Читать книгу Braided Waters - Wade Graham - Страница 13

2

Traffick and Taboo

Trade, Biological Exchange, and Law in the Making of a New Pacific World, 1778–1848

The postcontact period of 1778–1848 was one of radical change in Hawai‘i, at some times and in some places gradual, at other times and in other places turbulent. Molokai was not central to the largest historical events of the period, which occurred instead on the larger islands—especially O‘ahu, scene of the fiercest Hawaiian battles in the first half of the period, site of the majority of foreign shipping and commercial activity at the port town of Honolulu, and seat, after 1804, of the Hawaiian government. In contrast, Molokai would have seemed a tableau of stability. But even there, occasional violent battles shredded the social and physical fabric of native communities, and deeper, systemic changes were afoot that, at the end of the period, would lead to fundamental, even catastrophic, change: foreign people, weapons, organisms, trade goods, religion, and civic and legal institutions all came to Hawai‘i and engaged Hawaiian people, communities, institutions, and the natural systems they depended upon. This chapter will try to sketch both the larger panorama of change in Hawai‘i and the Pacific Basin in the contexts of world and regional history and the foreground details of historical change in Molokai between the end of Polynesian isolation in Hawai‘i and the Mahele, the revolution of land tenure that marked the coming of Western legal, economic, and political norms to the Sandwich Islands kingdom.

MOLOKAI AND THE FINAL ROUND OF HAWAIIAN WARFARE

In the centuries prior to contact with Europeans, the control of Molokai passed back and forth between a series of warring O‘ahu, Maui, and Hawai‘i chiefs. As the largest and most productive of the islands “in the middle,“ Molokai was a natural resort for provisioning, especially along its protected south shore with its many fishponds, groves, and kalo lands, and for enlisting Molokai ali‘i and their troops for campaigns elsewhere. It was also a target for retribution by successive conquerors for the inevitable alliances made by Molokai chiefs with the previous ruling mo‘i, or king. Not infrequently, occupiers ravaged the place, and Molokai remained a battleground and a pawn.

At the time of Captain Cook’s advent, in 1778, Molokai had been for some time under the O‘ahu king Peleioholani, and after his death in 1780, under his successor Kahahana.¹ Here, Kahekili, king of Maui, came to visit Kahahana, as Kamakau relates: “The two chiefs met with many professions of affection, but Kahekili’s was feigned; he coveted O‘ahu and Molokai for their rich lands, many walled fish ponds, springs and water kalo patches. The island of O‘ahu was very fertile and Molokai scarcely less so, and Kahekili lay sleepless with covetous longing. He asked for Hālawa . . . and Kahahana gave it to him.”² Here is a historically recorded example of the paradigmatic eastern island chiefs’ lust for the wet western islands and an example of the fine, productive state of Molokai before the nineteenth century.

For some years after Cook’s visits, the Hawaiian balance of power was not greatly disturbed. In the late 1780s, what had been a handful of ships became a steadily rising tide, and warring chiefs lost little time in integrating foreign ships, weapons, and personnel into their forces. They engaged in fierce competition to obtain them, sometimes by kidnapping, seizure, or massacre. The next decade and a half saw a violent scramble to consolidate control of larger and larger territories. In 1785, Kahekili had invaded O‘ahu by way of Molokai, taking the whole of it.³ Five years later, Kamehameha, having consolidated his grip on the Big Island, invaded Maui, then ruled by Kalanikupule. He was victorious, but Kalanikupule escaped to O‘ahu; Kamehameha and his army began to pursue him but stopped on Molokai for a year to prepare an attack across the rough Kaiwi Channel that separates the two islands.

According to one account, Kamehameha spent the year living at Kauluwai in Kala‘e, practiced his troops on the plains of Kaiolohia, and grew kalo at the Paikalani patch in Honomuni Valley on the East End.⁴ All accounts indicate that his stay was very hard on the people and the land. Vancouver observed in March 1792: “The alteration which has taken place in . . . these islands since their first discovery by Captain Cook, has arisen from incessant war, instigated both at home and abroad by ambitious and enterprizing chieftains.“ He called the devastation of “Mowee and Morotoi . . . the principal feats of Tamaahmaah’s wars, and that Rannai [Lana‘i] and Tohowrowa [Kaho‘olawe], which had formerly been considered as fruitful and populous islands, were nearly over-run with weeds, and exhausted of their inhabitants.” He continued: “The troubles . . . had hitherto so humbled and broken the spirit of the people, that little exertion had been made to restore these islands to their accustomed fertility by cultivation.”⁵

Archibald Menzies, surgeon aboard the HMS Discovery with Vancouver from 1792 to 1794, agreed that Kamehameha had employed a scorched-earth policy through Maui, Lana‘i, and Molokai: “In desolating the country by destroying the fields and plantations of the inhabitants.“ Off the West End, March 18, 1792, he wrote: “We were visited by no natives or canoes of this end of Molokai. The people we had on board told us that Kamehameha’s descent upon it had desolated the country, and that it had not yet recovered its former state of population.”⁶

Later that year, news of rebellion on Hawai‘i reached the chief on Molokai, prompting him to return there without attacking O‘ahu. In his absence, Kahekili regained Molokai and Maui.⁷ In 1795, the cycle repeated with a far stronger Kamehameha who, his strength fortified with European sailors, ships, and firearms, encountered little resistance in taking Maui and Molokai again. He went on to secure O‘ahu with a campaign that culminated in his famous victory at the battle of Nu‘uanu.

The cost was particularly high. The conqueror’s army of Hawai‘i men, reported to be ten thousand to fifteen thousand strong, increased O‘ahu’s population by a quarter and ate through the island’s resources like locusts.⁸ Kamehameha installed himself and his court at Honolulu and focused on preparing a fleet to cross the channel to take Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau, the last islands not under his control. Visitors universally described a massive shipbuilding effort, with Euro-American and native carpenters toiling on hundreds of vessels and the king’s men bargaining hard with foreign ship captains to obtain weapons and naval stores in exchange for supplies. Various accounts place his armada at dozens of foreign and foreign-type vessels and eight hundred peleleu double-hulled canoes.⁹

William Broughton, who commanded one of the vessels of George Vancouver’s expedition, described O‘ahu in February 1796: “The situation of the natives was miserable, as they were nearly starving; and, as an additional grievance, universally infected with the itch. No cultivation was to be seen on shore; and, consequently, little prospect of their future subsistence. The attention of Ta-maah-maah was entirely engrossed by the vessel which the English carpenters were constructing for him.”¹⁰ Broughton and others reported that Kamehameha projected that after he conquered Kaua‘i, he would move on to an invasion of Bora Bora in the Society Islands, to compel a trans-Pacific Polynesian alliance with the Pomares clan, the rulers of Tahiti. In the meantime, O‘ahu was decimated, its people reduced to starvation or stealing food; those who were caught were killed by the ali‘i or burned alive. Death also claimed many of the occupiers, according to Broughton: “It was computed that Tamaahmaah had lost six thousand of his people by the conquest of this island, and subsequent calamities.”

Once again, while preparing to conquer the next island in his advance up the chain—this time Kaua‘i—rebellion on Hawai‘i drew Kamehameha and most of his forces back to the Big Island, leaving O‘ahu in the hands of governors. When he returned in 1804, he would conduct his occupation differently. He realized that canoes and guns alone made a shallow foundation for controlling distant territory; to make his rule permanent, he would need to make his garrison self-supporting and to make the countryside productive with stone walls and water. He ordered his seven thousand to eight thousand Hawai‘i warriors to become farmers, settling them all over O‘ahu on under- or unused lands, including in the Nu‘uanu and Manoa Valleys and in the upper Anahulu River watershed in Waialua, on the north shore.¹¹ Here, Kirch and Sahlins uncovered evidence of the systematic clearing and terracing of what had been uninhabited, lightly exploited forests and their transformation in a few years into a “newly-created, intensive-settlement landscape.”¹²

No systematic inventory exists of Kamehameha’s troop resettlements in the Hawaiian Islands, but the king did order a significant settlement in Molokai. When the king returned to Kohala, Hawai‘i, “some years after the battle of Nu‘uanu,” he asked his lieutenant Hoolepanui of Kiholo, North Kona, who had served him well in the conquests, “Where on the island of Hawai‘i would you like to dwell?” The warrior responded: “Nowhere on Hawaii.” The chief again asked, “Where would you like to go and dwell?” Hoolepanui answered, “On Molokai, where the fish is plentiful, at Kalamaula, Piliwale, Hoolehua, Holi and on to the cape.” The Hawai‘i people came, and “the natives of the land were ordered to move inland or on the lands set apart for them on the eastern side.” Along the coast of Hoolehua and Pala‘au, they built brackish water kalo lo‘i and extensive fishponds (see figure 2).¹³

FIGURE 2. East Molokai.

MOLOKAI PASSED BY

The first accounts of Molokai recorded by foreign sailors describe the island as a passing shore, intriguing but not offering enough inducement to halt between the known havens of the main islands. The scale and speed of Euro-American navigation rendered Molokai, a necessary stop for canoe voyages, little more than a curious sight on the one or two-day passage between Maui and O‘ahu. Along its north shore, sheer cliffs up to three thousand feet high plunge into pounding seas. Along the calm south shore, though it is alee of the trade wind and swell and shadowed by Lana‘i from kona storms and southerly swells, there are few real harbors interrupting the fringing reef and the continuous expanses of shoal waters as shallow as three feet that stretch up to three thousand feet seaward from shore from Kolo to Kumini. Instead of paddling her canoes, “Molokai ko‘ola‘au” (Molokai poles with a stick).¹⁴

The lack of extensive tree cover also deterred landing parties. Cook, coasting along the south shore, set the tone: rounding the West End, he saw “a small bay . . . with a fine sandy beach [perhaps Kaumana or Kaupoa]; but seeing no appearance of fresh water” continued to O‘ahu.¹⁵

Vancouver described the East End this way: “The face of the country, diversified by eminences and valleys, bore a verdant and fruitful appearance. It seems to be well inhabited, in a high state of cultivation; and presented not only a rich but a romantic aspect.” But the West End “showed a gradual decrease in population, uncultivated, barren soil. This part of the island inhabited by the lower orders of the islanders, who resort to the shore for the purpose of taking fish, with which they abound.”¹⁶

Here is Menzies’s version of the same passage: “The trade wind freshening again at night enabled us to pass the west end of Molokai, which, like Lana‘i, presents a naked, dreary barren waste without either habitation or cultivation; its only covering is a kind of thin withered grass, which, in many parts, is scarcely sufficient to hide its surface apparently composed of dry rocky and sandy soil.”¹⁷

Molokai was attractive neither to trade nor navigation nor to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Euro-American Romantic aesthetic sensibility. The missionary Charles Stewart, passing the island en route from major ports in Honolulu, Maui, and Hawai‘i, was typical in writing: “The islands of Lana‘i, Molokai, and Kahulawe . . . at the distance of fifteen or twenty miles, are as dreary as the gloomiest imagination could paint them. Almost constantly enveloped in lowering clouds, they are as emphatically the dark mountains of the natural, as they are figuratively those of the intellectual and spiritual world. We here look in vain for those beauties in nature with which we once feasted our admiration to enthusiasm; for Objects we find none, Except before us stretched the toiling main, And rocks and wilds in savage view behind.”¹⁸

Molokai, close at hand but far away, familiar yet inaccessible, remained comparatively isolated and insulated from the changes brought by foreign vessels, at least for a time.

TRADE AND BIOLOGICAL EXCHANGE IN THE PACIFIC

It has been said that when Captain Cook stepped ashore at Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island in December 1778, greeted by hundreds of Hawaiian chiefs, warriors, and priests, it was not simply another collision between the Stone Age and modern, industrializing Europe but an encounter, from a certain point of view, between two remarkably similar societies. The ships of the Royal Navy, each miniature models of the British class system, strict rank hierarchies buttressed by caste and run with autocratic discipline, found their counterparts in the Hawaiian chiefdom as baroquely stratified and authoritarian as any in the Pacific. “At Kealakekua,” Patrick Kirch wrote, “one chiefdom met another, recognizing in the other the essential structures of hierarchy and power.”¹⁹ The participants may also have recognized another point of similarity—that theirs was an encounter between two of the greatest seaborne colonizing societies in history. As Crosby and others have shown, Europe’s “portmanteau biota” was as critical to its expansion as the Polynesians’ was to their own colonization of the Pacific Islands. Cattle, white clover, wheat, weeds, and diseases underwrote the efforts of the British and others to colonize most of the world and, in temperate climes, to create “neo-Europes,” full-dress biological recreations of the home landscapes. Whereas in the Atlantic in previous centuries ecological imperialism had been a subordinate part of the project of implanting European colonists or garrisons, in the Pacific from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, imperialism’s strategy aimed primarily at implanting not populations but preferential, advantageous relations and trade flows between mobile agents of the European metropole and native groups in situ.²⁰ Biological traffic was both a means and an end to this effort, and the transfer of organisms was quickly organized and systematized to provide fuel for an intricate globalization machine.

Cook has been called the “avatar” of the “Second” British Empire: an imperialism reconfigured after the loss of the American colonies and the atrophying of the mercantile system and no longer interested in territorial jurisdiction or conquering native peoples but in spreading a newly articulated, more humane form of control, whether by direct or indirect sovereignty, manifested through trade and diplomatic relations.²¹ “We prefer trade to dominion,” asserted one British official in 1782. The British-French wars of 1790–1815 left the imperial project tired, spent, and distracted; its limited resources available outside the North Atlantic theater were deployed to search for “footholds” and way stations and a supply archipelago to support the Royal Navy, advancing trade and scientific exploration. On his Pacific cruise to attack Spanish shipping from 1740 to 1744, George Anson attempted to establish a South American base—a “halfway house” like the Dutch had at the Cape of Good Hope.²² The voyages of Byron in 1764–1766, Wallis in 1766–1768, and Cook’s three voyages from 1768 to1779 marked, in addition, a renewed search for the Northwest Passage, a British dream dating from the Tudor era, and the supposed terra australis, or southern continent. In all of these efforts, the figure of the scientist-naval officer was central, commanding small expeditions with explicit instructions to cultivate ties and trade relations with the natives and to pursue biological exchange: to seed and stock the (is)lands found along the way and to bring back potentially useful seeds to the empire.²³

Cook’s orders on the first trip had been to observe the transit of Venus in Tahiti and to catalog what he saw along the way. On the third voyage, he had, in addition, secret instructions to find “a North East, or North West Passage, from the Pacific Ocean into the Atlantic Ocean” and to “carefully to observe the nature of the Soil & the Produce thereof; the Animals & Fowls that inhabit or frequent it” and “to bring home Specimens of . . . the Seeds of such Trees, Shrubs, Plants, Fruits, and Grains, peculiar to those Places, as you may be able to collect.” No secret was his duty to leave specimens from his own country behind: when the Resolution left London in June 1776, it “was a floating barnyard” loaded with “cattle, horses, sheep, goats, hogs, and poultry for New Zealand, Tahiti, and Tonga” and a Tahitian named Omai, returning with Cook from a celebrated sojourn in England after the second voyage. At Huahine, Cook had a garden planted for Omai; he had previously planted a garden in Tahiti in 1769, as Wallis had planted citrus trees there in 1767. At Ni‘ihau in 1777, Cook contributed to the Hawaiian biota English pigs and goats and melon, pumpkin, and onion seeds.²⁴

The historian David Mackay remarked that “planting a garden in Tahiti was the botanical equivalent of taking coals to Newcastle.” Others, such as Gannanath Obeyesekere, have interpreted it as an expression of the European imperialist “improvement narrative,” wherein Cook the Civilizer introduces order into the untended wilderness “to domesticate a savage land,” rendering his imperialist mission “morally persuasive.”²⁵ It was more likely simply pragmatic. In the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, few transoceanic voyages left port without a menagerie on deck—supplies both to consume and, where practicable, with which to stock passing shores as an investment in future voyages. The French explorer La Perouse landed goats on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and planted seeds on his march into its interior—and commented accurately in his journal that the natives had “foolishly cut down” the island’s trees “ages ago,” causing desertification.²⁶ Even American traders did it, at their own expense, considering it a wise investment in the success of future voyages and good baksheesh to grease trade with native rulers. John Meares wrote of a voyage from Canton in 1788: “A certain number of cattle and other useful animals were purchased, for the purpose of being put on shore in those places where they might add to the comfort of the inhabitants or promise to supply the future navigators of our own, or any other country, with the necessary refreshments. On board of each ship were embarked six cows and three bulls, four bull and cow calves, a number of goats, turkeys and rabbits, with several pair of pigeons, and other stock in great abundance.”²⁷ To various Hawaiian chiefs, Vancouver gave out “some vine and orange plants, some almonds, and an assortment of garden seeds” as well as goats, sheep, and a pair of cattle, one pregnant, for Kamehameha in 1790.²⁸ In 1803, William Shaler and Richard Cleveland brought four horses from Mexican California to Hawai‘i as presents for Kamehameha (the king bought their ship, the Lelia Byrd, as the flagship of an armada to invade Kaua‘i). American whaler captains, generally unconcerned with moral persuasion, left livestock on even the smallest rocks, such as the Bonins south of Japan.²⁹

By the 1780s, Sir Joseph Banks, veteran of Cook’s first voyage and director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, had launched a global scheme for rebuilding the mercantile system with an “unabashedly economic” program of “plant transfer” to bring production of raw materials inside the British Empire. “Botany and great power rivalry became curiously intertwined, as nations endeavoured to guard their precious colonial treasures while seeking to filch those of their competitors,” in Mackay’s words. Banks sent a Polish spy, Anton Hove, to Gujarat, India, to steal cottonseed. He organized the movement of sago and date palms to avert famines in India, of hemp and flax for naval stores, and of spices to break the Dutch monopoly and then helped sponsor prizes for the importation of cinnamon, “cochineal, silk, indigo, fine cotton, cloves, camphor and coffee.”³⁰ And, responding to pressure from British sugar planters in the West Indies who had lost fifteen thousand slaves to hurricanes and drought from 1780 to 1787, he sent Captain Bligh, another veteran of Cook’s first trip, to Tahiti to collect seedlings of the breadfruit trees they had seen there to transplant to Saint Vincent and Jamaica as food for slaves. After the first expedition foundered on mutiny at Tahiti, Banks sent Bligh again—and succeeded, making his ship, the famous Endeavor, into “a floating garden transported in luxuriance from one extremity of the world to another.”³¹ As an example of the thoroughness of this traffic, the British had successfully imported over two hundred species of plants to New South Wales by 1803.³²

Pacific natives were also eager for Euro-American goods and organisms. As the Euro-Americans themselves did, they filtered this trade and traffic through their own economic, political, religious, and class frameworks. When Cook stepped off at Tahiti, Kealakekua Bay, and elsewhere to further the march of the British Empire, he met powerful sets of chiefs, many trying to advance their own designs of Polynesian empire. In Hawai‘i and elsewhere, he and his compatriots stepped into long-running cycles of warfare for consolidation and control of districts, islands, and groups of islands. Kamehameha and other chiefs quickly saw the usefulness of Euro-American arms, ships, and personnel and launched expensive arms races that would completely reshape patterns of life in their islands. Some learned the new rules quicker than others. Kehekili, ruler of Maui, Molokai, and O‘ahu in the 1780s, frequently employed thievery and occasionally violence to procure goods; as a consequence, European and American ships gave him a wide berth and traded instead with Kamehameha, who clearly saw the advantage of courtesy and openness in dealing with the newcomers. Along with his hospitality, Kamehameha’s trading acumen was widely praised. His assertion of kapu, or taboo, control over hogs, the cattle that had expanded from Vancouver’s pair into vast herds, and later, sandalwood, won him strategic advantage over Kehekili and all other rivals as he successfully consolidated his rule over the archipelago. Many defeated chiefs blamed the Europeans for the concentration of all power in Hawai‘i in one hand.³³ In Tahiti, the Pomares clan rose to dominance through a similarly shrewd control of the pork trade with New South Wales.³⁴

In time, Kamehameha became a kind of Polynesian Joseph Banks, collecting plants and seeds (including the seeds of apples spit out on the beach by foreigners) and employing a Welsh gardener and Mexican cowboys to train his kanakas (men) to become paniolos (Hawaiian for españoles, or Spaniards). He picked and chose as it suited him: according to Cleveland, he was initially unimpressed with the horses given to him, thinking them too much trouble to feed for the transportation benefit to be had: “He expresses his thanks, but did not seem to comprehend their value.”³⁵ Other Hawaiians, commoners in particular, took more readily to them, and horse riding became a craze. Tobacco became a plague, smoked by “almost every person,” including “children . . . and adults smoking to excess and falling senseless to the ground.”³⁶ Melons, watermelons, “and fruit in general having found the most ready reception next to tobacco” were widely grown.³⁷ Yet, on the whole, Polynesians were uninterested in adopting the European diet. A British officer visiting Kealakekua Bay in July 1796 reported that, of the things left by Vancouver, the ducks had bred, the cattle “had much increased in number,” but “the garden seeds had failed through inattention.”³⁸ In Tahiti, “it was only after three decades of visits that the Tahitians began to nurture some of the alien species or to deplore their introduction such as guavas and goats.” The “shaddock” citrus trees introduced there by Cook and called ooroo no pretany (breadfruit of Britain) had been kept alive only by the attention of one old man. “The natives do not value them,” wrote Bligh.³⁹ Where Bligh had planted Indian corn, a later crew also planted a garden and asked the natives to take care of it. The Tahitians laughed and said that they had everything they needed. Of the horses and cattle left by Cook, they had neglected the cattle and killed the horse but had disliked the meat.⁴⁰

Many Europeans thought that the prospect of commerce might entice Polynesians to become farmers of European crops, and to a certain extent, it did. Beginning in 1793 the British governor of New South Wales introduced hogs and potato seeds to Maoris in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand; by 1805, Maoris supplied a considerable produce market there.⁴¹ In Hawai‘i, lush gardens of vegetables “introduced by foreigners” were tended “chiefly for the white people.” The largest of these were farmed by white people—and one black one.⁴² A Captain Butler at Lahaina, Maui, maintained an irrigated plantation that prompted wide admiration and comparisons with England. Anthony Allen, an American freedman, had gardens at Pawa‘a, O‘ahu. A Spaniard, Don Francisco de Paula Marin, arrived in Honolulu from California in 1814 and built up a large capacity in herds, extensive gardens, and vineyards both for the shipping trade, which he for some time dominated, and his own “table d’hote.” Travelers could expect to find there beef, pork, goat, duck, goose, turkey, watermelons, onions, coconuts, bananas, cabbages, potatoes, beans, shallots, citrus fruit, pomegranates, figs, pineapples, pumpkins, tamarinds, and wine made from “Isabella” vines from Madeira. One visitor assessed that Marin was “still not adept at the art of making wine,” though others disagreed.⁴³

Along with these intentional imports came other, unintentional, ones: cockroaches, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, fleas (called uku lele, the jumping louse), and innumerable plant species gone wild across the landscape: thorn trees, puncture vines, feral cabbages, and indigo. European diseases, starting with “the clap,” a gift repeatedly given from Cook’s visits forward, spread unchecked. By the second decade of the century, foreigners’ descriptions of common Hawaiians showed that their physical state had deteriorated markedly. According to Stewart, “the majority are more or less disfigured by eruptions and sores, and many are as unsightly as lepers.”⁴⁴ Langsdorf wrote: “The islanders we had an opportunity to observe were naked, unclean, not well built, of middle stature, and with dark, dirty, brown skin covered with rashes and sores, probably the result of drinking awa or of venereal disease. Most of the men had no front teeth. According to them they had been knocked out by stones in battles. . . . They were good swimmers and tattooed on their arms and bodies with lizards, billy goats, muskets and other rhombus-shaped figures, which in no way embellished their bodies, as on Nukuhiva, but rather distorted them.”⁴⁵

HAWAI‘I AND THE FUR TRADE

On Cook’s third voyage, between his first and second visits to Hawai‘i, the British ships cruised the northwest coast from Alaska south, trading for sea otter pelts, which his crew subsequently found to bring fabulous prices in the market at Canton. Publicity for the voyage was immediate in Great Britain and the United States, and especially in the best-selling account by the American-born sailor John Ledyard, the details and routes of a new globe-encircling trade were laid out like a map for others to follow.⁴⁶ Soon, British traders sailed for the northwest coast and as predicted turned spectacular profits at Canton. As per Cook’s example, Hawai‘i became the natural stopover for refreshment of ships and crews. Fleurieu, chronicler of the French expedition led by Etienne Marchand in 1790, dubbed it “the great caravansary” on the Pacific fur route.⁴⁷ Honolulu quickly became the most cosmopolitan place many Americans and Europeans had ever beheld, as the German poet Chamisso expressed: “In the Sandwich Islands trading brings together the most varied assortment of all the peoples of the earth. Among the servants of upper-class women I saw a young Negro and a Flathead Indian from the northwest coast of America. Here I saw Chinese for the first time.”⁴⁸ Hawaiians supplied the shipping industry with water, vegetables, meat, salt, firewood, spars, rope, sailors, and women. The historian Ernest Dodge wrote that it was “doubtful” if the fur trade “could have been carried out profitably . . . without the Hawaiian Islands.”⁴⁹

Beginning with the Northwest-Canton fur trade, a rapid ramification of trade webs in the Pacific occurred, with Hawai‘i at their center. What is most remarkable about this growth was that it lay almost entirely outside the plans and dictates of mercantilist, imperial planners in Europe. The British trade illustrates the tensions and ambivalences of the new Pacific world. On one hand, Great Britain had been for decades attempting to break the maritime monopoly claimed by the Spanish for its American possessions. British whalers had been forced off the South American coast in the 1780s, and in 1789, Spanish warships seized two British vessels at Nootka Sound, leading to the Nootka Crisis of 1790 and the brink of war.⁵⁰ On the other hand, at Canton, the British East India Company strictly enforced its monopoly on the China trade, requiring all British-flagged ships to sell to it at listed prices. In addition, it imposed a punitive tax on the sale of any British vessel to foreigners to avoid the restrictions. Samuel Shaw, supercargo on the first American ship to Canton, the Empress of China, in 1784, and later US consul there, noted that these rules “strongly favor the suspicion” that the United Kingdom aimed for a monopoly on tea exports to Europe. Instead, what it built was a situation tailor-made for smuggling. British tea consumption in 1784 was fourteen million pounds, yet the company’s receipts “did not exceed six.” The remainder was shipped by rival countries or by British ships flying flags of convenience—“Renegado Englishmen,” Shaw sniffed. The upside for monopoly-breakers was too good to ignore. “Since the year 1784, the trade here has been constantly tending to the disadvantage of the Europeans. The imports, collectively taken, hardly defray the first cost, and the exports have increased in a ratio beyond all possible conjecture. . . . Such is the demand for this article, that the Chinese hardly know how much to ask for it; and, should the rage for purchasing continue only another year, it is not improbable that its price may be doubled.”⁵¹

Shaw recognized an opportunity for American traders. The United States, its economy devastated by the revolutionary war, British blockades, and a crushing specie crisis, desperately needed markets. Shaw suggested that “if it is necessary that the Americans should drink tea,” they pay for it with “the produce of her mountains and forest” as the Empress of China had, with ginseng. Ships left New York with ginseng, but many more sailed to the northwest coast for sea otter furs. Within a few years, New Englanders had taken over the trade. By 1800, one hundred US ships anchored at Canton.⁵²

The traders’ own success drove them to look beyond the fur trade “and this in consequence of the animal’s being almost annihilated.”⁵³ Economical sources of domestic ginseng, too, were soon tapped out. US traders searched out new commodities and diversified markets, but their customers adapted nearly as fast as they did. The Chinese, famously, would look at little besides top-quality furs or silver; Northwest Indians kept careful control over their own sources of furs and salmon, demanding ever-increasing prices; and Spanish officials punished smuggling stiffly, if unevenly.⁵⁴ From 1810 onward, Americans found that good quality Hawaiian sandalwood fetched good prices in Canton, and a new dimension was added to the circuit. Hawaiian chiefs, allowed progressively by Kamehameha to trade on their own accounts, became prodigious consumers of foreign goods, as conspicuous consumption became an arena of furious social competition between factions of the chiefly class. US captains might leave Boston or New York with cargoes of guns and ammunition for South American rebels and silk dresses, pianos, and bone china for Hawaiian nobles and then pick up furs, salmon, or lumber on the northwest coast; dried beef, hides, and tallow in California; copper in Peru; and sandalwood at Honolulu before sailing for home full of tea from China. As the markets matured, enterprising “gather” merchants combed the Pacific for goods: “Beche-de-mer, tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl, shark fins, edible birds nests, grain, fish, salt, coal, sandalwood and other exotic woods, and crude construction lumber for Asiatic and Australian markets. Copra, copper, cowhides and tallow, arrowroot, vanilla, spices, and guano they delivered to American and European markets.”⁵⁵ On the horizon the whaling fishery loomed, slowly building from the 1820s toward its golden age from the 1840s to the 1850s.

Kamehameha himself underwent a gradual evolution from warrior to trader, then governor, that is representative of the dynamics of the period. For decades, from Cook’s landfall until the cession of Kaua‘i in 1810, Kamehameha’s control of trade was aimed at acquiring arms, ships, and naval supplies for his conquests. At first he proceeded by direct purchase but quickly got the point of European behavior and instituted a native mercantilism of sorts—asking or demanding that ships leave behind expert European and American carpenters, armorers, and shipwrights to build a fleet of European-style vessels in Hawai‘i. His shipyards bustled with activity, and the skill of the Hawaiian workmen trained by foreigners was frequently remarked upon.⁵⁶ By 1806 Kamehameha had fifteen vessels, including three-masters, brigs, and cutters; by 1808 he counted more than thirty ships, most under forty tons, built in Hawai‘i, plus the two-hundred-ton Lelia Bird.⁵⁷ At the height of the buildup, he was said also to have had a fleet of peleleu war canoes up to eight hundred strong.⁵⁸ After the capitulation of Kaua‘i, the king turned his attention to other things. An 1812 invoice of goods he purchased includes “chairs, lamps, tables, fireworks, velvets, satins, silks, fifty paper parasols, fifty silk hats, 135 pounds of large glass beads, and the like.”⁵⁹ The same year he participated as stakeholder in sending a cargo of sandalwood to Canton; while the voyage was not a financial success, the port charges levied by Chinese authorities at Canton inspired him to impose an eighty-dollar- per-ship harbor duty at Honolulu plus a twelve-dollar piloting fee.⁶⁰

From the first European landfall in the eighteenth-century Pacific, control of trade was the name of the game. Cook strictly regulated which members of his crews were allowed to carry on trade. By the third voyage, he could write: “Knowing from experience, that if every body was allowed to traffick with the natives according to their own caprice, perpetual quarrels would ensue, to prevent this I ordered that particular person(s) should manage the traffick both on board and ashore, and prohibited the trade to all others.” On approaching Tahiti, Bligh wrote in his log: “2:00 PM. The Surgeon examined the Ships Company to discover those that were tainted with the Venereal disease. 5:00 PM. Took an Account of every Man’s Cloaths to prevent them trafficking them away.”⁶¹ If one were not vigilant, capricious trade would break out, just like venereal disease, and was equally unhealthy for the body of the mercantilist empire.