Studying the writings of merchants and agents, one is struck by the detailed descriptions Charles Bullard, John Coffin Jones, and Charles Hammatt generated regarding trade in the islands. Descriptions of the reliability of any ali‘i to trade, “follow through” on transactions, or pay debts provide a view of the anxiety agents struggled with on a daily basis concerning their success and their ability to deliver profits into the hands of their employers.76 Present profits also ensured future gains—the reputation they built as successful men of business on Hawaiian shores would lay the foundation for their professional lives when they settled back home in New England. Rather than transparent descriptions of the behavior and shortcomings of ali‘i, the letters, reports, and journals kept by these men also illustrate the agents’ difficulty in ascertaining the shifting loci of Hawaiian political power, whether it be invested in the person of a particular ali‘i, or as it was held by particular groups of chiefs against others. All in all, knowledge of the relationship between chiefs and political power was not an end unto itself; it was the necessary precondition that agents set for themselves in order to carry out successful trade.
Agents’ insistence on pinpointing and projecting New England standards of proper character, deportment, and behavior belonging to “good consumers” or “good leaders” upon individual ali‘i was a vain endeavor. This individualization of the chiefs could not extricate an ali‘i from his or her embeddedness in the web of close genealogical ties, which were the foundation of their governing powers. Though attempting to ensnare individual chiefs in debt, traders consistently met with opposition from groups of chiefs. As happened also with missionaries, New England traders’ assumptions completely missed Hawaiian ideas of debt, obligation, and exchange. Hawaiians had their own ideas about what constituted proper leadership in the form of the ali‘i pono. Yet merchants persisted in assigning debt to individual chiefs in a manner that their economic system required: one simply had to know who to send the bill to.
It is no wonder that the merchants in 1824 began to become more agitated about what was due to them, and when their ability to cheat, flatter, cajole, and insist that the chiefs pay their debts was exhausted, they called upon the United States to intervene on their behalf and collect the debt that was owed not to their employers, they insisted, but rather to the citizens of the United States.77
By 1825, Dixey Wildes was calling upon his partner to petition the government to send a US ship of war to the islands to press the ali‘i to pay their debts.78 “The Islands are quite out of trade, our prospects are very fair. Lord Byron has been here in a frigate he has not been of any service to the American trade. Our government must send a frigate here. The interest of the United States require it. The Russians and English send ships of war, although their trade is small compared to ours. I think it would be well for you and others to make a strong representation to our government to send a ship here.”79
This mode of running the business came screeching to a halt when, beginning in 1825, the merchant agents in the islands began to demand the transformation of individual chiefly debt into a new “national” debt. The steps toward this development, the significance of its occurrence for the groups involved, and how it affected the progress of Hawaiian governance will be the subject of a later chapter. But for now, it is important to emphasize that the emergence of a conception of “national” debt is something that converges complexly with chiefly political and economic reorganizations that come as a consequence of Kamehameha’s unification of the different islands in the archipelago and of the final defeat, through religio-political changes and active suppression, of secessionist chiefs’ ambitions.
CHAPTER 2
Creating an Island Imaginary
Hawai‘i’s American Origins
Long before American westward expansion and the growth of the United States into a global imperial power in the late nineteenth century, America found itself entangled with the Hawaiian Islands in ways that were far less self-assured, far more tentative, and far more curious than an anachronistic focus on colonialism, imperialism, and “nation” might suggest. Hawai‘i became a place more prominent during the Early Republic, an opportune space through which American conceptions of the world and the United States’ new place in it expanded. In looking closely at the entertainments that came to the Atlantic, made from narratives and material objects brought back from the Pacific, we can see the development of an American imaginary of the Hawaiian Islands and kānaka constructed as bountiful, full of alluring women and fierce warriors, ripe and open for the “influence” of great, civilizing European and American men. Americans’ imagined Sandwich Islands were shaped by enterprising entertainment producers and curiosity collectors, who shaped the tastes of Americans eager to consume Hawaiian objects: pieces of information, material curiosities, and stories of paradise.
This chapter focuses on the self-interested efforts of the New England–based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) to raise money for a school in Connecticut and a series of missions to bring Christianity and its church to the Hawaiian Islands by producing narratives of the lives of young Hawaiian men living in New England. It examines the way in which these native men’s stories were the ground in which settler origins were sown, and though these historical narrativizations were keenly opportunistic, when read against the grain, they illuminate a portion of the experience of the Hawaiian men living in New England at the time. American familiarity with an imagined Hawai‘i is profoundly transformed with the advent of the ABCFM’s Sandwich Island Mission in 1820. From that point onward, an avalanche of administrative and official reports and histories produced by the ABCFM reschooled American expectations about the islands. In this new light, Hawai‘i became a field in which an American mission was planted to civilize and save Hawaiian souls.
A central component of the ABCFM mission was the narrative fashioning of native subjects suitable for conversion, the young male escaped from a pagan world of savagery. Before the Sandwich Islands Mission could come to fruition, the figure of the young Hawaiian male, freed from human sacrifice, became an ideal vessel for stirring public sentiment and stimulating financial support of the mission. The funds raised by the individual stories and testimonies of these men would facilitate the planting of an American mission church in Hawaiian soil, free from British and American authorities and the bitterness of church controversies and denominational competition that continued to roil the New England landscape. Reading through the surface to the more complex contradictions of these public productions of Hawaiian types—fierce and deadly warriors, the intensely desirable women whom men are always fighting for, the noble yet not yet civilized chief, and the earnest and skilled Hawaiian convert—we will find the basic bedrock of imaginary fantasies of Hawai‘i that continue to be reproduced today. More immediately, the production of these types for late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Atlantic public consumption set the stage for increasingly intimate connections—both imaginary and material—between the young republic’s people and an emerging Hawaiian nation. The disorderliness of a savage desire for women and things must, in these narratives, give way to the civilized orderliness of restraint and Christianity. And nothing was more likely to stir American desire to consume Hawaiian things than stories of sex, sacrifice, and death.
Ship captains returned home from the Pacific with souvenirs, and news of their contributions to American museums was published in the papers. In 1790, a “donation of curiosities” was deposited at the Museum at Cambridge by Boston-based ship captains James Magee (Astrea) and Joseph Ingraham (Columbia), showcasing materials from places along emergent maritime trade routes connecting New England, China, the Northwest Coast, the Sandwich Islands, and the Southern Pacific with which mariners were familiar. The skin of sea otters from Nootka and a bird of paradise from the Moluccas were “natural curiosities,” while the shoes that bound the feet of Chinese