Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (37 page)

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Now it was time to really be a king. After four decades the royal residence that faced the legislative assembly building was nearing the end of its useful life. Called the ‘Iolani Palace, it was a palace only in the meaning that it housed royalty; it was really a middling large pavilion, designed for ceremonial functions more than living in. It was built of wood and thus suffered the fate of all wooden structures in Hawai‘i over time, riddled by insects to the point of collapse. The king commissioned the building of a new ‘Iolani Palace that, while not on the scale of a Versailles or a Caserta, would at least allow the Hawaiian crown to conduct its business in a state somewhat similar to the rest of the world’s monarchs.

And then, if he had accomplished so much on his trip to the United States, what might he do on a trip around the world? At a cabinet meeting on January 11, 1881, Kalakaua announced his intention to make a royal circumnavigation, something that no other monarch, from anywhere, had ever done. There was little time to discuss it. He would take Attorney General William Armstrong with him, and his chamberlain, Charles Judd; he appointed Lili‘uokalani as regent, and sailed on January 20. Usually dismissed as an opening extravagance of the king who gained fame as the “Merrie Monarch,” Kalakaua on his world tour actually did what monarchs still do: He promoted his country and its business interests, he built or cemented relationships, and in fact he conducted a fair amount of state business out of pocket.

The first call was at San Francisco to huddle with the sugar refiners about business there, and then he reversed course for Japan. Twenty-four rough days out of San Francisco fighting high seas and headwinds, Kalakaua’s party docked in Yokohama on March 4, and a week later were ensconced in suites at the Imperial Palace. Watchful for the dignity of his country, the king expressed his satisfaction at being billeted in the same rooms that had hosted President Grant and the Duke of Genoa. He was also able straightaway to conclude his most important business, an agreement for an increase of Japanese workers. “What you desired, mostly,” he wrote to Chancellor C. C. Harris, “skilled labor, can be had by proper applications through the Foreign Office at any time.… I would take no heed of what the foreign news papers say. No foreign news paper is allowed in Tokio. So their judgment cannot be taken as a fair representation of the inward working and policy of the country.” A second letter, to Foreign Minister W. L. Green, alerted him that he had concluded an agreement for a treaty allowing Japanese courts expanded jurisdiction “to the exclusion of the extraterritorial clause,” which would soon be forwarded to Green by the Japanese Foreign Office. He particularly asked Green to press the princess regent for her approval. The king was anxious that Lili‘uokalani gain a reputation as a successful administrator and believed that this would be set down to her credit.
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During his sojourn Kalakaua was treated to visits to the naval academy, an arsenal, a civil engineering school, a paper factory, and a printing office, among others, and he was the honored center of a military parade. All this left him with a feeling of the warmest fraternity with Emperor Mutsuhito.
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The Japanese politely raised a barrier, however, when the Hawaiian king ventured one too-intimate proposal. Kalakaua sensed that at the end of all games, Hawaii was too small and weak to exist indefinitely as an independent country. He believed that it must, eventually, come under the dominion of either the Americans, whose cultural and commercial encroachment was already pervasive, or the Japanese—an outside chance, but one that he thought he could perhaps improve. The king’s youngest sister, Princess Miriam Likelike, had married Scottish businessman Archibald Cleghorn, and their daughter, Princess Victoria Ka‘iulani, was now five years old. Lili‘u and Dominis had no children, which made Ka‘iulani, after her mother, heiress apparent to the throne. Gently Kalakaua explored the possibility of Ka‘iulani’s betrothal to a Japanese imperial prince. That government, giving no hint of its mortification at the thought of racial intermarriage, declined with fulsome thanks on the ground that the prince was already betrothed to another.
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Hardly was the king out of Hawai‘i when rumors and diplomatic intrigues began swirling about his actions and intentions. The king’s increasing debt to the sugar industry was common knowledge, and the story gained currency that his true purpose in traveling abroad was to find a buyer for the country or some part of it, or to use it as collateral in securing a large foreign loan. Those stories reached the ear of James G. Blaine, the new U.S. secretary of state, who felt impelled to squash any European ambitions before they could take root. Buttonholing the French minister to Washington, Blaine characterized Kalakaua as “a false and intriguing man,” and “thought it his duty to say plainly” that the United States would never allow a sale of Hawaiian territory to happen. He made similar remarks to the British minister, Sir Edward Thornton, who passed it up to the Foreign Ministry, with the observation that Blaine’s comments left him certain that “the position of the Sandwich Islands is of such importance to the safety of the United States that they would never allow any other nation than themselves to have control over them.” The British might have a free hand anywhere else in the Pacific, as far as Blaine was concerned, but Hawai‘i was off limits. Thornton went on to suppose that, ultimately, this issue would drive the United States to take sole control of the islands.
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From the State Department the topic wafted up to the newly installed president James A. Garfield, who declared that such an action by Kalakaua would be a breach of the 1875 reciprocity treaty, which ruled out any alienation of Hawaiian territory during the life of the treaty. Blaine sent dispatches to U.S. ambassadors in European capitals to head off any attempts by Kalakaua to sell or mortgage his country by warning his hosts that the United States would not permit it.

Meanwhile, the British Foreign Ministry sent a copy of Thornton’s report to its commissioner in Honolulu, James Wodehouse. Seeing a chance to advance Britain’s case in Hawai‘i (and blithely unaware that Britain was in a phase of rapprochement with the Americans over Hawai‘i) Wodehouse used his cordial access to the queen dowager to show the letter to her, playing up the part about the American intent eventually to seize control of the country. Emma was shocked. This more than overrode her disdain for Taffy; she was a patriot and in her deep roots she was thoroughly antirepublican. Wodehouse also slipped the letter to Archibald Cleghorn, who then brought his wife, Likelike, to see it, and then to John Dominis, who asked for and received a copy to show to Lili‘uokalani herself. All were stonefaced.

Two of the English-language newspapers in Honolulu had British editors, and Wodehouse lobbied them successfully to feature the subject in their journals, with accompanying editorials critical of the United States. Finally he felt emboldened to send to the British squadron at Esquimalt, British Columbia, to dispatch a warship to Honolulu to protect British interests. Satisfied that he had started driving a wedge between the United States and its client state, Wodehouse informed London of his little venture into geopolitics and spent $250 to host an elegant party on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s birthday, which the princess regent attended and hoisted a glass to toast the British monarch’s health.

When Wodehouse heard back from London, what he received was a frosty slap. Foreign Minister Earl Granville was horrified by Wodehouse’s meddling; significant repairs must now be made with the United States, there was no need for a warship in Honolulu, and to top it off, Wodehouse had to pay for the queen’s birthday party himself.

And all this took place in response to the mere
rumor
that Kalakaua was intending to sell the kingdom. Blaine’s own horror at the scale of Chinese immigration contemplated by the sugar growers would have been assuaged had he only known the energy with which Kalakaua was working behind the sugar boys’ backs. In China in early April, foul weather nearly frustrated Kalakaua’s desire to visit Tientsin and Peking, but he persevered and was able to gain an important concession concerning Chinese labor: “First, of stopping if possible further immigration of Chinese to the Islands, without carrying with them their wives, and Secondly, to secure for our government the same privileges granted to the United States Government, the right to restrict, return or remove, the large influx of Chinese to our Islands. On these two subjects our mission has been successful.”
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The sugar boys back in Hawai‘i would have gone into fits had they known what he was doing.

Kalakaua was in Hong Kong when he wrote on April 21 that he had learned of an outbreak of smallpox in Honolulu, and was right away concerned for the success of Lili‘uokalani’s administration. “I hope Her Royal Highness will continue admister [
sic
] her government for the good of the people, for I really empathize with her … that the small pox should make its appearance, imposing upon her anxiety and extra labor.” He considered aborting his world tour and returning to Honolulu to deal with the epidemic, but a letter from Dominis that the king answered from Singapore let him know that the danger had been contained. The royal tour was costing money, and Kalakaua apologized for the single greatest expense: the manufacture of badges for the royal orders that he was handing out to the crowned heads and potentates. However, “badges have a powerful weight upon the minds of Asiatic Princes, especially those of Japan, Siam and Johore.” He noted that European monarchs had already taken care to load them down with hardware, and if Hawai‘i wished to be included in the family of significant nations, it could do no less.
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From Cairo on June 21 Kalakaua wrote his sister; he had learned that nearly three hundred Hawaiians had fallen to smallpox, and that she had led the nation in prayers to get through the epidemic. But then he loosed a broadside, showing that those years at the Royal School had not penetrated to the core of his
ali‘i
identity, wanting results and not placated by incantations: “As you are a religious and praying woman, Oh! All the religious people praise you! But what is the use of prayer after 293 lives of our poor people have gone to their everlasting place. Is it to thank Him for killing or is it to thank him for sending them to him or to the other place which. I never believed in the efficacy of prayer and consequently I never allowed myself to be ruled by the Church.… The idea of offering a prayer when hundreds a [
sic
] dying around you. To save the life of the people is to work and not pray.”
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(His old schoolmarm, Juliette Cooke, would have predicted as much. “They do not speak much against religion,” she had written of the royal children at the school, “yet their practices, conversations &c tell their true opinions.”
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)

The king went on his way through Egypt as guest of the khedive, noting that he had intended to buy a set of pearls for Kapi‘olani, but the five-hundred-dollar price was simply too much. In Italy he met King Umberto I and then Pope Leo XIII, then toured Europe, in all capitals being received, and acting like, a fellow monarch. He returned via the United States and arrived home on October 29, having been gone seven months—the average amount of time that it once took a shipload of missionaries to reach the islands from America.

The new ‘Iolani Palace was nearing completion, less the subject of remark on its beauty, which was extraordinary, than on its cost, which was some three hundred thousand dollars—equivalent to an entire annual budget. It was imposing in its scale but had astonishingly few rooms. The forty-four tall windows spaced around this first floor looked out from only four principal chambers. Crossing the intricately tiled floor of the veranda, one entered the Grand Hall that extended straight through the building. At the far end a broad straight staircase of gleaming koa and other exotic woods rose to the second story. Eight bronze chandeliers hung from the elaborately plastered ceiling, their even, yellowish electric light not flickering like the previous gas lamps. Technology, as the British astronomers discovered, was Kalakaua’s favorite hobby, and new inventions replenished his sense of wonder and amusement. The lights and their electric generator had doubled the cost of the building, but he had taken great pride that his ‘Iolani Palace had electric lights, indoor plumbing, and a telephone even before the White House of the American presidents in Washington could boast of such amenities.

The second floor of the palace contained six rooms—the king’s bedroom, study, and music room on the west side, and the queen’s bedroom and two spare bedrooms on the east side. The latter were reserved mostly for use by Kapi‘olani’s sisters, Virginia and Victoria. The latter was the widowed mother of three sons who, after the immediate family, were the heirs of the kingdom. The great grief of Kapi‘olani’s life was that, as much as she adored children, she bore none. Thus, more than public spirit was involved in her establishing the Kapi‘olani Maternity Home for native mothers and their babies, in a house that Victoria had bequeathed for the purpose when she died in January 1884.

A lavish banquet inaugurated the palace on December 27, 1882, followed by the coronation six weeks later, timed to the ninth anniversary of Kalakaua’s accession. Crowns were the last remaining confirmation of the new dynasty, and they and the ceremony were paid for with appropriations from the previous two legislatures. The crowns were gold but not gaudy, the circlet of his crown thinly spaced with small diamonds, the circlet of her smaller crown equally thinly spaced with small opals. A modest pavilion was built on the grounds just southeast of the palace, and connected by a covered ramp. The ceremony was brief, an amalgam of European ritual—crown, scepter, sword, and ring—with Hawaiian custom—
kapu
stick to create a sacred space,
kahili
to proclaim his rank, and the great feather cloak of the Conqueror for continuity. Those Americans of the party critical of him, who might have been inclined to be moved by the coronation, or to accept it as a ceremony of some gravity, were disabused of the notion at the sight of Kalakaua crowning himself, picking up the crown by the golden bead that surmounted the arches and, according to one observer, plopping it on his own head with all the dignity of a golf cap. (Another ceremony during the festivities was the dedication, finally, of the heroic statue of the Conqueror by Thomas Ridgeway Gould.) With the coronation Kalakaua saw a chance to finally repair the rift between his family and the queen dowager. He issued new royal patents, designating Kapi‘olani as first lady of the realm, with Emma second in precedence, followed by his sisters Lili‘uokalani and Likelike. This was in the best European etiquette, but he could not, apparently, find the words to tell his sisters about it, leaving the crown princess to read about it in the newspapers. Emma saw it as a healing step, but also noted that he still excluded Bernice and Ruth, both of whom should have taken precedence over herself. She therefore followed their lead in not attending the coronation, but all three attended the dinner. Absent from the dinner were Lili‘u and Likelike, who stayed home and sulked—alone, as both their husbands did attend. The progress was that it was one of the few occasions when Emma and Kapi‘olani attended the same function, and no word of discord escaped the evening.