History came to Hawaii by way of the sea, and traces of the past are still visible in the water as well as on the land. At Lahaina, close to the harbor, skin divers prospecting on the sandy sea bed occasionally turn up anchor chains and oil lamps and square-face gin bottles from whaling ships, coffee cups from Navy submarines and Matson cruise liners, and splintered calabashes and stone adze heads tossed overboard from Hawaiian canoes. The sand shifts with the currents; one day the past is exposed, the next it is all but obscured, and it takes a sharp eye to bring it to light again. Farther out to sea the past repeats itself endlessly. The tides run, the sun sets, the night passes, and in the morning, just at dawn, the islands come into view again as they did for Cook so long ago, a fresher green breast of the new world than ever the old Atlantic sailors saw, and still a place of gentle, beckoning beauty.
I'm going to Hawaii next week. It'll by my fiftieth state state. And with good reason: it's possibly the single most remote major population center on earth, much farther away from mainland U.S. than even Alaska. I have many expectations, but one is that it will be strange how not strange it will feel to be dropped off in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, nearly as close to Japan as California, and to be in the same old McDonald's-and-Chipotle America. How did we come to possess such a place? And how did it become a state like all the others, when it seems so different?
A little less than 200 years passed from the time that Captain Cook first spotted the "Sandwich Islands" to the moment that Hawaii became the fiftieth star on the U.S. flag. Some might object that Gavan Daws takes these two moments as the endpoints for Shoal of Time, his history of the Hawaiian Islands. After all, Hawaii's history as a Polynesian settlement extends back much, much farther than the 18th century. (It seems perhaps more excusable to end with the 1959 statehood when writing in 1968, as Daws did.) But it's hard to argue, when Daws reveals how much of a watershed moment the arrival of Cook was not just for the Europeans, who found a new cache of resources to plunder in the Pacific, but for the Islands themselves. Without Cook, Daws makes clear, there would be no Kamehameha, the Hawaiian juggernaut who united the islands for the first time under a single ruler. Though there's no selling Kamehameha short--you only need to compare him, it seems, to the lineage of feckless drunks that came after him--it was European guns and iron that allowed him to make the conquest, along with the assistance of a pair of whites, one kidnapped and one shipwrecked. The arrival of Europeans, it seems, had a funny way of making a people out of fractious and divided tribes; Kamehameha's conquest is almost a literalization of this principle.
Kamehameha's story would make one hell of an HBO streaming series. I know what a lame thing that is to say, and I'm the first to say we're all a little too TV-pilled these days. But it really does have all the Game of Thrones elements: a powerful leader, unconventional allies, scheming vassals, and the pressures of choosing between a bunch of morons to carry on your legacy--plus the beautiful natural setting. Hawaiian history, and thus Daws' book, is never quite as interesting after the Kamehameha period, with its wars and diplomacies and poisonings. But Shoal of Time offers a reminder, too, that this Golden Age of Hawaii was a relatively brief period; after Kamehameha's death in 1819, no subsequent king or queen has the same kind of control over the Islands, and all seem caught perilously between protecting Native Hawaiian interests and the European planters who become quickly and uneasily absorbed into the kingdom's politics.
But in my imagined HBO series, I hope there is a season set aside for the aftermath of Kamehameha's death, which is one of the most interesting stories in all of Hawaiian history. At the time of Cook's arrival, Hawaiian religion was circumscribed by the concept of "kapu," that is, taboo, the interdiction of certain places and things as off limits to some or all members of society. It was kapu, for example, for women to eat with women, but a chief could also declare and lift kapu as he saw fit. Kamehameha consolidated his power, for example, by declaring the harbors where European ships had landed as kapu until his particular demands for trade had been met. Yet, when Kamehameha dies, his young son and successor Liholiho (or Kamehameha II) is convinced by the dead king's widow to overthrow the kapu system entirely. (Although powerful, she seems to have felt keenly the way that the kapu system was used to keep women in their place.) The result is total cultural destabilization, which paves the way for the Christian missionaries who arrive just months later, just in time to offer an alternative to the Hawaiian religion that lies in shambles.
One idea I see on Twitter a lot is that Hawaii isn't "really" part of the United States; or it shouldn't be. That's certainly true; the state of Hawaii is the direct successor of a military coup by American whites against the kingdom's last monarch, Liliuokalani. (As far as that goes, none of it should be the United States.) But one thing I didn't really understand until reading Daws' book is that the kingdom was already filled with, and staffed by, whites. Kamehameha relied on Isaac Davis and John Young; Kamehameha III relied on a rotating staff of whites from missionary families to perform the business of the kingdom. Though it was clearly far from racial harmony, there's something to marvel at in this era of the kingdom, in which whites served in the king's cabinet as Hawaiian nationalists. Later on, things devolved, as one supposes they must, with the white elements in the kingdom trying hard to minimize the power of the Hawaiian king. The pretext for Liliuokalani's overthrow, in fact, was her attempt to abrogate a constitution her brother and predecessor had been forced to sign at the point of a gun. This solved one of the two questions that seems to have dominated the white elements of the kingdom in the 19th century. The other question was, which imperial nation should we be allied to, and under what context? This question was settled with the 1898 annexation, fought for by the same actors who overthrew Liliuokalani and created a republic, but one look at the Hawaiian flag with its hopeful Union Jack shows that an American Hawaii was not a historical inevitability.
Daws describes the process of obtaining statehood as one that was both fraught and sort of inevitable. (One thing that made it inevitable, which I never really considered, was the admission of Alaska, which obliterated most of the already weak complaints by stateside politicians.) The Hawaii that becomes a state in 1959 is a far cry from the Hawaii of 1778, or even the Republic of 1898. Both Hawaiians and whites are far outnumbered by Asians (whom, in a regrettable relic of the 60's, Daws calls "Orientals"). Hawaii's position in the Pacific has made it a place where many cultures converge, and not always easily or well, as Daws shows in one particularly lurid story of racism and murder in the 1930s. But Daws finds a lot of hope in the symbolic nature of its statehood; perhaps its diversity--it's the first state to send a Japanese and Chinese legislator to Congress--tokens a changing America. I don't know how well we've lived up to that hope, but it's a nice thought, and it makes me wonder what Daws would have made of the political ascension of Barack Obama, whose Hawaii background is often forgotten in consideration of his breaking down of racial barriers.
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