Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (33 page)

Perhaps it was inevitable that even Lot’s bitter heart would finally think of her tenderly. Emma was a vivacious thirty-five; they might even have children and solve the succession issue. With the utmost discretion he put out a feeler as to whether she might be able to return his affections. She replied with the utmost respect and kindness, but she said no.
25

13.
Mountains of Sugar

Whaling, which once anchored the islands’ commerce with the outside world, had peaked in the early 1850s. But the decline in the number of whales, then losses of Northern ships to Confederate raiders, and the discovery of petroleum all damaged the industry. In April 1871 many of the remaining vessels sortied from Honolulu for the Arctic. Hunting was poor; they stayed too long and were trapped by ice. The crews were rescued, but thirty-nine ships with their cargoes were crushed and lost. Late in Lot’s reign, fewer than fifty whalers a year called at Honolulu and Lahaina for supplies and recreation. The only resource on the horizon that could fill this gap in the economy was sugar, and sugar, they discovered, made a vastly different footprint on the islands. In supplying whalers, Hawai‘i was a beneficiary but a bystander of an operation that required nothing of the islands. The whalers extracted a resource from the open ocean; it required no commitment of vast tracts of land, no financial investment, other than buying goods to profitably resell to the sailors. It did not rearrange the Hawaiians’ landscape, maim their environment, or dislocate their society.

None of that could be said of sugar, at least after it came to dominate the economy, but in the beginning just getting an industry started was a struggle. The techniques of growing and refining sugar were learned by trial and error; down in Kohala, Elias Bond did not bring in a viable crop until January of 1865, and by then he owed his banker/agents, Castle & Cooke, thirty-five thousand dollars. Torn between his benevolent instincts and the need to convince his people that they must work, he dismissed a foreman whom he caught beating a lazy
kanaka
, but his people, when they looked at the labor needed to produce sugar, simply shrugged and moved to Hilo or Honolulu.
1
The bad news for any country dependent upon an agricultural base was that there was no escaping work. Coffee plantations were undergoing a blight, and an experiment at exporting
pulu
, which were tree-fern fibers used for mattress stuffing, was as much work as sugar, and was not a major factor in the economy.

Since the end of the reign of Kamehameha III, the simple export tonnage of Hawaiian sugar told an accurate story of both the laws and the times. In 1851 the crop failed, and the country exported a mere ten tons of sugar. The following two years it rebounded to about 300 tons, which was roughly similar to exports before the collapse. Six years later, after passage of the Alien Land Ownership Act—allowing time to acquire land, put it into production, and bring in a crop—the importation of coolies had begun, and with incrementally increased mechanization in the processing, exports tripled to more than 900 tons. By 1862, when the Civil War opened California to as much sugar as they could send, it was 1,500 tons, and two years later, 5,200 tons, and one year later, 7,600 tons. In 1866 Hawai‘i exported more than 8,800 tons of sugar, and the nation achieved its first positive balance of payments.

The economics of growing sugar required large-volume production from a large-scale operation, which meant instituting a plantation system in a country that traditionally only understood subsistence farming. In a nation with a plummeting population, the problem of finding enough natives to work the fields—let alone finding those willing to work—was insuperable. Even as the king was considering whether to raid Polynesia for immigrants of similar ethnicity to restock the native islanders, plantation owners began looking to Asia as a source of labor—cheap, obedient, hardworking, controllable labor.

Very experimentally, 180 Chinese workers had been imported as early as 1852, opening unfavorable discussion in Western countries of what they called the “coolie trade,” the signing of exploitative labor contracts with thousands, and then tens of thousands, of impoverished Asiatics to swelter in the Hawaiian cane fields. At first it did not seem so abusive, because the wage—three dollars a month—was about double what they could expect at home. But the system grew to such proportions that it not only captured its contractors, it changed the ethnicity of the kingdom forever.

1867, when sugar production was exploding, brought hard times on other fronts, however. The close of the American Civil War seemed an auspicious time to make another run at a reciprocity treaty, which could only tie the islands more closely to the United States. Negotiations opened afresh, and it was difficult for other foreign representatives in Honolulu to warn of its dangers without sounding merely as if they were attempting to thwart closer ties to the United States. But Varigny, speaking not as a Frenchman but as the Hawaiian foreign minister, issued a prophetic warning:

Suppose the tariff were in effect for a period of seven years … and thus assured us a remarkable prosperity for this period of time. What if, at the expiration of this term, the United States government should exert the right to annul the treaty and impose on our sugar a tariff rate.… Would not such a shift in future policy result in a terrible commercial crisis? Threatened by imminent ruin, would not our planters all rally round the notion of annexation to the United States, if only that nation would assuage the planters’ fears of the future by permanently abolishing the tariff on sugar?… How would Hawaii survive it?
2

Some of Varigny’s fears may have formed in his mind thanks to the inopportune presence in Honolulu Harbor of an American warship, the USS
Lackawanna
, a screw-propelled, 1,500-ton sloop–of-war mounting, most prominently, two monstrous eleven-inch Dahlgren smoothbores, two nine-inch smoothbores, and a battery of smaller but still modern and imposing howitzers and rifles.
Lackawanna
’s port call was not meant to convey any threat—in fact the last time Hawai‘i reached any agreement with the United States the kingdom actually
requested
American warships to visit or even be stationed in Honolulu, but times had changed. France was no longer a threat, and English friendship had never been warmer. On the other hand
Lackawanna
’s captain, William Reynolds, was a former resident of the kingdom who had issued statements favoring American annexation of the islands that the king found seditious, and Reynolds was persona non grata. Hawai‘i announced that it would not take up consideration of the treaty until the warship was recalled. U.S. minister Edward McCook found this rather odd, considering it was Hawai‘i that was pressing for the treaty, and sent Varigny a sarcastic note asking whether the kingdom claimed the right to select the captains of U.S. warships.
3

Nevertheless McCook reported to the secretary of state that the Hawaiians felt intimidated, and agreed that Reynolds was not the best man to have in the vicinity. Unrelated to this discussion but with good timing,
Lackawanna
received orders to survey Midway. The day she steamed away, July 30, 1867, the king called the legislature to a special session and the treaty was approved by a vote of 33 to 4. Again unrelated to events but now with bad timing,
Lackawanna
returned only days later and stayed for eight months, which was the first time that Hawaiians felt the presence of an American warship, as opposed to British or French, to be a threat, although that was not the intent.

Varigny’s fears of the long-term repercussions of a reciprocity treaty proved to be premature. For all their work on the treaty, what Hawai‘i got was another lesson on the realities of American government. Both in concept and infrastructure American democracy was majestic, but when one came down to the actual, individual men who worked behind those imposing marble facades, the people were as likely as not to elect seedy, shortsighted, self-serving jingoes who embarrassed their offices. An equitable reciprocity treaty, signed by the principals and ratified in Hawai‘i, reached the U.S. Senate, which was dominated by radical Republicans intent on impeaching Andrew Johnson, rubbing the former Confederacy’s nose in its defeat, and squeezing the maximum spoils from dominating a Congress in which their main opposition was disenfranchised. The embattled administration worked in good faith on behalf of the treaty, but the Senate could not be bothered and swatted it down.

And then things got stranger. The United States, having exorcised slavery from its own midst, began manifesting concern for labor conditions elsewhere in the world, and the U.S. took its turn in condemning the “coolie trade.” Congress in 1862 passed a law barring American ships from transporting them, and a following resolution in 1867 required the State Department to register American displeasure with countries who imported contract labor into the Western Hemisphere “or adjacent islands.” In 1868 the United States learned that fifty Japanese laborers had been transported to Hawai‘i, and McCook duly registered American concern. The Hawaiian government dodged that they had just established a national immigration bureau to prevent labor abuse, an aim with which they were in perfect sympathy, but the fifty Japanese were not actually coolies because they did not sign contracts before they left Japan. The United States was prepared to accept this explanation, with perhaps the arch of an eyebrow, but then the Japanese government, which had no regular representation in Honolulu, asked the American and British ministries to watch over the welfare of Japanese in Hawai‘i, citing signs that conditions there were less favorable than they had been led to believe.
4

The sugar planters, many of whom still had strong ties to the missions, but an increasing number of whom were businessmen who were in it purely for the profit, naturally found this annoying. Castle & Cooke issued a reminder that before the revolution, more than half of the American colonials either had been, or were descended from, indentured servants. Castle & Cooke became the sugar factor for a number of plantations, not just Elias Bond at Kohala, and sent out a circular to all their clients recommending provision of hot water for the Japanese workers’ daily baths.
5
Castle was now sixty-one, vigorous and engaged (he would live to eighty-six), but in the matter of contract labor generally he was still Calvinist enough to believe that the law was the law, which he extrapolated to a contract was a contract, and the law must and would enforce a contract, even a contract for labor and even one for harsh terms. “Our ‘forced labor’ system,” he wrote to the
Hawaiian Gazette
, “consists in laws requiring people to fulfill their contracts, specifically. They are just to both parties.… he who tries to throw odium upon our system abroad as a semi-slave system … unless he brings something practically better, strikes a serious blow at
every interest
in the country, not the planting interest alone, but the coasting, the mercantile and every other one.”
6
What Castle refused to see was that equitable contracts arise from comparable bargaining power, and that was never part of the coolie trade.

But some people did see it, and not all voices sang the praises of contract labor. One of the most astonishing stands against it came from a polite but presumptuous upstart, Sanford Ballard Dole, son of Daniel and Emily Dole of the Ninth Company of missionaries. He had been born in the kingdom, nourished by a native wet nurse, and grew up partly in Koloa, which was a prime sugar area. He attended the Punahou School for a time before his parents shipped him off to Williams College in Massachusetts; then he worked for a Boston law firm for a year. He was only twenty-five and had just returned from the United States. A large public meeting convened in Honolulu in October 1869, and a succession of planters and factors praised the Chinese workers who have, “as a rule, been faithful, industrious, and reliable,” even declaring that labor contracts had been not just advantageous but “quite necessary” to the Asians’ well-being. They moved resolutions that the program be expanded.

Then Dole—tall, pole-thin, large eyed, apple cheeked—spoke: “I oppose the system from principle, because I think it is wrong.… I cannot help feeling that the chief end of this meeting, its heart and soul, is plantation profits.… Is this not so? The burden of your cry is
labor; we must have labor
, and the plan which promises that … you favor without asking many questions.… Tried in the balance of the ‘free and equal rights’ principle, the contract system is found wanting.”

One can imagine the pall in the hall, but Dole was seconded by another missionary scion, Albert Francis Judd, son of Gerrit. He was thirty-one, another product of the Punahou School sent to the homeland for higher education, and he came back with his Yale undergraduate degree and his Harvard law degree. But the planters were most provoked by Henry M. Whitney, son of Samuel and Mercy Whitney of the very first company of missionaries and one of the first white children born in the islands. He was now forty-five, had been schooled as a printer in the United States, and as Hawai‘i’s first postmaster was responsible for issuing the first postage stamps. Now he owned a bookstore and published the
Pacific Commercial Advertiser
. Galled by unfavorable comments in his newspaper, the business element began meeting on other islands than O‘ahu to escape his notice. (They also withdrew their advertising, prompting Whitney to sell the paper, start the
Hawaiian Gazette
, and he later founded the Hawaiian-language
Ka Nupepa Kuokoa
.) A quarter of a century on, both Dole and Judd would play important roles in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. Many scholarly articles have been written trying to defeat the popularly held but erroneous notion that the revolution was done in service of the sugar industry. The revolution suffered from many moral failings, but the stands taken by the junior Dole and Judd, and a few others, are the first exhibit that benefiting sugar was not one.