Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (30 page)

William Richards, who was no longer a missionary but was heartily connected to its philosophy, wrote to his old friend William Ellis, his fellow worker from a quarter century before, now back in London. He sought to guide the development rather than block it, asking Ellis to do what he could to see that a man of evangelical zeal was appointed: “A High Churchman, or one of loose Christian habits, would not succeed,” and the existing community of evangelical ministers would oppose him. Wyllie derailed this effort, however, sending his own letter to Ellis, suggesting that he visit Manley Hopkins—who could probably be counted on to tell Ellis of the royal wish that the post go to anyone
but
a zealous evangelical.

*   *   *

The terrible epidemics of 1848–49 had not even passed from memory when a new scourge, smallpox, swept the kingdom in 1853, leaving at least 2,500 dead. For many years seamen’s hospitals had offered care to the foreign community, but for the
kanakas
in the countryside, and the poor floaters who were trying to make their way in the towns, there was nothing. The dwindling population weighed on Kamehameha IV’s mind as much as it had his uncle’s, to the point that he once suggested initiating an immigration program from elsewhere in Polynesia to invigorate the native stock. To the legislature he proposed the establishment of hospitals for the poor,
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which the legislature approved if the money could be privately raised. One Congregationalist expressing his view on the subject was the Rev. Samuel Damon of the Tenth Company, who felt that if the natives were not lazy, drunk, and licentious, they would not need a hospital. (Not all the American medical missionaries were so contemptuous, especially the doctors who practiced unstintingly among the poor.) The legislature referred the question of fundraising to a committee consisting of the acting finance minister, D. L. Gregg, and Wyllie. The latter, perhaps partly in jest, suggested that if the matter were turned over to ladies, they could raise the money straightaway. But Wyllie also had enormous confidence in the queen, and she and the king did raise the money, resorting even to importuning people on the street.
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The Queen’s Hospital, when it was built, was a huge step forward in the country’s public health.

After getting that project launched, Emma intended to spend a long vacation at R. C. Wyllie’s plantation at Hanalei Bay. She took the baby and his governess, Esther Kapi‘olani; her favorite cousin, Peter Ka‘eo; D. L. Gregg’s wife and three children; and several other friends. On the north shore of Kaua‘i they hiked, raced canoes, swam, and indulged in such naughtiness as eating chicken with their fingers—for the propriety of which Emma cited the example of Queen Victoria. The king joined them after a month; in and out of a fog of depression, after his daily work he often cared for Henry Neilson himself, his penance for having shot him. A few weeks at Hanalei Bay almost restored him—fishing, playing with the children, learning the Tyrolean waltz—all under Wyllie’s beatific gaze.

One chief cause of the Americans’ dislike of him was his influence with the royal family. He renamed his plantation Princeville in honor of the toddler Albert Edward. He encouraged Emma to open a correspondence with Queen Victoria, rather a bold suggestion because Emma was not confident of her spelling and expression—“As you know,” she once wrote her father, “I am not very good at it.”
16
She ventured a letter, however, and in fact she and the British queen became affectionate if long-distance friends. Wyllie set the cabinet ministers to wearing dress uniforms, and he formalized court etiquette, both of which could be defended on the ground of establishing the nation’s dignity in foreign relations, but the American-associated newspapers ridiculed him for it.
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When he promoted the idea of a Hawaiian peerage, though, opposition was so fierce that he did not pursue it.

*   *   *

Back in England, the wheels turned slowly to establish a church in Hawai‘i. After much discussion, the bishops thought it better, since Hawai‘i was already a Christian nation, to send not a missionary but a bishop with clergy under him—a prefabricated hierarchy. Ellis reported darkly back to Honolulu that the whole effort included Anglicans who were among “the greatest … perverts to Popery.”
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The process took so long that the royal couple began planning an event to coincide with the bishop’s arrival: the baptism of the crown prince. Queen Victoria consented to be his godmother, and arranged for a proxy to bring a massive silver christening vessel. In the meantime they performed in Verdi’s
Il Trovatore
at the Amateur Musical Society, of which the king was a contributor and sometime stage manager. They sailed down to Kona, a place rich with their family history, and stayed at Princess Ruth’s Hulihe‘e Palace. They began arranging alternative family seats, acquiring a summer villa above Honolulu in the Nu‘uanu Valley, and a country seat above Kona on the slopes of Hualalai volcano.

On February 11, 1862, Henry Neilson finally died, giving the king a chance to mourn him and move on. The Prince of Hawai‘i turned four, made his first appearance in the legislature, and behaved flawlessly. Many people had remarked on his sweet nature, but despite his parents’ determination not to spoil him, there were storms. One day in Kapi‘olani’s care, he threw a tantrum over a pair of shoes he did not like. Liholiho suddenly doused him with cold water to stop the display. On August 19 the boy took a fever and stomachache and deteriorated by degrees. Three days later Victoria’s proxy, William W. F. Synge, arrived to find him dying and his parents inconsolable. With an Anglican bishop and clergy not yet arrived, Ephraim Clark of the Kawaiaha‘o Church performed an Anglican baptism on the morning of August 23, and the little prince died four days later.
19

The prostrated Emma gave herself a new surname, Kaleleokalani, “Flight of the Heavenly Chief.” The king blamed himself and all but withdrew from public view; he had tortured himself for more than two years over what he had done to Henry Neilson; now this. He could not recover. The hysterical queen blamed Kapi‘olani, in whose charge the incident happened, and for the rest of her life could not bring herself (with rare state exceptions many years later) to attend a function where they might meet. The prince’s symptoms, however, were consistent with appendicitis,
20
and there was probably nothing that could have been done.

Just over three years after the movement was initiated, Bishop Thomas Nettleship Staley disembarked in Honolulu, with his wife and staff, on October 11, 1862. He was thirty-nine, a Yorkshireman, a product of Queen’s College, Cambridge, and intellectually everything that the king had asked for. King and queen were baptized and confirmed, followed by Wyllie, the king’s father Governor Kekuanaoa, David Kalakaua, and other important members of the ruling class. It was a time for the American Calvinists to lick their wounds, but in fact the death of the toddler Albert Edward was a nail in the coffin of the British future in Hawaii, and the American reclamation faced one less obstacle.

12.
Useful Marriages

The death of the crown prince cast a final pall over the reign of Kamehameha IV. He all but withdrew from public life, although he did not neglect his state duties. He proclaimed and maintained Hawai‘i’s neutrality when the United States descended into the nightmare of the Civil War, and that developed into an interesting refinement of the Hawaiians’ understanding of the Americans’ view of them. Many of the U.S. businessmen who staked their fortunes in Hawai‘i were New Englanders, and they shared that section’s approval of the abolition of slavery. That did not extend, however, to any notion that different races were equal. Besides, the evil of slavery would have been a curious doctrine to advocate in a country whose population had once consisted of a couple of hundred chiefly families living on the tribute handed up by about four hundred thousand
kanakas
living in near-serfdom. Nevertheless the dominance of New England Congregationalism and, perhaps as important, the intermarriage of Yankee businessmen to native chiefesses already well schooled in noblesse oblige, created a certain sympathy for the Union cause. Despite the king’s proclamation of neutrality, three or four dozen young men from the Punahou School volunteered for the Northern cause, but what many of them discovered was the same racial schizophrenia encountered by the king when, as Prince Alexander Liholiho, he was almost forcibly ejected from the train in New York. Probably not atypical was the experience of Henry Ho‘olulu Pitman, son of Queen Emma’s bridesmaid Mary Pitman. Henry’s father was banker Benjamin Pitman of Boston, where Henry was educated. He was about eighteen when he enlisted, and notwithstanding his nationality and nobility he was assigned to a Negro regiment. The Confederacy treated black prisoners of war harshly, and Henry, captured early in the war, died on February 27, 1863, in the notorious Libby Prison at Richmond, Virginia.

The few Hawaiians who entered Confederate service did so by quite a different route. Over the preceding decades about two thousand young
kanakas
had escaped their drudgery by signing aboard American whaling vessels. During the Civil War the remains of the Yankee whaling fleet became the regular prey of the dreaded Southern raider CSS
Shenandoah
. Captured whaling crews were given a choice between being clapped in irons below deck and then put ashore in the middle of nowhere, or joining the rebel crew. Twelve Hawaiian sailors made the latter choice.
1

Wyllie used Hawai‘i’s neutrality to expand trade with the United States. The absence of Confederate sugar in the North quintupled the price of that commodity there, a hardship that Wyllie was quick to take advantage of by encouraging increased Hawaiian production. The attempt at a reciprocity treaty in 1855 had been defeated by the influence of Southern sugar planters, and their voice was no longer heard in the Congress. While sugar consumption in the North was being throttled, California was a Union state, and the market was open for as much Hawaiian sugar as could be produced.

As William Richards had predicted to Ellis, the Congregational establishment in Hawai‘i was hostile to the English Church preferred by the royal family and many of their retainers. That opposition did not lessen when Rufus Anderson of the ABCFM himself visited the islands in 1863 to formally turn the remaining mission establishment over to the Hawaiian Evangelical Association. The Anglican Church gained an even larger public profile when the king presented a copy of the Book of Common Prayer—his own translation into Hawaiian. But they were now not the only competition that the Calvinist missionaries had to work around.

*   *   *

In the year of Kamehameha IV’s accession the Mormons established the City of Joseph on Lana‘i. The Congregationalists found Mormon beliefs even more appalling than the rituals and costumes of the Anglicans. The Mormons, however, stole a march on them by giving the natives positions of real responsibility in the local churches, as opposed to the Calvinists’ habit of keeping them in seemingly endless pupilage. This danger of losing influence among the native believers was not unforeseen, in fact it was an important factor in Dr. Rufus Anderson’s washing his hands of them. The Mormons, however, arriving late on a scene where thousands of natives could already read and write and understood the rudiments of Christianity (thanks to the missionaries), were able to capitalize on one certainty in Anderson’s philosophy: that the natives would seize upon a church that made them feel important.

The Mormons had been quietly laboring in Hawai‘i since the end of 1850, when ten young adherents abandoned the search for gold in California and came to the islands to mine souls instead. They quickly shifted their focus from white converts to native. Their most effective advocate in the islands was George Q. Cannon, English by birth but an early convert whose family was close to the heart of the movement—in fact his uncle John Taylor was wounded in the hail of bullets that killed the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith. A year after he arrived in Hawai‘i, Cannon began translating the Book of Mormon into Hawaiian, assisted ably and eagerly by one of his first native converts, Ionatana (Jonathan) Napela. Scion of a cadet branch of the ancient kings of Maui, Napela was nearly forty and a graduate of the Lahainaluna School—a shocking betrayal in the Calvinists’ eyes, and he was deprived of his Wailuku judgeship at the time of his defection.

In 1853, when Mormons on the mainland were thinking to cloister the members of the church in a “gathering” in Utah as a bulwark against worldliness, the same sentiment led the church in Hawaii to fort up in the City of Joseph on Lana‘i. Native emigration from the kingdom was illegal, and the church persuaded Chief Levi Ha‘alelea of Lana‘i to allow them to “gather” instead on his
ahupua‘a
in the Palawai Valley. Renaming the land the “Valley of Ephraim,” the Mormon Church anchored itself there for more than a decade.
2

Cannon returned home after four years, and while Ionatana Napela remained a pillar of the Mormon community and an interesting figure in the history of the islands, Brigham Young’s recall of the white missionaries to help fight the “Mormon War” left the church rudderless (arguably undercutting Rufus Anderson’s theories on the efficacy of native church leadership), and prey to the machinations of a shadowy American figure, Walter Murray Gibson. He was about forty, his past was a mystery; no one knew where he was from, although the most entertaining story was that he had been born at sea to English nobility, switched at birth to a poor American family, and one day would claim his title. That melodrama alone should have alerted people that something unsavory was afoot. His utterance of pro-Confederate sentiments—not the quickest way to win friends in Hawai‘i—made people think he was from the South. He had run guns in the Caribbean, and the Dutch jailed him on Java for revolutionary activities but he escaped. He had the gift of plausibility, and upon joining the Mormon Church in Utah persuaded Brigham Young to send him to the Pacific with the splendiferous title (he claimed) of Chief President of the Islands of the Sea and of the Hawaiian Islands. He won the confidence of the Mormons on Lana‘i, who worked mightily to earn for themselves the
ahupua‘a
of Palawai—a tract over which Gibson could rhapsodize in cracked King James English: “I am King … of Palawai on this day of grace.… Smile sweet valley, thy baby smile, thou hast no evils of manhood. No type of man’s sins are here.… Oh smiling Palawai, thou infant hope of my glorious kingdom.”
3
Only later did the faithful learn that Gibson took title to the land in his own name, not theirs or the church’s. Ionatana Napela journeyed to Utah to see if Gibson really was legitimate; the Mormon Church sent a deputation in 1864, who excommunicated him but could not get hold of his title to the 2,500 acres on Lana‘i. Gibson made himself scarce for a time, to resurface in a later reign.