A Shark Going Inland
One of the great scholars of historical Hawaii was a Swede, Abraham Fornander, who arrived in the islands in 1838, learned the language, married a Hawaiian woman, and developed a passion for the society. He died in 1887, and his manuscripts were eventually published by the Bishop Museum in the 1920s. Fornander wrote down a chant:
A shark going inland is my chief,
A very strong shark able to devour all land;
A shark of very red gills is the chief,
He has a throat to swallow the island without choking.
The chant compares the chiefs of Hawaii (before Kamehameha’s time) to “sharks going inland.” It was an apt, and predatory, analogy.
Just like other instances of despotic growth, the creation of a Hawaiian state under Kamehameha soon followed in the ways of the previous chiefs—the shark went inland. This process was summarized by Samuel Kamakau, another one of the first generations of Hawaiians to emerge as historians of their society. Like David Malo, whose evidence we discussed in the previous chapter, Kamakau witnessed firsthand many of the events he recorded, or interviewed people who had. His description mentions the beneficial aspects of Kamehameha’s state building but is also blunt on the huge downside:
The country as a whole benefitted by the uniting of the government under one head, but most of the chiefs and landlords under Kamehameha oppressed the commoners and took away their lands, thus forcing the people who had owned the land to become slaves … Taxes were laid upon all holdings whether large or small and were constantly being added to, for there were many landlords and under landlords who demanded tribute … The uniting of the land had brought about excessive taxation … “Even the smallest patches are taxed” … was a familiar saying.
The progress of the shark—or sharks, since the chiefs below Kamehameha and his successors quickly got into the action—is vividly described in a surviving set of documents written in 1846, in the context of King Kamehameha III’s attempt to rationalize and redistribute land rights. A board of three people, one Hawaiian and two foreigners, established a set of “principles” by which property rights were to be formalized. These principles noted that “the King, representing the government, having formerly been the sole owner of the soil … must be considered to be so still.” Of course, as we already saw, it wasn’t the case that kings “owned” the land in the Western sense of the word. Nevertheless, the document went on to note:
When the islands were conquered by Kamehameha I, he followed the example of his predecessors, and divided out the lands among his principal warrior chiefs, retaining, however, a portion in his hands, to be cultivated or managed by his own immediate servants or attendants. Each principal chief divided his lands, anew, and gave them out to an inferior order of chiefs, or persons of rank, by whom they were subdivided again and again; after passing through the hands of four, five or six persons, from the King down to the lowest class of tenants. All these persons were considered to have rights in the lands, or the productions of them.
All persons … owed and paid to the King not only a land tax, which he assessed at pleasure, but also, service which he called for at discretion, on all the grades from the highest down. They also owed and paid some portion of the productions of the land, in addition to the yearly taxes. They owed obedience at all times.
This wording is significant. Not just the makaainanas, the ordinary people, owed tribute and labor now, everyone did—“all the grades from the highest down.” Also notable is the reference to “service which he called for at discretion.” Forced labor was extensively used on the king’s lands. F. I. Shemelin of the Russian-American Company, which had frequent interaction with the islands, recorded that “not only does he pay them nothing for their labor, he even declines to feed them.” Kamakau recorded that the sandalwood cutters were reduced to eating “herbs and fern trunks.”
Forced labor became especially important as the demand for sandalwood expanded in the 1820s after Kamehameha’s death. The wood was usually far from people’s farms, growing on the slopes of more mountainous areas, and the king and chiefs began to organize massive missions of hundreds and even thousands of coerced men who would have to find, cut, and transport the wood to the coasts, a process which could take weeks. The English missionaries Tyerman and Bennet saw 2,000 men carrying sandalwood to the royal storehouse in Kailua, Hawaii, in 1822. They were neither paid nor fed, instead having to live off the land. Coerced labor and the dislocation that it entailed soon led to a precipitous fall in agricultural output and to persistent near-famine conditions. One contemporary visitor recorded that
the reasons why provisions are so scarce on this island is, that the people, for some months past, have been engaged in cutting sandalwood, and have of course neglected the cultivation of the land.
The behavior of one chief in the north of O‘ahu, known as Cox, is particularly well documented. In the early 1820s he organized long campaigns to wrest sandalwood from the upland forest surrounding the Anahulu River valley in the north of the island. A trader, Gilbert Mathison, witnessed the scale of this undertaking and the intensity of the coercion involved. He wrote:
Cox had given orders to some hundreds of his people to repair to the woods by an appointed day to cut sandalwood. The whole obeyed, except one man, who had the folly and hardihood to refuse. Upon this his house was set fire to, and burnt to the ground on the very day; still he refused to go. The next process was to seize his possessions and turn his wife and family off the estate.
Mathison’s observations about the way Cox ran his territory show how extractive Kamehameha’s state became after he died. For example, an American sailor, who had been granted land by Cox, reported that he was afraid of making any sort of improvement on his land because it might attract Cox’s attention, who would then appropriate everything for himself. A local reported to the preacher James Ely in 1824 that
we are sunk in discouragement. We have no inducement to labor, but many things to deter us from it. If we are enterprising, we are marked by the chiefs, and the property we obtain is taken by them. If we feed the heads of swine, or flocks of sheep, goats or fowl they are borne from us at the pleasure of the chiefs. If we sell produce, the money or property received in return is taken from us. The more enterprising, the more we are oppressed.
By the late 1820s the required work for the king increased from one day to three per week as coerced labor services for harvesting sandalwood were intensified. By the 1830s the sandalwood forests were exhausted, but now the king and chiefs started using coerced labor in agriculture. In the 1840s, the missionary William Roberts estimated that, in addition to all the required labor services, the average farmer was passing on a massive two-thirds of all of the output he produced to the king and the different chiefs.
This extractive system culminated in the Great Mahele of 1848, when King Kamehameha III decided on the radical distribution of lands we mentioned above. The outcome of this was that 24 percent of the islands’ lands were taken as private property by the king. A further 36 percent went to the government—again, in effect, to the king. A further 39 percent went to 252 chiefs, leaving less than 1 percent for the rest of the population.