Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii Read online

  In 1993, the centenary of the overthrow, President Bill Clinton did the only proper thing to mark the occasion: On behalf of the rest of the United States, he apologized. Another event of cultural significance to the islands that occurred in 1993 was the repatriation of the remains of Henry Opukaha‘ia, the youthful refugee from the Kamehameha conquest whose zeal for the new God set the missionaries in motion and changed Hawaiian history forever. An effort was coordinated by collateral descendents, who raised money and support, and shipped a glowing casket of koa wood to Connecticut. In July a team led by the state archaeologist painstakingly excavated the grave at Cornwall; their hopes sank as they found only discolored soil in the outline of the original coffin, which had been dissolved by the acetic soil. To their great surprise, however, Opukaha‘ia’s nearly intact skeleton slowly emerged from the earth. Washed and articulated in a bed of foam rubber in the koa coffin, he returned home and was reburied on August 15 in the cemetery of the Kahikolu Church, close by Kealakekua Bay from where he had escaped the butchery of the conquest two centuries before.15 Originally constructed in 1852–55, the Kahikolu Church was one of only two stone churches built on the Big Island in the missionary era. Felled by the earthquake of August 21, 1951, it lay in ruins for many years before being restored and reopened for services in 1999.

  A much more important restoration has been the stunning resurrection of the ‘Iolani Palace, seat of the Kalakaua monarchy. Immediately after the coup the building was appropriated to house the junta’s government, for a time during which the queen was locked in her bedroom directly overhead. Much of the original woodwork had been lost to insects and rot incident to the climate, and was meticulously re-created. Similar to the experience of the French palace of Versailles, a call was put out to return furniture and precious objects that had been dispersed. While the project is not complete, the people’s response has been eloquent testimony of their endorsement of the project.

  In 1994 another site of cultural importance was recovered when the U.S. Navy relinquished control of the sacred island of Kaho‘olawe. Once settled and agricultural—albeit thinly because it lies in the rain shadow of Haleakala and is semidesert—it had been uninhabited since being commandeered as a bombing and naval gunnery range during World War II, a use that continued through the Korean and Vietnamese Wars. In one test, to see whether a retired cruiser could withstand a nearby blast, five hundred tons of TNT were set off, ruining the island’s only well. Shattered by the decades-long rain of high explosives, the forty-four-square-mile island was designated an environmental and cultural reserve, and is being restored by young natives reconnecting to their Polynesian traditions.

  * * *

  Hawai‘i in the twenty-first century, despite having contributed a president to the United States, is still in ferment. Protests, such as those that periodically occupy the ‘Iolani Palace grounds, continue to the present day, carried out by what is collectively known as the “Independence Movement.” It is angry and vigorous but disunited, with perhaps half a dozen principal groups, some headed by one or another royal descendent, each claiming the throne for herself. Some things, it seems, never change.

  But Hawai‘i’s social ills—poverty that is demonstrably an aftereffect still of the Mahele more than a century and a half ago; youth crime and disaffection that come of having one’s cultural heritage ripped apart and never mended; the restoration of native identity and the just desire for the return of some amount of autonomy, which for decades was never accorded a status equal to that even of American Indians; the natural environment that was nearly obliterated in the worship of sugar; and more, need to be not just addressed but comprehensively, meaningfully—and probably expensively—addressed.

  But they are not addressed by nostalgia for the chiefly days. People who espouse reincarnation always fancy themselves to have been Henry VIII or Marie Antoinette. No one channels his past as some humble, downtrodden medieval plowman. In old Hawai‘i 999 people in 1,000 were kanakas, digging taro, netting fish, trying to hide their one pig from the chief’s steward, being throttled on an altar if their shadow crossed an ali‘i. Modern cultural sensitivity obscures an important fact: Hawai‘i never was a paradise.

  In its own way the Western-dominated nineteenth century was as merciless as precontact warfare. The Age of Imperialism had no room for small but strategically vital countries. Kamehameha III sensed that when he prepared to cede his kingdom to the United States in preference to the French or British. Kalakaua realized it when he tried to marry off Princess Ka‘iulani to a Japanese imperial prince. The Second World War gave sufficient examples of how the Japanese governed their client states for the Hawaiians still to be counting their blessings that he failed.

  What is needed, by the government and on the mainland, is a clear grasp of the history and what Westernization has done to the islands and people. Precontact Hawaiians had no iron, but that did not make them a Stone Age culture. They had by most measures a highly evolved society, albeit retaining some brutal remnants of a more primitive time whose eradication need not be mourned. But there was also a large extent to which contact meant exploitation—economic more than cultural—and that is what needs to be put right. Over generations as an American territory and then state, Hawaiians have often struggled to maintain the spirit of aloha—the “face of breath,” from the ancient greeting of inclining close in greeting, and sharing the air. That is the most famous part of their culture, and mainlanders have come to expect that of them.

  But Hawaiians have another important concept: Ho ‘oponopono—reconciling, the making right of a bad situation. In the ancient days there were ceremonies to achieve it, to cleanse the minds of anger or selfishness, and to come together earnestly and in good faith to rectify and satisfy. Hawai‘i deserves to have it made right.

  Notes

  Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.

  Preface

  1 Docents at Queen Emma’s summer “palace” in the Nu‘uanu Valley, and at Princess Ruth Ke‘elikolani’s Hulihe‘e “palace” in Kailua-Kona, regularly contest this characterization, with some reason, although these two residences were residential retreats and did not function as a nexus of royal power in the same sense as did the ‘Iolani Palace.

  2 Menton, “A Christian and ‘Civilized’ Education,” 222–29.

  3 Nogelmeier, Mai Pa‘a I Ka Leo, 110.

  4 Bird, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands, 316.

  5 http://hawaii-inns.com/history/index.htm.

  6 Nogelmeier, Mai Pa‘a I Ka Leo, 144–52.

  7 The ‘okina question has beset plenty of other editors. See for example Eloise Christian’s preface to the 1951 annotated edition of Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, xx. Similar considerations led me to the opposite conclusion, and I have omitted using the macron, the bar over a vowel that lengthens its sound. The thick tongue of the mainland outweighed the additional accuracy of pronunciation.

  8 See the writings of the early missionary William Ellis, published in 1825: “In the year 1819, Tamehameha, king of the Sandwich Islands, died, and his son Rihoriho succeeded to his dominions.” Journal of a Tour around Hawaii, iii.

  Antecedent: Captain Cook

  9 By far the premier scholar of Captain Cook has been John Cawte Beaglehole, author of the biography The Life of Captain James Cook in 1974, and editor of Cook’s journals from his three voyages. His works cemented Cook’s august reputation, to which John Ledyard, the American corporal of marines aboard the Resolution, took such exception.

  10 Westervelt, Hawaiian Historical Legends, 102–3.

  11 Ibid., 104–5. In this account it was the mother of Kaumuali‘i, later king of Kaua‘i, Kamakahelei, who advocated giving their daughters for the gods’ pleasure, she first among them.

  12 Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, the native historian and commentator Davida Malo dismissed the notion that the difference in size between the lordly ali‘i and the lorded-over maka‘ainana stemmed fr
om any different ethnicity, but acknowledged that the difference was unexplained. Hawaiian Antiquities, 52, 60. Much has since been learned about the aboriginal Hawaiian migration, but the issue is still unresolved.

  13 Cook, The Journals, quoted in Smith, “John Ledyard Revisited,” 59.

  14 Ledyard’s importance to the historiography of Captain Cook is well expounded in Smith, “‘We Shall Soon See the Consequences of Such Conduct’: John Ledyard Revisited.”

  15 Ledyard, Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage, 102.

  16 See Braden, “On the Probability of Pre-1778 Japanese Drifts to Hawaii,” 86, and works there cited.

  17 Dye, “Population Trends in Hawai‘i before 1778,” 15.

  18 Key elements of the religious system originated in Tahiti (or in old Hawaiian, “Kahiki”), where such ki‘i images were known as tiki.

  19 Wichman, Kaua‘i: Ancient Place-Names and Their Stories, 94–95. Other accounts have the eyeball eating at the beginning of the season. See www.donch.com/lulh/heiau1.htm. Other various circumstances in which the eyeballs of sacrificial victims were consumed, sometimes floating in a cup of ‘awa, are outlined in Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology, 49–50. The practice of eating the eyeballs of sacrifices seems to have been imported from Tahiti when that group conquered Hawai‘i, although some sources maintain that in Tahiti, the sacrificed eyeball was raised to the chief’s lips but not actually ingested. Still, at the time the French imposed their protectorate over Tahiti, the reigning Queen Pomare IV’s given name was ‘Aimata, or “Eye Eater.”

  20 That precontact Hawaiians actually took Cook for Lono was expounded by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, and quickly challenged by the Sri Lankan scholar Gananath Obeyesekere, who denied “the right of any non-Polynesian to speak with authority” on the subject. Smith, “John Ledyard Revisited,” 45. While that particular dispute degenerated into an epic pissing match of political correctness over who has the “right” to study non-Western cultures—itself a stunningly antiintellectual notion—the timing of Cook’s visit, his circumnavigation of Hawai‘i Island during makahiki, his landing in Kealakekua Bay of all places, Ledyard’s memory of his acclamation as “Orono,” the reception accorded him, and the forbearance demonstrated by the natives at his partial dismantling of the Hikiau heiau seem to justify a conclusion that he was regarded, at first, as more than a mortal visitor. Although they may not rise to the level of historical testimony, the sources used by the folklorist W. D. Westervelt included a rather lengthy excerpt of the prayers offered to Cook as Lono; indeed, in Westervelt’s account, the natives of Kaua‘i had debated and concluded him to be Lono the year before, but apparently made less fuss over him since Hawai‘i Island was the locus of his cult. Westervelt, Hawaiian Historical Legends, 104, 108–9. See also Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press/Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1992); versus Sahlins, How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, For Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

  1. The Loneliness of a God

  1 The appearance of the south shore today is remarkably different; Hurricane Iniki scoured away the sand, and it is now a pebble beach of lava and coral, the chunks worn smooth by the waves but as startlingly black and white as a chessboard, studded with boat-crunching spikes of newer lava.

  2 Ledyard, Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage, 103.

  3 See, for instance, Grant and Ogawa, “Living Proof,” 140–41, and works there cited.

  4 Beaglehole, Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery, 1776–1780, Part 2, 1234. Samwell’s own memoir, The Death of Captain Cook and Other Writings, lives in reprint, edited by Martin Fitzpatrick et al., Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007.

  5 Ledyard, Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage, 104.

  6 Derivative of the kava plant (Piper mythesticum), still familiar today as “kava-kava.” Habitual use also leads to skin scabs, which Kalaniopu‘u also evinced.

  7 Thrum, Hawaiian Annual, 42, is among those who cite a traditional paternity of Kahekili, but Keoua is more commonly accepted as the Conqueror’s father, and the usual genealogies stem from him. But rather like the Romanovs after Catherine II, it is a genealogy of common consent with the possibility of biological accuracy.

  8 Fornander, Polynesian Race, 2: 24.

  9 Silverman, “Young Paiea,” 105, doubted this, pointing out that Keoua was one of Alapa‘i’s closest confederates, but this assumes first, that Keoua was indeed his father, and second, the birth year of 1758, which is disputed. Silverman is a good source for many of the malleable aspects of the Conqueror’s biography—that he may have been named Pai‘ea later, after showing himself inflexible in battle, etc. The best a reader can do is accept an account of his life as true in its impressionistic whole but subject to dispute in its particulars. See for instance Kamakau, Ruling Chiefs, 66–120. It is Kamakau who asserts that Alapa‘i died in 1754, so if he had any cognizance of Kamehameha at all, the latter must have been born about 1750 at the latest for the traditional rendition of his early years to be true, which would still make him less than seventy at the time of his death.

  10 The degree to which infanticide was practiced among the commoners, and the controversy over accepting early accounts, is dealt with in chapter 4, infra.

  11 Sahlins and Barrère, “William Richards on Hawaiian Culture,” 23. The missionary Richards’s estimate was a guess only, but it seems well-enough borne out by contemporary descriptions of what the kanakas lost each year “via taxes, arbitrary confiscations, and voluntary offerings.” La Croix and Roumasset, “Evolution of Private Property,” 832.

  12 Westervelt, Hawaiian Historical Legends, 108.

  13 Smith, “John Ledyard Revisited,” 49, quoting Ledyard, Last Voyage of Captain Cook, 98.

  14 Westervelt, Hawaiian Historical Legends, 110. Use of the term aikane was later broadened to include nonsexual male companions, but the nature of the relationship in chiefly circles at this time is well established. Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, 67. See a more detailed discussion of aikane in chap. 5, nn. 16–21.

  15 There is an alternative theory of Captain Cook’s death: that it was an assassination carried out on the order of Kamehameha. See Valdemar R. Wake, “Who Killed Captain Cook?” Australian Quarterly 75, no. 3 (May–June 2003).

  16 Mookini, “Keopuolani,” 7.

  17 Silverman, “Young Paiea,” 104.

  18 Kamakau, Ka Mo‘olelo Hawai‘i, 73, cited in Kuykendall, Hawaiian Kingdom, 1: 25.

  19 Simon Metcalf to S. I. Thomas et al., 22 March 1790, http://apps.ksbe.edu/kaiwakiloumoku/makalii/historical-photos/manuscript/metcalfletter.

  20 For a biography see Miller, “Ka‘iana, the Once Famous ‘Prince of Kaua‘i,’” 1–21.

  21 Silverman, “Young Paiea,” 103.

  22 Kuykendall and Day, Hawaii: A History, 25.

  2. “Disobey, and Die”

  1 She was the daughter of Kamehameha’s popular brother Keli‘imaika‘i, long remembered in Kohala as “the good chief.” “Royal Lineages of Hawai,” Bishop Museum, Honolulu.

  2 Daws, Shoal of Time, 38.

  3 Equally likely, as the Kona chiefs who had supported Kamehameha’s first war against Kiwala‘o died, their sons took their places, and they displaced Ka‘iana in the king’s regard. Miller, “Ka‘iana,” 14.

  4 The number and paternity of Keopuolani’s children differs among the native chroniclers, one of whom identifies Kamehameha as the father of all her children. See Langlas and Lyon, “Davida Malo’s Unpublished Account of Keopuolani,” 40–41. One of her alternate names was Makuahanaukama, meaning “Mother of Many Children.” Richards, Memoir of Keopuolani, 9.

  5 www.hawaiilink.net/~ems/Pila/AAOK_files/v26.Waimea.Temples.html. Modern Western society, one might note, is not the only one where each side thinks that the deity is rooting for them.

  6 Del Piano, “Kalanimoku,” 3. Oddly, it took until 2009 for the known facts of Kalanimoku’s life to be pulled t
ogether into this first biographical article. Ka‘ahumanu would have been in a good position to advance him at court, but there is a second story that, like Kamehameha being the cousin of Kiwala‘o, he was taken captive after the Battle of Moku‘ohai, noticed, spared, and favored by the king.

  7 Schmitt, “Brief Statistical History of Hawaii,” 48.

  8 See www.donch.com/lulh/heiau1.htm.