Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii Page 15
The first people in Hawai‘i to conceive of the commercial production of sugar were from China, where the art of making sugar had been known for generations. Their first recorded pass through the islands was in 1788, ten years after Cook, by which time traders had begun to arrive. In that year Kamehameha saw about four dozen Chinese carpenters, who had built the forty-ton schooner North West America for Capt. John Meares. Thinking ahead to his own fleet, the Conqueror asked Meares, without success, to leave him a couple to build him a ship. One of Vancouver’s officers found a Chinese in the king’s suite in 1794, and Chinese probably jumped ship regularly during the sandalwood years; John Papa ‘I‘i remembered three of them being well established in Honolulu around 1810. “Because the faces of these people were unusual and their speech … was strange, a great number of persons went to look at them.”2 In 1802 a mysterious Chinese, his name not recorded, was seen to be making sugar on the island of Lana‘i. It was presumed that he came on a vessel seeking sandalwood and left by the same conveyance.
O‘ahu witnessed a false start to a sugar industry in 1826, and it raised quite a ruckus among ali‘i of competing sentiments. The arrival of HMS Blonde brought a reunion of sorts between Governor Boki and one John Wilkinson, who had apparently agreed with Boki in London3 to come to the islands and begin a commercial sugar operation. He arrived on the ship brittle in health and temperament; Boki turned over seven acres of his lands in the Manoa Valley, which Wilkinson put under cultivation, but he apparently had little more luck in coaxing labor from mocking islanders than Lieutenant Bligh had had in 1779. Money ran short, a flood destroyed the beginnings of a dam—sugar production requires copious quantities of water—and Wilkinson died in September 1826. Boki, perhaps seeing a way out of his sandalwood debt, increased the acreage, paid his workers generously, and built a road to the plantation. Levi Chamberlain was impressed. “If the natives persevere in cultivating the cane,” he wrote on November 1, “and manufacturing it into sugar, the nation may be supplied with that article,” and then added prophetically, “and a surplusage remain for exportation.” By February 18 a British sea captain reported that he had seen the sugar, which “looks very good indeed,” and that California might look for a shipload of it before long.
At that point Boki’s elder brother, Kalanimoku, the prime minister, seems to have pulled rank, stripped the mill from Manoa, and rebuilt it near Honolulu to expand the industry to that area. Then Kalanimoku died, Boki reasserted control, and formed a new partnership with four haoles for the production—being Boki—of rum. His investors expended several thousand dollars in converting the mill into a distillery, but by then Ka‘ahumanu had converted to Christianity; she decreed rum production illegal—the new word for kapu—and she supported the missionaries when they refused to allow their carts, which were the only ones on the island, to haul cane if the end product was to be alcohol.4 The authority was the queen regent’s, but goodwill for the missionaries on the hard-drinking waterfront was scarce after this.
It was also the beginning of the end for Boki. With his rum operation shut down, he opened a hotel and mercantile in downtown Honolulu, exported merchandise to Tahiti and Alaska, but likely still had difficulty breaking even in those ventures. In the fall of 1829 there arrived in Honolulu the new eighteen-gun sloop-of-war USS Vincennes. Though the stop was intended only to be an amicable port call, the American merchants in Honolulu prevailed on the captain to speak to the government about the enormous amount of debt they were carrying on their books, which the chiefs owed them in iliahi futures. They reached a settlement of $48,000 for 6,865 piculs of sandalwood, or something over 450 tons of the trees now virtually extinct in Hawai‘i, a debt of which Boki was apportioned one-quarter. This is what prompted Boki to follow news of large sandalwood stands in the New Hebrides, taking four hundred men in two ships, of whom only twenty ever returned to Hawai‘i after dolorous misadventures. Boki was either lost at sea, or marooned, or more likely just sailed away from his problems and started over near Samoa. Thus Boki, ironically the chief who more than any other clung to the traditional ways and its privileges, became probably the first refugee from American-style debt.
The deal for the first large American-owned sugar plantation was made in 1835, when the royal governor of Kaua‘i leased 980 acres for fifty years at three hundred dollars per year to Ladd & Company of Honolulu. The founders of that concern were not missionaries, but they were wholly contained in the Calvinist New England culture that subscribed to the missionary effort. William Ladd was twenty-eight, a native of Hallowell, Maine; Peter Brinsmade was three years older, from Hartford, Connecticut, a graduate of Bowdoin College who had attended both Andover and Yale Theological Seminaries. The two were brothers-in-law, married to relatives of Lucy Goodale Thurston, who was a keystone of the First Company of missionaries. William Northey Hooper was the youngest at twenty-six, from Manchester, Massachusetts, also married. The trio had arrived in Honolulu on July 27, 1833, on the sailing ship Hellespont, and immediately opened a mercantile on the waterfront. Lacking funds to improve a wharf, they sank an old hulk to serve the purpose, while the families shared the space on the second floor of their warehouse. They were something of an anomaly in the business district. Their connection to the Thurstons, and Brinsmade’s background in theology, gave them good relations with the missionaries—perhaps one reason why they received little business from their neighbors, who called them the “Pious Traders,” and they struggled for a year and a half.
The Ladd family Web site acknowledges that the missionaries interceded for them in acquiring the lease on Kaua‘i.5 It was an act that seemed harmless at the time, but it was a step onto the slippery slope of interfering with the government, something their missionary mandate prohibited, but that, as they grew more accustomed to their interpretation of God’s law being equated with the law of the islands, became ever easier to resort to.
William Hooper, who knew nothing of sugar or milling, was dispatched to manage the venture. The land was at Koloa, near the southernmost point of the island, which had the requisites for growing cane: rich soil and abundant water. Kaua‘i, its royal family’s marital amalgamation into the rest of the kingdom notwithstanding, remained some degrees apart both really and psychologically. Changes to the traditional system wrought in the other islands could be slow to reach there. Establishing their plantation at Koloa not only met the climatic needs of the crop, it also allowed the “Pious Traders” to mount a frontal assault on the ali‘i’s lingering overlordship of the serfs.6 Workers were paid twelve and a half cents per day, which, allowing for the kanakas’ famous ambivalence toward labor, still provided sufficient incentive for enough of them that the chiefs began growling that their traditional labors—and that translated to tribute—were not being maintained. Unlike previous attempts to lure the commoners to labor, here it was a success; people liked the idea of being able to buy things that they could not grow or make for themselves. The chiefs began posting thugs to intimidate workers away from taking jobs, but they backed down when faced with the combination of king and governor.
After constructing housing for laborers, Hooper planted the first twelve acres of cane, which he soon doubled, along with large tracts of coffee and banana trees (five thousand plants each), and forty-five fields of taro. In addition to their wage, Hooper provided the workers a meal each day of fish and poi. With no place nearby to spend their money, workers were paid in company scrip, redeemable for merchandise at Hooper’s store, a system that became the standard in the sugar industry. Over time across the country as the sugar industry grew, payment in scrip limited to company stores became abusive, when real currency could have been spent elsewhere, but in this first plantation circumstance of weaning the maka‘ainana away from subsistence farming to working for wages, it made little difference what medium was used in the only store around.
In 1836 Ladd & Co. shipped its first four tons of sugar and molasses to the United States. Once the feasibility was proved, other
missionaries on Kaua‘i established mills, “grinding cane on shares for native growers.” Two years after Ladd’s first export, there were twenty-two mills grinding sugar in the kingdom, two powered by water and twenty by animals.7 From all sources sugar export rose to 44 tons in 1838, 50 tons in 1839, and 180 in 1840. It was, of course, the first sprinkle of what would eventually become a crystalline white avalanche of Hawaiian sugar, but its eventual dominance in the kingdom did not happen for lack of effort to create a more diversified economy. In fact the missionaries perceived precisely this need, and in 1837 presented a memorial to the ABCFM, requesting a shipload of vocational teachers who could encourage “the cultivations of sugar-cane, cotton, silk, indigo, and various useful productions adapted to the soil and the climate; and the manufacture of cotton, silk, clothing, hats, shoes, instruments of husbandry, etc.” The profit from the venture would be turned to support of schools and other benevolent purposes.8
The Sandwich Islands Mission buttressed the memorial with a testimonial from a council of chiefs:
Love to you, our obliging friends in America. This is our sentiment:… Do give us additional teachers … whom we would specify, a carpenter, tailor, mason, shoe-maker, wheelwright, paper-maker, type founder, agriculturalists … and makers of machinery to work on a large scale, and a teacher of the chiefs in what pertains to the land, according to the practice of enlightened countries.… Should you assent to our request, and send hither these specified teachers, we will protect them, and grant facilities for their occupations, and we will back up these works, that they may succeed well.9
The document was signed by all those with the greatest power and influence: Kamehameha III; Nahi‘ena‘ena; Kina‘u, the kuhina nui, and her husband, Kekuanaoa; Kekauluohi, who would succeed Kina‘u as prime minister; and ten of the most powerful chiefs. Clearly, they were serious in their proposal; William Richards himself carried it to New England to present it to the ABCFM. The sentiment was progressive and noble, but the timing was awful. The United States had entered the throes of the Panic of 1837, which was the worst business recession in its history to that time—although because of that, willing emigrants should have been plenty. The larger obstacle was the ABCFM itself, which did not have the vision to perceive that, now with a largely literate population, something more than preaching was needed to assure Hawai‘i’s progress as a Christian nation. With kapu dead by the islanders’ own hand, the missionaries had stepped into that vacuum and provided a conservative Christian alternative and conquered the spirits of at least the ruling elite, if not the majority of the maka‘ainana. For them now to step away from the opportunity to guide the country’s economic development along some kind of benevolent path left the next step in the conquest of paradise—the economy—to the tender mercies of the business community.
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As it was, desultory efforts to diversify the economy were made. An experiment with silk production began on Kaua‘i in 1836, with imported silkworms and mulberry trees. It looked promising at first, and some silk was even exported, but within a decade insects and drought wrecked the venture. An equally optimistic start was made at a cotton industry. Any good New England woman knew her craft at a spinning wheel, and upon her arrival Rebecca Hitchcock of the Fifth Company found four spare wheels in the storehouse at Lahaina, and had them converted to spinning wheels. Hawaiian women, no doubt enthralled at discovering a way to make cloth that did not involve pounding tapa, took it up with such enthusiasm that before long they had in their hands what Mrs. Hitchcock believed was the first cotton cloth woven in the islands. Sensing the commercial possibilities, several of the missionaries wrote letters home to the ABCFM to send machinery.
The Board found that expense prohibitive, and instead dispatched Miss Lydia Brown with the Seventh Company, one of the few single women to win appointment as a missionary. She was fifty-five, a spinster, an expert at spinning, weaving, and knitting who was keen to pass on those skills to the Hawaiian women. While seed was later sent for planting, natives knew where cotton already grew abundantly, having spread to the wild from fields planted years before by Don Francisco Marín. Miss Brown set up a weaving school for women at Wailuku, Maui. Before long they could boast that they were wearing clothes entirely of their own making; with two more years, they turned out some six hundred yards of cotton cloth. When Miss Brown added dyeing to the class regimen, her pupils were so thrilled with the result that she wrote with some pride, “I have not seen so much heathenish gesticulation since I have been on the Islds. as when they came to see it.”10 Brown’s success drew the attention of the governor of Hawai‘i and later O‘ahu, John Adams Kuakini, brother of Ka‘ahumanu. He built a thirty-by-seventy-foot cloth mill that rolled out another four hundred yards at Kailua, had a small gin brought in from China, and commissioned a carpenter to turn out a number of spinning wheels. But this industry, too, played out—mostly after Kuakini discovered that, as proud as he was of introducing a new industry to his country, cotton cloth and clothing could still be imported cheaper than they could be produced at home.
Western food crops left an equally spotty history. The Maui white potatoes that American whalers so looked forward to passed from economic importance to the islands, first with the decline of the whaling fleets and then further with increased potato farming in the American West. Early on, the widespread opinion in the United States was that cereal grains would not prosper in Hawai‘i. This was found not to be the case, but the climate and insects presented obstacles; one early grower noted that his acreage had fattened the largest crop of weevils he had ever seen.11 Americans in Hawai‘i promoted corn as a healthful supplement to taro, which would improve both the native diet and fatten their pigs. Once introduced, there was always some acreage of corn but it was not a major crop. Wheat likewise elicited a lukewarm reaction; as many as three mills ground out a small export of flour, but it also never caught on.
Coffee had more staying power. Plantations of various sizes were begun on Kaua‘i, O‘ahu, Maui, and at Hilo on the Big Island. But it was the slips that missionaries planted mauka (up the mountain) from Kailua Kona sometime before 1830, on the slopes of Hualalai, that became the heart of the coffee industry. Coffee, however, proved itself highly susceptible to both meteorology and labor disputes, with exports rocketing or plummeting in response. Another industry that did make its impact was cattle. The Conqueror’s wisdom in laying a kapu against disturbing the cattle that Vancouver introduced, along with later arrivals, eventually produced thriving wild herds in the uplands of the Big Island. They were hunted like wild game, professionally by some who lived rustically on the upper slopes of Mauna Kea. (David Douglas, a young botanist for whom the Douglas fir was named, was killed by a wild bull on that mountain in 1834).12 This established a creditable hide and tallow industry, exporting between two and five thousand hides per year and some salt beef. Ranching the cattle also began in this era, including the development of a community of Mexican vaqueros who dazzled islanders with their colorful ways and feats of horsemanship. The vaqueros departed after several years, but were replaced by natives who mastered riding and roping.
Thus, while other enterprises made some showing they did not, except for cattle and coffee, take root. Nor was the economics of sugar entirely promising at first. In fact, Ladd’s Kaua‘i plantation itself ran into trouble. The capital expenditure to construct the mill, boiling house, sugarhouse, dam, carpenter and blacksmith shops, and provide housing and food for the laborers, who were paid twelve and a half cents a day plus food—for a product that sold for four cents a pound—was a difficult set of numbers. To be commercially profitable, sugar had to be produced on a massive scale.
By the spring of 1839 the Hawaiian government, with the missionaries behind the king, won the recall of the riotously living American commercial and seamen’s agent, John Coffin Jones, and the new appointment, with appropriate lobbying, went to Peter Brinsmade, one of the “Pious Traders.” And Kamehameha III, still only twenty-six but with
fourteen years on the throne, importuned William Richards to resign from the mission to become his adviser. To rescue Ladd & Co. from its financial distress with a bold stroke, Brinsmade gained an interview with Richards in November 1841 to propose issuing common stock to form a company whose purpose would be nothing less than bringing into cultivation all the idle lands in the country. The contract would be good for a hundred years, the land would be selected in a year, settlement and development would begin within five, and the sovereign could buy in for whatever amount he pleased. Large-scale dispensation of land to colonial impresarios had worked effectively in other countries to speed up bringing empty land into productivity. And the idea was not too different in complexion from what the mission had requested of the ABCFM a few years earlier, only instead of sowing the land with teachers, tradesmen, and husbandmen, the same result was to come through private enterprise. Richards was not opposed but inserted a stipulation that the agreement would be observed provided the islands remained an independent country. Hawai‘i’s relations with the West had turned suddenly problematic, thanks to a blustering British consul who had been stationed in Honolulu and a French frigate captain who looted the city of twenty thousand dollars to satisfy French “honor.” Honolulu was increasingly hosting a parade of foreign warships, most on friendly visits, but the presence of so much visiting firepower could not fail to intimidate. Richards thought it would be well for foreign investors in the country to have an incentive to press their home governments to respect Hawaiian integrity.