Politically, this kind of widespread trade by the lesser chiefs was overseen by the chiefs who ruled as Kamehameha’s successors: Liholiho, his son and heir; Ka‘ahumanu, his wife and kuhina nui (the chiefess who shares rule with the mō‘i); and William Pitt Kālaimoku, his chief counselor who held the king’s purse and who inventoried and distributed land to chiefs.16 In the sandalwood trade, it was Kālaimoku who was the chief whose importance rose as American merchants pursued as many tons of sandalwood from as many chiefs as possible. His management of this merchant free-for-all after Kamehameha I’s death elevated Kālaimoku in the eyes of the merchants as the chief to trust in approving contractual relations with the lower chiefs.
A portrait of Kālaimoku, the chief, was sketched by English artist Robert Dampier on his visit to the islands in 1825. In the sketch, Kālaimoku’s hair appears shorn, handsomely so, and sideburns in European style are cut close to his face, framing his cheekbones. He is wearing a loose-fitting white shirt of European manufacture, finely made, along with a jacket. The chief is older, with a receding hairline and lines etched into his forehead—no doubt a legacy of the many responsibilities he has had to take on over the years. His expression is direct, yet in the moment that has been captured, there is nothing harsh that appears in that gaze, which is measured and wise. According to many foreign accounts, Kālaimoku’s character seems to match what the artist’s hand sought to portray. Charles Hammatt first met Kālaimoku in the house of Liholiho, Kamehameha II, on May 12, 1823, two days after Hammatt’s arrival in Honolulu. That afternoon, the chiefly residence was full, some “fifty or sixty” people in attendance; Kālaimoku stood apart amid the assembled crowd, “a lively intelligent looking old man, & seemed to be full of thought.”17
Kamakau, the famed Hawaiian historian of the mid-nineteenth century, penned the only obituary for Kālaimoku written in Hawaiian, which began, “I ka make ana o Kalanimoku, ua moku ke kaula hao o keaupuni i paa ai” (At the death of Kalanimoku, the iron cable that held fast the nation was severed).18 Kālaimoku, Kamehameha’s kuhina nui (high-ranking counselor), was a favorite (punahele) of Kamehameha, and he served as tax collector (pu‘ukū nui) and carver of lands (kālaimoku). He was also an ‘alihikaua, a skilled warrior and general.
The shifting political terrain of chiefly authority was opaque to outsiders who came to the islands seeking bountiful provisions, access to women, or, in the case of missionaries, minds to educate and hearts to convert. Merchants and missionaries came to the islands with their own agendas; they learned enough about chiefly politics and relations of power to achieve their own ends. In the management of mercantile and spiritual economies, the goal was not to understand the intricacies of relation among the ali‘i; instead, it was to locate the individual chief or chiefs who held power at any given time in order to ingratiate oneself so as to get what one needed.
After Kamehameha’s death, Kālaimoku ruled jointly with Ka‘ahumanu and Liholiho, who was acknowledged as the king of the Sandwich Islands—although in truth, his elder relatives seem to have taken on the massive responsibility of dealing with foreign vessels, their personnel, and merchant agents in the islands.19 When foreign traders opened their showrooms aboard vessels or in portside stores, they dealt with a coterie of chiefs of diverse rank and whose administration of lands and resources portended different levels of purchasing power. Merchant agents were stationed at Kaua‘i and Honolulu, reflecting the still acknowledged and pronounced division of chiefdoms between those ali‘i who served Kamehameha, who ruled over the islands of Hawai‘i, Maui, Lāna‘i, Kaho‘olawe and O‘ahu, while Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau were still largely left to the rule of Kaumuali‘i. The paramount chiefs of the intertwined families of Ka‘ahumanu and Kamehameha were those who traded most frequently with merchant agents and ship captains. From their reports, it appears that Kālaimoku was instrumental in consolidating the debt of the chiefs and was efficient at mobilizing both ali‘i and maka‘āinana as laborers to collect the massive amounts of sandalwood that were sent to Canton at the end of the season in 1821. As debt collector and administrator of resources, the chief innovated upon his role due to the necessity of having to deal with the influx of foreigners into Hawaiian society, which steadily increased each year after the death of the great chief Kamehameha in May 1819.
The Politics of Mana
Kālaimoku’s abilities and capacity to manage trade and subsequent debt during this period must be examined within a larger understanding of how mana underpinned chiefly authority. Without understanding mana as the basis of chiefly authority, we cannot understand how a chief could mobilize entire populations to harvest sandalwood and engage in trade with American merchants. Hawaiian engagement in this global trade was predicated upon the politics of mana, and these politics evolved and adapted to address what the sandalwood trade brought to the islands.
Simultaneous with the tales of chiefly heroism and rule are stories, far more complex, about relationships set in bone (‘iwi): of mo‘okū‘auhau (genealogy), the carefully manipulated couplings between chiefs, a politics of debt, obligation, and exchange.20 Hawaiian chiefs possessed sophisticated ideas about debt and obligation coincident with, but quite separate from, those brought by New England traders. The most excellent example of the formulation of debt and obligation occurred, however, with respect to the circulation of chiefly bodies (both male and female), kapu, and mana (spiritual power) in an engineered system of genealogical connection, an economy of mana.
Excavating the term mo‘okū‘auhau (genealogy) and uncovering its layers is an excellent starting point for our investigation into Hawaiian conceptualizations of relation, obligation, and connection. The oldest published definition of kū‘auhau is supplied by American missionary lexicographer Lorrin Andrews in his 1865 Dictionary of the Hawaiian Language. Kū, to be set fast, is added to ‘auhau, or tax, hence kū‘auhau, by Andrews’ reckoning, is to “be recorded in genealogy, in history or tradition.”21 A later dictionary produced by Samuel Elbert and Mary Kawena Pukui, the most prominent genealogist, ethnographer, lexicographer, and translator of her generation, offered another definition of ‘auhau: “femur and humerous [sic] bones of the human skeleton.” The polysemy of the word ‘auhau furnishes another layer of understanding—genealogical connection as bred into bone. The layered meaning of words leads one to consider the ritualized practice of the ceremonial stripping away of the flesh of a chief after his or her death in order to preserve the bones, which are the repository of mana. Hence, ‘auhau can be an accounting in word; it can point to connection through sexual intercourse, and birth, and is physically manifested in ritual practice and in the careful caring for the bones of the ali‘i. Finally, a third way to parse the word mo‘okū‘auhau is to consider the word as made up of three constitutive parts: mo‘o, kū‘au, meaning stem, shaft, or stalk, and hau (Hibiscus tiliaceus).22 The hau tree is a low-lying tree whose branches form a tangle of impenetrable thickets. The plant “has a highly spreading, near surface, lateral root system, often comprised of only a few main roots.”23 This perhaps is the closest visual, somatic, and metaphoric inspiration to the genealogies of ali‘i—entangled branchings that spread copiously emergent from a few main roots.24
Plumbing these semiotic depths is important because Hawaiian chiefs of Kamehameha’s time did not think genealogically on paper, but through word, act, engagement, and interpretation. Moving from ruminations over the concept “mo‘okū‘auhau,” it is important to see how these webs of chiefly interrelationship create both stable outcomes, such as arranged “marriages” or sexual couplings, and the opening up of unstable,