Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (8 page)

Remaining on O‘ahu kept the king closer to the independent and occasionally impudent Kaumuali‘i, the one annoyance that continued to nettle him. While Kamehameha raked in trade, primarily from the English and the Americans, a different empire cultivated the friendship of Kaumuali‘i and began to make its presence felt. In June 1804 two Russian ships, the
Neva
under Yuri Lisianski, and the
Nadezhda
under Ivan Johann von Krusenstern, called at Kaua‘i, opening an imperial bid that would not play out for some years. Anxious to gain knowledge of these mighty foreign nations, Kaumuali‘i placed his young son and heir, who became known as Prince George Kaumuali‘i (the king maintained his friendship with the British by naming his children after members of the royal family), on an American ship, with the charge to return with a Western education.

Eventually Kaumuali‘i acknowledged the inevitable, that Kamehameha would only keep coming. And Kamehameha, who profited handsomely from increasing foreign trade, accepted that peace was more beneficial than war. The Conqueror sent word through his retainers that he would be content to leave Kaumuali‘i in power on Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau, but as his vassal, acknowledging Kamehameha’s sovereignty and paying tribute. Remembering the fate of Keoua, and of Kalanikupule after him, Kaumuali‘i hesitated to travel to O‘ahu and pay homage in person.

His fears were well founded, for a council of Kamehameha’s chiefs was even then sifting through the most advantageous circumstance in which to assassinate him, and decided to invite the visiting king on an excursion to the diving pool at Waikahalulu, out of the Conqueror’s sight.
9
Kamehameha would not approve, and after about two years of trading gifts and assurances with his rival, he utilized the good offices of Capt. Nathan Winship to bring him over to O‘ahu. Fearing to be massacred, some Kaua‘i chiefs still held back, but Winship, leaving his first mate behind as hostage, bore Kaumuali‘i and a retinue over in late March or early April 1810. In his own canoe Kamehameha was rowed out to meet him, with a suckling pig in his arms as a gift, and said, “Homai ko lima” (Give me your hand).
10

After some days of feasting and trust building, the king of Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau offered his islands to the ascendant king, and was allowed to continue ruling them as Kamehameha’s vassal, and as a symbol of his new office he received a splendid
ka‘ei
, a feather cordon some five yards long.
11
Few of these feather stoles existed, and they were objects of tremendous
mana
, centuries old, trimmed with the teeth of sacrifices whose spiritual power transferred to the new owner. Kamehameha would never have handed over such a powerful thing unless he meant to keep his bargain. Thus Kaumuali‘i escaped being sacrificed, but there was an important casualty. In traditional society, if an
ali‘i
overburdened his serfs with taxes and tribute, they were free to leave him and offer their services elsewhere. Indeed, the incentive for chiefs not to abuse their
kanakas
was enforced here and there throughout their history with the violent deaths of tyrannical chiefs, even kings.
12
The chiefs of Kaua‘i bitterly resented having another level of tribute—to Kamehameha—being placed over them, and either they or Kamehameha’s own chiefs, led by Haiha Naihe, determined to poison Kaumuali‘i—a favored method of assassination in the islands.
13
Isaac Davis, whom Kamehameha had made governor of O‘ahu and who had been involved in the negotiations, learned of the plot in time to warn him, but was instead himself poisoned. (Ironically Davis’s daughter Betty later married Kaumuali‘i’s son, Prince George.)

Davis’s death was a hard blow to Kamehameha, who valued loyalty and ability as ardently as he punished treachery. But by 1810 he was undisputed king of the Sandwich Islands, and the
‘ahu‘ula
, the feather cape that he donned, where others in the islands were predominantly red and trimmed in the rare yellow, was solid yellow, comprising perhaps a quarter of a million feathers of the
mamo
, a native bird now extinct. Amassing his empire was accomplished by twenty-eight years of blood, terror, and at the end, negotiation. Honored today as the “unifier” of the Hawaiian Islands, that characterization has been softened by time, and serves a modern need. In his own day he was feared and despised as widely as he was revered.

*   *   *

Kaumuali‘i himself chafed under the overlordship, and when the Russians came back he was willing to make some intrigue with them. The Russians had been surprisingly slow to attempt to consolidate their claim to North America’s upper Pacific coast, with its rich fur trade, and buffer their claim to Alaska. In 1815 Aleksandr Baranov, governor of the Russian American Fur Company, sent a vessel under a German commander, Georg Anton Schäffer, to salvage a cargo wrecked on the shores of Kaua‘i three years before. His visit had a subtext, however, which was to capture as much of the trade as he could for Russia, and then on his own responsibility Schäffer set about trying to transform the islands into a Russian colony.

John Young, in league with the growing number of Americans, saw through Schäffer even as he tried to pass himself off as a curious naturalist and salvage operator. Kamehameha dismissed their warnings, Ka‘ahumanu gave Schäffer land from her own holdings, and the German adventurer proceeded to Kaua‘i. He overreached himself when two more Russian ships arrived in 1816, and he started to build a fort at Honolulu—a project that the king dispatched John Young to break up, although he very sensibly finished and occupied the fort. Kaumuali‘i had followed these developments, and offered the Russians huge land and trade concessions if they would help him conquer the islands that were, he said, rightfully his—all of them, save Hawai‘i.
14
Schäffer’s delusions of grandeur only inflated; he gave Russian names to Kaua‘i geography, sent out surveyors, and began erecting fortifications. Two things toppled his empire. The first was a port call by Otto von Kotzebue (son of the famous German playwright) in a Russian ship, who expressed his shock to Kamehameha at Schäffer’s audacity, and assured him that Russia had no territorial ambitions in his islands. Second, the king, now six years stronger than when he made his peace with Kaumali‘i, sent his command to Kaumuali‘i to evict Schäffer or face the consequences. Finding safety the better part of ambition, and learning that Schäffer had no standing, Kaumuali‘i became again the obedient if reluctant vassal, and threw the Russians off his island.

*   *   *

The Russian adventure was a gaudy distraction for a year, but it ended with no harm even as it emphasized Hawai‘i’s importance to Pacific geography. Once the existence of the Sandwich Islands became known, their strategic location made them the crossroads of the Pacific, the stopping place for vessels of every seafaring nation. And they brought to trade Western dress that became the craze among the
ali‘i
, furniture for their houses, tools and appliances, and amenities they had never imagined. The Hawaiians proved happily amenable to all the enlargements the foreign visitors brought to their way of life. The mainstays of their diet up to this point their ancestors had brought from their home islands centuries before—pigs, dogs, bananas, yams, breadfruit, sugarcane, and taro, whose starchy corms they cooked into a pasty lavender gruel called poi. Now, however, they assimilated a variety of new foods into their diet. Captain Cook himself had given them seeds to grow onions, melons, and pumpkins on his first landing at Ni‘ihau. Vancouver’s cattle were increasing happily in lush upland meadows on the leeward sides of Hawai‘i. The greatest benefactor of their diet proved to be the Spanish mariner Don Francisco de Paula Marín, who introduced exotic fruits from the colony in the Philippine Islands: lemons and limes, guava, papaya and later mangoes, and one plant that gained great local favor and became an island staple: pineapple. Kamehameha himself took note of the boon that Don Francisco was providing to diet and trade, and brought him into his circle. He gave the Spaniard an estate on the south shore of O‘ahu, where Marín settled and later planted Hawai‘i’s first vineyard, and then coffee. A natural linguist, hospitable, funny, and somewhat raffish (important virtues in the native culture), with an undetermined number of children by three wives, Marín often acted as the king’s host and interpreter, and did very well in trade with visiting mariners.

*   *   *

Marín was the first in the islands to turn from subsistence agriculture to cash crops, and by 1810, just as Kamehameha completed his conquest, the kingdom made its debut on the stage of world commerce. When Simon Metcalfe had cruised the Hawaiian waters twenty years before, he was on the lookout for sandalwood, which was extremely valuable in the China trade, to augment his usual cargoes of fur from the American Northwest. The wood was known well enough among the islanders, who called it
iliahi
, and ground up the heartwood to rub into
tapa
to perfume the cloth. Westerners discovered it only the year before, and quite by accident, when some was burned for firewood.

Early attempts to sell
iliahi
wood in China failed, because islands in the southwest Pacific had species of sandalwood superior to the Hawaiian, and there were no buyers. Chinese demand, however, eventually exhausted the Fiji and Solomon Islands sandalwood, setting up Hawai‘i for its first big venture in resource extraction. The American captain Nathan Winship’s aid in cementing peace with Kaumuali‘i placed Kamehameha in Winship’s debt, thus when Winship approached the Conqueror with a business proposition in 1810, he got an attentive hearing. If Kamehameha would set his tenants to felling sandalwood trees, and give Winship, his brother Jonathan, and their partner, Capt. William Heath Davis, a monopoly on the trade, they would transport the product to China, sell it, and pay the king one-fourth of the proceeds, either in specie or such fine Chinese goods as Kamehameha might desire. He agreed, and laid a
kapu
against any people but his own felling sandalwood trees, and the Winships took their first shipload to China—where they learned that the United States and Great Britain had entered upon the War of 1812.

While the United States’ few tough, brilliantly engineered frigates gave a good account of themselves in the Atlantic, American activities in the Pacific were almost entirely at the mercy of the vast Royal Navy, and three of the Winships’ vessels were blockaded in Honolulu for three years. Kamehameha owed Winship consideration for his peacemaking services, but the king’s eye for business placed a limit on his obligation. Kamehameha had some eighty thousand dollars with Canton factors, half in coin and half in merchandise, which the Winships dared not risk on the high seas. As the delayed payment became increasingly difficult to explain to the king, his English captive-turned-adviser John Young used the opportunity to play a small role in the war, and convinced Kamehameha that the Winships had played him false and absconded with the sandalwood with no intention of paying him. Even if he still believed the Winships faithful, the king learned an object lesson on the respective power of the British and American navies when a British privateer entered Honolulu Harbor on May 23, 1814, as an American prize taken by Lt. John Gamble, U.S. Marine Corps. He sailed on June 11, but the ship was back in Honolulu two days later, the prize of HMS
Cherub
, with Gamble a prisoner of war.

At length a neutral (Portuguese) vessel was engaged to ship Kamehameha’s merchandise and cash to Hawaii, and even then was delayed by monsoons. The Winships, annoyed that Kamehameha had suspended their contract, instructed the captain to unload the merchandise when he arrived in Honolulu, but to keep the money on board until they were certain of the king’s intentions. If a British man-of-war entered the harbor, however, the specie was to be safely given to the king at once. There was a story that—if it cannot be confirmed nevertheless displays exactly the kind of shrewdness that Kamehameha habitually displayed—the Winships’ plan was betrayed to him. All ships arriving in Honolulu were heralded before they ever crossed the reef by lookouts on Diamond Head, one signal for a small vessel and a larger commotion for a major ship. All Kamehameha had to do was arrange for the lookouts to alert the port of the arrival of a nonexistent British warship, and the forty thousand dollars was in his custody before the ruse was discovered.
15
He also was astute enough, after learning that one of Ka‘ahumanu’s ships was charged piloting and docking fees in Macao, to begin collecting money for the same thing at Honolulu—eighty dollars for anchorage, and twelve dollars for piloting payable to his English pilot, Capt. John Harbottle. The fees were not unjust because Honolulu had a tricky reef to navigate and a waterfront to develop, but the levy undoubtedly surprised ship captains who had not thought the king would so quickly adopt Western streams of income.
16

Academic discussion of the sandalwood trade usually treats it as an exponent of American exploitative imperialism,
17
but once the scent of profit was in the air, there is no question that Kamehameha knew how to cash in with little prompting from American traders. Thus the king went into the sandalwood business, for cash and luxury goods, but he never lost his eye for weapons. As late as 1818, the Boston mercantile firm Bryant & Sturgis advised the captain of one of their ships, the brig
Ann
, “You have probably double the number of muskets and more Powder than is wanted … and it would be well to dispose of some at the Islands.… If you can sell the King any articles of your cargo on advantageous terms, to receive your pay in Sandal Wood … we think you had best do it.”
18
Kamehameha could even pay cash for ships, such as the 175-ton
Lelia Byrd
, which became his flagship.

For Americans the sums of money to be made were addictive; where they might have to pay Kamehameha ten to fifteen thousand dollars to fill a hold with sandalwood, that cargo in Canton could fetch four times that amount. The Conqueror himself fell to the addiction, commanding the tenants who worked his vast lands to leave their fishponds and taro fields to go into the forests to cut
iliahi
, and squeezing still more in tribute from his chiefs, who wrung it from their own tenants. In remarkably little time there was no food, and
kanakas
were reduced “to eat[ing] herbs and fern trunks.” The aging Kamehameha repented his excesses and ordered his tenants back to the production of food. And more than that, he was quick to notice when sandalwood began to be difficult to find, and he laid a
kapu
against the taking of saplings, so that there should be a future supply.