Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (35 page)

The king entered an acutely ill period; he probably knew his time was short, for at one of his last parties he commanded the band to play “God Save the King” seven times. He retreated to his cottage in Waikiki, but more trouble followed him there. Hawai‘i had no real standing military force; most of the men in uniform were the band started by his predecessor. There was a small company of household troops sufficient to deal with any local disturbances, and in the quest for spit and polish, they were given over to a Hungarian martinet, Capt. Joseph Jajczay. His infliction of nineteenth-century military discipline was out of proportion to his command. On September 6, 1873, he discovered four treasury guards absent from their post, found them enjoying a Saturday night in town, and locked them up, shackled to balls and chains. The next morning, with the captain gone to church, those prisoners with four others in the cell knocked down the door with the balls they were chained to, and freed themselves but did not run away.

When Jajczay returned from church, other troops ignored orders to seize them; the captain hit one with the flat of his sword, and that soldier knocked him down. Governor Dominis and the Adjt. Gen. Charles Judd (another son of Gerrit) were called to the scene; when Judd tried to force the situation, he was knocked down. Then there was a full-on mutiny. Fourteen loyal troops sided with the government, forty barricaded themselves in the barracks with a six-pounder cannon seized from the palace yard.
Haole
families living in the area left their houses; the streets filled with celebrating
kanakas
who cheered the rebels and brought them food and water. And then, interjecting himself unbidden into the disturbance was David Kalakaua, presenting himself as mediator. Anything that embarrassed Lunalilo made him look good to the public, and he may well have made things worse. After a week three of the mutineers were given safe conduct to Waikiki, where the king promised them amnesty if they would return to duty, and that ended the affray.
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The rebels were discharged and barred from further service, whites were put in charge of the armory, and many people, the
haoles
especially, tried to put it out of their minds. At some level beneath conscious acknowledgment it registered on them that it was significant how quickly the
kanakas
had stormed to support a mutiny, and thus how much resentment lay just beneath the surface.

Although Lunalilo was pressed to name a commissioner to negotiate yet a new attempt at a reciprocity treaty, this time on the basis of a Pearl Harbor lease, he finally followed both his own instincts and the popular remonstrance, and withdrew his support. He had tried to govern, through the ravages of whiskey and disease, and in truth kept the one promise he made during the campaign: He restored the universal male suffrage of the 1852 constitution. The king was barely conscious when the election was held on February 2, 1873, and his death from pneumonia the next day saddled the privy council with deciding which legislature must choose a new monarch: the old one, which had not been prorogued, or the new one scheduled to convene in April. They chose the latter.

One matter of which Lunalilo made certain before he expired was to express his command not to be buried with the Kamehameha kings at Mauna ‘Ala. His bitterness at their refusing him their sister still burned. He was instead laid to rest in a small, stately Victorian mausoleum in the Kawaiaha‘o churchyard, inscribed simply LUNALILO KA MO‘I, “Lunalilo the King.”

Through the king’s persistent illness, Emma often nursed him, but they seldom had any time alone. Thwarted in marriage by his cousins, Lunalilo had taken for a mistress the green-eyed Eliza Meek,
hapa haole
daughter of Honolulu’s harbormaster. Hopelessly overmatched in the company of the royal family, she became shrill and shrewish, careful never to leave Emma and Lunalilo alone together, refusing to leave the room even when asked to be excused. She insulted the king to such a degree that even in his exhaustion he once found the strength to throw a chair at her. Emma took it in stride,
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knowing that there was a faction at court who believed she was angling for his endorsement to succeed him. While the dowager queen basked in the love of the people, she was under no illusions about her lack of popularity among the wealthy Americans. But upon both major counts of her intransigent Anglophilia she was unshakable: her Episcopal religion, and her preference for British over American influence in Hawai‘i. It looked increasingly as though the new contest, sharpened as never before, would be a face-off between Emma and Kalakaua.

*   *   *

The grief over Lunalilo’s death overshadowed any appreciation of a living reminder of their history glimpsed at the same time by the observant American writer Charles Nordhoff. Of that first generation of missionaries there was now a single survivor in the islands:

Of the first band who came out from the United States, the only one living in 1873 is Mrs. Lucy G. Thurston, a bright, active, and lively old lady of seventy-five years, with a shrewd wit of her own. She drives herself to church on Sundays in a one-horse chaise, and has her own opinions of passing events. How she has lived in the tropics for fifty years without losing even an atom of the New England look puzzles you; but it shows you also the strength which these people brought with them, the tenacity with which they clung to their habits of dress and living and thought, the remorseless determination.
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In truth Mrs. Thurston had no difficulty maintaining the aura of old New England, for she had just finished her memoirs, using copies of her letters that her husband long before had encouraged her to make. “In the silence and solitude of night, with my study lamp,” she wrote, “I was young again, and I saw my father’s family surrounding me, so loving and so lovely. Many, many noble friends had assembled with them.… So real, so near they all seemed, that when about to open these lips to speak to them in an easy manner, a thrill went through me.” Others may have seen an eccentric elderly lady clattering to church in her buggy on Sundays, but in her own mind she had been twenty-five again, and writing one of the most fascinating and readable memoirs of early American Hawai‘i.
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Mrs. Thurston had six more years to live, but in the preface of her book she composed her own epitaph: “
She Hath Done What She Could.
” The sentiment could equally have memorialized the fellow travelers of her youth. It was true that they imposed a frowning and alien morality on the native culture, but they had also taught and doctored, pastored and befriended. In their own minds their most important contribution was to give the Hawaiians a faith to replace
kapu
and sacrifice, but they also gave them a written language and a literacy rate that was now the highest in the world. They gave them a head start on principles of constitutional government to which they must have come later than sooner anyway. And now some of their sons—Dole, Judd, Whitney—maintained a lookout for the integrity of the kingdom. But there was another element that would wreck it all. That was the sons and grandsons who increasingly dominated the islands’ economy. They were possessed of an inflexible certainty that their moral right was only augmented by their financial might. They mistook, however, their own greed for the sense of purpose that fired the first missionaries.

Now there was David Kalakaua, who would make sweet deals with them if they would make him king. And he would find that in making his easily-given promises to the “Missionary Boys,” he was making a deal with the devil.

14.
Taffy Triumphant

On September 17, 1875, a distinguished visitor disembarked from the steamer
City of Melbourne
, two weeks out of Auckland, New Zealand. Anthony Trollope was sixty, and had assumed the mantle of the late Charles Dickens as England’s most famous novelist. He spent less than two days in Honolulu before continuing his voyage, and was gone by the time the newspapers published his presence, but the brevity of his acquaintance did not prevent him from writing his impressions for the
Daily and Weekly Mercury
of Liverpool. Amenities at the Hawaiian Hotel, he noted, cost dearly, but the establishment produced its own gaslight, and local laundries could process any amount of work by a “steam apparatus” in as little as six hours. The parties glittered, Americans dominated the government, the mainstay of the economy was sugar, and the country was led by King Kalakaua, whose dynasty “rejoiced in the name of Ka-meha-meha.”
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Trollope was about to become even more famous with publication of the novel most often cited as his masterpiece,
The Way We Live Now
, whose central theme was the self-deception of greedy graspers who believe that dishonesty becomes acceptable if only it succeeds on a grand-enough scale. If Trollope had stayed longer in Hawai‘i, he would have seen how closely life can imitate art, for the expensive, prosperous, American-accented Honolulu that he glimpsed was the fruit of a year of scheming, tumult, dissension, riot, and recrimination.

The death of a king once again without issue or declaration of a successor threw the matter into the legislature, and the two predicted figures came forward as claimants. The first was Dowager Queen Emma Kaleleonalani, who asserted that Lunalilo on his deathbed had declared his desire that she succeed him, but he expired before a decree could be prepared. To make this claim twice within a year would sound suspicious, but most observers both foreign and domestic were equally certain that he would have chosen her. And there, again, was David Kalakaua with his weighty but not royal family behind him, and his American-style political savvy that Emma felt was beneath her.

Emma’s blood claim over Kalakaua’s was commanding.
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With the Conqueror’s legitimate direct candidates now removed from contention, Emma’s lineage was superior to that of any rivals, being the great-granddaughter on her father’s side of Kamehameha I’s only full brother, Keli‘imaika‘i. Kalakaua, as he had with Lunalilo, hired genealogists to dispute her claim; they maintained that her grandmother was
po‘olua
, making Emma not certainly the Conqueror’s great-grandniece. (That alternative great-grandfather, however, would have descended Emma from Kalaniopu‘u, which would still best Kalakaua’s claim.) In either event, Emma Kaleleonalani was a chiefess of high descent. On her mother’s side, however, she was the granddaughter of Kamehameha’s British captive servant John Young, leaving her vulnerable—as she had discovered at her engagement party—to a racist whisper that being one-quarter white disqualified her. More to policy, the legislature also had to consider that Queen Emma remained immensely popular with the native people, who had come to depend upon the hospital she had built and endowed for them, and to whom she remained philanthropically devoted. Weighing against her in the largely Congregationalist legislature was her Anglicanism and her openly British sympathies in the international arena. They would not forget that Emma’s late child had been named Albert Edward after the Prince of Wales, and that Queen Victoria herself had been his godmother.

Only a day after the dowager queen made her candidacy known, High Chief Kalakaua published his intention also to run for king. Though not of the royal line, he was descended from Kamehameha I’s general and confidant Kame‘eiamoku (he who had captured the
Fair American
and killed her crew, save Isaac Davis), and his mother was a high chiefess of the Kona District—so his election would mean a complete change of dynasty.
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A sometime poet, he cleverly framed his announcement, beginning in the style of the traditional Hawaiian chant, which might draw some of the native support away from Emma, and ending with a little American-style electioneering that would play well with the
haoles
: “Now, therefore, I, David Kalakaua, cheerfully call upon you,” it concluded, “and respectfully ask you to grant me your support.”

And the race was on. Kalakaua was a complicated man. His name meant “Day of the Battle,” and in that uncanny Hawaiian way, foreshadowed his life of conflict. He was born in November 1836, making him only a few months, probably, younger than Emma. She had been given in
hanai
to a wealthy English doctor, and grew up in luxury and stability. He had been promised in
hanai
to Kuini Liliha, but Kina‘u intervened, perhaps disapproving of her and Boki’s recalcitrant tendencies, and routed him instead to the High Chiefess Ha‘aheo, who died when he was seven. He lived with his
hanai
father on Maui, then with his biological parents on O‘ahu, when not boarding at the Royal School. He could be forgiven ambition born of not knowing exactly who he was. Emma was beautiful, he tended to be fat; his nickname was “Taffy.” At the Royal School, because of their similar ages they were placed in a group that took their lessons together, and he was always trying to catch up to her. Owing to her home life, she spoke excellent English; he struggled with the lessons. She grew up in a home with a sense of propriety, he lived closer to the life where the chief took what he wanted—until he saw his grandfather hanged for it.

And here they were at thirty-eight, with little changed in their respective relationship. Like Emma, Kalakaua despite his pandering to the Americans also desired to restore native rights and rehabilitate the culture, and bring the
haoles
to heel. In his younger years he had headed a group called the Young Hawaiians, whose motto had been “Hawaii for the Hawaiians.” He was well known in the legislature, having served there for thirteen years after holding earlier positions in the administration of Kamehameha IV. The acting British commissioner quoted A. F. Judd, now attorney general, as saying that he would “almost prefer the chances of a revolution, to the nomination of Colonel Kalakaua.”
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Bishop saw things perhaps most clearly: that Kalakaua if he were elected would try to do a good job, despite his faults, but “there are strong fears, that Q. E. would be partial to a clique,” by which he meant the English.
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