Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (31 page)

In contrast to Gibson, if there was a hero among the missionaries in Hawaii, he was not among the Americans at all, but Father Damien de Veuster, a Belgian of twenty-four who was ordained two months after he arrived in spring 1864 into the Picpus Fathers, the original Catholic order that first came to Hawai‘i (Honolulu by then had a bishop and a cathedral). At first he was sent to Kohala, where Elias Bond (informally but now ironically known as “Father Bond”) was trying to keep his people busy and in good morals on the sugar plantation. Father Damien’s calling, though, would lie in a different sphere entirely.

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Kamehameha IV died, only twenty-nine years old, as much from a broken heart as from asthma, on November 30, 1863. Emma, still stricken by the loss of her son but performing her public duties, was almost beyond reach. The king had been unwell for two days, but none of the doctors believed there was any mortal danger. She was alone with him when he suddenly began gasping for breath and expired in her arms. Emma aided in the decision to postpone a funeral until the new royal mausoleum was completed at Mauna ‘Ala in the Nu‘uanu Valley—which meant that he lay in state in the throne room for two months—about the usual period of mourning for royalty in the old days. French consul Charles de Varigny wrote of the thousands of commoners who swamped the palace grounds, wailing in the first convulsions of grief. “The Queen,” wrote Bishop Staley, “sits almost incessantly by the coffin. She has prayers in the room night and morning, in the Hawaiian language, so that all present may understand.”
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The day after the funeral on February 3, 1864, Emma also presided over the reburial of Albert Edward. While she stayed in a tent during the days, she slept in the burial vault every night for two weeks, until the combined urging of Lot, Kekuanaoa, Wyllie, and Staley coaxed her away. Emma now changed her name from Kaleleokalani to Kaleleonalani—the plural form, “Flight of the Heavenly Chiefs.”

The afternoon of Liholiho’s death the council and
kuhina nui
proclaimed Lot Kapuaiwa king as Kamehameha V. The independent tack that his rule would take became clear when he refused to take the oath of office under the existing constitution. Toward the end of his reign Kamehameha III had granted a more liberal fundamental law than the 1840 document, and Lot wanted those royal prerogatives back. The usual time to convene the legislature was in April, but the king issued a call instead for it to assemble in July to revise the constitution. This was not the mode of amendment provided for in the existing document, as the American press demanded to know what the use of a constitution was if the king could change it at will. In July the convention deadlocked over the most controversial articles, and Lot dismissed them, abrogated the existing constitution, and said, “I will give you a Constitution.” That document, which he signed on August 20, 1864, rescinded the universal male suffrage his uncle had granted and replaced it with both literacy and property tests. He abolished the office of
kuhina nui
, without whose signature laws had not been valid, and he freed his ability to act from the privy council. With those steps taken, he signed the document and took the oath as king—a suddenly very powerful king—on the same day.

For a monarch who intended to rule as well as reign, Kamehameha V chose a highly international cabinet to assist him. The former French consul Charles de Varigny took the finance portfolio, and he retained the Scot Wyllie as foreign minister. The American C. C. Harris became attorney general, Elisha Allen of long service was chief justice, and the secondary positions were just as eclectic. As with his grandfather, what was paramount was loyalty to the chief.

In the first year of his reign Kamehameha V was compelled to deal with a new disease threat, not as imminently deadly as smallpox and not as widespread as measles or whooping cough, but a disease that was incurable and whose horror was biblically reinforced. The natives called leprosy
ma‘i pake
, the Chinese disease, for the prevalent belief was that they were the ones who first introduced it, but that could not be certain. Its spread, however, was alarming. “The increase of leprosy has caused me much anxiety,” the king told the legislature, “and is such as to make decisive steps imperative.” Twenty-five miles across the Kaiwi Channel from O‘ahu lay the island of Moloka‘i, on whose north shore sea cliffs, virtually unclimbable but for a single dizzying mule track, vaulted three thousand feet above the ocean. Jutting from this north shore, the small Kalaupapa Peninsula became a colony to house the diseased, who were rounded up from among the population and deported. In a few years there were just over eight hundred, a few of them Caucasian but predominantly native, including the only
ali‘i
to be afflicted, Emma’s cousin and correspondent Peter Ka‘eo, who early in the reign was in the house of nobles and a privy councillor. For several years the kingdom ill supported the colony, and conditions there deteriorated in some cases to the unimaginable, although to his credit Ionatana Napela visited and tried to help. Knowing leprosy to be contagious, the Catholic Church was hesitant to assign priests, but in 1873 Father Damien went willingly, and then volunteered to stay when the church would have begun a rotation. He did not just preach and pastor; he comforted the sick, dressed their lesions, organized recreational opportunities, and finally, in a real as well as a Pauline way, became one of them in December 1884 and died just over four years later.
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Stubborn on the restoration of royal powers, Kamehameha V proved equally stubborn on the topic of his marriage. The Cookes’ icy destruction of his relationship with Abigail Maheha at the Royal School had worked dark damage on him, and no doubt contributed to his sour personality. From early in life he had been betrothed to Bernice Pauahi, but as the time approached for such a marriage to progress to concrete plans, she proved herself no less a Kamehameha than the men in the family. Her parents tolerated her friendship with Charles Reed Bishop, but they opposed him virulently once they found out she loved him. Lot’s father Kekuanaoa, with all the weight he brought to the discussion, sided with her parents, and demanded that Bernice recognize her royal obligations and marry the prince.

She refused. The Cookes were in her confidence, and she let them see the letters she wrote disengaging herself. As Amos Cooke recorded,

This afternoon Bernice wrote a letter to Lot requesting that he come to see her. She told him of the wishes of her parents and said she would marry him, in accordance with their commands, but she knew it would make her unhappy, for he did not love her and she did not love him.

After this she wrote the governor [Kekuanaoa] and said that, if they wished her buried in a coffin, she would submit to their authority. That she would as soon they buried her as promise to marry Lot. The governor replied to it, saying she was deceiving herself.

Lot, learning the depth of Bernice’s determination, showed himself gentleman enough to release her from their engagement, admitting that he was not worthy of her and would not be the cause of her misery.
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Lot’s refusal to consider marriage, heavy as that was in import to the kingdom, was only one manifestation of the state that matrimony in the kingdom had come to be. Many of the highborn were torn between Christian sacrament and their ancient chiefly rights, and this fell harder on the women, who were now expected to be virtuous Victorians like their European models. Emma embodied this, and she was fortunate in that she loved her husband, whom she addressed affectionately, even in public, as “Aleck,” and he responded with “Emma.” For others in the family it was more problematic.

Not long after Aleck and Emma’s wedding, with most of the family ensconced in the palace complex, the couple invited to dinner the married Englishman Marcus Monsarrat, a businessman and auctioneer, who recently was among a consortium that gifted the queen with a new carriage. After the family thought that the evening was over, a servant reported that Monsarrat was in Victoria Kamamalu’s room. Prince Lot burst in and found Monsarrat at the stage of “arranging his pantaloons.” While Lot threw him out of the house, the king blamed his brother “for not shooting Monsarrat down like a dog.”
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(He had not yet wrecked his own life by shooting down Henry Neilson, so bold speech was easy.) There was no criminal charge to make, but Liholiho banished the offender from the kingdom; he returned some months later, was arrested and banished again.
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In the precontact days, sexual adventure was the right of chiefesses as well as the men, but purity in Hawai‘i was coming to be as one-sided as it was in the Western world.

This raised the issue of what to do with the libertine Kamamalu, and that was settled in ways that reflect little credit on the men of the family. The
kuhina nui
was eighteen at the time of the Monsarrat incident, well old enough to know what she was doing. There had been talk of marrying her to David Kalakaua, and now that was off the table—although in the old days her sexual experience would not have been an issue. More culpably, it was well known around the court that she had actually been in love with Prince William Lunalilo, and he with her, but her brothers had forbidden the match. Lunalilo was the last male Kamehameha—although a collateral one, descended from the Conqueror’s father via a secondary wife. Other branches of his family tree were formidable on their own: One of his grandmothers was a sister of Ka‘ahumanu. Court genealogists had to tell the king and his brother that if Lunalilo and Kamamalu married, any children of theirs would outrank children of any other royal offspring, including those of Liholiho and Lot. Victoria Kamamalu therefore was doomed to a kind of limbo until her brothers could find someone genealogically harmless to them for her to wed—small wonder she turned to a British auctioneer. Kamamalu and Lunalilo, like Emma and Liholiho, were only second cousins once removed, and like the royal couple, they loved each other; they might have had children. It was sad for the future of the kingdom that the last two Kamehameha kings’ jealousy of rank kept a potentially fertile branch of the dynasty from having a chance. A similar argument could be made for Lot and Bernice. He was the Conqueror’s grandson, she was his great-granddaughter, through different wives. They might have had children, and the dynasty would have survived, but for his self-indulgent petulance in making himself too unpleasant to marry: The impending doom of the Kamehameha line was self-inflicted.

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Equally serious for the future of the kingdom was the prevalence of mixed-race marriages. At first contact Hawaiian women could not wait to give themselves to the exotic and, even to their perception, vastly advanced white men. As decades passed the practice took on a different complexion. In England and America women, by and large, could not own real property, where in Hawai‘i chiefesses controlled enormous estates. In Hawai‘i, before the
Mahele
and its related statutes, foreigners could not own land, and after passage of the Alien Land Ownership Act, it was still easier, and cheaper, to come into control of a large tract by marrying its
konohiki
. In these Victorian times, it went without saying that this practice did not work in the other direction. White men might take native wives at will, but in the Anglo mind, the thought of a white woman being possessed by a native man, be he ever so highborn, was demoralizing. It was an inequity that aroused bitter comment from Hawaiian men, from Opukaha‘ia to Kamehameha III.

The wedding of Princess Bernice Pauahi in 1850 was one of the most prominent and successful, and to all appearances free of mercenary motive. Charles Reed Bishop of Glens Falls (on the Hudson), New York, large-eyed, long-nosed, and handsome, originally came to Hawai‘i in company with his aunt-in-law’s brother, William Little Lee. They were on their way to seek their fortune in the Oregon Territory when their ship diverted to the islands to resupply, and they stayed. They became naturalized citizens, and Lee did admirable legal and diplomatic service until his untimely death. Bishop went into finance, his Bishop & Co. bank being the first chartered in the kingdom, and it was an idea whose time had come, as he raked in nearly five thousand dollars in deposits on the first day. Ladd & Co. hired him to unsnarl their land fiasco; he invested in a Kaua‘i sugar plantation, and likely would have ended rich even had he not married Bernice, who was yet to inherit the vast pool of land she was heir to. Theirs was an example of a good marriage; in fact even her parents eventually accepted him, and they took up residence on the family estate. After her death he honored her memory with the founding of schools and the museum that bears their name.

Likely on the other end of the happiness scale was the 1862 union of Lydia Kamaka‘eha with John Owen Dominis, son of the ship captain’s widow of Washington Place. Lydia’s
hanai
father Abner Paki had been so incensed that Kamehameha IV didn’t marry her that he groused he would marry her off to some good white man, but apparently he had little to do with the Dominis match. His family was of vaguely noble Croatian heritage, via Schenectady, New York.
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His boarding school was next door to the Royal School, and he made friends with the
ali‘i
children over the top of the fence. After marrying Lydia he dedicated himself to becoming the indispensable man. He served on the boards of education, immigration, and health, and more than twenty years as royal governor of O‘ahu, part of that time as governor of Maui also. His marriage should have been so dedicated. Dominis married Lydia and dumped her at Washington Place in the contemptuous care of his mother, who was an arrant racist. Lili‘uokalani wrote discreetly in her memoirs that her husband “preferred to socialize without me,” but that did not stop him from fathering an illegitimate boy by his wife’s servant Mary Purdy Lamiki ‘Aimoku. (According to his physician, Dr. George Trousseau, Dominis was a serial philanderer and was probably lucky that there was only one baby out there.
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) Finding refuge in the spirit of
aloha
, Lydia partly blamed herself, for her apparent inability to have children, and later adopted the bastard son and, in one account, briefly considered trying to pass the child off as their own, which would have been illegal. (In this adoption she followed the example of Queen Dowager Kalama, who adopted Kamehameha III’s illegitimate son, Albert Kunuiakea.)
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