Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (22 page)

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Great therefore was the Hawaiian shock when, on February 10, 1843, a British frigate entered the harbor at Honolulu. HMS
Carysfort
, 925 tons, twenty-six guns, was under the command of Lord George Paulet, thirty-nine, erect, self-assured, the third son of the Marquess of Winchester. Atop everything else, the Hawaiian government had been fighting a running battle with the British consul, Richard Charlton, who had taken his station shortly after the errand of HMS
Blonde
in 1825. A man with no diplomatic experience, he was a bully by nature, sour of temperament, litigious, hypocritical, derisive of Americans and islanders; he was chosen largely because the owner of the trading ship that Charlton commanded advanced him.
9
He drank, enjoyed native women, and hated the American missionaries with a passion. He was quick to seek vindication for all things British. When William Richards accused an English whaling captain of buying a local girl (which he did, for $160, although they were later married), Charlton tried to have Richards extradited to Britain to face a libel charge. He made himself particularly unpleasant over a certain tract of land in Honolulu, which Kalanimoku had leased to him apparently without it being his to lease, and Charlton kept his lawsuit over it alive for years.

In 1842 he stomped out of the country to lay his many grievances before the Foreign Office, his charges now expanded to include one that English subjects were being abused. Worse, Charlton’s personal creditors in Valparaiso sued him in Hawai‘i and won a ten-thousand-dollar judgment, to satisfy which the court attached Charlton’s property, which prompted his urgent note to the commander in chief of the Pacific squadron to send a warship to protect British interests. As acting consul in Honolulu, Charlton left Alexander Simpson, a diplomatic journeyman and junior Machiavelli who harbored dreams of adding Hawai‘i to the empire. His sentiments were well and publicly known, for which reason the Hawaiian government declined to receive him as the British consul.

At anchor in Honolulu, Paulet inquired immediately who was in local charge, and directed a letter to “M. Kekuanaoa, Governor of Woahoo,” requiring to know the whereabouts of the king, as he would conduct his business only with him, and whether he had been sent for, as otherwise Paulet intended to take his ship to find him. “As we were not informed of the business,” Kekuanaoa replied, “we have not yet sent for the king.… He is at Wailuku, on the east side of Maui. In case the wind is favorable, he may be expected in 6 days.”
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Summoned again from Maui, Kamehameha III had every reason to be confused. He was now thirty, he had surrendered his attachment to the former life and was now a serious (although often not sober) monarch. In the previous four years he had done everything that the Americans had asked of him. First Richards and then Judd had resigned from the mission to become his advisers, and under their guidance he had granted his people a declaration of rights and a constitution. Richards he had sent abroad with the scholarly Timothy Ha‘alilio, and they were making progress in winning a joint recognition of Hawaiian sovereignty from Britain, France, and the United States. But now another frigate was in Honolulu Harbor ready to roll out her guns.

The king informed Paulet that Dr. Judd would speak for him, but Paulet refused to see him. Instead he responded with a list of demands; if they were not met by four o’clock the next day, he would open fire on Honolulu: The attachment on Richard Charlton’s property was to be lifted at once, and conveyance made to him of all land he claimed, with payment of damages; recognition of Simpson as consul; no imprisonment in irons of any British subject, unless the crime he was accused of would be a felony in England; and retrial of land disputes before new juries, one-half of whom were to be English subjects approved by the consul.

Residents took Paulet’s threat of violence seriously. When an empty brig was towed out to shelter British residents, “the streets were crowded with carts containing money chests, Book Safes, Trunks, Personal Clothing, &c. all hastening toward the wharfs to be placed on board of the ships.”
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At the same time an eighteen-gun American sloop-of-war, the USS
Boston
, offered asylum to American residents, the commander having no instructions about what to do in such an event. The king pointed out that he had ministers in London to negotiate all such matters at that very time, a fact that carried equally little weight.

“Some of the demands which you have laid before us,” the king wrote coldly, “are of a nature calculated seriously to embarrass our feeble government, by contravening the laws established for the benefit of all.… We shall comply with your demands, but we must do so under protest.” Flushed with victory (notwithstanding the king’s sending a personal note of protest to Queen Victoria), Acting Consul Simpson then added new demands: one hundred thousand dollars in indemnity, reversal of court verdicts by royal decree without retrial, the king’s personal endorsement of Charlton’s lease, and more.

While much commentary has assessed the French bullying and thuggery, Laura Judd was equally shocked by Lord Paulet’s conduct:

Daily interviews with the king were demanded, and granted, only to pour upon him insult upon insult. Decisions in the courts were required to be reversed; claims to large tracts of valuable land to be confirmed; and a great amount of hypothetical damages demanded. The king was neither judge nor constable, and was utterly ignorant of the facts in many of the cases brought before him.… The demands which the defenseless king was obliged to acknowledge, ran up in a few days to about eighty thousand dollars, quite enough to cripple the nation. The ship-of-war was brought around, so that the mouths of her guns yawned continually upon the town.
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Nearly two weeks after the
Carysfort
’s arrival, it became obvious that what Simpson wanted, with Paulet’s guns behind him, was for the king to cede the islands to Great Britain. The cabinet split over what to do. Some urged defiance: “Let them fire.” Others wondered who would pay for the American property that was sure to be destroyed. They considered ceding the country to France, but that was an even uglier prospect; perhaps they could place the country in trust with France and the United States jointly, but either case would only provoke a forcible seizure by Britain. Or rather, a seizure by Simpson and Paulet, which surely the British government would not allow—and that was where it rested. They would have to depend on London to redress this hideous conduct. After much anguish Kamehameha III pronounced, “I will not die by piecemeal.… I will yield the breath of my kingdom, and trust … to the magnanimity of the British government to redress the wrong and restore my rights.”
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Even this step the king felt he had to clear with Paulet, and on the evening of February 24 Paulet agreed that if the islands were ceded provisionally, he would not consider an appeal to London to be a hostile act.
14

A ceremony was agreed for the next day, at the fort. In making the news public it was ironic, almost comical, that Kauikeaouli used the high oratory of the ancient chiefs to express his own powerlessness. “Hear ye! I make known to you that I am in perplexity by reason of difficulties into which I have been brought without cause. Therefore, I have given away the life of the land … but my rule over you, my people, will continue, for I have hope that the life of the land will be restored when my conduct is justified.” Simpson and Paulet were furious with him. The Hawaiian flag was lowered, and the
Carysfort
’s band played “God Save the Queen” as the Union Jack was raised. Then, at the special request of a female British resident, they also played “Isle of Beauty, Fare Thee Well,” which Laura Judd took as “a refined cruelty, which could only emanate from a woman.”
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After the cession, Kamehameha III repaired to Maui in grief. “Every avenue of communication with the king or foreign countries was most jealously watched and guarded by his lordship,” and Paulet prevented any criticism of his coup reaching the outside world. He made himself head of a government commission, in conjunction with the king or his deputy, which proved to be Dr. Judd, and others named by Paulet. He, however, proved to be a less accomplished plotter than he imagined. He requisitioned three Hawaiian government schooners to undertake his business. One of them, the
Hooikaika
, renamed
Albert
, he sent to the fleet at San Blas, Panama, with Simpson on board to flesh out the written report to Adm. Richard Darton Thomas, the squadron chief. The
Hooikaika
belonged to Ladd & Co., which agreed to place the vessel at the disposal of Paulet’s commission if he would allow them to carry out a previously chartered errand to return specie to them from San Blas, and allow their agent on board to accompany it.

Paulet readily agreed, never suspecting that Ladd & Co.’s agent, James F. B. Marshall, would really be in the service of the king. With Dr. Judd involved in the scheme, “dispatches, prepared in the silence of midnight in the royal tomb, with Ka‘ahumanu’s coffin for a table, were sent off in canoes from distant points of the island; and once, when the king’s signature was required, he came down in a schooner and landed
incognito
at Waikiki.” By such means information of the takeover was sent to Washington, London, and the British squadron chief, but throughout the spring and half the summer Judd and the cabinet had no word what effect their effort might have had.

Paulet’s commission, meanwhile, assumed a ham-handed sort of government. More than 150 trials were reversed, with natives put off their land as it was awarded to English residents. Paulet recruited a new native constabulary, named it the Queen’s Regiment, and ordered Judd to pay them out of local finances, which Judd declined to do, provoking a new crisis; Judd resigned, and the king declined to name a replacement, placing the entire responsibility in English hands. To all the Calvinists, the nadir of Paulet’s visitation was his constructive decriminalizing of prostitution, which, according to the American seamen’s chaplain, “resulted in a veritable flood of immorality” at the fort
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(perhaps one reason that Paulet’s sailors, according to an observer a few years before, were devoted to him). The humiliated king had no choice but to allow it.

Finally, on July 25, residents in Honolulu saw the native alert from Diamond Head of a sail sighted, and soon, “an immense man-of-war hove in sight, floating the flag of an English rear admiral.”
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She was HMS
Dublin
, a ship of the line mounting fifty guns, the flag was that of Adm. Richard Thomas, commander in chief of the British Pacific Fleet. Thomas was sixty-five, having served in the Royal Navy since 1790. After making suitable inquiries, and with Lord Aberdeen’s more enlightened statement of policy in hand, Admiral Thomas wrote the king that

the Commander-in-Chief of Her Britannic Majesty’s ships and vessels in the Pacific … as the highest local representative … hereby declares and makes manifest that he does not accept of the Provisional Cession of the Hawaiian Islands, but that he considers His Majesty Kamehameha III the legitimate King of those islands: and he assures His Majesty that the sentiments of his Sovereign towards him are those of unvarying friendship and esteem, that Her Majesty sincerely desires King Kamehameha to be treated as an independent sovereign, leaving the administration of justice in his own hands.
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At 9:30 in the morning of July 31, 1843, Thomas and his entourage met the king and his entourage at the fort, where the British flag was lowered and the Hawaiian flag once again raised to thundering cannons and pealing bells. Paulet, most pointedly not invited to the ceremony, had destroyed all the Hawaiian flags he could confiscate, so Thomas had a new one sewn together on board the
Dublin
.
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The speeches were not recorded, but one of the king’s sentiments was subsequently rendered,
Ua mau ka ea o ka aina i ka pono
, or, “The life of the land is preserved in righteousness,” which many years later became the motto of the state of Hawaii. Given the vagaries of translating from Hawaiian, other shades of meaning may be equally valid, especially that of Hawaii’s first chief justice, William Little Lee, who rendered a slightly different version: “The life of the land is preserved
by
righteousness.” About ten thousand people witnessed the ceremony. “The soldiers had made sure to take care of their actions … twice they encircled the King, with beloved acknowledgment to him. They saluted him often with gunfire, marching here and there.”
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Afternoon saw a service of thanksgiving at the missionaries’ Kawaiaha‘o Church, which had undergone a stunning transformation. It stood on the site of a former spring that belonged to a high chiefess named Ha‘o—
Ka wai a Ha‘o
, the “water of Ha‘o.” Built to the design of Hiram Bingham, beginning in 1836 and finishing in 1842 in place of the grass church rose a monumental edifice of fourteen thousand half-ton blocks of coral cut from the Honolulu reef. Reminiscent of medieval peasants laboring for years on the great cathedrals of Europe,
kanakas
had dived from ten to twenty feet deep with hand tools to chisel the blocks, and raise and transport them to the mission compound. It was a suitably magnificent structure in which to celebrate the redemption of the kingdom.

Ceremonies done, the court retired to the king’s new summer house, Kaniakapupu, a substantial residence of lava-rock walls built high in the Nu‘uanu Valley above Honolulu. There the event was celebrated with a gargantuan luau attended by at least two thousand people. In the forest the tables bearing the food were chronicled as thirty-two fathoms long and two fathoms wide, and they creaked beneath sixty pigs, three hundred chickens, forty turkeys, fifty-three ducks, and about seven hundred fish, in addition to poi, sweet potatoes, coconuts, and fruit—all supplied by the chiefs, both the king’s vassals and those of Kekuanaoa. Gerrit Judd, now one of the landed class, contributed two pigs, eight fish, and seven measures of poi.
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Part of the fun at the luau was a performance of a “Restoration Anthem,” contributed by Rev. Edwin Oscar Hall of the Seventh Company of missionaries, sung to “God Save the King.” It had three verses, one praising the king, one praising Admiral Thomas (“Quick o’er the wave”), and the third one praising God.
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Before Thomas and the
Dublin
sailed away, he hosted the king at a review of the ships in the harbor, with thundering cannon salutes all around. In perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the importance of the occasion, the king was seen to be happy—and sober.