Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (23 page)

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This hopeful chapter of Hawaiian history had yet one sour note that was largely missed in the general jubilation. There is evidence that Admiral Thomas, while accepting the homage of the islanders, had effected the restoration less out of outrage at what Paulet had done, or from a sense of justice. Likely he acted more out of pique that Paulet, an upstart young enough to be his son, had gained such an inflated view of his own importance that he undertook to correspond directly with London rather than through the fleet commander—himself. When William Richards returned to Hawai‘i he imparted to Samuel Castle that he had been told—he did not remember if by Lord Aberdeen himself or by his undersecretary—“that if Admiral Thomas had not restored the flag, the British government would not have done so.”
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Independence now seemed even more precious, and it became even clearer what kind of imperial bullet Hawai‘i had dodged when word came of the fate of Tahiti—the French had seized it and declared a protectorate. “Poor Queen Pomare,” committed Laura Judd to her journal, “is dispossessed of power and property. The people are strongly attached to the Protestant faith, and numbers refuse submission to Roman Catholic masters, and have fled to the mountains. They will doubtless be hunted down and compelled to surrender.”
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She proved to be correct but had no idea that it would take the French four years and heavy losses to secure their empire in the South Pacific.

The American commissioner, George Brown, newly on station, echoed her sentiments when

the French frigate Boussole arrived from Tahiti … with the news of the taking possession of the Society Islands by the French, in complete sovereignty, & the dethronement of the Queen. Poor soul I pity her, but this never would have happened had the English government & Eng missionaries done what they were in duty bound to do. It seems that the French admiral arrived there with a squadron on the 2d Octr with the expressed intention of landing the French Commissioner, and informing the Queen that the French King had accepted the Protectorate of her islands. But the Queen refusing to haul down the flag which had been given her by the Capt of the Eng frigate Vindictive, the French admiral chose to consider it an insult, and she still refusing, after representations & threats were made to her, he landed his troops & took possession of
all the islands.
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It seemed as though the Pacific had gone mad with imperial seizure.

9.
A Nation Among Nations

The Honolulu of the mid-1840s, at the height of the American whaling boom, was a far cry from the dusty fishing village of a half century before. On January 9, 1847, the
Polynesian
published an assay of the city that was more detailed than a census would have been. They counted 1,347 residential dwellings, 875 of grass, 345 of adobe, and 127 of wood, stone (which meant cut coral), or a mixture of both. None of them were of brick; Hawaiian clay lacked the binder necessary for brickmaking so adobe was substituted, and those walls had to be maintained, because they melted beneath the rain, leaving piles of formless goo “ankle-deep” around their perimeters. Of the twelve finest stone houses, two belonged to the former missionaries who entered government service, Gerrit Judd and William Richards. Most of the rest were owned by chiefs.

The
Polynesian
estimated the population of the city at ten thousand, of whom 617 were “foreigners,” mostly American, followed by British, about a dozen French, and a scattering of other nationalities, plus 472 foreign-born who had become naturalized subjects of the king. In addition there were about a hundred members of a new class of people loosely called “floaters,” native Hawaiians who had abandoned their sharecropping for the chiefs to move into the city, work for wages, and discover a kind of independence they had never known before. For those who could afford it, foreign and native, there were four hotels located
mauka
of Hotel Street, where a comfortable room and board cost seven dollars a week, somewhat less than in a private boardinghouse.

Centered in the city’s commercial district, the foreigners’ various occupations made Honolulu, apart from being the only city in the central Pacific, a cosmopolitan crossroads worthy of its geographical importance. There were thirty-eight carpenters, twelve masons, and five painters, who stayed busy from the $170,000 of new construction that was under way. Professionally there were five doctors, five lawyers, two watchmakers, ten printers, and a bookbinder. Eight tailors, nine tinkers, and two barbers kept the public looking good; seven blacksmiths kept them mounted or rolling. Two pilots got the ships through the reef and into the harbor, to disgorge their cargoes at five commercial wharves and one government wharf, much of it destined for the eight commercial warehouses, most of which touted red fireproof slate roofs.

Also crowding the city were the “country people,” the rural
kanakas
who came to vend their wares. The Honolulu police arrest record tells an interesting tale of the relationship between these natives and the law, actual crime as opposed to moral crime, and the
kanakas
’ success in bridging that gulf: Between April 1846 and April 1847, the police arrested 2 natives for polluting a stream with human bones, 4 for attempting to pray others to death, 3 for blasphemy, 39 for breaking the Sabbath, 43 for drunkenness, 48 for fighting, 57 for gambling, 211 for theft, and 806 for fornication. But when the natives were not stealing or trying to have sex, their vending stalls were located
makai
(on the seaward side) of what became King Street, or they just importuned pedestrians. Their chickens averaged thirty cents each, ducks fifty cents, turkeys up to a dollar depending on their size. Local produce was cheap—Irish potatoes as little as two dollars a barrel, oranges two cents each—but dairy products were dear: milk twenty-five cents per half gallon, butter thirty cents a pound, eggs averaging fifty cents per dozen. Fresh beef, though, was just six cents per pound, about half the cost of mutton.

For construction, lumber came in all precut sizes from the Pacific Northwest, as did premilled doors, windows, and moldings, kegs of nails, and window weights—enough iron to make a precontact native faint. Mariners also found boathooks, whale line, blubber hooks, sail canvas and huge curving needles to mend them, even anchors. Seamen who came into port sick or hurt found treatment in the American Hospital, which treated 156 of them in the previous year, or the British Hospital, which doctored 63. French sailors doubtless preferred the French Hospital, which treated 9.

Of consumer goods, there were hats and caps as disparate as Glengarry and Guayaquil; dry goods from Chinese satin to Scottish cambric to English wool to American duck; and a world market of ladies’ fashion, including unmentionables of the finest make. Gentlemen could purchase cigars from Manila or even Havana, and if they could withstand the missionary glare they could choose wine from Bordeaux, Madeira, Sicily, and more—or carbonated sodas for the temperate. The general stores were a riot of playing cards, bath salts, writing paper, steel pens, lead pencils, sealing wax, riding tack, including bridles and whips, soap, glue, spermaceti candles, and Jew’s harps.
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To administer the cosmopolitan new capital the king provided a vastly modernized government, but that had been a hard study and he had not done it alone. In fact, it was Hawai‘i’s good fortune that during this time the chiefs still held real power. After his adolescent rebellion against the oversight of Kina‘u, they eventually had enough of his self-indulgence. They jailed his Tahitian favorite, Kaomi, for a time, and in other ways impressed on the king that it was time to live up to his responsibilities. Once broken to harness, and even while he was suffering varying degrees of lovesickness for his sister, he undertook the transition from Kauikeaouli to King Kamehameha III.

Decades of foreign contact, years of close observation of the missionaries, and the rapid Westernization of their society convinced the chiefs that, until they codified their laws in a Western way,
haoles
would continue to act as they pleased and appeal to their own governments for protection from what, in their eyes, amounted to no more than tribal custom. On January 5, 1835, the king promulgated a penal code prescribing punishments for homicide, theft, adultery, fraud, and drunkenness. The chiefs also desired to have their rights and responsibilities to foreign nations spelled out, but no one in the islands was competent to advise them in matters of law. Through William Richards they requested the ABCFM in 1836 to send them someone to instruct and advise them in politics; that brought a quick refusal, as it clearly crossed the Board’s line against political involvement. So at the king’s request Richards himself resigned from the mission to become royal adviser, translator, and instructor in “political economy,” starting in July 1838. The king and
kuhina nui
—Kina‘u until her death and Kekauluohi thereafter—and the council of chiefs heard Richards’s lessons with focus and attention.

Their decrees began to take Western form: “Be it enacted by the King and Chiefs of the Sandwich Islands, in council assembled.…” And then on June 7, 1839, Kamehameha III issued the Declaration of Rights, a first and a signal turning point for the kingdom. While the document was written under Richards’s general direction, much of the work was carried out by Boaz Mahune, a graduate of the Lahainaluna Seminary. He had become recognized as one of Hawai‘i’s ablest scholars, he was appointed secretary to the king, and he refined the paper several times after consultations with king and council. Thus one important torch was passed in the Hawaiian Declaration of Rights: Hawai‘i now had its own native acolytes ready to claim and own Western political philosophy and adapt it to the islands’ culture and circumstances. The philosophy of the document was unmistakably Western, even American, even as its language was just as unmistakably Hawaiian: “God hath made of one blood all nations of men, to dwell on the face of the earth in unity and blessedness. God has also bestowed certain rights alike on all men, and all chiefs, and all people of all lands. These are some of the rights He has given alike to every man and every chief: life, limb, liberty, the labor of his hands, and productions of his mind.”

Until this document the common
kanaka
, while not technically a serf because he was not bound to the land, yet had no redress against a chief, except to leave and seek the patronage of some other chief. The Hawaiian Declaration of Rights opened a chasm away from the old days that could never be bridged again; there was good reason that the paper became known as Hawai‘i’s Magna Carta.

Scarcely a month after its promulgation, Captain Laplace and the frigate
L’Artémise
sallied into Honolulu and distracted the country with his raid in promotion of Catholicism and French wine. Once that annoyance was past, it was time to fulfill the Declaration’s promise with an actual constitution. This was brought forth on October 8, 1840, another preeminently Western document in which the king laid down his absolute power. He and the
kuhina nui
still shared executive authority—a uniquely Hawaiian safeguard against runaway tyranny—with lesser powers accorded four island governors: those of Hawai‘i; Maui and the leeward islands; O‘ahu; and Kaua‘i and its dependencies. The instrument also provided for a representative house, elected by the people, giving the
kanakas
a voice in government for the first time, and for a supreme court, comprising the king,
kuhina nui
, and four judges to be appointed by the lower house. The existing council of chiefs was rolled over into a house of nobles, of whom fourteen would perform a function roughly similar to any upper house of a legislature. Significantly, it included women as well as men, a continuation of the traditionally meaningful role that women played in ruling circles. Among them, in addition to the
kuhina nui
, were Keohokalole, the mother of the Kalakaua dynasty, and Hoapiliwahine, recently the widow of the solid Hoapili.

The 1840 constitution also contained a subtle but important change of style. Without remark or explanation, the official appellation “Sandwich Islands” was quietly dropped in favor of “Hawaiian Islands,” a permanent alteration that reflected both the native preference that had always been in use, and American satisfaction to dispense with this first tie to England. The week before the constitution’s promulgation, the
Polynesian
’s American editor, J. J. Jarves, published his opinion that “nothing so denationalizes a people than to change their language.… the natives have ever used ‘Hawaii nei’ as applicable to these islands,” and Jarves maintained that their sense of patriotism should be “studiously encouraged.”
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The document had important practical consequences beyond structuring the government, and even beyond providing an avenue of redress for the
maka‘ainana
for the first time. The new constitution gave foreigners, and more to the point foreign governments, confidence in the country’s judicial system, and in fact “was a key element in keeping the sovereignty of the Hawaiian monarch intact.”
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The growing influence of foreigners and particularly Americans in the bureaucracy during the rule of Kamehameha III demonstrated, on the one hand, the king’s desire to staff his administration with the efficient and the able. On the other hand, it also made clear just how limited the reservoir of talent really was. In 1842 the king prevailed on the multiskilled Gerrit Judd to follow Richards in resigning from the mission to be his adviser, and through subsequent years others in the foreign community referred to Judd with some jaundice as “Minister of Everything,” as he held the portfolios of foreign minister (November 1843 to March 1845), interior minister (March 1845 to February 1846), and finance minister (April 1846 to September 1853). Richard Armstrong followed still later to superintend the kingdom’s school system.