Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (14 page)

To the missionary wives Ka‘ahumanu learned to relate in a different and entirely womanly way than she did to the male preachers. “Ka‘ahumanu treated us like pet children,” wrote Laura Judd, who met the queen regent the very day they disembarked from the
Thames
. She “criticised our dress, remarking the difference between our fashions and those of the pioneer ladies, who still wear short waists and tight sleeves, instead of the present long waists, full skirts, and leg-of-mutton sleeves. She says that one of our number must belong exclusively to her, live with her, teach her, make dresses for her.… As the choice is likely to fall on me, I am well pleased, for I have taken a great fancy to the old lady.” Like those before them, the women of the reinforcement were as overawed by her huge size as they were touched by her maternal affection. Ka‘ahumanu, wrote Laura Judd, “could dandle any of us in her lap, as she would a little child, which she often takes the liberty of doing.”
21

The remarkable thing about Laura Judd’s writing was not just that she was game for the adventure. She was a missionary’s wife and believed that the way of life they offered the Hawaiians was superior to what they already had. But what buffed her memoir was her genuine respect and affection for the native people. The same could not be said for all of them. Lucia Ruggles, one of the original
Thaddeus
contingent, was frequently aghast at the people before them. “Finally I do not know how to describe their manners,” she wrote, “for should I make use of language as indelicate and uncouth as they really appear, which I must do to give you any correct idea of their manners, you must be disgusted.” Of their servants: “We have as many men and women servants as we please, and it will cost us nothing but the vexation of having them about, which is more than I can bear.”
22
Nor was she fond of being pulled into the queen regent’s lap.

*   *   *

Like Cook and others before them, the missionaries were struck by the difference in size between the
ali‘i
lords and the multitude of common
kanakas
who outnumbered them by several hundred to one. The chiefs “seem indeed in size and stature to be almost a distinct race,” wrote Charles Stewart of the first company of reinforcements who arrived three years after the
Thaddeus
pioneers. “They are all large in their frame, and often excessively corpulent; while the common people are scarce of the ordinary height of Europeans, and of a thin rather than full habit.” As exceptions he could point out only the sacred queen mother and the king of Kaua‘i, but otherwise he could well have believed that nobles and commoners descended from conquering and conquered ethnic stock.
23

As they had with the arrival of iron with Captain Cook, and with the monopoly of sandalwood, the
ali‘i
were keen to make certain that any good things that foreigners brought with them were reserved for their own use, alone, not for the
kanakas
. The missionaries acquiesced in this to a degree, as when they devoted extra time and attention to instructing the chiefs and royal family, but they made it plain that God’s message of salvation was for everyone. The missionaries’ concern for the commoners as much as the
ali‘i
manifested itself in a particular crusade that receives scant attention now, against the native practice of infanticide. Culturally sensitive modern scholars give the subject a wide berth, either omitting it altogether, mentioning it only in passing,
24
or dispensing with it quickly and matter-of-factly without lingering on its moral valence.
25
But to the newly arrived Americans, the realization that overworked or sometimes merely disinterested native mothers thought little of throttling unwanted newborns, or more commonly burying them alive barely outside their houses, was unspeakable. The Englishman William Ellis would have been less shocked, for he would have been aware of the practice on Tahiti. “We have been told by some of the chiefs, on whose word we can depend, that they have known parents to murder three or four infants where they have spared one.” Ellis was even more disturbed by the reason: “The principal motive with the greater part of those who practice it, is
idleness
; and the reason most frequently assigned, even by the parents themselves, for the murder of their children, is
the trouble of bringing them up
[emphasis in original].” He related the story of one mother who grew weary of her baby’s crying, who “stopped its cries by thrusting a piece of tapa in its mouth, and digging a hole in the floor of the house, perhaps within a few yards of her bed,… buried, in the untimely grave, her helpless babe.”
26

William Ellis may have seen it all before but Charles Stewart, writing two years later, was aghast, asserting that “we have the clearest proof, that in those parts of the islands where the influence of the Mission has not yet extended,
two-thirds of the infants born, perish by the hands of their own parents before obtaining their first or second year of age!
[emphasis in original] … my soul often melts within me: and I cannot but think, how little … the inhabitants of Christian countries are aware.”
27
Ultimately Kalanimoku endorsed the missionaries’ remonstrations against killing babies, and Ka‘ahumanu proscribed infanticide in 1824, reinforced by statute in 1835.

*   *   *

Capt. Lord Byron of HMS
Blonde
, while critical of the missionaries’ assumption of temporal influence, allowed the sincerity of their spiritual mission, but the end of the decade found even some Americans put off by the missionaries’ cold and pompous lifestyle. In 1831 the sick whaler Abram Fayerweather was put ashore in Honolulu for treatment; he wrote a scathing assessment to his father in Connecticut—home state of the ABCFM, to which the father was a contributor. Bingham, he wrote, lived in “a new house … which in America would cost six thousand dollars,” while the
kanakas
subsisted in “the lowest state of degradation.” The Americans had entered into commerce, and “spend their time mostly in trading and oppressing the natives, [who] say nothing for fear of them.”
28
In justice to the Congregationalists, one man’s effort at elevation and conversion another man might well see as oppression, but by the opening of the 1830s the missionary effort had taken on a different and somewhat more entitled complexion.

Fayerweather’s charge might have borne some credence in the commercial environs of Honolulu, but probably more representative was the experience of John and Ursula Emerson, two of the Fifth Company of reinforcement missionaries assigned to Waialua on the north coast of O‘ahu in 1832. It was an area spiritually devastated by the destruction of
kapu
, for just to the east lay what had been perhaps the holiest valley in the kingdom. In an age when ownership of each
ahupua‘a
could be contested when the king died, only Waimea remained the permanent sanctuary of the
kahunas
. Two temples loomed over the entrance to the valley, their gods propitiated with human sacrifices, including in 1792 a lieutenant and three sailors from Vancouver’s HMS
Daedalus
who had dared to draw water from Waimea stream. Thus the spiritual vacuum created when the temples were wrecked on the order of Liholiho and Ka‘ahumanu was particularly acute. And then the
ali‘i
lording over Waialua proved to be so avaricious in pursuit of the sandalwood that grew bountifully in the jungle that he set his people to extracting every tree they could find, even at the cost of neglecting their taro patches and fishponds. When the Emersons arrived to preach salvation, they found the local
kanakas
“dispirited” and more than ready to listen.
29
The Emersons tended their Waialua mission for the next thirty-two years.

In the traditional culture there was a limit, however undefined, on the chiefs’ ability to abuse their commoners. Queen Lili‘uokalani later insisted that “the chief whose retainers were in any poverty or want would have felt, not only their sufferings, but, further, his own disgrace.”
30
Yet the missionaries often saw the other side of it, as Reverend Stewart once recorded, “A poor man of this description by some means obtained … a pig, when too small to make a meal for his family. He secreted it at a distance from his house and fed it until it had grown.… It was then killed, and put into an oven, with the same precaution of secrecy, but when almost prepared … a caterer of the royal household unhappily came near … deliberately took a seat till the animal was cooked, and then bore off the promised banquet without hesitation or apology!”
31

In such an environment any kindness shown by the foreigners was bound to be received with little short of wonder.

5.
The New Morality

In April 1821, almost exactly one year after the missionaries’ arrival, the United States government established an official presence, under the title Agent for Commerce and Seamen at the Sandwich Islands. John Coffin Jones, Jr., obtained the post; he was only twenty-four, the son of the speaker of the Massachusetts State House, but he was already an accomplished seaman, had previously visited the islands, and indeed had presented an oil portrait of the Conqueror to the Boston Athenaeum in 1818, the year that Opukaha‘ia died in neighboring Connecticut and kindled the whole missionary effort.
1
A more symbolic choice could hardly have been imagined. In this era when American diplomats commonly combined business with official duty, most of Jones’s attention was devoted to being the agent of the Boston mercantile firm of Marshall and Wildes. Basing himself in Honolulu (a shrewd choice at a time when the royal court was still shifting among there, Lahaina, and Kona), he constructed a two-story warehouse convenient to the waterfront that did double duty as, and that the missionaries grandly referred to as, the American consulate.

He also lost little time, to the mortification of the missionaries, in going native. In 1825 he initiated a relationship with Hannah Holmes, the
hapa haole
(half-white) daughter of another Yankee sailor, and then almost as quickly became the lover of Lahilahi Marín, whose Spanish father had been so well rewarded by the Conqueror for his services. Jones prospered in his sinful ways, dwelt in a comfortable house on Fort Street, and within several years also had a retreat in the cool of the Manoa hills above Waikiki. How were the missionaries to persuade the natives to forsake their traditional sensuality when the American representative presented them such an example?
2
Even worse, in the growing business district near the waterfront, Jones showed the effrontery to conduct Unitarian services for seamen and ruffians who did not keep to the Calvinists’ moral standards.

Peace, of a sort, with the waterfront was engineered with the arrival of Capt. John Diell, representing the American Seamen’s Friend Society, who constructed a bethel at the corner of King and Bethel Streets. He was not one of them, but he had similar morals, and remembering the ABCFM’s directive to keep doctrinal squabbling to a minimum, they accepted him into their circles. Plus, he had cultural possibilities; in the coral basement beneath where he held services, he began amassing a library and museum, and founded and hosted the Sandwich Islands Institute, a learned society of forty-two charter members at three dollars per year dues, each bound to deliver one scholarly paper per year or face a one-dollar fine. Diell gained credence with the missionaries for facing down the threat of a whipping from local grogshop proprietors for his habit of rounding up their patrons to attend prayer meetings; such a man deserved encouragement. Dr. Gerrit Judd of the Honolulu mission delivered one of the first treatises, which inevitably dispensed their own point of view: “Remarks on the Climate of the Sandwich Islands, and Its Probable Effects on Men of Bilious Habits.”
3
The institute was a success among those with cultural aspirations, and Diell was presented with a three-hundred-pound bell to preside over their meetings, the cost subscribed by ship captains, the chiefs, and the king. In danger of being isolated from the influential element, Jones struck back, helping to organize the Oahu Amateur Theatre, whose first play,
Raising the Wind
, was presented on March 5, 1834. The venue was the large wood-frame ‘Iolani Palace; the stage manager was the king.

Nothing could have shown more clearly the conflicts raging within the troubled youth Kauikeaouli, who became King Kamehameha III when he was only twelve years old, and whose early reign was dominated by the queen regent. The missionaries’ persistence netted its greatest prize on December 5, 1825, when Ka‘ahumanu submitted to baptism. As evidence that she was serious, she divested herself of her handsome recreational husband, Prince Keali‘iahonui of Kaua‘i,
4
and she lived out her life in hospitable piety, sympathetic neither to others’ opposition to the Christian regimen nor to the young king being torn between the old life of unquestioned privilege and the new one of self-denial.

Kamehameha III was more than a handful. His name, Kauikeaouli, meant “Placed in Dark Clouds,” and nothing could have been more prophetic. The Conqueror had promised him in
hanai
to Kuakini, Ka‘ahumanu’s youngest brother, but when it first appeared that the infant was stillborn, that chief would not accept him. The high chief Kaikio‘ewa, a secondary husband of the Conqueror’s formidable mother, sent for a
kahuna
, who declared that the baby would live. Prayed over and sprinkled with water, he drew breath, and Kaikio‘ewa received him in
hanai
.
5
After serving as his mothers’ instrument in destroying
kapu
, he fell under the sway of the recalcitrant Boki, governor of O‘ahu, who encouraged him to insist on his ancient privileges and pursue the pleasures that were his birthright. Acquiring a favorite companion in the person of Kaomi, a Tahitian-Hawaiian hanger-on and sort of native Piers Gaveston, Kauikeaouli instituted a secret society called
Hulumanu
(Bird Feather) that was dedicated to pleasure and to bedeviling the missionaries. Some of the old life’s luster dulled with the disappearance of Boki early in the reign; his improvident use of sandalwood futures had spent him into stunning debt, prompting him to fit out two ships and set sail for the New Hebrides, which he heard contained thick forests of
iliahi
. He never returned; the belief was that he was lost at sea, but evidence later suggested that he established a new life on Samoa.
6