Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (26 page)

Usually, however, Wyllie found it necessary to instruct emissaries and send them abroad with powers to negotiate. Undertaking careful diplomatic minuets from his corner of the globe and making sure that complete understandings had been reached would have been prohibitively time consuming. Mail service still moved at the caprice of wind and wave—and at the sufferance of distracted mariners. Chief Justice William Little Lee discovered that a newspaper sent him by a friend in Buffalo, New York, had undertaken a remarkable journey before reaching him: “From the U.S. it [rounded] Cape Horn and first landed at Valparaiso. From thence it took passage on a Chilean vessel for Tahiti. At Tahiti it exchanged the Chilean vessel for a French Man-of-War, the ‘Sarcelle,’ and went to Callao and the city of Lima in Peru, and then by the same vessel came with a large American mail to Honolulu. But the stupid Frenchman, forgetting that he had a mail on board, sailed without landing it, and carried the newspaper to Christmas Island, where after an absence of a month, it returned to Honolulu and made a safe landing, all ‘tattered and torn.’” But Lee confessed that to his amazement, “I have never had any letters directed to me at the Sandwich Islands miscarry,” which was a comfort because, “to lose letters at this distance from home is provoking beyond all measure.”
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Interisland mail, at least, was soon put on a more regularized basis; in 1851 Hawai‘i followed the United States by only four years in the issuance of prepaid postage stamps, an innovation first introduced by the British in 1840. The rate was thirteen cents to send a letter home: five cents for postal handling in Hawai‘i, two cents for the ship’s captain, and six cents for forwarding in the United States.
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That paid for letters up to one-half ounce in weight—hence the habit of several missionaries to write two pages of text on one sheet, one written at a right angle to the other, to save paper and avoid additional postage, but they could be maddening to try to read.

When free domestic postage ended in that year, the missionaries saw to it that the legislation provided for natives to continue sending letters without charge, as an encouragement to practice their skills in reading and writing. The postal service was placed under the interior minister, who at that time was Prince Lot Kapuaiwa, who agreed that despite some financial burden to the government, he would endorse free postage for the islanders as “contributing in some degree to the advancement of the nation in civilization.” The native Hawaiians, employing their often-demonstrated skill at descrying loopholes, began using the postal service to ship large parcels such as sacks of fruit, with the expectation that the attached letter qualified the whole lot to post for free. A new civil code was enacted in 1859 that imposed a two-cent postal rate for all domestic correspondence, and despite the missionaries’ fears that native letter writing would be discouraged, postal use increased steadily.
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Hawai‘i’s increasing cultural amenities and maturing social life, nicely appointed as they were, were secondary in importance to the program of governmental reforms that Kamehameha III pursued doggedly under the tutelage of his American ex-missionary advisers. The changes that he undertook in the 1839 Declaration of Rights and the 1840 constitution articulated basic changes in the hierarchical structure of the society, but they had to be given effect with a whole program of enabling legislation that would earn the respect of the great powers. First came the creation of a treasury board in May 1842, composed of John Papa ‘I‘i,
kahu
of the Royal School; the king’s secretary, Timothy Ha‘alilio; and the trusted Dr. Judd. It took them four years to do it, but organizing the country’s finances cleared the national debt. The treasury board also had the job of taking the first steps toward a vast reordering of land tenure in the kingdom.

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.

*   *   *

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.”
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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 ship 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,
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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.