These Hawai‘i-based agents would oversee shops and storehouses that contained fancy and mundane trade goods, as well as provisions that were left at the islands by arriving ships, as even space on a ship was a commodity one could sell. Provisions stored in the islands would be retrieved at a later date for use on a ship’s return journey home. Voyages to the North Pacific could last anywhere from three to five years, so the agents, officers, and ship captains involved in the trade were relatively familiar with the people in the ports they frequented if they managed more than one voyage, which many ship captains did.
As agents in the islands, men like Hammatt, Jones, and Babcock were charged not only with selling goods to Hawaiian people and ali‘i, but also with increasing people’s desire for goods. Once merchants had spent time taking orders and drumming up interest in new, more extravagant wares, they would write letters to the home office that included long lists of goods for the Hawaiian market. Trade in the Pacific was about managing risk, since ships could be dispatched from New England before a letter from an agent based in the islands requesting the latest fashion or indispensable new item had arrived. By the time another ship came out with the requested goods, a year might have passed, along with the desire for that item, which had been filled by goods brought ashore by a competitor.
Promised goods long looked for and not delivered could destroy the reputation of the agency conducting trade, and a reputation worthy of trust in the business of credit and debt was important to employers and chiefly clients. John C. Jones had been unable to fulfill his promises to chiefs on numerous occasions. When a Captain Masters failed to show up in May 1821 with ship and cargo that Jones had chatted up to the ali‘i Kaumuali‘i, the king of Kaua‘i, to Jones’ dismay, purchased a ship “of inferior quality” for 3,500 piculs of sandalwood from rival ship captain John Suter, who worked for Bryant and Sturgis. On another occasion, Jones, who had “secured the friendship of several powerful chiefs,” persuaded them not to purchase any ships until the Paragon arrived. A number of chiefs had wood to spend, and Jones projected his hope that an excellent trade could be made across several letters beginning in January and ending in August 1823, when his hopes were finally dashed.
Instead of the very fine elegant goods he had enjoined his employers to send in his letters, the Paragon carried “no merchandise for this place, save a quantity of sour wine, tin pots, lanthorns, frying pans, miserable Spanish brandy, mouldy cherries, cask of honey and last though not least brick bats.”29 These were not even pickings—the dull thud of the motley assortment spoke volumes about Jones’ own deflated hopes, of consumer dreams dashed. The chiefs, including Kālaimoku, were not at all interested in the poor cargo and objected to its landing, which further irritated Jones. Consider Jones’ enthusiasm and optimism for this moment of trade in a letter he had penned two and a half months before the Paragon’s arrival. “A small quantity of superfine broadcloth, a large quantity of cambric prints … also first quality calicoes, white cambrick muslin, Irish linen, ladies shoes large sizes, white stockings, silk and button, black silks hats, women’s bonnets must be different patterns large size and of good 60 or 100 would sell well, ladies dresses large and small sizes made of 1” quality of materials and showy would command a good price.”30 The list has an almost melodic quality to it, veritably singing off the page. The list is illustrative of merchants’ personal investment in setting up the best goods that would bring the highest prices at market.
In this letter Jones also reiterated the belief that like their famous chief Kamehameha, the Hawaiian people were being civilized through their consumption of Euro-American goods:
A cargo should consist of an assortment of every thing no great quantity of any one Article, were I at home myself I could select an outfit that would do well—Ox teams, Light wagons, handcarts, wheelbarrows, carriages, and one or two of those vehicles Called barouches [covered carriages], two or three chaises you might be surprised that such articles Would sell but you would be more surprised to see how fast these people are advancing towards civilization, only two days since Mr. Pitt asked me to send for three carriages And have them adorned with gold, every thing new and elegant will sell and at good Profit, coarse articles are of no use.31
Jones here imagines that Hawaiian chiefly consumers demand wheeled vehicles, and he says that “Mr. Pitt,” Kālaimoku himself, has asked him to send three carriages to the islands. He uses this purported desire for vehicles that move faster than walking as a metaphor for his claim that Hawaiians are “fast … advancing towards civilization.”
Distance from the home office, the source of all potential goods desired, made desiring subjects of not only the ali‘i but also of the merchant agents themselves. Though the ali‘i may have wanted these goods, what merchants consumed greedily (or were consumed by) was not only the actual point of sale or trade but the raised expectation of seeing whether or not their orders would be fulfilled by the timely arrival of cargo that they had personally requested. Lulls between seasons of selling, accounting, and ingratiating themselves to chiefs while wheeling and dealing were spent scheming against rivals. Lengthy lists of goods and services, bordering on the obscene, did not originate with the “devouring” or “avaricious” chiefs. Instead, they first originated with the agents who dreamed them up out of their own longing for profits and their desires to beat the competition at the profit-making game.
Moku (Forests) for Moku (Boats)
The most extravagant purchase any ali‘i could make was to buy a ship (moku) in exchange for forests (moku) of sandalwood. Ships were the highest-priced items traded between chiefs and New England merchants and therefore accounted for a disproportionate amount of the debt ascribed to chiefs by individual merchant concerns.32 Rather than fetishizing the detrimental effects of trade upon “Hawaiian tradition,” in this section I ask what effect trade and debt had upon Hawaiian chiefly relations. Far from being the ravenous and idle consumers that fill merchant narratives, Hawaiian chiefs were active participants in commerce, often setting the terms of trade and payment according to scales of value foreign to New England agents and ship captains.33 The chiefs Kālaimoku, Ke‘eaumoku, and Ka‘a-humanu worked strenuously to organize other ali‘i to pay off debts owed to merchants. Kālaimoku, along with several other chiefs, also sought to curb the buying practices of individuals among them, whose excessive purchases threatened to turn all Hawaiians, including chiefs, into laborers working off the debt.
Providing a better view of the way the business of trade was managed by the ali‘i also casts doubt upon the immensity of the debt American merchants claimed was owed by Hawaiians. While the chiefs and people were enthusiastic consumers, the prices traders set for large items like ships and houses, as well as dry goods like cloth and luxury items like rum and wine, often included a significant markup. Meeting in council, the ali‘i deliberated and deployed kapu restricting the ability of certain ali‘i to purchase ships from certain captains who sold rotten ships.
Merchant concerns Marshall and Wildes and Bryant and Sturgis managed several trading voyages in the China–Northwest Coast–Sandwich Islands trade during any given season. Merchant agents stationed in the islands working for both concerns were routinely given instructions to sell any ship touching at the islands if the ali‘i appeared interested in making a purchase. The cost of ships fluctuated depending on the number of ships ali‘i owned, the state of their wear, and competition between rival merchants and chiefs in any given area.
In the two years preceding Hammatt’s voyage, 1819–1821, the chiefs purchased between four and six ships, one frame house, and several cargoes full of trade goods, accruing new “debt” of 29,760 piculs of sandalwood to Marshall and Wildes and Bryant and Sturgis combined.34 Ali‘i owning ships was also perhaps a matter of scale, as high-ranking ali‘i also had peleleu, single- and double-hull canoes, in their employ in order to pursue war and send messages and goods between the islands. The ability to mobilize a labor force to build canoes and propel