Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (13 page)

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Back in England the British accorded Hawai‘i’s royal couple, sealed in multiple caskets of lead, mahogany, and oak, greater dignity than George IV had shown them in life. Interred temporarily in the church of Saint Martin in the Fields, and guarded against a rumored theft for display in a circus, they were returned home aboard a frigate mounting forty-six guns, HMS
Blonde
. She dropped anchor in May 1825 at a Honolulu in profound mourning already, for an American whaler had brought the sad news. It also occasioned the elevation of Liholiho’s barely adolescent brother, Kauikeaouli, as King Kamehameha III, and not unimportantly consolidated power in the hands of Ka‘ahumanu as
kuhina nui
and regent.

In October 1825, three months after this somber reminder of mortality, Kapi‘olani was baptized. Within the church her fierce nature began to soften as she demonstrated charity to the fate-stricken and the needy. But she was still a high chiefess and guardian of her culture, as she proved in 1829. Just south of the City of Refuge at Honaunau was perhaps the holiest site on the Big Island, a log-walled mausoleum containing the bones of Hawaii’s ancestral kings extending back to the 1600s. It was called the
Hale o Keawe
, the House of Keawe, named for the Conqueror’s great-grandfather who had had it constructed. It measured about sixteen feet by twenty-four, set in a palisade studded with the most ferocious idols that the culture could conceive, with eyes of mother-of-pearl and grimaces of sharks’ teeth. In the earliest days of conversion, Reverend Ellis was allowed to visit the place and peek inside, but not enter. The hair stood up on his neck, not just from the perceived savagery of the place, or the overpowering sense of history to see the bones of dead kings neatly tied up and visible to the viewer. More than that, at its construction and with each interment,
Hale o Keawe
was drenched in human sacrifice. “At the setting of every post and the placing of every rafter, and at the thatching of every ‘wa’ (or intervening space), a human sacrifice had been offered.” Until Liholiho had abandoned the practice in services for the dead Conqueror, every stage of preparing a royal corpse, “at the removal of the flesh, at the putting up of the bones, at the putting on of the tapa, at the winding on of the sennit,” was accompanied by more ritual death.
9

At a place of such crushing awe in that culture, it had been a signal concession to the new religion in 1825 when Ka‘ahumanu had allowed officers of the
Blonde
to remove many of the
ki‘i
, the ferocious idols, and take them to England for display. But with the removal of the guardians the place fell into disrepair. In 1829 news of its condition occasioned a visit by Naihe and Kapi‘olani; when she, accompanied by Mrs. Judd, entered the
hale
they were the first women who had ever been allowed to do so. The sight of the few rotting offerings left to the piles of neglected bones overcame Kapi‘olani, who wept in grief. Later, after consulting with Ka‘ahumanu, she rescued the bones of the Hawaiian kings and high chiefs. Eleven sets of remains were placed in one large coffin, and twelve in another, and they were carefully hidden in a cave, in the old way, and the entrance rocked over. Then, with the precious relics removed, the mausoleum and its court were pulled down so that not a trace remained.

Kapi‘olani lived a dozen more years as a devout Christian; in fact her first American biographer considered that her life’s significance was that it was, “in its essence, the tale of every life of spiritual aspiration” among the islanders.
10
Kapi‘olani was surely an example to her people, but one other incident associated with her, not related by later writers, must have had its influence in the spread of Christianity in Hawai‘i. Some years after her conversion, she was visiting with Laura Judd, who asked her how, specifically, her servant Mau, who had procured bananas for her during her childhood, met his end. Kapi‘olani did not know, but sent for the
kahuna
, who was still alive, to further explain the incident. When he arrived he answered that the boy was taken into the
heiau
at Honaunau and strangled at the altar. That was the traditional mode of dispatch for sacrificial victims. “Those were dark days,” he further admitted to Mrs. Judd and the high chiefess, “though we priests knew better all the time. It was power we sought over the minds of the people to influence and control them.”
11
Pu‘uonua o Honaunau, temple and City of Refuge, was one of the most important
heiaus
of the Big Island. For one of its
kahunas
to admit that the whole regimen of
kapu
was nothing more than a con to manipulate the people was a shattering admission, and a powerful weapon to hand the missionaries.

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With the hostile Boki back in the country, the Calvinists—who had now grown accustomed to having their sermons backed by handbilled notices giving legal effect to some of God’s laws—began to encounter more vocal opposition. It was a tension that the officers of HMS
Blonde
were quick to notice, and in currying their own relationship with the Hawaiians, they tried to give them a more congenial alternative to New England Congregationalism. Lord Byron, captain of the
Blonde
(and recent inheritor of the title from his cousin the poet), was particularly irked by Hiram Bingham. “This man is, we have no doubt, truly zealous in the cause of religion; but … he has in a manner thrust himself into all the political affairs of the island, and acts as secretary of state, as governor of the young princes, director of consciences, comptroller of amusements, &c an interference that some may regard as political, and tending to establish an American interest in the islands.”
12

Lord Byron prevented Bingham from attending the royal funeral, which Bingham resented,
13
but after the greatest mourning had passed and the officers of the
Blonde
staged a Saturday-evening lantern-slide presentation for the entertainment of the natives, Bingham used his influence to discourage attendance. Saturday, it seemed, was the day before the Sabbath, when their attention should be more profitably given to preparing for the next day’s worship. Among the gifts that the British Crown sent to their Hawaiian counterparts was an elegant silver teapot for Ka‘ahumanu. Lord Byron noted that the Hawaiian ladies “have adopted tea, and almost rival the Chinese in their love of it.” However, he griped, “the Americans, who chiefly supply them, have taken care that they shall have no experience of the best kinds.” That, apparently, would be too pleasurable.
14

Nevertheless the missionaries gained ground. By November 1825, the station at Hilo had made astonishing progress since the time Ka‘ahumanu’s namesake pig had scattered one of the early meetings. “The house of public worship will not contain half that assemble to hear the Word of Life,” Joseph Goodrich of the Second Company wrote to the ABCFM in appealing for increased aid. “The chiefs have lately begun to build a new meeting-house of much larger dimensions. I am unable to supply one-twentieth part of the calls for books.… Nearly thirty thousand souls have open ears to hear the Gospel. Must they be left to perish because American Christians have exhausted their charities?”
15
Their school, Goodrich added, had been in operation only ten months, and already some natives had assimilated such urgency with their learning that they left to preach in more remote areas.

From the half year and more that it took such reports to reach New England, it was impossible for the Board of Foreign Missions to know whether the effort to Christianize—and perforce Americanize—the natives was indeed such a blazing success, or whether the missionaries’ laudable zeal might be leading them to overestimate their influence. But it was clear that something remarkable was happening, and they marshaled increasing resources for the effort in Hawai‘i. It had now been two and a half years since Goodrich and the reinforcement missionaries had arrived on the
Thames
, and while his appeal did not fall on deaf ears, it took another two and a half years before a third influx arrived. On March 30, 1828, the
Parthian
dropped anchor, carrying Mary Ward, twenty-nine, a spinster teacher; Rev. Peter Gulick and his wife, Fanny; Rev. Jonathan Smith Green and his partner in good works, Theodosia Arnold; and two men who would profoundly shape Hawai‘i’s future: Rev. Lorrin Andrews was thirty-three; he accelerated native conversion by establishing the Lahainaluna Seminary, and he bequeathed to the country his grandson, Lorrin Andrews Thurston—a name to remember for future years. And then there was Dr. Gerrit P. Judd. He was a month short of twenty-five, a graduate of Fairfield Medical College, married only six months to Laura Fish of his own Oneida County, New York. He established a medical practice treating natives—a ministry critically needed in a country as disease ridden as Hawai‘i. His earnestness and skill helped him to navigate his wife through nine pregnancies, and eventually his dedication earned him the intimacy of the royal family and a second career, unsought, as their adviser, diplomat, and as one observer wrote with some exasperation, “Minister of Everything.”

Eventually there were no fewer than eleven infusions of reinforcements for the original pioneers of the
Thaddeus
, totaling more than 120 men and women, spaced over the next twenty years, the last arriving at the end of February 1848. The two most important were the fifth, when the
Averick
disembarked a dozen preachers, teachers, doctors, and a printer in 1832; and the eighth, when the
Mary Frasier
disgorged nearly double that number in 1837, including Amos Starr Cooke and his wife, Juliette, later noted as founders and headmasters of the Royal School, and Samuel Northrup Castle, remembered mostly because his children combined with those of the Cookes to begin the march toward a sugar monopoly.
16

That last evil effect lay in the future, however, and for now the missionaries taught and doctored and ministered as best they knew how, sincerely, doggedly. Behind all their efforts loomed the enormous figure of the queen regent, Ka‘ahumanu, shrewd, calculating, watchful for cause and effect, and the missionaries never lost sight of the fact that they depended upon her favor. She never let them forget it, either. Once when she dispatched servants laden with food to help the Americans host a dinner, and they thanked her and acknowledged they were indebted to her for the meal, she raised an eyebrow and teased, “Just this one?” To a certain extent she adopted Christianity similarly to Constantine in the fifth century: She was willing for her people to put their eternal faith in God, but she also expected it to cement their earthly loyalty to herself. Her interest in learning and the religion was genuine, but she never forgot her position for a moment. She attended church, but arrived in a great carriage pulled, in default of horses, by a dozen puffing lackeys. (Other royals attended, arriving in a gaudy parade of improvised litters and sedan chairs.)

When for reasons of state she acted outside Christian expectations, the missionaries learned to stay out of her way. Bingham, after long association with her, recognized her complexity. “This woman,” he wrote, “with all her haughtiness and selfishness, possessed, perhaps, as true a regard for the safety of the state, as her late husband or his high chiefs.”
17
They witnessed a case in point when, after several rumblings of renewed defiance by old Kaumuali‘i of Kaua‘i, she had Liholiho sail to Kaua‘i, ostensibly on a journey of friendship to renew the existing agreement. Bingham went with him, and had an opportunity to see the new king in a more official and favorable light than he was accustomed to, and he also took in an object lesson on Hawaiian oratory and native politics—that what one heard was not necessarily what was meant. The errand nearly came to grief; the trade wind through the notorious Kaua‘i Channel was roaring, but the king refused all entreaties to delay the trip, and the ship reached the point of foundering numerous times during the sixty-mile crossing.

Kaumuali‘i renewed his allegiance, and after a lengthy sojourn, Liholiho invited his host to return to O‘ahu with him. To outside ears it might have sounded like an invitation that could be declined, but it could not. Kaumual‘i was now a prisoner of state, and once ensnared on O‘ahu he was kept under close watch and then compelled to marry Ka‘ahumanu to renew his fealty.
18
Then to seal the arrangement, and probably at least get some pleasure out of the situation, the queen regent also compelled his son to marry her, not Prince George Kaumuali‘i who the missionaries had returned to his father, but a younger and more handsome one—Prince Keali‘iahonui, twenty-one, six feet six, athletic, and “one of the handsomest chiefs in the islands.” As it turned out, her distrust of the family was shrewd, as George had entered into a life of dissolution, and after his father’s death he made a clumsy attempt to reestablish the independence of Kaua‘i. He and some allied chiefs stole guns and powder from a fortification on August 8, 1824, but failed to capture the fort. Ten days later Kalanimoku had an army on Kaua‘i, ran him to ground, and hauled him to O‘ahu, where he lived under a kind of house arrest until he died of influenza the next year.
19

Human sacrifice was now banned, but the difference in their fate would hardly have been noticeable to the disloyal. From that rebellion on Kaua‘i, Reverend Stewart noticed that “one of the rebel chiefs, a fine looking young man, was made captive.… He requested to be shot, but was bound hand and foot, according to the custom of the country, and carried on board the pilot-boat. Mr. Bingham saw him in the evening, after they had put to sea, seated against the timbers of the vessel in her main hold. In the morning, the prisoner was gone; and on inquiry, the captain without speaking, but by very significant pantomime, made known his fate; he had been thrown overboard in the dead of night, with his cords upon him.”
20
Simple execution, it seemed, was an adequate substitute for sacrifice.