Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (40 page)

There may actually, though, have been a religious figure who was involved in Kalakaua’s slow downfall—a mysterious man who appeared on the scene probably late in 1886, and enjoyed enormous influence over the king for the next year. That was Abraham Rosenberg, who claimed to be a rabbi and traveled with a Torah scroll and splendid silver
yad
, or pointer. As far as anyone could have known, during their long nighttime hours together Rosenberg was instructing the king in Jewish tradition and history, but he was almost universally known as the king’s soothsayer.

One scholar has noted something salient about the effect that Jewish ritual would have had on Kalakaua. “Anyone who has heard such chanting must be struck by the remarkable similarity to Hawaiian chanting,”
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an art form at which the king was highly proficient. And Rosenberg, whether he was actually a rabbi or merely a man versed in Jewish learning, could have augmented Bible stories with which Kalakaua was familiar with Talmudic commentary on their meaning, which would have made him seem (perhaps not inaccurately) more knowledgeable about them than the missionaries whom the king disdained. And Kalakaua could certainly have noticed the structural similarities between Hebrew and Hawaiian that struck Henry Opukaha‘ia seventy years before. The political lobbies scoffed at Rosenberg, and the newspapers referred to him as “Holy Moses,” but he held the king in thrall until his sudden decampment just weeks before the business element finally moved against the king.

It was singular how this upper echelon of the
ali‘i
, no less than the commoners, kept one ear open to the call of the old ways. Praying someone to death, while long nominally debunked, was still feared and had been illegal for many years. Princess Ruth of course had never adopted Christianity, but even Queen Emma, who was the most devout of them, weakened to its charms at least once. Nearly two years after the queen dowager lost the bitter election to Kalakaua, one of Ruth’s servants went to Emma with a recipe for hexing him and his whole clan to death. As Emma admitted in a letter to her cousin Peter Ka‘eo, after a regimen of fasting and praying “that God would please place me on the Hawaiian Throne,” a young lamb was sacrificed, and she drank a glass of brandy containing three drops of its gall and three drops of blood from its heart.
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It is difficult to imagine a letter showing Emma in a worse light, but the fact that the ritual came from Ruth’s
kahuna
, Kaiu, and was relayed by one of Ruth’s servants, eloquently answers the question of how passively that formidable lady had been brooking Kalakaua’s repeated insults.

Kalakaua was untroubled by spells cast in lamb’s blood and brandy, but his expansive lifestyle, his rusticated palace with its electric lights and telephone and indoor plumbing, his entertaining and his gambling, left him in helpless need of money. The planters and factors could give it to him, but their terms became harder. Like an ant that had broken the edge of an ant lion’s trap, Kalakaua sank into the cone of sugar. He had given them the reciprocity treaty he promised, and the sugar industry became gigantic. The 8,800 tons that Hawai‘i exported in 1866 after the ramp-up to supply California during the Civil War seemed like a lot at the time. The industry’s transformation after the United States ratified the reciprocity agreement in 1875, however, was stunning—the 9,400 tons that were exported in 1870 increased to 12,500 tons the year of the treaty, to 31,800 tons in 1880, on its way to nearly 130,000 tons in 1890. There were fifty-four major plantations in operation in 1879: twenty-four on Hawai‘i, thirteen on Maui, seven each on Kaua‘i and O‘ahu, and three on Moloka‘i. The larger among them covered as much as three thousand acres and employed a thousand or more workers. Irrigation now played a major role; rainfall on the islands was distributed so unevenly between windward and leeward sides that either artesian wells or channels diverting water from high in the forest on the wet sides to more arid regions were required to bring previously unsuitable lands into full cultivation. The shrewd Scotsman James Campbell, husband of Abigail Kuaihelani, took his profit from selling the Pioneer Mill and purchased land on the arid Ewa Plain on the dry side of O‘ahu, twenty miles west of Honolulu. By drilling artesian wells he quadrupled his money in sugarcane.
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Even more dramatically, in the year after reciprocity the firm of Alexander & Baldwin—another one owned by missionary descendents—engineered a seventeen-mile irrigation ditch on Maui, from the wet, windward side of Haleakala to their acreage between Pa‘ia and Makawa‘o. Partner H. P. Baldwin proved himself indefatigable in getting it done. Despite having lost an arm in a mill accident, he shamed workers into finishing work in the dangerous Maliko Gorge by lowering himself on a rope with his one arm for daily inspections.
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The ditch cost the extravagant sum of eighty thousand dollars, but delivered forty million gallons of water every day. That success led them to acquire more land and more mills until they became recognized as one of the so-called Big Five sugar combines.

Concentration of sugar production into fewer hands was the natural process of capitalism as larger companies acquired smaller ones, but the overall planted acreage continued to increase. Some others of what became the Big Five, such as Castle & Cooke, backed into sugar growing by having been the factor for plantations they eventually took over. Another one was H. Hackfeld & Co., founded by a German immigrant who marketed the sugar from the original Ladd & Co. plantation at Koloa. Another major player was Starkey, Janion & Co., British merchants who had run a store in Honolulu since 1846; one of their employees, Theo Davies, raised capital and assumed control of the company and its mercantiles, insurance business, and began buying plantations. The oldest of what became the Big Five had roots that extended all the way back to the sandalwood trade, which employed Henry Peirce, who eventually retired to become the American minister to the kingdom, as the company evolved into C. Brewer & Co., with Peirce’s son as a partner—which made Henry Peirce something more than a disinterested bystander in the effort at reciprocity.

One important aspect of the plantation system at this time was mutual cooperation. With the American market apparently able to absorb all the sugar they could produce, there was no need to feel competitive against one another. So they shared irrigation networks where practicable, and agreed on slates of local officials who should be appointed, for instance district court judges, who could be counted on to decide contract-labor disputes in their favor. An even more serious effect of the spreading plantations was the eradication of local villages, with their remaining possibility of subsistence agriculture, forcing more
kanakas
to hang about the plantations for some kind of work.
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After 1879 Chinese immigration into Hawai‘i under the controversial labor contracts increased to an average of some three thousand people a year. They presented one set of issues to the government, and other considerations to the planters. In China in 1881 Kalakaua had tried to limit immigration to those Chinese men who came with their wives. The native Hawaiian population was still in free fall, and it only exacerbated the problem when Chinese bachelors took Hawaiian wives and began having
hapa pake
(half Chinese) children. To the good side, somewhat more than half the coolies returned to China at the expiration of their contracts. The others presented a problem for the white element because, having hoarded their slender wages, they moved to the cities, went into business, and being shrewd and hardworking, undercut white-owned businesses. Sun De Zhang, for instance, more widely known as Sun Mei and the older brother by twelve years of Chinese republican leader Sun Yat-sen, came to Hawai‘i in 1871 to work in his uncle’s store, and by 1885 was the principal merchant on Maui, owned a six-thousand-acre ranch, and was known as the “King of Maui.”
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Sun Yat-sen himself lived in Hawai‘i from 1879 to 1883 under his brother’s sponsorship, but he was more interested in education than labor.
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Chun Afong, for another case, one of the first Chinese to arrive back in 1849, opened a mercantile in Honolulu, folded his profits into real estate, and became that community’s first millionaire. Perhaps most frightening to the
haole
community were men like Tong Yee, who made a fortune with his own Paukaa sugar plantation north of Hilo, married a chiefess on the Big Island—most Hawaiian women thought no worse of marrying a Chinese than an American, a notion the latter community had some trouble accepting—and had a daughter, Emma Aima, who became a leader in the fight against annexation.
9

Overall the Chinese population in Hawai‘i, which had stood at 2,038 in 1872, tripled to 6,045 in 1878, and tripled again to 18,254 in 1884—one-quarter of the population of the entire kingdom, before the government stepped in to regulate the flood. By 1886 Honolulu’s “Chinatown” alone teemed with six to eight thousand residents, such a tightly packed warren of houses, shops, shacks, and lean-tos that a fire that year could not be extinguished before devastating most of it.
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Plantation wages for them had increased to fourteen dollars per month, and still, despite Kalakaua’s effort to limit the number of bachelors coming to the islands, sixteen Chinese immigrant men out of seventeen were unmarried.
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In 1881 both the Chinese government, newly alert to abuses in the coolie trade, and the Hawaiian government, fearful of being displaced from its own islands, each moved in its own way to restrict Chinese immigration, causing the planters to scout the globe for other ethnicities to bring to Hawai‘i. As Kamehameha IV had envisioned, there was an attempt to recruit workers from elsewhere in Polynesia, with whom intermarriage would be less of an issue, but as laborers they proved to be not much more energetic than native Hawaiians. The Portuguese worked hard, settled with their families, and knew their place, but being white (albeit swarthy) they tended to want white wages, so the planters began to look elsewhere after bringing over several thousand.
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In 1882 the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act; that did not directly affect Chinese contract labor in Hawai‘i—except among those who foresaw a problem with annexation if the kingdom were overrun with people that the Americans would shun as undesirable. Still, it caused attention to turn to Japan, whose laborers also came mostly as single men but, unlike the Chinese, preferred to shop for wives in picture albums from home than seek out the diminishing number of native women.

*   *   *

In 1883 Kalakaua allowed himself to be drawn into a new scheme that added more tarnish to his reign, this one for Hawaiian coinage. It was not a bad idea; there were about half a million dollars in paper “silver certificates” circulating in the economy, but the law had been adjusted many times over the years, assigning values and depreciations to the many countries’ coins that were accepted in the islands. People were wondering whether those certificates were actually redeemable for anything. It was Claus Spreckels, to whom the king was badly in debt, and who now held a mortgage as well on Walter Murray Gibson’s Mormon paradise of the Palawai Valley, who came up with a solution: He would mint one million Hawaiian silver coins of various denominations, whose intrinsic worth could not be questioned. They would bear Kalakaua’s profile on the obverse, the Hawaiian arms and motto on the reverse—a capital way to appeal to the king’s ego. For this million dollars Speckels would be paid in government gold bonds bearing 6 percent. And that was after making $150,000 on the deal, because each face-value dollar of silver would cost him eighty-five cents for the metal and the minting. Some of the legislators, including Sanford Dole and William Castle, tried to block it but were unsuccessful. The coins were struck: half a million silver dollars, seven hundred thousand half-dollars, half a million quarters, and a quarter of a million ten-cent pieces. Spreckels then opened a bank in downtown Honolulu to compete with Bishop’s,
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and began laying plans for a Hawaiian National Bank that would be empowered to issue paper money. No one needed to be told who would be in charge of that. Hawaiian minister in Washington Henry A. P. Carter wrote a disgusted and confidential note to Dole: “Probably the next move will be to declare photographs of Mr. Spreckels legal tender for any amount.”
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More capers over the next two years further eroded the king’s standing with the business interests. A penultimate straw was the elevation of Gibson to the premiership at the end of June 1886, an office for him to hold while he also held the Interior Ministry.
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For many downtown, the last straw was a bribery scandal that surrounded the king with too much smoke for anyone to believe there was no fire. In 1886 the legislature passed a bill to regulate the import of opium, which the religious quarter opposed, but the government saw little harm in allowing the now large Chinese community access to their traditional drug of choice. The newly appointed registrar of conveyances and friend of the king, Junius Kaae, importuned a wealthy Chinese named Aki, who wanted the opium-distributing license, into making a $75,000 gift to the king. However, the opium license went to a second Chinese in consideration of an even bigger gift to the king, and Kaae refused to give Aki his money back. Accepting one bribe would have been bad enough, but this was dishonor even among thieves. Aki went public, and both the British and American representatives reported that, while the government maintained that the king knew nothing of the dealing, public feeling against him on the part of those who wanted governmental reform—and that was most of the commercial element—was reaching the boiling point.

In November 1886 the nation celebrated Kalakaua’s fiftieth birthday with bonfires, cannon salutes, and glittering balls and luaus. At a commemorative service on November 28 at the Kaumakapili Church (which had come to be known as the commoners’ church, as the Christian
ali‘i
increasingly claimed Kawaiaha‘o as their own
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), Prime Minister Gibson delivered a lengthy homage to the glories of the king’s reign: “Is he not a Father beloved by his children? More than a Ruler revered by his subjects?.… He holds in his hands the sources of their welfare. And does he not shape all his action for the public good? For our King has inspired a great hope abroad, as well as at home, that his island realm was to advance, grow, and be glorified … that he, King Kalakaua, was the appointed man—the man of the Pacific, to lead onward to a higher destiny; to become a successful, beneficent and respected power.” The powerful faction that abhorred Gibson and scoffed at the king would not restrain from vomiting much longer.