Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii Read online

  After his death, the two queens took charge of Kamehameha’s body, assigning its preparation to male relatives. The corpse was baked in an imu and the flesh stripped from the bones that contained his immense mana. The bones of Hawai‘i’s previous kings were bundled and deposited in the cliff cave overlooking Kealakekua Bay, inaccessible but known. Kamehameha had proved himself greater than any of his predecessors, and it was imperative that the mana of such a protean figure should be sacrosanct. To those who believed in the gods, if his bones fell into the hands of enemies, they could cause incalculable harm. Even in benign hands, such as those of a fisherman, they could be crafted into hooks that, while they would be believed to possess near-magical powers, would be an end of incomprehensible humiliation for such a king.

  As Kamehameha’s body was prepared for burial, it fell to Liholiho to decree how many sacrifices were required to usher the king’s spirit into the next life. As word spread that the time was drawing near, the commoners who had assembled to mourn began to vanish back to their homes. They may have venerated the Conqueror, but not enough to be strangled on the altar for him. Hawaiian mythology warned people against clever kahunas who would trick people into violating a kapu in order to nab a sacrifice;19 far better for them simply to disappear. However, taking the example that the Conqueror allowed no sacrifice to win his recovery, Liholiho ordered no sacrifices to mark his passing—a startling change in custom.

  Kamehameha’s body was buried secretly, reputedly deposited in a cave whose only entrance was offshore, and the resting place of his bones has never been discovered. Liholiho at length returned to Kailua for his investiture, a ceremony now colored with Western touches. He emerged from a heiau “robed in scarlet and a feathered mantle, with several chiefs on either side bearing kahili [tall, feather-festooned standards that proclaimed royal rank] and spittoon, having on his head a princely hat from Britain.” His retainers were armed not with spears but with muskets. It was his stepmother, as kuhina nui and guardian of the kingdom, who presided, addressing him as the Heavenly One. “O Kalani, I report to you what belonged to your father—Here are the chiefs, and the men of your father—there are your guns, and this is your land.” Then came what was, for her, the moment of truth: “But you and I will share the land together.”20 The new king agreed, opening his reign as Kamehameha II, but sharing actual power with Ka‘ahumanu as queen regent.

  She realized there was only one way for her to maintain her power, and that was to destroy the kapu system. Not to break this kapu and that one—she had already done that with impunity—but to gut the whole system and destroy it, to pull down the altars, burn the idols. Nor was it entirely about maintenance of personal power. For years, as the king’s hostess, she had observed foreigners break kapus repeatedly, and no volcanoes erupted, no wooden, shark-toothed ki‘i roused themselves to life and smote them. The gods had not forestalled the advent of the foreigners’ diseases, seen most terribly in the cholera that destroyed the army that was to invade Kaua‘i. The officers and traders who called at the islands had no kapus, and they lived healthier and more abundantly than her people, even the ali‘i, had ever imagined. It seemed perfectly plausible that in overthrowing the system, she had a rich new life to gain, and—apart from her life—only some old wooden statues and rockpiles to lose.

  In this purpose she was joined by Keopuolani, and the way they chose to open their campaign was stunning. During the feast that followed Liholiho’s installation, Ka‘ahumanu in feather regalia, leaning on the Conqueror’s tall spear, told him,

  If you wish to observe kapu, it is well and we will not molest you. But as for me and my people we intend to be free from kapu. We intend that the husband’s food and the wife’s food shall be cooked in the same oven, and that they shall be permitted to eat from the same calabash. We intend to eat pork and bananas and coconuts. If you think differently you are at liberty to do so; but for me and my people we are resolved to be free. Let us henceforth disregard kapu.21

  Liholiho stared at her, perhaps drunk, perhaps in shock, perhaps incredulous that she might just have pronounced her own death sentence. But he said nothing. At that moment Keopuolani put her hand to her mouth, signaling her assent that he end kapu and eat with the women. So entrenched was the kapu against mixed eating that the men dared reproach even the sacred royal wife for suggesting this. It was true that in the paroxysms of grief that followed the death of a king, acts were permitted that would be forbidden at any other time, but for men to eat with women was an outrage. Liholiho was demoralized by the prospect, and his response was to absent himself. Thwarted only briefly, the queen mother then importuned her younger son, Kauikeaouli, who was only six, into taking food with the women, all but daring the men to do something about it. And they backed down, unwilling to challenge her ni‘aupi‘o rank.

  Another step in the self-immolation of kapu occurred soon after. The new king journeyed to Honokohau nearby to dedicate a new temple, indicating that perhaps he was not of the same mind as his mothers. However, such a consecration required reciting a lengthy, complicated prayer, uninterrupted and unbroken, without mistake. Rum, which of all the imported liquors had become the most popular, flowed so freely that this could not be done, so the new heiau stood useless. Liholiho was only the most visible example of a surrender to alcohol that afflicted many of the ali‘i, who discovered that its “euphoria which was so new and exhilerating [sic] … was so pleasantly different from the semi-paralysis brought on with the drinking of awa.” And already sensuous by cultural heritage, the Hawaiians enthusiastically adopted a beverage that lowered their inhibitions even more.22

  The party was broken up when a messenger from the queen regent arrived to announce that this god would not be respected at Kailua—her way of proclaiming the new order, and her control. Liholiho’s response was to load his rum and retainers onto his ship and sail aimlessly off the Kona coast for a two days’ bender. Ka‘ahumanu used the time profitably, lobbying key chiefs to end the kapu system and winning over the islands’ most powerful priest, Hewahewa. Finally she dispatched double-hulled canoes to fetch the king back to Kailua; the messengers reached him, found his ship becalmed, and towed him in. Again he was offered food with the women, and this time he relented. The shattering event was called ‘ai noa, “the free eating.” The gods were dead, the only known time in the history of the world when a people threw over a long-established religious system with nothing to replace it.23

  Ka‘ahumanu had good reason to destroy the kapu system. But apart from maybe saving Ka‘ahumanu’s life, why the sacred widow, the new king’s birth mother, went along with it is a harder question. She had always done well by kapu. She was an ali‘i of the naha class. She was the offspring of a half-sister marriage, and the granddaughter of a full-sister marriage. She was one of the few women in the islands who possessed the kapu moe: Commoners had to prostrate themselves before her, and even her husband the Conqueror had to partially strip in humility at her presence. Herself so highborn, her children also outranked their father. If foreigners beheld Kamehameha’s children playing on his lap, they would have been wrong to believe that he was merely being paternal and affectionate. Lesser children, not sparing his own offspring by lesser wives, would have been executed for such an affront. For him to allow Keopuolani’s children on his lap, or for him to lie on his back and let them play on his chest, was in fact his own submission to rank. Throughout her tenure as his consort, she gained fame for her kindness and amiability. (The same could not be said for her mother, who once hounded one of Kamehameha’s lesser wives to suicide for miscarrying the Conqueror’s baby.) How a child played was significant; Keopuolani’s mother also once sent her grandson Liholiho, when he was very small, to climb on that wife’s back to demonstrate that they were of higher rank than she.24 There were times during Keopuolani’s reign when commoners’ shadows crossed hers, and she forgave them when she could have had them killed; in fact there is no story that she ever had any of her subjects executed fo
r breaking kapu.25

  And therein may lie the clue—that she was never awed by the sanctity of the forbidden. Indeed she demonstrated as much when she defied kapu by refusing to give her youngest daughter, Nahi‘ena‘ena, in hanai to anyone, and raised her herself, although she was restricted by the kapu ‘uha (sacred lap) which decreed death to any child she tried to rear.26 And, while famed for her gracious bearing, perhaps she never forgave her fate at being bartered off at the age of eleven to marry her father’s killer. (That Kamehameha cared for her was certain; her health had always been fragile, and in 1806 when she grew dangerously ill, the Conqueror sacrificed people until she recovered,27 but the feeling was proprietary. It could not be said that there was love between them.) She was also ten years younger than Ka‘ahumanu, and while being mentored by her, may have been somewhat dominated as well. But whatever the reason, when Ka‘ahumanu put her life on the line by advocating the destruction of kapu, Keopuolani threw in with her.

  In far-off Kaua‘i the vassal king Kaumuali‘i happily agreed to abandon the idols and their kapus, and remarkably the reigning high priest, Hewahewa, also acquiesced in the new order, but the destruction of kapu did not take place without dissent. Many still believed in the power of the old gods and were prepared to fight for them. Even as in his youth Kamehameha had been named guardian of the war god, the Conqueror had entrusted the same office to the high chief Kekuaokalani, son of his younger brother, the “good chief” of Kohala. Now the nephew became a magnet that attracted dissenters. When Liloliho, coaxed in from his two-day bender, had endorsed and participated in the ‘ai noa with the women, those who did not approve picked up and followed Kekuaokalani south to Kealakekua Bay, where armed men collected about him. No doubt, the chiefs who followed him were also looking for better selections of land than they would get from the drunk and the women. It was the worst of the old days, all over again.

  When negotiation failed, and Keopuolani herself made a personal appeal for peace, the two queens deputed the Conqueror’s prime minister, Kalanimoku, to lead an army down to fight him. It was a wrenching task for him, for his sister Manono was the rebellious chief’s wife, and she had resolved to fight at his side. The battle was brief; the dissenters fought gamely, but the royal forces had muskets and the rout was complete. The rebel army was driven down to the shore, where they were fired on by men in double-hulled canoes, one of which mounted a small cannon, commanded by Ka‘ahumanu.28 Kekuaokalani was killed and Manono after him, shot down while calling for mercy. Armed opposition to the new regime ceased there, and the common people continued to revere their household gods, but from this day the old religion was ended. Heiaus were dismantled; those ki‘i that were not burned were either neglected or given away as souvenirs to foreigners.

  * * *

  The uproar over ending kapu was enough of a social upheaval to attend the new reign, without engaging in the usual fratricidal war over redistribution of land. Instead Kamehameha II and the queen regent decided to win the loyalty of the chiefs by ending the royal monopoly on sandalwood, giving them the freedom to earn the best they could at it. And the ali‘i, after years of seeing the Conqueror’s storehouses swell with luxury goods, fell upon their forests with a vengeance. Chiefs and chiefesses competed with one another for the latest fashions; household items such as mirrors that they had lived without for generations were suddenly seen as indispensable necessities, and merchants overcharged them mercilessly.

  It was true that Americans had introduced Hawaiian sandalwood to an international market, and that they introduced the islanders to the concept of resource extraction to fund a consumer economy, but the nobility grasped the essentials of capitalism in a heartbeat. And when sandalwood trees became scarce, they were equally quick to comprehend the nature of a futures contract, paying for this year’s purchases with the next year’s product—which they then browbeat their tenants to scour the forests in search of. The difference between them and the Conqueror was that when Kamehameha saw the resource declining, he used his superior intellect to protect it, placing young trees under kapu. Some chiefs, on the contrary, when sandalwood was hard to find, actually ordered their jungle burned, with woodcutters commanded to follow their noses to the burning sandalwood trees and extinguish the fire before the valuable inner wood could be damaged—a ravenous act that hastened the disappearance of sandalwood by incinerating the saplings and seedlings.

  The standard unit of measure for sandalwood was the picul, the equivalent of 1331/3 pounds, worth an average of ten dollars but varying from three to fifteen dollars depending on its quality. Within three years of the Conqueror’s death, just one trading company had chiefs in their debt up to 23,000 piculs of product—a debt that they could not just repudiate because they knew exactly how powerful these new people were, and if they exacted their revenge, or even if they just stopped coming, all that remained was the old life, and now they had seen better: Possessions came with worry.

  Before he died the Conqueror expressed his desire that the line of future kings stem from one of his sons by his sacred wife, united with one of his daughters by his sixth wife, who was Ka‘ahumanu’s sister.29 The plan was given effect when Liholiho married his half sister Kamamalu, and then for good measure also married her sister Kina‘u, both young women who rivaled their aunt in size, with Kamamalu by one account towering some six feet seven inches tall.30 The new king hosted a lavish three-week luau to celebrate his accession and recognize Kamehameha Day. A large number of foreigners attended, and it was his half sister, Queen Kamamalu, who presided, dressed in Western satin and lace, personifying both the generosity of the culture and the relaxed etiquette of the luau: “She personally saw that none of the company was in any degree neglected; and extended her kindness even to those who had no claim to special civility. For instance, seeing a crowd of American seamen … she immediately gave orders to have refreshments served to them.”31 The coup that toppled kapu was now all but complete, and this was the face of the culture that American sailors saw when their ships anchored: festive hospitality, the bounty of nature readily shared, the chiefs supported by the labor of an enormous, imposed-upon but apathetic class of serfs. Only at the core of it now lay a spiritual vacuum.

  * * *

  During all these events the brig Thaddeus heaved southward on the rolling seas of the Atlantic. Conditions on board the little vessel were claustrophobic: “Chests, trunks, bundles, bags, &c., were piled into our little room six feet square,” wrote Lucy Thurston, “until no place was left on the floor for the sole of one’s feet.… With such narrow limits, and such confined air, it might well be compared to a dungeon.” And in this tiny cabin she was confined for her first two days and nights with seasickness.32 January 26, three months and a week into the voyage, found the Thaddeus attempting to enter the Straits of Magellan, and the missionaries discovered the legendary terrors of rounding Cape Horn. Lucia Ruggles (sister of Samuel, who would marry Dr. Thomas Holman) committed to her journal, “The wind having turned against us, we were driven off and on for 12 hours, in no small danger of being dashed against the rocks.”

  “Suffer much from the cold,” she added six days into the ordeal, “there being no fire in the cabin, nor are we allowed a foot stove in the cabin as the Magazine is under us.… It is more than 3 months since I have seen a fire.”

  They exited the Straits a week later: “Last night, the winds began to blow and the seas to roll, as we had never before witnessed; so that the two conflicting powers seemed to agitate the ocean to its very foundations. Our vessel labored excessively, the seas constantly breaking over, threatened every moment to overpower her. I think I never so much realized the weakness of man, and the power of the Almighty.”

  Once safely through to the Pacific, the terrors abated and they rolled before favorable trade winds for a month, and then discovered the reason for the ocean’s name. “A calm of 6 or 7 days has detained us here in the most sultry region of the globe,” she bemoaned on March 11. “The hot and sco
rching rays of the sun are almost insupportable. We hoped to be at or near Owhyhee before this time, but the Lord would have it otherwise, and for wise reasons, no doubt.” Six of the men ventured to go swimming that day, were in the water for some twenty minutes, and had just returned aboard when a ten-foot blue shark was hauled out of the water, which was found, when gutted, to have been following the vessel devouring table scraps.

  Thankful for their escape, they continued until finally, on March 30, 1820, “the long wished for Owhyhee is in full view on our left.” They could make out streams coursing down the flank of Mauna Loa. “The country before us is beautiful,” wrote Lucia Ruggles, “wearing the appearance of a cultivated place—with houses and huts, and plantations of sugar cane and Tarrow.” After 160 days at sea, the missionaries were awash with gratitude, their native Hawaiian converts overjoyed. At nine in the morning a boat was sent ashore to discover whether they would be received.

  At four in the afternoon the boat returned, “with news of King Kamehameha’s death; that the worship of Idolatry and other heathenish customs are entirely abolished. Such glad news we were not prepared to receive. Truly the Lord hath gone before us in mercy.”33

  4. Abhorring a Vacuum

  The Thaddeus skirted the Big Island before dropping anchor at Kailua, and a deputation rowed ashore to announce their business. As usual, Kamehameha II was loath to commit himself to anything more than a spree. He declined to give the newcomers an audience for days, and when he did the meetings were inconclusive. Eventually he gave his consent that the missionaries could stay there in Kailua, provisionally, for a year. With a little more persuasion he consented to their starting a mission in Honolulu, and to run an errand north to Kaua‘i to take Prince George home to his father. (Lucy Thurston believed they would not have been permitted to stay, except that the presence of the women proved the men’s benign intent.1) Between the king’s stipulations and the casting of ballots, the Kailua mission would consist of the Thurstons, Dr. Holman, and Hopu and Kanui. With the Binghams disembarked at Honolulu on April 14, the Ruggleses and the Whitneys sailed on to Kaua‘i, where an ecstatic Kaumuali‘i greeted his son and insisted that they stay and open a mission at Waimea. Kalanimoku, who had stayed on at the change of reigns as prime minister, and who now was even more important for having married the widowed Keopuolani, claimed Elisha and Maria Loomis for himself, to reside at Kawaihae. Although he was a printer by trade, Loomis had studied at the preparatory mission school enough to impart Calvinism’s central elements to the prime minister.