Lost Kingdom

Hawaii's Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Adventure

Julia Flynn Siler

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780802194886
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

The New York Times –bestselling author delivers "a riveting saga about Big Sugar flexing its imperialist muscle in Hawaii... A real gem of a book" (Douglas Brinkley, author of American Moonshot ). Deftly weaving together a memorable cast of characters, Lost Kingdom brings to life the clash between a vulnerable Polynesian people and relentlessly expanding capitalist powers. Portraits of royalty and rogues, sugar barons, and missionaries combine into a sweeping tale of the Hawaiian Kingdom's rise and fall. At the center of the story is Lili'uokalani, the last queen of Hawai'i. Born in 1838, she lived through the nearly complete economic transformation of the islands. Lucrative sugar plantations gradually subsumed the majority of the land, owned almost exclusively by white planters, dubbed the "Sugar Kings." Hawai'i became a prize in the contest between America, Britain, and France, each seeking to expand their military and commercial influence in the Pacific. The monarchy had become a figurehead, victim to manipulation from the wealthy sugar plantation owners. Lili'u was determined to enact a constitution to reinstate the monarchy's power but was outmaneuvered by the United States. The annexation of Hawai'i had begun, ushering in a new century of American imperialism. "An important chapter in our national history, one that most Americans don't know but should." — The New York Times Book Review "Siler gives us a riveting and intimate look at the rise and tragic fall of Hawaii's royal family... A reminder that Hawaii remains one of the most breathtaking places in the world. Even if the kingdom is lost." — Fortune "[A] well-researched, nicely contextualized history... [Indeed] 'one of the most audacious land grabs of the Gilded Age.'" — Los Angeles Times

PART I
ISLAND KINGDOM

Chapter One
Born in Paradise, 1820–1843

On April 4, 1820, a small merchant vessel, the Thaddeus, carrying a group of Christian missionaries, arrived off the coast of the Hawaiian archipelago’s biggest island, Hawai‘i. The New Englanders’ unwavering belief in the righteousness of their mission gave them the courage to undertake a dangerous, 164-day voyage from Boston.

The brig made its way through the treacherous Atlantic during the winter storm season, navigated the southernmost tip of South America, and then fought winds and high seas to make its way back up into the north Pacific. Fourteen members of missionary families were onboard, including the Reverend Hiram Bingham and Reverend Asa Thurston, as well as four Hawaiian youths.

Before setting off on this 18,000 mile journey, the missionaries gathered at the Park Street Church in Boston to receive their public instructions. Warned by one of the leaders of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions that they were headed to a pagan “land of darkness as darkness itself,” their orders were clear. “You are to aim at nothing short of covering those Islands with fruitful fields, pleasant dwellings, schools, and churches.”

The Americans hoped to bring what they considered progress to the islands while reaping the souls of the Sandwich Islanders. When they arrived, they were horrified by what they saw.

“The appearance of destitution, degradation, and barbarism among the chattering, almost naked savages, whose heads and feet and much of their sunburnt swarthy skin were bare, was appalling,” wrote the Rev. Bingham. “Some of our numbers, with gushing tears, turned away from the spectacle. Others with firmer nerves continued their gaze, but were ready to exclaim: ‘Can these be human beings?’” They soon overcame their disgust and sought and received permission from the chiefs to move into thatched houses, living alongside the natives.

Just a few months before their arrival, two powerful chiefesses had overthrown the kapu, the system of rules regulating Hawaiian life, by overtly disregarding the ancient law against women eating with men. At a feast in November, 1819, Alexander Liholiho, the young king who had assumed the throne as Kamehameha II after the death of his father, Kamehameha I, broke the ancient law against women eating with men by sitting down at their table. “The guests, astonished at this act, clapped their hands and cried out, ‘Ai noa,—the eating tabu is broken.’”

That was just the first of the radical changes that Kamehameha II made. After the meal was over, he ordered the heiau, the places for worshipping the many gods of the old Hawaiian religion, destroyed. It seemed sudden, but this revolution within Hawaiian society had fomented long before that fateful meal. Cook’s arrival had ended the islands’ long isolation and, inevitably, Hawaiians began to see themselves differently. They had watched as foreigners disregarded the kapu with no ill effects. And they had observed that Pele did not unleash her fury on Hawaiians who dared to break the rules surreptitiously.

Thus, the Reverand Thurston and the other missionaries arrived just in time to fill a void in the Hawaiians’ belief system. As Congregationalists who practiced an austere, Calvinist form of Christianity, they quickly spread out, settling in almost all parts of the island. They also brought heluhelu (reading and writing) to the islands for the first time.

Within a year and nine months of arriving, they’d given the Hawaiian language a twelve-letter alphabet (all the vowels—a e i o u—and a handful of consonants—h k l m n p w), introducing writing to an oral culture. Compared to the visiting whale men, who first arrived a year before the missionaries, in 1819, and only wanted pleasure from the Hawaiians after months at sea, the missionaries opened a wider world to them through education. By 1839 they had published the first complete Hawaiian-language Bible.

The first company of missionaries was soon joined by many more, including such passionate evangelists as Titus Coan, who began preaching in Hawaiian in the Hilo district on the island of Hawai‘i, reducing hundreds of natives to crying, shouting and weeping at his descriptions of hellfire and promises of redemption. In short order, missionaries had established more than a dozen churches in the islands and won thousands of converts; even Kamehameha II himself became a Christian.

Was there ever a stranger match than that between the New England missionaries, dressed in tightly buttoned black, and the barely clad Polynesians? Did the missionaries fully grasp the fierce history of the Hawaiians or did they lump them in with the African slaves they encountered on the streets of Boston because of the dark color of their skin? Did they realize that the king was a descendant of people who had conquered the seas in canoes, and that his father was the great warrior who had unified the far-flung Hawaiian archipelago?

One missionary who grew close to the chiefs was Asa Thurston, who was assigned to head the mission at Kailua on Hawai‘i Island, near the site of Captain Cook’s death. There, he instructed the king and his brother on Christianity until the itinerant court moved on to Lahaina on the island of Maui and then to Honolulu on O‘ahu. Like the other missionaries, Thurston and his family lived a life far removed from the relative comforts of New England, struggling to make ends meet. The family, for instance, went without butter so they could afford to buy a dictionary. Their plan backfired, though, for when the authorities of the missions discovered how they’d obtained the dictionary, they deducted its cost from Thurston’s salary.

The missionaries may not have understood much about the ­Hawaiians when they first arrived, but they saw an opportunity for spiritual harvest. Sometime in late 1820 or early 1821, Thurston wrote to the mainland urging other missionaries to join the cause if they possessed a single-minded devotion to God: “We want men and women who have souls . . . who have their eyes and their hearts fixed on the glory of God in the salvation of the heathen—who will be willing to sacrifice every interest but Christ’s.”

Such purity of purpose wouldn’t last long in Hawai‘i, however, especially among Thurston’s own descendants.

Looming over Honolulu lies a geological oddity known as the Punchbowl, an extinct volcanic crater whose brilliant red soil stands out from the green skirts of the mountains. New England sailors gave the crater this nickname because its rounded shape reminded them of punch bowls they remembered from home. But to Hawaiians it was a sacred site known as Pūowaina, “the hill of human sacrifices.”

In a compound of grass houses at the base of the Punchbowl, where some of Hawai‘i’s ali‘i, or high chiefs, lived, a baby was born on September 2, 1838. As the mother labored inside the windowless home, lying on mats braided from the bladelike leaves of the pandanus tree, men and women waited outside, reciting chants, oli, which traced the family’s genealogy and described their ancestors’ feats.

The infant emerged and began to cry. A midwife wrapped her in a soft blanket made from tree bark. The hut was filled with sweet and musky fragrances, including the coconut oil and turmeric that were often sprinkled on such cloth to give it a soft golden color.

The baby was a girl, later named Lili‘u. Soon after the cries of the child were heard, gasps of a different sort were made. A few drops of rain had fallen from an otherwise cloudless sky and a rainbow had spanned the horizon. “Ali‘i! Ali‘i! That is the sign of our Ali‘i!” the men cried out. Nature was signaling a propitious birth.

She was born during the time of year some islanders called Māhoe Hope, meaning “the time when the plumes of the sugarcane begin to unfurl from their sheaths.” It was a significant coincidence, since Lili‘u’s life would be inextricably bound to the fortunes of Hawai‘i’s sugar trade.

Although Lili‘u was born a high chiefess, with lineage that reached back to the high chiefs under Kamehameha the Great, at the time of her birth it would never have seemed possible she would someday become queen. And despite the appearance of a rainbow shortly after she was born, the full name she acquired foretold not a blessed life but one filled with pain. As was the tradition, she was named by the highest chiefess who, unfortunately, was suffering at the time from an eye infection. Marking the birth with her own complaint, the chiefess named her Lili‘u (smarting) Loloku (tearful) Walania (a burning pain) Kamaka‘eha (the sore eye.)

Bloodlines were crucial to Hawaiian society and elders scrutinized genealogy closely before a marriage to make sure that a partner of high rank was marrying an equal. Lili‘u’s social position rose soon after her birth, when she was adopted by chiefs of a higher rank than her own: Konia, a granddaughter of Kamehameha I, became her foster mother and Pākī, a high chief and adviser to Kamehameha III, became her foster father. The couple’s only daughter, Bernice Pauahi, became Lili‘u’s foster sister.

Lili‘u was welcomed by Pākī and Konia as part of a Hawaiian custom known as hānai. To strengthen family ties, newborns were sometimes given to close friends and relatives for adoption. The birth parents could not reclaim their child, except in the event of a death or serious illness on the part of the adoptive, or hānai, parents. They could, however, maintain a connection with the child by visiting and conferring with the adoptive parents over the child’s welfare.

Lili‘u adored her foster parents, particularly Pākī. An imposing man at six foot four and three hundred pounds, Pākī was a gentle giant, with a light complexion and reddish hair. At some point, a photographer captured an image of the enormous chief, looking somewhat uncomfortable in a dark, Western-style suit. Perhaps to display his wealth, a watch chain is looped from his vest and he holds out in front of him a walking stick topped with an ornamental knobbed handle.

Lili‘u’s feelings toward her adoptive father were much warmer than those for her biological parents. She recalled climbing on Pākī’s knees and putting her small arms around his neck, kissing and hugging him. He returned her affections and “caressed me as a father would his child,” she later wrote. Yet when she met her biological parents, “it was with perhaps more interest, yet always with the demeanor I would have shown to any strangers who noticed me.”

The practice of hānai was abhorrent to the New England missionaries, who discouraged it. But it continued anyway, reflecting not only a communal attitude toward child rearing but also a practical response to the rising incidence of infertility on the part of native Hawaiians.

It was a time when old Hawaiian customs were being swept away and new ones emerging to replace them. One sign of the changes was a flurry of activity on Punchbowl Street, not far from where Lili‘u was born. Rising above the few square blocks of storefronts, taverns, and grog shops that then made up downtown Honolulu, an extraordinary structure, Kawaiaha‘o church, arose out of blocks of buff-colored coral rock, weighing 200 to 1,200 pounds each. Native divers had quarried them from an offshore reef and then dragged them from the sea to the site of an ancient freshwater spring. Soaring above the palace and every other building in town was the first large Christian church to be built on O‘ahu.

The child Lili‘u was swept up in the Christian fervor. She was baptized at two and given the Christian name Lydia. She spent her earliest years with Konia and Pākī in Lahaina on the island of Maui, the Hawaiian capital until the court moved permanently to Honolulu in 1845. Looked after by a Hawaiian nursemaid there, Lili‘u as a toddler wandered one afternoon out of her hut, where she was supposed to be napping, and climbed onto a morning glory vine to swing. Losing her grip, she fell off, and her howls of pain sent her nursemaid running. Lili‘u lay on the ground, writhing. She had broken a leg, which left her with a mild limp all her life.

Perhaps believing Lili‘u needed closer supervision, she was sent by her parents to a boarding school on the neighboring island of O‘ahu just before her fourth birthday. At the school, near the palace and the stone church at the eastern edge of Honolulu, American missionaries educated ali‘i children, with the support of Kamehameha III and the chiefs.

Known as the Chiefs’ Children’s School, later renamed the Royal School, it was founded by Amos Starr Cooke and his wife, Juliette, in 1839....