Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (27 page)

Once they were eligible, some ten thousand
kanakas
applied for ownership of the plots they had long been cultivating, and at the end of the day, the total of all such land distributed to the
maka‘ainana
was only about thirty thousand acres. This was less a miscarriage than it seems at first, for the few acres of one
kuleana
given to a
kanaka
was fertile, arable land, whereas vast tracts of the chiefly or royal lands were taken up with lava flows, escarpments, or other features that were not materially productive.

Thus the first assay of the Great
Mahele
was that in a real sense it
was
the “great division” of the lands, with the net result that some ten thousand commoners actually owned land, a prospect that would have been unthinkable a generation before. But if the road to hell was paved with good intentions, then the road to a completely Americanized Hawai‘i was paved with the Great
Mahele
. At the outset virtually everyone agreed that its effect would be to transform the class of
kanaka
tenants into landowning stakeholders in their own country, but its actual effect, disastrously, was the opposite.

For the individual commoners the biggest factor involved in receiving desirable land was luck, and many of them wound up with less land than was actually needed to support their families. A busy government commissioner might assign one family a plot containing a taro patch of only two or three acres. But taro depletes the soil, and a patch must lie fallow for at least two years before being replanted; an agent who understood this awarded larger tracts. The luckiest commoners were those for whom the missionaries acted as commissioners, especially those missionaries who came to understand the tension between the tenants and the chiefs, whose disregard for the
kanakas
could be quite heartless. Such a missionary was willing to bite deeper into the chiefly lands and might award a
kuleana
of thirty acres or even more
16
to insure that the
maka‘ainana
really did become self-sufficient. Chief Justice William Little Lee, during his stint as chairman of the Land Commission, received many letters from commoners so anxious for sustainable tracts of land that they even addressed him as their
Pu‘uhonua
, their City of Refuge, to whom they looked for a new beginning in life.
17

But the real poison pill that doomed the Great
Mahele
was not the small size of average plots awarded to
kanaka
families. It was the passage, a few weeks before the Kuleana Act, of the Alien Land Ownership Act. During the preceding decades, international interest in Hawai‘i had surged; its potential for trade and imperial defense were widely noticed, but the remnant feudal system of land tenure had proved a potent discouragement to foreign investment in the islands’ economy. American and European capitalists were deeply wary of sinking money into agricultural ventures (and large-scale development required vast sums of money) without some guarantee more binding than the chiefs’ smiling assurance of goodwill that their investment was secure. The provision of a Western-style constitution and courts set a system in place by which redress could be sought, but it was still illegal for foreigners to own Hawaiian land in fee simple.

Widespread misunderstanding of the Hawaiian concept of a lease had in the past been at the root of many ugly conflicts with foreign residents, European consuls in particular, but not limited to them. To Western minds one leased the whole of a property—land and improvements together. The chiefs, however, considered that one leased the improvements on the land, and enjoyed the use of the land, but they never entertained a notion that they had alienated the land itself, even for a period of time. Passage of the Alien Land Ownership Act of July 10, 1850, opened the floodgate of foreign capital, which filled the land just as thousands of native commoners found themselves in possession of real estate, however modest their acreage, that they were free to sell. Freedom to sell they understood very well, and the most sinister factor in the failure of the Great
Mahele
was that the
kanakas
, similar to American Indians at the time of forced severalty (individual ownership), had little understanding of the nature or responsibilities of ownership. Whether because of that, or because they owned parcels too small to support their families anyway, or whether they needed quick cash to doctor or bury victims of the hideous epidemics, or whether, acting on caprice, they seized a chance to have a good time in town, or to get to town and investigate making an urban living—whatever the combination of factors, the Great
Mahele
had the net effect of evicting thousands of native Hawaiians from the countryside and leaving them worse off than they were before.

*   *   *

Even as the Great
Mahele
matured over time into a feast of unintended consequences, so too did a second momentous development of 1848: After twenty-eight years of support and oversight, the ABCFM cut the Hawaiian Mission loose. It was not unexpected, as for several years a philosophical rift had been quietly but earnestly widening between Boston and the islands. As far back as 1832 the “foreign minister” of the ABCFM had been Rufus Anderson, a Maine man now of fifty-two. Like many of the missionaries he was a product of Andover Theological Seminary; unlike them, he nursed a tightly held vision of missionary work that was purely evangelical in nature: Preach, move on, and preach again. Their business, as he was wont to say, was with the unbelievers, not the believers. Teaching, doctoring, and pastoring were not their concern—high irony as it was for the issue to reach a boil during the epidemics. Natives were to be trained as rapidly as possible to take charge of native congregations. Hiram Bingham led the others to Hawai‘i twelve years before Anderson took charge, Anderson had been spurring them for a further sixteen years, and even then Hawai‘i had only a couple of seminaries and a handful of native Christian graduates.
18

It was all tidy theorizing from a man who had never served in a mission station (he had wanted to go to India but the church kept him in a secretarial capacity). Had his model been followed, the Congregationalist missions in Hawai‘i would have been not just failures but abject failures. The more than one hundred missionaries and wives taught and doctored and pastored because that was what was required for Christianity to take root in the islands. William Kanui and Prince Kaumuali‘i had been examples of giving responsibility to native converts too soon. Moreover the missionaries enmeshed themselves in the lives of the islanders because they cared for them. In 1820 they encountered a native culture that practiced human sacrifice and infanticide, in which the multitude of commoners were beholden to and terrorized by a tiny caste of chiefs. Modern scholars criticize the missionaries for their equating Boston morality with Christian virtues, and they have a point—apart from a heavy dose of “presentism” (that is, the fallacy of judging nineteenth-century people through twenty-first century sensibilities). But those who rhapsodize over the natives’ lost innocence and languorous sensuality also gloss over the horrors of precontact life. The change that the missionaries wrought, turning it within a generation into a constitutional monarchy with one of the highest literacy rates in the world, was stunning. The habits of centuries could not have been broken with a couple of sermons and a lecture series.

But Rufus Anderson was certain that he knew best. Others in the ABCFM knew that his patience was wearing thin. “Whatever methods may be adopted,” one of the Boston insiders warned them in 1844, “you must pursue this object of raising up … successors in the gospel ministry.… Think as favorably as you can of those whom you have brought forward, confide in them as much as you can … and in this manner aim to make them … respect themselves.” The issue was considered in Honolulu; they had been licensing native preachers since 1841, and they took steps to increase the pace, but it did not happen fast enough, and Anderson lowered the boom in April 1846. “The great point is,” he wrote them, “
to get a NATIVE MINISTRY.
In this I understand you to have failed.”

To Anderson’s credit, so far from desiring the Americanization of the islands, he did regard the expeditious training of native clergy as essential to the future independence of the kingdom. “I believe that if the churches are officered by foreigners, the offices of the government will continue to have foreign occupants. Nothing will save the native government but a native ministry placed over the native churches.… It is better to have a very imperfect native ministry,” he insisted, “than to have none at all.… The most effectual rebuke for ambitious foreigners in the civil government, will be … creating native pastors for all the native churches.… When the natives see that you are putting them forward in the churches, they will feel an impulse … to become qualified for the posts … and an upward direction will be given to the native mind.”
19

That was one part of the story. The other was a sea change in the ABCFM’s policy toward the missionaries’ involvement in Hawaiian life. Until then they had been forbidden to engage in politics, and were discouraged from becoming citizens or owning property. (Judd and Richards had had to resign from the mission in order to accede to the king’s request to help him run the government.) When others of the missionaries began returning home, ostensibly to oversee their children’s education but almost certainly never to return, Anderson realized that he did not want what he called this “homeward current” either. Thus an accommodation was reached, by which the ABCFM relaxed the restrictions, making it easier for them to live in Hawai‘i as Hawaiians, and to help make the mission self-supporting as he weaned it off of home support.

In 1847 the ABCFM reduced the Hawaiian missionaries’ salaries to five hundred dollars per year—half the level of support given those sent to China. And the timing was terrible; news of the discovery of gold in California reached Hawai‘i before becoming known in most of the United States, and starting in 1848, the diversion of goods and produce to sell in California caused prices to skyrocket in the islands. “You will like to know how we live in these times,” Castle wrote a friend soon after. “Well, I will tell you something of how we live—or, rather, how we don’t. We have not bought a bunch of bananas in many months.… much of the time we have neither Irish nor sweet potatoes.… Almost every species of fruit is beyond our means.”
20

Some of the missionaries got jobs, some took in boarders, some prepared to return home. With the closing of the Royal School, Amos and Juliette Cooke were among those who found themselves at loose ends. “Pray for me!” Cooke wrote to his New England relations. “I love to preach, but, you know, my talents are limited. I left a mercantile life to prepare to preach. Shall I now leave the prospect of preaching to return to my former life?”
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That question was answered for him when Levi Chamberlain, who had long assisted Castle in running the mission’s supply distribution, died of consumption on July 29, 1849, and one of the workers at their depository left to edit the
Polynesian
. Badly in need of help, Castle and Cooke, in a long night of discussion with their wives, decided to form a partnership and capitalize the mission’s supply base into a commercial mercantile. Their plan was still to sell supplies to the missionaries at cost, but then recover some profit by selling to the general public as well.

It was not an easy plan to implement. Many of the missionaries, particularly those on the outer islands, had each believed for years that he was at the end of the line when it came to receiving badly needed supplies, and now all feared that they would be gouged, notwithstanding Castle and Cooke’s determination to pass materials along with no markup. Then the ABCFM itself weighed in, requiring the two to charge 5 percent over cost even to the several missions to pay for the company’s overhead—a condition they were in some position to make, as they offered favorable terms to Castle and Cooke to privatize the mission’s inventory of supplies. As a single exchange of letters required the better part of a year, it seemed doubtful that terms would ever be consummated. Both Castle and Cooke became naturalized subjects of the king during 1850, the new firm of Castle & Cooke obtained wholesale and retail merchants’ licenses on June 3, 1851, and the two principals signed a partnership agreement two days later. The ABCFM retained them as agents for the mission at five hundred dollars per year, allowed them to draw on the warehouse’s funds for start-up expenses, offloaded unneeded merchandise at cost, and gave them permission to open a second location if business warranted.

As Castle & Cooke used its location in Honolulu, the center of the kingdom’s commerce, to open a multifaceted business concern, the scores of missionaries scattered across the islands were hard put to keep their operations together. At Kohala on the northern tip of the Big Island, Elias and Ellen Bond fretted for years how to keep their flock of believers faithful and out of trouble. The Bonds were from Maine, he had just turned twenty-seven when, following the pattern of so many of their predecessors, they married on September 29, 1840; he was ordained the next day, they sailed for Hawai‘i six weeks later and set to work producing their eleven children. They came with the Ninth Company, arriving in Honolulu in May 1841 in time to see the splendid Kawaiaha‘o Church being raised. Before he could entertain any visions of his own grandeur, Bond was dispatched to windy Kohala, where Isaac and Emily Bliss had been laboring in a modest thatch church for four years. By his own sweat Bond expanded the mission complex, adding a kitchen, washroom, carpenter shop, and other improvements, and he repaired the storm-battered ‘Iole Mission Station while ministering to the flock at the Conqueror’s own birthplace.