Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii Page 12
Surrounded by lice and licentiousness, the compound that the Honolulu missionaries lived in became a partial refuge where they could commune with a more familiar life. The large house of which the young whaler Fayerweather had complained had been built in New England, disassembled and stored in the hold of the Thaddeus, and then reconstructed near the harbor in Honolulu, immediately behind the large traditional grass house that first served as the Kawaiaha‘o Church. Fayerweather’s criticism was less than just, as the wood-frame structure was actually a communal residence for the whole contingent, and it was not even all that comfortable. Honolulu was on the leeward side of O‘ahu, where it was often hot and dusty, and the families papered the dining room ceiling with tapa to keep the upstairs grit from sifting through the floor and down into the food. The house was designed to stay snug through frigid New England winters, and the Americans sweltered in it. Ten years later the compound added the Chamberlain “House,” actually a two-story depository built of coral blocks in which they stored the supplies to be distributed to stations throughout the islands, and several years after that a separate building for the printing press to turn out Bibles, tracts, and lesson books. Even more than Gutenberg’s press revolutionized learning in the West, this simple machine changed Hawai‘i forever, as the missionaries provided the people with their first written language, which the maka‘ainana learned with stunning alacrity.
After Bingham, the most famous resident in the Hale La‘au, the “wood house,” as the islanders called it, came to be Dr. Gerrit Judd, a New York physician who came with the Third Company of missionaries on the Parthian, arriving in April 1828. Judd opened a medical practice, treating commoners as well as nobles in an upstairs eave room. In this large house they also hosted company—the queen regent often spent the night in the guest room—and tried to come to grips with the proposition that American Calvinist Christianity was going to be a hard sell in Polynesia. It cannot be denied that the missionaries equated, and many would say confused,14 their strict secular morality with Christian faith: In this era virtually everybody did. But this left them at a distinct disadvantage in Hawai‘i. It was an outpost of Polynesia, whose attitude toward sex was generally frank, happy, and unashamed—qualities that made this portion of the globe legendary among lonely mariners. But the missionaries found it shocking. “For a man or woman to refuse a solicitation for illicit intercourse was considered an act of meanness,” wrote Sheldon Dibble of the Fourth Company, which arrived in 1831. Any stroll by a native household would discover “emptied bottles strewn about in confusion amongst the disgusting bodies of men, women and children lying promiscuously in the deep sleep of drunkenness.”15 Reverend Whitney once asked a chief on Kaua‘i whether having seven wives did not cause him anxiety, and the chief assured him that it did: “I cannot sleep for fear some other man will get them.”16
It was also awkward to criticize sex to the natives when the missionary wives were dropping babies left, right, and center. Laura Judd had nine, and came to a stark realization of how the chiefesses felt about this when so many of them were infertile. When the Judds’ second child was born, Kina‘u begged and remonstrated to be given the baby in hanai, a custom that the Americans found mortifying. There were some tense moments about giving offense to such a powerful figure, before the Judds were able to convince Kina‘u that naming the child after her was considered a great honor. Indeed the baby was named Elizabeth Kina‘u Judd, and the kuhina nui kept an active interest in her upbringing—along with the five of her own whom she eventually bore.
In this society there was little notion of being too young or too old for sex. Children were expected to experiment as soon as they were curious. And there was no notion of what the newcomers could barely utter as the “Unmentionable Vice of the Greeks.” Indeed, among the ali‘i, on whose favor the missionaries depended, one particularly difficult custom to stamp out was the aikane relationship between a chief and his youthful male lovers. Much has been debated over the years about the actual nature of aikane—some denying that it had a sexual component at all, in order to make the old ways seem less scandalous to modern Western eyes, and others particularly in more recent years affirming it, to proclaim that there is nothing in the native culture to be ashamed of.17 As with other aspects of native culture, control of the narrative today goes a long way toward controlling who learns what.18 But it was no mystery to the first American in the islands. John Ledyard, the marine corporal aboard the Resolution, found it more an object of morbid fascination than censure, since “we had no right to attack or even disapprove of customs that differed from our own.” At first Captain Cook’s sailors could not believe their eyes. “As this was the first instance of it we had seen in our travels, we were cautious how we credited the first indications of it, and waited untill [sic] opportunity gave full proof.” Yet the most cursory observation made it apparent that “sodomy … is very prevalent if not universal among the chiefs.… The cohabitation is between the chiefs and the most beautiful males they can procure about 17 years old.… These youths follow them wherever they go, and are as narrowly looked after as the women in those countries, where jealousy is so predominant a passion.” Others of Captain Cook’s chroniclers were more judgmental in their assessment of aikane, especially of old King Kalaniopu‘u’s delight in having his young lovers ejaculate on his royal person.19 Indeed they were not mistaken in what they beheld. The native scholar Davida Malo was surprisingly frank in his assessment that “of the people about court there were few who lived in marriage. The number of those who had no legitimate relations with women were greatly in the majority. Sodomy and other unnatural vices in which men were the correspondents … were practiced about court.”20
Ledyard was especially shocked that whether a chief’s wives stayed or left seemed to be a matter of indifference to them; they were more possessive of their youths, whom they showered with gifts and open affection. (On this point Ledyard overspoke, for there was one famous instance in 1805 where the great high chief Kalanimoku, overcome with shame and rage when his wife, Kuwahine, deserted him in favor of a new lover, told Kamehameha, “I want to burn up the world.” “Burn,” shrugged the Conqueror, at which Kalanimoku set fire to most of Honolulu to drive her from hiding.21) And aikane was not without benefit to those younger partners, for in addition to the gifts received during the passion of courtship, young men could gain political and diplomatic status, and it also made them eligible later in life to marry a chiefess, and their children were recognized as ali‘i—an otherwise unattainable social advancement.22
The missionaries, therefore, found themselves in a society where a sexual relationship between two males had no moral valence, and they wished to tread lightly in a new land but still preach their truth. Their somewhat prevaricating response was to translate aikane, in their budding Hawaiian-English lexicon, as “best intimate friend,” with no mention of its original context. This came back to haunt them in a demoralizing way when the subsequent eleven shiploads of new missionaries fanned out into new villages to spread the gospel, relying on the Hawaiian-English dictionaries provided them. Learning the language as best they could, and relying on this translation, new preachers would sometimes announce to a local chief in their best new Hawaiian the desire to become his “best intimate friend,” which was greeted with considerable surprise, not to say enthusiasm.23
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Quiet native noncompliance with the missionaries’ preachings about sex was reinforced by their witnessing increasing conflict among the haoles over morality—not just sex but drink and seemingly less portentous amusements, from theaters to card games. And the emergence of Lahaina as a town of royal residence and the establishment of a mission station there made it ripe for conflict when it became the leading Pacific anchorage for the world’s—which meant mostly American—whaling fleets. Only two whalers visited in 1819, but then rich hunting grounds were discovered in the seas near Japan in 1820. With that country’s perfervid isolationism keeping its ports
closed to foreigners. Hawai‘i was the perfect base of supply and recreation.
About sixty whaling vessels visited in 1822, a hundred or so in 1824, increasing to about 170 in 1829, and given the world demand for whale oil, ballooning thereafter. The islands’ economy had stagnated since the exhaustion of sandalwood, but now wealthy shipowners, through their captains, could pay more for everything from supplies to transshipping to recreation. Some native women, once quite happy to dispense their favors for pleasure, found it an easy transition to take money for what still seemed to them harmless fun. That, however, was a trade at which the missionaries drew the line; they sermonized incessantly, and recruited Kalanimoku’s help to lay, as it were, a kapu against women visiting foreign ships. Interestingly, it was not a whaler but an American warship, the USS Dolphin, that generated the first crisis. The ship’s commander, Lt. John Percival, known in the navy as “Mad Jack,” had been sent to the islands at the request of American merchants, who hoped that the presence of a warship would inspire the chiefs to pay something toward their debts racked up with sandalwood futures. In Honolulu the sailors were shocked to discover that the celebrated women were now off limits; they grumbled for more than a month before taking action. February 26, 1826, a Sunday, Hiram Bingham was preparing to hold services at Kalanimoku’s house when a mob of sailors arrived with clubs. Amid shattering windows Bingham escaped back to the mission house, but the riot overtook him there; the high chiefess Namahana interposed herself and was struck by a blow meant for Bingham. Kapu might have been dead, but chiefs were still venerated, and the natives present exploded. The melee subsided only with the arrival of Lieutenant Percival, who roughly corraled his own men even as Bingham saved one of their lives. It was Boki, the governor of O‘ahu who himself had little love for the missionaries, who restored order when he had a deputation of willing women rowed out to the ship.24
There were easier pickings at Lahaina, and that town overtook Honolulu as the favored port of call for the whalers. Their presence was crowded into two seasons, fall and spring, and farmers there were alert to the seamen’s preference for white potatoes, so they turned it into a staple Maui crop to keep them coming back. Port calls increased until they reached a high-water mark in 1846, when Honolulu recorded the visit of 146 whaling vessels, and Maui no fewer than 429, jostling each other up to a hundred at a time at Lahaina Roads.25 Rev. Lorrin Andrews calculated that “on average they have $300 each. Ships 300 × dollars 300 = $90,000.… Whatever the people have been, I cannot now call the people poor on Maui.”26
Seamen there no less than at Honolulu grew incensed at the wahines’ newfound modesty, but Maui’s royal governor Hoapili, the widower of Keopuolani, heeded her dying admonitions of Christian devotion and did his best to stem the vice. When the British whaling vessel John Palmer called at Lahaina, several women ignored the governor’s orders and offered themselves on board. Hoapili detained the captain, Elisha Clarke, ashore; sailors turned their six cannons on the town, and more particularly on the house of the man they held particularly responsible: Rev. William Richards. In one of his reports back to the ABCFM, Richards made mention of another British captain buying a native woman for a sum of money, which found its way into newspapers. It became an international incident when news of it echoed to England and back. The British consul angrily vindicated the captain and demanded that the missionary be shipped to London to face a libel action, but a trial by the chiefs found for Richards.27
After Hoapili’s death in 1840, Lahaina gained the reputation of a town where sailors could have a good time, but even when the whalers were behaving innocently, the missionaries made no friends for themselves with their stiff-necked self-righteousness. Capt. Gilbert Pendleton of the whaling ship Charles Phelps was laid up in Lahaina with “lung fever” that forced him to send his ship out without him. His doctor ordered him to take exercise, and when he passed their establishment, the missionaries refused him water because it was the Sabbath. It was true that whalers could be a rough lot, but many of the captains were New Englanders, too, and they could cite Bible stories with equal facility. “Christ himself went through the Cornfield on the Saboth [sic] & plucked the Ears of Corn because he hungered,” he slashed in his diary. “I would thank any man whether missionary or what not to tell me why a weary hungry traviler [sic] should not be fed on the Saboth in this day & age of the world—Christ declared if any one give but a cup of cold water in his name he should not lose his reward.”28
From such events Kamehameha III remained aloof as he metamorphosed from the rebellious youth who at one time rescinded all laws except those against theft and murder (and briefly turned Honolulu into a haven of vice) into a grave young monarch who was determined to do his duty. He had suffered a crushing blow with his sister’s death, and it is difficult to overestimate the effect this had on the Americanization of Hawai‘i. Had Nahi‘ena‘ena and the baby lived, Kauikeaouli was a defiant enough young ali‘i that he could have turned the clock back by years, and Hawaiian history might have taken a different direction entirely. After centuries of inbreeding for the refinement of mana, however, the clock finally ran out on the Conqueror’s dynasty, and the twenty-three-year-old monarch emerged from the experience not just a shattered man, but a shattered king with a country to govern, and a genuine sense of obligation as his countrymen’s ali‘i nui, their highest lord. And, the most capable people around to help him were the haole missionaries. As the 1830s closed the Congregationalists’ campaign for morality began, by sheer weight of determination and the shiploads of reinforcements, to take effect. Only three days before Nahi‘ena‘ena’s burial on Maui, the Mary Frasier out of Boston disgorged thirty-two more of them, the Eighth Company and by far the largest contingent of New England Calvinists to spread the gospel, joining the sixty or so previously landed.
And their printing press was ever busy, so much so that it threatened to inundate the kingdom with tracts. Having given the Hawaiians a written language, they printed nine editions of First, Second, and Third Elementary Books, a text on arithmetic, and (judiciously) “The Thoughts of the Chiefs.” Then followed a Decalogue and Catechism, the Sermon on the Mount, a hymnal, a history of scripture, and other works that took advantage of their near-monopoly on disseminating the written word. By the time the ABCFM published its 1833 report for its backers, the missionaries could enumerate having printed well over twenty million pages of texts and tracts. The value of paper on hand was nearly two thousand dollars, in readiness to print the remainder of the New Testament, selections from Numbers and Deuteronomy, and a geography book. They were expecting the arrival of a second press from home, with which they could expand their operations to Sunday school tracts, doctrinal sermons and their understanding of marriage, and further academic publications.29
Against this tidal wave of Christianity the king’s further rebellion was hopeless. In his heart Kauikeaouli was sad and he drank too much, but he surrendered, and as Kamehameha III he became a good king.
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In 1838 the colorful agent for American affairs journeyed to California and returned with a “Spanish lady,” whom he introduced as his wife. Although John Coffin Jones’s womanizing and informal cohabitations had been tolerated by the government up to then, Hannah Holmes, who had been with him the longest and claimed the station of his wife, sued for divorce on the grounds of bigamy. She won, and Kamehameha III, now grafted to American morality, not only sustained her but declared Jones persona non grata. “I refuse any longer,” the king informed him on January 8, 1839, “to know you as consul of the United States of America.” But even here was an echo of the old days: Jones had also been heard to utter a disparaging remark about the late Princess Nahi‘ena‘ena, which would have earned him the king’s cold shoulder faster than his own hedonism.30
Accustomed to centuries of privilege, Hawai‘i’s chiefly families responded to the new morality with varying degrees of individual compliance, according to the state of their own conversion to the new religion.
But then their transition was hurried along with a sobering demonstration in the example made of Kamanawa II, a high chief of Hilo. He was an unreconstructed chief in the old mold, taking whom and what he pleased; his wife, Kamokuiki, became a Christian and disapproved of his continuing polyamorous wanderings. She sought a divorce, which was decreed on August 16, 1840, on terms that were biblical: Because she was the innocent party, she could remarry as soon as she wished; the chief, however, could not remarry while she lived.
Six weeks later Kamokuiki collapsed and died, and an autopsy found an inflamed stomach. At trial the chief testified that he administered “medicine” to his wife that was prepared by Lonoapuakau, a sailor and his friend. That friend testified that he had prepared poison, a cup of ‘awa laced with ‘akia, the “false ‘ohelo,” which in the old days was one mode of execution, and ‘auhuhu, the “fish poison plant.” But he argued he could not be found guilty because he did not administer it. The jury of twelve chiefs convicted both of murder, and death warrants signed by the king and kuhina nui ensued. No pardon came, and the two were hanged in Honolulu on October 20, 1840, before a throng of ten thousand, most of whom were probably astonished at the sight of a high chief, whose word had once meant life or death, himself swinging dead at the end of a noose.31
It was not only the unreconstructed old chiefs who resented this relentlessly growing influence of the haoles. Some of the newer generation, who had been educated enough to take a longer view, also had misgivings. Davida Malo, who had been raised in the Conqueror’s court as a playmate for the young Liholiho, and who after the missionaries came was ordered to go to school for him and relay what he had learned, became one of the islands’ first bona fide intellectuals and a trusted adviser to Kamehameha III. Halfway through his reign Malo wrote a letter to Kina‘u, to pass along to the king, and in it he tried to explain the risk: “If a big wave comes in large fishes will come from the dark ocean which you never saw before, and when they see the small fishes they will eat them up.… The ships of the white men have come, and smart people have arrived from the Great Countries which you have never seen before, they know our people are few in number and living in a small country; they will eat us up, such has always been the case with large countries, the small ones have been gobbled up.”32