Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (21 page)

8.
Captains and Cannons

During Kamehameha II’s doomed visit to Britain, his suite included a French purser named Jean Rives. After the deaths of the queen and king, Rives absconded to France, and it was soon discovered that a large amount of the king’s traveling cash was missing as well. In Paris Rives promoted himself as a great man in Hawai‘i, persuading the Foreign Ministry to back a French colonizing venture that he would lead. Part and parcel of the settlement was to be a contingent of Catholic missionaries.

Rives returned as far as California, where he learned that his doings had been uncovered, and he again disappeared. But by then Pope Leo XII had created the office of Prefect Apostolic for the Sandwich Islands, under the governance of the Picpus Fathers (Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary). Three priests—the Frenchmen Alexis Bachelot, prefect, and Abraham Armand, and the Englishman Patrick Short—and six lay brothers sailed on
La Comète
from Bordeaux on November 21, 1826, arriving in Honolulu the following July 7.

Catholicism was far from unknown on the islands. The Abbé de Quélen, the ship’s chaplain, had baptized Kalanimoku aboard
L’Uranie
in 1819, in the presence of the new king and queen regent, just after she ended
kapu
but before the American Protestant arrival. Boki and Liliha, no friends of the Calvinists, accepted Catholic baptism on board HMS
Blonde
as they brought back the bodies of Liholiho and Kamamalu. There were also a number of Catholic communicants in the foreign community, most prominently the famous braggart, bigamist, brewer, and vintner, Francisco de Paula Marín. To outside eyes it would have appeared only that the American Calvinists were about to get some competition in the contest for souls, but to the Sandwich Islands Mission it was an issue spiked with profound moral implications. In their minds, having papists loose in the country was only a half step above a return to wooden, shark-toothed
ki‘i
leering in the
heiaus
. Ka‘ahumanu was now an ardent Protestant, and on being warned of the danger, she summoned Boki to send Bachelot and company away. He was Catholic; they would take the news better from him. Boki could not be found, and the priests disembarked after two days’ limbo.
La Comète
, rather like Rives, then disappeared before consequences could materialize.

It was a highly pregnant, if not actually dangerous, time in the kingdom. The great Kalanimoku had died five months before, and Boki, the perennial malcontent, was determined finally to emerge from his older brother’s shadow. Ka‘ahumanu dominated Kamehameha III and spread the new religion, but the boy king sought Boki’s companionship with the familiarities of the old life, its privileges, and its hedonism. Under the old system Ka‘ahumanu had far higher
kapus
than Boki, and under the new system as
kuhina nui
and regent she had far more power. But one thing Boki could still do was curry the favor of the Catholic missionaries for whatever use it could be against the queen regent. While to outward appearances Boki was attending Mass and performing his office as governor of O‘ahu, the tension between him and Ka‘ahumanu escalated for the better part of two years. What the Calvinists found even more troubling was the Picpus Fathers’ success at winning converts.

All this occurred even as Honolulu was in the throes of its moral transformation, to the fury and threats of visiting sailors. Before leaving on a visit to Hawai‘i Island, Ka‘ahumanu forced Boki to renounce opposition to her rule in a council of chiefs, but while she was gone he began assembling an armed force to greet her return. Kekuanaoa tried his best to talk him out of it—without success, for Boki meant to revisit the old days and have a war. It was Hiram Bingham who defused the situation. He invited the feuding principals to tea, after which the fifteen-year-old king expressed his wish to sing, so Boki and the queen regent had to swallow their hatred of each other in a fest of psalm singing. Bingham considered the outcome to be a triumph of the gospel. He also took criticism for crossing the line into political affairs, largely without getting credit for preventing the country from slipping back into the butchery of the previous generations.

And then it was all to do over again. Boki left on his sandalwood expedition, never to return, leaving the governorship of O‘ahu with Liliha. She was as much of an obstacle to the new order as he had been. With the king and high chiefs off visiting other islands, she heard that they had actually left to perfect plans to depose her, and she assembled a small army to receive them. This time the peacemaker was her father, Hoapili, the Christian governor of Maui, who talked her into coming home, where she lived until 1839. Those same chiefs took it in mind that the root of the trouble was the Catholic presence in the islands, and they struck on Christmas Eve, 1831. Father Armand had departed previously, but Bachelot and Short were seized, hustled through the streets, and put aboard the schooner
Waverly
. With a derisive cannon salute from the fort they were sent off to California, a land already planted thick with missions. The chiefs did this on their own authority, but Bingham was present when they made the decision.

This left the Hawaiian Catholic community severed from the sacraments, but the chiefs met complaints with persecution; there were beatings and jailings, to the Calvinists’ probable relief, but without their expressed sanction. Ka‘ahumanu died on June 5, 1832, her last words reputedly those of the hymn “Lo, Here am I, O Jesus.” Among the minority of chiefs with a traditional bent, there was a thought to make Liliha the new
kuhina nui
, but that went nowhere, and she remained on Maui, having attached herself to the king’s hedonistic circle, occasionally comforting him over his unsuccessful battle to marry his sister. The office of coruler instead went to Ka‘ahumanu’s niece, Elizabeth Kina‘u, a woman of similar proportions and imperious demeanor, the Conqueror’s daughter and therefore a half sister of Kamehameha III. She also was a Calvinist, and one whose face was set against the Catholics even more sternly than her aunt’s had been. Under her premiership, scrutiny of native Catholics was sharpened, and Catholicism itself was banned from the islands at the end of 1837. Many of them had sought refuge in Boki’s stronghold of Waianae in western O‘ahu, but they were raided and sixty-seven of them marched to Honolulu. The thirteen who did not recant were jailed and set to hard labor. More than once Hiram Bingham, in person or in writing, alone or in company with Judd, Chamberlain, Bishop or others
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advised the king and chiefs that imprisonment—of anyone—for conscience was not a good idea, and that they should ease off, but they did not interfere. British and American naval officers also importuned the king on the issue, but heated exchanges between the king and
kuhina nui
left Kina‘u victorious on the policy.

By 1835 Bachelot had made his way back as far as Valparaiso, from where the vicar sent to Hawai‘i not him but an Irish brother named Columba Murphy to make a report on the current conditions. Murphy was allowed in first because he was merely a lay brother and could not administer sacraments, and second because he was in an investigative, not a pastoral, capacity. But when Father Arsenius Walsh followed him the next year, Kina‘u’s government denied him permission to land, a decision that was reversed with the timely arrival of the French scientific vessel
2
La Bonite
, with additional intercession by the captain of HMS
Actaeon
. The authorities allowed Walsh ashore, but on the condition that he tend only to the foreign Catholic community, not preach to the natives.
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Bachelot and Short slipped quietly into Honolulu in April 1837, but the authorities put them back onto their ship, the
Clémentine
, owned by the informally acting French agent Jules Dudoit. Once again the chiefs backed down, under the guns of HMS
Sulphur
and the French
La Vénus
, whose captains pledged that the fathers would obey the laws.

It was a great deal of strife for a government whose king was intent on pleasuring himself on Maui. Kina‘u was left with the work, and it was she who got the king’s signature on the total ban on Catholicism in December 1837 (just as that community lost a sizable piece of its visibility with the death of Marín). Kina‘u died of mumps on April 4, 1839, so she did not live to see the result of her anti-Catholic vitriol; her death was followed a week later by Chief Kaikio‘ewa’s (a cousin of the Conqueror, whom Ka‘ahumanu had installed as royal governor of Kaua‘i after Prince George’s abortive rebellion), who had been her principal support on the council for Catholic persecution. Barely two months after Kina‘u’s death, Kamehameha III, perhaps having been warned of an impending French reprisal, verbally instructed the chiefs to end the persecution. His order was not published, and it did not amount to an “Edict of Toleration,” but it gave the king some semblance of cover for when the French showed up—which they did, as soon as July 10, when a heavy frigate flying the French flag eased into Honolulu Harbor. She was
L’Artémise
, mounting fifty-two guns, under command of Capt. Cyrille Pierre Théodore Laplace, forty-five, one of France’s leading naval officers and famous for having circumnavigated the globe nearly a decade before in
La Favorite
. He carried orders that were stern and unambiguous: He was to “destroy the malevolent impression you find established to the detriment of the French name; to rectify the erroneous opinion which has been created as to the power of France; and … you will not quit those places until you have left in all minds a solid and lasting impression.”

The terms that Laplace meant to impose on the islands included freedom to practice the Catholic religion, payment of twenty thousand dollars in indemnity for the honor of France, and a salute to the French flag with twenty-one guns. The first that the Americans learned of his mission was a notice “To the Citizens of the United States resident at the Sandwich Islands,” from the American commercial agent, Peter Brinsmade, that unless his terms were met, Laplace would open fire three days hence. And “in case of war, I am desired, under his kind Favor, to proffer to all American citizens, excepting the Protestant Clergy, an asylum, and protection on board the Frigate.” Noting that they had been especially excluded from protection, the Sandwich Islands Mission hurried a note back to Brinsmade, signed by Bingham, Judd, Richards, Castle, and half a dozen others, requesting protection of American lives and property, which Brinsmade extended to them within his walls.
4

The chiefs sent urgently to Maui for the king, but saw only one way out of the difficulty and that was to accede to Laplace’s demands in all particulars. The weight of his office heavily upon him, Kamehameha III arrived and negotiated an agreement with Laplace that further stipulated that Frenchmen accused of crimes could be tried only by juries approved by the French consul, and, most odiously to the missionaries, Hawai‘i was opened to the import of French wines and brandies, taxed at not more than 5 percent. French marines escorted the priests ashore, where they held Mass; cannon salutes were exchanged, the money rounded up and paid as a “bond” to insure future good conduct.

The business district in Honolulu viewed the “Laplace Affair” with some satisfaction for its casting the missionaries in a bad light, notwithstanding that they had to front much of the twenty-thousand-dollar indemnity. The January 15, 1840, number of the
Sandwich Islands Mirror
contained “An Account of the Persecution of Catholics in the Sandwich Islands,” with primitive woodcuts (by Dudoit), including an illustration of one Juliana Makuwahine lashed to a tree, “for the unpardonable sin of believing in the Church of Rome.” Another depicted Kimeone (Hawaiian for “Simon”) in chains, his cross defiantly around his neck, “released from his chains by the magnanimous conduct of Captain Laplace.”
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Once back in business, the priests did not lack for converts seeking some shelter from the uncompromising frost of American religion. The natives’ “habits are fixed,” wrote Juliette Cooke at this time, “and are not improved by all their intercourse with civilization & religion.” One young chief “has declared his intention of being a Catholic because he says they are not so
strict
as the Protestants. He can be religious & go to heaven & retain his sins into the bargain. His wife is not much better, a young person of 16—She is said to be a ringleader of wickedness.”
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The Honolulu business leaders, happy to see the Congregationalists spurned, were even more pleased to learn that Hiram Bingham, keystone of the Sandwich Islands Mission since their arrival, had been recalled by the ABCFM. He and Sybil took ship on August 3, 1840, ostensibly for a rest because of Sybil’s failing health, but in fact the ABCFM was unhappy with his continued involvement in the affairs of the kingdom. Sybil died at the end of February 1848, but despite Bingham’s wish the ABCFM did not return him to Hawai‘i. He made himself useful instead ministering to an African-American church; he remarried, and died in New Haven in 1869, aged eighty.
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*   *   *

French truculence and bombast in Hawai‘i naturally led the British government to undertake a review of their own relations with the islands, which had been discovered by an Englishman and with which they had a cordial friendship. The incoming foreign minister was George Hamilton-Gordon, the fourth Earl of Aberdeen, characterized as kind, scholarly, unflappable, and “a profoundly good man.” As the Foreign Office communicated to the Admiralty, all British officers were “to treat [the islands’] rulers with great forbearance and courtesy, and, at the same time … afford efficient protection to aggrieved British subjects, not to interfere harshly or unnecessarily with the laws and customs.”
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