Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii Read online

  Lot, learning the depth of Bernice’s determination, showed himself gentleman enough to release her from their engagement, admitting that he was not worthy of her and would not be the cause of her misery.6

  Lot’s refusal to consider marriage, heavy as that was in import to the kingdom, was only one manifestation of the state that matrimony in the kingdom had come to be. Many of the highborn were torn between Christian sacrament and their ancient chiefly rights, and this fell harder on the women, who were now expected to be virtuous Victorians like their European models. Emma embodied this, and she was fortunate in that she loved her husband, whom she addressed affectionately, even in public, as “Aleck,” and he responded with “Emma.” For others in the family it was more problematic.

  Not long after Aleck and Emma’s wedding, with most of the family ensconced in the palace complex, the couple invited to dinner the married Englishman Marcus Monsarrat, a businessman and auctioneer, who recently was among a consortium that gifted the queen with a new carriage. After the family thought that the evening was over, a servant reported that Monsarrat was in Victoria Kamamalu’s room. Prince Lot burst in and found Monsarrat at the stage of “arranging his pantaloons.” While Lot threw him out of the house, the king blamed his brother “for not shooting Monsarrat down like a dog.”7 (He had not yet wrecked his own life by shooting down Henry Neilson, so bold speech was easy.) There was no criminal charge to make, but Liholiho banished the offender from the kingdom; he returned some months later, was arrested and banished again.8 In the precontact days, sexual adventure was the right of chiefesses as well as the men, but purity in Hawai‘i was coming to be as one-sided as it was in the Western world.

  This raised the issue of what to do with the libertine Kamamalu, and that was settled in ways that reflect little credit on the men of the family. The kuhina nui was eighteen at the time of the Monsarrat incident, well old enough to know what she was doing. There had been talk of marrying her to David Kalakaua, and now that was off the table—although in the old days her sexual experience would not have been an issue. More culpably, it was well known around the court that she had actually been in love with Prince William Lunalilo, and he with her, but her brothers had forbidden the match. Lunalilo was the last male Kamehameha—although a collateral one, descended from the Conqueror’s father via a secondary wife. Other branches of his family tree were formidable on their own: One of his grandmothers was a sister of Ka‘ahumanu. Court genealogists had to tell the king and his brother that if Lunalilo and Kamamalu married, any children of theirs would outrank children of any other royal offspring, including those of Liholiho and Lot. Victoria Kamamalu therefore was doomed to a kind of limbo until her brothers could find someone genealogically harmless to them for her to wed—small wonder she turned to a British auctioneer. Kamamalu and Lunalilo, like Emma and Liholiho, were only second cousins once removed, and like the royal couple, they loved each other; they might have had children. It was sad for the future of the kingdom that the last two Kamehameha kings’ jealousy of rank kept a potentially fertile branch of the dynasty from having a chance. A similar argument could be made for Lot and Bernice. He was the Conqueror’s grandson, she was his great-granddaughter, through different wives. They might have had children, and the dynasty would have survived, but for his self-indulgent petulance in making himself too unpleasant to marry: The impending doom of the Kamehameha line was self-inflicted.

  * * *

  Equally serious for the future of the kingdom was the prevalence of mixed-race marriages. At first contact Hawaiian women could not wait to give themselves to the exotic and, even to their perception, vastly advanced white men. As decades passed the practice took on a different complexion. In England and America women, by and large, could not own real property, where in Hawai‘i chiefesses controlled enormous estates. In Hawai‘i, before the Mahele and its related statutes, foreigners could not own land, and after passage of the Alien Land Ownership Act, it was still easier, and cheaper, to come into control of a large tract by marrying its konohiki. In these Victorian times, it went without saying that this practice did not work in the other direction. White men might take native wives at will, but in the Anglo mind, the thought of a white woman being possessed by a native man, be he ever so highborn, was demoralizing. It was an inequity that aroused bitter comment from Hawaiian men, from Opukaha‘ia to Kamehameha III.

  The wedding of Princess Bernice Pauahi in 1850 was one of the most prominent and successful, and to all appearances free of mercenary motive. Charles Reed Bishop of Glens Falls (on the Hudson), New York, large-eyed, long-nosed, and handsome, originally came to Hawai‘i in company with his aunt-in-law’s brother, William Little Lee. They were on their way to seek their fortune in the Oregon Territory when their ship diverted to the islands to resupply, and they stayed. They became naturalized citizens, and Lee did admirable legal and diplomatic service until his untimely death. Bishop went into finance, his Bishop & Co. bank being the first chartered in the kingdom, and it was an idea whose time had come, as he raked in nearly five thousand dollars in deposits on the first day. Ladd & Co. hired him to unsnarl their land fiasco; he invested in a Kaua‘i sugar plantation, and likely would have ended rich even had he not married Bernice, who was yet to inherit the vast pool of land she was heir to. Theirs was an example of a good marriage; in fact even her parents eventually accepted him, and they took up residence on the family estate. After her death he honored her memory with the founding of schools and the museum that bears their name.

  Likely on the other end of the happiness scale was the 1862 union of Lydia Kamaka‘eha with John Owen Dominis, son of the ship captain’s widow of Washington Place. Lydia’s hanai father Abner Paki had been so incensed that Kamehameha IV didn’t marry her that he groused he would marry her off to some good white man, but apparently he had little to do with the Dominis match. His family was of vaguely noble Croatian heritage, via Schenectady, New York.9 His boarding school was next door to the Royal School, and he made friends with the ali‘i children over the top of the fence. After marrying Lydia he dedicated himself to becoming the indispensable man. He served on the boards of education, immigration, and health, and more than twenty years as royal governor of O‘ahu, part of that time as governor of Maui also. His marriage should have been so dedicated. Dominis married Lydia and dumped her at Washington Place in the contemptuous care of his mother, who was an arrant racist. Lili‘uokalani wrote discreetly in her memoirs that her husband “preferred to socialize without me,” but that did not stop him from fathering an illegitimate boy by his wife’s servant Mary Purdy Lamiki ‘Aimoku. (According to his physician, Dr. George Trousseau, Dominis was a serial philanderer and was probably lucky that there was only one baby out there.10) Finding refuge in the spirit of aloha, Lydia partly blamed herself, for her apparent inability to have children, and later adopted the bastard son and, in one account, briefly considered trying to pass the child off as their own, which would have been illegal. (In this adoption she followed the example of Queen Dowager Kalama, who adopted Kamehameha III’s illegitimate son, Albert Kunuiakea.)11

  Another important royal heiress to marry white was Elizabeth La‘anui, the great-granddaughter of the Conqueror’s older brother. She wed Franklin S. Pratt of Boston in 1864, who spent years on the periphery of power without taking any key role: staff colonel to Kamehameha V and privy councillor; in later years his longest tenure was as registrar of public accounts before serving briefly as Hawaiian consul in San Francisco.

  Americans were not the only practitioners of the mercenary marriage. From whaling in the Antarctic to cattle ranching in Texas, Scots were seldom second in line to banking a profit. Lydia’s biological younger sister, Miriam Likelike, wed Archibald Scott Cleghorn in September 1870. He was from Edinburgh, the son of immigrant parents, and had been responsible for running the family store in Honolulu since he was seventeen. He already had three hapa haole daughters from a previous relationship, but once he graduated to the royal circle
he served for eighteen years on the privy council and succeeded Dominis as royal governor of O‘ahu. His marriage to Likelike, however, dissolved into bitter vituperation, which made things awkward in raising their child, when they finally had one fifteen years into the marriage. That was Princess Victoria Ka‘iulani, heiress presumptive during and after Lili‘uokalani’s reign.

  And those were just the most important marriages. Throughout the kingdom white, usually American, businessmen won the hands of chiefesses and acquired instant stakes toward future wealth. Both sides, at least, could play at this game, as land-rich ali‘i women secured fortunes for themselves in exchange for their lands, as when Abigail Kuaihelani married the Scot James Campbell the year he sold the Pioneer Mill for half a million dollars. Some mixed-race families were already rolling into a second generation, as with John Adams Kuakini Cummins, born as early as 1835 to an American father and a high-chiefess mother. He became known for his lavish entertainments, and for friendships and service to Kamehameha V, Princess Ruth, and Queen Emma, among others. Between the marriages and the Mahele, much of the wealth of the islands passed out of purely native control.

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  Exhausted by losing baby and husband within fifteen months of each other, Emma gathered a suite for a European progress: her escort John Synge of the British Foreign Office; William Hoapili Kaauwai (the first native Episcopal deacon) as her chaplain and his wife as lady-in-waiting; her Canadian footman, John Welsh; Sister Catherine Chambers for companionship, and two chiefs’ daughters to deposit in England for schooling. They sailed on May 5, 1865; Emma meant to rest and recover herself, and almost from the start the voyage had its effect. She enjoyed Acapulco and Panama, crossed the Isthmus and boarded the RMS Tasmanian. They were feted by the governor of the Danish West Indies, arrived at Southampton in mid-July, and were conveyed by carriage to London. In between rounds of sightseeing and a surfeit of Anglican church services, Emma was diligent to promote the cause of the Episcopal Church in Hawai‘i, but highest on her agenda was to meet Queen Victoria, with whom she had been corresponding with all the fervent affection of the era.12 They met on September 9 at Windsor Castle; Victoria had been a widow for almost four years, Emma almost two, and both wore mourning.

  “She is dark,” wrote Victoria in her journal, “but not more so than an Indian, with fine features & splendid soft eyes. She was dressed in just the same widow’s weeds as I wear. I took her into the White Drawingroom [sic], where I asked her to sit down next to me on the sofa. She was much moved when I spoke of her great misfortune in losing her husband and only child.”

  “The Queen received me most affectionately,” Emma wrote home to the king, “most sisterly.”

  When Victoria returned from her habitual summer sojourn at Balmoral she invited Emma to spend the night of November 18 at Windsor, a mark of singular favor, and the visit cemented their friendship. Emma “is not looking well,” Victoria recorded, “and coughs poor thing, for which reason she is ordered to go to the south of France.” At dinner Emma was seated between the queen and her visiting eldest daughter, Vicky, now the crown princess of Prussia. Emma “was amiable, clever, & nice in all she said, in speaking of her own country.… The people now were always dressed as Europeans, & were all nominally Christians, but not very fervently so.”

  “Directly after breakfast,” Victoria wrote of the following morning, “we went to wish good Queen Emma goodbye & I gave her a bracelet with my miniature and hair. She thanked me much for my kindness, & for consenting to be godmother to her poor little child.”13

  The group had a long vacation on the Riviera, during which Hoapili succumbed to the atmosphere and took a French mistress, for which he and his wife (who had not been a diligent lady-in-waiting) were sent home early. A letter from Emma’s brother-in-law the king reminded her of the importance of going to Paris and presenting herself to the emperor. She did so, relaying to Lot that Napoleon III had no memory of meeting him fifteen years before, but they had a hearty laugh when Empress Eugénie asked if the king of Hawai‘i spoke French, to which Emma answered, of course, and he had learned it in Paris. Emma’s greatest surprise was the sight of an exotic Pacific plant growing in a vase of Sèvres porcelain. Emma explained to them that it was a ti plant, considered a nuisance in the islands, fed to cattle and used to wrap fish.

  The party returned home by way of the United States, and Kamehameha V drew on his American experience to advise her: “They are a very sensitive people, your visiting them will disarm all the lies and insinuations directed against our family.”14 The dowager queen received a thirteen-gun salute in New York Harbor, and President Andrew Johnson received her in the Red Room of the White House—the first queen to visit the executive mansion.

  Emma returned home on October 22, 1866—having missed some important events. R. C. Wyllie had died almost exactly a year before; Emma had deeply mourned the news, and she came home to find him interred in the royal cemetery at Mauna ‘Ala, a high honor for his more than twenty years of service. More troubling, Victoria Kamamalu, the heiress presumptive, had died the previous May, throwing the succession into confusion. As the highest-ranking chiefess in the country, she had undertaken charitable activities such as founding the Ka‘ahumanu Society for the relief of elderly and sick natives, which was widely subscribed and generously supported.15 She was only twenty-seven, and yet unmarried, an unhappy hostage to her brothers’ determination to preserve their status as the highest in the land.

  Her passing might have been only a minor story in the American press, but it became known to large numbers through the pen of a remarkable author. In March 1866 the American steamer Ajax dropped anchor in Honolulu, disgorging cargo and passengers, except for one California journalist who stayed swapping stories so late that he spent another night on board. In the morning Samuel Clemens, lately famous for a short story about a jumping frog under the pen name Mark Twain, sauntered ashore. To all appearances he had come to dispatch home amusing anecdotes of the islands and people, yet there was a more serious intent as well. Twain’s employer, the Sacramento Union, was one of those newspapers that was alive to the possibilities of Pacific empire, or at the very least trade, and the stories that he filed, while inimitably Twain, also convey much accurate and relevant information on the government, economy, and commercial potential.16 The very ship that Twain arrived on, the Ajax, was intended to inaugurate regular steamship service between the islands and California, and he was supposed to generate tourist traffic. (She was a year ahead of her time, however. Service on the Ajax was suspended after two unprofitable voyages, but a similar service the next year on the SS Idaho did make money, boosted with a $75,000 per year mail contract with the United States.)17

  Mark Twain arrived in time to witness the entire month of Kamamalu’s funeral observations. And his senses were filled, for the king accorded her the traditional rites of their people. “A multitude of common natives,” wrote Twain, “howl and wail, and weep and chant the dreary funeral songs of ancient Hawaii, and dance the strange dance of the dead.” Indeed the king closed the palace grounds to all but the maka‘ainana so they could mourn in their own way, annoyed that the funeral obsequies for his brother had been “criticized and commented on too freely.”18

  This stern but benevolent demeanor, whether seen in his insistence on a crown-empowered constitution, or in his use of that power, as when he quashed legislation that would have permitted the sale of liquor to natives (“I will never sign the death warrant of my people”), or in his judicious embrace of the ancient culture, earned Kamehameha V wide respect. His motto was Onipa‘a, “immovable,” and the kanakas considered him “the last great chief of the olden type.”19 “He dressed plainly,” Twain wrote of him, “poked about Honolulu, night or day, on his old horse, unattended. He was popular, greatly respected, even beloved.”20

  In trying to relate an engaging story, Twain may not have understood the significance of the funeral’s reversion to native traditions, but his journalist’s eye
certainly noted the decline of the Hawaiian people, and held the business and missionary interests equally to blame in accomplishing it: “The traders brought labor and fancy diseases … in other words, long, deliberate, infallible destruction, and the missionaries brought the means of grace and got them ready. So the two forces are working harmoniously, and anybody who knows anything about figures can tell you exactly when the last Kanaka will be in Abraham’s bosom and his islands in the hands of the whites.”21

  The native indulgence of Victoria Kamamalu’s funeral was only a temporary revival of native custom, however. More representative was the king’s laying the cornerstone of Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Cathedral on March 5, 1867, an act that could not help but showcase the royals’ continuing disdain for their Calvinist upbringing. The cathedral had been a favorite project of Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma, who selected the stonework when she was in England. It was designed by the London firm of Slater & Carpenter, which dispatched to Hawai‘i the prefabricated stonework and their master builder Benjamin Ingelow.

  * * *

  During 1869 events occurred that seemed to reinforce British relations with Hawai‘i and left the American community in further doubt of their future. During her sojourn in England, Emma had not met Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh. He had undertaken a naval career, a duty at which he excelled, and rose to command the frigate HMS Galatea. He was twenty-five and third in line to the throne after the Prince of Wales and his son, the infant Duke of Clarence. He proved to be a popular representative of the royal family wherever he called—notwithstanding an assassination attempt in Australia the preceding year.