![]()
PART I
Pacific Subjects
![]()
CHAPTER ONE
Typee
Melville’s “Contribution” to the Well-Being of Native Hawaiians
Monica A. Ka‘imipono Kaiwi
A
LONG with whaling ships in the nineteenth century came writers to Hawai‘i in search of adventure among—what they believed to be—the “exotic” and “savage” natives. English and Euro-American writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Mark Twain, James Michener, and, before them, Herman Melville, recorded their impressions in fictional short stories, lengthy novels, and “factual” travelogues as well as personal autobiographies. Many writers depicted Native Hawaiians as noble, ignorant savages and as members of a dying race (Wood 19). At best these works are inaccurate and annoying, and as native people,
Kānaka Maoli1 have learned to overcome and live with the impact of such misperceptions and stereotypes. However, because authors such as London and Melville misrepresented Native Hawaiian culture and history, their texts must be addressed and exposed as not only inaccurate, but also prejudicial and injurious to those of us who are
Kānaka Maoli. More significantly, established and often canonized writers such as London and Melville continue to be published, edited, and taught, and through such actions, the legacy of inaccuracy and racism is perpetuated, and
Kānaka Maoli continue to be victimized by stereotypes of “fat, lazy, Negro-looking blockheads” (
Typee 189) who live in paradise, dancing and seducing foreigners. Seeing Melville’s
Typee—specifically his commentary regarding Native Hawaiians within the main text of
Typee and the appendix—within a nineteenth-century historical, political, and cultural context reveals Melville’s distortions of Hawaiian culture and history.
Ironically, an editor of Melville’s Typee proclaimed him “a writer about sea life and about the Polynesian islands” and heralded his work as “sympathetic to and an ally of” the natives of the Pacific (qtd. in Woodcock 7). In 1994, John Carlos Rowe maintained that in Typee, Melville even betrays the “civilized world” with his admiration of native people, criticism of Western influence in Polynesia, and denunciation of the exploitative nature of American imperialism and policy of colonization in the Pacific (“Melville’s Typee,” National Identities 257). Some of Melville’s contemporaries even chastised him, touting his sympathy for the native as a betrayal of all that they believed to be good and civil. In an 1846 review published in Graham’s Magazine, Thomas Buchanan wrote that “at times [Melville] almost loses his loyalty to civilization and the Anglo-Saxon race” (qtd. in Leyda 216). And in Christian Parlor magazine, Melville was accused of creating “an apotheosis of barbarism” (qtd. in Leyda 224).
Scholars of Melville regularly conclude that during his short stay in Lāhaina, Maui, and Honolulu, O‘ahu, Melville was appalled by the effects of Western ideology, specifically that of the missionaries, on Hawaiian culture and its people (Howard 7). In Chapter 26, through Typee’s narrator, Tommo, Melville claims that Native Hawaiians have been reduced to “draught horses, and evangelized into beasts of burden” (196). In this claim, Melville appears to be a true critic of his compatriot missionaries, and some scholars even speculate that Melville opted to return to his voyaging because he was “tiring of the arrogance of the Europeans and degeneration of Hawaiians” (qtd. in Woodcock 16). But from a Native Hawaiian perspective, in his Typee, Melville actually remains a faithful son to the conventions of Western ideology and practice. He holds true to the American ideals of his pro-civilizing contemporaries, contributing significantly to the travel genre of the time period that notoriously degraded native peoples.
The events that occupy Melville’s commentaries in Chapters 25, 26, and 32 as well as the appendix of Typee would have tainted opinion in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, Britain, and the United States because the readership of all three countries would have been aware of the British overthrow of the kingdom in 1843; both Hawai‘i and Britain were directly involved in the crisis, and Melville testifies in the appendix that Lord George Paulet’s overthrow of the kingdom had been reported in America (254). In order to interpret Melville’s words accurately, however, one must place his thoughts and opinions within both a Hawaiian and an American historical context.
Recorded Hawaiian history within the context of Western history began when Captain James Cook happened upon the Hawaiian Islands, first in 1777 and then again in 1778. During these first encounters, Cook described Native Hawaiians as possessing the most sophisticated society that he had met in the Pacific (Daws 2). In the hundred years following Cook’s arrival, the islands were united under Kamehameha I, and subsequently, the Nation of Hawai‘i was formalized. In 1840, Kamehameha III—also known as Kauikeaouli—was the first monarch in the world to voluntarily establish a constitutional monarchy (Osorio 25–26). Following the overthrow and restoration of the native monarchy in 1843, the Kingdom of Hawai‘i was recognized as an independent nation by over twenty-one countries, and over ninety “embassies and consulates in multiple sea ports and cities” were established (Larsen v. the Hawaiian Kingdom).
After the introduction of written language by the missionaries in 1823, Native Hawaiians became the most literate people in the world, with nearly 98 percent of the indigenous people able to read and write in the Hawaiian language (Kahumoku 87). As a result, over seventy newspapers were published in Hawai‘i in both Hawaiian and English, generating nearly one million pages of text by the turn of the nineteenth century (Ho‘omanawanui). Unfortunately, Native Hawaiians during the same period also experienced a severe population decline due to introduced diseases, with only one in every twenty Kānaka Maoli surviving (Stannard, Before the Horror 52). Finally in 1893, in “an act of war,” America overthrew the independent sovereign Kingdom of Hawai‘i (Scudder 5).
Melville’s sojourn through the Kingdom of Hawai‘i occurred between 2 May and 17 August 1843—a total of 104 days, or a little more than three months (Howard 7). Melville arrived during the five months when the kingdom was under British rule, and he remained long enough to witness—on 31 July 1843—the restoration of the kingdom to the Native Hawaiian king, Kauikeaouli (Kamakau 364–65), referred to by Tommo as Kamehameha III. Seventeen days after the restoration, Melville chose to leave Hawai‘i.
As witness to the events during the period of British rule, Melville uses his appendix in Typee to chastise the American media, claiming that they “grossly misrepresented” Paulet’s actions (254). He alleges the superior accuracy of his rendition of the overthrow and restoration of the kingdom because it is based primarily on information he gathered from an “Englishman who was much employed by his lordship [Paulet]” (254). Although present-day readers may be unfamiliar with 1843 events in Hawai‘i, Melville’s British and American readership was very much aware, and as stated in the appendix, Tommo (or Melville) made it his mission to “set the record straight,” by proclaiming his recounting to be factual and accurate (254).
In fact, Melville fought for the credibility that his narrator, Tommo, claimed. In a letter to A. W. Bradford, Melville criticized those who doubted the authenticity of the narrative described in Typee: “The fact is, those who do not believe [Typee] are the greatest ‘gulls.’—full fledged ones too” (Davis and Gilman 26). His credibility was “dramatically saved” when his companion, Richard Tobias (Toby) Greene, shared his escape story with Melville (260). Toby’s confirmation of Tommo’s encounter with the Typee effectively silenced critics, and for nearly eighty years, Typee was “accepted as authentic accounts of passages from the life of the man who later wrote that highly imaginative novel, Moby-Dick” (Woodcock 9). Melville fostered his assertion so effectively that he is quoted even today within works about the Marquesas. His observations are also included in standard texts of ethnography on precontact Pacific culture (Pearson 68).
Accepted as a true representation of the Marquesans, Typee was validated as Melville hoped. Likewise, the commentary on Hawai‘i would also be considered as authentic, especially since Tommo’s tone changes dramatically throughout Typee whenever he “pauses to consider the fate of another group of Polynesian islands—Hawai‘i. His tone is no longer musing, certainly not idle,” shifting from a seemingly carefree, open-minded outlook to a more journalistic, factual style of writing (Sumida, View from the Shore 26). In order to judge Tommo’s account as factual and to create an accurate historical context, which includes historical individuals rather than fictional characters, it is important to determine whether Tommo’s reporting is truthful.
One of the most defamed victims in Typee was Kamehameha III, the monarch of Hawai‘i who was deposed before Melville arrived in the islands. Tommo’s commentary in Chapter 26 regarding the king was considered so disturbing to historians of Kamehameha III that Melville’s passage was later reprinted and referred to in a documentation of Hawaiian history as “vituperation from the pen of Herman Melville” (E. B. Scott 63):
His “gracious majesty” is a fat, lazy, Negro-looking blockhead, with as little character as power. He has lost the noble traits of the barbarian, without acquiring the redeeming graces of a civilized being; and, although a member of the Hawaiian Temperance Society, is a most inveterate dram-drinker.
The “blood royal” is an extremely thick, depraved fluid; formed principally of rawfish, bad brandy, and European sweetmeats, and is charged with a variety of eruptive humors, which are developed in sundry blotches and pimples upon the august face of majesty itself and the angelic countenances of the princes and princesses of the blood royal. (189)
Tommo’s comments in this passage ridicule Kamehameha III and the notion of monarchy as a form of government in a “half barbarized” nation such as the Kingdom of Hawai‘i (255). The descriptors—“fat,” “lazy,” “blockhead,” “extremely thick,” and “depraved”—provide assessments of Kamehameha III’s physique and intellect, suggesting a personal contempt for an individual whom Melville claims never to have actually met.
Tommo’s reference to Kamehameha III as a “Negro-looking blockhead” must be contextualized within the era and the readership of the time. To an America still steeped in the practice of slavery, a label of this kind, which juxtaposes the categories “African” and “Polynesian,” would concretize for the reader the inhuman, despotic nature of Native Hawaiians. The nineteenth-century Euro-American reader would not seriously consider a “Negro”—a slave, someone only three-fifths of a white man—to possess the competence or intelligence to govern a country (Le Bon 26–27).
Tommo mocks Kamehameha III by referring to him as “His ‘gracious majesty’” and “blood royal” in the same instance that he calls him a “Negro-looking blockhead,” implying the absurdity of the idea that such a person could ever rule a nation. Tommo prefaces his cynicism about the Hawaiian monarch when Tommo crowns the Typee: “KING MEHEVI—A goodly sounding title!—and why should I not bestow it upon the foremost man in the valley of Typee? … Now, if the farcical puppet of a chief magistrate in the Sandwich Islands be allowed the title of King, why should it be withheld from the noble savage of Mehevi, who is a thousand times more worthy of the appellation?” (188–89). In Tommo’s opinion, Kamehameha III’s title was created and maintained solely by American missionary advisors, just as he created King Mehevi’s title (188). In this passage, Melville, through Tommo, contests the legitimacy of a “half-civilized” native in a position of power over Euro-Americans. Melville’s support of Lord Paulet’s reign over the kingdom in the appendix further confirms this point. Ironically, Tommo’s slanderous comments regarding the Native Hawaiian monarchy challenge Melville’s self-proclaimed anti-imperialist stance.
In Chapter 25, Melville begins his defamation of Native Hawaiians by creating a barbaric, “monstrous Jezebel” character out of Ka‘ahumanu (186), a powerful and well-respected chiefess who died in 1832, more than eleven years prior to Melville’s arrival (Kamakau 348). Described in history as “a handsome woman” and the favorite wife of Kamehameha I, the man who united Hawai‘i’s archipelago (Peterson, Notable Women 174), she was also the kuhina nui2 of Hawai‘i from 1819 until her death in 1832 (Peterson, Notable Women 175).
Upon Ka‘ahumanu’s death, two other women from Ka‘ahumanu’s lineage filled the position of kuhina nui; they were also referred to as Ka‘ahumanu (Kamakau 356). Elizabeth Kina‘u—Ka‘ahumanu II—was appointed kuhina nui in 1833 (Kamakau 337), and soon after her death on 4 April 1839 (Kamakau 348), Kamehameha III appointed Miriam Kekauluohiomano—Ka‘ahumanu III—as kuhina nui, which she was throughout much of his reign (Kamakau 356). If any credit can be given to Tommo’s accuracy, Miriam would have been the Ka‘ahumanu being referenced. However, the rest of his description applies more accurately to the first Ka‘ahumanu.
In describing Ka‘ahumanu, Tommo claims to have witnessed a “humpbacked wretch” who fell victim to the “terrific gusts of temper” of Hawai‘i’s “gigantic old dowager queen—a woman of nearly four hundred pounds weight, and who is said to be still living at Mowee.” According to Tommo, Ka‘ahumanu was known to “snatch up an ordinary size man who had offended her, and snap his spine across her knee,” Melville stating further that although “Incredible.… It is a fact” (186). Tommo even claims to have seen the poor deformed man.
It is true that the first Ka‘ahumanu was a powerful presence as a ruler and as a woman who weighed over three hundred pounds and stood six feet tall (Silverman 20). Tommo’s characterization of Ka‘ahumanu’s temper is also accurate. But according to Hawaiian historian Samuel M. Kamakau, “Women feared her most, for she treated men better than women, with whom she was always surrounded” (134). As the favorite wife of Kamehameha I, Ka‘ahumanu was kept away from men because she “enjoyed” their company too muc...
