Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii Read online

  Mrs. Thurston had six more years to live, but in the preface of her book she composed her own epitaph: “She Hath Done What She Could.” The sentiment could equally have memorialized the fellow travelers of her youth. It was true that they imposed a frowning and alien morality on the native culture, but they had also taught and doctored, pastored and befriended. In their own minds their most important contribution was to give the Hawaiians a faith to replace kapu and sacrifice, but they also gave them a written language and a literacy rate that was now the highest in the world. They gave them a head start on principles of constitutional government to which they must have come later than sooner anyway. And now some of their sons—Dole, Judd, Whitney—maintained a lookout for the integrity of the kingdom. But there was another element that would wreck it all. That was the sons and grandsons who increasingly dominated the islands’ economy. They were possessed of an inflexible certainty that their moral right was only augmented by their financial might. They mistook, however, their own greed for the sense of purpose that fired the first missionaries.

  Now there was David Kalakaua, who would make sweet deals with them if they would make him king. And he would find that in making his easily-given promises to the “Missionary Boys,” he was making a deal with the devil.

  14. Taffy Triumphant

  On September 17, 1875, a distinguished visitor disembarked from the steamer City of Melbourne, two weeks out of Auckland, New Zealand. Anthony Trollope was sixty, and had assumed the mantle of the late Charles Dickens as England’s most famous novelist. He spent less than two days in Honolulu before continuing his voyage, and was gone by the time the newspapers published his presence, but the brevity of his acquaintance did not prevent him from writing his impressions for the Daily and Weekly Mercury of Liverpool. Amenities at the Hawaiian Hotel, he noted, cost dearly, but the establishment produced its own gaslight, and local laundries could process any amount of work by a “steam apparatus” in as little as six hours. The parties glittered, Americans dominated the government, the mainstay of the economy was sugar, and the country was led by King Kalakaua, whose dynasty “rejoiced in the name of Ka-meha-meha.”1 Trollope was about to become even more famous with publication of the novel most often cited as his masterpiece, The Way We Live Now, whose central theme was the self-deception of greedy graspers who believe that dishonesty becomes acceptable if only it succeeds on a grand-enough scale. If Trollope had stayed longer in Hawai‘i, he would have seen how closely life can imitate art, for the expensive, prosperous, American-accented Honolulu that he glimpsed was the fruit of a year of scheming, tumult, dissension, riot, and recrimination.

  The death of a king once again without issue or declaration of a successor threw the matter into the legislature, and the two predicted figures came forward as claimants. The first was Dowager Queen Emma Kaleleonalani, who asserted that Lunalilo on his deathbed had declared his desire that she succeed him, but he expired before a decree could be prepared. To make this claim twice within a year would sound suspicious, but most observers both foreign and domestic were equally certain that he would have chosen her. And there, again, was David Kalakaua with his weighty but not royal family behind him, and his American-style political savvy that Emma felt was beneath her.

  Emma’s blood claim over Kalakaua’s was commanding.2 With the Conqueror’s legitimate direct candidates now removed from contention, Emma’s lineage was superior to that of any rivals, being the great-granddaughter on her father’s side of Kamehameha I’s only full brother, Keli‘imaika‘i. Kalakaua, as he had with Lunalilo, hired genealogists to dispute her claim; they maintained that her grandmother was po‘olua, making Emma not certainly the Conqueror’s great-grandniece. (That alternative great-grandfather, however, would have descended Emma from Kalaniopu‘u, which would still best Kalakaua’s claim.) In either event, Emma Kaleleonalani was a chiefess of high descent. On her mother’s side, however, she was the granddaughter of Kamehameha’s British captive servant John Young, leaving her vulnerable—as she had discovered at her engagement party—to a racist whisper that being one-quarter white disqualified her. More to policy, the legislature also had to consider that Queen Emma remained immensely popular with the native people, who had come to depend upon the hospital she had built and endowed for them, and to whom she remained philanthropically devoted. Weighing against her in the largely Congregationalist legislature was her Anglicanism and her openly British sympathies in the international arena. They would not forget that Emma’s late child had been named Albert Edward after the Prince of Wales, and that Queen Victoria herself had been his godmother.

  Only a day after the dowager queen made her candidacy known, High Chief Kalakaua published his intention also to run for king. Though not of the royal line, he was descended from Kamehameha I’s general and confidant Kame‘eiamoku (he who had captured the Fair American and killed her crew, save Isaac Davis), and his mother was a high chiefess of the Kona District—so his election would mean a complete change of dynasty.3 A sometime poet, he cleverly framed his announcement, beginning in the style of the traditional Hawaiian chant, which might draw some of the native support away from Emma, and ending with a little American-style electioneering that would play well with the haoles: “Now, therefore, I, David Kalakaua, cheerfully call upon you,” it concluded, “and respectfully ask you to grant me your support.”

  And the race was on. Kalakaua was a complicated man. His name meant “Day of the Battle,” and in that uncanny Hawaiian way, foreshadowed his life of conflict. He was born in November 1836, making him only a few months, probably, younger than Emma. She had been given in hanai to a wealthy English doctor, and grew up in luxury and stability. He had been promised in hanai to Kuini Liliha, but Kina‘u intervened, perhaps disapproving of her and Boki’s recalcitrant tendencies, and routed him instead to the High Chiefess Ha‘aheo, who died when he was seven. He lived with his hanai father on Maui, then with his biological parents on O‘ahu, when not boarding at the Royal School. He could be forgiven ambition born of not knowing exactly who he was. Emma was beautiful, he tended to be fat; his nickname was “Taffy.” At the Royal School, because of their similar ages they were placed in a group that took their lessons together, and he was always trying to catch up to her. Owing to her home life, she spoke excellent English; he struggled with the lessons. She grew up in a home with a sense of propriety, he lived closer to the life where the chief took what he wanted—until he saw his grandfather hanged for it.

  And here they were at thirty-eight, with little changed in their respective relationship. Like Emma, Kalakaua despite his pandering to the Americans also desired to restore native rights and rehabilitate the culture, and bring the haoles to heel. In his younger years he had headed a group called the Young Hawaiians, whose motto had been “Hawaii for the Hawaiians.” He was well known in the legislature, having served there for thirteen years after holding earlier positions in the administration of Kamehameha IV. The acting British commissioner quoted A. F. Judd, now attorney general, as saying that he would “almost prefer the chances of a revolution, to the nomination of Colonel Kalakaua.”4 Bishop saw things perhaps most clearly: that Kalakaua if he were elected would try to do a good job, despite his faults, but “there are strong fears, that Q. E. would be partial to a clique,” by which he meant the English.5

  His constant angling for the throne, though, and his possible manipulation of the palace troops’ mutiny, only heightened Emma’s disgust with his grasping. But she also realized that his ability to dedicate himself to a goal was a lesson by which she could profit. As she wrote her cousin Peter Ka‘eo, “With Taffy’s faults we must give him credit … he has exerted himself … he has not faltered, but keeps on trying for the end. This is a good point in him which we must copy.” Copy, she wrote, using honorable means, not the crooked subterfuges that Kalakaua was all too ready to resort to.6 In her memoirs, Kalakaua’s sister Lydia Kamaka‘eha relentlessly takes his part, depicting Emma as the one grasping for power, shamele
ssly importuning both the dying Kamehameha V and the dying Lunalilo to name her, even within Lydia’s hearing. It is this last element, if nothing else, that falls too far outside the parameters of Emma’s discretion to be credible.7

  Perhaps as a measure of his desire to be king, Kalakaua paid up his back dues to the Masons, membership in which he had dropped in 1868, and began attending meetings again.8 This time there would be no plebiscite, which Emma would have won going away; the entire contest would be waged within the legislature, behind the paired Ionic columns of the Ali‘iolani Hale. As the campaign progressed, Emma left the city for her house in the Nu‘uanu Valley. Stories began to circulate about her that had something of Kalakaua’s sound about them: she had promised to abolish all taxes, she had promised to free convicts from the jail, she had promised to take no salary. Some of it may have been true; Emma’s advisers were pressing on her that she could not win in the legislature, and she must compete with Kalakaua on his own ground. If she did make or consent to these pronouncements, it was out of her character and not well done. And it all happened with astonishing suddenness. Lunalilo had died on February 3, and the legislature met to make its choice on February 12.

  American political interests could never have come to dominate Hawai‘i without first capturing the culture, and Kalakaua’s lobbying in the legislature gives some vivid examples of how complete the transformation had become. One of Kalakaua’s backers there was the hapa haole John Adams Kuakini Cummins, the “Lord of Waimanalo,” who previous to casting his vote against Emma offered that “I believe in beautiful women and fine horses, but no petticoat shall rule me.”9 Cummins was the offspring of another one of those useful marriages, this one between Massachusetts businessman Thomas Jefferson Cummins and a high chiefess of O‘ahu five years his senior. Himself raised as a high chief,10 there was a time when a man like Kuakini Cummins would have fallen on his belly at the approach of a figure like Keopuolani; for a decade and a half after the Conqueror’s death, the important policy decisions of the kingdom were made by Ka‘ahumanu and then by her niece Kina‘u. For Kuakini to have entered the legislature as a knee-jerk mysogynist, and to refer to such a decidedly Western concept as “petticoat rule,” demonstrates the sea change in the Americanization of cultural values—which certainly smoothed Kalakaua’s path to the throne. To say that the seat on the privy council that Kalakaua then awarded to Cummins was a payoff for his vote might not be fair, for Cummins’s wealth, social prominence, and favors rendered to previous monarchs recommended him for such a station, but over the next two decades Cummins proved himself an effective servant of the house of Kalakaua.

  A large throng gathered before the Ali‘iolani Hale, most of them the queen’s supporters—“Emmaites,” their enemies called them. When the vote was taken there were 39 votes for Kalakaua, 6 for Emma, and it was apparent that Kalakaua had managed to do what observers feared he might do the year before—get himself elected monarch against the prevailing will of the people, by ingratiating himself with a majority of the legislators. Lunalilo had had the fact of a landslide referendum to prevent that; Emma had none. When the result was announced, a deputation of five legislators left the building for a waiting carriage to take the news to the new king.

  But then “a hoarse, indignant roar, mingled with cheers from the crowd without was heard within the Assembly.”11 The crowd became a mob as shock gave way to utter outrage. They rocked and then tore apart the carriage as the deputation fled back inside. Wheel spokes became clubs; windows shattered as they surged inside. Most of the eighty policemen whom the marshal of the kingdom, William C. Parke, had assigned to crowd control, joined in. Inside, Parke stationed himself just outside his own office with a pistol, and the crowd avoided him, but the legislature was sacked. One legislator who was known to have supported Kalakaua was defenestrated and killed where he landed.

  There was no help. Hawai‘i’s showy little army had never been reconstituted after the mutiny the previous year; the policemen were now part of the mob. Charles Reed Bishop, now foreign minister, Governor Dominis, and the king-elect called on the British and American consuls for marines from their warships—of which there were only three in the harbor—to restore order. About 75 marines landed from HM screw corvette Tenedos, and about 150 from the sloops-of-war USS Portsmouth and USS Tuscarora. The Americans cleared the courthouse and square; the British marched up the Nu‘uanu Valley to Emma’s summer house, Hanaiakamalama, and dispersed her people gathered there.12

  It was the most violent rioting that Honolulu had ever seen. At one point Kalakaua sent a message to the queen dowager, asking her to request her partisans to disband, but she refused. The tension was slow to dissipate; that night was punctuated by breaking glass and gunshots. That Kalakaua opened his reign by placing himself in further debt to the Americans played a suitable overture; that was a central theme of his seventeen-year tenure.

  * * *

  In arranging the royal household of his new dynasty, and himself being childless with Kapi‘olani, he declared his younger brother, William Pitt Leleiohoku II, twenty, his heir apparent, followed by his younger sister Lydia Kamaka‘eha, and next their youngest sister, Miriam Likelike. All were, by his prerogative, made royal highnesses, and he bestowed a new name on Lydia. When she was born in 1838 the kuhina nui, Elizabeth Kina‘u, who had only seven months to live, was enduring a painful eye condition. She was close friends with the new mother, Keohokalole, with whom she shared a descent from Keoua, and she named the infant Kamaka‘eha, “Sore Eyes,” preceded by Lili‘u Loloku Walania, “Painful Tearful Burning,” with Lydia being her first name, and her oft-used surname, Paki, that of her hanai father. At his accession Kalakaua contracted her names to Lili‘uokalani, “Smarting of the Royal Ones,” which her close friends shortened to the nickname “Lili‘u.”

  Soon after his election, Kalakaua undertook a royal progress to the different islands, which helped his popularity. And there were other ways in which he figured out how to help himself. One of his first accomplishments was composing the lyrics of a national anthem, “Hawai‘i Pono‘i” (“Righteous Hawai‘i,” more liberally translated as “Hawai‘i’s Own True Sons”), partnering with his bandmaster, Capt. Henry Berger, who wrote the music. “Hawai‘i’s own true sons,” it began. “Be loyal to your king, Your country’s liege and lord, the chief.” After each verse came the refrain, “Father above us all, Kamehameha, Who guarded in wars, With his spear.” The song was a clever, clever fusion of patriotism, designed to promote an upwelling of national pride that the people would find in having a national anthem, and his own ingratiation with the people by tying himself to Kamehameha I, to whom he was not related, and whose descendents viewed him as something between a civil servant and ambitious grabber.

  And the project also began to recast Kamehameha from Conqueror to Unifier. Many Hawaiians on Kaua‘i still viewed him as the king who failed to subdue their island and had to negotiate for it; many on O‘ahu reviled him for the massacre at Nu‘uanu Pali, where hundreds of their own men had plunged to their deaths and had their severed heads offered in sacrifice. It would have been impossible for Kamehameha to have killed tens of thousands during the conquest and been kindly remembered everywhere. Kalakaua, in league with a controversial legislator—Walter Murray Gibson the ex-Mormon, who had wheeled and dealt and rehabilitated himself back into public employment—undertook a project to commission a heroic statue of Kamehameha to commemorate the centennial of Captain Cook’s landing. A worldwide search for an artist led them to Thomas Ridgeway Gould, a Bostonian working in Florence, who had recently produced portrait busts of Junius Booth and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Gibson and the king raised ten thousand dollars, and commissioned Gould to execute a heroic standing figure of the Conqueror, to depict him at the age of about forty-five, which gave Gould some creative license since the only portraits of Kamehameha showed him in his old age.

  The plaster model that Gould created was sent to Paris for casting in brass, the gilded finis
hed statue was dispatched in August 1880, but the ship burned and sank near the Falkland Islands. The Hawaiian government used the insurance proceeds to pay for a second casting, unaware that Falklands fishermen had salvaged the original, although it was damaged. Painted in lifelike colors to conceal damage to the gilt brass, this original was later erected before the courthouse in Kapa‘au, near Kamehameha’s birthplace in North Kohala. The second casting was placed before the legislative building, the Ali‘iolani Hale in Honolulu, and it too was eventually painted in natural colors. And Kalakaua was proved correct, as the statues were quickly accepted as iconic symbols of the Hawaiian nation; the more traditional natives accorded them the status of spiritual objects, and receptacles of mana, despite their being Western-created objects of heroic art. For those who could not see the statues in person, the image was widely disseminated on a twenty-five-cent postage stamp. Kalakaua was probably the first head of state to realize the propaganda value of the humble stamps. During his tenure as postmaster, issues of Hawaiian stamps—perforated, gummed, and beautifully engraved in Boston—became some of the most advanced in the world and were avidly sought by collectors.

  Kalakaua was fascinated by science and inventions, and he keenly followed the doings of a British scientific expedition that arrived in June 1874, to record a transit of Venus across the sun—the first such event since the one that brought Captain Cook to the islands ninety-six years before. It also, happily for his purposes, put him in connection with the somewhat outcast Princess Ruth on a matter not related to the succession. The seven astronomers wished to be lodged as close as possible to where their instruments were set up. The site selected was in the Apua District on Honolulu, mauka of the business center. Ruth rented them a house that she owned, and the station was located next door on land that Kalakaua owned. The king proved to be rather an overgrown schoolboy, and wore his welcome thin, but he had facilitated their business by waiving customs inspections and in other ways, and the astronomers tolerated him with smiles—unlike the incessant heat, rain, mosquitoes, and a throng of curious locals.13 The actual Venusian transit was not to occur until December 8; on November 15 Kalakaua imposed on them with several ladies of the court; it was as close to the transit as he would get, for he had to leave the country two days later.