern scholarly commentary criticizes the Royal School for being inherently Anglocentric, which it was, and for its unique equating of Christian civilization with Boston, which it did. It also finds the school, and the missionaries, disrespectful of, if not oblivious to, any virtues of the native culture they encountered.
25
Without the training received at the Royal School, however, its graduates would never have made the impression on, and gained the respect of, the world’s royal courts, or conducted the affairs of their nation as ably as they did. That Hawai‘i became a coveted prize of global imperialism would have occurred in any event; what consideration the royal administration did receive, from Britain, from France, from the United States, was the Royal School’s success. The school most certainly did fail in its mission to turn its pupils into little Americans, but the education they received empowered those students in their later noble or royal lives to preserve their culture, and that was the nation’s success.

*   *   *

Lahainaluna was judged a success, and the Chiefs’ Children’s School was up and going, but it left the missionaries, many of them now with growing families, in a dilemma over educating their own children. It was expensive, not to say emotionally wrenching, to send them home to boarding schools, but the Hawaiian children in the common schools were being taught in their own language, which the Americans did not think proper for their own. And there was the question of how to preserve their own children’s morals in such a vividly sexualized society. They knew how raw it was, but seldom wrote about such indelicate things. One exception was when William Ellis warned them of the danger of allowing their children to fraternize too freely with natives; down in the Society Islands, racial mixing had not gone well. Samuel Whitney sailed to Tahiti to see for himself, and when he came back his wife, Mercy, wrote a breathless report of it. Several of the missionary children there

have been ruined.… One was confined with a bastard child by a native man, not 3 months since. Three daughters of one of the Missionaries were not long since guilty of admitting 3 native men by means of a servant to their bed chamber, & secreting them under the beds till night, when the mother hearing a noise, lit a candle & went into the room, but on seeing the men, fainted & fell & they made their escape.… Two lads, sons of Missionaries, were lately expelled [from the South Seas Academy], for illicit connections with native girls.

Her catalog went on. Clearly, educating their growing broods in company with native children was a dangerous idea.
26
The ABCFM itself was little help, discouraging an exodus of children back home with such platitudes as they would be spoiled by their grandparents, or God would use them as examples of decorum for the native children. The missionary families reached their own conclusions, some sending children home, some retaining them in the islands. Interestingly, some of the missionary wives, as their families increased, voiced their frustration at being pinned down to domestic drudgery when they had come to Hawai‘i to convert the heathen. They had hoped for a missionary appointment before they met their husbands, and married them largely for the shared ambition to venture into the world to do good. They were not too bashful to point out that they had ways to establish bonds with the native people (witness Ka‘ahumanu’s fascination with their clothes) that their preachy husbands did not, and they were not being well utilized. Mercy Whitney found her “usefulness among the heathen … greatly impeded, by having to devote so much of our time to the education & care of our children.” Others, such as Maria Chamberlain (wife of Levi, the missionaries’ commercial agent), were content to model Christian womanhood by their example, but she particularly was not enthusiastic at the prospect of providing lessons to her seven children at home.
27
(Ironically, when the American ladies were able to interact with the native women and provide an example of being a good wife, it robbed the latter of “the very aspects of Hawaiian culture which afforded Hawaiian women some measure of autonomy within their own social system.”
28
)

In 1841 the missionaries began to organize a school for their own at Punahou, in the cool of the Manoa Valley above Waikiki. It was on land that had been given, interestingly enough, to Hiram Bingham by Boki and Liliha, who were not otherwise great supporters of social transformation.
29
The first class was held in a thatched-roof adobe building on July 11, 1842, making it the first English-language school west of the Rocky Mountains; fifteen students attended the first day, but there were more than thirty by the end of the year. The first teachers were Daniel and Emily (Ballard) Dole of Maine; he was a graduate of Bowdoin College and Bangor Theological Seminary, and they had arrived with the Ninth Company of missionaries the year before. Emily Dole died on April 27, 1844, four days after giving birth to their third son, Sanford Ballard Dole, who became an important figure in his own generation.

The year that Mrs. Dole died, Marcia Smith of the Eighth Company was imported to help with the teaching, and William and Mary Rice of the Ninth Company transferred from Maui to supervise the boarding students. William Richards undertook to turn the school into a college where graduates of the Royal School could complete their education.
30
In one guise or another, after receiving a royal charter in 1849, Punahou grew into a distinguished institution.

7.
A Sweet Taste

Before discovery, the Hawaiian Islands contained about 2,700 species of plants, most of them “endemic,” or not found anywhere else in the world. (Introduced foreign species now outnumber them by almost two to one, resulting in many crises of botanical survival.) As islands go these were a relatively new emergence from the sea, less than ten million years old, too isolated from other landmasses to share many species with them naturally. When the first aboriginal explorers arrived from southern Polynesia, they brought with them plants associated with some of their gods: gourds and sweet potatoes for Lono, breadfruit and coconuts as emblems of Ku‘, the bananas of Kanaloa, and the taro, bamboo, and sugarcane of the most powerful god, Kane.
1

Europeans had regularly supplemented the local diet. After Cook had brought onions, pumpkins, melons, and mutton, Vancouver had brought in addition to cattle a variety of garden seeds. Observers in the early 1820s recorded chilis, asparagus, turnips, cabbages, and horseradish, in addition to garden flowers that would have been familiar in Europe and America. When HMS
Blonde
arrived in 1825, it carried not just the caskets of Kamehameha II and Kamamalu but a virtual orchard of sample fruit and nut trees to begin cultivating on the islands: fig, plum, apple, cherry, peach, and walnut, and grapevines. Stopping in Rio de Janeiro, she picked up orange trees and more grapevines, and also thirty coffee plants that were offloaded and consigned to the care of Don Francisco de Paula Marín. If anyone could keep them alive, that famous farmer could.

Sugarcane was not native to Hawai‘i. It originated in the islands of what became Indonesia, and spread with human migration through Australasia and the South Pacific. There were many different varieties of it, which cross-pollinated readily into new hybrids. The Pacific islanders did not process crystalline sugar; the canes, whose inner fibers comprised about 12 percent sugar, were cultivated to be cut and chewed for the sweet raw juice.

The first people in Hawai‘i to conceive of the commercial production of sugar were from China, where the art of making sugar had been known for generations. Their first recorded pass through the islands was in 1788, ten years after Cook, by which time traders had begun to arrive. In that year Kamehameha saw about four dozen Chinese carpenters, who had built the forty-ton schooner
North West America
for Capt. John Meares. Thinking ahead to his own fleet, the Conqueror asked Meares, without success, to leave him a couple to build him a ship. One of Vancouver’s officers found a Chinese in the king’s suite in 1794, and Chinese probably jumped ship regularly during the sandalwood years; John Papa ‘I‘i remembered three of them being well established in Honolulu around 1810. “Because the faces of these people were unusual and their speech … was strange, a great number of persons went to look at them.”
2
In 1802 a mysterious Chinese, his name not recorded, was seen to be making sugar on the island of Lana‘i. It was presumed that he came on a vessel seeking sandalwood and left by the same conveyance.

O‘ahu witnessed a false start to a sugar industry in 1826, and it raised quite a ruckus among
ali‘i
of competing sentiments. The arrival of HMS
Blonde
brought a reunion of sorts between Governor Boki and one John Wilkinson, who had apparently agreed with Boki in London
3
to come to the islands and begin a commercial sugar operation. He arrived on the ship brittle in health and temperament; Boki turned over seven acres of his lands in the Manoa Valley, which Wilkinson put under cultivation, but he apparently had little more luck in coaxing labor from mocking islanders than Lieutenant Bligh had had in 1779. Money ran short, a flood destroyed the beginnings of a dam—sugar production requires copious quantities of water—and Wilkinson died in September 1826. Boki, perhaps seeing a way out of his sandalwood debt, increased the acreage, paid his workers generously, and built a road to the plantation. Levi Chamberlain was impressed. “If the natives persevere in cultivating the cane,” he wrote on November 1, “and manufacturing it into sugar, the nation may be supplied with that article,” and then added prophetically, “and a surplusage remain for exportation.” By February 18 a British sea captain reported that he had seen the sugar, which “looks very good indeed,” and that California might look for a shipload of it before long.

At that point Boki’s elder brother, Kalanimoku, the prime minister, seems to have pulled rank, stripped the mill from Manoa, and rebuilt it near Honolulu to expand the industry to that area. Then Kalanimoku died, Boki reasserted control, and formed a new partnership with four
haoles
for the production—being Boki—of rum. His investors expended several thousand dollars in converting the mill into a distillery, but by then Ka‘ahumanu had converted to Christianity; she decreed rum production illegal—the new word for
kapu
—and she supported the missionaries when they refused to allow their carts, which were the only ones on the island, to haul cane if the end product was to be alcohol.
4
The authority was the queen regent’s, but goodwill for the missionaries on the hard-drinking waterfront was scarce after this.

It was also the beginning of the end for Boki. With his rum operation shut down, he opened a hotel and mercantile in downtown Honolulu, exported merchandise to Tahiti and Alaska, but likely still had difficulty breaking even in those ventures. In the fall of 1829 there arrived in Honolulu the new eighteen-gun sloop-of-war USS
Vincennes
. Though the stop was intended only to be an amicable port call, the American merchants in Honolulu prevailed on the captain to speak to the government about the enormous amount of debt they were carrying on their books, which the chiefs owed them in
iliahi
futures. They reached a settlement of $48,000 for 6,865
piculs
of sandalwood, or something over 450 tons of the trees now virtually extinct in Hawai‘i, a debt of which Boki was apportioned one-quarter. This is what prompted Boki to follow news of large sandalwood stands in the New Hebrides, taking four hundred men in two ships, of whom only twenty ever returned to Hawai‘i after dolorous misadventures. Boki was either lost at sea, or marooned, or more likely just sailed away from his problems and started over near Samoa. Thus Boki, ironically the chief who more than any other clung to the traditional ways and its privileges, became probably the first refugee from American-style debt.

The deal for the first large American-owned sugar plantation was made in 1835, when the royal governor of Kaua‘i leased 980 acres for fifty years at three hundred dollars per year to Ladd & Company of Honolulu. The founders of that concern were not missionaries, but they were wholly contained in the Calvinist New England culture that subscribed to the missionary effort. William Ladd was twenty-eight, a native of Hallowell, Maine; Peter Brinsmade was three years older, from Hartford, Connecticut, a graduate of Bowdoin College who had attended both Andover and Yale Theological Seminaries. The two were brothers-in-law, married to relatives of Lucy Goodale Thurston, who was a keystone of the First Company of missionaries. William Northey Hooper was the youngest at twenty-six, from Manchester, Massachusetts, also married. The trio had arrived in Honolulu on July 27, 1833, on the sailing ship
Hellespont
, and immediately opened a mercantile on the waterfront. Lacking funds to improve a wharf, they sank an old hulk to serve the purpose, while the families shared the space on the second floor of their warehouse. They were something of an anomaly in the business district. Their connection to the Thurstons, and Brinsmade’s background in theology, gave them good relations with the missionaries—perhaps one reason why they received little business from their neighbors, who called them the “Pious Traders,” and they struggled for a year and a half.