Braided Waters: Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawaii 9780520970656

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The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Richard and Harriett Gold Endowment Fund in Arts and Humanities.

Braided Waters

WESTERN HISTORIES William Deverell, series editor Published for the Huntingon–USC Institute on California and the West by University of California Press. 1. The Father of All: The de la Guerra Family, Power, and Patriarchy in Mexican California, by Louise Pubols 2. Alta California: Peoples in Motion, Identities in Formation, edited by Steven W. Hackel 3. American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California, by Joshua Paddison 4. Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California, edited by Peter J. Westwick 5. Post-Ghetto: Reimagining South Los Angeles, edited by Josh Sides 6. Where Minds and Matters Meet: Technology in California and the West, edited by Volker Janssen 7. A Squatter’s Republic: Land and the Politics of Monopoly in California, 1850–1900, by Tamara Venit Shelton 8. Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster, by Norris Hundley Jr. and Donald C. Jackson 9. The Other California: Land, Identity, and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands, by Verónica Castillo-Muñoz 10. The Worlds of Junípero Serra: Historical Contexts and Cultural Representations, edited by Steven W. Hackel 11. Braided Waters: Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawai‘i, by Wade Graham

Braided Waters Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawai‘i

Wade Graham

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2018 by Wade Graham

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Graham, Wade, author. | Worster, Donald, 1941- writer of foreword. Title: Braided waters : environment and society in Molokai, Hawaii / Wade Graham. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2019] | Series: Western histories ; 11 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: lccn 2018025160 (print) | lccn 2018032368 (ebook) | isbn 9780520970656 (ebook) | isbn 9780520298590 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Human ecology—Hawaii—Molokai. | Political ecology— Hawaii—Molokai. | Nature—Effect of human beings on—Hawaii— Molokai—History. | Water-supply—Political aspects—Hawaii—Molokai. | Molokai (Hawaii)—History. Classification: lcc gf504.h3 (ebook) | lcc gf504.h3 g73 2019 (print) | ddc 304.20969/24—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025160 Manufactured in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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contents

List of Illustrations List of Maps and Tables Foreword by Donald Worster Introduction: Outer Island, In Between

vii ix xi 1

1. Wet and Dry: The Polynesian Period, 1000–1778

12

2. Traffick and Taboo: Trade, Biological Exchange, and Law in the Making of a New Pacific World, 1778–1848

44

3. A Good Land: Molokai after the Mahele, 1845–1869

69

4. The Bonanza Horizon: Molokai in the Sugar Era, 1870–1893

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5. A Bigger, Better Hawai‘i: Making an American Molokai, 1893–1957

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6. From Lonely Isle to Friendly Isle: Economic Struggles in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries and the Future of “the Most Hawaiian Island”

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Conclusion: Two Experiences of Settlement Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

194 199 205 235 253

illustrations

1. Fishpond in East Molokai 24 2. East Molokai 48 3. Kaluaaha Ma Molokai engraving of Kalua‘aha in Molokai, created between 1833 and 1843 62 4. Poi making outdoors at Halawa, Molokai, 1888 73 5. Group of Hawaiians on Molokai before 1899 74 6. First leper settlement at Kalawao, looking eastward 101 7. Father Damien with the Kalawao Girls’ Choir at Kalaupapa, circa 1878 102 8. R. W. Meyer Sugar Mill, engine and boiler house, circa 1881 115 9. Pa‘u riders, Kalaupapa, July 4, 1907 127 10. Molokai Ranch Headquarters, 1913 163 11. Inter-Island Airways Sikorsky S-43 in flight past windward Molokai, circa 1935–1940 177 12. Dirt road along Hawaiian homesteads, Ho‘olehua, 1973 181

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map s and ta bl es

MAPS

1. Location of Molokai and the Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific Basin 2 2. Map from 1901 showing locations of ahupua‘a land divisions and fishponds 26 3. Molokai map from 1897 prepared for the 1906 Report of the Governor of the Territory of Hawaii to the Secretary of the Interior 80 4. Molokai land use 174 TA B L E S

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Molokai ahupua’a 199 Molokai land transactions, pre-Mahele to 1859 202 Molokai land transactions, 1860–1869 202 Molokai land transactions, 1870–1889 203 Major landholdings on Molokai, 1984 204

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foreword Donald Worster

Like the celebrated Galápagos Islands of the South Pacific but far more romantically lush, green, and hospitable to Homo sapiens, the Hawaiian Islands offer an extraordinary window into the planet’s evolution. But Darwin never saw Hawai‘i. After traveling to the Galápagos in the 1830s, he published his masterwork, On the Origin of Species (1859), which launched the science of evolution, the foundational truth of modernity. Evolution tells us a true, if sometimes disturbing, story of species emerging out of competition and through an ancient, merciless struggle for survival. In the Galápagos that story was revealed to Darwin through the mute testimony of finches, tortoises, and swimming iguanas. But if he had gone to Hawai‘i, the story would have become far more complicated. Evolution in Hawai‘i would have to include cycles of people succeeding other people, a process of social and cultural evolution. If Darwin had gone to Hawai‘i instead of the Galápagos, he might have found things too confusing and tangled. He needed a simpler, less-peopled place to suggest questions and provoke a revolutionary theory about the natural order. To understand the more complex intertwining of ecological and social evolution would require the combined efforts of scientists, anthropologists, economists, philosophers, and historians—and even more than Darwinism, that multilayered perspective would lead us beyond science and into questions of ethics and value. We could not avoid asking who or what should triumph, and who or what should lose? This book about Hawai‘i’s history, because of its combined natural and social dimensions, leads us into that maelstrom. Always in that place, and in books about it, we become embroiled in human controversy.

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foreword

Some four decades ago, I discovered the Hawaiian Islands—not long after I had discovered Charles Darwin so that henceforth the two discoveries would be firmly linked in my mind. After living there nearly a decade, I was forced to leave the islands and escape their devastating mold spores, which for me were deadly allergens blowing down from the rainy highlands on the soft trade winds—a threat I was not naturally well adapted to meet. As one of nature’s “unfit,” I abandoned my ambition to write about Hawai‘i’s complicated evolution through deep time. Now I look back with fond memories on that ravishingly beautiful place, mixed with darker memories of hospital emergency wards but also with a sense of missed opportunity. Someone else, I have had to tell myself, must tell that amazing history of competing waves of migrating plants, animals, microorganisms, and peoples of diverse races and cultures. Now Hawai‘i has found its environmental historian in Wade Graham, an exceptionally talented writer and scholar. He has carefully read the archives, gathered statistics, tracked down travelers’ reports, learned island natural history, and actually lived in the place long enough to know it like a native. His book is rich in theory and insight, and it should stand for a long time as an exceptional piece of history—a provocative tale of evolution. Thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean separate the Hawaiian archipelago from the big continental landmasses so that the first plants had to arrive more or less accidentally by ocean and wind currents and flying birds. Over a period of 27.5 million years, one plant species made it here every 100,000 years. Radiant evolution occurred among those early migrants, until the islands became home to eleven hundred different kinds of plants, along with many species of endemic animals—a lush Garden of Eden but one without a Creator. The first Adams and Eves of this place showed up about one thousand years ago, arriving in Polynesian canoes loaded with still more plants and animals and introducing an all-too human urge to burn forests, plant taro, create artificial fishponds, and kill birds to make brightly hued feather cloaks. Their descendants still believe that they are the “rightful” owners of the place—the kama‘aina, or children of the land, who supposedly have lived for centuries in “harmony” with the rest of nature. For good reason, Graham does not succumb to such a myth, charming though it may be and worthy of some respect. He has gathered plenty of evidence that the First Hawaiians committed ecological destruction, suffered from overpopulation, practiced violence, endured class stratification, and witnessed land monopolization that spoil any notion of idyllic harmony. Like the emperors of Rome and China, like the Medici bankers of Florence, the power elite of Polynesian Hawai‘i could be ruthless, greedy, and cruel, yet they were accepted meekly by those they dominated. Hawai‘i’s archaic state must tell volumes about the course of social evolution. No societies, we learn from comparative study, are immune to internal competition for natural resources. Some may try to limit that competition, but they never

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stop it completely or achieve a perfect symbiosis between people and the rest of nature. Such a conclusion I take to be the main argument of this book. Graham goes on to theorize that the “thickness” or “thinness” of environments in terms of water, soil, and other resources is a strongly determinative force behind structures of power. Hawai‘i evolved toward “social bigness” because it was richly endowed with natural resources but not so endowed for every valley or shore. In some places “bigness” proved difficult to create or sustain. A rich endowment always brought a higher population density, and eventually, it brought a concentration of power and wealth among those most adept at competition. Thus, Hawai‘i’s native leaders, the ali‘i, managed by the mid-nineteenth century to gain control over some four million acres, including the best lands for accumulating riches. That initial concentration of “bigness” owed little to other later invaders coming from Europe, Africa, America, or Asia. Graham focuses most of his attention on Molokai, a small island situated in the middle of the archipelago, where the habitat was comparatively “thin,” providing only a few small patches of high productivity amid a generally fragmented and stingy set of environments. The Hawaiian elite, therefore, tended to pass over poor Molokai, for it lacked much scope for their aggrandizement, and so did the white settlers who came in the nineteenth century with dreams of religious missions along with sugar, pineapple, and coffee plantations. Molokai proved unsuitable for sugar growing on a modern scale and instead became a primitive grazing frontier for cattle, sheep, and goats. Then there was that small thumb of lava rock jutting below towering sea cliffs, a tiny place named Kalaupapa, which offered a quarantine site for lepers. The rich, powerful, and healthy never found much to attract them there. In part the excellence of this book comes from the author’s skill in moving back and forth among the various scales of history, from the local to the global. He steps back from Molokai to take in the whole island chain and then the entire Pacific Ocean and then the ever-tightening global web of commerce so that what was isolated and local can take on transoceanic and international significance. This mixing of scales is one of environmental history’s greatest contributions to the writing of history, and Graham is masterful in weaving those scales into a single, compelling narrative. The white Americans who led a second major human invasion of the Hawaiian Islands came full of Protestant piety and, paradoxically, smug social Darwinist beliefs. They saw themselves as the “fittest,” morally and intellectually, in any competition. By the 1890s they had managed to overthrow the native monarchy and even get the islands annexed to the United States. After those triumphs, they proved as remorseless—and even brutal—as anyone in history. In their own eyes, and especially in the eyes of the sugar planters, they had to become the “keystone species”; that is, the arbiters of good land use, the rightful heirs of plenty, and the people best equipped to create and maintain a new and better ecology.

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One of the most ardent of their agents was Harold Lyon, a plant pathologist employed by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association. Enthusiastically, he served both their self-interest and his own by promoting the wholesale importation of new tree varieties from every part of the world and releasing them onto the islands to create a new and better forest. These imported plants he would pit against each other, letting them “work out their own salvation.” The result, he hoped, would be a tougher, more resilient forest that would stop erosion and runoff and save precipitation that the planters needed for irrigation projects. Lyon’s science was based on the theory of evolution, but for him evolution became a “law” that humans must obey. Islanders should take competitive nature as a model. In focusing on one prominent scientist, Graham moves downscale to illustrate the ideology that many white Americans brought to the islands and tried to implement in the landscape. Evolutionary science and environmental history can, and indeed should, work together to illuminate the past and ground us in reality, not in myth or ideology. But the laws of nature should not dictate how we write history. There is also the matter of what ought to be. Humans, unlike the trees and birds that arrived in the islands without any volition, did a lot of thinking about what separates “right” from “wrong” and distinguishes “ought” from “is.” They came up with competing ethical standards or ideals, primarily aimed at their relations with other humans but also now and then promulgated as guides to managing nature. And writing about that struggle for ethics makes history a moral discipline as much as a scientific one. Wisely, the author does not take a strongly partisan position in current Hawaiian politics of land claims and counterclaims. On the contrary, he skewers all those who cannot see their own moral shortcomings, including not only Lyon but also a few prominent Hawaiian nationalists of our day who want all whites simply to go “home” and leave the islands under their native rule. Molokai, among the most “backward” of the islands economically, has in recent decades become a place of refuge for those nationalists who want to restore the old ways, which supposedly would remedy all perceived injustices. Graham’s book offers a stern antidote to such nostalgic and uninformed politics, which ignores the moral failings of the precontact past and the universal workings of evolution found in all nature and in all societies. At the same time, Graham is clearly sympathetic to the contemporary plight of the common native people, who have for centuries been given a raw deal. Those commoners he portrays as undeserving of their poverty, marginalization, and loss of identity in the currents of change. In short, like many and perhaps most historians, Graham does more than describe the evolutionary changes in environment and society. He suggests that there are moral issues intertwined in this story that need careful sorting through and thinking about, although he does not set forth any rigid set of values by which to judge the past. One wonders indeed whether there is such a moral standard that all people could agree on.

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Living in Hawai‘i, as both the author and I have done, can awaken one’s sympathies for the birds, plants, and people who have been the victims of competitive evolution—the losers pushed aside or now extinct in the race to acquire and reproduce. But what should be our moral compass to complement our scientific truths? If we take Darwin as a guide to writing a deeper, more inclusive kind of history— one that puts people into nature—to whom should we turn for ethical enlightenment? Evolution and ethics can seem like two separate spheres. Historians believe that facts and values should be brought together into a single narrative, but historians are not the arbiters of morality. The study of history may suggest that ethics and moral sensibilities have evolved in unison with or in opposition to changing structures of nature, power, and dominance. We should not build a wall between the many forms of evolution. And the historian must try to ride that narrow cusp separating fact from value. I see this more clearly than ever after reading Wade Graham’s remarkable work about a little piece of land in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, so far from the world’s attention and yet so valuable for its multilayered lessons. Hawai‘i has long been one of the most inaccessible places on the planet, and for that very reason, it has become one of the most vulnerable and endangered. Always, it forces us to consider what has been right and wrong in the past; to describe as intelligently as we can the age-old competition for habitat, natural resources, and wealth. At the same time, through the practice of history we can find our way toward greater sympathy and responsibility.

Introduction Outer Island, In Between

What does the history of Molokai have to tell us? Molokai is an island of the Hawaiian chain, located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and physically average in most respects. It is the fifth largest of the group at 38 miles long and 10 miles wide at its widest point, with an area of 260 square miles and a coastline of 100 miles. It has a representative mix of the astonishing variety of environments typical of the larger Hawaiian Islands: rain forest, mesic forest, semiarid grassland, high mountain bogs, sheer sea cliffs, broad alluvial fans, sandy and rocky coastlines, and fringing coral reefs. It sits squarely in the middle of the eight main islands of the Hawaiian chain: 25 miles east of O‘ahu, the capital and metropolis of the archipelago; 8.5 miles west of Maui; and 9 miles north of Lana‘i (see map 1). On a clear day, it is in sight of five of them (only Kauai and Ni‘ihau are out of sight, below the western horizon). Molokai is also an exception: even occupying its central position, Molokai was always marginal to the political, military, and economic affairs of the Hawaiians, and it has remained marginal in the modern US territorial and statehood periods. For centuries, it has been known as a place of failure—politically, economically, militarily—and as a place of depopulation, emigration, and exile. It has borne much of the worst social and environmental damage in Hawai‘i and continues to lead the state in indicators of malaise such as unemployment, welfare dependency, invasive species, and erosion. It was known to the ancient Hawaiians as Molokai o Pule o‘o (Molokai of the Powerful Prayer), a place of sorcery, poisons, and misty, remote places of refuge, an island easy to subjugate by invading armies but difficult to fully subdue or incorporate into social and economic orders imposed from outside. It has been known for the last several generations of people in Hawai‘i as “the 1

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Introduction

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300 km

map 1. Location of Molokai and the Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific Basin.

lonely isle,” a place most often passed by; to most of the world, it is known simply as “the living grave,” where the lepers were banished to wait for death. In all of these senses, Molokai defines the limit of what is called “outer island” Hawai‘i— peripheral and rarely visited. But in physical terms, it is not on the periphery but dead in the center of the group, its cliff-edged, wind-scoured coasts marking off the four most important channels and sea routes in the archipelago—a position that may have been memorialized in its name: as molo means gathering or braiding together, and kai means ocean waters.1 (The use of the glottal stop, Moloka‘i, is likely a modern mistake, possibly the invention of singers catering to tourists in Honolulu in the 1930s tailoring syllables to rhyme in their verses.)2 Molokai is in the middle; to go anywhere between the islands of Hawai‘i, Maui, Lana‘i, Kaho‘olawe, and O‘ahu, one must pass Molokai.3 With its several verdant farming

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valleys and a long shoreline studded with rich fish ponds during the precontact Polynesian period, the island was an opportunity for more powerful outsiders to come conquer and exploit. Hawaiian armies up to King Kamehameha’s in the early nineteenth century had little choice but to stop and fight over the island, often laying it to waste, en route to larger battles elsewhere. After the violence was suppressed, Molokai remained a lure to outsiders looking for land and wealth, who were always more powerful than the few dispersed inhabitants. Molokai is an outer island in between, the near far away, an other place just next door; a place marginal to the main events of history and yet never entirely apart from them, transformed by them and yet filtering their impacts through its own conditions and structures. And, it is the contention of this study that this is not a defect from the point of view of writing history. Indeed, Molokai’s marginality, relative to its larger neighbors and to the larger outside world, gives it a focused explanatory power, like a small lens that refracts and reflects back bigger processes and wider histories with which it has intersected, thereby illuminating them in invaluable ways. Because it is more isolated and simplified in comparison to larger, more central places, certain processes are more visible, their outlines less blurred by complexity. To understand the history of this marginal place is to go a long way toward understanding the history of Hawai‘i, the United States, the Pacific, and the world. One reason I chose Molokai to study is because it is a small, marginal, unimportant place within a somewhat larger, somewhat more consequential place, Hawai‘i—itself at the center of the world’s largest ocean and so a critical junction of Pacific and world history during the past two and a half globalizing centuries, as well as an active frontier of American expansion. Like a doormat, it has been at the center of a lot of action, and like a doormat, it has been really beaten up. And you can see the scuff marks pretty clearly; the island is just lying there open to view, essentially untouched by the modern development that has buried so many of the traces of history on the larger islands beneath hotels, subdivisions, and parking lots. But it is important not to focus exclusively on the island’s negative markers. It is also a place of remarkable endurance, resistance, and cultural resilience. Molokai people gained their reputation for sorcery through a millennium of resistance to powerful outside forces. They were celebrated for fierce independence from the demands of higher-status outsiders in a society rigidly ordered by caste and for an ethos that we might think of in modern terms as nature-centered and communitarian. Since the coming of the rest of the world to the Hawaiian Islands over the last two and a half centuries, Molokai almost alone has maintained many of the values and ways of the old Hawaiians, from the ‘ohana extended family, rooted in the soil of a small valley, to traditional forms of farming and fishing that help sustain a community-based lifestyle that has mostly vanished elsewhere. This is true in large part because the island has been, on the whole, a place of economic stagnation and persistent business and administrative failures. In ancient and modern

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Introduction

Hawai‘i equally, Molokai was and is thought of as a land of regret for its failures and of longing for what it has preserved. Molokai as a case study has many advantages from a historian’s point of view. It has a well-developed archaeological record, well spread over the island’s breadth, including a trove of groundbreaking work on one of the earliest and longest continuously inhabited Polynesian settlements, at Hālawa Valley. Historical traces are very visible on the island because there has been very little modern agricultural or urban development compared with the other Hawaiian islands. Because it has been marginal to the political and economic development of Hawai‘i in the postcontact period, there has been a retardation of historical effects: what may have happened on O‘ahu in the early nineteenth century might have happened on Molokai in the late nineteenth or even early twentieth, making such events easier for historical methods to see. As a place near but peripheral to the center, O‘ahu, Molokai is a better theater in which to view environmental and economic history than political, diplomatic, or military history or the social history of the elites in Hawai‘i. Because of this— and the fact that these last subjects have been extensively worked over by other historians—this study takes as its focus the nexus between environment and society. It looks at how the land and ecosystems have changed over time with human intervention and at how social structures; land tenure; market conditions; definitions of common resources; and technologies such as irrigation, aquaculture, and new crops, including genetically modified organisms in the twenty-first century, have changed over time and have in turn affected the land. It looks for patterns, relationships, sequences of causation, cascade effects, and scale effects—especially spatial ones—in order to understand how these factors have worked on and with one another and how they have shaped the history of communities in Molokai. Molokai’s exceptionalism has much to do with scale—but not in a straightforward or one-dimensional way. It is comparatively small and so is at a comparative disadvantage in population and resources to other islands. But scale does not work in a simple way: in many ways, the island is large. There are the obvious physical ways: it has the tallest sea cliffs in the world, up to three thousand feet, the longest fringing reef in the Hawaiian Islands, and once had the largest fishpond aquaculture complex in the Polynesian Pacific. And there are other, less obvious ways that have to do with the local, perceived relationships between people and things, which we will explore in this study. Molokai has a bit of everything, such as a representative mix of climates and terrains, as has been noted. It has a thoroughly mixed population, with the largest per capita percentage of native Hawaiians in the state cohabiting with transplanted Europeans and mainland Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and many others. Economically, it has supported at one time or another all of the components of Hawai‘i’s history: fishing, irrigated farming, dryland farming, fishpond aquaculture, ranching, sugar, coffee, pineapple, diversified

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fruit and vegetables, light manufacturing, and tourism. It has had irrigation both on a small scale, supporting traditional Hawaiian farms, and on a large scale, watering thousands of acres of industrial plantations. It has had (and continues to have) both a subsistence economy of small farms and homesteads and a huge, outsidecapitalized export agribusiness sector employing cheap immigrant labor. Both have been materially aided by significant state and federal interventions, and both have coexisted on one island—though each mostly has had to itself one very different half of it. The distribution of these features has largely been imposed by environmental variation: wet versus dry, level versus steep, rocky versus fertile. The environment is critical to everything in Molokai, both as constraint and as opportunity: some places are “thick” with natural resources, making them potentially prosperous and so coveted by outsiders; some are resource “thin” and so impoverished and ignored. Water, in abundance or scarcity, has from the beginning of settlement there fundamentally structured human social and economic possibilities and thus how people have restructured the natural environment to suit their aims. Hawai‘i is shaped by a fundamental wet/dry dichotomy, due to the permanent trade winds that produce rainfall on the windward sides of each island and arid rain shadows on the leeward sides. Some of the wettest places on Earth are just a few miles as the crow flies from extremely dry places; this situation is common on all of the large islands, and even on the smallest, precipitation, or the lack of it, is a basic environmental fact. Unavoidably, in Hawai‘i, water is the fundamental organizing principle of both the human and the natural worlds, of the landscape and the social body that lives on it, and of their intersections. Water orders and differentiates production, reproduction, politics, and religion as well as their disorders in the forms of drought, erosion, warfare, and conquest—and in between these extremes, the thread of Hawaiian history unspools. This is a long-range study, of a very long durée, from the antecedents of the arrival of Polynesians in Molokai around the year AD 1000 to our own era. A big part of what is observed is how the settlement and colonization of a remote island archipelago works. In one thousand years, the Hawaiian Islands were settled, in the simplest accounting, twice: once by Polynesians and again after discovery by the outside world in 1778. Really, they were settled many times, over and over again: landfall was made in Hawai‘i by Polynesians many times and by people from nearly everywhere on Earth countless times, bringing with them animals, plants, parasites, pathogens, tools, techniques, ideas, and religions. In both, or all, cases, depending on one’s arithmetic, this amounted to plugging into the world and setting off each time what are effectively the processes of globalization. Thus, our socioenvironmental history is also the history of an environment and society under near-constant stress from outside settlement, colonization, extraction, and the attendant processes of change.

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Introduction

A key finding of this study is that clear patterns of interactions between people and their environment are visible across Hawaiian history, from the appearance of Polynesians to our own era. Discerning these patterns begins with looking at water. Because water is so unevenly distributed, access to water resources is key to life: irrigated agriculture was at the base of Polynesian Hawai‘i’s economy, religion, and competitive social order. The control of water is everything: from its control flow the control of land, labor, and therefore, power. Under an intensely competitive social order, the control of water in Hawai‘i tends toward—because it strives for—monopoly control of water and thus the rest, as well as a continuous intensification of production for surplus to support that monopoly control and people and resources. Forms of monopoly control of water are clearly and repeatedly visible in both the Polynesian period and in the postcontact period, where water remains at the center of the economic and therefore political and social life of both the nineteenth-century Hawaiian kingdom and the twentieth-century American territory and state. It is also clear from the historical record that monopoly control of water and land resources exacerbates and drives the feedback loop of environmental degradation; the destruction of common resources; and the decline of small, subsistencebased communities, further reinforcing intensification and the control of monopolists. This helps to explain the rapid social change and very high degrees of agricultural development in both the Polynesian and postcontact periods and helps to explain the rapid and severe environmental degradation seen in both periods. This apparent repetition is striking. I refer to it as a historical isomorphism: the similarity of form or structure between two things or organisms with different ancestry, arrived at through convergence. This word is important. It does not mean that the same thing happened twice, or that history repeated itself in Hawai‘i, but that something similar happened (at least) twice, to different people, at different times—but in the same place. In evolutionary biology this is known as convergent evolution, where unrelated organisms assume similar forms while adapting to similar or the same environmental constraints. Seeing this isomorphism in Molokai indicates that deep structures unique to the place pushed apparently very different human societies at very different times toward assuming similar forms. The challenge is to explicate, first, what those deep structures of place are and how they work and, second, how the nature of the societies—their cultures—are worked on by them and work on them in turn. What is revealed? Not, as might be expected, or feared, environmental determinism, where physical geography determines human social outcomes. Instead, the history of Molokai shows a dynamic interaction between different types of environment and different types of social orders, which is not random but shows distinct patterns across long spans of time and is thus suggestive of a strong role of environment in social outcomes—and an equally strong role of social structures

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and values in determining the fate of the environment. Discerning these patterns and how they work is important because in both cases, most of the time, both the environment and a plurality of the members of society came out the worse in the deal, becoming significantly impoverished over time and falling under the control of narrow, monopolizing elites defined largely by heredity. We see that countervailing patterns exist, at the same time, of environmental and social structures that resist control and impoverishment, and yet they are limited, by the same factors that enable the opposite outcome in most cases, across Hawaiian history. A challenge for this study is to make the history of one small island relevant to the larger world. The history of Molokai must be embedded in the history of the milieu (Hawai‘i); in the region (the Pacific); in America, of which it becomes a part; and in the world; hopefully, by learning about the processes that have shaped Molokai, we will learn something about the larger world. Hopefully, it can also be a case study that casts light on and encourages the study of similar places: small, out-of-the-way, marginal, minor places. In 1975, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called for the study of “minor literature” in its own right, as necessary as the study of the great books and without which the great books cannot make sense.4 This study is informed by the desire to write the history of a minor place because the world is made up of them, and their history shapes the fates of big, major places far more than historians have been willing to allow. It is not a microhistory because it does not assume that Molokai is a microcosm but rather that it is a distinct place with a history linked at all levels with contexts greater and smaller, from the largest stories of human history—migration, discovery, and globalizations—to the intimate histories of families. This study looks at Molokai, but always in context, never in isolation. These contexts range from Hawai‘i to North America to China to Europe. They are considered not simply to illuminate events on Molokai but also to examine how events on Molokai have affected them; all are parts of a continuum, and all share a space-time. There are many general histories of Hawai‘i; most are primarily concerned with the progress of political events. There are many more studies of Hawaiian natural history, since it is one of the great laboratories of evolution on the planet, rivaling the Galápagos in the amount of literature developed. Very few authors have looked at its environmental history—and then not in sufficient relation to the economic and the social. Historiography tends to portray Hawaiian history as primarily a political process—just one more instance of a small, weak Aboriginal grouping succumbing to the irresistible pressures of European and American imperialism. Demographic, economic, and eventual political collapses are seen as inevitable given the progress of world history. The role of the environment is not considered adequately. Yet Hawaiian history is to a great extent a saga of physical and biological changes, of radical transformations in its landscapes and inhabitants, beginning with processes set in motion by the first Polynesian colonizers. From 1778

8

Introduction

onward, it becomes a story of the steady retreat of native Hawaiian people and nature. Politically centered history, riveted by the confrontation between Hawaiian rulers and foreign usurpers, has done a poor job of addressing or understanding these changes. Given that Hawai‘i remained a sovereign monarchy until 1893, it was a unique situation in the island Pacific: not colonial—though perhaps paracolonia—and thus a product as much of internal dynamics as of external ones.5 Land and water are at the center of these internal dynamics and so should be put at the center of Hawaiian history. While the major twentieth-century authors recognize, to varying degrees, the role of environmental stresses, such as deforestation, erosion, desertification, disease, and the myriad effects of species invasion and extinction, little is understood by historians about the mechanisms and extent of these.6 Among professional historians, Ralph Kuykendall and Gavan Daws did the best jobs of acknowledging the role of environment and disease, but they ascribed few motivations and isolated few consequences. Answers to questions as fundamental as what caused the Hawaiians’ demographic decline were based on shaky estimates or guesses drawn from early accounts. Others, such as Lilikala Kame‘eleihiwa, elide nature altogether, dismissing it by positing an eternal “harmony” between Hawaiians and their ‘aina (land), before turning all attention on the cultural chasm that separated the understandings and experience of Hawaiians and haoles (foreigners). This elision ignores copious evidence that the Hawaiians, while certainly living in greater “harmony” with nature than do we in our modern, industrial society, were quantifiably ruinous to aspects of the low-elevation environment of the islands, including forests and birds. Part of the problem is that historians have relied on traditional documentary sources that, when they took any note of the physical world around them, tended to do so in a fragmentary way. A major shortcoming is a lack of attention to scientific studies, from archaeology, paleobiology, geomorphology, and other fields, which have the potential to fill in the wide blanks in the historical documentation. In addition, since the publication of most existing Hawaiian histories, the volume and quality of such work has multiplied enormously.7 This study has relied on several layers and registers of evidence, from traditional historic documents to recent research in the natural and social sciences to visual evidence such as images and mapping, in order to try to reconstruct and diagram physical changes in the islands; to provide a kind of moving picture of the sensible Hawaiian world; and to analyze these changes against the broader social, economic, and political canvasses. The major signal exception to the foregoing complaints is the work of Patrick V. Kirch, one of the world’s leading Pacific archaeologists, and Marshall Sahlins, one of the world’s leading Pacific historical anthropologists, on the relation between Hawaiian social structure and history. Their 1992 collaboration, Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, a two-volume study of a valley

Introduction

9

in Waialua District, windward O‘ahu, is a synthesis and pairing between archaeological and ethnohistorical investigations of the history of the Anahulu River valley, from precontact up to the aftermath of the Mahele, or land revolution of the mid-nineteenth century. By linking changes in the environmental and the social and insisting that historical analysis map both registers onto one another, this approach illuminates riddles that would otherwise have remained opaque. For example, the authors found, through archaeological excavation, a vast extension of irrigated taro pondfield and ditch construction in the upper valley, about which historical documentation had contained barely a hint. This building boom coincided with King Kamehameha’s second garrisoning of O‘ahu from 1795 to about 1810. They deduced that the king, having seen his first attempt at occupying the island collapse as famine spread under the pressure of his armies, resolved to install a self-sufficient warrior-farmer garrison that could endure indefinitely by settling his Hawai‘i-island fighters and their families on new taro lands high in the watershed. From 1810 to 1825, these lands were gradually abandoned as the ascendant Ka‘ahumanu faction of the ali‘i shifted its corvée demands away from agricultural produce to sandalwood cutting. Briefly, after 1829, there was a new burst of activity, ending with the total collapse of sandalwood resources.8 These discoveries confirm the basic interrelatedness of the natural and the social. Another example of interest is the evidence Anahulu presents of devastation caused by crop and plant diseases, blights, and animal invasions to the productive capacity of rural Waialua District, ultimately contributing to its social and demographic collapse. Kirch and Sahlins tried, in their words, to “bring down the history of the world to the Anahulu river valley.”9 This study takes theirs as an inspiration, but it differs in that its Hawaiian location is larger, its time span longer, and its analytical framework focused on the reciprocating interactions between environment, economy, and society moreso than on the social structure as the driver of these. Several works from American environmental history have helped to guide this study. A general model of how an environmentally literate history can illuminate larger historical questions is Alfred W. Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism.10 Applied to Hawai‘i, Crosby’s approach would benefit from a greater attention to diverse scientific and social scientific literature, to historical geography, and to the native Hawaiian side of the story, expressly including the history of processes begun by Polynesians that then continued, often in radically accelerated form, after 1778. In this regard, William Cronon’s book Changes in the Land and Stephen J. Pyne’s work, including Fire in America and Burning Bush, are excellent examples of how indigenous practices powerfully shaped land and water long before European arrivals.11 The work of Jeremy Adelman, Stephen Aron, and Richard White on borderlands and frontiers is directly applicable to the history of Hawai‘i, which, in the period from contact in 1778 to the American-led overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, while remaining nominally sovereign, was nevertheless a borderland between

10

Introduction

competing imperial powers in the Pacific and a place where a diverse mixture of people from all over the world shared space with native Hawaiians in a complex, shifting “middle ground” between overlapping, rivalrous sets of political, economic, military, cultural, and environmental worldviews and practices.12 Donald Worster’s lifelong focus on how structures of class, expertise, and power interact in the settlement of marginal landscapes and, not coincidentally, his focus on the links between irrigated agriculture and political domination, inform this study throughout.13 Indeed, the United States Bureau of Reclamation, which he chronicled in Rivers of Empire, played a central role in the transformation of West Molokai into a terrain of industrial agriculture in the second half of the twentieth century (as will be seen in chapter 5). In Molokai and elsewhere in Hawai‘i, the Bureau of Reclamation and other government agencies at both the state and federal levels actively intervened on behalf of large landowners and commercial interests by imposing policy, fiscal, and legal frameworks that aided their capture of resources, often to the detriment of smaller, local interest groups and communities. This aspect of Hawai‘i’s history underscores its commonalities and continuities with the experience of the American West, including Alaska, with state and federal lands and environmental agencies and policies. The recent work of Jared Diamond has brought wide attention to many of the insights of environmental historians by synthesizing their work and that of numerous scientific investigators in some of the fields previously listed into large-scale, panoramic histories of human experience, using comparisons between large and small social and physical entities, sometimes widely separated in time and space.14 His book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed proposed to link environmental factors with the historical failures or the collapse of societies. Diamond’s initial premise was that factors such as soil fragility, aridity, small size, extreme climatic conditions, and climate change contributed greatly to the likelihood of failure of societies. But in his survey of case histories, it is clear that the environment is rarely the determining factor. Severe cases of collapse occur both on small islands, such as Easter and Henderson in the South Pacific, and in large continental regions, such as the American Southwest and Central America. While all seem to share one or more types of ecological marginality, there are many different variables. Diamond tirelessly cataloged and sorted natural structures and factors according to rubrics such as fragility versus resilience or eight kinds of degradation, including deforestation, soil degradation, overhunting or overfishing, population growth, and so on. Yet, given his inclusion of so many dissimilar places, no pattern emerged that convinces one that environmental damage is a programmatic, comprehensible factor in the success or failure of different societies in different places at different times. Diamond allowed as much in his introduction to the volume, admitting, “I don’t know of any case in which a society’s collapse can be attributed solely to environmental damage: there are always other contrib-

Introduction

11

uting factors. When I began this book, I didn’t appreciate those complications, and I naively thought the book would be about environmental damage.” He designated five sets of factors: environment, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trading partners, and each “society’s response to its environmental problems.”15 On completing the study, he found that only the last factor “always proves significant”; the first four “may or may not prove significant.” In spite of the exhaustive taxonomies of factors, no hierarchy organizes all the many variables, and no set of rules orders them into a global logic or a set of criteria that would be useful for prediction. Each case study is a good description and is unique, like an address— or a history. In the end, Diamond succeeded in writing a series of fascinating histories—a venerable and valuable narrative art form to be sure—but fell short of his goal of finding a kind of science of the failures of societies. What was missing, even from the point of view of satisfying narratives, was an appreciation for culture, a thing much maligned among historians and scientists alike, apparently because of its high-profile career among the anthropologists in the twentieth century. But it is inescapable. Even in the case of the smallest, most resource-impoverished places that Diamond described, it is easier to place blame for the failure of long-term colonization on the shortcomings of the social structure involved than on the environment there. In each case, the moves that precipitated a collapse were cultural failures to adapt or respond adequately to environmental challenges rather than simply these challenges themselves. In each case Diamond narrated, culture was the man behind the curtain: decisions were made—economic, military, legal, reproductive, even aesthetic—that had an impact on the tendencies, trajectories, and outcomes of the societies under the microscope. Cultural categories were often the fundamental, causative problems such as elite competition and unaccountability, warmaking, religion, dictatorship, and the most powerful and environmentally (and socially) damaging of these, the “lust for power.” We hardly need an environmentally centered history to tell us this. And such a history, focused on cataloging and understanding physical factors, is not sufficient to get to the bottom of the story. What is needed is a catalog of cultural factors alongside physical ones and an analysis of their dynamic interaction where historical outcomes are produced. What Collapse proved is that while environment is hugely important in influencing historical outcomes, environment is not destiny; it is just a set of constraints and limitations on which and within which human social structures and values work and are in turn worked on. The lesson is that it takes two to tango, and neither partner—environment or society—always or necessarily leads the dance. This study of Molokai is an effort to write a history of a Hawaiian island and, through it, of the Hawaiian Islands, that combines the optics of nature and culture into a more integrated practice of history than we have generally seen in this reach of the ocean.

1

Wet and Dry The Polynesian Period, 1000–1778

The moment that the first Polynesian canoes touched Hawaiian beaches, around AD 1000, marked one of the culminating achievements of the greatest seaborne colonizing society in the premodern world.1 Over a two-thousand-year period, Polynesians perfected techniques of long-range ocean voyaging and permanent agricultural settlement that allowed them to claim small islands and thrive in an archipelagic realm covering a quarter of the globe. Contrary to earlier theories that held that these mariners must have been descendants of migrants into the region from as far away as Asia or India, archaeologists now believe that “becoming Polynesian took place in Polynesia,” in the words of Patrick Kirch, the preeminent Pacific archaeologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. According to this view, ancestral Polynesian culture evolved in situ first, from Melanesian and “Austronesian” Southeast Asian antecedents, up to thirty-five hundred years ago in what is called the Lapita cultural cradle area in eastern Melanesia. From there, these peoples reached Fiji and then Tonga and Samoa by perhaps 880 BC, where, over the next millennium, the fully formed Polynesian cultural complex incubated. It was a lifestyle based on crops—the Melanesian suite of vegetatively propagated roots such as aroids (taro, or kalo in Hawaiian) and yams—supplemented with orchard crops, such as coconuts and breadfruit, and fish and other products of the surrounding sea. In maintaining links between these neighbor islands, Polynesians effectively created a “voyaging nursery”: the small, outrigger canoes of Melanesia and Southeast Asia became large oceangoing vessels equipped with double hulls and lateen sails, sailed by large crews and guided by a supple science of navigation by stars, winds, currents, swells deflected between islands, and the signs of birds and other creatures.2 In the face of the near-constant easterly trade 12

Wet and Dry

13

winds at this latitude, Polynesians perfected the art of sailing upwind to remote landfalls and then returning to their islands of origin. When, after one thousand years, the cultural conditions coalesced in favor of purposefully searching for new lands to colonize, the skills and technologies required were in place, allowing Polynesians to reach nearly every (not yet populated) inhabitable island in the Pacific Ocean and establish themselves on them. The first waves of settlement out from the Fiji-Tonga-Samoa-Futuna core reached the Society group and the Marquesas; later migrations traced northward up the Line Islands to Hawai‘i; eastward to Easter (Rapa Nui); and southward to Mangareva, the Southern Cooks, and finally, New Zealand (Aotearoa) by AD 1200–1300—making it “one of the last places on earth to be settled by preindustrialized humans,” in Kirch’s words.3 The addition of the South American sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) to the crop repertoire of the last-settled islands also indicates Polynesian contact with that continent.4 Polynesians went—and stayed— everywhere, occupying even rocky, inhospitable Pitcairn and Henderson in the Eastern Pacific, and remote islets like Necker and Nihoa in the Hawaiian chain northwest of Kaua‘i, for as long as six hundred years.5 Linguistic and material evidence shows that they maintained links between islands across formidable distances for centuries, before isolation returned for unknown reasons.6 When Europeans ventured into Polynesia in numbers in the eighteenth century, they immediately recognized that the widely dispersed people they encountered, from Tahiti to Easter Island to New Zealand to Hawai‘i, belonged to a single group closely related by race, language, religion, technology, and cultural patterns and organization from agriculture to architecture. This expansion was not just a question of boats and navigation: the islands of the Pacific east of the Solomons had few edible plant or animals species, especially on atolls.7 Prospective settlers had to bring almost everything with them, providing a textbook example of what the anthropologist Edgar Anderson called “transported landscapes” and the historian Alfred Crosby called a “portmanteau biota”: all the biological resources necessary to long-term survival, without which the technological and cultural skills of the voyagers would have proven useless.8 Settlers in Hawai‘i would eventually import dogs, pigs, chickens, rats, and the Hawaiian horticultural complex (differing only in emphasis from that of elsewhere in Polynesia): taro (kalo), sweet potato (‘uala), yam (uhi), banana (mai‘a), sugarcane (kō), breadfruit (‘ulu), coconut (niu), paper mulberry (wauke), kava (‘awa), gourd (ipu), ti (ki), arrowroot (pia), turmeric (‘olena), and bamboo (‘ohe).9 All across Polynesia, the colonizers adapted to fit the diverse environmental circumstances they found. In a general sense, these can be divided into the three principal kinds of islands in the Pacific: atolls, makatea islands, and high islands. Their origins can be either from “arc” islands or “hot spot” islands. All Pacific islands are volcanic or tectonic in origin; most on its western margin are arc islands, accretive

14

Wet and Dry

products of plate margin subduction, wherein pieces of crust sitting atop the diving plate are scraped off onto the overriding plate. Arc islands, such as New Zealand, Fiji, and New Caledonia, are often large and mountainous. In the mid-ocean, including most of Polynesia, islands are products of midplate hot spots—plumes of molten magma rising from the earth’s mantle that pierce the crust to form volcanic shields; as the plates move over the stationary plume, islands string out like beads on a necklace, leaving lines, arcs, or clusters of islands diminishing in size as they recede in distance and time from their point of origin and erode back into the sea. High islands, such as Tahiti, Rarotonga, and the main Hawaiian islands, are examples of relatively recently formed hot-spot islands. Built of volcanic basalts and lavas, younger islands often lack surface water because of extreme rock porosity and lack fringing reefs because of steep slopes into the surrounding depths. Older high islands, removed by plate motion from the building process of the hot spot, gradually erode, developing deeply incised stream valleys, broad coastal flats, and fringing or barrier reefs. Atolls are formerly high islands that have been lowered, through a combination of erosion and subsidence under their own weight, to near or below sea level, leaving fringing reefs surrounding a volcanic core that eventually disappears, leaving no dry rock, just a barrier reef surrounding a lagoon. Makatea islands are older atolls or subsided high islands where previously submerged portions have been partially raised above water, either by falling sea levels or by tectonic forces. Typically, the uptilt is caused by the weight of a nearby, related volcanic shield formation. Makatea means “white stone,” after the exposed limestone of former reefs elevated to become limestone ramparts and plateaus. These are often marginal environments for cultivation because rainfall disappears into their porous limestone karsts and thin soils. Mangaia and Henderson, both islands with histories of socioenvironmental stress, are examples.10 Within environmental limits, most Polynesian societies thrived—and evolved. The ability of Polynesian societies to adapt their main crop, taro (Colocasia spp.), to highly varying circumstances is the most significant “event” in Polynesian prehistory, second only to success at voyaging. All of these adaptations involved the control of water. On atolls, which are typically dry zones because of high soil porosity and low rainfall, taro was grown by pit cultivation: digging down through the sand or coral to the thin freshwater lens overlying the seawater. On high islands and makatea islands with swampy coastal valleys, it was by raised-bed cultivation: digging drainage canals through the swampy flats and heaping the spoils up into mounds where taro, yams, sugarcane, and other crops were planted. On high islands with well-developed stream valleys, irrigated pondfields were constructed, with streams diverted through barrages and ditches to a series of linked, walled paddies, in which flooding and drainage were controlled by means of headgates. Several writers have pointed to a seeming paradox of Polynesians’ existence: though accomplished at seafaring and fishing, the majority of them derived their

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15

subsistence from the land. The dominance of the land over the sea would have profound effects on the history of Hawai‘i, as we will see later; here I will list just a few examples. E. S. and Elizabeth Handy, with Mary Kawena Pukui, in their classic study Native Planters in Old Hawaii, cite much evidence that most common Hawaiians were farmers, not fishers.11 Suggestively, the word for an island or a division of land, moku, is also that for a ship or a boat. The sea as highway is a frequent metaphor in legend and oral tradition, and it is even reported that some Polynesian navigators talked about the moving sea passing by the stationary canoe.12 In an agricultural society with a severely limited land base that practiced a form of primogeniture, younger sons would be pushed to sea in search of tillable land: as it was for many of the Scandinavian Vikings who sailed off in search of new lands, oceanic expansion was a farmer’s imperative.13 NAT U R A L H I S T O RY O F T H E PAC I F IC I SL A N D S

The discoverers of Hawai‘i found the largest piece of unclaimed island real estate in the Pacific, excluding New Zealand: an area of 16,692 square kilometers (6,424 square miles) 30 percent larger than Connecticut.14 It was also the most remote: 2,557 miles from Los Angeles, 5,541 miles from Hong Kong, 3,847 miles from Japan, and 5,070 miles from Sydney.15 The insularity of the Hawaiian Islands, together with their geologic history, accounts for much of their physical—and in certain ways, their social—destiny. From its origin over a stationary, midplate hot spot now under the island of Hawai‘i, the Hawaiian chain extends 2,449 miles westward toward Kure Atoll, where the eroding volcanoes submerge, then carries on northward as the Emperor Seamounts, ending at Meiji Seamount, beyond which the Pacific Plate subducts into the Kuril Trench off Kamchatka. The oldest seamounts date to seventy-five million to eighty million years; the islands’ life span above water varies from eight million to fifteen million years.16 Active volcanism is limited to the zone directly over the hot spot: three volcanoes on the island of Hawai‘i—Mauna Loa, Hualalai, and Kilauea—and Haleakala volcano on Maui, have erupted historically (since 1778). Mauna Loa last erupted in 1984, while vents on Kilauea have erupted continuously since that year. The island-making process continues: Loihi, a new, actively building, submerged volcano southeast of the Big Island, is expected to surface in roughly one hundred thousand years. On these islands, age is fundamental to form. The Big Island of Hawai‘i, so new that its surface rocks are no more than a million years old, has no significant stream valleys with developed soils, except on its northernmost and oldest coasts, Kohala and Hamakua. Offshore, its slopes drop precipitously into deep water, and consequently, the island has no fringing coral reefs. By the same token, as islands increase in age, erosion gradually changes their character: at the other end of the main group, five-million-year-old Kaua‘i is typified by deep canyons, broad

16

Wet and Dry

and swampy coastal valleys, and more generous fringing reefs than on the other islands. As age equals geomorphology in a general sense, topography is fundamental to climate at the local level, and variation is tremendous. Ten percent of the main island area is above 7,000 feet, with relatively cold temperatures; Mauna Kea volcano on Hawai‘i reaches 13,796 feet and boasts ancient glaciers and a seasonal snowcap. Precipitation varies abruptly and radically depending on local topography, with the main dynamic being orographic rain produced over windward mountains by the prevailing trade winds from the northeast and compensatory rain shadows in their lees: Mount Waialeale on Kaua‘i receives up to 486 inches of rain, more than forty feet, the highest total in the world; not far away, in its rain shadow, is a desert. The northeasterly trades are so predictable—blowing at or above twelve miles per hour 50 percent of the time in summer and 40 percent of the time in winter—that the windward/leeward (ko‘olau/kona) distinction orders climate, vegetation, and land use a priori in Hawai‘i.17 With the exception of areas too low to create orographic clouds (below about one thousand feet) and that are therefore largely arid—such as West Molokai and much or all of Lana‘i, Kaho‘olawe, and Ni‘ihau—windward areas are wet, and leeward ones are dry, irrespective of elevation. Windward coasts (with the previous exceptions) are well watered yet see some sunshine most days. With increasing elevation, windward ranges are wetter and more often cloud shrouded, clothed in deep forest dominated by ohi‘a lehua (Metrosideros collina), until the alpine zone, above eight to ten thousand feet. At higher elevations, the flanks and lees of mountains are covered in mixed mesic, or medium rainfall, forest dominated by koa (Acacia koa). Low leeward areas once grew a distinctive, variegated dry forest, though this has been very nearly wiped out since human colonization and replaced with grasslands. Precipitation gradients are commonly extreme, as much as 118 inches in a mile, though more typically 25 inches per mile.18 Nearly every main island has rain forests just around the corner, so to speak, from semiarid zones or neardeserts that see fewer than 20 inches per year. In between can be found a representative of every climate zone on Earth from subtropical to alpine, save true tropical humidity and polar cold. Mark Twain wrote in 1866 that if a person were to stand at the top of Mauna Loa, “he could see all the climes of the world at a single glance of the eye, and that glance would only pass over a distance of eight or ten miles as the bird flies.”19 Indeed, on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, one can deliberately select one’s preferred weather conditions by simply driving for five to twenty minutes. Even so, fully half the islands’ area is below two thousand feet, with a stable year-round temperature ideal for cultivating the oceanic crop suite: temperatures average 77 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level and vary seasonally about 5 degrees Fahrenheit at Hilo and 6.5 degrees at Honolulu. Below five thousand feet elevation, the seasonal variation does not exceed 9 degrees, and this is almost exclusively where the precontact Hawaiians lived and worked.20

Wet and Dry

17

Insularity and isolation, more than any other factors, have shaped Hawai‘i’s natural history. Because of the “volcanic conveyor belt,” habitats have continuously evolved, fragmented, and disappeared as new islands have arisen, and old ones have eroded and disappeared.21 As specks of land in the mid-Pacific ocean, any animals or plants that reached Hawai‘i had to do so over vast expanses of water— limiting potential immigrants to those that could fly or ride exceptionally well. There were no reptiles, amphibians, or land mammals, save one species of bat, in Hawai‘i prior to human settlement. This lack of representation of groups common on more varied continental areas is called disharmony and extended even to types of insects and birds that presumably had better chances of colonization, so great was the difficulty of successfully establishing a population. Hawaiian flora and fauna is disproportionately made up of members of a handful of families. In fact, the prehuman Hawaiian flora of eleven hundred species can be accounted for by just 275 successful immigrants over 27.5 million years, a rate of one introduction every 100,000 years.22 A corollary of disharmony is impoverishment of diversity— that is, a biota made up of less than the full complement of species that made up the ecosystem in which the immigrant organism evolved: competitors, congeners, predators, and parasites. Successful immigrants into a depauperate environment are then free to move into and adapt to open habitat niches, a process called radiation, often rapidly speciating into a variety of new forms unprecedented in their ancestry. As an archipelago of continuously transforming high islands with radical climatic gradients over short distances, Hawai‘i presented successful colonists with a dizzying array of different habitat types, resulting in stunning biodiversity and a level of endemism unknown elsewhere in the world. Among plants, insects, spiders, moths, birds, freshwater fish, shrimp, and snails adapted to trees, land, and freshwater, evolution produced not only new species but entire genera unique to Hawai‘i. Among the forest birds is the most spectacular example, the Drepanidae, or Hawaiian honeycreepers, with forty-two historically known species exhibiting an extraordinary diversity of color, form, and lifestyle, all descended from a single ancestor.23 Had Darwin landed in Hawai‘i before the Galápagos, he might have had the evidence he needed to come out with his theories decades earlier. Yet in the process, it is typical of colonizing organisms to lose the extraordinary powers of dispersal that got them to the islands and shed defensive characters that no longer serve any purpose. With no herbivorous animals, Hawaiian plants generally have no thorns or toxic compounds: mints have lost their oils and raspberries, their spines. This loss of defenses would come back to have devastating consequences when Hawai‘i was suddenly “reconnected” with continental flora and fauna with the advent of Polynesians and later, Europeans and Asians.24 Molokai had its share of unique species, including, in the historic period, the endemic birds kākāwahie, or Molokai creeper (Paroreomyza flammea); ō‘ō, or

18

Wet and Dry

Molokai or Bishop’s ō‘ō (Moho bishopi); mamo, or black mamo (Drepanis funerea); and numerous plant species, including the lo‘ulu palms Pritchardia forbesiana and P. lowreyana and the tree hibiscus Kokia cookei. SE T T L E M E N T O F M O L O KA I

Molokai, the fifth largest of the eight main islands, is 38 miles long and 10 miles wide at its widest point, with an area of 260 square miles and a coastline of 100 miles. It lies 25 miles southeast of O‘ahu, 8.5 miles northwest of Maui, and 9 miles north of Lana‘i—a position in the center of the archipelago and thus at the locus of four of the archipelago’s most important channels and essential sea travel routes. This location may have been memorialized in its name, as molo means “to interweave and interlace,” and kai means “sea” or “seawater.” Or the name is of unknown, ancient origin and cannot be translated—though this seems unlikely given the wealth of layered linguistic tradition around names in Hawai‘i and Polynesia, generally. (The use of the glottal stop, Moloka‘i, is likely a modern mistake, possibly the invention of singers in Honolulu in the 1930s who tailored syllables to rhyme in their verses.)25 The island is an amalgamation of two originally separate volcanoes; topographically and climatically, they retain their differences. The eastern half of the island is dominated by steep mountains; the tallest is the 4,970-foot Kamakou peak. Its north shore, the Ko‘olau district, consists of precipitous sea cliffs, at 3,000 feet the highest in the world, plunging into deep water. At its center is a large collapsed caldera, drained by three deep, steep-sided valleys open to the sea: Waikolu, Pelekunu, and Wailau. All are heavily forested and virtually inaccessible except by sea—and even then sometimes only in the summer months, when the giant northerly swells and the high trade winds that make landings impossible much of the rest of the year subside. At the eastern tip of the island is a narrow bay opening into another long valley, Hālawa, which can be reached overland from the south. East Molokai’s south slope, the Kona district, known locally as mana‘e side to the east of Kamalō (from mana‘e, east, versus malalo, or west of Kamalō), is deeply dissected by roughly fifty sets of alternating narrow valleys and ridges, some nearly vertical in the upper reaches, where they are known collectively as the canyon country. The higher elevations are forested, while, moving downward and southward, rain shadow progressively dries the landscape. Some perennial streams exist here and, at the immediate coast, abundant groundwater surfaces near shore or just offshore in shallow sea water. The south side, sheltered from trade swells by mountains and from southerly winter kona storms by Lana‘i, has some of the most developed fringing reefs in the islands. The middle portion of Molokai is a gradually sloped shield formed by lava from the eastern volcano and the alluvial outwash plains from both ancient volcanoes, becoming progressively more arid toward the west. The West End is dominated by the

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19

remnants of Mauna Loa, now reduced to 1,381 feet. Its landscape is arid or semiarid except for the peak itself. There are sandy beaches facing fringing reefs on the south side but only isolated beaches, without developed reefs, on the west and north sides. As on the East End, the West End’s north coast consists mainly of sea cliffs exposed to the rough waters of the open ocean. Midway along, extending seaward at the base of the cliffs, is Kalaupapa Peninsula, a more recent volcanic product shaped liked a low lava table, or, as its name indicates, a stone leaf lying on the sea. Probably the earliest Hawaiian settlement site known for Molokai was found in the backshore dunes at the seaward entrance to Hālawa Valley, likely settled by AD 1200–1400.26 While the first archaeologically recorded Hawaiian sites, such as the Bellows dune site on windward O‘ahu, came earlier, perhaps as early as AD 800, the initial settlement at Hālawa was presumably typical of Hawaiian subsistence patterns in the colonization period.27 Excavation of this stratified site revealed the long-term occupation of a small, nucleated fishing camp consisting of several dwellings and hearths, loosely grouped and probably inhabited by a small group of people. Artifacts recovered indicate direct affinities with the material culture of the Marquesas, according with the broad archaeological consensus that the initial colonization of Hawai‘i originated in that island group.28 Hālawa has many advantages that would have made it ideal for early Hawaiians, and judging from the archaeological record, it is exemplary of how early Polynesian settlers fit their economy and culture into Hawai‘i’s physical environment and how that environment in turn shaped the development of Hawaiian culture. Three kilometers long, the valley is nearly one kilometer wide at the coast, narrowing to less than half a kilometer inland. Unlike the other large valleys on the north coast, where plunging sea cliffs and exposure to winter surf make access difficult, Hālawa is somewhat sheltered in a bay, with a headland to the north and a cape to the southeast blocking swells and a navigable river mouth and estuary easily accessible to canoes. The bay and shoreline have abundant invertebrates and fish. Fossil remains from the earliest period show a preponderance of mollusks and inshore fish in the diet—though no tuna or other deepwater species—as well as pigs, dogs, and rats.29 Hālawa’s name means both “curve,” perhaps in reference to the bay, and plenty (lawa) of stems (ha), either of kalo, sugarcane, coconut, or banana—indicating its potential for Polynesian agriculture.30 Everywhere in Polynesia, where conditions allowed, well-watered but sunny windward valleys, ideal for kalo cultivation, were the first locations settled. These have been called the “salubrious cores” that sustained settlers until they could multiply and expand out into less favorable environments. The Hālawa Stream is reliably perennial, draining a large watershed in the high mountains of East Molokai through four tributaries. Rainfall high in the watershed is above one hundred inches and above sixty inches at the head of the

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valley but just twelve inches at the beach, making for mostly sunny conditions in the low-lying fields.31 In the colonization period, kalo would have been grown in the low, swampy flats around the mouth and the estuary, where clay soils that can hold water are well developed. The degree of water control required in the earliest stages is uncertain; cultivation may have been ad hoc, in semipermanent, unlined fields. Shifting or “swidden” cultivation of kalo in cleared patches of forest farther up the valley where slopes are steeper and soils less developed is attested to by much evidence of charcoal flecking in the strata, indicating periodic burning for clearing.32 According to models proposed by Kirch and others, after colonization of Hawai‘i by one or more small canoe loads of settlers, population numbers would have increased slowly for the first four hundred to five hundred years of occupation.33 Evidence from what is called the development period in Hālawa Valley, from first settlement to about AD 1400, points to just such a gradual population expansion. The fossil sequence shows a similarly gradual change in subsistence as fish, important early on, decreases as a percentage of diet relative to pigs and dogs. (The record of dental caries in these animals also shows that they were fed a mostly vegetarian diet.)34 There was a gradual increase in clearing the low Acacia koadominated forest inland for traditional swidden cultivation, as evidenced by an increase of charcoal in the first few hundred years of occupation and the presence of fossils of land-snail species specific to that forest.35 The forest clearance set in motion a feedback process: as the forested slopes of the watershed were burned off and tilled, erosion increased, including the collapse of the steeper valley-side slopes, shown by accumulations of layered tallus, higher up in the watershed. In turn, Hawaiians retained more of these slopes with stone terracing, at narrower contours as the slopes become steeper. In this period, the interior of Hālawa was likely not settled but was extensively exploited.36 This pattern of increasing exploitation of the valley took two forms: an expansion of the land area under cultivation and an increase of yield per unit area of land already under cultivation by shortening crop and fallow cycles—a process referred to as agricultural intensification. Intensification can proceed by two routes: one, greater inputs of labor, mostly in the form of mulching and fertilizer; and two, large investments in permanent built infrastructure such as stone walls, stonelined ditches, and drainage structures, called by archaeologists landesque capital intensification. In Hālawa, the archaeological record shows a predominance of the latter. The historical landscape, reconstructed in the excavation series, shows a gradual progress toward greater complexity, increasingly in scale and speed during the “expansion period” from AD 1400 to 1650. In the valley floors, wet kalo pondfields were constructed with stone facing and pounded clay floors and irrigated by means of ditches and headgates linked together in elaborate, reticulate systems much like the rice terraces of Bali. Hawaiian terraces differ from the Indonesian,

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though, in that they are squarish in plan and do not follow slope contours so closely—instead being organized into a hierarchical sequence of ditches and drops that mirrored the social hierarchy, with the most powerful people holding rights to the head of the diversion and the least powerful people the tail.37 Archibald Menzies, the Scottish surgeon and naturalist who accompanied Captain George Vancouver’s British expedition to the Pacific in 1792, described an especially fine example of Hawaiian hydraulic engineering at Waimea on the north shore of O‘ahu: The aqueduct which waters the whole plantation is brought with much art and labor along the bottom of the rocks from this north-west branch, for here we saw it supported in its course through a narrow pass by a piece of masonry raised from the side of the river, upwards of 20 feet and facing its bank in so neat and artful a manner as would do no discredit to more scientific builders. Indeed the whole plantation is laid out with great neatness and is intersected by small elevated banks conveying little streams from the above aqueduct to flood the distant fields on each side at pleasure, by which their esculent roots are brought to such perfection, that they are the best of every kind I ever saw.38

Farther up the valley on steeper, narrower streamside slopes, partially and intermittently irrigated and dryland, or rain-fed, terraces were built for growing varieties of kalo requiring less water. On the highest and driest terraces, sweet potato, ‘uala, would have been grown in preference to kalo. Dryland terraces averaged three meters wide, following the slope contours, unlike house terraces and wet pondfields, which were squarish in plan. In addition, numerous stone-walled pens attached to the habitation structures of fields show the growing importance of animal husbandry.39 Beyond these terraces was a third agricultural form known as colluvial slope cultivation, where a mix of crops of roots, tubers, leaves, and tree fruits and nuts were tended in eroded sediments that accumulated at the base of valley slopes. These included ‘uala; yams; bananas; pia (arrowroot); breadfruit in limited locales; nonsubsistence crops such as kukui nuts (Aleurites mollucana) for lighting, medicine, and flavoring; olonā (Touchardia latifolia) for cordage; wauke (paper mulberry) for kapa cloth; and kava (Piper mythysticum) for ritual consumption. Robert Hommon described the Hawaiians’ extensive alterations in areas receiving between five hundred and one thousand millimeters of annual rainfall— barely enough for ‘uala cultivation—as a form of surface runoff management or floodwater irrigation: “Planters subtly transformed entire local landscapes with stone structures including walls, mounds, check dams, and terraces, as well as sprawling forms defying simple description, that perhaps served as combinations of dam, lithic mulch, and barage wall.”40 But the key parameter was geochemical: success in growing Polynesian crop species in Hawai‘i’s volcanic soils is limited by the presence of necessary nutrients; new and young lava substrates are insufficiently

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broken down by weathering, while mid- and old-age upland soils have their minerals leached away by rainfall. Pondfield irrigation is only possible on older terrains with incised valleys and clay streambed deposits. Yet in the upper reaches of those valleys, slope erosion exposes new rock, and accumulated sediments on lower slopes and toes have a higher “base saturation” of necessary minerals such as phosphorus and nitrogen than older leached slopes.41 Though purposeful landscape alteration was part of colluvial slope cultivation, it was an extensive practice, rather than an intensive one, with much lower labor inputs required than intensive pondfield cultivation, and it was inserted into the natural community instead of replacing it—an example of what is called an agroecosystem. Such landscapes have been archaeologically described in Mākaha Valley, O‘ahu, South Kohala, and Hawai‘i and in Hālawa Valley, Kawela, and Kaulaupapa Peninsula on Molokai.42 A study by Natalie Kurashima and Patrick Kirch using GIS modeling has suggested that colluvial cultivation had the potential of doubling the amount of cultivable land on Molokai over that achieved with pondfields and dry terracing.43 In the expansion period, the growing Hawaiian population moved out of the “salubrious cores” of Hālawa and other valleys into progressively more marginal areas. Taking the extensively documented Hālawa case, by 1400 the valley’s residents had expanded out from the nucleated village of the coastal dune site (from about 100 to 350 persons over this period) and established permanent homes up the valley and in several tributaries. Their dwellings were dispersed among their terraces, in loose groupings on low ridges embedded in the cultivated landscape. From 1400 to 1500, inland sites at Hālawa proliferated, meshing well with a raft of evidence from all over Hawai‘i of a demographic explosion from 1200 to 1650. Hālawa’s population was probably between 350 and 600 persons at the end of this period. The model of exponential population growth from the first canoe loads until 1450 is borne out by the archaeological record of settlement patterns showing a clear interlinking of population growth and agricultural intensification, with neither one preceding or driving the other but each sustaining the other in a kind of symbiosis.44 The kinds of changes seen in the archaeological record in Hālawa are also seen elsewhere on Molokai—including Wailau Valley and Kalaupapa Peninsula, where sites have been excavated, and all over the Hawaiian archipelago as settlement expanded and radiated into lowland areas outside the primary windward valleys. In the expansion period, Hawaiians came to be everywhere, even inhabiting the remote islets Nihoa and Necker northwest of Kaua‘i, for several hundred years. Kirch has written: “There is scarcely an area in the lowlands (if it receives greater than 500 mm rainfall and is not a steep cliff ) that upon archaeological reconnaissance does not yield evidence of indigenous Polynesian agricultural use.”45 On Molokai, Hawaiians inhabited, or at least utilized, nearly everywhere below twenty-five hundred feet elevation. Adzes from Mauna Loa quarries on the West

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End appear at Hālawa from the earliest period. Kalo cultivators moved into the south shore valleys, building conventionally stream-irrigated pondfields in those larger valleys where water was sufficient, such as Waialua, Puko‘o, Mapulehu, Ualapu‘e, and Kamalō. In others, terraces were carved out of the swampy coastal lowlands, kept brackish by the spring flow of water percolating down through the lava from the mountain forests and surfacing at the shore where the island’s freshwater lens meets the saltwater. These farmers developed a technique unique in Hawai‘i of “mound” culture in inundated paddy fields, where soil was heaped up into a mound and planted with kalo at its base, with kō (sugarcane), ‘uala, and other crops on top. In the upper valleys, dryland kalo and ‘uala were grown on terraces, along with extensive colluvial slope cultivation. Dryland crops were also grown in the Kala‘e kula (upland) area in the midsection of the island, including at Kualapu‘u, “sweet potato hill,” just downslope from it. Where there was not enough water for agriculture, Hawaiians established fishing camps, some seasonal, some permanent, even on the arid West End shoreline, which is thick with archaeological remains.46 The reliable spring flows on the mostly arid south shore also favored aquaculture in the form of offshore (loko kuapa) ocean fishponds—a form developed in Hawai‘i that reached its greatest extent on Molokai, in good part due to the protection from waves afforded by the long fringing reef. Rock walls up to a mile in length built out onto the shallow nearshore flats enclosed ponds ranging from 1 to 523 acres.47 Kurashima and Kirch state that there were “at least 73” ponds.48 The main fish species cultivated were mullet, or ‘ama‘ama (Mugil cephalis) and milkfish, or awa (Chanos chanos), both inshore species. Tides, let in through makaha, or gates blocked with wooden grates designed to let water and fish fry in but keep larger fish in, flushed the ponds while freshwater spring flow maintained a semibrackish condition that encouraged the growth of young fish. The fishpond necklace and the diversified agriculture in the valleys and uplands helped make the southeast kona shore of Molokai one of the richest food-producing regions in the Hawaiian Islands, outpacing the windward valleys in productivity and population (see figure 1).49 WAT E R , L A N D, A N D S O C I E T Y

In Hawai‘i, water is not only the critical variable in shaping the physical landscape, it is the basis of the social as well, structuring everything: production, reproduction, mythology, religion, and political economy. Its relationships and vocabulary extend into every facet of Hawaiian life. In the muddy water of the kalo field is the ‘oha (kalo sprout), which begets the ‘ohana (productive extended family). The ‘ohana members till the ka ‘āina (land, “that which feeds,” from the protoPolynesian kaainga, an extended household group and its associated estate or

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figure 1. Fishpond in East Molokai. Photo by Kristina D. C. Hoeppner.

productive landscape), making them ma ka‘āina na (living on the landers, na = substantive plural) and kama‘āina (children of the land).50 In this relationship is the origin of the world: in the stone-lined, irrigated lo‘i (kalo paddy), the ‘oha grows from the makua (parent corm). This haloa (long kalo sprout, or “long stem”) was both the firstborn son of the creator, Wakea, who died and turned into a kalo plant, and his younger son, also named Haloa, the progenitor of people. People too, call their parents makua. The lo‘i is watered by wai (freshwater), carried from the stream in ‘auwai (ditches) and hawai (wooden flumes), often of bamboo stems (ha). Wai as the giver of life is associated with Kāne, the first god and giver of water: kāne ka wai ola. In prayers and mythic tales, it is the significant basis of the spiritual and of fertility. As an element, it is the basis of waiwai (wealth)—literally, much water. Wai provides the founding structure of the human community, physical and legal: Hawaiian law, called kānāwai, “of the water,” describes first the management of water, which is itself a literal map of the division and tenure of land, and from this, the rigid system of ranking and class that overlays the productive landscape— each level called papa (stone strata), the same as the walls and terraces that divide and guide and submit the stream waters to orderly production. The lo’i and its associated irrigation works, barrages, ‘auwai, headgates, and so on are constructed by laulima (community labor, “many, many hands”). Under the rule of the luna wai (water boss), each planter receives a share of water in proportion to the amount of labor contributed, both in construction and in maintenance, to keeping the ditches

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clean and clear. Each ‘ohana tends an ‘ili (a collection of productive spaces made up of lo‘i ponds), kuauna (the banks of ponds and ditches where banana, coconut, sugarcane, and other crops are planted), mo‘o (strips of kalo or ‘uala land), and pauku (yet smaller strips, “land cut off ”). An ‘ili could be pa‘a (complete) or an ‘ili lele (jumping ‘ili), made up of various noncontiguous pieces and strips. It could be an ‘ili ‘āina, subject to the konohiki (chief ’s man) who controls the environs, or an ‘ili kupono, paying tribute directly to the ruling chief. Within it were koele (plots) cultivated for the ali‘i, who were designated by what kuakua (portion) of the land they eat: the ali‘i ‘ai ‘ili, ali‘i ‘ai ahupua‘a, “the chief who eats the subdistrict,” and the ali‘i ‘ai moku, “the chief who eats the major district or island.” Koele were also called po-a-lima (fifth-day patches), as they were worked for the chiefs on Fridays. Next were haku (lord or overseer) one, plots for konohiki; mahina ‘ai, usually dry-farmed plots for the people; and kihapai, plots for the tenants. Together, all the ‘ili belong to an ahupua‘a, the basic political division in Hawai‘i.51 At the top of the ahupua‘a, generally organized as a single watershed demarcated by ridgelines, are the mountains and the uninhabited forested uplands, wao (wild, unpeopled), where wild foods and birds are gathered; next are the kula lands, where ‘uala and other dry crops are grown, where pili grass is gathered for thatching houses and where groves of kukui trees are harvested for their nuts for candles and food, and wauke (paper mulberry) trees are tended for their bark, which is pounded into kapa cloth. Then, the stream (kahawai) flows through the cultivated landscape (au) or the reticulate, irrigated pondfields to the beach (kahakai) and finally, to the sea (kai). Under the right conditions, rock-walled fishponds are built, either just inshore (loko wai) or offshore (loko kuapa), turning the space where the freshwater (wai), meets and mingles with the saltwater (kai), into fat fish, another kind of waiwai. Fishponds effectively encircled the sea, attaching it and assimilating it to the controlled relations of production of the land; they complete the linkage between the top of the watershed and the sea in both physical-environmental terms and political terms. Hawaiian space, bounded by the relation between water and land, is a fundamentally islanded space: the productive landscape is segmented and divided into ever-smaller pieces, each an island with its own water supply, isolated yet linked with others in a larger archipelago, which is itself surrounded by trackless, unproductive, uncontrolled wastes: the lo‘i and mo‘o within the ‘ili, the groves and patches within the kula, the stream surrounded by the wao of the forests; the ahupua‘a by the moku, the island surrounded by other islands, and they by the endless sea, where no chiefs claim rights. As physical space, land, and water is structured by environmental constraints, so too is it structured by the social hierarchy with its myriad subtle gradations, divisions, and constraints. And, vice versa, Hawaiian social space is fundamentally structured by the environment. The two are intimately grafted onto one another and are illegible as independent ideas (see map 2).

map 2. Map from 1901 showing locations of ahupua‘a land divisions and fishponds.

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E N V I R O N M E N TA L I M PAC T S O F SE T T L E M E N T

The landscape was extensively transformed by people, both to fit their needs and inadvertently. Forests covering much of the lowlands were cleared, especially the leeward dry forests. When Europeans arrived, many remarked on the treeless character of the Hawaiian coastal uplands, which seem to have been mainly grasslands with interspersed fields and stands of trees extending as much as four or five miles inland in some areas.52 Archaeology indicates, through pollen cores and land-snail fossils present, for example, at the base of Diamond Head, O‘ahu, that dry forests grew down to the sea when Polynesians arrived. There had been few or no original grasslands.53 Prior to humans, there had been little or no fire away from active volcanic zones, and anthropogenic fire would have quickly transformed the dry and mesic lowlands, leaving isolated pockets of dry forest remnants and vast areas of more fire-adapted species such as pili grass, favored for thatching. More recent evidence from stratigraphy on the ‘Ewa Plain of O‘ahu suggests that, even prior to Hawaiian burning, the introduced Polynesian rat may have decimated forest plant species by eating seeds and fruits unadapted to herbivores. One study argues: “The main source of destruction of the native forests was the introduced Polynesian rat, Rattus exulans, not Hawaiian agricultural clearing and burning.”54 In his memoir, Patrich Kirch reflected: “It is a sobering thought that the delicate and vulnerable Hawaiian lowland forests may have been subject to a tidal wave of exploding rat populations, hundreds of thousands of little jaws munching away at the defenseless vegetation.”55 Rat predation on native birds, an unusually high proportion of which were ground nesting, especially in the lowlands, was also likely devastating.56 Whether or not the Polynesian rat preceded them in destruction, the human colonists clearly did their part: the expansion of ‘uala culture by forest clearance was particularly widespread and devastating, as the ubiquity of “burn layers” in the archaeological record attests.57 Evidence of the former forests on the now dry and nearly treeless West End is plentiful both in the presence of the vestigial pockets of trees that can still be seen in the deepest gulches of Mauna Loa and in Hawaiian tradition: the peak area was celebrated for a type of mythic poison trees, kalaipahoa, and for its marvelous o‘hia lehua groves, where every traveler was urged to make a lei of lehua blossoms.58 By 1600, at minimum 80 percent of Hawaiian lands below fifteen hundred feet were extensively altered; Kirch believes the figure to be closer to 100 percent.59 Studies of windward O‘ahu provide an intriguing indication of former lowland forest composition: Pritchardia, or lo‘ulu palms, once apparently a dominant species, went quickly in steep decline, limited thereafter to refugia such as Nihoa and the several tiny sea stacks off Molokai that even today remain covered by palm forests. One researcher, Stephen Athens, wrote: “Pollen diagram after pollen diagram from the coastal lowlands of O‘ahu show the same thing. The native forests

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of the lowlands disappeared in a matter of centuries. By AD 1400 to 1500 there was essentially nothing left.”60 With deforestation came erosion. Erosion sequences from O‘ahu have been carefully documented: over a comparatively brief time, a number of centuries, the coastline was totally transformed with the creation of square miles of new land, as bays infilled into new valley floors, and advancing sand barriers pushing out from stream deltas created marshy flatlands behind them. For the first time in these islands, enough marsh habitat existed for several species of duck, rail, and gallinule to tarry on their great Pacific migratory routes and establish breeding populations. Some are now recognized as unique subspecies—a case of evolution responding to anthropogenic environmental change in a very brief time frame.61 Most of the currently observable alluvial fans in the state are of recent vintage, products of manmade hillslope erosion.62 Based on these and similar geomorpholical changes seen on O‘ahu and elsewhere from prehistory and documented on Molokai in the historic period (detailed in chapter 3), it is reasonable to assume that the same processes were at work on Molokai prior to European contact in 1778, especially on the kona shore, with its shallow reef flats stretched out below the steep, dry, easily eroded southern slopes of the ancient volcanoes. Polynesian expansion brought equally massive impacts to the biota. The fossil record shows wholesale extinctions of land snails and birds (these are far more easily preserved than insects and other invertebrates, about which little is known). Recent, startling discoveries in dunes at Mo‘omomi, Molokai, and in limestone sinkholes near Barber’s Point, O‘ahu, have revealed that the Hawaiians’ hunting and habitat destruction pushed at least one-half of the known land bird species, at minimum thirty-eight previously unknown birds, and between one-third and one-half of the land mollusks into extinction.63 With the depletion of easily obtainable wild foods came a greater reliance on agriculture, setting in motion a cycle of cropland expansion, agricultural intensification, and population growth, which in turn had their feedback regime in deforestation, followed by erosion, which affected nearshore reefs and bays, decreasing the productivity of the marine environment and in turn forcing an ever-greater reliance on agriculture.64 For Hawaiians, it was a mixed bag: there was less wild food but more farmed from pondfields, terraces, and fishponds—more reliable and less vulnerable to drought, weather, and pests. A fragile environment had been transformed into a rich agricultural landscape. However, this change came at a price—one perhaps higher in social terms than in environmental losses. PAT T E R N S F R OM PAC I F IC A N T H R O P O L O G Y

Events in Hawai‘i were part of a broad pattern across Polynesia of anthropogenic environmental change, almost always following a version of the same script: early

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exploitation of wild foods, leading to extinctions, especially of birds; deforestation for swidden agriculture aided by fire and introduced animals, leading to erosion and dessication; and agricultural intensification in response to slope erosion, population growth, and decreasing productivity of the nearshore marine environment. The transformation of once-forested landscapes on Pacific islands following Polynesian settlement into treeless grasslands or fernlands dominated by pyrophytic plants has been extensively documented. It was especially emphatic in New Zealand, Mangaia, Easter Island, and the Marquesas, as well as Hawai‘i.65 Across the Pacific, archaeologists have found evidence of colonization: charcoal and fossilized bones, shells, nuts, and pollen well preceding the first dated habitation sites.66 This is an indication of both the odds against the preservation of early coastal sites on unstable, flood-prone sand dunes and the odds against successfully locating and excavating them. But in significant part, this is because the environmental degradation set in motion by the arrival of humans was devastatingly rapid. This fact is due to Polynesian practices, as we have seen, but also, significantly, to the structure of island biogeography that gives island biotas “their extreme vulnerability, or susceptibility, to disturbance,” in the words of botanist Raymond Fosberg.67 In remote Polynesia—and nowhere there more so than Hawai‘i—island biogeography reaches its apogee. Just as the forests had evolved without fire, rooting pigs, or dessication, birds—whether seabirds nesting on the exposed ground by the millions or geese that had actually lost their ability to fly—had never been hunted, by humans or rats, and quickly succumbed to both. The Polynesians in their march encountered flightlessness on nearly every major island they settled; the record of extinctions in Hawai‘i is matched generally by all major Pacific island groups so far adequately studied. In New Zealand, for example, the thirteen species of moa (in Maori, as in Hawaiian, meaning chicken or chicken-like running birds) were virtually all eliminated by Polynesian settlers. A poignant detail is provided by the fact that Polynesian sailors knew that unusual concentrations of seabirds over the open ocean indicated the proximity of uninhabited islands. “It is no exaggeration,” Kirch writes, “to say that among the Remote Oceanic islands, the ‘biodiversity crisis’ began not recently but 3,500 years ago with the Lapita expansion.”68 These outcomes are not cases of environmental determinism in history but the complex and dynamic interaction between Polynesian social structures, economies, introduced organisms, and a series of similar yet unique island environments—outcomes predictable, to some extent, based on the variables involved yet different on every island. Patrick Kirch invoked Charles Tilly’s concept of “historically grounded huge comparisons of big structures and large processes” to “help establish what must be explained” and to shine light back on the human, contingent, and social causes.69 Historical environmental change visible to the techniques of anthropology is one such large process, played out at the level of the island: “An ecological process with enormous consequences for island landscapes and for

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island cultures . . . In these large environmental ‘structures’ one seeks clues to certain big processes of political economy.”70 One such locus is how population growth interacts with the environment. Archaeological evidence sketches a series of similar progressions across most of the Pacific that accord with mathematical models of demographic increase. Most every place in Remote Oceania, on the eve of European contact, had reached a near-maximum population density.71 Remote Oceania (Polynesia, Micronesia, and extreme eastern Melanesia) had much higher growth rates than Near Oceania (most of Melanesia and insular Southeast Asia) for several conditions and reasons. The first was a better disease environment, with no mosquitoes capable of carrying malaria east of the Solomons, due to the same dispersal difficulties encountered by other immigrants to remote islands. Next in importance were plentiful marine and terrestrial foods, at least initially; the lack of competing human inhabitants on arrival; and the cultural reasons for high fertility and voyaging already discussed.72 In every case, there is a familiar relationship between population increase, agricultural expansion and intensification, and environmental degradation. Equally strong is a corollary relationship between environmental stress and increasing social hierarchy. Kirch in On the Road of the Winds uses as his textbook case that of the island of Mangaia, in the southern Cook Islands, because of its extreme geological features and history of environmental and social disaster. It is an ovoid island, fifty-two square kilometers, with an eroded volcanic core surrounded by makatea ramparts as much as two kilometers wide. This is a limestone karst landscape riddled with caves and sinkholes and deeply cut by small streams that nearly disappear into the ground before ponding against the ramparts near the coast and dropping their sediment load. At these edges are swampy basins ideal for irrigated kalo culture but that account for just 2 percent of the total land area, with no more than another 18 percent available for dryland agriculture. Pollen coring and stratigraphy indicate that the island possessed extensive forests and marine and terrestrial resources, including a rich bird fauna, prior to human colonization about twenty-five hundred years ago. These resources were heavily exploited and crashed, resulting in faunal extinctions and the replacement of the forest with a pyrophytic landscape of scrub ironwood and ferns. The human population, divided into six districts with each ruled by a hereditary chief, eventually reached 150 persons per acre—very high even in Polynesian terms. Over time, competition for land became so severe that the political economy devolved into a permanent state of intertribal raiding and war, with victors seizing irrigated bottomlands and defeated groups taking refuge in cave systems on the upland makatea. There is plentiful evidence of human sacrifice and potentially outright cannibalism. In Kirch’s words, “Late precontact Mangaian society became . . . a society based on terror.”73 Similar trajectories are visible in the Marquesas; parts of New Zealand; Mangareva, which has some of the worst land degradation in Polynesia; and, most famously, Rapa Nui

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(Easter), where total deforestation led to spectacular social collapse, descent into warfare, cannibalism, and population crash. In each case of environmental degradation, there was a parallel political evolution from a social hierarchy based on rigid hereditary chiefships to a more fluid one based on earned status, typically in the military sphere. In Mangaia and elsewhere, this transition proceeds in lockstep with the progress of environmental degradation. Kirch has described the process as “competitive involution” (borrowing and enlarging a concept from Clifford Geertz) where rapid population growth in areas of marginal, especially dry environments led to land degradation and fierce competition over resources “between inherently contradictory hereditary and achieved status positions.74 The result was an involuted cycle of prestige rivalry and competition that led as often to the destruction of the very means of production which were the objects of competition.”75 Easter Island is only the radical nightmare scenario of population “overshoot” of scarce resources leading to social collapse; to lesser degrees this process was ongoing in much of Polynesia by the eighteenth century. Fortunately, in only a handful of them had conditions worsened to such a grim point. These few, extreme examples naturally come from islands with marginal environments, whether due to makatea geology, remoteness, and/or small size—as with Henderson, Pitcairn, or the ten other small islands that Polynesians once inhabited but had abandoned by the time of European contact.76 This can help explain the rapidity of their transit through the phases Kirch catalogs—which we might better call socioenvironmental involution. Other places in Polynesia, with fewer obvious environmental limitations, appeared to be pushing against the door of involution in late prehistory: Tonga, the Societies, and other islands in the Cooks among them. While not every case of environmental vulnerability produced competitive involution, much less crash, the record promises some ability to predict these trajectories based on geography; after all, as Braudel formulized, “living standards are always a question of the number of people and the total resources at their disposal.”77 A bigger question is: What can the record of how they choose to dispose of their resources teach us? E X PA N SIO N I N T O T H E D RY L A N D S

A new agricultural form appeared in Hawai‘i around AD 1400: intensive cultivation of ‘uala and other crops in unirrigated field systems constructed on broad slopes, mostly in leeward areas. Like the other Hawaiian farming types, this intensive rain-fed, or dryland, cultivation was unevenly distributed across the islands, being possible only where the right conditions existed: rocks old enough to form soils but not so old as to be leached and nutrient-poor, combined with enough rainfall to grow crops of mainly ‘uala, supplemented with dryland taro and kō but not so much as to leach away necessary nutrients. This “sweet spot” for sweet

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potatoes can be found only on the eastern islands—Kaua‘i and O‘ahu are too old geologically—and principally on the broad, unincised leeward slopes of Hawai‘i and East Maui running in horizontal bands between the dry coastline makai (below) and the wet forest mauka (above).78 On Maui, the Kahikinui and Kaupo field systems wrapped around the southeastern, leeward slopes of Haleakala; on Hawai‘i, traces of extensive field systems have been found in Kohala, Waimea, Kona, and Ka‘u. The best-preserved and most extensively studied, the Lower Kohala field system, covered sixty square kilometers over parts of thirty ahupua‘a and large ‘ili ‘āina with a dense, reticulate grid of stone walls delineating terraced gardens, water catchments, planting mounds, and trails, which also formed field boundaries. Interspersed among the productive infrastructure were house platforms, burial platforms, temples, and middens.79 The dryland fields were by nature less reliable food producers than irrigated pondfields, depending as they did on the vagaries of rainfall in a marginal environment where drought is a regular occurence. Kirch has suggested that farming families coped with the risks of variable climate by employing “bet-hedging agronomic strategies,” planting crops at several locations up and down the slope and thus, the rainfall gradient, to maximize their chances of a return.80 They also required more labor for weeding and especially mulching, including for “lithic” mulch, stones used to slow wind- and water-driven erosion and evaporation of moisture.81 On Maui and Hawai‘i, the women joined the men in the fields— something unknown on the other islands.82 The native Hawaiian historian David Malo wrote: “On lands supplied with running water, agriculture was easy and could be carried on at all times . . . On the kula lands farming was a laborious occupation and called for great patience, being attended with many drawbacks.”83 Areas of dryland culture, with unreliable water and thin, volcanic, chemically impoverished soils in place of the rich valley soils, were inherently marginal and more vulnerable to drought, fire, erosion, and soil exhaustion. Beyond these physical difficulties were social ones: Samuel Kamakau noted that “the women worked outside as hard as the men, often cooking, tilling the ground, and performing the duties in the house as well. This is why the chiefs of Hawai‘i imposed taxes on men and women alike and got the name of being oppressive to the people, while the chiefs of O‘ahu and Kaua‘i demanded taxes of the men alone.”84 Nevertheless, the enormous size of the larger field systems supported large populations: the Lower Kohala system may have been capable of supporting 15,480 to 30,960 persons, while the Kona field system’s population has been estimated at between 47,300 and 94,600.85 From its initial appearance, dryland cultivation on the eastern islands exploded, feeding populations that may have doubled in a single lifetime.86 By the end of the precontact period, Maui depended on rain-fed crops for 70 percent of its food, while the percentage on Hawai‘i reached 94 percent.87 On Molokai, soils on the leeward slopes with the correct rainfall were too old—most had formed

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from volcanic eruptions up to 1.4 million years earlier—and thus too mineral-poor for extensive field systems. But at Kalaupapa Peninsula, the “stone leaf ” formed at the base of the windward sea cliffs by an eruption 330,000 years ago, ideal soil conditions combined with a rainfall band between nine hundred and thirteen hundred millimeters to allow a very productive ‘uala field system, begun about 1400 and encompassing at its zenith in the nineteenth century a grid of up to four thousand walls covering a combined 230 kilometers, according to partial surveys.88 Studies of the dryland field systems indicate that they, like the irrigated valleys but in an accelerated amount of time, followed the path of intensification. Likely beginning as long fallow swidden areas carved out of the mesic forest to help support small numbers of people, they gradually became more permanent and more intensive, with labor needs and population growth rising reciprocally, leading to the rapid expansion of the area under cultivation but also to increased subdivisions within the fields.89 Productivity also trended downward as nutrients were depleted, spurring farmers to shorten fallow periods and increase mulching.90 Robert Hommon summarized the probable net effect on the dryland farmers: “Increased labor requirements, the addition of field work to women’s traditional tasks, diminished productivity, rapid population growth, reduced soil fertility resulting from shortened fallow, government levies, and finally infrastructure development that reached the limits of cultivable land—probably led to an increased frequency and degree of food stress among the commoners who were dependent on rain-fed systems.”91 Even so, the inherent instability of the dryland field systems slowed neither their expansion nor the increase in overall average production as well as population. This is in contrast to the situation in the older, western islands of Kaua‘i, O‘ahu, and probably Molokai, where the population, after expanding enormously from 1400 to 1650, reached a peak in 1650 and then went into a slow but steady decline.92 Yet on Maui and Hawai‘i, population continued to grow from 1650 to contact.93 Had population in the western islands reached the limits of their environment’s carrying capacity, or were other processes at work? Patrick Kirch outlined a theory of why population growth in Polynesia slowed, oscillated, or even reversed in many places at or about the same time: the “full land” scenario, where population pressure was felt first in a lack of access to land, not in constrained food supply, “which could often be offset through” intensification. Population densities of one hundred people per square kilometer or higher were not uncommon on many Polynesian islands, without causing famine. Instead, “cultural controls on population growth began to be implemented,” including “means of reducing fertility (celibacy, contraception, abortion), as well as of increasing mortality (infanticide, suicide voyaging, war, expulsion of certain groups, ritual sacrifice, and even cannibalism).94 The most successful of these societies self-regulated

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to adapt to their resource base before their diminishing resource base did the regulating for them. The fact that agricultural intensification is, if not entirely independent of demography, at least not deterministically produced by population pressure is one of the most interesting discoveries of Pacific anthropology. Instead, it is dependent on social variables. There is a primary relationship between production and power. In anthropological theory the salient feature of chiefdoms as distinct from other simpler modes of social organization (usually described as the domestic model of production and typically organized around many equivalent-status household units producing only enough for their subsistence) is that chiefdoms are ordered by rank and impose “social production” on the households that make it up. That is to say, a small, nonproducing class of chiefs extracts a surplus of food and goods from the majority of producers and then deploys it in the service of continuing and expanding the hierarchical relationship. In a sense, the surplus is a kind a capital accumulated and spent to sustain or increase itself, the extraction of surplus. Kirch, echoing his colleague and frequent collaborator University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, characterized the political economy of chiefdoms as “the ceaseless extraction of surplus from individual households that otherwise might be thought of as intrinsically antisurplus.”95 In Hawai‘i, status was conferred not solely by genealogy but by wealth, which took the form of food and labor extracted from the people and of ritual, status, and durable goods, such as feather cloaks, produced by commoners and specialists for the ali‘i—goods that could in turn be deployed to obtain more status and power— a system of political economy referred to as staple finance.96 Kurashima and Kirch wrote: “The political economy of precontact Hawai‘i was based fundamentally on food surpluses.”97 There have been two classic analyses of Polynesian chiefdoms, both from the mid-twentieth century (predating the postwar expansion of field archaeology in the Pacific), attempting to explain both the broad similarities and diversity of types by dividing them into three classes. The first is Sahlins’s 1954 study, “Social Stratification in Polynesia.” In it, Sahlins identifies Type III societies as simple; small (not more than two thousand people); generally based on atolls like Tokelau; and ruled by hereditary chiefs, little removed in lifestyle from commoners, who are responsible for both religious and secular guidance. Type II societies are midsized both in terms of population and island size (like Mangaia), with at least two strata of chiefs. Type I societies are large (ten thousand or more people), with distinct and often complex social hierarchies (Tonga or Hawai‘i) counting as many as seven to eight distinct strata, with separate priestly and warrior classes. In this framework, environmental limits had a direct social manifestation: greater aggregate productivity of an island or system equaled greater social differentiation between producers and

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distributors—which is to say that social stratification is ecologically adaptive. Accordingly, the physical size of the island or island system, insofar as it equates with productive potential, correlates in Sahlins’s conception directly with social typology.98 Big islands have big societies; small islands have small ones. The second classic analysis is Irving Goldman’s 1970 Ancient Polynesian Society, in which his three categories are sorted by degrees of “status rivalry” between chiefs and are called traditional, open, and stratified. A traditional society is governed by the same hereditary chief as Sahlins’s Type III; it is “conservative” and close in structure to the ancestral Polynesian model described by Kirch of the ‘qariki (hereditary leader of a common descent group).99 Open societies are typified by competition between politicomilitary claimants and are less rigid, and less religiously ordered, than the traditional type. They tend to be located on midsized islands, such as Mangaia, the Marquesas, and Easter. Stratified chiefdoms, including Hawai‘i, Tahiti, and Tonga, are rigidly divided by caste and rank and supported by elaborate religious structures yet retain some of the competitive, warlike qualities of open societies as a sort of alternate method of social advancement. Clearly, there is overlap between the two analytical frameworks; both describe the dynamic social and productive evolution of Polynesian societies, though from different optics: one resources, the other status. These optics derive from and illustrate two fundamental outlooks in anthropology: Malthus’s focus on environment and Marx’s on political economy. Both share a basic correlation with size, though only Sahlins’s ecological approach interprets it explicitly. In Sahlins’s model, greater size equals greater productive potential and therefore greater potential or tendency toward sociopolitical stratification and, when conditions are right, toward greater intensification. Simple atoll environments sustain only simple, relatively stable social types, as the opportunities for agricultural intensification are radically limited. In midsized environments—which correspond with the list of environmentally marginal islands—progress toward stratification is derailed by the shortage of good land. When the “full land” state is reached in the valley cores, intensification extends onto more marginal lands, pushing them into the cycle of degradation—deforestation, erosion, and so on—at first increasing and then markedly decreasing the carrying capacity of the land and creating conditions of competition and strife too unstable and dynamic for the rigid, stratified structure to take hold. Instead of an intermediate stage on the evolutionary road from traditional to stratified, the open society is more like another pathway, “different, more fluid,” sometimes leading to a more dire, or dead, end. Large islands, with greater productive potential and therefore more capacity to absorb population shifts and environmental stress, could take the path of intensification and still successfully accommodate more layers of human structure.

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WA I A N D M A L O‘O

In the dichotomy between the western and eastern Hawaiian islands can be seen the outline of one of the most fundamental oppositions not only in Hawai‘i but most everywhere in Polynesia; one that extends the full range from the environmental to the social and their conjuncture: the wet and the dry (wai and malo‘o)— at once the differing productive regimes and crops of well-watered, kalo-growing windward landscapes and dry, yam- and sweet potato–growing leeward ones and the correspondingly different social systems each produced.100 As each island encompassed a wet/dry distinction based on trade winds and topography, so too did the archipelago: the western islands of Kaua‘i and O‘ahu predominantly wet and kalo growing and boasting the largest irrigation complexes in the Pacific; the eastern islands of Maui and Hawai‘i predominantly dry and yam- and ‘uala growing. Molokai sits in the middle, half wet and half dry and too small and segmented to rival its larger neighbors in either character. The Hawaiians acknowledged this fundamental distinction, as their creation stories of Pele and Hi‘iaka at opposite ends of the archipelago attest.101 They also understood, as well as do Kirch and other modern scientists, how “this environmental gradient played an important role in the political dynamics of the late prehistoric Hawaiian chiefdoms.”102 The force of the dichotomy derives from the single fact that irrigated kalo is the most efficient form of Polynesian agriculture, yet land suitable for it is strictly limited and varies in direct relation to position within the archipelago. Wet kalo culture and dry ‘uala culture stand at opposite ends of a spectrum of efficiency. Pondfield kalo culture produces the highest yield from the smallest land area, with the lowest long-term labor input, requiring only a one-time investment in the capital improvements of pondfields and ditch systems, accomplished through a community labor pooling organized by konohiki appointed by the ruling chief.103 On drylands, on the contrary, the path to intensification came through quickening the cropping cycle, decreasing fallow, and squeezing more yield from fertilization and mulching. All of this was labor intensive, rather than capital intensive. Dry land then, equaled constant risk and periodic stress: first agricultural and in direct consequence, social and political, shaping a sociopolitical structure different from that of the more stable windward valleys. Sahlins writes that “the great challenge [of the dryland economy] . . . lies in the intensification of labor: getting people to work more, or more people to work.”104 The religious structure of the archipelago also attests to this geographic one. The authors of Native Planters in Old Hawaii assert evidence for different times of arrival of certain agricultural and cultural forms from elsewhere in Polynesia in Hawaiian tales of gods and their identification with different foods: “It seems likely that the four chief gods of Hawaii . . . represent distinct eras of colonization.” The first is Kāne, associated with kalo, sugarcane, bamboo, and windward valleys, who

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is central to the creation myths of Hawai‘i and therefore assumed to have arrived with the first settlers. The second is Kaneloa, associated with bananas, the ocean, and springs. The third is Kū, god of war, coconut, breadfruit, and fishing—and therefore assumed to be a latecomer because breadfruit orchards are poorly developed in Hawai‘i but fundamental to the Tahitian economy and because fishing is strictly regulated as an ali‘i prerogative, as opposed to farming, the occupation of peasants. Kū often appears in myth as Kū-the-land-snatcher, the invading, conquering chief whose war rituals are descended from ancient fishing rituals. The last is Lono, associated with sweet potatoes, gourds, and hogs, the primary foods of dry areas. The authors note that, in the makahiki festival of the new year celebrated on Hawai’i Island, the ruling chief who tours the island accepting his tribute of food and goods, the ali’i ai moku (chief who eats the land), takes the role of Lono, not Kāne, though Lono is the only god who takes human form and has no role in Hawaiian creation myths. That new influences continued to arrive in Hawai‘i in the centuries after the first colonization is attested to by considerable evidence of a renewed “voyaging era” in the thirteenth century that saw frequent interisland travel in South Pacific Polynesia and interchange between Hawai‘i and a place called Hawaiki in the Hawaiian mo‘olelo oral histories, a generic name for ancestral lands to the south of Hawai‘i—most probably Tahiti and other islands in the Society group. The voyages brought new material techniques and new crops, especially ‘uala, which was not part of the original Polynesian crop suite but a later addition imported from South America. They also brought new social and religious ideas. A key figure was the Tahitian priest Pā‘ao, who is credited with major changes to the religious and ritual practices of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. He installed there a Tahitian chief he had brought with him, Pilika‘aiea, built major luakini heiau temples at Waha‘ula in Puna and Mo‘okini in Kohala, and introduced human sacrifice and the Kū war cult. Both of these would come to dominate ali‘i practices on Hawai‘i, as intensive dryland culture of ‘uala would radically expand their economic and territorial bases there.105 The voyaging era was over by about 1400, and thereafter “the further evolution of Hawaiian society, economy, politics, and religion was a strictly endogenous affair,” yet the innovations the outsiders brought must have contributed to “a fundamental transformation in Hawaiian economic, social, and political structures” between the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century.106 First, the expansion of dryland agriculture into previously marginal leeward landscapes and the new, more aggressive ali‘i culture that oversaw and parasitized it began to shift the balance of population and power from the older western islands to the younger eastern ones. This may also, in Hommon’s words, “explain the decoupling of the Hawaiian commoner and chiefly classes” that occurred during the period.107 Unique in Polynesia, land tenure in Hawai‘i became completely alienated from the

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majority cultivators to a small class of ruling chiefs. Victorious war chiefs could displace the entire hierarchical structure of land tenure in areas they controlled at will; indeed this displacement was almost automatic in late prehistory. Also probably unique in Polynesia, commoners in Hawai‘i by the time of contact were not allowed to recite their ancestry beyond parents and grandparents—a radical impoverishment of identity in a society in which all claims to rank and power rested on recited genealogies.108 This differentiation was reflected in new concepts: nā kanaka for the common people and nā li‘i for the chiefs—a shift of categories “from clan to class” that was highly unusual in what had hitherto been a kinshipbased society and known elsewhere in Polynesia only from Tonga and Tahiti.109 There was even a class of slaves or very low-class people (kauwa), described by Handy, Handy, and Pukui as “probably the descendants of aborigines found already settled in the Hawaiian Islands when the migrants from the south came and their chiefs established themselves as overlords.” These untouchables lived apart in reservations strictly kapu—taboo, in the anglicized Tahitian—to others and were “killed at will” for human sacrifice purposes, according to the Hawaiian chronicler Kepelino, born in 1830 and himself a descendent of the voyaging priest Pā‘ao.110 While today few scholars credit the idea that the Tahitians invaded the Hawaiian Islands in the thirteenth century, Hawaiian folk memory contains references, perhaps embroidered, to such a cataclysmic change. A particularly vivid version of these events comes to us in the oral history of the venerated Molokai kumu hula (hula and chant expert) Kaili‘ohe Kame‘ekua, recorded before her death in 1931: To us, they were invaders. Pa‘ao had gone back to Tahiti and gathered thousands of people to come to Hawai‘i . . . The people on Lanai’i saw them approaching. Their red malo [loincloths] could be seen stretching from horizon to horizon. Soon the sea itself turned red with the blood of our people as thousands were slaughtered and enslaved. Those who could make their way to Kaua‘i were safe. Others hid in mountain caves. Those who were caught were used as fish bait and human sacrifices, and our people’s bones were used to decorate the tiki statues of their gods. The ali‘i people ruled through a system of chiefs. Where we had lived in unity, they made separations and distinctions everywhere among people and things. War was accepted as a way of life. They thought everything could be taken by force.111

Dryland religion, especially on Hawai‘i, was dominated by Lono and the war cult of Kū over Kāne, the god of kalo, streams, and irrigation.112 The social structure was more aggressive, with more turmoil from young chiefs rebelling against old and more frequent cycles of warfare and territorial conquest. Kurashima and Kirch describe the dryland ali‘i as “hostile and expansionistic” because of the conjuncture between their own ambition and the instability and therefore vulnerability of their economic system.113 Consequently, more pressure was put on the productive base while at the same time it was being undermined by the same environmental

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dynamic already seen. In a short period of time, from their expansion around 1650 to a peak sometime in the early eighteenth century, the great dryland field systems of Hawai‘i and Maui reached limits and began to see declining yields relative to input, even as the population continued to increase, and field units were divided into smaller and smaller pieces.114 This is the pattern of competitive socioenvironental involution. Indeed, on Hawai‘i, for several hundred years before contact, warfare between the few longestablished, windward kalo areas such as Waipi‘o Valley and the large, rapidly growing but unstable leeward areas increased. At the end of the period, there is evidence of caves adapted as places of refuge in the Kona district. Dry West Hawai‘i appears to have been primed to head down the Mangaian road, and had it been an isolated world, it might have found an end there. But it was part of a much larger system and could turn its stress-derived energies, what Sahlins calls its “historical dynamism,” to advantage by turning to conquer wetter, windward areas that had not reached the same limits.115 The wet/dry dichotomy correlates with duration of settlement and so with deeper, and thus better, genealogies in the western islands versus the eastern. In consequence, leeward chiefs coveted windward kalo lands for ritual legitimacy as well as for the productivity of their landscapes.116 The archetypal story comes from the sixteenth century, when the Hawai‘i chief Umi-a-Liloa, son of the chief Liloa by a low-ranked chieftess, is driven out by his half brother from his inheritance of Waipi‘o Valley, the only large kalo valley on the entire island. Exiled to the arid plateaus in the interior, Umi becomes a master farmer and pig herder, feeding the oppressed people there, who then help him to reconquer Waipi‘o, where he builds his war temple. Subsequent Hawaiian history is largely that of Maui and Hawai‘i chiefs who, when not attacking one another, were campaigning to seize the windward and western lands. Robert Hommon, noting the prevalence of marriages between Hawai‘i and Maui chiefs sealed with gifts of food and other forms of wealth and predicated on genealogical exchanges and the prevalence of wars between such clans, called them “cousin’s wars.”117 With his unification of Hawai‘i in the wake of Cook, Kamehameha the Great, Umi’s descendent, repeated the myth and fulfilled it; then, in unifying the archipelago under his rule, he replayed it on a grand scale: upstart dry West Hawai‘i finally subjugated the ancient salubrious cores.118 Kirch sums up the full, complex dynamic as a “set of linked feedback loops” between economic change, population pressure, and environmental limits and variability, causing food and “staple finance” insecurity, as well as drivers in the specific cultural context, including intensified status rivalry and competition and conquest warfare. On the eve of contact, he explains: “The aggressive, expansionist, Ku-cult centered polities of Maui and Hawai‘i were precisely those most dependent on intensified dryland field cultivation. In Hawai‘i and Maui, and especially in their leeward regions that constituted the ancestral seat of the most powerful and

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aggressive kings, the limits of increased productivity even with significant labor inputs (including the addition of female labor in field cultivation) had probably been reached by the end of the seventeenth century. And the increasingly frequent objects of their aggression became the western islands of Moloka‘i, O‘ahu, and Kaua‘i, rich in irrigated pondfields and fishponds.”119 E XC E P T IO NA L M O L O KA I

Molokai, in certain locales, was a rich food producer and an irreplaceable stopover for moving armies, but these spots were too few and far between for the island as a whole to sustain population centers comparable to the larger islands. The Hālawa, Wailau, Pelekunu, and Waikolu Valleys thrived, as did the larger southern valleys, especially those joined with major fishpond complexes. These places, big enough to produce a surplus that could be siphoned off but too small to defend themselves, were vulnerable to invasion and control from outside and to the intensification imposed by conquering, parasitic chiefs. But other places were either too small or too inaccessible to be powerfully attractive to outside forces. Western and upland areas were too poor, too sparsely populated, and too far from canoe landings where armies could disembark to be effectively subdued or occupied, as the people simply melted into the woods and shadows. The Kala‘e area is celebrated in Hawaiian tradition for its stubborn independence. Its ali‘i were said to be so proud that they kept only their own kapus, even in the presence of higher-ranked chiefs.120 Kala‘e was also known as a place of kauwa (slaves or low-status individuals), who frequently lived on the margins of the cultivated areas of settlement, such as in the kula uplands and forests: “Kala’e pe’e kakonakona” (Kala‘e hides and avoids contact.121 Another word for kauwa, reported by Malo, was nahelehele, people of the wild woods.)122 Molokai acquired a mythology of resistance and its people a reputation for sorcery. Many legends in the ethnographic corpus describe powerful invaders repelled by the spiritual force of the weaker, less numerous Molokai people: O Molokai i ka Pule o’o (Molokai of the Powerful Prayer). The island was known for its traditional prophets (kaula), typically common men and women “of spontaneous inspiration,” in Sahlins’s words, who constituted “an alternative to the ‘organized religion’” that buttressed ali‘i rule. In a later context, Sahlins considered that the association of kaula with a popular religious revival “reinforces the sense of an anti-chief movement.”123 The greatest school of kaula kahuna in Hawai‘i was that of Lanikaula, on the East End, and its mythology centers around the hostile visits of outside chiefs and rival priests. The history of Molokai is notably replete with incidences of poisoning— typically by kama‘āina (children of the land) using poison against stronger malihini (outsiders). A legendary grove of trees on Mauna Loa, the kalaipahoa, was said to have intensely poisonous wood that could be made into weapons or powder. Kamehameha’s invaders were said to have been killed en masse by pule o‘o—though

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at least one local informant insisted that the Hawai‘i people were not prayed to death but were fed sweet potatoes mixed with ‘auhuhu, a common fish poison.124 L E S S O N S : A S O C IO E N V I R O N M E N TA L C A L C U LU S

Because of the central role of irrigation in Hawaiian history, Hawai‘i enters into the long-running historical debate over the supposed correlation between largescale irrigation worldwide and Marx’s “oriental despotism,” as advanced by Karl Wittfogel (who singled out late prehistoric Hawai‘i as “a crude, agro-bureaucratic hydraulic despotism”) and elaborated and extended to the American West by Donald Worster.125 This “hydraulic hypothesis” holds that the requirements of labor control and the management of large irrigation works assure the development of a bureaucratic elite that dominates the mass of producers. Handy, Handy, and Pukui, while agreeing with Wittfogel’s emphasis on irrigation in Hawai‘i, argued that the ali‘i overlay and dominance of the windward valleys was not inherently despotic.126 Kirch went further, arguing that it is intensification itself, not irrigation per se, that attends social complexity: “The neglect of intensive dryland cultivation by anthropologists and archaeologists . . . has masked the fact that it was not irrigation but short-fallow dryland systems that were the most demanding of labor inputs . . . the most hierarchically structured and hegemonic Polynesian polities are usually associated, not with the irrigation-dominated production zones as the hydraulic theorists would predict, but with the intensive dryland sectors. Thus, a more inclusive analysis of Polynesian agricultural variability results in the virtual turning of the hydraulic hypothesis on its head.”127 I would qualify this by noting that, while there may be forms of irrigation without stratification in Polynesia, irrigation as intensification—that is to say, irrigation as a phenomenon of scale—is certainly implicated in stratification—though it may not be a sufficient cause. It is intensification’s quasi-industrialization of the landscape, of production, of the division of labor, not the method used, that creates stratification. It is the hierarchy, not the technology. In Polynesia, dryland cultivation at large scale is more regimented, temporally, spatially, and socially, than wet cultivation at large scale. But it is no more than a more extreme form of the same process. In Hawai‘i, both irrigation and dryland farming reached their greatest elaboration and complexity in the Pacific. And, on the eve of contact, the Hawaiian archipelago was the single most complex, hierarchical society in the Pacific. To most scholars, it had already passed out of the status of chiefdom and into that of an “archaic state,” having moved beyond a power/class structure based on kinship and toward one of divine kingship.128 To recapitulate, recent Pacific archaeology has shown that human colonization of island environments is inflected toward certain patterns according to the size,

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resource base, climate, geology, and other physical characters of the colonized place, in dynamic interaction with the characters of the colonizing society: its economy, religion, technology, fertility, and so on. Certain combinations of these characters will push the process in certain directions—trajectories, like those seen in the chiefdom typologies of Sahlins and Goldman—that do not “determine” outcomes but help to explain, and perhaps to predict, historical outcomes—and certainly cannot be ignored in the ideological service of some notion of absolute historical contingency.129 Water, the fundamental organizing principle of both the human and the natural in Hawai‘i, operates on a range of registers: metaphysical, social, and physical, but its effects are modulated according to the different scales and characters of the places and people involved. Just as wet and dry, wai and malo’o, are fundamental physical characters, so too do big and small structure the history of Hawai‘i at all levels. Bigness can be physical, as in types of resource “thickness”—such as high streamflow, fertile soils, broad valleys, or productive aquaculture—and it can be social, as in the high populations, surpluses, and stratified societies that resource thickness can sustain. It is a circular relation: social bigness thrives on physical bigness and makes more of it through intensified land use to obtain more surplus, thereby making more social bigness through stratification, and so on. The mechanism is at base environmental: given enough resources, bigness benefits from the environmental degradation inherent in human economic activity in fragile island environments in that it weakens the earlier, dispersed, diversified, presumably more egalitarian settlement pattern and strengthens centralized, simplified, intensified agriculture and the competitive involution that feeds on it. This in turn has its feedback mechanism in more cascading environmental degradation: deforestation, denudation, erosion, dessication, and extinction. This sequence proceeds at varying rates and intensities, depending on the characters involved. In small environments characterized by resource “thinness”— aridity; poor soils; physical remoteness or isolation, such as in small, steep valleys; inaccessible uplands or stormy coastlines; or in the atolls that stall out in the first, simple form of chiefdom structure—it may not get started at all or, once started, may fizzle out. Physical smallness fights social bigness, as the history of Kala‘e on Molokai suggests. Small places, like Kala‘e, can become places of refuge for politically and economically weak segments of the population; these refugia, as biologists call such pockets, ironically preserve both cultural and natural diversity because of their marginality and vulnerability, not in spite of them. But, under the right conditions, social stratification and environmental degradation will tend to produce one another reciprocally, as the larger history of Polynesian Hawai‘i attests. This conclusion has important similarities to Worster’s thesis: bigness tends toward social stratification, coercion, and monopoly control of land and resources, though scholars may argue over the comparative coerciveness of the wet versus

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dry modes in precontact Hawai‘i. In either case, bigness constitutes itself, at least in part, on the destruction of the environmental basis of small community reproduction and by seizing control over the common resources that remain, such as streamflows, fishponds, fishing rights, and access to the kula uplands, and by instigating or coercing economic development by expansion into new areas with capital-intensive infrastructure and labor-intensive production. In Sahlins’s words, “all life begins with the chiefship”—and this is because the chiefship has, in seizing power, seized the resources that give life. What I have been trying to do with these analyses is to sketch a moving picture, or series of pictures, of the physical Hawaiian universe on the eve of contact. I have tried to show some of the dynamic interaction of the environment and the social and how each was shaped in particular ways by it. With Kirch, I have tried to show that “by the end of prehistory the Pacific world was a constructed world, an ocean full of thoroughly modified, transformed, anthropogenic islands.”130

2

Traffick and Taboo Trade, Biological Exchange, and Law in the Making of a New Pacific World, 1778–1848

The postcontact period of 1778–1848 was one of radical change in Hawai‘i, at some times and in some places gradual, at other times and in other places turbulent. Molokai was not central to the largest historical events of the period, which occurred instead on the larger islands—especially O‘ahu, scene of the fiercest Hawaiian battles in the first half of the period, site of the majority of foreign shipping and commercial activity at the port town of Honolulu, and seat, after 1804, of the Hawaiian government. In contrast, Molokai would have seemed a tableau of stability. But even there, occasional violent battles shredded the social and physical fabric of native communities, and deeper, systemic changes were afoot that, at the end of the period, would lead to fundamental, even catastrophic, change: foreign people, weapons, organisms, trade goods, religion, and civic and legal institutions all came to Hawai‘i and engaged Hawaiian people, communities, institutions, and the natural systems they depended upon. This chapter will try to sketch both the larger panorama of change in Hawai‘i and the Pacific Basin in the contexts of world and regional history and the foreground details of historical change in Molokai between the end of Polynesian isolation in Hawai‘i and the Mahele, the revolution of land tenure that marked the coming of Western legal, economic, and political norms to the Sandwich Islands kingdom. M O L O KA I A N D T H E F I NA L R OU N D O F HAWA I IA N WA R FA R E

In the centuries prior to contact with Europeans, the control of Molokai passed back and forth between a series of warring O‘ahu, Maui, and Hawai‘i chiefs. As the 44

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largest and most productive of the islands “in the middle,“ Molokai was a natural resort for provisioning, especially along its protected south shore with its many fishponds, groves, and kalo lands, and for enlisting Molokai ali‘i and their troops for campaigns elsewhere. It was also a target for retribution by successive conquerors for the inevitable alliances made by Molokai chiefs with the previous ruling mo‘i, or king. Not infrequently, occupiers ravaged the place, and Molokai remained a battleground and a pawn. At the time of Captain Cook’s advent, in 1778, Molokai had been for some time under the O‘ahu king Peleioholani, and after his death in 1780, under his successor Kahahana.1 Here, Kahekili, king of Maui, came to visit Kahahana, as Kamakau relates: “The two chiefs met with many professions of affection, but Kahekili’s was feigned; he coveted O‘ahu and Molokai for their rich lands, many walled fish ponds, springs and water kalo patches. The island of O‘ahu was very fertile and Molokai scarcely less so, and Kahekili lay sleepless with covetous longing. He asked for Hālawa . . . and Kahahana gave it to him.”2 Here is a historically recorded example of the paradigmatic eastern island chiefs’ lust for the wet western islands and an example of the fine, productive state of Molokai before the nineteenth century. For some years after Cook’s visits, the Hawaiian balance of power was not greatly disturbed. In the late 1780s, what had been a handful of ships became a steadily rising tide, and warring chiefs lost little time in integrating foreign ships, weapons, and personnel into their forces. They engaged in fierce competition to obtain them, sometimes by kidnapping, seizure, or massacre. The next decade and a half saw a violent scramble to consolidate control of larger and larger territories. In 1785, Kahekili had invaded O‘ahu by way of Molokai, taking the whole of it.3 Five years later, Kamehameha, having consolidated his grip on the Big Island, invaded Maui, then ruled by Kalanikupule. He was victorious, but Kalanikupule escaped to O‘ahu; Kamehameha and his army began to pursue him but stopped on Molokai for a year to prepare an attack across the rough Kaiwi Channel that separates the two islands. According to one account, Kamehameha spent the year living at Kauluwai in Kala‘e, practiced his troops on the plains of Kaiolohia, and grew kalo at the Paikalani patch in Honomuni Valley on the East End.4 All accounts indicate that his stay was very hard on the people and the land. Vancouver observed in March 1792: “The alteration which has taken place in . . . these islands since their first discovery by Captain Cook, has arisen from incessant war, instigated both at home and abroad by ambitious and enterprizing chieftains.“ He called the devastation of “Mowee and Morotoi . . . the principal feats of Tamaahmaah’s wars, and that Rannai [Lana‘i] and Tohowrowa [Kaho‘olawe], which had formerly been considered as fruitful and populous islands, were nearly over-run with weeds, and exhausted of their inhabitants.” He continued: “The troubles . . . had hitherto so

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humbled and broken the spirit of the people, that little exertion had been made to restore these islands to their accustomed fertility by cultivation.”5 Archibald Menzies, surgeon aboard the HMS Discovery with Vancouver from 1792 to 1794, agreed that Kamehameha had employed a scorched-earth policy through Maui, Lana‘i, and Molokai: “In desolating the country by destroying the fields and plantations of the inhabitants.“ Off the West End, March 18, 1792, he wrote: “We were visited by no natives or canoes of this end of Molokai. The people we had on board told us that Kamehameha’s descent upon it had desolated the country, and that it had not yet recovered its former state of population.”6 Later that year, news of rebellion on Hawai‘i reached the chief on Molokai, prompting him to return there without attacking O‘ahu. In his absence, Kahekili regained Molokai and Maui.7 In 1795, the cycle repeated with a far stronger Kamehameha who, his strength fortified with European sailors, ships, and firearms, encountered little resistance in taking Maui and Molokai again. He went on to secure O‘ahu with a campaign that culminated in his famous victory at the battle of Nu‘uanu. The cost was particularly high. The conqueror’s army of Hawai‘i men, reported to be ten thousand to fifteen thousand strong, increased O‘ahu’s population by a quarter and ate through the island’s resources like locusts.8 Kamehameha installed himself and his court at Honolulu and focused on preparing a fleet to cross the channel to take Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau, the last islands not under his control. Visitors universally described a massive shipbuilding effort, with Euro-American and native carpenters toiling on hundreds of vessels and the king’s men bargaining hard with foreign ship captains to obtain weapons and naval stores in exchange for supplies. Various accounts place his armada at dozens of foreign and foreign-type vessels and eight hundred peleleu double-hulled canoes.9 William Broughton, who commanded one of the vessels of George Vancouver’s expedition, described O‘ahu in February 1796: “The situation of the natives was miserable, as they were nearly starving; and, as an additional grievance, universally infected with the itch. No cultivation was to be seen on shore; and, consequently, little prospect of their future subsistence. The attention of Ta-maah-maah was entirely engrossed by the vessel which the English carpenters were constructing for him.”10 Broughton and others reported that Kamehameha projected that after he conquered Kaua‘i, he would move on to an invasion of Bora Bora in the Society Islands, to compel a trans-Pacific Polynesian alliance with the Pomares clan, the rulers of Tahiti. In the meantime, O‘ahu was decimated, its people reduced to starvation or stealing food; those who were caught were killed by the ali‘i or burned alive. Death also claimed many of the occupiers, according to Broughton: “It was computed that Tamaahmaah had lost six thousand of his people by the conquest of this island, and subsequent calamities.” Once again, while preparing to conquer the next island in his advance up the chain—this time Kaua‘i—rebellion on Hawai‘i drew Kamehameha and most of his

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forces back to the Big Island, leaving O‘ahu in the hands of governors. When he returned in 1804, he would conduct his occupation differently. He realized that canoes and guns alone made a shallow foundation for controlling distant territory; to make his rule permanent, he would need to make his garrison self-supporting and to make the countryside productive with stone walls and water. He ordered his seven thousand to eight thousand Hawai‘i warriors to become farmers, settling them all over O‘ahu on under- or unused lands, including in the Nu‘uanu and Manoa Valleys and in the upper Anahulu River watershed in Waialua, on the north shore.11 Here, Kirch and Sahlins uncovered evidence of the systematic clearing and terracing of what had been uninhabited, lightly exploited forests and their transformation in a few years into a “newly-created, intensive-settlement landscape.”12 No systematic inventory exists of Kamehameha’s troop resettlements in the Hawaiian Islands, but the king did order a significant settlement in Molokai. When the king returned to Kohala, Hawai‘i, “some years after the battle of Nu‘uanu,” he asked his lieutenant Hoolepanui of Kiholo, North Kona, who had served him well in the conquests, “Where on the island of Hawai‘i would you like to dwell?” The warrior responded: “Nowhere on Hawaii.” The chief again asked, “Where would you like to go and dwell?” Hoolepanui answered, “On Molokai, where the fish is plentiful, at Kalamaula, Piliwale, Hoolehua, Holi and on to the cape.” The Hawai‘i people came, and “the natives of the land were ordered to move inland or on the lands set apart for them on the eastern side.” Along the coast of Hoolehua and Pala‘au, they built brackish water kalo lo‘i and extensive fishponds (see figure 2).13 M O L O KA I PA S SE D B Y

The first accounts of Molokai recorded by foreign sailors describe the island as a passing shore, intriguing but not offering enough inducement to halt between the known havens of the main islands. The scale and speed of Euro-American navigation rendered Molokai, a necessary stop for canoe voyages, little more than a curious sight on the one or two-day passage between Maui and O‘ahu. Along its north shore, sheer cliffs up to three thousand feet high plunge into pounding seas. Along the calm south shore, though it is alee of the trade wind and swell and shadowed by Lana‘i from kona storms and southerly swells, there are few real harbors interrupting the fringing reef and the continuous expanses of shoal waters as shallow as three feet that stretch up to three thousand feet seaward from shore from Kolo to Kumini. Instead of paddling her canoes, “Molokai ko‘ola‘au” (Molokai poles with a stick).14 The lack of extensive tree cover also deterred landing parties. Cook, coasting along the south shore, set the tone: rounding the West End, he saw “a small bay . . . with a fine sandy beach [perhaps Kaumana or Kaupoa]; but seeing no appearance of fresh water” continued to O‘ahu.15

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figure 2. East Molokai.

Vancouver described the East End this way: “The face of the country, diversified by eminences and valleys, bore a verdant and fruitful appearance. It seems to be well inhabited, in a high state of cultivation; and presented not only a rich but a romantic aspect.” But the West End “showed a gradual decrease in population, uncultivated, barren soil. This part of the island inhabited by the lower orders of the islanders, who resort to the shore for the purpose of taking fish, with which they abound.”16 Here is Menzies’s version of the same passage: “The trade wind freshening again at night enabled us to pass the west end of Molokai, which, like Lana‘i, presents a naked, dreary barren waste without either habitation or cultivation; its only covering is a kind of thin withered grass, which, in many parts, is scarcely sufficient to hide its surface apparently composed of dry rocky and sandy soil.”17 Molokai was attractive neither to trade nor navigation nor to the late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Euro-American Romantic aesthetic sensibility. The missionary Charles Stewart, passing the island en route from major ports in Honolulu, Maui, and Hawai‘i, was typical in writing: “The islands of Lana‘i, Molokai, and Kahulawe . . . at the distance of fifteen or twenty miles, are as dreary as the gloomiest imagination could paint them. Almost constantly enveloped in lowering clouds, they are as emphatically the dark mountains of the natural, as they are figuratively those of the intellectual and spiritual world. We here look in vain for those

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beauties in nature with which we once feasted our admiration to enthusiasm; for Objects we find none, Except before us stretched the toiling main, And rocks and wilds in savage view behind.”18 Molokai, close at hand but far away, familiar yet inaccessible, remained comparatively isolated and insulated from the changes brought by foreign vessels, at least for a time. T R A D E A N D B IO L O G IC A L E XC HA N G E I N T H E PAC I F IC

It has been said that when Captain Cook stepped ashore at Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island in December 1778, greeted by hundreds of Hawaiian chiefs, warriors, and priests, it was not simply another collision between the Stone Age and modern, industrializing Europe but an encounter, from a certain point of view, between two remarkably similar societies. The ships of the Royal Navy, each miniature models of the British class system, strict rank hierarchies buttressed by caste and run with autocratic discipline, found their counterparts in the Hawaiian chiefdom as baroquely stratified and authoritarian as any in the Pacific. “At Kealakekua,” Patrick Kirch wrote, “one chiefdom met another, recognizing in the other the essential structures of hierarchy and power.”19 The participants may also have recognized another point of similarity—that theirs was an encounter between two of the greatest seaborne colonizing societies in history. As Crosby and others have shown, Europe’s “portmanteau biota” was as critical to its expansion as the Polynesians’ was to their own colonization of the Pacific Islands. Cattle, white clover, wheat, weeds, and diseases underwrote the efforts of the British and others to colonize most of the world and, in temperate climes, to create “neo-Europes,” fulldress biological recreations of the home landscapes. Whereas in the Atlantic in previous centuries ecological imperialism had been a subordinate part of the project of implanting European colonists or garrisons, in the Pacific from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, imperialism’s strategy aimed primarily at implanting not populations but preferential, advantageous relations and trade flows between mobile agents of the European metropole and native groups in situ.20 Biological traffic was both a means and an end to this effort, and the transfer of organisms was quickly organized and systematized to provide fuel for an intricate globalization machine. Cook has been called the “avatar” of the “Second” British Empire: an imperialism reconfigured after the loss of the American colonies and the atrophying of the mercantile system and no longer interested in territorial jurisdiction or conquering native peoples but in spreading a newly articulated, more humane form of control, whether by direct or indirect sovereignty, manifested through trade and diplomatic relations.21 “We prefer trade to dominion,” asserted one British official in 1782. The British-French wars of 1790–1815 left the imperial project tired, spent,

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and distracted; its limited resources available outside the North Atlantic theater were deployed to search for “footholds” and way stations and a supply archipelago to support the Royal Navy, advancing trade and scientific exploration. On his Pacific cruise to attack Spanish shipping from 1740 to 1744, George Anson attempted to establish a South American base—a “halfway house” like the Dutch had at the Cape of Good Hope.22 The voyages of Byron in 1764–1766, Wallis in 1766–1768, and Cook’s three voyages from 1768 to1779 marked, in addition, a renewed search for the Northwest Passage, a British dream dating from the Tudor era, and the supposed terra australis, or southern continent. In all of these efforts, the figure of the scientist-naval officer was central, commanding small expeditions with explicit instructions to cultivate ties and trade relations with the natives and to pursue biological exchange: to seed and stock the (is)lands found along the way and to bring back potentially useful seeds to the empire.23 Cook’s orders on the first trip had been to observe the transit of Venus in Tahiti and to catalog what he saw along the way. On the third voyage, he had, in addition, secret instructions to find “a North East, or North West Passage, from the Pacific Ocean into the Atlantic Ocean” and to “carefully to observe the nature of the Soil & the Produce thereof; the Animals & Fowls that inhabit or frequent it” and “to bring home Specimens of . . . the Seeds of such Trees, Shrubs, Plants, Fruits, and Grains, peculiar to those Places, as you may be able to collect.” No secret was his duty to leave specimens from his own country behind: when the Resolution left London in June 1776, it “was a floating barnyard” loaded with “cattle, horses, sheep, goats, hogs, and poultry for New Zealand, Tahiti, and Tonga” and a Tahitian named Omai, returning with Cook from a celebrated sojourn in England after the second voyage. At Huahine, Cook had a garden planted for Omai; he had previously planted a garden in Tahiti in 1769, as Wallis had planted citrus trees there in 1767. At Ni‘ihau in 1777, Cook contributed to the Hawaiian biota English pigs and goats and melon, pumpkin, and onion seeds.24 The historian David Mackay remarked that “planting a garden in Tahiti was the botanical equivalent of taking coals to Newcastle.” Others, such as Gannanath Obeyesekere, have interpreted it as an expression of the European imperialist “improvement narrative,” wherein Cook the Civilizer introduces order into the untended wilderness “to domesticate a savage land,” rendering his imperialist mission “morally persuasive.”25 It was more likely simply pragmatic. In the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, few transoceanic voyages left port without a menagerie on deck—supplies both to consume and, where practicable, with which to stock passing shores as an investment in future voyages. The French explorer La Perouse landed goats on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and planted seeds on his march into its interior—and commented accurately in his journal that the natives had “foolishly cut down” the island’s trees “ages ago,” causing desertification.26 Even American traders did it, at their own expense, considering it a wise investment in

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the success of future voyages and good baksheesh to grease trade with native rulers. John Meares wrote of a voyage from Canton in 1788: “A certain number of cattle and other useful animals were purchased, for the purpose of being put on shore in those places where they might add to the comfort of the inhabitants or promise to supply the future navigators of our own, or any other country, with the necessary refreshments. On board of each ship were embarked six cows and three bulls, four bull and cow calves, a number of goats, turkeys and rabbits, with several pair of pigeons, and other stock in great abundance.”27 To various Hawaiian chiefs, Vancouver gave out “some vine and orange plants, some almonds, and an assortment of garden seeds” as well as goats, sheep, and a pair of cattle, one pregnant, for Kamehameha in 1790.28 In 1803, William Shaler and Richard Cleveland brought four horses from Mexican California to Hawai‘i as presents for Kamehameha (the king bought their ship, the Lelia Byrd, as the flagship of an armada to invade Kaua‘i). American whaler captains, generally unconcerned with moral persuasion, left livestock on even the smallest rocks, such as the Bonins south of Japan.29 By the 1780s, Sir Joseph Banks, veteran of Cook’s first voyage and director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, had launched a global scheme for rebuilding the mercantile system with an “unabashedly economic” program of “plant transfer” to bring production of raw materials inside the British Empire. “Botany and great power rivalry became curiously intertwined, as nations endeavoured to guard their precious colonial treasures while seeking to filch those of their competitors,” in Mackay’s words. Banks sent a Polish spy, Anton Hove, to Gujarat, India, to steal cottonseed. He organized the movement of sago and date palms to avert famines in India, of hemp and flax for naval stores, and of spices to break the Dutch monopoly and then helped sponsor prizes for the importation of cinnamon, “cochineal, silk, indigo, fine cotton, cloves, camphor and coffee.”30 And, responding to pressure from British sugar planters in the West Indies who had lost fifteen thousand slaves to hurricanes and drought from 1780 to 1787, he sent Captain Bligh, another veteran of Cook’s first trip, to Tahiti to collect seedlings of the breadfruit trees they had seen there to transplant to Saint Vincent and Jamaica as food for slaves. After the first expedition foundered on mutiny at Tahiti, Banks sent Bligh again—and succeeded, making his ship, the famous Endeavor, into “a floating garden transported in luxuriance from one extremity of the world to another.”31 As an example of the thoroughness of this traffic, the British had successfully imported over two hundred species of plants to New South Wales by 1803.32 Pacific natives were also eager for Euro-American goods and organisms. As the Euro-Americans themselves did, they filtered this trade and traffic through their own economic, political, religious, and class frameworks. When Cook stepped off at Tahiti, Kealakekua Bay, and elsewhere to further the march of the British Empire, he met powerful sets of chiefs, many trying to advance their own designs

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of Polynesian empire. In Hawai‘i and elsewhere, he and his compatriots stepped into long-running cycles of warfare for consolidation and control of districts, islands, and groups of islands. Kamehameha and other chiefs quickly saw the usefulness of Euro-American arms, ships, and personnel and launched expensive arms races that would completely reshape patterns of life in their islands. Some learned the new rules quicker than others. Kehekili, ruler of Maui, Molokai, and O‘ahu in the 1780s, frequently employed thievery and occasionally violence to procure goods; as a consequence, European and American ships gave him a wide berth and traded instead with Kamehameha, who clearly saw the advantage of courtesy and openness in dealing with the newcomers. Along with his hospitality, Kamehameha’s trading acumen was widely praised. His assertion of kapu, or taboo, control over hogs, the cattle that had expanded from Vancouver’s pair into vast herds, and later, sandalwood, won him strategic advantage over Kehekili and all other rivals as he successfully consolidated his rule over the archipelago. Many defeated chiefs blamed the Europeans for the concentration of all power in Hawai‘i in one hand.33 In Tahiti, the Pomares clan rose to dominance through a similarly shrewd control of the pork trade with New South Wales.34 In time, Kamehameha became a kind of Polynesian Joseph Banks, collecting plants and seeds (including the seeds of apples spit out on the beach by foreigners) and employing a Welsh gardener and Mexican cowboys to train his kanakas (men) to become paniolos (Hawaiian for españoles, or Spaniards). He picked and chose as it suited him: according to Cleveland, he was initially unimpressed with the horses given to him, thinking them too much trouble to feed for the transportation benefit to be had: “He expresses his thanks, but did not seem to comprehend their value.”35 Other Hawaiians, commoners in particular, took more readily to them, and horse riding became a craze. Tobacco became a plague, smoked by “almost every person,” including “children . . . and adults smoking to excess and falling senseless to the ground.”36 Melons, watermelons, “and fruit in general having found the most ready reception next to tobacco” were widely grown.37 Yet, on the whole, Polynesians were uninterested in adopting the European diet. A British officer visiting Kealakekua Bay in July 1796 reported that, of the things left by Vancouver, the ducks had bred, the cattle “had much increased in number,” but “the garden seeds had failed through inattention.”38 In Tahiti, “it was only after three decades of visits that the Tahitians began to nurture some of the alien species or to deplore their introduction such as guavas and goats.” The “shaddock” citrus trees introduced there by Cook and called ooroo no pretany (breadfruit of Britain) had been kept alive only by the attention of one old man. “The natives do not value them,” wrote Bligh.39 Where Bligh had planted Indian corn, a later crew also planted a garden and asked the natives to take care of it. The Tahitians laughed and said that they had everything they needed. Of the horses and cattle left by Cook, they had neglected the cattle and killed the horse but had disliked the meat.40

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Many Europeans thought that the prospect of commerce might entice Polynesians to become farmers of European crops, and to a certain extent, it did. Beginning in 1793 the British governor of New South Wales introduced hogs and potato seeds to Maoris in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand; by 1805, Maoris supplied a considerable produce market there.41 In Hawai‘i, lush gardens of vegetables “introduced by foreigners” were tended “chiefly for the white people.” The largest of these were farmed by white people—and one black one.42 A Captain Butler at Lahaina, Maui, maintained an irrigated plantation that prompted wide admiration and comparisons with England. Anthony Allen, an American freedman, had gardens at Pawa‘a, O‘ahu. A Spaniard, Don Francisco de Paula Marin, arrived in Honolulu from California in 1814 and built up a large capacity in herds, extensive gardens, and vineyards both for the shipping trade, which he for some time dominated, and his own “table d’hote.” Travelers could expect to find there beef, pork, goat, duck, goose, turkey, watermelons, onions, coconuts, bananas, cabbages, potatoes, beans, shallots, citrus fruit, pomegranates, figs, pineapples, pumpkins, tamarinds, and wine made from “Isabella” vines from Madeira. One visitor assessed that Marin was “still not adept at the art of making wine,” though others disagreed.43 Along with these intentional imports came other, unintentional, ones: cockroaches, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, fleas (called uku lele, the jumping louse), and innumerable plant species gone wild across the landscape: thorn trees, puncture vines, feral cabbages, and indigo. European diseases, starting with “the clap,” a gift repeatedly given from Cook’s visits forward, spread unchecked. By the second decade of the century, foreigners’ descriptions of common Hawaiians showed that their physical state had deteriorated markedly. According to Stewart, “the majority are more or less disfigured by eruptions and sores, and many are as unsightly as lepers.”44 Langsdorf wrote: “The islanders we had an opportunity to observe were naked, unclean, not well built, of middle stature, and with dark, dirty, brown skin covered with rashes and sores, probably the result of drinking awa or of venereal disease. Most of the men had no front teeth. According to them they had been knocked out by stones in battles. . . . They were good swimmers and tattooed on their arms and bodies with lizards, billy goats, muskets and other rhombus-shaped figures, which in no way embellished their bodies, as on Nukuhiva, but rather distorted them.”45 HAWA I ‘I A N D T H E F U R T R A D E

On Cook’s third voyage, between his first and second visits to Hawai‘i, the British ships cruised the northwest coast from Alaska south, trading for sea otter pelts, which his crew subsequently found to bring fabulous prices in the market at Canton. Publicity for the voyage was immediate in Great Britain and the United States, and especially in the best-selling account by the American-born sailor John Ledyard, the

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details and routes of a new globe-encircling trade were laid out like a map for others to follow.46 Soon, British traders sailed for the northwest coast and as predicted turned spectacular profits at Canton. As per Cook’s example, Hawai‘i became the natural stopover for refreshment of ships and crews. Fleurieu, chronicler of the French expedition led by Etienne Marchand in 1790, dubbed it “the great caravansary” on the Pacific fur route.47 Honolulu quickly became the most cosmopolitan place many Americans and Europeans had ever beheld, as the German poet Chamisso expressed: “In the Sandwich Islands trading brings together the most varied assortment of all the peoples of the earth. Among the servants of upper-class women I saw a young Negro and a Flathead Indian from the northwest coast of America. Here I saw Chinese for the first time.”48 Hawaiians supplied the shipping industry with water, vegetables, meat, salt, firewood, spars, rope, sailors, and women. The historian Ernest Dodge wrote that it was “doubtful” if the fur trade “could have been carried out profitably . . . without the Hawaiian Islands.”49 Beginning with the Northwest-Canton fur trade, a rapid ramification of trade webs in the Pacific occurred, with Hawai‘i at their center. What is most remarkable about this growth was that it lay almost entirely outside the plans and dictates of mercantilist, imperial planners in Europe. The British trade illustrates the tensions and ambivalences of the new Pacific world. On one hand, Great Britain had been for decades attempting to break the maritime monopoly claimed by the Spanish for its American possessions. British whalers had been forced off the South American coast in the 1780s, and in 1789, Spanish warships seized two British vessels at Nootka Sound, leading to the Nootka Crisis of 1790 and the brink of war.50 On the other hand, at Canton, the British East India Company strictly enforced its monopoly on the China trade, requiring all British-flagged ships to sell to it at listed prices. In addition, it imposed a punitive tax on the sale of any British vessel to foreigners to avoid the restrictions. Samuel Shaw, supercargo on the first American ship to Canton, the Empress of China, in 1784, and later US consul there, noted that these rules “strongly favor the suspicion” that the United Kingdom aimed for a monopoly on tea exports to Europe. Instead, what it built was a situation tailor-made for smuggling. British tea consumption in 1784 was fourteen million pounds, yet the company’s receipts “did not exceed six.” The remainder was shipped by rival countries or by British ships flying flags of convenience—“Renegado Englishmen,” Shaw sniffed. The upside for monopoly-breakers was too good to ignore. “Since the year 1784, the trade here has been constantly tending to the disadvantage of the Europeans. The imports, collectively taken, hardly defray the first cost, and the exports have increased in a ratio beyond all possible conjecture. . . . Such is the demand for this article, that the Chinese hardly know how much to ask for it; and, should the rage for purchasing continue only another year, it is not improbable that its price may be doubled.”51 Shaw recognized an opportunity for American traders. The United States, its economy devastated by the revolutionary war, British blockades, and a crushing

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specie crisis, desperately needed markets. Shaw suggested that “if it is necessary that the Americans should drink tea,” they pay for it with “the produce of her mountains and forest” as the Empress of China had, with ginseng. Ships left New York with ginseng, but many more sailed to the northwest coast for sea otter furs. Within a few years, New Englanders had taken over the trade. By 1800, one hundred US ships anchored at Canton.52 The traders’ own success drove them to look beyond the fur trade “and this in consequence of the animal’s being almost annihilated.”53 Economical sources of domestic ginseng, too, were soon tapped out. US traders searched out new commodities and diversified markets, but their customers adapted nearly as fast as they did. The Chinese, famously, would look at little besides top-quality furs or silver; Northwest Indians kept careful control over their own sources of furs and salmon, demanding ever-increasing prices; and Spanish officials punished smuggling stiffly, if unevenly.54 From 1810 onward, Americans found that good quality Hawaiian sandalwood fetched good prices in Canton, and a new dimension was added to the circuit. Hawaiian chiefs, allowed progressively by Kamehameha to trade on their own accounts, became prodigious consumers of foreign goods, as conspicuous consumption became an arena of furious social competition between factions of the chiefly class. US captains might leave Boston or New York with cargoes of guns and ammunition for South American rebels and silk dresses, pianos, and bone china for Hawaiian nobles and then pick up furs, salmon, or lumber on the northwest coast; dried beef, hides, and tallow in California; copper in Peru; and sandalwood at Honolulu before sailing for home full of tea from China. As the markets matured, enterprising “gather” merchants combed the Pacific for goods: “Beche-de-mer, tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl, shark fins, edible birds nests, grain, fish, salt, coal, sandalwood and other exotic woods, and crude construction lumber for Asiatic and Australian markets. Copra, copper, cowhides and tallow, arrowroot, vanilla, spices, and guano they delivered to American and European markets.”55 On the horizon the whaling fishery loomed, slowly building from the 1820s toward its golden age from the 1840s to the 1850s. Kamehameha himself underwent a gradual evolution from warrior to trader, then governor, that is representative of the dynamics of the period. For decades, from Cook’s landfall until the cession of Kaua‘i in 1810, Kamehameha’s control of trade was aimed at acquiring arms, ships, and naval supplies for his conquests. At first he proceeded by direct purchase but quickly got the point of European behavior and instituted a native mercantilism of sorts—asking or demanding that ships leave behind expert European and American carpenters, armorers, and shipwrights to build a fleet of European-style vessels in Hawai‘i. His shipyards bustled with activity, and the skill of the Hawaiian workmen trained by foreigners was frequently remarked upon.56 By 1806 Kamehameha had fifteen vessels, including three-masters, brigs, and cutters; by 1808 he counted more than thirty ships, most

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under forty tons, built in Hawai‘i, plus the two-hundred-ton Lelia Bird.57 At the height of the buildup, he was said also to have had a fleet of peleleu war canoes up to eight hundred strong.58 After the capitulation of Kaua‘i, the king turned his attention to other things. An 1812 invoice of goods he purchased includes “chairs, lamps, tables, fireworks, velvets, satins, silks, fifty paper parasols, fifty silk hats, 135 pounds of large glass beads, and the like.”59 The same year he participated as stakeholder in sending a cargo of sandalwood to Canton; while the voyage was not a financial success, the port charges levied by Chinese authorities at Canton inspired him to impose an eighty-dollar- per-ship harbor duty at Honolulu plus a twelvedollar piloting fee.60 From the first European landfall in the eighteenth-century Pacific, control of trade was the name of the game. Cook strictly regulated which members of his crews were allowed to carry on trade. By the third voyage, he could write: “Knowing from experience, that if every body was allowed to traffick with the natives according to their own caprice, perpetual quarrels would ensue, to prevent this I ordered that particular person(s) should manage the traffick both on board and ashore, and prohibited the trade to all others.” On approaching Tahiti, Bligh wrote in his log: “2:00 PM. The Surgeon examined the Ships Company to discover those that were tainted with the Venereal disease. 5:00 PM. Took an Account of every Man’s Cloaths to prevent them trafficking them away.”61 If one were not vigilant, capricious trade would break out, just like venereal disease, and was equally unhealthy for the body of the mercantilist empire. Where and when they were enforceable, controls were profitable to the controllers: Spanish governors; the East India Company; chiefs like Kamehameha, the Pomares, and among the Northwest Indians; and the Chinese authorities at Canton. But antimonopolist forces were always in motion, siphoning off and redirecting flows of goods and organisms and planting seeds of uncharted, future trade wherever they went: US captains were just the most effective of free traders from many nations (John Jacob Astor’s plans to monopolize the Northwest fur trade were defeated as handily as the East India Company).62 The full panoply and energy of Pacific trade in the period was in great part the result of unregulated competition keeping the monopolist powers sidelined. This in turn was due to a combination of the size of the Pacific and its distance from the Atlantic world— making exclusions difficult to enforce and home governments disinclined to do the enforcing—and the number and resourcefulness of independent competitors, including natives. The Pacific world in this period provides an example of the “borderland” condition described by Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, a kind of “middle ground” characterized by “the extended cohabitation between natives and newcomers that prevailed in the perimeters of European colonial empires” and by multiple-sided rivalries between national claimants that allowed natives significant agency and produced extreme fluidity of alliances and trade relations

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between groups.63 European and native governments alike were, in a sense, paralyzed by their own factionalisms and ideological ambivalences regarding nationalism and free trade. From his consulate at Canton, Samuel Shaw said: “The experience of nearly a century has convinced the Europeans of the utility of managing their commerce with this country by national companies and with large ships. How far it may be proper for America to imitate their example . . . must ultimately be determined by her own experience.”64 Experience proved that the speed and flexibility of independent market actors outperformed the mercantilist assumptions that supply and demand are essentially static and that “savages” could not be important customers. S A N DA LWO O D A N D T H E P O L I T IC A L E C O N OM Y O F G R A N D E U R

The connection with the world brought change: Hawai‘i supplied many of the things necessary for the making of a Pacific world; the world’s things came to Hawai‘i and remade the Hawaiian world. At first, King Kamehameha tried, fairly effectively, to monopolize all foreign trade, but his grip waned as the volume of shipping increased. Common Hawaiians could not be stopped from trading; their proceeds tended to end up in hands of chiefs, who, newly emboldened by the weakening of royal control and equipped with new resources, entered the new haole market economy. As warfare faded from memory, Western consumer and luxury goods were deployed in the ritual competition for status that previously had been decided by marriage or combat. A frenzied “market in Polynesian swank” emerged, as the ali‘i “itself was running amok in the marketplace.”65 The chiefs did not participate in the commercial system as capitalists but as feudal lords, trading away the ho‘okupu tribute payments that had sustained their traditional position in Hawaiian society in order to maintain that position in an uncertain, changing world. The historian Gavan Daws is often quoted as saying that “the fall of the kapus was an incomplete revolution,” as the structure of feudal landowning and authority was not jettisoned along with the akua (gods).66 Thus, a hybrid and incommensurate system arose. The chiefs spent, and consumed, in a cash economy, not with cash as their end but in the service of the old conception of mana (power), undiminished by the overthrow of traditional religion: “Their consuming frenzy represented a Polynesian political economy of grandeur,” in the phrase of Sahlins and Kirch.67 But the burdens of financing this bachanal fell on the common people, who grew the provisions sold to the ships; spread “aloha” among the crews; and, after 1810, cut the sandalwood that began to replace fur at Canton, as the otters were hunted into oblivion on the North American Pacific coast. Sandalwood, the six Hawaiian species of Santalum that are known collectively as ‘iliahi, are small, root-parasitic trees

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that grow dispersed in most native forest types. The biggest grow in the wet forests and were gathered from the mountains by corvée, first for the king and later for the ruling chiefs. Kamehameha was reported to have earned $40,000 annually from it, financing his ever-growing navy and storehouses full of Western goods.68 After his death, chiefly consumption, indebtedness, and demands on the people reached destructive levels. Sandalwooding campaigns could involve thousands of people away in the mountains for weeks or months, often without adequate food, clothing, or shelter. Two thousand men were seen in 1822; another report claimed five thousand, unfed. One campaign on O‘ahu in 1827 was said to have lasted eight to nine months. Fields went untended, fishing canoes stayed beached, and mortality increased. In the 1820s reports of food shortages and high prices were widespread.69 The pilikia (difficulties) of the people were no impediment to the cycle of ali‘i consumption and indebtedness. Even King Kamehameha II, Liholiho, himself losing his lands to the powerful Ka‘ahumanu chiefly faction, began giving promissory notes for sandalwood.70 “Most ships are after it,” Chamisso wrote. “For the sake of this trade the chiefs were burdening the people with feudal service that is detrimental to agriculture and industry.”71 The gradual abandonment of much of the productive landscape resulted. The newly intensified settlements ordered by Kamehameha after 1804, as seen in Waialua by Sahlins and Kirch, were in decline by the 1820s, with half the population of the upper Anahulu watershed gone a few years later.72 Even though a disillusioned Kamehameha had returned to Kona, Hawai‘i, in 1812 to dedicate himself to farming in an effort to set an example for his people, among the ali‘i in Honolulu there was no let up in conspicuous consumption—and so, no rest for the people on the land. In 1818, Golovnin reported that some wood could still be found but only at higher, steeper elevations in the interior mountains, making it that much more difficult to move to coastal harbors. By the mid-1820s, it was largely gone. The maka‘ainana were even said to have pulled up seedlings of the trees wherever they saw them, to hasten the end of the trade. But clearing for agriculture and cutting for lumber and firewood to sell to the whaling fleet grew apace, while church-building, house-building, and tending the gardens of the ali‘i and konohiki were all heaped onto the ho‘okupu rent burdens.73 D E M I SE O F T H E HAWA I IA N S , 1 8 3 0 s – 1 8 4 0 s

In the 1830s, the nexus of historical events and globalizing forces bearing down on a stubbornly rigid social structure became unsustainable. Sahlins summed up the decade as one of “the deconstruction suffered by the Hawaiian community.”74 In spite of an all-out assault on the forests, the chiefs’ indebtedness to the haole merchants grew. In supposed defense of the merchants’ claims, a procession of warships appeared threateningly in Honolulu harbor, demanding concessions and, in

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one case, outright cession of the kingdom: Lord Byron in HMS Blonde in 1825, who helped arrange permanent property inheritance for the ali‘i—in effect a seizure of the king’s right in the land; the US warships Dolphin and Peacock in 1826, which forced a formal assumption of debt on the kingdom; the French L’Artemise in 1839, which obtained free passage for French Catholic missionaries and French cognac; and the HMS Carysfort in 1843, commanded by Lord Paulet, who saw fit to seize the islands themselves for Great Britain (an act canceled by the admiralty four months later).75 Hawaiian sandalwood exports, by then reduced to “little other than Chips,” were finally shut out of the Canton market by new, better quality Pacific and Indian Ocean sources in 1829–1830.76 This brought a scramble for new trade goods just as a deepening crisis gripped the American economy for much of the 1830s, culminating in the US financial crisis of 1837.77 The only bright spot was a Pacific whaling fleet growing slowly throughout the decade, eager to use Hawaiian ports for refreshment and transshipment. The chiefs, of course, muscled in on the business. The missionary Artemas Bishop wrote: “A more complete monopoly could not be devised than what exists here. All trade is forbidden to the common people and the chiefs set their own prices, knowing that foreigners must purchase. The consequence is that provisions have become scarce throughout the islands to an alarming degree, and all encouragement to industry is checked.”78 Kamakau reported that a new royal requirement that itinerant, native traders be licensed cut their number in half.79 The chiefs initiated a new round of intensification aimed at supplying a cash market provisioning the fleet, but they relied on the ancient feudal coercions to get the people to work: forced labor policed by konohiki and a new office of tax collector (luna auhau), introduced in 1839, to guarantee the government’s cut.80 Confronted with recalcitrance, sabotage, and abandonment by a maka‘ainana population that had already been pushed to the brink, the ruling chiefs responded by multiplying the number of their konohiki and other middlemen installed on the land above the cultivators, even as the ranks of the common people diminished while the ranks of the ali‘i swelled with new claimants—years later, in 1866, Mark Twain would refer to “three kings to the acre.” The traditional limits to abuse of feudal ho‘okupu demands—redress or removal to other chiefs and their lands or occasional, outright violence—evaporated, and the demands reached ruinous levels, variously reported to be from one-tenth to two-thirds of production. A new vocabulary emerged. Of work: the ko‘ele or po‘alima day of work for the chief became pa‘ahao, jail—the price for shirking the many days per week, even weeks per month, demanded. Of dependency: luna (bosses) under the konohiki; hoa‘aina (tenants) under them; and under them, lopa (subtenants), and below them, lopaho‘opili wale and lopakuakea; “The proliferation of these categories of domestic dependents is surpassed only by the number of Hawaiian words for ‘indigence,’ many of them having to do with homelessness and landlessness.”81

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On top of this, the landscape was being rapidly transformed by new creatures that had never before walked on Hawaiian soil: “goats, bullocks, pigs, turkeys” and other animals were used to pay the ali‘i debts. Arrell Morgan Gibson compared the successive waves of commercial exploitation and exhaustion of the Pacific’s resources—sea otters, seals, sandalwood, guano, gold, and whales—to the extractive frontiers of the United States: clear-cutting the sandalwood; shooting out the otters and whales like the buffalo.82 After the collapse of Hawaiian sandalwood, the bodies of animals were the new bonanza. The cattle left by Vancouver on Hawai‘i, protected by the royal kapu, had gone feral and multiplied into great herds, twenty-five thousand by one count, in the uplands of Mauna Kea, ravaging forests unadapted to grazing animals. To continue Gibson’s analogy: cattle grazing, which would begin to be felt in massive erosion on Molokai and other islands, was like the hydraulic mining of the gold rush, where entire mountainsides were washed down into valleys and streams to get at the evanescent gold dust inside them. Soon, they had been introduced to all the islands where haole ranchers typically leased access to kula lands from chiefs and konohiki. Near-feral cattle ran untended on the undemarcated, unfenced, open range of the tablelands and uplands that stretch above the lower valleys where the common Hawaiians lived. Protected by the chief ’s kapu, cattle wandered freely down into the people’s fields, destroying crops wholesale in many districts. With no other defenses, people began to build pahui, collective, walled enclosures, behind which they could grow their crops in massed plots. Kamehameha himself, seeing the people’s pilikia, was said to have ordered built a wall “enclosing perhaps four to five hundred acres” to keep “the cattle . . . out of the kalo patches.”83 On O‘ahu, “the building of a great stone wall to contain them [cattle] was a major project of the chiefs during 1831.” Kauikeaouli and his court were said to have participated in building the pahui enclosing Honolulu from the king’s residence at the harbor, Pelekane, to Punchbowl, eastward to Makiki, and makai from Punahou to Waikiki.84 The remains of such walls are still visible in many places, including at Waialua; O‘ahu; and Kawela, Molokai.85 On Hawai‘i Island, “the encroachment of feral cattle and the growth of ranching” drove farmers off the Lower Kohala field system in spite of efforts to build walls to exclude the animals, transforming “the entire field system to pasture in last half of the nineteenth century,” according to Thomas Dye.86 In 1839 David Malo wrote: “The chiefs seem to have left off caring for the people. Their attention has been turned more to themselves and their own aggrandizement and they do not seek the welfare of the people as a nation and therefore they are more oppressed at the present time than ever they were in ancient times. . . . Some of the people are losing their attachment to the land of their birth; they forsake their places of residence, their kindred, and live here and there where they can find a place.”87

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In droves, common Hawaiians abandoned the countryside. Many women moved to the towns and the aloha trade. Births dropped precipitously. While rural districts lost half their inhabitants, Honolulu grew from four thousand in 1823 to fourteen thousand in the late 1840s.88 Many men, as many as one thousand per year at the peak of the exodus, shipped out as seamen on foreign vessels. Into the 1880s, Hawaiian kanakas were present worldwide, wherever ships sailed: in China; in the Northwest; tanning and tallowing at San Diego; and later, in large numbers in the whale fisheries and in the West Coast gold rush encampments. Many never returned.89 P IC T U R E S O F M O L O KA I

The historical record from Molokai in this period is sparse, but we can surmise what processes were at work by reference to what is known from the rest of the archipelago. Rarely visited by ali‘i or haole and removed from the major currents of trade and politics, processes of historical change began later and were less virulent on Molokai but, by the same token, played out more slowly and are in some cases visible longer to the historian. That sandalwooding was intense is suggested by the presence of a pit in Kala‘e, still visible, dug into the earth in the shape of a ship’s hull, the only such discovered in the islands—presumably, for measuring cargoes of wood before carrying to the coast.90 The first horse was introduced in 1832, and the first cattle, no later than the 1840s. That cattle became widespread later is very apparent from both the presence of pahui walls like that still visible at Kawela and from the economic and environmental records of later decades, but the speed of these changes remains to be established (in chapter 3).91 In 1823, the English missionary William Ellis wrote of “Morokai,” which he passed by en route to his circuit of Hawai‘i: “There is but little level land . . . and consequently but few plantations; several spots, however, are fertile, and repay the toils of their cultivators. The population . . . does not probably exceed three thousand persons.”92 The New England Congregationalist missionary Reverend H. R. Hitchcock and his wife arrived November 7, 1832, and settled on land at Kalua‘aha, on the East End, given to the mission by Hoapili-wahine, governor of Maui and owner of Hālawa Valley.93 In Hitchcock’s 1833 station report, he counted six thousand Hawaiians: thirty-three hundred in Kalua‘aha district (defined as being “within a few miles” of the mission and taking in both Hālawa and Kamalō on the west), including five hundred in Hālawa, and twenty-seven hundred in Kalaupapa district (defined as the windward valleys plus Kalawao on the peninsula and Kala‘e above it), including one hundred to two hundred persons in Wailau Valley and a few more in Pelekunu Valley (see figure 3).94

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figure 3. Kaluaaha Ma Molokai engraving of Kalua‘aha in Molokai, created between 1833 and 1843; artist unknown.

There are considerable disagreements in population estimates before the first quasiformal census in 1848. Visitors typically disembarked at one of the small landings on the kona shore then rode or walked for a day or so before leaving. The Missionary Record contains these two accounts in 1839: “Shortly afterwards, Messrs. Andrews and Green, accompanied by two native chiefs, traversed the island of Molokai, which they supposed to contain about five thousand inhabitants. Of these they found about a thousand to be learners in the schools, nearly all of who could read.” And the Reverend Bingham reported that Hitchcock’s “parish . . . embraced about 5,000 souls, living sparsely around the shores of the whole island, most of them being poor, destitute and ignorant.” The difference between literacy and “ignorance” was a slippery one, however, as school attendance oscillated wildly along with the political mood of the kingdom. Most scholars recognize that the system of Christian schools was deeply identified with the rule of konohiki and “the oligarchy of the Christian chiefs,” which had in many ways “melded” itself with the missionary party in the 1820s. Belying high counts of students and converts, Sahlins wrote that “the people’s conversion was grounded in chiefly coercion.”95

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The Missionary Herald of 1836 counted a total of 315 schools and 13,150 students in the islands, with 31 schools and 1,426 students listed for Molokai. It concluded with these very interesting observations: In the census actually taken, it will be perceived that only about seven-twenty-thirds of the population are under 12 years of age. Comparing this with the census of the United States, it will be perceived that a much larger proportion of the people there are under twelve than here, and as the people in America live to a greater age than at the Sandwich Islands, it thence appears that the increase here, if any, must be very small. Or rather it is to be inferred, that the population is diminishing. We have additional reasons for supposing this to be the fact. The diseased state of the parents, the sickly appearance of the infants, and the numerous deaths of children which come to our knowledge, as well as the judgment of the observing natives, all tell us that the population must be diminishing.96

As the commoners were disappearing, the chiefs were multiplying: in 1837, Kauikeaouli, the young King Kamehameha III, allowed his hulumanu (feathers, a word of esteem, and as in a feather cloak that surrounds and protects) circle of close friends and advisors to divide up his Molokai lands among themselves. These included Hanakaipo and Levi Ha‘alelea, son of Ha‘alou, Molokai governor under Kalaimoku.97 The downward trend continued. Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, commander of the United States Exploring Expedition, wrote this report in 1841 (without, as far as is known, landing on Molokai): The population of the island was reported as five thousand, in 1840; eight years prior, in 1832, it was six thousand: during this time, five hundred marriages took place. The data has shown, that the births much exceed the deaths; and the decrease is attributed to emigration, which has been going on for some time. The inhabitants are all poor, and their pastor, the Rev. Mr. Hitchcock, asserts, that there are not ten individuals on the island who have comfortable clothing, and sufficient food; and he adds, that there has been no improvement in their dwellings for the last ten years. The schools on this island are little more than a name; for they have neither regular teachers nor school-houses. One thousand scholars are said to be embodied in them.98

The end of the 1840s were bad years. The year 1845 saw a major influenza outbreak, and stacked multiple epidemics struck in 1848 and 1849, leaving perhaps ten thousand dead, more than one-tenth the population of the islands. Measles, possibly brought to Hilo by a US warship in September 1848, was followed by whooping cough, killing most infants in the fall of that year. Then, dysentery struck: “The dying multiplied around us, and from every part of the Islands, we heard only tidings of suffering and death,” one writer expressed. After a winter of severe rain brought by kona storms, influenza returned. The sense of depopulation was magnified by the fact that the California gold rush had drawn “most” of the adult male

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population away. Four years later, in 1853, smallpox took an estimated five thousand to six thousand more lives. Maui missionary Dwight Baldwin wrote in a letter of “sad scenes of death and carnage.” The demographers Schmitt and Nordyke gave crude death rates per thousand for the year 1848 as Ni‘ihau, 60.9; Hawai‘i, 100.2; O‘ahu, 104.1; Molokai, 120.2. They gave birth rates as Lana‘i, 9.5; Kaua‘i, 22.2; Ni‘ihau, 24.9; and Molokai, 15.2 (from 52 births and 412 deaths—a grim ratio indeed). The island’s population for January 1849 was given as 3,429. The trajectory is steep: in 1778 there were perhaps 400,000 Hawaiians; in 1836, 107,354; according to the 1850 census, there were 82,035 unmixed Hawaiians (and 558 part Hawaiians); in 1876 their number was 54,000.99 P R E S SU R E S F O R P R I VAT E P R O P E RT Y

From the 1820s to the early 1840s, a growing chorus of voices called for change to the Hawaiian land tenure system, still claiming authority from ancient custom but increasingly perverted from its roots in Polynesian moral or political economy. All the major interest groups agreed that change must come, though each saw the world through its own optic. The haole merchant community had for years tried to find an accommodation with unpredictable ali‘i who might one moment grant land and another moment seize it. One American resident explained that he, “as others had done . . . was afraid of making any improvements and putting more land into cultivation, lest his property should excite the cupidity of the Chief, who would not hesitate, if he chose it, to appropriate the whole to himself.”100 Even the Spaniard Marin had had his estates summarily taken by the governor, Boki, and Kalanimoku, along with the property of three other haoles.101 For foreigners, the majority of them Americans who believed private property to be an almost divine-granted right, uncertainty of tenures was the single greatest impediment to progress in the kingdom, for haoles and Hawaiians alike. The missionaries had long expressed horror at the arbitrary cruelties of the chiefly system, which abetted indolence and immorality, prevented industry, and doomed a demoralized populace to extinction. Many of them saw private property, if not “a cure for all sins,” in Sahlins’s words, then the best road for freeing the commoners from the deadly weight of the ali‘i. Agriculture, organized around New England-style yeoman family farms, would make the kingdom prosperous, populous, and Christian, fulfilling Hiram Bingham’s mission “that this vine might be transplanted and strike its roots deep in the Sandwich Islands, and send forth its branches and its fruits till it should fill the land.”102 The mission encouraged and sponsored various attempts at instilling farming into the Hawaiians and, in an early form of cooperative agricultural research, organized the test introductions of dozens of crops, including coffee, cotton, wheat, mulberries, and silkworms.

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The chiefs and the government, for their part, desperately needed revenue and though not eager to relinquish their lock on the land to either subjects or foreigners, were increasingly forced to experiment in search of a cash flow. Private investors convinced the king and the chiefs to lease particular lands for plantations. Among the earliest was a sugar and coffee farm planted in the upper Manoa Valley, Honolulu, in 1825, by John Wilkinson, an Englishman who had spent time in the West Indies. It failed after Wilkinson died the following year.103 The most important was the sugar plantation established at Koloa, Kaua‘i, in 1835, which struggled in its early years and frequently changed owners but which nevertheless showed the way for the sugar industry in Hawai‘i.104 Insistent pressure from foreign residents, backed by the persuasive power of warships, nudged the government toward changing the land laws. By the late 1830s, the government was largely made up of haole ministers, who pushed land reform as part of a broader effort to remake the Hawaiian chiefship in the formal guise of a modern Western monarchy, complete with written laws, courts, private property, a legislature, a constitution, taxation, and a military marching band with tubas and crisp uniforms. During the 1825 visit of Lord Byron and the HMS Blonde, the high chiefs’ council (which the same year had installed twelve-year-old Kauikeaouli on the throne as Kamehameha III) voted the right of its members and other ali‘i to hold the lands given to them by Kamehameha in perpetuity, to be passed on to their descendants. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, warship visits increased, with their commanders’ aims primarily to force guarantees of the “inviolability of property and persons,” and incremental legal steps were taken toward fee simple land ownership by chiefs and foreigners alike.105 The one group that emphatically disagreed with the need for Western-style land laws were the maka‘ainana. As their pilikia grew, and their alienation from the chiefs, so too did acute consciousness of what was happening. In the run-up to the Mahele, a scattering of petitions, in the form of letters addressed to ruling chiefs and signed by multiple signatories, became a torrent as the issue came to a head in 1845. All warned of the danger to the Hawaiian people should foreigners be allowed to hold high office and, most frighteningly of all, to own land. Several came from Molokai, in July 1845, with 1,344 signatories.106 The people’s voice was in many instances helped to crystallize on paper by a handful of young Hawaiian intellectuals, such as David Malo, Samuel Kamakau, and Z. P. Kauma‘ea, who had been educated at Lahainaluna, the missionaries’ school in Maui, and who at various times served in the legislature as representatives of the people—after the Constitution of 1840, maka‘ainana representatives had been elected by district to sit under the House of Nobles in a bicameral legislature in Honolulu.107 Jonathan Osorio has argued that the petitions clearly represent maka‘ainana criticism of the chiefs for not guarding the people and for taking the interests of the ali‘i and the haole first. Here is the text of one from Hawai‘i: “The things we think proper, if the nobles agree

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with us are these: You chiefs must not sell the lands to the white men nor to the foreigners. . . . We object to the practice of the government in this respect, the granting of rights of citizenship to foreigners, as being improper in our opinion . . . The dangers we wish to set before you are these: If the chiefs are to open this door of the government as an entranceway for the foreigners to come into Hawaii, then you will see the Hawaiian people going from place to place in this world like flies.”108 THE MAHELE

The petitions, signed by thousands of Hawaiians, received little notice in the legislature—and less discussion. In December 1845, the legislature took action in the direction opposite that urged by its subjects, establishing a Board of Commissioners to Quiet Land Titles, and in February, the king named five commissioners, three Hawaiian and two haole, to begin the work of separating the chiefs’ land from that of the king, as well as considering foreigners’ leaseholds and grants. The Land Commission, as it was called, had “only the authority to determine the rights in land existing as of the date of the Act,” not to sell or otherwise divide lands nor establish the claims of the maka‘ainana.109 It had two years to hear and rule on all claims. A claim would be awarded pending “commutation” of one-third its unimproved value, generally paid by ceding part of the claim to the government—for example, an ali‘i or konohiki might cede half of an ahupua‘a (the least productive half) in commutation and keep the other half. In 1848, the commission had finished its buke mahele (book of the division) between the king and the ali‘i. The king, Kauikeaouli, kept 984,000 acres (the “crown lands”); the government, 1,495,000 acres; and the ali‘i, 1,619,000 acres.110 All ‘ili and ahupua‘a were awarded “subject to the rights of the Native tenants,” but no attempt was made to guarantee the common people’s rights of tenancy, much less their rights of tenure.111 A law passed the year prior had reserved one-third of government lands for the maka‘ainana, but no mechanism was set out to actually grant titles. Finally, in August 1850—a month after a law allowing haoles to do so—the Kuleana Act was passed to grant fee simple titles to the people for their kuleana (the lands they worked—property, estate, portion, as well as right, privilege, and responsibility). They would not be expected to pay commutation but would have to pay for surveys and filing fees.112 Out of 13,514 claims eventually received, 8,205 were awarded, to 7,500 maka‘ainana, 560 ali‘i, and 200 haole. Of the 4,177 not awarded, many were duplicates, false, or incomplete, or the claimants had died or failed to appear.113 A total of 28,658 acres were awarded as kuleanas—a mere 1 percent of the land in Hawai‘i. In addition to this, from 1846 to 1860, 400,000 acres of the best government land—nine-tenths by one estimate—were sold, mostly to Hawaiians, although the biggest individual sales went to haoles.114 Cumulatively, a great deal of land was granted, “ranging from ahupua‘a of 100,000

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acres to kuleana of less than an acre and kalo patches of less than one tenth of an acre. Yet for none of these was there anything vaguely resembling a written description appropriate to the Western legal system that Hawai‘i would soon adopt.”115 Even if there had been, it would not have begun to bridge the chasm between traditional Hawaiian land use and the Western, allodial intention of the Mahele’s drafters and surveyors. Three structural impediments to a smooth transition between the two systems presented themselves immediately: 1) the Hawaiian kinship system, including polygamy, hapai adoption, and fine gradations of caste that might elevate a sister or uncle over a firstborn son, did not lend itself to a system of lineal inheritance, 2) the irrigation rights that accrued to a particular piece of property were not simply rights to a specified flow of water but were embedded in kanawai, the larger corpus of law governing reciprocal relations of responsibility and aloha between ali‘i, konohiki, and tenants—relations that flowed up the stream as well as down, and 3) the kuleana land grants did not represent a faithful rendering of the Hawaiian productive landscape. Because Hawai‘i is physically variegated—abruptly segmented by microclimate, rainfall, topography, soil, wind, and cloud—most Hawaiian life depended on using a patchwork of different pieces of land for different things: fish from reefs, coasts, ponds, and streams; crops from fields, the kuakua paths between them, and groves; and a myriad of products from the vast commons of the kula—fruit, ‘awa root, kukui nuts, ‘olona fiber, wauke bark, pili grass, and wood for canoes, tools, houses, images, and so on. The Hawaiian landscape was archipelagic, a series of islands that added up to a collective self-sufficiency, based on a community economy of “diversified exploitation of ecological variability,” in Sahlins and Kirch’s phrase—far from the autonomous family farm of the Jeffersonian grid that inspired the reformers.116 The basic spatial logic was derived by drawing watershed boundaries that included access to resources from the sea to the mauka uplands. Sometimes, these boundaries could be eccentric, with slivers running off in odd directions and with occasional ‘apana (piece, slice, segment) jurisdictions and ‘ili lele isolated in other ahupua‘a, making their description by Western surveyors tricky at best. The Hawai‘i Supreme Court acknowledged this in a decision in 1883: “The divisions of the lands were to a great extent made on rational lines, following a ridge, the bottom of a ridge or depression, but they were often without these and sometimes in disregard of them. Sometimes a stone or rock known to the aboriginals and notable from some tradition or sacred uses, marks a corner or determines a line.”117 Plowing for new plantations obliterated field borders and boundary stones, and forest swallowed up abandoned kuleanas and pieces of kula. As older Hawaiians passed on, the markers of the Hawaiian landscape died with them—in case a surveyor knew enough to ask. Of the surveyors employed in the Mahele, twentythree were foreigners, some with very limited or no knowledge of Hawaiian life and language. Ten were Hawaiians, most trained at Lahainaluna, who, while they had intimate knowledge of things Hawaiian, often lacked reliable surveying skills.118

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The largest problem with the surveying was a lack of uniformity: of skill, procedure, equipment, and even assumptions about fundamental issues. One participant, C. J. Lyons, wrote later in his “History of the Hawaiian Government Survey”: “There was a vast deal of haphazard about the matter.”119 Was a line determined by the exact middle of a wall that separated neighboring fields? If not, which farmer owned the wall? The same question applied to kuakua paths, ‘auwai ditches, and streams themselves. A kuleana was meant to include all the land that a cultivator used, but there was no agreement about whether to include lands that lay fallow for multiple years nor kula groves, bamboo clumps, or reef flats. Rugged, mountainous topography and bad weather made accurate surveying of large parcels extremely taxing. Even in accessible terrain, Lyons described the work as “an arduous campaign, among the kalo patches, with an ever watchful konohiki to contest his progress.” It is not surprising then, that “anecdotal evidence suggests that many of the less than professional surveyors took short cuts to alleviate some of the tedium and difficulty associated with their work.”120 Lyons lamented the fact that different surveyors, few of them adequately trained, used different techniques to measure distance; mark corners; and, worst of all, to account for the radical variation in apparent compass headings caused by the topography: “We have every possible method of measurement adopted, every conceivable scale employed, meridians pointing everywhere, no marking of corners; in short, everything left to the sweet will of the man who was hired at from two to three dollars per kuleana to do the measurement. Nor was one district assigned to one man. No less than a dozen tried their hands at Waikiki, no one being required to guide himself by the notes of another.”121 Worst of all, few surveys had anything like common referents, as few kuleanas shared boundaries, instead floating within larger ‘ili or ahupua‘a, which themselves were rarely surveyed but granted based on name only. Government and crown lands, most of which also contained kuleanas, were not surveyed at all. After the establishment of the Hawaiian Government Survey in 1870, some ahupua‘a were run, yet to this day many have never been.122 Lyons wrote: “It is this existence of titles within titles unseparated one from another by especial survey that creates the unmitigated state of confusion that now exists in these islands.”123 The land revolution was the capstone in the series of massive changes brought to Hawai‘i after the end of its isolation in 1778: the coming of Western people, organisms (including diseases), technology, techniques, goods, trade norms, laws, and religious and social ideas. It created confusion not simply because of its haphazard execution but also because it was an incomplete revolution in structural terms. The old system had been smashed, but the new regime had still to be built on the fragments of the old—making for a weak, unstable foundation. This incompletion would make the transition difficult and agonizing for all parties, but the price would be paid disproportionately by the Hawaiian population.

3

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By the time of the Mahele, much of Molokai was a shadow of its former self, its population having dropped steeply from a reported 6,000 in 1832 to about 3,400 in 1850; then, after recovering a few hundred by 1855, dropping further to 2,864 in 1860.1 The ruins of former hamlets, fishponds, and kalo lo‘i were visible seemingly everywhere. Yet, because of its isolation, the island bore few marks of the new world outside: few haoles lived there, and almost all land was in Hawaiian hands; most residents subsisted on traditional farming and fishing, with some seasonal labor at Lahaina in the whaling economy; little shipping stopped there, and few of the biological intrusions such as invasive species and grazing animals had made an appearance. Nevertheless, a transition to the market economy was going on, and though its main forums were elsewhere—in the whaling fleet and the new sugar plantations on O‘ahu and on Maui—its gravity was felt in Molokai and gradually reshaped life and land there. The pull of a cash economy was reinforced by the push of a plethora of new taxes levied by the Hawaiian government to encourage plantation agriculture. The traditional bonds between ali‘i and maka‘ainana that governed economic life were breaking apart, leaving confusion and abandonment in their wake. And, the traditional land divisions of the ahupua‘a and kuleana held over by the Mahele turned out to be ill-matched to the needs and realities of the new capitalist system. There were severe disruptions in the social and economic orders every bit as far-reaching as the disruption of the religious order had been in 1819. By far the most important single agent in all these changes— social, economic, and threatening to the physical landscape of Hawai‘i and Molokai— was the spread of grazing animals. From the beginning of the period to the end, Molokai moved from a human and environmental regime still recognizably Hawaiian to one utterly new, foreign, and irrevocable—and cows stood at the center of the story. 69

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By the number of accounts we have, few travelers apparently came to Molokai in these years, and the accounts we do have are limited in important ways. Nonetheless, they give us an irreplaceable picture of the physical and human landscape at the time of the Mahele, showing an island still very Hawaiian on its surface, with more apparent stability and continuity with the old ways than discontinuity. Natural ecosystems are nearly intact, with little or no grazing, except that of horses. A rich and varied flora extends from the coastlines to the mountain passes and pali cliffs; streams run through the kula lands, and springs bubble up near the beaches. Government property records show a pattern of active land sales between common Hawaiians in the 1850s, amounting, unfortunately, to a kind of golden age, as the 1860s see a slowing of common Hawaiian purchases and more alienation of ownership and leases from common Hawaiians to ali‘i and to haoles and an unmistakable shift toward the purchase of large parcels, often entire ahupua‘a, for grazing. The largest purchasers were at first ali‘i Hawaiians, followed by increasing numbers of haoles leasing and buying. There was a gradual transfer of lands in Kala‘e and the extreme East End, between Hālawa and Puko‘o, to haole grazers. A shift to livestock grazing, most often by haole owners or lessees, transformed most of the large pieces of open, kula areas of the island, spreading from the West End and Kala‘e to the East End. Grazing was favored by the bulk of the forces that were at work against the old Hawaiian world: cash, taxation, disease, depopulation, and growing competition between ali‘i owners of traditionally common ahupua‘a space and the customary uses of the people. Responding to those forces and to their own increasingly insecure position in a weakening traditional social order, many ali‘i attempted to charge cash fees for access to kula lands but found a populace, in general, unable to pay. Just as the overthrow of the kapus had been “an incomplete revolution,” the transition to the market economy was botched by a fundamental mismatch between the kanawai of the old world, contained in personal, genealogical, and caste relationships that structured land use, and the property lines and legal prohibitions of the new world—each of which valued and aggregated people and land in different, incomparable, and incompatible ways. The social and environmental costs of this change were unevenly distributed, and some places, such as Hālawa, seemed to thrive. Yet in others, the costs were enormous, as evident in the report of a Hawaiian traveler in 1867: communities had vanished or were vitiated, and once-forested lands were transformed into dry plains peopled only by goats and cows. The population of Molokai sank to a new low of seventeen hundred in 1870, but it would have further still to fall.2 T WO T R AV E L E R S : M O L O KA I I N 1 8 53 – 1 8 5 4

We are fortunate that two of the rare foreign visitors to Molokai, one of whom arrived in 1853, the other the following year, left written accounts of their travels.

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The first, an American named George Washington Bates, stopped on Molokai en route from O‘ahu to Lahaina, Maui, aboard the interisland schooner Sarah, owned by John Ii, a prominent chief (and important chronicler of Hawaiian history). The Hawai‘i Bates described was one suspended between two eras, still recognizably a Hawaiian world, though everywhere being pressed by new people, ways, things, and forces of change. On one hand, many parts of the kingdom enjoyed modest prosperity and a relaxed lifestyle; on the other, many areas, especially in the hinterlands beyond the towns, which were rarely visited by outsiders, were troubled by poverty, disease, depopulation, and abandonment. On board the ship, he remarked on the “perfect order” of the Hawaiian passengers’ teeth, which he ascribed to their diet of poi, fish, watermelon, and water. At the same time, he noted their “fondness” for tobacco: “A native would as easily forget to take himself on board as forget his little bag of tobacco. In many instances, he loves his tobacco better than he loves his wife; and so it is in regard to the wife toward her husband.”3 At Kalua‘aha, site of the Congregationalist mission and the normal waystation on the kona side of the island, the ship anchored off the reef while Bates was rowed inshore in a small boat to the fishpond wall and left to clamber to the beach over its rough rocks. He was welcomed by Mr. Dwight, the American teacher at the mission school who had formerly been the missionary until his marriage to a Hawaiian had prompted the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) to replace him with Reverend Hitchcock. Dwight instructed an average of one hundred boys and girls in “reading, writing, algebra, geography, universal history, vocal music, drawing, mental and moral science, elocution, and composition,” reported Bates. Besides the mission school, the teacher gave the number of government schools on Molokai as sixteen, teaching 810 students, with a budget of $1,197.48.4 The first spectacle Bates was treated to was Mr. Dwight’s sewing class for “about thirty” young Hawaiian ladies, whom he had taught and encouraged to make “sundry unmentionables for gentlemen, besides cutting and making all their own drapery . . . The articles they manufactured . . . commanded a ready and lucrative sale at the agricultural fairs in Honolulu.” The girls were paid seventy-five cents for a piece that sold for two dollars, “and so on in regular ratio.”5 From the mission station, Bates set off on horseback eastward along the coast. He remarked, as almost every visitor to Hawai‘i did in the nineteenth century, on the Hawaiians’ love of horses and flair for horsemanship. He described groups of people gathering limu seaweed near shore and fishing on the reef with spears and from canoes two miles offshore. As he passed through the once-populous region, he saw the storm-smashed walls of fishponds and isolated houses and small villages that bore an “aspect” of “the last extreme of poverty and discomfort.”6 On his way over the mountains to Hālawa Valley, he met and was entranced by a Hawaiian beauty on horseback. After she had passed, he noted the strange silence of the forest at the crest, a void he attributed to “the almost universal absence of

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singing-birds.”7 One can only speculate about what conclusion to draw from his observation. Were the forest birds quiet in the heat of noon? Had the Hawaiian ali‘i, who especially prized yellow, red, and black feathers for their capes and other emblems of status, hunted them to near extinction years before? Or had avian malaria and birdpox—previously unknown in the Hawaiian Islands— already decimated the native bird fauna of this low, mesic (semiwet) forest? Not many miles away, the ship Wellington had poured out the dregs of its water barrels into a stream in Lahaina, Maui, in 1826, and with them, the tropical mosquito Culex quinquefasciatus, the primary vector of the avian malaria parasite (Plasmodium relictum), picked up at its last stop in Mexico: “Thereby to blot one more blessing from the Hawaii that had been Eden,” in the words of one chronicler.8 From that point onward, diseases that had been present in migratory shorebirds and waterfowl for millennia and were arriving continuously in the hundreds of bird species introduced into Hawai‘i in the nineteenth century had their vector, limited only by lower temperatures at higher elevations, and began to cull Hawai‘i’s native bird fauna. Passing the famed kukui grove of Lanikaula, Bates wrote that it “contained nearly two hundred acres, and on its outskirts stood a few native dwellings.” Finally, at Hālawa overlook, he rhapsodized that it was “the finest scene on Molokai.” Below, he saw “scores of taro beds, and a number of dwellings, and the romantic river . . . at the foot of the enormous walls which bound this earthly Eden.” Even after touring bigger, more prosperous Maui, Bates was impressed with Hālawa: kalo was being grown “on a large scale” for export to Lahaina and elsewhere on Molokai (see figure 4). Its annual value Mr. Dwight gave as $15,000 to $20,000. “The valley of Hālawa is the richest spot on the island,” he wrote, its population “little more than three hundred and fifty, and on the decrease.” He judged the residents “to be a strictly religious people . . . Their morals were more elevated than on any other part of the island.”9 From Hālawa, Bates returned westward along the coast past Kalua‘aha, then headed to see the pali at Kala‘e. Between the mission station and Kaunakakai, the picture changed. The visitor, he wrote, “passes several deserted villages which present the most absolute pictures of desolation. The houses were falling in. Rank weeds had grown up around the oft-frequented doorways. And the tenants had gone—heaven knows whither!” From Kaunakakai north and west, climbing to Kala‘e, he crossed many “deep ravines . . . shaded by a variety of foliage” and waterfalls and streams “so clear and beautiful . . . just fordable by the horse.” He saw fields of castor oil plants, an invasive species he called palma christi, which is today widely naturalized in Hawai‘i and California; Gaulteria penduliflorum or ‘ohelo; and “whole groves” of ti, a Polynesian introduction. Occasionally, a “solitary native dwelling” came into view. Nearing the pali, the pili grass became so deep that he was forced to dismount and leave his horse behind.10

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figure 4. Poi making outdoors at Hālawa, Molokai, 1888. Source: Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum.

Thousands of feet below, on the low tongue of Kalaupapa, he saw “scattered . . . dwellings . . . pasture-lands and plantations.” Bates “had been urged to visit the Palis on the assurance that foreigners seldom or never went there.” Having done so, however, he went no further and retraced his steps. The night before reaching Kalua‘aha, he stayed in the house of several natives at Kaunakakai, where he had the kind of experience that kept most tourists from visiting Molokai for a very long time: he was revolted by the salt fish and poi offered him and was kept awake much of the night by fleas and mosquitoes and the revelry of the natives. He awakened in the morning to find that “my tired horse had been rode all night by some miscreant of a Kanaka. Brimful of wrath . . . I soon left for Lahaina on Maui.”11 Bates’s account of Molokai in 1853 shows the extent both of stabilities and of changes. The settlement pattern he recorded corresponds with the picture sketched by the Mahele records. Along the kona coast, traces of the ancient pattern remain, though they are scattered and in evident decline: fishponds were destroyed and not rebuilt, native dwellings were generally in a sad state. Hālawa’s prosperity, founded on its agricultural infrastructure and the poi trade with Lahaina (where demand was stoked in this period by the whaling fleet and the growing, haoledominated sugar industry there) set it apart. Not coincidentally, Christian penetration seemed to Bates greatest in the valley and of course, at Kalua‘aha, where the mission station had attracted Hawaiians to live, congregate, and apprentice to the capitalist industrial world economy (see figure 5). Westward from the mission,

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figure 5. Group of Hawaiians on Molokai. Photo by John F. G. Stokes, before 1899. Source: Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum.

the situation deteriorated: none of the formerly prosperous valleys seemed to be inhabited—only “the most absolute . . . desolation” remained. His description of Kala‘e also corroborates that of the Mahele records: a few Hawaiians remained on the land, though they were dispersed and evidently isolated from the market economy. At Kalaupapa was another instance of direct contact with the outside allowing a high level of settlement and agriculture. The two prosperous agricultural zones, Kalaupapa and Hālawa, were each outward-looking export producers, isolated from the rest of the island (spectacularly so, in Kalaupapa’s case)—yet paying no penalty for this, as each was perfectly self-sufficient in soil and water resources. In the Hawaiian economy of the 1850s, these little places enjoyed sufficient resource thickness to make them viable—they were “big” enough—while the vast majority of Molokai’s land area suffered the opposite problem. With no harbors, no roads, no towns, and its population dispersed among many small outposts isolated from one another by climate and geography, the rest of Molokai in toto was a small and thin terrain and so languished and was partially abandoned as many of its residents decamped for other islands. Though few, Bates’s observations on the landscape are useful. He described a vegetation still largely native and uninvaded by weeds (the castor oil plant fields in Kala‘e

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are an obvious exception, an unambiguous sign that large-scale landscape change was underway). The ancient kukui grove of Lanikaula was fortunately intact, though the suggestion that avian malaria had already made a grim harvest in the lowaltitude forest of the pass is ominous. Everywhere he went, he described what seem to be mostly unimpaired watersheds, well vegetated, with running streams. The next year, the French traveler and botanist Jules Remy, who spent the years 1852–1855 in the Sandwich Islands acquainting himself with enough of the language and lore to eventually publish a Hawaiian-French vocabulary and a history of Hawai‘i, paused on the island.12 He spent two weeks, from June 14 to June 30, on Molokai, documenting his experiences there in a journal published as L’Ile de Molokai avant la leproserie (Molokai Island Before Leprosy).13 Remy carefully noted the plants he encountered, leaving us an unsurpassed, detailed record of Molokai’s people and land at midcentury; it is worth the time, in my view, to examine Remy’s records in some detail to gain a textured picture of the island’s physical state in 1854 and a baseline to measure future change against.14 After a two-and-a-half-hour passage from Lahaina, Remy was landed over the reef on the fishpond wall at Kalua‘aha, just as Bates had been. The missionary there, Richard Claudius Andrews (Hitchcock’s replacement), was absent at Honolulu with his family. Remy too met Mr. Dwight and gave us a fuller accounting of his history: he had been a Yankee whaler captain until about the age of forty, until “a voice from on high ordered him to become a fisher of men.” Sent as a missionary to Molokai, he was demoted after taking a Hawaiian wife and turned instead to his new calling as a teacher—yet supported himself and the school with his old calling as a Yankee businessman, through the profits from a store where he sold goods to the Hawaiians.15 Making his way eastward along the coast toward Hālawa, Remy encountered a string of foreign and half-Hawaiian residents. At Mapulehu, “in the smallest, oldest and most sordid house,” lived Kana‘e, half French and sired by an unnamed Bordelais who had once passed through Honolulu. Kana‘e had been a luna wai or konohiki under the king Liholiho; now, he sold watermelons for six dollars per hundred.16 At Kana‘e’s house, he also met another part Hawaiian named John Stevenson (Kiwini), a konohiki who had been granted the ahupua‘a of Kumimi farther eastward, and Riviere, the French owner of the sloop that had transported Remy from Maui, who lived in “a new and very proper” Western-style house with a Hawaiian wife. Farther along, on the coastal plain probably at Honomuni or Kamanoni, an old Portuguese accosted him in “the language of El Cid” and complained bitterly about “the arrogance of the American colonists” who had done him some unmentioned “injustice.”17 Everywhere they went, Remy and his party of Hawaiian horsemen crossed running streams, skirted loko ponds, and received plenty of food from the natives in the form of poi and fish. At Ualapu‘e, he described the “ingenious, absolutely new”

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mound kalo culture unique to this area, where soil in shallow, brackish loko was heaped up in mounds, with ‘uala and onions planted at the top and kalo around the base. At Honouli, “at the mouth of a valley remarkable for its kalo plantations,” he saw the Western-style stone house built for Paki, at one time a konohiki under Victoria Kamamalu. On the ride up the hill to the Hālawa overlook, the trail was lush with native lobelias, ‘ilima (Sida fallax), wiliwili (Erythrina sandwicensis), ‘ihi‘ai (Oxalis corniculata), and a grove of kamani trees (Calophyllum inophyllum) planted for the king at Keopuka, where an Englishman known only as Kimo had lived for thirty years.18 At Hālawa, the missionary church boasted a bell, a strong testament to prosperity and cash earned from trade. Traveling up the valley, he saw cultivated guavas, lemons, and occasional coconut palms—interestingly, the first he had yet seen on Molokai. At the head of the valley, he described a rich native forest, with at least fifteen plant species and its Achatinella land snails intact.19 In 1854, the middle Hālawa watershed was apparently undisturbed. The morning of June 19, he set out by canoe along the north coast. Seeing the huge swells lifting the canoe and crashing into the imposing walls of the pali, Remy was deathly worried until he was reassured by the calm prowess of his paddlers. As they progressed westward, several villages came into view: Puaahunui, peopled by fishers; Papala, peopled by kalo growers; then the community at the base of Wailau Valley. At Pelekunu, they made a perilous landing through the surf. Pelekunu means “stinky,” because the valley is so rain soaked and its walls so steep that the sun never fully dries the ground. There, Remy noted the “rich kalo fields” surrounded by dense native forest.20 The inhabitants made their kalo in the form of pai‘ai, a paste made by pounding the kalo corms with minimal added water then wrapped in ti leaf panniers and sold elsewhere on Molokai and as far as Maui. Continuing on by boat, near the mouth of Waikolu Valley, Remy passed several islets, one of which (Mokapu) “wore a bouquet as graceful and inaccessible of lo‘ulu palms,” showing that the palms had likely retreated to this refuge well before Remy’s time, since they are reported from nowhere else. On June 20, he was landed at Waikolu and continued overland to Kalawao, where he reported seeing sweet potatoes (‘uala) growing in fields amid Argemone poppies (puakala) and Sida (‘ilima). He stayed the night in Kalaupapa, in the house of Maipelekane, the king’s konohiki there.21 The next morning, he peered into the old volcanic crater of Kauhako and noted a “vigorous and varied” flora he thought more typical of the island’s East End than the other coasts, and the sometimes whitish, sometimes reddish water at the crater’s bottom, teeming with ‘opae shrimp.22 Noting that he had seen neither coconut palms, kalo, nor pandanus (hala) growing on the Kalaupapa plain, he asked the locals why they were not planted: “They told me that it isn’t the custom, and that, concerning kalo, the soil isn’t right for it, whereas it produces potatoes at will, and these are easily exchanged with the kalo growers of Waikolu.”23 Later, he climbed

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up the steep trail ascending the pali to Kala‘e, careful to avoid a fatal fall and much bothered by the heat. But, he wrote: “While the task is rude, I find on the other hand an agreeable compensation in finding myself, beginning from a certain height, in the midst of a rich and varied flora.”24 Once safely above the pali, he climbed up to the bog near the summit, passing on the way a pair of old men cooking bananas in a smoky hut. Descending again to his night’s lodgings at Waialala, he quenched his thirst with ulei (Ostomeles anthyllidifolia) fruit and passed through patches of agriculture: small sweet potato fields bordered by rocky terrain; dispersed plantings of bananas, sugarcane, cabbages, pukiawe, and kukui trees, growing in the dry bed of a ravine.25 Passing by the missionary Hitchcock’s house at Kala‘e, he found R. Alexander, the director of the missionary seminary at Lahainaluna on Maui, instructing a group of novices. On June 22, Remy pushed, against advice, westward from Kala‘e, leaving the only record of the far West End we have from the middle nineteenth century. He wrote: “The west extremity of Molokai forms a district called Kaluako‘i . . . of easy access and travel, but whose? The soil is too poor to attract inhabitants; no one spoke to me of it but as a desert, and discouraged me from visiting it. More reason to judge it with my own eyes.” With three native companions, he set out on horseback through expanses of pili grass “dotted with blue liserons [Dianella].” Soon they encountered a man in a house and a group of boisterous young people in a field of watermelons. On the cliffs overlooking the bay of Mo‘omomi, they rode through “a maquis of bushes” that gave way to the low, matted vegetation of the sandy coastal flats, which they galloped through.26 Beyond the bay, they climbed the Keonelele (flying sand) ridge, where Remy noted the remains of ancient burials emerging from the windblown, partly calcified sand dunes.27 After three hours of riding, the party reached the shore of the far West End, facing O‘ahu, probably at Kepuhi the eel, a small cove just north of Papohaku beach, where three isolated houses stood. In one, two fishermen and their wives lived “exceedingly humble, with their hearts in their hands. All the provisions they had—some sweet potato poi and salted fish—they placed before us.” The red, brackish water offered him to drink made Remy vomit and feel for several days that he had dysentery. He offered to help them relocate to a more agreeable spot, yet the fishers replied, “with a sort of bitterness, and as though they doubted my good sense: ‘Why would we move? Where could a person be better off than here, where the sky almost never sends us rain, and the sea gives us fish in abundance?’” To the south, probably on the low backshore between the cove and the rocky hill of Pu‘u o Kaiaka, he saw abandoned fields overgrown with what he called weeds, all of them native plants of open spaces.28 The village of Papohaku was “abandoned and destroyed, with the exception of one house inhabited by a Mormon convert family.” They continued on past a ravine to the south, where fields of ‘uala and sugarcane grew, their cultivators unseen.

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Turning up the flanks of Mauna Loa back toward the east, they arrived at nine o’clock the night of June 22 near the summit, where a house stood nearly invisible in the fog and darkness. Inside, an old woman named Kaiana lived alone; she lit a kukui nut string for light and offered the travelers dinner and sleep. The place was called Kukui, though there were no kukui trees in sight. In their stead, Remy was told the story of the legendary kalaipahoa tree, which had supposedly grown in the ohi‘a forest at the summit. The next morning the party rode down the slope above Pala‘au through a dry forest “analogous to that at Kahikinui, Maui, and almost as remarkable for the variety of woody species found there. After having savored in this little woods the charm of collecting rare species, I continued to descend in the midst of pili and rocks to the hamlet of Pala‘au, established at a spring so many decades before by Kamehameha’s Hawai‘i men, now inhabited by good people who have plenty to eat, but not a drop of sweet water to slake the thirst that the heat of the day has made painful.”29 Along the coast he passed the villages of Haanui and Kaunakakai and saw wiliwili trees with flowers redder than those in Kaluako‘i. Along the shore he saw “productive” salt pans hewn into the tidal flats and a mix of native (ma‘o, or Hawaiian cotton) and alien plants—a forest of “ricins” (castor oil plants). The village of Kawela was shaded by magnificent hala trees. Past Kamalō, at Kumueli, his friend Pere Aubert, the Catholic priest, had gathered his flock; nearby was the house of a Portuguese colonist called Akoni, whose daughter had married an American colonist (he may or may not have been the “old Portuguese” who accosted Bates on the East End and may or may not explain the “injustice“ he lamented.) At ten o’clock the night of the twenty-fourth, it started to rain, yet in the east Remy could see “a large fire in the direction of the island of Kaho‘olawe”—a spectacular visual manifestation of the advancing destruction of the Hawaiian landscape. The next day, the wife of a Chinese gave him a whale tooth lei (lei palaoa), a traditional gift, he was told. The giver and the gift were both manifestations of aloha and cultural resilience, as well as the reach of globalization in the roughly seventy-five years since contact.30 On June 29, one day before his departure from Molokai, Remy the botanist reflected on the island: “The impression that I take away is somewhat confused, somewhat vague, like the country itself in sum. As much as the vegetation is remarkable from the point of view of science, it is almost null from the point of view of the picturesque. Not a tree in the landscape, at most one or two groups of coconut palms along the entire length of the coast: it is this above all that gives the island, taken as a whole, the appearance of an arid and uninhabitable place.” What he had seen and cataloged was a flora almost intact from precontact conditions. There were apparently just a few introduced weeds: an erigeron, the castor beans, possibly an oxalis.31 It may have been that he neglected to see or to mention more invasive species through a lack of interest in familiar plants, yet he was such an astute observer of the state and composition of the flora that it is unlikely he

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missed much. The picture we gain is one of the island’s native ecosystems intact nearly everywhere Remy traveled, including the coastal mat vegetation at Mo‘omomi and the rich dry forest on the east flank of Mauna Loa. However, the lack of trees he noted on the summit of Mauna Loa and for the entire lee shore of the island shows that most of the leeward dry forest had long since been burned off of most areas and had taken refuge in the gullies and higher mountain flanks— probably, as with the lo‘ulu palms clinging to Mokapu islet, long before his arrival. What is most telling about Bates’s and Remy’s accounts is the lack of signs of grazing impacts, whether by pastured or feral cattle, sheep, or goats. Bates saw pastures below him from the pali at Kalaupapa but mentions seeing no animals besides horses. Remy mentions no animals save the horses that he and his companions ride and which are refreshed at several points on the itinerary. In 1851, William Lee of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society gave the number of horses on Molokai as two hundred, plus two hundred cattle and no sheep. He gave the numbers of animals on Hawai’i as twelve thousand tamed and eight thousand wild cattle, twelve hundred horses, and three thousand sheep; on Maui as thirtyfive hundred cattle, twenty-five hundred horses, and one thousand sheep; on O‘ahu as twelve thousand cattle and sixty-five hundred horses; on Kaua‘i as fiftyfive hundred sheep; and on Ni‘ihau as five hundred cattle, thirteen hundred horses, and seven hundred sheep.32 These three sources give strong indication that Molokai’s native vegetation was in a more pristine state than that of comparable elevation on other islands. On every major island save Molokai, already at midcentury, livestock had multiplied so rapidly that they were an economic miracle, in Lee’s words: “Beyond question the raising of cattle, has, thus far, been the most successful pursuit connected with the soil, yet undertaken in the islands.” Yet at the same time they were the single greatest threat to the kingdom’s economic wellbeing: “Another great evil in connection with this subject, both as regards graziers and planters, is the overstocking of our pastures and the almost universal want of fences. Instead of keeping our herds reduced to a reasonable number, they are in some instances allowed to increase to an alarming extent, and thousands of half starved creatures are seen ranging over the country destroying everything in their reach. All interests suffer from this evil, and he who shall discover a remedy by introducing some cheap and durable fence, or otherwise, will prove a public benefactor.” As ever, isolated and resource-thin Molokai lagged behind the rest of the archipelago in being subjected to historical change. Nevertheless, what the botanist Remy saw and diagrammed in his lists of plants was a traditional Hawaiian economy in the throes of the transition to the market economy. With perhaps one-third or one-fourth of its precontact population, most of the island’s residents continued to subsist within a traditional framework—though much simplified and impoverished. In the few, favored locations where people were adapting to a cash economy,

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map 3. Molokai map from 1897, prepared for the 1906 Report of the Governor of the Territory of Hawaii to the Secretary of the Interior, in order to assess the Hawaiian Islands’ economic development potential.

production remained within its Hawaiian parameters and Hawaiian geography: kalo and a few other crops in the wet valleys, ‘uala at Kalaupapa, a mix of small patches and some forest products in the Kala‘e kula, and fish on the shoreline taken by essentially traditional methods. At a moment, 1854, when plantation agriculture and large-scale livestock raising were already beginning to transform the other islands, a weak penetration of the market into Molokai’s traditional patterns can be seen as if in slow motion—even as it picked up speed (see map 3). Molokai’s marginality in the archipelago’s affairs can be starkly traced in the kingdom’s spending priorities: line items dedicated to the island in the 1854 appropriations bill total $1,650 out of a government budget of $366,916.43: $350 for the tax collector’s salary; $250 each for the salary of the district justices, one for koolau, one for kona Molokai; $200 for a harbor survey at Kalaeloa; $100 for a bridge at Hālawa; $300 for a road from Kalaupapa to Honouli; and $200 for the district court house.33 The dollars tell of a spectacular indifference. T H E M A H E L E I N M O L O KA I

It has been widely assumed that foreigners quickly swallowed up vast tracts of the best lands in the kingdom and thereby dispossessed the resident Hawaiian cultivators. Evidence from Molokai, at least, suggests that the accumulation of land in

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haole hands was neither especially fast nor direct. It also corroborates the claim of historian Jean Hobbs that “close scrutiny of the records of the land office in Honolulu will reveal, however, that a much larger area of land remained in the possession of Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians than is generally thought to have been the case.”34 At the end of the Mahele process, virtually all of the island was in Hawaiian hands: all of the ahupua‘a and all but two of 611 kuleana grants. Further, since kuleana as they were surveyed included a preponderance of permanent kalo and ‘uala lands over kula or swidden lands, it has been argued that the maka‘ainana held title to the best agricultural lands in Hawaii at the close of the Mahele. Within the traditional agricultural system of low-valley irrigation, this argument is clearly sound. The ali‘i grants of whole or partial ahupua‘a, “native kuleana excepted,“ while consisting of vastly greater acreage, were predominantly composed of steep, dry, forested, mountainous, marshy, or kula lands and so were not valuable in the same measure—at least in the traditional Hawaiian system. The question is: What did the new Hawaiian “owners” make of their fee simple property rights—property now situated in a new and rapidly changing world? At the end of the “first” Mahele in 1848, the lands of Molokai had been parceled out among the king, the ali‘i, and the government. Of the fifty-seven historic ahupua‘a, thirty-two ahupua‘a (twenty-two full, ten half) went to twenty-six ali‘i, ranging from ali‘i nui (direct descendents of Kamehameha the conqueror), to ali‘i ranking a rung below (kaukau ali‘i), to yet lower-ranked konohiki, or close servants of the higher chiefs.35 The list forms a localized diagram of the convoluted, interrelated oligarchy of the Kamehameha chiefs: Victoria Kamamalu (granddaughter of Kamehameha through his daughter Kinau, who was kuhina nui, or premier, until 1839) was awarded Hālawa Valley; Miriam Kekauonohi (granddaughter of Kamehameha through his son Kaho‘anoku Kinau and kuhina nui after Kinau’s death) was awarded six ahupua‘a; William Pitt Leleiohoku (grandson of Kamehameha; son of Kalanimoku; adoptive son of Hawai‘i Island governor John Adams Kuakini; husband of Nahienaena, King Kamehameha III’s sister; brothercousin of Kekauonohi) was awarded one; William Charles Lunalilo (grandson of Kamehameha by his daughter Kekauluohi and future king) received two. Five of the king’s hulumanu also received lands—Halualani, Hanakaipo, William Ho‘onaulu, Levi Ha‘alelea, and David Malo, as did two part-Hawaiian chiefs descended from British seamen who had served under Kamehameha—John Stevenson (Kiwini), whom Remy had met at Mapulehu, and Isaac Davis (Aikake Lui). In commutation for these lands, the chiefs relinquished twenty-one ahupua‘a (eleven full, ten half) to the government. The remaining fourteen were property of the king, who then split with the government, keeping just three ahupua‘a for himself: Kalamaula, Pala‘au, and Ualapu‘e.36 While Victoria Kamamalu was awarded the island’s most choice real estate, Hālawa Valley, the low-ranking chief Levi Ha‘alelea became Molokai’s largest

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Hawaiian landowner. Ha‘alelea was born in 1822 and died in 1864; was the son of Ha‘alou, who had been governor of Molokai under Kalaimoku; and was husband, after 1850, of Miriam Kekauonohi. He himself had been given a few small lands by Kamehameha III in 1837 when the hulumanu, of which he was a member, were allowed to divide up some of the king’s Molokai lands among themselves: a 5.58 acre lot at Ohia and half the ahupua‘a of Kamananoni, constituting 35 acres.37 Through his marriage to Kekauonohi, he came to also control the ahupua‘a of Makanalua (the central third of the Kalaupapa Peninsula); Naiwa in Kala‘e; the adjoining kona ahupua‘a of Kapulei, Kumueli, and Wawaia; the ahupua‘a of Moakea on the far East End; and forty-one acres in Pelekunu Valley (see table 1 for Molokai Mahele grants and historic ahupua‘a). All ahupua‘a grants were awarded with the caveat koe no kona kanaka (“except for his men,” referring to the chief), usually rendered in English as “native kuleanas reserved.” The second round of the Mahele was the Kuleana Act, passed in 1850 and completed in 1855. Of the 611 total kuleana grants in Molokai, all but two were made to Hawaiians or part Hawaiians. Of the two haoles, Harbottle got his fishpond, and the Reverend H. R. Hitchcock was granted 1,371 acres at Kalua‘aha where the mission station had been established in 1832. Hobbs reported that he paid $438.92 for Royal Patent #474, when the average annual salary was $450, and that “of this land 1,242.9 acres are shown to be practically unfit for planting and very mountainous.”38 Leaving out Harbottle, Hitchcock, and Hoe, a konohiki with 147 acres awarded at Puelelu—an unusually large award for the kuleana round and most likely including a fishpond—the Molokai kuleana awards averaged 3.65 acres. Most were under 2.5 acres. Awards were consistently bigger in the windward valleys and the Kalawao/Kalaupapa area, 10 acres being common; elsewhere, many were under an acre, with some as small as .018 acre. The distribution is revealing, in part because it is not surprising from the point of view of historical patterns. As of 1855, the historically large and prosperous windward valleys, with Hālawa foremost, listed the greatest concentrations of kuleana: totaling 140. The Kalaupapa/Kalawao area too seems to have been fairly intensively farmed, with 40 kuleana awards, probably reflecting shifts toward the market economy. The East End from Keopukaloa below Hālawa westward to Kamalō had 415 kuleana, with the biggest and wettest valleys having the most cultivators and the smallest and driest having the least or none at all. From Kamalō, which means “dry place,” westward to Pala‘au, the coastal plain is indeed very dry, with cultivation possible only where spring flow surfacing near the saltwater lens could irrigate fields and where fishponds supplied the majority of sustenance. This stretch of central kona shore, which once had significant settlement, by 1855 seems to have had nearly none—with the exception of Kawela, the largest single zone of spring flow, where ten kuleana were awarded. The Kala‘e region, an eight-milewide swath of upland that includes all of Manowainui and Naiwa and the mauka

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portions (‘apana) of ‘Iloli, Pala‘au, Kahanui, Kalamaula, and Kaunakakai, had only three kuleana—in what had historically been a fairly well-populated upland region.39 The West End, which includes Ho‘olehua, Pala‘au, and ‘Iloli—not counting the odd exemplar of Harbottle’s fishpond—is entirely empty of awards. With the exception of Kala‘e and the central kona shore, this distribution broadly mirrors earlier precontact and postcontact settlement patterns—only at a fraction of the population and with many historically inhabited regions apparently abandoned. By 1855, the processes of depopulation sketched in the previous chapter would have very likely left the West End, the central kona shore, Kala‘e, and many of the very small, already ecologically marginal kona valleys with fewer, or in some cases no, people. However, the absence of a kuleana grant in a place is not proof that that place was actually without inhabitants—for example, Bates and Remy had encountered Hawaiians living both in Kala‘e and in Kaluako‘i. Why had those residents not made kuleana claims? Scholars have pointed out strong cultural impediments to filing claims: Lilikala Kame’eleihiwa wrote that “the claiming of ‘Aina was a very foreign idea, generally outside the common Hawaiian’s reality”—an act that would be perceived as breaking or repudiating the aloha bond of mutual obligation between chiefs and commoners that held society together—“traditionally that would have been very rude and inappropriate behavior.” This may explain why some Hawaiians did not file claims, but it cannot explain why so many in fact did—14,495 claims, by her count, from a Hawaiian population of males over the age of eighteen just about double that number (29,220 of a total Hawaiian population of 88,000 in 1848).40 On a strictly practical level, there were significant barriers to filing claims with the land commission. Cash was required for surveying and filing, which would eliminate many households that barely eked out their subsistence, much less engaged in the market economy—perhaps including the fishers of the West End and the woodsmen of Kala‘e, who were universally described as poor. There were also konohiki notoriously unhelpful or hostile in varying degrees to their kanakas’ claims—though there is no reason to suspect that the West End or Kala‘e had worse-disposed owning chiefs than anywhere else on Molokai. Last, missionaries played an active role in the Mahele, both in encouraging their parishioners to file and pursue claims and in actually surveying them in certain districts where they occupied the office of surveyor. It may have been the case that the mission at Kalua’aha had little contact with the western areas because of their remoteness and sparse habitation—although Reverend Hitchcock kept a family home at Kalamaula mauka near Kala‘e. (The Mormon affiliation of at least some West End Hawaiians might conceivably have had something to do with it.) By the same token, one might assume that the lack of awards from the West End is a function of thin population: that in more populous areas, a higher proportion of inhabitants filed

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claims, and many kuleana claimed were not awarded. Nevertheless, the kuleana numbers give a fair indication of overall settlement as it stood in 1855. M O L O KA I I N T H E 1 8 5 0 s

The Mahele reforms had been aimed at establishing smallholder farming in Hawai‘i, both to increase revenue and to reverse the decline of the Hawaiian people and their flight from the countryside. In 1848, the minister of finance expressed the government’s hopes for the outcome of the Mahele: “I trust . . . that the lands may, at no distant period, lie no longer unoccupied, or devoted solely to the sustenance of cattle and horses, but dotted with enclosed and cultivated farms and pleasant dwellings.”41 By the early 1850s in Molokai, there were some visible successes for the new economic program. During the whaling industry’s apex decade of 1845–1855, Molokai had been well-situated to supply the whaling fleet at Lahaina, just eight miles across the Pailolo Channel, and to a lesser extent at Honolulu, twenty-five miles off the West End. Even as whaling began to decline in the late 1850s, the burst of demand from gold rush California spurred many Hawaiians to reoccupy abandoned lands or to shift production to new cash crops.42 The natives of Kalaupapa became notably prosperous selling tubers to ships that called directly from California—making it a Molokai version of Nu Kaleponia (New California), as the fields of Kula, Maui, became known in this period. A correspondent for a Hawaiian-language newspaper in 1857 wrote of nineteen varieties of potatoes raised at Kalaupapa, nine “old-fashioned dark sweet potatoes” (Hawaiian) and ten “white and fragrant . . . introduced from South America for trading with ships”: Kalaupapa is a good land because the crops planted are successful and the gain is large. They are not eaten by caterpillars and cut worms. The number of animals from Kalaupapa to Waikolu are over a hundred, cattles, horses, donkey and mules. They do not swallow these things because there is much grass. . . . The animals are multiplying more and more. . . . Our patches are like the places where the ropes for the riggings are kept outside of the sides of the whaling ships which move on the sea. Not a thought is given if there is a hole somewhere. Much sweet potatoes are being planted now, four or five patches to each man. Most of the crops are water melons, and some small and big beans and onions. Be on the watch you traders for Kalaupapa is the best in all the islands for good prices and fast work. All the California ships come to Kalaupapa.43

Irish or white potatoes were grown in the kona valleys from Kawela to Honomuni. Certain kona valleys did well selling wheat, poi, rice, potatoes, vegetables, molasses, and fish to the whaling ports of Honolulu and Lahaina. Of the big windward valleys, Hālawa, especially, with its immediate, all-season access to the sea, enjoyed a sustained prosperity as an exporter of pai’ai (hard poi) to Lahaina. To a

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lesser extent, Pelekunu, Wailau, and Waikolu eked out a living off this trade as well. From other Hawaiian islands, sugar, molasses, pulu (a fern used for upholstery and mattress stuffing), goat skins, and coffee went to Oregon and California; sugar, pulu, and a fungus liked by the Chinese called pepeiao akua, “ear of the gods,” was shipped to San Francisco and China.44 While many people raised cattle, sheep, goats, and horses, livestock products were not a major export item in the early part of the decade. But, as the correspondent’s account of Kalaupapa shows, the animals “multiplying more and more” would soon attract the attention of would-be entrepreneurs, especially haoles, looking for a way to make Molokai pay. M EY E R O F KA L A‘E

Of the handful of white settlers who came to Molokai in the nineteenth century, the most prominent was Rudolf Wilhelm Meyer, born April 2, 1826, in Hamburg, Germany, and trained as a civil engineer and surveyor who worked for the Hamburg water works department. Pushed from home “because of an argument with his stepmother” and drawn by the gold rush, young Rudolf left Germany in 1848 bound for California. Apparently, he was delayed in Sydney, Australia, and again in Tahiti, not arriving at Lahaina until January 1850 aboard the British brigantine Cheerful.45 Having missed the height of the gold rush, he chose to stay on in Hawai‘i. After six months, Meyer was employed as a surveyor by the government “at a salary of $100 a month, plus expenses” and was forthwith sent to Molokai to demarcate Mahele claims there.46 He made his base at Kalua‘aha and was often accompanied in the field by Reverend Dwight, who took native testimony and helped him navigate the Hawaiian cultural ground that his European instruments could not see or measure. Fluent in German, French, and English, Meyer quickly mastered the Hawaiian language. In March 1851, he was married by Dwight to an eighteen-year-old Hawaiian girl, Dorcas Malama Waha, the daughter of a kaukauali‘i (low-ranking ali‘i) at Puko‘o. In July of that year, he was naturalized as a Hawaiian subject. The couple lived at Kalua‘aha, at first with the Reverend Hitchcock, and briefly in Honolulu, where Meyer worked for the firm of Austin and Becker. They returned to Kalua‘aha in 1851 and bought nineteen acres there from Hitchcock on the first of the year, 1852, for $354.47 During the course of the Mahele, Meyer surveyed the Kala‘e area and apparently saw opportunity there, for in 1854 he and Dorcas bought two hundred acres of kula land in Kahanui mauka, not far from the Kalaupapa overlook. There they set about building a diversified family farm, growing corn, wheat, potatoes, grapes, sugar, coffee, fruit, vegetables, beans, and barley, collecting honey; and keeping cattle for meat, milk, and butter. At first, Meyer’s industry was limited by Kala‘e’s climate: below the forest line, rainfall is sparse and unpredictable, and periods of drought can last several years; the

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trade winds, deflected and compressed by the wall of northern Molokai’s sea cliffs, find their first outlet here and are hugely accelerated by the venturi effect over the Kala‘e plains. The archaeologist Summers noted that Hawaiian chants said, “Ula kala‘eloa i ka lepo o ka makani” (Red is kalaeloa with the wind’s dirt).48 Plantings around the farmhouse were irrigated with water carried by horse from a spring one-quarter mile upslope at Papalenui Gulch. Other crops were grown in gullies protected by the wind. To supplement the spring water that had to be carried by horse from the spring, a rain cistern was built in 1869 to supply the bathhouse and irrigate a quarter-acre garden adjacent to the house. Over half a century, the Meyers raised six boys and five girls, speaking Hawaiian at home and encouraging the children to learn English as well. The homestead was self-sufficient, yet Meyer looked for commercial opportunities, reportedly exporting corn, coffee, wheat, and potatoes to O‘ahu and California.49 With Orramel Gulick, the son of the Reverend Peter Gulick who had arrived in the islands with the third missionary company in 1828, as a sometime partner, he leased land at Naiwa from Levi Ha‘alelea to run cattle.50 The cattle were herded downslope to Pala‘au, where they were driven out over the shallow reef flats, then swum out to be loaded by slings onto a schooner owned by Gulick and transported to O‘ahu.51 Kala‘e below the forest line was more or less flat and mostly treeless except for gullies and produced abundant seasonal growths of pili and manienie grasses—and so was well-adapted to grazing cattle.52 From the Catholic church on Fort Street in Honolulu, Meyer carried back a seed from the first algeroba tree (kiawe) in Hawai‘i, which had been planted by the French priest Pere Bachelot in 1832. Kiawe thrived at Kala‘e, in spite of the blasting wind and seasonal drought; its long, pea-like bean pods (it is a legume), borne in summer when the grasses are dormant and dry, are ideal for sustaining cattle. And, kiawe spread by itself, soon taking off across the West Molokai landscape, aided no doubt by other cattle growers who recognized its value as summer forage. Meyer and Gulick were prescient. Cattle and kiawe would be the future for much of the island—Kala‘e and the Hoolehua plain foremost. Other haoles saw the opportunity too: Gulick and the younger Hitchcock; Edwin Jones; and J. W. Austin all purchased or leased lands in the area. The success of the animals in West Molokai was not unnoticed by elite Hawaiians. In 1859, Kamehameha IV bought government land at Kaluako‘i and started raising sheep.53 He hired Meyer as his ranch manager. The Polynesian newspaper announced: “The King is just about establishing a sheep station on this island. . . . His Majesty’s intentions embrace large operations and success is a matter of material import [for the kingdom].”54 After assuming the throne in 1863, Kamehameha V took over his predecessor’s Molokai property, adding cattle and introducing “various game birds and animals” for pleasure hunting.55 From 1863 until his death in 1872, he expanded the operation: “In the desire to have a country estate, he

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bought up land and cattle from the resident Hawaiians and used Molokai as a vacation ground from the cares of State.”56 He built a vacation home called Malama (meaning “take care of, serve, honor”) on the beach at Kaunakakai and had Meyer and his sons plant ten thousand coconut palms at the beach beginning in 1864—a palm forest that is still there, known as the Kapuaiwa grove, after the king’s middle name. In 1868, he ordered released on his land a handful of axis deer that had been a present from the British viceroy of India. The deer multiplied rapidly in an environment without predators, protected from people by the king’s kapu and the natives’ lack of experience with such animals, not to mention their lack of hunting weapons.57 T H E P R O P E RT Y M A R K E T, 1 8 4 5 – 1 8 5 9

From compiling records of property transactions maintained at the State of Hawai‘i Bureau of Conveyances in Honolulu, including all recorded land sales by deed and assignment, leases, and mortgages, it is possible to gain a partial picture of patterns of economic activity and land use in Molokai. The records list many details: the type of transaction; the buyer/lessee; the seller/lessor; the dates of transaction and recording; the ahupua‘a; and in some cases, the appurtenants of the deal, such as buildings or equipment included or other business arrangements. Yet they are also schematic, not giving sale prices, rents, mortgage payments, encumbrances, or specific uses. There are few details to allow one to determine whether sales or leases were motivated by market conditions and trends or by the personal or family circumstances of sellers, buyers, lessors, and lessees. In spite of the pitfalls, they are a valuable tool for interpreting change on Molokai. From the first recorded transactions prior to and during the Mahele (mostly sales of land from owning ali‘i or the king to the Christian mission) to 1859, excluding transactions related to the mission; transfers from the crown to government agencies, such as the board of education; and mortgages, a total of forty-five real property transactions were recorded. Fifteen were sales by Hawaiians to Hawaiians: ten were sales of kuleana parcels (three each in Kamalō and Waialua, one each in Puko‘o, Ohia, Kupeke, and Pelekunu); five were sales of larger konohiki tracts, including the ahupua‘a of Ohia and Keopuka and three tracts of kula land at Kahanui and Naiwa in Kala‘e, obtained by the chief Levi Ha‘alelea, who already controlled six and a half ahupua‘a. Eleven transactions were recorded from Hawaiian sellers to haole buyers, all of them in kona valleys. Another fifteen sales were between haole owners and sellers: all were on the kona shore except one in Kaunakakai and Harbottle’s fishpond in ‘Iloli, which he transferred to his son; many were lease assignments; many specifically included buildings, equipment, tools, rights-of-way, and livestock. Another three transactions were between haole sellers and Hawaiian buyers and stand out for unrepresentativeness: two from Reverend Hitchcock to Hawaiians in Kalua‘aha

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(presumably members of the congregation there) and a half interest in the ahupua‘a of Pelekunu, sold in 1857 by Joseph H. Morrison (who was married to a sister of King Kalakaua’s mother) to Charles Kanaina (the father of William Charles Lunalilo, who would be king from 1873 to 1874) (see table 2 for Molokai land transactions pre-Mahele to 1859). The majority of transactions recorded involved kuleana parcels in the kona valleys, with the largest valleys also the most trafficked: Puko‘o, Kamalō, Waialua, Mapulehu, and Kalua‘aha. There were very few transactions in the windward valleys and just one in Hālawa. Notable clusters developed in Puko‘o and Kalua‘aha— the latter of course being the mission station, the former the property and home of the konohiki Ila‘e Napohaku, who was also the government’s tax collector (luna auhau)—and so an administrative center for Molokai began to grow here. Puko‘o was also the site of one of the only inshore reef pass harbors on the island (a wharf was built there in the 1880s). In spite of the preponderance of kuleana tracts in the listings, it appears that most of the buyers and lessees were people of substantial means: either Hawaiians of at least konohiki status or haoles with commercial intentions and some degree of access to capital. Certainly, only a small fraction of maka‘ainana kuleana holders entered the property market in this period. The percentages of Hawaiian and haole buyers/lessees and sellers/lessors were roughly even. Many of the haoles had been settled on the island for some time, and some had part-Hawaiian families; newly arrived foreigners were also attracted to try their luck on Molokai. But the records show a pattern of increasing investment in agriculture at a larger-than-subsistence scale: one can see the beginning of cattle raising in the mid-1850s, and from the 1860s forward, efforts at commercial agriculture became more pronounced than Meyer’s, who was first and foremost homesteading. Most of the other haole buyers and lessees, at least on the West End, made significant capital investments, on their own or by obtaining financing from Honolulu merchants and factors. Examples are Charles Butler at Mapulehu and D. H. Hitchcock at Kalua‘aha, who each turned to Samuel N. Castle for capital. Patterns of land concentration also began to emerge, with several people amassing groups of parcels in single areas: besides his Kala‘e cattle leases, Orramel Gulick bought pasture land at Ka‘amola and Keawanui and deeded to his son sixty-five head of cattle in July 1856; Edwin Jones purchased eight parcels at Puko‘o; and Peter H. Treadway obtained most of the ahupua‘a of Moakea, including an undefined “portion” of the offshore islet of Ho‘oniki, from Levi Ha‘alelea in January 1855, as well as a number of parcels at Moakea from several haoles. Treadway turned around and sold a half interest in his Moakea properties to a partner, Thomas King, and in turn leased from him portions of the neighboring ahupua‘a of Keopukau‘uku that King had purchased from Enoka Kuakamauna. Treadway also bought small pieces of land at Puko‘o and Keopuka from Hawaiian owners.

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Ha‘alelea himself purchased or leased pasture land at Kahanui and Naiwa in Kala‘e, which he then leased to Edwin Jones and Meyer in complicated deals. Ha‘alelea’s testimony to the Mahele Land Commission listed properties in all or part of nine Molokai ahupua‘a.58 But he is a notable exception among Hawaiians: an owning chief, well married, and part of the king’s hulumanu. At the ahupua‘a level, most of Molokai remained in the hands of Hawaiians in 1859; just two small ahupua‘a on the East End had been alienated outright—although many large tracts of land had been leased to haoles, especially in the Kala‘e area, that fell under the majority control of non-Hawaiian—and nonresident—cattle grazers. M A R K E T T R A N SI T IO N O F T H E 1 8 6 0 s

In the 1860s, the Sandwich Islands kingdom struggled with the transition to a monetized economy and integration with global markets. Though the whaling fleet declined after 1860, the rump fleet, as well as a significant portion of a growing Pacific shipping industry, continued to call at Hawaiian ports. With the window of opportunity provided by the American Civil War, which took Louisiana sugar off Union shelves, a nascent sugar industry also made great strides, especially on O‘ahu and Maui. These forces created powerful and opposing currents in Hawai’i. On one hand, in some cases market incentives kept Hawaiian farmers on the land to supply products to the fleet and to booming sugar plantations. On the other, increasing demands for cash from many quarters put pressure on the traditional productive system in several tiered, reinforcing ways. Farmers of small kuleana plots were hard-pressed to prosper beyond subsistence without access to cash markets—putting a premium on transportation and proximity to towns and ports. Chiefs, still deeply indebted from the excesses of the sandalwood era—debts that were compounded by interest and loans—and pushed by constant pressure applied for collection by foreign gunboats and government representatives in Honolulu, maneuvered to turn their landholdings to profitable accounts. Since they lacked capital to pay for the labor they had previously commanded through the kapu system and were prohibited by law in 1847 from compelling po‘alima or corvee labor in their traditional konohiki roles, they struggled to compete with haole landowners who had access to scarce capital.59 After 1850, when the king and the ali’i divided their lands in the “first” Mahele, many began charging rents for allowing the maka‘ainana access to their traditional fishing and gathering sites. Reverend Artemas Bishop of Waianae, West O‘ahu, warned his colleague Armstrong, the missionary at Waialua, on the north shore: “The word has gone forth from the chiefs to all their konohikis to forbid all such maka‘ainanas who get their land titles, the privileges they formerly enjoyed . . . They are not to pull grass for their feasts nor ilima for fuel, nor go into the mountains for any ki leaf . . . or timber of any kind.”60 As livestock grew in importance as a way to make money, many chiefs

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charged for kula grazing access. Fees were in numerous cases prohibitively or even punitively steep.61 In the first versions of the land-reform process, protections were voted in the native-dominated legislature for customary uses: in 1846, kanaka were given rights to keep their lo‘i kalo patches, on their own lands and any they had built on unoccupied lands; to continue their traditional fishing and gathering on the konohiki lands of the ahupua‘a; and to sell the proceeds of their labors doing so.62 However, these early and earnest protections were gradually eroded. The right to lo‘i built on unoccupied lands, to sell produce taken from konohiki lands, and to fish in konohiki waters were all taken away by the Kuleana Act of 1850. In August of the same year, the legislature sought to remedy the loss, but in so ambiguous a manner that the traditional rights became even more murky and contested than ever: in Osorio’s words, they “set out rules defining and ‘guaranteeing’ the hoa‘aina [friends of the land, i.e., tenants] appurtenant rights to gather timber and thatch and secure water and rights of way.” According to him, this had the effect of making the people’s rights less secure than they had ever been, as they depended on codification in law only, and customary practice could not apply. And yet, at the same time as the law had explicitly abrogated the traditional aloha bond between kama‘aina and ali‘i, the kanaka’s customary rights had been denied any legal status in the new regime, where law was all that filled the void left by the old system: “The rights of native tenants, both under ancient custom and prior legislation, were abrogated and superseded” by the Kuleana Act. The Hawaiian Supreme Court ruled in 1858 in Oni v. Meek that “each tenant was left to make a deal with each landowner or risk being shut out altogether.”63 Newly and singularly dependent on the law, Hawaiians had no choice but to use it: many signed the plethora of petitions that made the rounds, and not a few brought cases. Osorio points out that “after 1850, Native people were forced to appeal to the courts to allow them to fish, to gain access to irrigation water, and even to farm and graze lands that were unoccupied. . . . Thus law became the arbiter between a family that the law itself estranged.”64 In Osorio’s analysis, the legal revolution accomplished the final “dismemberment” of Hawaiian society, as the last links that remained between the chiefs and the kanakas in the new market economy were sundered by law. This was achieved in spite of the fact that the first Hawaiian legislatures were composed mostly of native Hawaiian representatives. Osorio wrote: “By 1855 legislation and judicial reviews were actually completing the separation of kanaka from the leadership they had known for centuries, leaving them with the vote and a representative agency in the government. The problem was not that the House of Representatives would be an impotent agency. Rather, it was its efficient use of laws and procedures that accelerated the transformation of aina into plantations and Maka‘aianana into wage labor that hastened the dismemberment of the kanaka from their Ali‘i, their Mo‘i, and from so many of their traditions and values.”65

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Law did its part in dismantling, or dismembering, the old system, yet in the transformation to plantations and wage labor it was the cart—the horse was money, which replaced the ancient power of mana with a new and miraculously self-renewing force to wedge and hammer apart the old system. Money at once drew the ali‘i toward it and pushed their lands away from them; the maka‘ainana it pulled off their traditional lands and into the new landscape of plantations. Capital divided, subdivided, and redistributed the Hawaiian landscape and society in a way analogous to the way the ali‘i had once done by applying a hierarchy of values with itself at the top of the pyramid and by reaggregating people, place, and production to maximize itself, just as the ali‘i had done with their mana. And, just as the ali‘i had done, the principal means employed by the new mana was taxation. In order to guarantee the kingdom’s freedom, the king and his ministers thought, the government had to encourage the sugar industry. The industry in turn demanded that the government invest in the necessary infrastructure it was unwilling to fund: harbors, wharves, roads, interisland shipping, police, judges, jails, and a bureaucracy to administer it all. To produce the revenue, the government sold off what it could of the crown lands, which was all of them suitable for agriculture or grazing—hundreds of thousands of acres—and, when this was not enough, it transferred the financial burden of sugar to the kanakas.66 Prior to the Mahele, an adult male Hawaiian’s responsibility to the king and the owning ali‘i was paid in labor and or goods; after the land revolution, he had to pay in cash—and pay a bewildering and constantly growing set of dues: poll, school, and road taxes assessed per head and property taxes that included separate assessments for each horse, cart, and dog a man owned. The sum reached five dollars a year per adult male by 1860—a significant sum, even for those who owned title to their kuleana.67 For landless Hawaiians, the options were few: find what scarce work there was in the country, move to a town, get work on a plantation, ship out on a whaler or a merchantman, or simply melt away into the columns of the diminishing demographic tables. Hawaiian land owners, large and small, were caught in a double bind between demands for cash to pay taxes and for capital to retool their production for the market. Many Hawaiians of the ali‘i, kaukauali‘i, or konohiki strata entered the market alongside their white peers (in chapter four we will see how several fared). Many or most others, though, chose to lease or mortgage their lands to others, usually haoles, who brought with them far more market experience and far better access to capital. A large number of the elite sat out the years in Honolulu, spending their incomes on Western-style houses and consumer goods and making their principal business the maintenance of the distinction between their class and the common people. While most of their cultural traditions and apparatus were being jettisoned, one that was zealously kept alive was the fetish of genealogy to prove one’s high ancestral status even as the ali‘i class itself was dwindling, intermarrying, and steadily losing its economic and political power.

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For those kanakas with land, growing cash was a tough proposition—they needed money to make money. King Kauikeaouli understood this yet was himself powerless to provide a financing mechanism. He had implored the legislature in 1847, in the run-up to the land revolution he was launching: “I recommend to your most serious consideration, to devise means to promote the agriculture of the islands, and profitable industry . . . What my native subjects are greatly in want of, to become farmers, is capital, with which to buy cattle, fence in the land and cultivate it properly.”68 His plea was ignored. Worse, what was given the kanakas, their cut of the resource base, the kuleana grants, had not been conceived in a way to mesh with the capitalist system—instead, they were the very last residuum of the ancient system. Kuleana were by definition embedded in a traditional productive system—now eviscerated of its core political-religious structure and chopped up into disjointed pieces. What had once been the body of the unified productive universes of ahupua‘a and moku were now fragmentary, irrational, dysfunctional islets; dispersed islands without relation to a larger whole. Even when those islets were lush and productive, their isolation from any contiguous, larger whole made the distances impossible to bridge—the sea stack of Makapu with its lo‘ulu palm forest comes to mind. Instead of the neighborhood of the ahupua‘a, the moku, and the archipelago, the new political economy was the Sandwich Islands kingdom in the mid-Pacific in a nominal sense, but for those in primary methods of production such as fishing or growing kalo, it was a vast sea almost impossible to navigate with the resources given—and not given. Thus, Sahlins and Kirch wrote that “with the Mahele the truly indigenous Hawaiian settlement pattern of diversified exploitation of ecological variability . . . was irrevocably shattered.”69 In Molokai, for many Hawaiian would-be capitalists, crossing the sea was no metaphor but the fundamental problem of transportation. To get produce to market required roads and harbors. Molokai had none, just a horse track along the kona shore with innumerable fords in wet weather and horse tracks over the mountain to Hālawa in the east and up to Kala‘e in the west, difficult at any time. The trails to Kalaupapa and the windward valleys were dangerous and barely passable for a young, fit person on foot. Interisland transport relied either on coasting schooners like John Ii’s Sarah; or Riviere’s sloop; or the government ferries that plied between O‘ahu and Maui; or for a few years after 1853, the S. B. Wheeler sidewheel steamer, which could not handle the rough channels between islands; and later the schooner Warwick, which was lost in a storm in 1867 and replaced by another vessel of the same name until 1882.70 None of them could approach closer than the reef, instead standing up to a mile offshore while passengers and cargo were rowed back and forth through the surf. Molokai’s contribution to the kingdom’s economy was negligible. The Honolulu newspapers, filled with notices of major commercial shipping arriving and departing daily from foreign ports, only occasionally recorded exchanges with Molokai. On November 15, 1862, the

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Polynesian noted the arrival of two small local vessels: “Haw sloop Express fm Molokai with veg produce, native freight and 4 passengers . . . Haw sloop Emily, fm Molokai, with 8 sheep, 5 cords wood, 6 kegs butter, lot fowls, native freight, and 12 passengers.”71 A handful of haoles managed to ship produce to market, notably Meyer, whose “Celebrated Molokai Butter! The Best Butter Made on the Islands” was regularly advertised in Honolulu, occasionally joined by butter from other Molokai dairies run by haoles.72 These few exeptions proved the rule that bad access to markets condemned most of Molokai to withering, within sight of O‘ahu, Maui, and Hawai’i. One story in particular from the period (no citations give a date, but it was likely in the 1860s) casts a sidelong but provocative light on how the new system could isolate and marginalize common Hawaiians: the incarceration of the people of Pala‘au. The village, on the dry plains mauka of the famous kalo lo‘i and fishpond built by Kamehameha’s men, was also the staging point for cattle shipments from the West End. The animals were driven down to the springs for water, then penned in stone enclosures before being driven out over the coral flats to waiting ships. After one annual drive, Meyer and Gulick noticed a large percentage of the herd missing. They found that many of the village’s men were guilty of cattle rustling on a large scale. They were arrested, tried, and sent to Honolulu, where they were made to build their own jail out of coral blocks, which became the old O‘ahu prison. There, their wives and children eventually joined them. When their sentences were up, the Pala‘au people did not return, and nothing more is known of them. Thus, the entire settlement was emptied; for decades afterward, its crumbling walls were said to be “half-visible through a thick kiawe overgrowth.”73 T H E SE PA R AT I N G SIC K N E S S

The 1850s and the 1860s were years of epidemiological turmoil. Repeated crop blights, insect plagues, and horrible mortality from Western diseases hammered the Hawaiians. Though mortality was nothing like the epidemics of the early decades of the nineteenth century, in many ways the worst period for disease among the Hawaiians was just beginning. The first case of leprosy is thought to have appeared in 1840 and is assumed to have come off a boat from China, though no proof has ever been offered. The disease was called mai pake (Chinese sickness). By the 1860s it had reached low-level epidemic proportions, striking people of all races—yet Hawaiians were more susceptible than others, as they were to all foreign diseases to which they had no immunity (90 percent of the world has some immunity to leprosy).74 In addition, Hawaiian social attitudes were different: Hawaiians did not share the social revulsion for the disease and its victims that Europeans, and especially East Asians, felt and so had no instinct to stigmatize and so effectively quarantine them. If anything, they took victims closer into their

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families; because the disease tends to be passed along family lines and is especially transmissible to children, this instinct may have made the epidemic worse. After so many decades of decline, the dying-off of the Hawaiian people was a haunting specter. Many haoles considered it to be “a judgment as much as a disease”—some sort of divine punishment for the Hawaiians’ promiscuity or lack of proper hygiene.75 While the absolute numbers of infected were never high, worries about the survival of the race prompted the king to accept the strict modern medical quarantine urged on him by his haole advisors. Kamehameha V signed “an act to prevent the spread of leprosy” on January 3, 1865, ordering that serious cases of the disease be removed to a quarantine facility. The Hawaiian kingdom was in the vanguard of a worldwide movement toward the compulsory segregation of leprosy victims. Patients were first removed to a hospital at Kalihi, in Honolulu. A more permanent and distant site for exile was searched for, and the spot chosen was unsurprisingly on Molokai, at Kalawao, the ahupua‘a occupying the eastern third of the Kalaupapa Peninsula. Many Hawaiians resisted confinement and hid relatives, children, and friends from authorities.76 A particularly celebrated story is that of Koolau the leper, a gifted hunter and rifleman who held off the Hawaiian army and sheriff ’s deputies for many years in the 1890s while hiding out in the wilds of Kalalau Valley, Kaua‘i.77 He was the exception. Health Department officers were paid a ten-dollar bounty for bringing in each infected person, and many people cooperated by informing on neighbors and relatives. Most of the victims were children, and most of them were seized from school and sent away from their families for life. Leprosy gained a new name—ma‘i ho‘oka‘awale (separating sickness)—and its victims would be exiled twice: once to Molokai and then from it, because the peninsula was cut off from the island by huge sheer cliffs and sealed off from the sea by giant breakers that crashed against the cliffs much of the year. By September 1865, the government had bought all the kuleana in Kalawao (ten) and lower Waikolu (twenty), totaling eight hundred acres, for which it paid $1,800.78 The people were relocated to government land at Honomuni, on the East End. Rudolf Meyer did the required survey work, including some plots at Kainalu, where the relocated wanted to lease more land and the fishpond.79 He was also appointed superintendent of the leper settlement in January 1866, the year the first 140 lepers were brought to Kalawao aboard the Warwick.80 “Luna” Meyer lived “topside” at Kala‘e, coming down the steep pali trail every month to speak to Bill Ragsdale, the first resident superintendent, or subluna, himself a leper.81 Life was hard and often grim at the settlement. The story of Kalaupapa is deeply moving, and it has been told many times elsewhere. Here, suffice it to say that the settlement’s location contributed greatly to the difficulties faced by the exiles. At first, the government intended the lepers to be self-sufficient, as the peninsula’s previous inhabitants had been, by growing ‘uala and melons and exchanging them

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for pai’ai with the windward valleys. But the residents did not make a go of farming, lacking seeds, livestock, equipment, and in many cases, experience, in addition to having other life and death issues at hand. Food shortages were chronic, and the government struggled to supply enough pai’ai from the windward valleys for the settlement’s needs. Kalawao was cold, windy, and wet, reachable except in the calmest of sea conditions only via a primitive beach landing across the peninsula at Kalaupapa. The western side was warmer but semiarid, while Kalawao was near the mouth of Waikolu Stream—the only significant freshwater available. Nevertheless, in 1873 the western side was annexed: Makanalua ahupua‘a was bought from Levi Ha‘alelea, and Kalaupapa somewhat later.82 By decade’s end more than one thousand people, 60 percent of them Hawaiian or part Hawaiian, had been sent to the settlement.83 The separating sickness also came to be called “the Molokai sickness.”84 They lived in total isolation, waiting to die off like the palms of Mokapu, the tiny, vertical sea stack plainly visible poking out of the sea just to the east of Kalawao. T H E P R O P E RT Y M A R K E T, 1 8 6 0 – 1 8 6 9

The decade of the 1860s saw a continuation of the patterns in the 1850s. Most Hawaiian buyers and lessees were of at least konohiki status, dealing in lands of kuleana size that had commercial value, often because they were in the best irrigated valleys or encompassed fishponds. Most Hawaiian sellers and lessors were maka‘ainana smallholders, and now they were almost twice as likely as in the previous decade to deal their lands to haoles as to Hawaiians. However, some Hawaiian sellers and lessors were of elite status, and many of them dealt their lands to other Hawaiians. And, there was a continuing, steady flow of large tracts from Hawaiian owners to haoles with commercial intentions. The role played by capital in all of these transactions grew as a much larger percentage of them involved mortgages or outside financing of some kind. Among the Hawaiians dealing to other Hawaiians were several notable figures: Kamaipelekane, a luna who would occupy various government positions on the East End over the years, bought a plot at Hālawa in 1862; Ilae sold part of his land and the fishpond at Puko‘o in April 1865 to one L. Kuaihelani; Peter Ka‘eo sold the ahupua‘a of Pua‘ahala to Kunuiakea in March 1863; Julie Moemalie leased the ahupua‘a of Honomuni to Kamakahiki in January 1866; Charles Kanaina sold his half interest in the ahupua‘a of Pelekunu to H. Kalama Kapakuhaili in December 1868. For the first time, haoles began to take control of fairly large parts of the East End. Edward G. Hitchcock bought a number of parcels between 1860 and 1865 in Kalua‘aha and Mapulehu, including one from Waha (presumably Dorcas Meyer’s father) “to cut timber on portion ahp.” in 1865. Michael J. Nowlien bought part of the ahupua‘a of Keopuka from Bernice Pauahi Bishop in July 1862, then leased the

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same to R. Newton in November 1865. The ahupua‘a of Kumimi was sold by the konohiki John Stevenson’s heirs to William Dedrick in July 1861; in July 1867 Dedrick sold to Edward Everett. The records show an increasing role of secondary financing in the larger deals and even some of the smaller ones: in March 1859, Hitchcock signed a note to Amos Cooke; in December 1862 the Honolulu Sugar Manufacturing and Refining Co. passed Hitchcock’s Kalua‘aha note to Samuel N. Castle, the Honolulu factor. Unsurprisingly, some mortgages quickly became delinquent and were foreclosed. In 1861, the Honolulu Marshall’s office ordered the sale at auction of konohiki John Stevenson’s ahupua‘a of Kumimi, to pay his debt of $110.25 to one John Montgomery.85 The owner of Hālawa, Victoria Kamamalu, mortgaged her lands to Charles de Varigny, formerly the French consul and then cabinet minister in the Hawaiian government, in March 1868 and sold some land there to Charles Harris, who also bought land at Kamalō from Isaac Davis. The accumulated indebtedness of the ali‘i nui led to several large sell-offs. John Dominis (the husband of Princess Liliu’okalani, later queen) leased all of Kawela, 14,787 acres, from Lunalilo in 1869. Dominis also took control of several haole leases and grants there and received a grant of “gen’l powers” from Queen Emma. The largest was the liquidation of Ha‘alelea’s lands before his death, with most of the Naiwa area going to Dominis in 1865.86 The 1860s saw the consolidation in haole hands of almost all of the dry and kula areas of the island—that is, the entire West End; most of the central gap, including Kala‘e; and big chunks of the swath of land lying between the line of the summit forests and the kona shoreline, all the way to Hālawa (see table 3 on Molokai land transactions from 1860 to 1869). This was an expression of the fact that Hawai‘i’s economy had almost no profitable use for the majority of its land, outside the core, irrigated valleys, besides grazing. So grazing, at a bigger and bigger and better capitalized scale, quickly and irrevocably took over the landscape. The social and environmental costs of this change were enormous: communities vanished or were vitiated as traditional Hawaiian agriculture was abandoned in many places and seriously diminished even in its strongholds; forests and shrublands were transformed into dry plains. The wet Hawaiian landscape was replaced with the dry landscape of haole cattle grazing. The changes wrought on Molokai can be clearly seen in the narrative of a tour of the East End by J. H. Kanepu‘u, published in the Hawaiian newspaper Au okoa, on September 5, 1867.87 Kanepu‘u was an observant traveler and well-versed in his subject. One of the charms of his account of the Windy Isle is that he gave the names of each breeze or wind known at almost every valley he passed through, no matter how tiny. “It is unusual to have calm weather on Molokai,” he noted. It is fortunate that he took the time to write these names down, since even as he traversed them, most of these valleys were already empty of Hawaiian people, or

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nearly so. He gave a picture of a forlorn, depopulated zone that was drastically different from that sketched by Bates and Remy just fifteen years before—but this was a difference in degree, not in kind, since the same processes were apparent and at work at midcentury but had not yet reached a grim expression. Kanepu‘u found Hālawa still industrious but in decline: “The number of homes and the inhabitants have decreased,” and the Maui markets had waned, since most of the product was carried “on the backs of beasts” to the kona shore and on as far as Kaunakakai, Pala‘au, and Kala‘e. The grove of Lanikaula was still there, “directly above Puuohoku, about a mile from the beach of Kapuupoi,” but it had become isolated, surviving on a spring two to three miles from the mountain forests, surrounded by the grazing lands of Keopuka, owned by J. K. Nowlien, and Moakea, owned by Peter Treadway. He wrote: “The spot is much admired by visitors because of these growing things in the middle of a dry plain.” From Moakea to Honouli, the coastline had once been dotted with ‘uala fields in its short, spring-fed valleys, a fact that Kanepu‘u noted: “It is a good land for melon and sweet potato cultivation, and they were grown there before. Now it is a place for the dung of cattle and sheep, and the inhabitants are mostly animals.” It had been leased to Treadway and Rogers for grazing. At Kumimi, once verdant but foreclosed on seven years before, he saw a dry plain, with “not a taro patch in sight.” At Moanui, a few kalo patches remained in otherwise “dry land,” but the fishpond was “almost all broken up. Very few inhabitants remain.” At Waialua, historically the largest and most productive of the kona valleys, he was given a reprieve from the previous despairing scenes: “Taro patches are on every side stretching from the shore far inland,” shaded by hala groves and watered by the biggest stream on the south shore. This fact of nature helps account for the Waialua community’s persistence: like Hālawa, it enjoyed enough water to be “big” enough to sustain itself against the environmental and economic stresses of the era, where more marginal areas were pushed over the edge. To the west, he saw more and more evidence of the intrusion of the new economy. At Poniohua were just two houses, both Western-style frame buildings, one owned by D. W. Kaie, the island’s judge. In the next valley, Puelelu, there was “not an inhabitant.” Continuing on to Honomuni, Kanepu‘u came upon a populous village of frame houses, built there by the government for the people displaced from Kalaupapa when the leper settlement was established. There, “they live well, like the white people with homes surrounded by ornamental plants,” he wrote. All of it, like the judge’s house, was built and maintained with Honolulu dollars and as such was an implantation from outside, unconnected to the traditional productive landscape and in stark contrast to the moribund valleys he had seen. At Mapulehu, Kanepu‘u saw the arrangement D. H. Hitchcock had made to lease the upland forest for timber and firewood: “Up in the mountain, back of the valley, lives a white boy who is a wood cutter, with his working men, which he pays monthly or yearly.” Continuing west,

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he found the town of Kalua‘aha “somewhat dreary now,” much diminished in activity and population from the halcyon days of the Christian mission in the 1840s under Reverend Hitchcock (Reverend Forbes was the new pastor). There were “some shops there now,” as there were in most of the larger settlements, including one near Ualapu‘e that had been “owned by some Molokai people” but had failed after six months: “Some people told me that some of them owed until their shares were consumed, and then kept on owing, thus using up the profits of others.” Even so, the community he saw around Ualapu‘e gave him hope for the future: it was “a good land, one filled with taro patches and also a pond.” And he praised those parents he had seen who had many children, though they were a rarity. “If all of the parents from Hawaii to Kaua‘i are as these in bearing abundantly, the lands will be re-filled with natives,” he wrote, expressing the fervent hopes of his people in a disorienting and discouraging time. In 1869, Hawai‘i was still governed by a Hawaiian king, but his realm was a saddened and hesitant one. A person might be cheered by happy spots like Hālawa and Ualapu‘e, but such scenes were countered by the dark thought of Kalaupapa, where the Hawaiian people had been reduced to lepers and exiles in their own land, clinging to their last refuge in Molokai. The old world was broken, contracted, and contradicted. Haoles with their money, livestock, new ideas, and new laws were overrunning it and soon, most everyone felt, would overrun the government as well. The British traveler Isabella Bird wrote in 1873: “It is never safe to forecast destiny; yet it seems most probable that sooner or later in this century the closing catastrophe must come. . . . Much as I like America, I shrink from the day when her universal political corruption and her unrivalled political immorality shall be naturalized on Hawaii-nei.”88

4

The Bonanza Horizon Molokai in the Sugar Era, 1870–1893

Molokai in this period was marked by painful contrasts. As the burgeoning sugar industry elsewhere in the archipelago took over huge swaths of land and moved large numbers of people from their villages to plantation centers, Molokai saw no significant inroads. It did support three sugar plantations, but they were the three smallest in the kingdom by an order of magnitude and contributed little to changing the overall character of the island. But Big Sugar on other islands changed Molokai, nevertheless, by providing a strong market for Molokai produce, including pai’ai from Hālawa and the windward valleys, fish, and other products. This demand at once oriented production in certain areas strongly toward the market and, ironically, helped support and maintain Hawaiian land tenure and traditional farming techniques. The period also saw a bureaucratic transformation of the Hawaiian government, modeled on British and American ideas, in order to provide infrastructure such as roads, harbors, and lighthouses essential to the sugar industry and to buttress the monarchy with the trappings of a modern state, including a (very small) army, police, prisons, a legislature, and a judiciary. And, a new board of health was constituted to tend to the victims of leprosy. In Molokai, Rudolf Meyer became the primary and ubiquitous agent of this expansion and administration. Most of these measures were demanded by the sugar industry, yet much of the burden of revenue fell on the common people, in the form of import duties on food, liquor, and consumer manufactured goods and in direct taxation. Hawai‘i, relatively unique in its tenuous paracolonial suspension between independence and annexation, nevertheless grafted itself onto the global system by hitching its fortunes to export

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commodity production serviced by a tax-supported state apparatus. This choice imposed heavy burdens on the people and the land. On Molokai, control of most land on the West End and the central gap was gradually consolidated in a few, mostly haole, hands. Grazing was the only profitable use for most of the island, and the business was shaped by the dominant role of large capital and large scale. The price of the cattle economy was steep for native communities, especially west of Kamalō: cattle displaced them on the uplands, and erosion destroyed springs, fishponds, and reef flats, driving most inhabitants out— and the people of the hamlet of Pala‘au straight to prison. Traditional small communities held out on an East End too small and segmented for capitalist grazing but now shrunken in extent, as cattle took the far East End from Honouli to Keopuka. Hālawa Valley, still the happy exception, continued to hold onto its way of life. The most wrenching experience for Hawai‘i in these years was the disaster of leprosy; communities everywhere suffered as families were torn apart and the afflicted sent to exile at Kalaupapa (see figure 6). For Molokai, it meant a permanent government presence, a market for windward produce, and a new, grim reputation it has never quite been able to shed. Though the peninsula was almost completely isolated from the rest of the island—an outer island of an outer island—its fate nonetheless came to stand for all of Molokai in the world’s imagination. T R E E S F O R KA L AWAO Dearest Coz . . . Take some Algeroba and monkey pod seeds to plant amongst the rocks at the beach, where you indulge in every revery [sic] and bath. If some were scattered at regular intervals along the road to and from the settlement to the beach, it might in time grow and be named to [future] generations as Kekuaokalani’s Aveneau, and many a poor cast-off sufferer whilst resting under their grateful shade will bless the hands that planted them. . . . Plant them close. Grow some inland near the foot of Pali road. . . . I forward the Bourgonvillea plant by this ship. Have it planted by the front verandah. Plenty of water will not hurt it—let it go [the direction of] the wind.1

So wrote Queen Emma Kaleleokalani on August 20, 1873, to her cousin, Peter Ka‘eo, a young ali‘i, sometimes called Prince Peter, whom she called by his middle name Kekuaokalani.2 Ka‘eo had until 1863 owned the ahupua‘a of Pua‘ahala on the south shore of Molokai, but the Molokai beach Emma spoke of, where he had his reveries and dreams, was not there but at Kalawao—the “living grave” where Peter had been exiled in 1873, the highest-ranked Hawaiian leper to be sent there.3 By then—the year of Father Damien’s arrival—conditions at the Molokai settlement had been much improved from their early lawlessness and poverty, but problems with the food supply remained. The cousins’ correspondence was curious:

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figure 6. First leper settlement at Kalawao, ca. 1922, looking eastward. Source: Albert Pierce Taylor, Under Hawaiian Skies: A Narrative of the Romance, Adventure and History of the Hawaiian Islands, a Complete Historical Account (Honolulu: Advertiser, 1922), 348.

familiar, tender, and sweet in tone but filled with a muted exasperation on Peter’s part regarding his circumstances—especially the scarcity of the poi the government was expected to deliver: “The expectation is that Poi will be supplied us from Wailau, Pelekunu, and Halawa,” Peter wrote to Emma, “The Board [of Health] has made a contract with these places to supply us weekly with Poi.”4 Yet deliveries were often late, at times by weeks, and the situation at the settlement was tense and uncertain. Ka‘eo pleaded with Emma to send him food from Honolulu, which she did, via the steamer Warwick. Along with the shipments of food and mail, Emma also forwarded seeds and plants; at various times Ka‘eo received bags of algeroba, tamarinds, and monkey pod seeds—all foreign species—with tips on how best to sow, mulch, and water them and suggestions for an extensive landscape architecture of allees, or “aveneaus,” of shade trees that the queen projected for the dry, windy Kalaupapa plain. She was particularly enthusiastic about algeroba (Prosopsis pallida), dubbed kiawe in Hawaiian, a South American relative of the mesquite tree of the American Southwest first brought to Hawai‘i in 1828 by the French missionary Father Bachelot from the Paris Botanical Garden and planted on the grounds of the Catholic church on Fort Street in Honolulu.

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figure 7. Father Damien with the Kalawao Girls’ Choir at Kalaupapa, circa 1878. Photo by Henry L. Chase.

Kiawe grew willingly in arid, leeward areas where no Hawaiian native or other exotic species attained any size. In spite of its imposing thorns, up to an inch and a half long, Emma valued the trees for their shade and quick growth, even to the extent of seeing in them a means to a better future for the islands. She recommended them to Peter by telling of how successful they had been at the Young family place in Honolulu, Kula o Kahua, which bordered Beretania Street out to lower Makiki: “Our Kula o Kahua is quite studded with Algerobas now. Most of them are large trees. That is one of the ways I should like you to leave your mark behind.”5 And Peter intended to, riding his horse along the plain scattering seeds, often hindered by the fierce winds but going out again and again at his cousin’s urging. On August 25, Emma also sent Peter two boxed saplings of royal poincianas (Delonix regia), a tree with brilliant red flowers commonly planted in Hawai‘i today, with these planting and fertilizing instructions: “Fill with manure, bones from the butcher shop, or anything, even the dead bullocks you saw roll down the mountainside—slops from the kitchen. If there is any space for a square of Public garden about the Hospital and Government buildings at settlement, you can have as many moiré Poincianas as you wish for there, a double row of them forming an Aveneau will be nice. Three or four years from now they will

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flower. Sketch me the position of Government buildings and where the water works are to be laid.”6 Queen Emma’s concerns were emblematic of the attitudes prevalent in educated American and British society in the 1870s (ideas that would blossom into the City Beautiful and Garden City movements in the 1880s and 1890s), equating good public urban design with good government and advocating gardening as a form of personal and social hygiene. The enthusiasm for exotic plants and trees reached up to King Kalakaua, who sent seeds and cuttings to Hawai‘i from stops on his world trip in 1881. Isabella Bird, a well-known and very observant English travel writer who visited the islands in 1873, noticed Peter’s trees growing around the whitewashed, wooden hospital buildings at Kalawao: “Although it is hoped that a leper hospital is not to be a permanent institution . . . the soft green grass of the enclosure has been liberally planted with algeroba trees, which in a year or two will form a goodly shade.”7 Landscape gardening was also for Emma a practice of consolation: these plants and avenues, she suggested, would help to ease not only Ka‘eo’s suffering and that of others at the settlement but that of his and her (as a half Hawaiian) beleaguered race. Consolation was the primary emotion in the letters—and indeed in the writing in the Hawaiian-language newspapers of the era—a response to the daily, inescapable evidence of the passing of old Hawai‘i. Elite Hawaiians like Emma joined with reforming haoles in intently building a new, modern order in the kingdom, even as the Hawaiians themselves faded, in spite of all efforts to save them (see figure 7). T H I S T OY K I N G D OM

Hawai‘i presented to outsiders an idyll of sorts in the 1860s and 1870s; the Hawaiians seemed to enjoy a carefree, trouble-free life that was even shared to an extent by the resident haoles, who struck travelers like Isabella Bird as happily free from the anxieties of fashion that afflicted their class elsewhere. Yet below the calm of day-to-day life was a sense of loss, reinforced everywhere one looked by the physical traces of a more populous time. Bird wrote a paragraph typical of visitors in the nineteenth century: In riding through Hawaii I came everywhere upon traces of a once numerous population, where the hill slopes are now only a wilderness of guava scrub, and upon churches and school-houses all too large, while in some hamlets the voices of children were altogether wanting. This nation . . . has to me the mournful aspect of a shriveled and wizened old man dressed in clothing much too big, the garments of his once athletic and vigorous youth. Nor can I divest myself of the idea that the laughing, flower-clad hordes of riders who make the town gay with their presence, are but like hundreds of butterflies fluttering out their short lives in the sunshine.8

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In support, she reprinted the population table from 1866 to 1872 that had been published in Thomas Thrum’s Hawaiian Annual that year:9 Total number of Natives, December 1872. . . Total number of Half-castes, December 1872. . . Total number of Chinese, December 1872. . . Total number of Americans, December 1872. . . Total number of Hawaiian born, foreign parentage. . . Total number of Britons, foreign parentage. . . Total number of Portuguese, foreign parentage. . . Total number of Germans, foreign parentage. . . Total number of French, foreign parentage. . . Total number of other Foreigners. . . Total population, December 1872. . . Total number of Natives and Half-castes in 1866. . . Total number of Natives and Half-castes in 1872. . . Total decrease of Natives and Half-castes 1866–1872 Total number of Foreigners in 1872. . . Total number of Foreigners in 1866. . . Total increase of Foreigners 1866–1872. . . Decrease of Natives and Half-castes 1866–1872 Increase of Foreigners 1866–1872. . . Total decrease of population 1866–1872. . .

49,044 2,487 1,938 899 849 619 395 224 88 364 56,897 58,765 51,531 7,234 5,366 4,194 1,172 7,234 1,172 6,062

Bird worried that the burden of taxation fell most heavily on those who remained: “I should think that the decrease in population must cause the burden of taxation to press heavily on that which remains.”10 While its subjects were dying off both in the countryside and in horrible Kalawao, the Sandwich Islands Kingdom took on ever more trappings of pomp and bureaucracy in an attempt to measure up to the highest standards of the outside world: “A costly and elaborate government machinery,” in Bird’s words, “sufficient in Yankee phrase to ‘run’ an empire of several millions, and here are only 49,000 native Hawaiians.” The king and his many ministers, dressed in crisp uniforms festooned with swords, ribbons, and ceremonial medals and orders, attended state occasions to the accompaniment of a military brass band in epaulets playing Prussian marches. It was easy for sophisticated outsiders to ridicule and many did, like Mark Twain, who called it a “play-house” kingdom, where adults played “empire” the way that children “keep house,” but pathetically, “with the poor little material of slender territory and meager population.”11 Isabella Bird took note of the painful mismatch, but her tone was less one of black comedy than of concern for the consequences of so much ambition, and pretense, on the part of the government. She listed, “Kings, cabinet ministers, an army, a police, a national

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debt, a supreme court, and common schools,” and there were also judges, sheriffs, prison wardens, and paid legislators, with salaries she lamented as “ludicrously out of proportion to the resources of the islands.” To support it all, the taxes paid by common people were high: an annual poll tax of $1 per male seventeen to sixty years of age; a road tax of $2 for all persons seventeen to fifty; a school tax for all persons twenty-one to sixty; a property tax of ½ percent; a tax of $1 per horse two years or older, and a tax of $1.50 per dog. She listed the fact that “of the $206,000 raised by internal taxes during the last biennial period, the horses paid $50,000, the mules $6,000, and the dogs $19,000!” On top of these direct taxes were piled a full panoply of indirect taxes, which fell most heavily on poorer residents who relied on imported goods subjected to punitive customs duties: manufactured consumer goods such as clothing and tools, food, wine and spirits, tobacco, cigars—and opium, $22,000 worth of which was consumed in 1872, probably in large part by the two thousand Chinese living in the kingdom.12 MODERN TIMES

Peter Ka‘eo did go to Kalawao to see the water pipe that was being installed to carry water from Waikolu Stream westward to the dry Kalaupapa plain. The pipeline was built under the management of Rudolf Meyer, who, as superintendent or luna of the settlement, oversaw its operations from his appointment in 1866 to his death in 1897. Robert Louis Stevenson described Meyer in his Travels in Hawaii as “a man of much sagacity and force of character.” Stevenson recalled how Meyer was called upon to mediate a tense standoff between “Prince Peter” Ka‘eo and Bill Ragsdale, the hapahaole (half Hawaiian, half foreign) resident luna among the lepers: armed only with a bottle of claret, Meyer marched Ka‘eo up to Ragsdale’s house, which was surrounded by a band of his armed supporters: “A conversation followed; some misunderstandings were explained away; an apology handsomely offered by Ragsdale was handsomely accepted by the prince; the bottle of claret was drunk in company and the friends on either side disbanded. Thus ended the alarm of war.”13 Meyer was a central figure in almost everything that occurred on Molokai during the last half of the nineteenth century. A trained surveyor and engineer and competent administrator and accountant, married to a Hawaiian and fluent in the language, he was respected by Hawaiians and haoles alike and proved to be an indispensable link between the government in Honolulu and the residents of Molokai. Beginning with his position as a surveyor in the Mahele, Meyer over the decades was appointed to a long and endlessly growing list of official positions. In addition to serving as the superintendent of the leper settlement, he was also the Molokai agent for the Board of Health, drawing a salary of $2,000 per year, and was responsible for running the accounting and staff of the Molokai Store, which

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supplied all government goods to the settlement. In 1868 he was appointed inspector of stallions and pound master for the island, a sort of sheriff-dispensary of government property, overseeing pound submasters at Ualapu‘e, Hālawa, and Kaunakakai. In 1869 he was made road superintendent for Molokai and fence commissioner for Molokai. In the late 1870s, he was made caretaker of the Kaunakakai lighthouse; he also managed the construction of a light at Kalaeokala‘au at the island’s southwestern tip, paying all costs and salaries. In 1871 he was appointed road superintendent “for Molokai and Lana‘i at a salary of $180 a year” and was referred to in this capacity as the Luna Alanui o Molokai (highway boss). From 1888 onward he agreed to serve as road board chairman for Molokai and Lana‘i, since the only other candidate, Daniel McCorriston, an Irish-American settler on the East End, passed on the position. The chief clerk in Honolulu wrote: “Mr. McCorriston declines acting and it is very desirable that there should be at least one good foreigner on the board who understands accounts.” Beginning in 1881, Meyer oversaw the building of the first bridge over Hālawa Stream. At various times he also served as superintendent of the public works department, responsible for all lighthouses and the buoys in Kaunakakai harbor; superintendent of the labor department on Molokai, administering public works contracts; chairman of the board of inspectors for Molokai and Lana‘i (the second precinct), supervising polling lists and elections; issuer of marriage licenses and district judge for the island, including Kalaupapa; school agent, at the salary of $75 per year, in which capacity he “furnished bonds in the amount of $1,500” (having already founded a private school at Kala‘e and imported a Ms. Baker, a California woman, to teach his kids and those of the local workers, twenty at a time; it later became the Kala‘e public school); and, finally, postmaster of Molokai, at the salary of $25 per month, distributing incoming mail from Honolulu at Kaunakakai to various post offices. His son Henry Meyer took mail down the trail to Kalaupapa “on his big white horse.”14 All of these posts and salaries prompted a Hawaiian representative in the legislature in Honolulu in 1892 to question whether it was right for one man to hold so many government offices. His concerns were alleviated by the chairman of the Board of Health and by the minister of the Interior himself, C. N. Spencer, who vouched for Meyer’s diligence and usefulness.15 For three decades, Rudolf Meyer was an all-purpose civil servant acting on behalf of the Hawaiian government on Molokai, a one-man public bureaucracy for the entire island. That such a complex bureaucratic agenda for Molokai was embodied in him reflects the ambition of the haole-run government’s vision for modernizing the kingdom and the thoroughness of its importation of contemporary American and European state models. That such an agenda was embodied only in him—himself an import from Europe and seemingly the only willing or able candidate for these posts—reflects the real limitations and barriers to fulfilling

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this vision, not only on minor islands like Molokai and Lana‘i but for the kingdom as a whole. One Meyer might have sufficed for Molokai, but how many Meyers would be required to capably administer the entire island chain? In addition to the previous duties and to managing the family homestead—a diverse, vertically integrated enterprise in its own right—Meyer was responsible for managing the administrative affairs and daily economic operations of nearly the entire West End. Alexander Liholiho, as King Kamehameha IV, had purchased the 46,500-acre ahupua‘a of Kaluako‘i from the government in 1859—land that Meyer, as agent for all the government lands on Molokai, had valued at 12.5 cents per acre.16 The king then hired Meyer to manage his sheep herd there. After assuming the throne, and his predecessor’s lands, in 1863, Kamehameha V (Lot Kamehameha) expanded the vast property that had become known as the Molokai Ranch: he “bought up land and cattle from the resident Hawaiians and used Molokai as a vacation ground from the cares of State.” At his death in 1872, the ranch passed to his half sister, Princess Ruth Ke‘elikolani. During the reign of King David Kalakaua, in February of 1874, the king came to Kala‘e to see Meyer and the ranch operations. When Ruth died a decade later, in 1883, she in turn willed her lands to her cousin, Princess Bernice Pauahi, whose combined holdings amounted to one-ninth of the entire kingdom. As every owner before her had, Pauahi retained Rudolf Meyer as manager of the ranch. Meyer also managed the adjacent landholdings of the princess’s husband, the American businessman Charles Reed Bishop, holdings that not incidentally included Kaluako‘i, which Bishop had bought in 1875. The couple appointed Meyer the “true and lawful attorney to manage all their lands on Molokai.”17 Meyer was responsible for moving the animals around the ranges of the West End depending on rainfall and forage conditions, managing the paniolo (cowboys), and exporting the cattle by swimming them out over the reef at Pala‘au, where they were loaded onto ships. The ranch supplied the leper settlement with all of its beef by driving strings of animals, eight to ten at a time, down the dangerously steep trail to Kalaupapa. Many strings fell to their deaths—as Peter Ka‘eo witnessed.18 F R OM KŌ T O SU G A R

Even from the first few decades after contact, European travelers to Hawai‘i kept a speculative eye on conditions for profitable agriculture. Archibald Menzies in 1794 predicted a plantation sugar industry worked by Hawaiian wage labor: “How far preferable this would be to that disgraceful mode of slavery by which we still continue to cultivate our West India Islands . . . In short it might be well worth the attention of Government to make the experiment and settle these islands by planters from the West Indies, men [who] . . . would here in a short time be enabled to manufacture sugar and rum from luxuriant fields of cane equal if not superior.”19

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George Washington Bates, in 1853, had made the same argument.20 These observers were no doubt stimulated by the sight of cane growing everywhere they looked: it was a staple Polynesian crop well adapted and widespread in Hawai‘i, typically grown on the banks of the kuakua paths that ran between kalo lo‘i. The Hawaiians chewed the cane raw as a snack and a famine food and used it as a condiment but did not refine it into granular sugar. Chinese were the first recorded to mill cane in the islands. As early as 1802, a Chinese cane miller is reported to have set up shop on Lana‘i. His choice was especially poor: Lana‘i was a small, mostly dry island ill-suited for large-scale cane production; he returned to China the next year.21 There were several experiments in the 1820s in commercial cane culture, such as John Wilkinson’s cane and coffee plantation in Manoa Valley, O‘ahu, in 1825. Like his, most failed. But the idea of sugar was becoming firmly rooted in Hawaiian soil. In 1835, William French brought a Chinese with a mill to Koloa, Kaua‘i, to grind cane grown by local Hawaiians under an arrangement with the island’s governor Kaikioewa. In spite of serious business difficulties and bankruptcies, French chose his location well. Sugarcane was most likely already abundant there—kōloa is Hawaiian for “long cane”—and the Koloa plantation produced significant quantities of sugar: in 1838, 5,039 pounds.22 The rush was on: in 1836 the Honolulu merchant Stephen Reynolds remarked that “the attention of the majority” in Honolulu had become absorbed in the new prospect.23 By 1838, twenty-two milling operations were said to be running or under construction.24 By the 1840s, the haole community was joined by much of the Hawaiian intellectual and governing elite in celebrating the advent of sugar as the kingdom’s best hope for temporal, spiritual, and financial salvation. Carol MacLennan wrote that the “rhetoric of that decade resonates with the vision of a commercial society,” and sugar was the favored medium to make the vision real and profitable.25 Most sugar acreage and mills in the 1830s and 1840s were owned in some part by Hawaiians, including Kamehameha III, who started a mill in Wailuku, Maui, in 1839.26 And yet most of these, whether native or haole-owned, were undercapitalized and technologically backward by global industry standards and failed. The capital required to sustain an industry was scarce. The kingdom had just one bank, Charles Reed Bishop’s. Most financing was arranged through plantation agents, or factors, and consisted of notes signed between planters and diverse members of the business community: factors, bankers, lawyers, judges, doctors, and government officials all invested. So too did wealthy members of the Hawaiian elite. Stephen Reynolds was typical of his cohort in purchasing a plantation at Makawao in East Maui in 1849: to meet obligations, he exchanged notes with a circle of other Maui planters, in effect trading in shares of one another’s plantations as the needs and fortunes of each fluctuated and bringing in outside investors to cover shortfalls. Over the course of five years, the indebtedness only increased.

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He recorded in his journal: “Destitute of means, or say cash, to do anything with. What am I to do, I know not!! Hope my Sugar Mill will do a little soon. Five years ago I was well off. Now overhead and ears in debt.” At his death in 1857, the plantation, wrote MacLennan, “was in debt . . . to thirteen Hawaiian and fifteen Chinese workers, plus merchants who had furnished supplies. The plantation was purchased by C. Brewer II [a Honolulu factor] and renamed the Brewer Plantation.”27 By 1860, the forces pushing toward sugar coalesced. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions ended its support for the Sandwich Islands mission that year, leaving the missionary families, now numerous with Hawai‘iborn descendents, without means and pushing them to move into commerce. For New Englanders, business and salvation were always at least philosophically aligned, even if they had for four decades been in sharp political opposition in Hawai‘i. These conflicts were put aside, and forthwith, the scions of the earnest, thrifty missionary pioneers would become rich and would dominate the land and business life of the kingdom: Castle, Bailey, Rice, Wilcox, Alexander, Baldwin, Chamberlain, Judd, and Cooke moved from pulpit to boardroom (where many of their descendents remain to this day). Also in 1860, the various strands that held together Hawai‘i’s economy spun apart: after the discovery of plentiful petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859, the Pacific whaling industry collapsed, and California, Hawai‘i’s largest export customer during the gold rush, had begun to harvest green gold from its valleys and was on its way to becoming the most productive agricultural economy in history. Hawaiians lost the vegetable and gathering trade and the aloha trade at one blow. The late 1850s were a great depression for the external economy of the kingdom. But the tragedy of the American Civil War, by stopping Louisiana’s sugar exports to the North, opened a void at the close of the decade—and Hawai‘i rushed to step in. Fortuitously for the industry, the new burdens of taxation placed on common Hawaiians to pay for the government’s outlays for the sugar industry pushed many of the kanaka into plantation employment. In the 1860s each adult Hawaiian male paid five dollars annually in combined tax. At first these were paid in kind, then the government required cash, which was hard for rural people to come by outside the plantation economy. Planters offered to pay annual taxes for a one-year enlistment; owing to the shortage of cash in the rural Hawaiian economy and the government’s escalating demands, this was a powerful incentive.28 Land sales boomed in the 1860s, with big, depopulated Maui and Hawai’i offering especially fat targets for speculators who consolidated massive sugar domains by buying patchworks of ali‘i, konohiki, and kuleana fee simple lands. The boom ended abruptly with the end of the American Civil War in 1866 and the resumption of mainland production. Several large Hawai‘i plantations failed, and the Hawaiian sugar industry staggered through a tough decade from 1866 to 1875. Isabella Bird wrote in 1873 that sugar was hampered by “the difficulty of procuring

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labor, and at San Francisco of a heavy import duty.” Profits were “hardly worth mentioning,” she continued, “and few of the planters do more than keep their heads above water.” Many plantations were sold for less than one-third of their previous value. But, she was confident that if the US duty were lifted, profits would soar: “There are thirty-five plantations on the islands, and there is room for fifty more.”29 Then, in August 1876, US president Grant signed the Reciprocity Treaty allowing Hawaiian sugar, rice, and other products to enter the United States duty-free; in Hawai‘i, news of the treaty prompted near-feverish speculation in sugar land and the entry of dozens of planters into the business.30 Even with the treaty, a volatile market, stiff foreign competition, and high capital costs pushed many or most of the small producers into bankruptcy within a decade. Plantations with strong agents—such as the Honolulu firms Castle and Cooke, H. Hackfeld and Co., and C. Brewer and Co., which could negotiate favorable terms with suppliers and refiners, survived. In a globalized market, bigness was necessary to survive, and from 1860 to 1880, consolidations pushed the business from a dispersed smallholder model to the massive, industrialized economy of Big Sugar that would prevail for one hundred years. Big plantation centers grew up, bringing change to the rural hinterlands that had hitherto been removed from the effects of the port towns. This was especially true in windward Hawai‘i, Maui, and Kaua‘i, where the landscape of sugar displaced and replaced Hawaiian villages as centers of housing, employment, and administration.31 Most plantation workers were Hawaiians of both sexes, who signed contracts for three to six months or worked for day wages during the harvest crunch periods. Owners, however, preferred Chinese, who could be induced to sign up for as long as five years. The first two hundred Chinese contract laborers arrived in 1852. Under pressure from the growers, the Hawaiian government established a board of immigration in 1866 to recruit more foreign workers. Large numbers of Japanese arrived from 1868 on. With greater scale came greater reliance, not only on foreign labor but on technology: new techniques and devices to clear and plant fields, to build irrigation works, and to transport cane and especially the use of steam-powered mills to crush, separate, and refine it. A commensurate level of organization was also required to manage the complexity. Sugar plantations became rural factories, of a type similar to those built in the United States earlier in the century. In the 1860s plantations ranged from two to three hundred acres, with most averaging one hundred acres in cane, worked by one hundred laborers. In 1866, Maui had twelve plantations; Hawai’i, eight, O‘ahu, six; and Kaua‘i, four. Maui’s tonnage was 7,750, more than half the kingdom’s total. In 1879, Maui had thirteen plantations; Hawai’i, twenty-four; Kaua‘i, seven; O‘ahu, seven; and Molokai, three—a total of fifty-four. Tonnage increased to 12,200 on Maui and 19,732 on Hawai’i. The period 1866–1879 saw a 250 percent plus increase in tonnage, much of that attributable to a huge

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expansion of haole-owned operations on Hawai’i. By the 1890s, the biggest plantations cultivated two hundred to three hundred acres and employed one thousand or more workers. The largest operation on Maui produced almost twelve thousand tons by itself in 1890. In the decade 1880–1890, average plantation size nearly doubled, while the total number of operations grew by just 10 percent.32 I R R IG AT IO N

From the beginning, the problem of adequate water for growing cane was a problem for all but the rainiest plantations. Even on well-watered windward lands, periods of drought could be common, and climate variability contributed an unwelcome portion to the business insecurity that Hawai‘i’s planters faced. In addition, the limits of available rain-watered sugar lands put a premium on expanding planting into progressively more marginal leeward areas. A drought in 1851, followed by a market drop the next year, caused a wave of bankruptcies and turmoil in the business community. Naturally, planters started looking at irrigation. They could not have ignored it: irrigation was all around them, both alive, sustaining Hawaiian kuleana and Chinese rice paddies, and dead, in the form of the ruined bones of ancient terraces and ditches. At the same time, a number of successful experiments with irrigation in the arid western United States, including the Mormon exodus to Utah in 1847, had captured the imaginations of American agriculturalists, many of whom made their way to Hawai‘i. All over the islands, small-scale irrigation was used in home gardens and small farms and even in the gardens of Punahou School in Honolulu, where a spring was diverted into ditches to water vegetables, trees, and sugarcane. The first major commercial sugar irrigation scheme was built by a former Punahou employee, W. H. Rice, when he was hired as manager of the Pierce and Company plantation at Lihue, Kaua‘i: the “Rice” ditch, eleven miles long, built in the summer of 1856 for $7,000.33 Thereafter, gravity irrigation was used by many, if not most, new sugar ventures, including three plantations at the mouth of the Iao Valley on Maui diverting water from the Wailuku River. The old, simple model of stream diversions was limited to cane lands lying within the same watershed as the source stream. A way around this constraint was found by H.  P. Baldwin, a son of missionaries, at Paia, Maui, at his plantation Sunny Side. As the name suggests, the operation, started in 1870, saw little rain, keeping it in the red in its first years. With no local stream to divert, Baldwin and his partner S. T. Alexander set their eyes on the copious streams of the nearby East Maui forests, owned by the government. With a bold engineering plan involving siphons, flumes, and ditches to cross the torturous terrain between the windward side and their cane lands, the biggest challenge the partners faced was in securing water rights from a skeptical and divided government. In 1876, they and several

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neighbor planters were granted a two-year lease in which to finish the work, or the rights would revert. The Hamakua Ditch project was built on time—for $80,000, more than three times its budget—and was judged a stunning success as the plantations prospered. Just as the Paia syndicate was negotiating its water deal, California sugar refining magnate Klaus Spreckels arrived in Honolulu on board the same steamer that carried the news of the passage of the Reciprocity Treaty. A German immigrant to the United States who had risen by sheer entrepreneurial moxie to become the West Coast’s biggest sugar refiner, Spreckels wanted to control the source; within a year he had signed contracts to buy “more than half ” the kingdom’s sugar production.34 In the course of his travels in the islands, he saw the potential that irrigation had to open vast areas of fertile but dry leeward lands to cane, and he hatched a plan to become the kingdom’s largest producer as well. It would take a lot of water—one ton of water to grow and mill one pound of sugar. He brought over a German engineer to assess water sources and found abundant, untapped streams on the governmentowned, windward slopes of Haleakala that could be brought to the dry plains of central Maui with enough capital. The key would be to procure the water rights cheaply. And it would take land, lots of it, also bought cheap enough to make the venture pay. Spreckels turned to political irrigation: a shrewd and charming man, within a year he had become the close confidant and financial guarantor of King Kalakaua and his premier, Charles Murray Gibson, and had managed to buy or lease more than thirty thousand acres of leeward Central Maui. He asked the king to grant him water rights to several streams on the windward side, but Kalakaua’s cabinet demurred. Spreckels tried to sway the Hawaiians with promises of investing $1 million and settling Hawaiians on his lands and letting them share in the prosperity the white gold would bring. Many hailed the plan as the salvation of the Hawaiian race; the editor of the newspaper Ka nupepa kuokoa advised: “He will divide this land into small districts and settle whole families on them. They will plant sugar shares and get paid for their labors. The country will become prosperous and the people will multiply.” When the cabinet continued to refuse the grant, Spreckels sponsored a night of champagne drinking with the king and threw in a $40,000 personal “loan.” At two o’clock in the morning, the cabinet was informed that it had been fired, and Spreckels got his water. The Spreckels Ditch was built, at a cost of a quarter million dollars, along with a wharf, a railroad, mill buildings lit with the kingdom’s first electric lights, worker housing, and a steamship line to carry the product to the refinery in San Francisco. A banner reading “grass grows and water runs” was hoisted above the town of Haiku when the water arrived, on July 4, 1877. The perfect vertically integrated corporation, Spreckels’s sugar empire boomed, and Central Maui bloomed. Many local Hawaiians had in fact been settled on the plantations, and native opinion of the grand scheme was favorable. More importantly for the long term, the value of massive investments in irrigation was unequivocably proven.

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M O L O KA I I N T H E F I R S T SU G A R RU SH

Because of demand from the leper settlement at Kalawao and from sugar growers, especially on Maui, Molokai’s windward valleys prospered—none more so than Hālawa. All were rare exceptions to the rule of consolidation of kuleana lands in wet valleys for plantations—Waikolu, Pelekunu, and Wailau because they were too isolated, with no roads and no harbors, and Hālawa because, though it was somewhat accessible, it was isolated and small enough to maintain its stability and prosperous enough to resist fragmentation through land sales. Again, Molokai’s smallness protected it from becoming big and yet gave it a speaking part, albeit minor, in the pageant of things. For a while, Hawaiians in windward Molokai negotiated the new capitalist economy by continuing to grow traditional crops on their kuleana, using traditional methods yet gearing their production to the changing market. Big plantations needed a lot of food. Chinese workers frequently insisted on eating rice, which was at first twice as expensive as poi. Quickly, Chinese who had fulfilled their contracts moved into kalo lo‘i abandoned by their Hawaiian owners to grow the familiar crop. Demand kept ahead of output—Chinese workers in California, 75,132 in 1880, in addition to Hawaiian plantations—helped drive the expansion of rice farming into previously untilled land such as coastal marshes and salt flats.35 But Hawaiian workers, still the majority, preferred poi, which does not keep or transport well and which at any rate was being planted less and less as sugar and rice usurped its acreage, its water supply, and the hands of its cultivators. Plantation managers, especially on Maui, struggled to keep up with demand. One manager at the Haiku plantation recorded in his letters that pai‘ai, for making poi, had doubled in price in two years and that salted salmon in barrels, a more reliable import from the northwest coast, was even more expensive: “Pai‘ai, still the most cherished food of the native laborer, foots up a big item in the general expenses of a plantation,” he wrote. “When salmon costs from twelve to eighteen dollars per barrel, the sum expended by a plantation alone is very considerable; and it seems strange that so much money should annually leave the country for the article of fish, which so plentifully thrive around these islands . . . That fish are almost a luxury at Wailuku, Makawao and other places, is a well-known fact.”36 At Haiku and other places, workers—the pai‘ai producers included—ran up serious debts at the company stores, mostly for food. Store logs from Lihue show that Hawaiians bought mostly salmon, poi, and cloth. No matter its price, managers had to keep food on hand or workers would leave. The Haiku manager wrote: “Besides they eat a great deal of cane if they have not plenty of food.” Often, the only option was to look across the channel to Molokai: “There is a great scarcity of food on the Island, & unless we can devise a means of getting it from Molokai, we shall soon be obliged to stop. We have 3 weeks food engaged for Haiku, but the

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Hamakuapoko [Maui] people have had little or none for three weeks, so that gang is scattering in search of food, as I have promised them for the last three or four weeks that the vessel would next trip bring from Molokai. My orders seem not to have been received there in season to prepare food.” A native Hawaiian traveler recorded this moment in time in the newspaper Ka lahui Hawaii, of August 2, 1877: “[Hālawa Valley] faces east and is like a dray horse with blinds, keeping it from seeing on both sides. . . . There is no haole or Chinese in this valley.” He counted 1,032 individual kalo patches, 90 of which were konohiki/po‘alima patches; the population he gave as 61 men, 64 women, and 99 children—equaling 224. “And some of the women are pregnant at this time. The race of the king [Kalakaua] is growing in this valley. The men and women are all married except two. In my visit I have been able to boast that this is the most fertile valley God ever made for the people, from the sea to the taro patches that cling close to the base of the pali where the falls tumble from above. . . . this valley grows the most taro on Molokai and other places on the islands except Waipio [Hawai‘i] and here on O‘ahu.”37 Yet on the rest of the island, depopulated and drier, without large areas of kalo culture, hopeful sugar planters saw opportunities. The sugar fever that gripped the islands in anticipation of a reciprocity treaty with the United States boom reached even to Kala‘e. As early as 1873, Rudolf Meyer planted sugar in the bottoms of several gulches windward of the family homestead, where seasonal rainfall was enough to produce a crop. In the best of them, Kaihohonu Valley, he could see a crop of three tons per acre in a good year. Spread over a patchwork of gulches totaling twenty-five to thirty-five acres in different years, he grew three varieties of cane: manulele and ‘ohi‘a, two native cultivars, and kenikeni, known as Lahaina cane, a favorite of big growers because of its disease resistance and ability to produce a ratoon, or second, crop. On the dry sides, coffee bushes were planted.38 To process the cane, Meyer began building a mill works in 1877, starting with $800 worth of piping to divert spring water from upslope to the mill site. He imported redwood and fir from the American Northwest for the millhouse and equipment from as far away as England: a cane-crushing mill that was yoked to a mule, clarifiers heated by a wood-fired furnace, evaporation pans, cooling pans, and a centrifugal drum driven by a small steam engine to separate the sugar crystals from the molasses. Meyer used his considerable engineering skills to repair, adapt, and modify each piece to his requirements (see figure 8). By 1879, his expenses for the mill and plantation totaled $8,367.85. He employed Hawaiian and Chinese workers, paying his foreman, Joseph Pauahi, $10 per month and his laborers from 50 to 75 cents per day. Over the next few years, the Meyer operation made a modest profit: in 1880, it sold $1,831.85 worth of sugar and molasses against expenses of $723.77; in 1881 his expenses shot up to $2,212.69, but no sales are noted in the ledger; in 1882 expenses were $1,303.89, while income was probably $1,400 for the 20,000 pounds that were shipped to Honolulu; in 1883 expenses

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figure 8. R. W. Meyer Sugar Mill, engine and boiler house, circa 1881. Locomotive-type, fire-tube, portable boiler, no. I model. Manufactured by Ames Iron Works, Oswego, New York. Source: National Park Service.

were held to $921, and 38,925 pounds were shipped; in 1884 expenses were $470 against 47,571 pounds, or 23.8 tons; and in 1885, 62,018 pounds, or 31 tons, were shipped against expenses of $330. One expert has calculated that the producer price of sugar at that time was near $.055 per pound, putting Meyer’s income at $3,410.99 and his profit for 1885, his best year, at $3,080.99. The Meyer sugar plantation was the smallest in the kingdom; it may have been that its modest size reflected “Meyer’s caution in approaching what was for him a new facet of agriculture.”39 Or it may have reflected the limitations of terrain and climate in Kala‘e and the capital resources available to him. For all of the complexity

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and labor-intensivity of operating the plantation and mill, sugar remained just one part of the Meyer family’s integrated farming operation. A letter to Meyer, then at Honolulu, from his oldest son, Otto, dated April 19, 1883, and here translated from Hawaiian, gives some sense of the hands-on knowledge needed to run the day-today business in Kala‘e: My Dear Father, . . . I will send the 20 barrels of molasses per Lehua [interisland vessel] shipped to H. Hackfeld & Co. We went down to Papalenui [Gulch] for three days to pick the ripe coffee, they are plenty now in Papalenui; I think we will get more than 500 lbs. when finished picking. The cane below the cowpen looks very well indeed, also that little piece you inquired. I think it will be better to have Kenikeni on that 7 acre field and that little piece below the peaches about 3 acre must have Kenikeni also, except Puahaka Makai. I think it will be better for Manulele and Ohia cane there. Monday or Tuesday we are going to commence to cut the cane ready for the grinding on Wednesday or Thursday. The horses are not all found yet, there are three more. We are going to hire a man to find them. I think if the Chinamen’s wages are going down to $8.00 per month, I think it will be better to have some few Chinamen for us, about 4 or 6. We are going to grind without men for a week or two; Samuel said if they get through driving the horses, he is going to get cattle for Honolulu for next week. That will take another week before the men can come to help us.40

In 1886, one year after the Kala‘e Sugar Mill’s best year, sugar prices on the world market plummeted. The hit was so severe that Meyer decided to cease growing cane entirely and shifted all his cane acreage to coffee. Such a small producer would not have been able to weather global commodity market volatility for long. However, Molokai had two other sugar plantations in the 1870s and 1880s, both on the East End, which persisted for some years. One, called the Kamalo Sugar Company, was started by Daniel McCorriston and valued at $50,000 in 1882, with a mill at Kamalō, one hundred acres of cane at Kamalō and Kawela, and about fifty workers.41 The other, the Moanui Sugar Plantation, owned by Eugene Bal, was valued at $60,000 according to the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Monthly of November 1883; another source said that it met its demise “in a fire sometime in the 80s.”42 The three Molokai plantations had between them 300 acres in cane at the time, while the total acreage in the kingdom was 39,350.43

A BA R R E N P L AC E

On the West End, cattle gradually came to dominate the landscape and the life of the people there. From the two hundred head reported for the entire island in 1851,

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by 1884 the Molokai Ranch, under R. W. Meyer’s management, had five thousand head roaming its two hundred thousand acres.44 Though only a few direct observations exist from the period, these help us to reconstruct the immediate impact five thousand cattle would have had on the fragile dryland ecosystems of the West End. The remnant dry forest and shrublands that Remy cataloged in 1854 would have quickly been grazed down and replaced by alien grasses and kiawe. With the destruction of the native flora would come a decrease in soil moisture, an increase in surface runoff and erosion, and a drying out of the perennial spring flows near the shoreline, including, notably, the large springs at the mouth of the several gulches draining the southeast flanks of Mauna Loa that had sustained the kalo lo‘i and fishpond at Pala‘au at least since the time when Kamehameha’s Hawai’i Island men came to settle. There is no way to know precisely how fast these changes occurred nor what interaction they may have had with the larger economic changes affecting communities in Molokai. An account of “Hina’s Windy Island,” published in the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka lahui Hawaii August 31, 1876, by a writer whose byline was S. P. K. Malihinihele (from malihinihele, a foreign or outsider traveler), gives eloquent testimony to the transformations wrought in Molokai since the 1850s: depopulation; the replacement of Hawaiian subsistence farmers with exotic animals; and their consequences of deforestation, dessication of springflows, and rapidly filling reef flats and fishponds from erosion. Of Pala‘au, he wrote: “In the olden days this was a good land with a fertile plain where plants grew. The population was large, but today it is uninhabited. Perhaps they’ve died or gone away. The plain was barren, and many cattle and horses go about on it. These are the only population.” Farther east, he reported that Kalamaula was “a barren place without a single native nor a house. Only the introduced animals walk about on the plain. Pitiful is the land.” At Kaunakakai, he found people, clustered around the source of employment and government services: “This place is a little better because it is like a town. There are fine houses belonging to our chiefs and a store. The natives live closer to the plain, and it may be the strangers may take the beaches . . . The people there were once busy tending the king’s cattle, branding them and doing everything else. The horses of the natives are skinny with sore backs, due to the doings of the haoles. There are so many cattle and horses. The plains are full of them.” Once he came eastward to Kawela, the vegetation became green and the air cooler, and the native houses, all frame built, reflected a measured prosperity that extended along the East End shore. With the exception of the original mission church at Kalua‘aha, which he found “ worn out . . . its beauty . . . about gone,” the churches he saw from Kaunakakai to Hālawa were “beautiful. These are all stone churches, and all the old ways are done away with. The best of these is the Waialua church with haoles attending it. Most of the dwellings houses of the natives are frame buildings, and old house are no more.” He saw sugarcane being

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grown and the mills readied for the harvest at the Kamalō plantation and at Eugene Bal’s Moanui plantation. He was impressed by the sight of “good” native houses along with those of the haoles and shared in the widespread enthusiasm in the kingdom that the Reciprocity Treaty would bring prosperity to the Hawaiian people. Of Moanui, he said: “The place will be a gold mine to the people there . . . If the reciprocity treaty will prove successful, these country places on Molokai will be taken over by haole cane growers, then the people there will reap more money.”45 T H E P R O P E RT Y M A R K E T, 1 8 7 0 – 1 8 89

What Malihinihele saw was the new economy’s reorganization of Molokai into two parts, according to market forces and ecological realities: one, a haole-controlled, extensive grazing zone on the West End, with a service town at Kaunakakai, plus an outlier on the far East End from south of Hālawa to Honouli; and two, a hybrid economic and ethnic-social zone in the East End valleys between Kawela and Moanui, populated sparsely with Hawaiians, part Hawaiians, haoles, and Chinese engaged in a mixed economy, partly subsisting from farming and fishing, partly in the cash economy. Some valleys were exceptional: Hālawa, where Hawaiians practicing traditional kalo culture were paradoxically well integrated with the plantation economy of the kingdom as a whole and a handful of the larger, wetter kona valleys—Moanui, Mapulehu, Kamalō, Kawela—where small haole companies tried to make a go of commercial agriculture in environments probably better suited to small, Hawaiian-style farming. These exceptions were inversions of the general bifurcation of Molokai into big/dry/haole and small/wet/Hawaiian and show both the limits and the domination of the two zones. The isolation of the north coast was only increased: Kalaupapa remained a universe of its own, and the windward valleys held onto only small, remnant populations—Hawaiian survivals buffered from change by their extreme remoteness. The property records reflect this, recording a robust market in real estate throughout the period, the details of which are somewhat surprising, in light of historians’ standard take on the dispossession of the Hawaiians after the Mahele (see table 4, Molokai land transactions, 1870–1889). The vast majority of transactions were sales or leases of kuleana plots, with improvements such as buildings noted in the Bureau of Conveyance records perhaps one-fifth of the time. Out of a total of 548 transactions, Hawaiians made up 475, or 86.95 percent, of the buyers/ lessees and 414, or 75.58 percent, of the sellers/lessors (the Hawaiian government, which sold ninety-four plots—mostly to Hawaiians, plus a few haoles—is not included as a seller in this accounting). Haoles made up 57, or 10.4 percent, of the buyers/lessees, and 37, or 6.75 percent, of the sellers/lessors. Chinese made up 16, or 2.9 percent, of the buyers/lessees, and 3, or .55 percent, of the sellers/lessors. In this period, the island’s population hovered a few hundred people over two

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thousand (the censuses are clouded by the rises and declines of inmates at the Kalaupapa settlement and by the fact that the 1884 and 1890 censuses combined Molokai and Lana‘i, making for considerable uncertainty in counts).46 The records reinforce the sharp contrast in land use and ownership between the East and West Ends. On the West End, there were few transactions overall; almost none of them involved Hawaiian buyers or lessors; most involved haoles engaged in commercial ventures on a medium (under one hundred acres) to large (thousands of acres) scale. Charles Reed Bishop consolidated his holdings in Kaluako‘i with various purchases, including that of Papohaku in 1881 from a haole widow. John Dominis paid off his mortgage for the ahupua‘a of Naiwa to John Mott-Smith in 1873. William R. Buchanan bought half the ahupua‘a of Kamiloloa, five thousand acres, from Charles Richards in 1876. Expanding his holdings in Kala‘e, Meyer bought pieces of land at Naiwa from Princess Ruth Ke‘elikolani and at Kahanui from Edwin Jones. In the 1870s he also bought one thousand acres of kuleana lands at the headwaters of Waihanu Stream from their Hawaiian owners, where he kept cattle and pigs.47 Except for those of Meyer, all of the acquisitions on the West End or Kala‘e were meant for grazing, not farming. The Meyers, to make their modest agricultural enterprise feasible, had to go farther and farther upslope into the forest to find reliable water. In 1884, the Meyer brothers dug trenches tapping into five springs upslope in the Waialala Valley, then piped the water downhill into a cement-lined pool behind the house. Its overflow first irrigated kalo patches below the sugar mill and then fields of sorghum planted for dairy cattle feed. Sometime thereafter, the Meyer brothers dug by hand a 350-foot tunnel to Waikalai, producing fifty thousand gallons per day. (These two intakes are still used by Maui County for domestic water supply in Kala‘e.)48 As early as the mid-1880s, Meyer’s title was disputed, and he bought a supposedly clear title from the government in 1886 for $500. Based on later, extensive disputation of the Meyer claim, it appears that recognition of the value of the land’s water rights was the reason for the questioning in the mid-1880s.49 Land sales in the Kala‘e area indicate not only the consolidation of a oncediverse landscape into an extensive grazing terrain under the commercial control of a handful of haole and part-Hawaiian families but also a radical depopulation— proportionally greater than that seen anywhere else on Molokai. Kala‘e had been populated, if thinly, in the 1850s, with even a small village at Waialala, as reported by observers. The great ethnographer Abraham Fornander (who himself leased some land and a fishpond on Molokai at Kiliula from 1878 to at least 1883) noted in 1880 the depopulation of all of Central Molokai: “As an instance of the dense population, even a few years previous to Kamehameha’s death, the author has often been told by a grand-niece of Kekuelike, who was a grown-up girl at the time, that when the chief ’s trumpet-shell sounded, over a thousand able-bodied men

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would respond to the call, within a circle described by Pala‘au, Naiwa, Kalae, and Kaunakakai.50 Those lands together cannot muster a hundred men this day.”51 In contrast, the East End saw steady traffic in land in the period, almost all of it small kuleana plots used for farming, plus several fishponds. One of the few exceptions was the purchase of the ahupua‘a of Ualapu‘e by Poomaikelane from the Crown Lands Commission.52 Most transactions were concentrated in the southeast valleys, with some turnover also in the windward valleys. The pace of business remained robust through the period, without the petering out of sales reported from rural North O‘ahu in the 1880s.53 In the windward valleys and the East End, Hawaiians made up the majority of buyers/lessees and sellers/lessors, both small and large. A handful of Hawaiians were clearly in the market speculatively, such as David Kahanu, who bought eleven pieces of land from Hawaiians and haoles: at Pelekunu, Wailau, Kalaupapa, Hālawa, Puko‘o, and Naiwa—a representative sampling of the most commercially viable valleys on the island. Conversely, many of the small buyers and lessees were haoles. Also, predictably, many haoles had larger commercial ambitions: the Beckleys leased a fishpond from Princess Ruth at Keawanui; Edwin Jones bought seven pieces at Puko‘o, Mapulehu, and Kahanui. Eugene Bal’s Moanui Sugar Plantation and the McCorristons’ Kamalo Sugar Company also leased a myriad of kuleana plots in various valleys (as will be detailed in the next chapter). Because of the limitations of the Bureau of Conveyances records, which do not record purchase prices, rents, encumbrances, or specific uses, there is no sure way to reconstruct land uses, economic activity, or market conditions in much of Molokai without help from other sources—sources that are only spottily extant. We can infer—from parcel size, ethnicity of sellers/lessors and buyers/lessees, and turnover—and, in concert with other sources, make educated guesses. Based on the small size of most kuleana plots exchanged and from travelers’ descriptions, it would appear that most Molokai property supported a mixed subsistence-market economic pattern that would hold into the twentieth century. Evidence is provided by the fact that enough money was in circulation to buy and pay taxes on property—money likely brought in by fishing or growing for local or Maui markets and employment and service providing for the small sugar plantations and other agricultural efforts. With the exceptions of Hālawa, the East End sugar valleys, and the West End/far East End grazing lands, most of Molokai was engaged only marginally in the market economy and could not have been called prosperous. Even many konohiki landowners—Hawaiians with larger plots in mostly favorable locations—did not profit much from their holdings. Here is the testimony concerning Halualani’s land from the Land Commission records: he had been konohiki of Kauikeauouli (Kamehameha III) for eight years before the Mahele and had received half the ahupua‘a of Ka‘amola: “The land is composed of grazing land, taro land, and has a fishpond.” Despite the land’s potential, on his

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death in 1878 at Lahaina, Maui, a witness in the case stated: “Halualani had nothing.” There was a house on the land, furnished by his daughter’s husband. He had owned two horses, which were sold in 1875. After his death, his heirs saw no rent, even though they had a tenant on the land.54 Nonetheless, it was a capitalist market, with all participating. In spite of periodic market reversals, entrepreneurs kept up an enthusiastic traffic in every conceivable form of real property—including ancient feudal prerogatives preserved in the Hawaiian legal and property codes as though in amber. The ancient konohiki fishing rights to many ahupua‘a were leased out, including the fishing rights to Kamalō and Keawanui, leased from Bernice Pauahi Bishop in 1886 by J. McColgan and his partner in the Kamalo Sugar Company, Daniel McCorriston, who also mortgaged their shares in the plantation that year to George Trimble. In 1891, Pauahi’s husband leased the konohiki fishing rights to “the lands of Kaunakakai, Kapaakea, Kalamaula, Naiwa, Pala‘au, and a portion of Kahananui situated on the island of Molokai” to Charles L. Hopkins of Honolulu for a period of five years, the yearly rent being $100, “payable semi-annually in advance.”55 Though few in number, Chinese were among the most active market participants. The largest example is that, upon the liquidation of Bal’s Moanui plantation (which looks on paper more like a bankruptcy than a fire, as “lands, lsehold, mills, bldgs, machny, animals, contracts & c. of Moanui S.P.” were listed as sold), most of the buyers were Chinese, who converted the plantation to rice.56 The Moanui mortgages continued to pass through many hands, Chinese and haole, for years afterward.57 For many other Molokai landowners, however, mortgages taken out could not be repaid, and a steady beat of foreclosure sales was recorded in the Honolulu newpapers in this period. As far as can be discerned, all of those foreclosed were Hawaiian, and all of the foreclosing lenders were haole; the majority of those lenders named in the legal notices resided in Honolulu and had apparently written mortgages on the Molokai properties as investments. Some were prominent members of the merchant community, such as Henry N. Castle, the financier, and Sanford B. Dole, the lawyer, supreme court justice under the monarchy, and later president of the Republic of Hawai‘i after he had been instrumental in the monarchy’s overthrow. Others were less prominent but no less members of Honolulu’s elite, such as Miss E. K. Bingham and Mrs. F. Simpson. Of seventy foreclosure notices published in the 1880s and 1890s, sixty were lands located in the mana‘e valleys and Hālawa, four were in the windward valleys, and six were on the kona shore from Kawela westward—there were none in Kala‘e or the West End. All but eleven were kuleana grants on lands in some portion suitable for kalo growing; three were ahupua‘a: Pelekunu (5,315 acres), Kapuaokoolau (671 acres), and threefourths of “Manama” (which I take to be Manawai); the remainder were described as kula or grazing land.58

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What this grim record shows is that, as the years passed, the irrigated landscapes that had been the most productive and valuable under the traditional Hawaiian system lost their power to generate mana in its new form—cash—and almost inexorably passed out of Hawaiian and into haole hands, to be absorbed into larger land units and larger economic strategies tied to the global economy. And yet, even as it was gradually transformed by the changing outside world, Molokai remained stubbornly marginal; if anything, its relative importance in the archipelago declined through the 1880s and into the late 1890s. At the outset of the period, its population was roughly stable: in 1872, Molokai and Lana‘i together counted 2,697 persons; by 1880 it had risen somewhat to 2,795—though this increase may have sadly been due to the arrival of lepers at Kalawao.59 Nor was it completely overlooked by government: Hawaiian representatives from Molokai sat in the legislature in Honolulu and made regular attempts to advance their island’s interests. In 1884, for example, motions were made to increase the size of the police force to eight, to post a foreign doctor on the island, and to drill wells and build wharves and bridges at various places.60 They were frequently heard: the budget of 1886 included $2,000 for a wharf at Puko‘o; $2,000 for another wharf at Kaunakakai; $1,800 for a wharf and landing at Kamalō; $800 for a bridge at Hālawa; $2,000 for a road from Kalawao to Kalaupapa; $2,176.86 in unexpended road tax collected on Molokai to be spent there; $5,000 for the purchase of additional land at Kalawao for the leper settlement; $15,000 to fund a new system of pipes bringing water from Waikolu Valley to Kalaupapa; a $4,000 subsidy for the primary steamer running between Honolulu and Molokai, the Mokoli‘i; and $1,800 for the salary of the district judge. But, to put these appropriations in perspective, the budget of the Hawaiian Islands kingdom that year was $4,552,447.61 Nor did modernity completely pass Molokai by: in August 1889, an underwater telegraph cable was successfully laid from Maui to Puko‘o.62 But instant communication could not by itself bring the island into the modern world of large-scale agriculture that its bigger neighbor had entered: the shipping notes in the the Hawaiian Gazette of November 3, 1891, tracked the comings and goings of ships of many nations bound for San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Europe before noting that the Mokoli‘i had brought 150 pigs and 20 sheep from Lana‘i to Honolulu but nothing from Molokai, and the steamer Viva had “brought a deck load of akule fish from Molokai. They arrived in good condition and found ready sale at the Fish Market on Sturday.”63 E R O SIO N

Environmental impacts in the last half of the nineteenth century mirrored land use. On the windward coast—steep, wet, and clothed in dense forests—economic activity, even where intense, was confined to small valley floors, and environmental

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change was correspondingly confined to those areas. An account by James Keola published in a Hawaiian-language newspaper in 1893 describes a resurgent Hālawa Valley, surpassing even lush Kaua‘i in abundance: I have never seen so much taro planted as at Hālawa. Every native took part in this good work . . . Only on this valley on Molokai that the population is large. There are over two hundred men women and children. The strangest thing is that there is only one haole, Mr. H. Van Giesen, a teacher of English; no Japanese, no Portuguese, no Americans, no Englishmen nor any other foreigner. There are a hundred big taro patches on both sides of the stream. There aren’t any proud people on the place for men, women and children work. The people here worked constantly and know nothing of the evil things that are destroying the race, such as laziness and idle hands. A hundred pa‘i ‘ai are sent from every week, all through the year, to Kalaupapa, Wailuku and Lahaina. I have seen men who hold good positions on Molokai working away in the taro patches. A man who works with his hands is honorable. A person with hands like a wooden image is greatly despised. On the beach stands the fishing tent of the Hon. GS Nahin and his workers, about ten or so. When they make a haul, the fish is taken to Wailuku and Honolulu on boats. At Hālawa, one can see Hawaiians that are as fond of work as those of the olden times . . . Wake up, brothers.64

Above the mana‘e shore, there were greater impacts: woodcutting for lumber and firewood and the gathering of pepeiao and pulu were occurring, and animals— feral goats and pigs and semidomesticated cattle and horses—multiplied on the steep kula lands above the inhabited shoreline. While there is little direct evidence in the historical record of the kind of accelerated deforestation that was occurring elsewhere, experience from throughout the kingdom shows that even moderate cutting and grazing of such slopes would have had very visible consequences.65 On the West End and in Kala‘e, where large commercial herds were grazing a semiarid landscape, environmental impacts were severe. Depopulation and the replacement of the native dryland flora with kiawe, which thrived along with cattle, made the western coastline, so celebrated in Hawaiian stories and chants, seem like a harsh, alien place to many visitors. Keola’s account of the area around Kaunakakai is typical: he complained that there were nothing but kiawe trees and rough a‘a lava, with no natives’ houses visible: “It wasn’t much to look at . . . How I despised it all . . . It was a painful sight to the eyes.”66 From shore to the mountains, for four or five miles, was barren, though he was told by his guide the plain was formerly inhabited. At Kawela “is seen the first signs of life,” including “four or five” frame houses, the remains of a heiau (temple), and “an old wiliwili tree which is said to be of historic importance. Beyond Kawela,” he wrote (in a second version of his report, published in English in the Hawaiian Gazette), “vegetable life begins.”67 A breeze relieved the heat, and he “saw plants growing thriftily there . . . My heart felt eased at seeing the

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green plants of the woodlands.”68 Five miles farther along, at Kamalō, he saw “the first Chinese store, standing in an almost isolated place”; various heiaus; and, farther along the beach, the “ruins” of the Kamalo Sugar Company, which, though of recent demise, seemed to him, as much as the ancient temples, like the remains of a vanished, better, former world: “The smoke stack and several outhouses mark the spot where a great sugar plantation once flourished.”69 But erosion had the greatest impact. Within the space of a few decades, a large part of what had once been the most productive complex of fishponds and reef flats in the archipelago was transformed into a dead zone. Mud, washed down from the mountains west and east of the Ho‘olehua plain, inundated the coast from ‘Iloli to Kalamaula. The offshore fishing ground that stretched between these places, called Hilia, had once so teemed with fish that it was said, “Ka i‘a ka wawae o Hilia” (fish are kicked with the feet at Hilia) and was “covered with mud, but formerly the shores had sandy beaches,” according to Summers.70 The fishponds were buried, beginning with the loko umeiki (fishtrap) at ‘Iloli called Pakanaka (“touched by the people” or “the people’s wall,” meaning belonging to commoners), which had enclosed around sixty acres.71 The four-hundred-acre fishpond at Pala‘au simply disappeared from view: one Hawaiian writer lamented: “It is a pity to think of this huge fish pond being so full of mud that traces of it cannot be found.”72 The massive ponds at Kalamaula, Kahokai, and Kamaloko silted in nearly completely, effectively extending the island of Molokai almost a quarter mile out to sea.73 Erosion into fishponds was a normal, expected occurrence in old Hawai‘i, dealt with through normal maintenance.74 Yet the erosion of the late nineteenth century was of a different class altogether. We can gain a sense of how fast and violent it was from the story of ‘Olo‘olo, a famous bathing pool at Kaunakakai. Covering a half acre and fed by five springs, it was used by Kamehameha V and was said to be frequented by a very old woman—perhaps explaining the name (olo‘olo, meaning “hanging down,” as in breasts). A Hawaiian writer in 1922 noted: In days long ago there were many springs along the beaches of Hawaii nei. This was especially true of Molokai. In the year 1888 there was a heavy downpour of rain which made a flood lasting for days and the water from the pool covered the whole land of Kaunakakai. . . . When the water subsided the whole pool was filled with mud. As it rained each time, the pool was filled up some more until in1898, ten years later, there wasn’t a trace of it left. From that time to this, kiawe trees grew up erasing all traces of the pool.75

In the early 1920s, engineers trying to relocate the water source in order to tap it for irrigation found one of the springs buried under six feet of silt. To the west, where the ahupua‘a of Pala‘au, Kaluako‘i, Ho‘olehua, and Naiwa meet, a boundary stone that had stood three feet high in 1898 was rediscovered in 1923 under a foot of sediment.76

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The massive physical transformation of so much of the Molokai landscape by deforestation, dessication, and erosion was a local, place-specific manifestation of globalizing forces, here in the form of the export grazing economy. Reciprocally, the grazing business in Molokai was strongly determined and shaped by the ecological realities of the place in concert with external market and social conditions. Taken together, they favored bigness: while many of the smallholder farmsteads on the island (that is, the East End) kept cattle, they took no part in the business, which rewarded whole ahupua‘a-scale or multiple-ahupua‘a-scale operations requiring enormous capital, professional management, and permanent labor forces. The business certainly arose as the capitalist economic activity of last resort in much of Molokai, which was too dry or otherwise marginal to support irrigated plantation crops. The business profited from the environmental degradation the animals themselves caused by eliminating any other competing uses and driving off Hawaiian residents from their lands in the marginal areas—the villagers of Pala‘au sent to build their own jail in Honolulu being only the most extreme case. Molokai during the sugar era was a place of paradoxes: Big Sugar completely transformed most of the rest of the kingdom, yet sugarcane remained a tiny affair on Molokai, in spite of several determined attempts. The island—half of it, anyway—was actually protected from those same forces of change by its failure and by its limited role as a food provider, of pai‘ai and fish, to plantations in Maui and O‘ahu. On other islands, the industrialization of plantation production continued apace, meaning the consolidation of Hawaiian lands in corporate, haole, hands and the absorption of Hawaiian villagers into a partly urbanized proletariat producing a nonessential food item for export while barely subsisting on fish imported from the mainland. Between these two opposed trajectories, the island found itself divided fairly cleanly into halves, West and East, with the East finding its own unique relationship to the changes going on outside Molokai and the West, with no other options, being reshaped by them and taking its place in the new, capitalist order. The end of the old Hawaiian order could be plainly and poignantly surveyed from the palis of Kala‘e: extending to the south and west as far as the eye could see was a barren, treeless, depopulate rangeland dotted with cattle; jutting out into the ocean below was the settlement at Kalaupapa, administered by a modern, bureaucratic public health apparatus, ministering to what many feared would be the last of the Hawaiian people.

5

A Bigger, Better Hawai‘i Making an American Molokai, 1893–1957

While the “long” nineteenth century saw the gradual infiltration into Hawai‘i’s economy and politics of foreigners and foreign influence, especially Americans and American influence, the twentieth century began with Hawai‘i coming under outright control of the United States (see figure 9). In the years leading up to annexation, a series of steps brought the two polities closer: with each one came a renewed push for the sugar industry. New techniques of tapping groundwater to irrigate dry, leeward lands previously usable only for grazing brought a surge of investment and expansion. As always, Molokai beckoned the ambitious from across the channel, virgin territory ripe for the plow. A big, well-capitalized sugar enterprise was launched there, as well as a far more modest one. Both met problems with difficult environmental circumstances; both failed. In spite of these setbacks, corporate, and frequently outsider, control was extended over much of the island, and the very purposeful transformation of the landscape in support of their economic needs continued. With American political control came a redoubling of the bureaucratic and scientific efforts already in place to increase the efficiency of the agribusiness sector. Expert personnel were recruited from the mainland to staff Hawai‘i territorial agencies, which enjoyed extraordinary cooperation from private industry research groups, such as the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA), and with federal agencies asked to lend resources, such as the US Geological Survey and the Bureau of Reclamation. All parties shared a progressive vision that saw industrial, scientific, and social logics in harmony, each yoked together in the service of a common good. This was unapologetically defined as the success of the sugar industry. For most of the twentieth century, the land management agencies of the Hawaiian 126

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figure 9. Pa‘u riders (traditional wahine Hawaiian women, riding astride with full skirts), July 4, 1907, Kalaupapa. Photo by Jack London. Source: Jack London Collection, Huntington Library.

government engaged in an unprecedented example of government-private sector cooperation devoted to serving the economic interests of a single industry. Sugar held near-complete control over Hawai‘i—its land, water, labor, economy, government, and in large part, society. This combined scientific-administrative-industrial vision was also intertwined with a theory of American racial manifest destiny that legitimated the American takeover of Hawai‘i. Together, they underpinned an unprecedented, programmatic campaign to remake Hawai‘i through the scientific management of forests, rangelands, and water resources that extended over hundreds of thousands of acres. Large-scale immigration from Asia stoked renewed concern about the failure to establish an American settler frontier in Hawai‘i. New government programs were designed to achieve it through the irrigation of arid lands—including, not surprisingly, on Molokai. Here, the best twentieth-century government and science programs were bent to fulfilling the old missionary dream of a smallholder, agrarian arcadia. But again, the dream was frustrated by Hawaiian reality: monopoly control by a small overclass of land, water, labor, and markets—this time by haole-owned corporations rather than by the ali‘i. The dream of yeoman Americanism in Hawai‘i gave way, without much lamenting, to acceptance of American imperialism based on the racially stratified plantation export system—owned and operated, in a perverse twist of history, by the scions of the missionaries themselves. T H E F EV E R S O F 1 8 93

Through the 1870s and 1880s, relations between the haole business community and the government of King David Kalakaua grew increasingly strained. As the monarch’s people continued to dwindle, the number of foreigners surged—most of them Asian plantation laborers working for a largely white, and American, elite. The demographic shift was mirrored by patterns of landholding: as what was left of

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the ali‘i class sold out its ahupua‘a grants and other property stakes, its economic and political influence waned while the power of the haole business class waxed. This trend was slowed not at all by the fact that most members of the popularly elected legislature continued to be Hawaiians. From his coronation in 1874, Kalakaua had inflamed tensions: though he gave the sugar industry its biggest boon by signing the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States in 1876, he also resisted the haoles’ control of government, naming eleven Hawaiians out of thirty-four cabinet appointments in his seventeen-year reign.1 He encouraged the revival of Hawaiian cultural practices such as hula, mele chants, and surfing, much to the anger and dismay of the missionary party. He and his chief minister, Premier Charles Murray Gibson, promoted a “Hawaii for Hawaiians” rhetoric and clashed often with various factions of the haole elite—who in turn railed against the government’s failed foreign entanglements, fiscal indiscipline, unresponsiveness to business concerns, and native trappings. As its central role in the kingdom’s finances grew, so did the sugar class’ boldness in opposing the king. An all-white political party, the Hawaiian League, was formed, with its own militia unit, the Honolulu Rifles. A series of real and imagined threats to the kingdom’s sovereignty from foreign powers stoked calls for closer association with or annexation by the United States. In 1887, using a scandal involving the king accepting money from a Chinese merchant for a(n illegal) license to sell opium, the Hawaiian League, through threat of violence, imposed the so-called Bayonet Constitution on Kalakaua, taking the selection of the cabinet out of the king’s hands, putting revenues from the crown lands into trust, and curbing the power of the legislature by restricting native Hawaiian voting rights to property owners and those with improbably high incomes—at the same time as it opened the franchise to unnaturalized foreigners. The situation was made worse by passage in Washington of the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890, which abrogated the Reciprocity Treaty and imposed duties on Hawaiian sugar, resulting in a severe commercial depression in the islands. Calls for annexation to save the sugar industry were made brazenly. After Kalakaua’s death in California on January 20, 1891, and the accession of his sister Lili‘uokalani, agitation by the antigovernment faction began to come to a head. United States minister John L. Stevens, an imperialist who had been recalled from diplomatic posts in Paraguay and Uruguay in 1874 after calling in US troops and from Sweden and Norway in 1884, ordered an American warship to Honolulu to block what he insisted were hostile British designs on the kingdom. The Hawaiian people seethed at such naked displays of haole perfidy against the king. In 1892, against haole opposition, the legislature passed bills creating a lottery and legalizing opium, both to raise revenue independent of the planters. The league went into high gear, sending a delegation to Washington to negotiate annexation (which included Charles Reed Bishop, a Hawaiian citizen sworn to protect its constitution, and Lorrin Thurston, a proannexationist who had recently purchased the Advertiser newspaper). At home

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in Honolulu, a self-appointed Citizens’ Committee of Safety called on Stevens to land US marines to protect American property from “the revolutionary acts of Queen Lili‘uokalani,” who had dared to suggest restoring Hawaiian voting rights. With marines surrounding ‘Iolani Palace, the Honolulu Rifles took the police station and government buildings and put the queen into checkmate. The Hawaiian government was overthrown on January 17, 1893. A provisional government ruled until July 4, 1894, when Hawaiian League member Sanford Ballard Dole was sworn in as president of the Republic of Hawai‘i. A new world beckoned the haole planters, who could not contain their excitement over prospects of US annexation. In advance, a second sugar rush was anticipated: any land not already planted in cane was hungrily sought; outside eyes turned again to Molokai.2 The Reverend Charles C. Hyde, en route from Honolulu to Kaunakakai in 1893 to visit the West End property he had bought in November of that year, described the journey with trepidation: “No one who knows the islands and the discomforts of traveling about them would think of making a visit to Molokai as a pleasure trip.”3 Though the island was clearly visible from O‘ahu, just twenty-three miles across the Kaiwi Channel, the crossing was rough, and with no piers or harbors, passengers were “dropped into an open boat away out from the land and then borne out forward in the darkness to a faint flickering light.” He found the experience “anything but exhilarating!” and yet the prospect of fortunes to be made from Molokai’s seemingly virgin expanses drew Hyde and others on. Heading westward from Kaunakakai, the reverend saw “a double row of stones [which] marked the failure of an experiment tried some years ago to give Molokai a Government wharf.” In its place, a Chinese entrepreneur had built a rough pier into water just deep enough for a small schooner to load firewood cut from the kiawe forest that by then covered the southern shore from Pala‘au to Kawela. He admired the “enterprising Chinaman” for his initiative, but he was truly excited by his business plan: “He is proposing to dig an artesian well and in case he finds water will proceed to put the land into shape for rice fields. It must be rich soil for it has had the wash of the hills for ages.” Overlooking the gentle slopes of the gap, the churchman allowed himself to imagine a delicious vision—one that did not include rice paddies: It is the ideal land for a sugar plantation. There are vast plains of red earth uncut by gullies, in every way well adapted for irrigation. The soil is rich and deep and beneath it is a stratum of papaakea, forming a natural drainage as well as a mine of fertilizing material. But there is no water on all these thousands of acres. If in the fissure between the two lands, Kaluako‘i and Pala‘au, artesian wells could strike a water bearing stratum and bring water to the surface, the land that is not worth more than ten cents would be worth a hundred dollars an acre.

Hyde was giving voice to a general excitement in Hawaiian business circles spurred by the promise of making dry, leeward lands, hitherto useful only for

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grazing, bloom with cane tassels—without the need for the massive investments in miles of ditches, siphons, bridges, and reservoirs required for conventional irrigation. Instead, simple, shallow wells might be drilled into abundant aquifers that might occur anywhere, even under semideserts—in effect, mining for gold by drilling for water. The recent experience of planters on O‘ahu had demonstrated that this dream could become reality. James Campbell, who had helped build the successful Pioneer Mill Company at Lahaina, Maui, had sold his interest in the 1870s and bought land on leeward O‘ahu at Honouliuli on the Ewa plain and at Kahuku and Kawailoa on the island’s northeast corner and ran cattle. In 1879, Campbell visited the Santa Clara Valley in California, a ranching region that was being transformed by an agricultural boom after shallow wells unexpectedly tapped into huge aquifer reserves. He returned to O‘ahu with a well driller named Ashley and a hand-powered drilling rig. Able to drill just a few feet into the rock, he nonetheless found water.4 In 1882, the McCandless brothers of Honolulu drilled deeper wells and found a lot more water under Ewa. Campbell decided that his O‘ahu holdings would be perfect for an agricultural colony to attract settlers from the mainland United States. In 1886, with B. F. Dillingham as his general manager, Campbell offered 115,000 acres for homesteads, organized as a joint stock company: $100 to $200 an acre for the best lands with access to water; $25 an acre for grazing land, all at 10 percent down.5 It was to be an irrigation settlement similar to contemporary schemes being floated in the American West, such as Horace Greeley’s Union Colony in Colorado.6 Each settler would be required to build a house within six months, to fence his land, and to drill his own wells—as no mention of a central irrigation company was made. There were few sales.7 Sometime before 1889, Dillingham commissioned a report on sugar irrigation in Hawai‘i and the possibilities for growing cane on the Honouluiuli and Kahuku lands by the engineers Schuyler and Allardt.8 Its conclusion was clear: irrigating cane would pay. In 1890 he bought Campbell out and then subleased the company for sugar to the Ewa Plantation Company and the Kahuku Plantation Company—each to be irrigated by groundwater. It was a huge success. Six years later, the O‘ahu Sugar Company was formed to irrigate the land mauka and adjacent to the Ewa operation. Elsewhere on O‘ahu, the Honolulu Sugar Company and the Waialua Agricultural Company were started, both initially on well water. O‘ahu, without the prodigious surface water available on Maui, nevertheless began to rival it in acreage and production volume. Many plantations on all the main islands (save Molokai) added wells.9 A M E R IC A N SU G A R

The 1890s were lean years, ravaged by drought—especially on the West End of Molokai. Its Molokai livestock operations unprofitable, the Bishop estate sold seventy thousand acres in 1897 to a hui (partnership or club) of Judge Alfred S.

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Hartwell, Alfred W. Carter, and A. D. McClellan, for $150,000.10 One source claims: “Their idea was to raise stock, but as annexation and the dropping of US sugar tariff seemed imminent, they decided to grow sugar.”11 But the papers reported that sugar was the initial goal, and public speculation on the possibilities of sugar on Molokai was rife.12 That year it was reported that the sugar operation at Kamalō was to be restarted, beginning with replanting three hundred acres.13 The Hawaiian Star confidently asserted that artesian wells near Kaunakakai would yield abundantly and, combined with intensified industry in the wetter valleys, including coffee, sugar at Kamalō, and better transportation access, would show that the “Neglected Island” could “easily support in comfort and plenty at least ten times the population it does at present.”14 In any event, events played their way. The same year, the McKinley act was lifted, unleashing another sugar rush in the Republic of Hawai‘i. In 1898, the US military seized possession of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines—interrupting sugar supplies. Hawaiian growers rushed to plant fields and import workers, most from Japan and the Philippines. American imperialism burned at its hottest, and the next menace looked as though it might be the Japanese “yellow peril.” Pearl Harbor loomed large in the American strategic eye. Just at that moment, twenty-five thousand Japanese laborers were employed on Hawaiian plantations, simultaneously a boon in a boom time and a source of fear for the haole establishment. Aiming to control this foreign population, President Dole imposed a high tariff on sake; in bellicose protest, a Japanese warship steamed into Honolulu harbor, in turn provoking US president McKinley to annex Hawai‘i on August 12, 1898. Also in 1898, the hui that had bought the Molokai Ranch, plus new members Charles Montague Cooke, George H. Robertson, and George R. Carter, incorporated the American Sugar Company (ASC), with C. Brewer and Co. its agent in Honolulu and an initial capitalization of $1,500,000.15 After leasing another thirty thousand acres of land from the government (and becoming one of ten largest landholders in the territory), the company began in earnest to build what it hoped would be one of the biggest plantations in the islands. Near the Chinese woodcutter’s pier, a mole was extended a half mile out from Kaunakakai point to a break in the reef. A massive coal pile was heaped up to feed a railroad being built up the slope to the fields below Ho‘olehua. There, 750 acres were plowed, to be watered by eight miles of ditch filled with water pumped uphill from wells on the coast by two ten-million-gallon steam-powered pumps imported from England.16 A site at Pala‘au was chosen for the mill works and construction began. The company even hired two professional hunters from California to reduce the herd of axis deer that roamed over the company’s lands. They killed twenty-five per day, keeping only the skins, and drove the deer to retreat to the West End, where many were rounded up in the Papohaku kiawe forest to be sent to Lana‘i.17 In all, a million dollars was invested. Anticipation was high. The Hawaiian Gazette gushed: “Cane on

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Molokai—Plantation on the Ranch Estate Has Been Started—An Artesian Water Supply—First Well is a Success—Not Deep, A Million Gallons a Day, More Wells.”18 Drilled by the McCandless Brothers, twelve wells reaching from fifty to seventyfive feet—and one well that eventually reached five hundred feet—were bored three-fourths of a mile from the beach west of Kaunakakai, and the big pumps began to draw in January 1900. The rows were planted one by one, and the cane came up. Then, row by row, the plants withered and died. The cause, when it was determined, was the water—with each day it became saltier, as the massive pumps sucked up the thin lens of sweet water that floated over a virtual ocean of saltwater that had intruded under the island from the sea. T H E P R I N C I PA L P R O B L E M

ASC ceased sugar operations “temporarily” in May 1900 and immediately commissioned a geologist named Waldemar Lindgren, who had done extensive field assessment work for the mining industry in the American West, to find a new water supply. He undertook a comprehensive report on the topography and hydrology of the island, west of Kamalō.19 First, he described the landscape, with attention to the flora, dividing the southern part of the island (and all the West End) into a series of four zones, “the immediate coast fringe,” with coconut palms and kiawe; “the barren zone, the belt of the grass lands; and finally the high forests.” All of the West End and most of the gap were “practically treeless” grassland or shrubland except for “a few small and stunted groves” of kiawe at Papohaku and hala (Pandanus tectorius) trees at occasional springs at the coast. Besides the kiawe forest along the shore, the only trees east of the gap were kukui and wiliwili (Erythrina sandwichensis) damaged by cattle while “scattered cactus trees and hau bushes complete the meager flora of this zone.” Describing standing on Mahana Hill, below Mauna Loa, Lindgren made no mention of any trees. But on this same spot, just seven years earlier, the Reverend Hyde had inventoried a garden: “Within the compass of twenty feet each side were twenty different varieties of Hawaiian trees—milimili, ulei, kalui, hau, lima, nala and so on. There was also a fine specimen of kaunoa, the Hawaiian air plant, a species of cascuta,” Hyde had written.20 A half century of intensive grazing had completed its destruction of the dryland forest. Further, Lindgren reported a wet forest in chaotic retreat from animals: around the Meyer Ranch at Kala‘e, a few ferns grew in the gulches between pastures; not until above twenty-five hundred feet did forests begin, but he noted that “the trees are in poor condition and large areas are dying. It should be observed that all forests on this island grow on swampy ground. Open forests with trees growing on dry ground do not exist.”21 From the outset, he warned that no gold mine of artesian water was likely to be found. Since the island was small, “built up of extremely porous rocks, and

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surrounded by salt water,” he wrote, “peculiar conditions result.” With no impermeable strata nor clay basins or dikes, seawater intruded everywhere: “Below a certain level there is indeed no reason to expect anything but salt water.” On the other hand, rainfall percolated right down through the rock and perched on the heavier saltwater as a lens. Given the amount of rain, especially on the north coast, “considerable amounts must exist in certain places,” he wrote. Indeed, he found impressive surface streams there and permanent springs coming out of the ground three hundred to five hundred feet above sea level. But on the south shore west of Kawela, freshwater springs appeared only a foot or two above sea level, even a mile inland; at Kawela, the wettest spot on the south coast he surveyed, spring level was a mere two to three feet above sea level: “A distinctly unfavorable sign, pointing to small precipitation and water supply.” There were no (longer any) permanent springs on the West End. The one often mentioned by older accounts, on the ridge two miles east of the lighthouse at Kalaeo Kala‘au (La‘au Point), had dried up in 1898 and had never been seen since. At Pala‘au a “grassy marsh” grew where “big springs come out for a distance of 700 feet”; abandoned kalo patches clearly marked where the old Hawaiian settlement had been. Farther east at Kalamaula, springs came out of the beach sand at Lot Kamehameha’s coconut grove. One mile east of Kaunakakai, at the foot of a bluff near the road, a good-sized spring surfaced—perhaps the remnants of the old spring of Olo‘olo. Most coastal springs went underwater at high tide—meaning they were effectively at or below sea level—except at Kawela in the rice fields and the kuleana kalo patches still being used. From there eastward to Kamalō, he saw lots of kalo patches and coconuts; beyond Kamalō—the East End— Lindgren reported that “the country is comparatively thickly settled.”22 Lindgren was particularly concerned with wells: above the immediate coast, there were almost none; two existed above Meyer’s ranch, tapping known springs; along the south coast and at Mo‘omomi on the north coast were a number of windmills pumping shallow, usually brackish wells for stock and for some small-scale irrigation. There were several shallow wells at Kaunakakai producing sufficient water for the kuleana there and the Japanese hospital. The company had drilled a number of deep wells, from fifty to five hundred feet, including two in the flats behind the Kalamaula coconut grove (which had been plowed in 1900 and planted with eighty acres of cane); the twelve near the pumping station; and another field of twenty wells, drilled farther east, in an array so they could be pumped with a twenty-million-gallon Risdon pump. Lindgren and the company men tested these and other new wells, attempting different combinations of pumps and pumping rates, holes into different strata, tunnels, and pits, some with tunnels radiating from them. They were pawing around in the earth, looking for the magic rock, the “water-bearing stratum”—but saltwater always got in.23 Lindgren performed elaborate calculations for rainfall, evaporation, runoff, and percolation rates to arrive at estimates of the groundwater theoretically available to

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shrewd developers on Molokai. His conclusions for the ASC were, for sure, a mixed message: “The principle problem on Molokai is how to obtain water for irrigation of the 14,000 acres of deep soil situated in the great gap. Another problem is how to obtain water for the irrigation of the smaller coastal flats occurring at intervals from Pala‘au to Mapulehu.”24 Using the commonly accepted figure of one million gallons per twenty-four hours (1.55 cubic feet per second [cfs]) to irrigate one hundred acres of cane (which he thought too high), Lindgren figured that Molokai developers would need to produce ten million gallons per day (15 cfs) for the one thousand or so acres of coastal flats and considered that a system of shallow wells and flumes could suffice, the whole linked together with an expensive pump lift bringing water from the wettest valleys up four hundred feet to be distributed over the steep ridges to the smaller, drier ones. He allowed: “Few agricultural industries but sugar plantations could bear such a tax; but, as is well known, there are many such high-power pumping plants in the islands, especially on Maui.” And, he wrote, “sooner or later the welfare of the island may demand that all possible resources be made available.”25 But, to irrigate the lands in the gap—the principle problem—would require 140 million gallons per day (216 cfs), and he concluded: “It is evident that such an amount of water is not available on the island.”26 The ASC went bust. The pumps, the pier, the railroad tracks, and the rolling stock were sold or scrapped. The expectations—and avarice—nurtured on larger, wetter islands were a mismatch for Molokai, which could not water the company’s sugar dreams. On one hand, the ASC had been guilty of hubris, or at a minimum a colossal misreading of the land. From the local native Hawaiian perspective, on the other hand, it may have been pule o‘o, another rejection by Molokai of outsiders bent on exploitation. According to the older Hawaiians in the district, the venture failed because the company had run its railroad tracks through a sacred heiau near Kahanui and had even used the heiau’s foundation stones to build the roadbed. SU G A R O N T H E SM A L L

Started one year before Lindgren wrote his report, another sugar operation on Molokai was attempting to make the coastal flats pay, without the expensive pump lift, using instead a simpler combination of wells, stream diversions, and flumes. The Kamalo Sugar Company was established in 1899—or reestablished, on the bones of the original Kamalo plantation, which had been run by the McCorriston brothers, growing cane with fifty workers on about fifty acres at Kawela and elsewhere.27 The new venture was a joint stock company, with about forty shareholders—mainly the extended family of the McCorristons and George Trimble, Frank Foster, H. R. Hitchcock, and many other Molokai residents, with the lawyer Frank Ward Hustace as its Honolulu agent.28 It was based at Kamalō but

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spread across a patchwork of leased and purchased lands in the small valleys and gulches between Kawela and at least Ualapu‘e (Lindgren said that the company “controls the coast” from Kamalō to Mapulehu).29 Most parcels were leased kuleana, with some pieces leased from local haole families such as Austin and Hitchcock.30 The records name about thirty Hawaiian lessors and a Hawaiian, D. Kalauokalani, who drew up many of the leases. In total, the company held 2,323 acres in fee simple and 6,000 by lease.31 Apparently, certain sections were managed individually by particular participants in the venture: George Cooke reported that George Trimble grew cane on fifty acres at Kawela and brought it to the Kamalō mill by means of a barge drawn through the coastal shallows by horses.32 Water from wells in the larger valleys was raised to a ditch seventy feet above sea level to irrigate the smaller flats. At Kamalō, water was taken from a small, permanent tributary of Kamalō Gulch (mauka and east of Kolekole Peak) and run in a ditch down the ridge to irrigate lower fields, according to Lindgren. From the company’s surviving records, one can glean some details of its operations.33 Land had to be cleared; irrigation infrastructure built and maintained; roads, bridges, and buildings constructed and maintained; workers recruited, housed, fed, equipped, and paid; seeds procured, planted, nurtured; cane harvested, milled, and transported to market. Judging from its financial records, the Kamalo Sugar Company was an ad hoc effort, solving problems as they arose and paying for them principally with debt. A complex web of suppliers—many of them large ranches and plantations on other islands, subcontractors, and at-will employees—provided the materials and accomplished the work. The expense logs are a collage of entrepreneurial hope and hard business reality: the ASC was paid for cows and calves and for the rent on a pile driver to build a wharf; the Kihei plantation for livestock; the Parker Ranch $720 for eight horses; the Waianae Sugar Company, the Olowalu Sugar Company, the Ola‘a Sugar Company, and the Maunalei Sugar Company $943.50 for seed cane; the Hawaiian Investment Company for “coin per steamer $1800” to cover on-island expenses; H. R. Hitchcock for animals, carts, and harnesses; various Hawaiians for labor; Akumakai, Chin Wo, Sam Wo Hop Kee, M. Philips and Co., M. W. McChesney and Co., Ah Hing, the Japan Emigration Co., and others for labor on account; Mssrs. Fugi and Yamashita for water development ($1.50 and $2 per day, respectively); and others for blacksmithing, postage, firewood, plowing, fences, ditches, beef, drugs and medicines, interest, freight, boarding houses, rolling stock, mill construction, flume expenses, track laying, ballasting, and grading. For the period April 1, 1902, to November 12, 1902, some of the larger expenses were $114,963.31 for railroad construction, $16,240 for real estate, $32,479 for flumes and reservoirs, and $84,124 for leases. Entries for income were few: the company received rent from “Hema” for the fishing rights to part of its land, from others for livestock; from a farm sublessee, V. de Camera; from Okubo for a store; from Shibayama for something unrecorded.

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Just a few lines in the account books record sugar sales—in dollar amounts not impressive and clearly not enough to cover costs. On August 21, 1902, the Kamalo Sugar Company was liquidated by its creditors at a sheriff ’s execution sale. What happened? The company was small in an industry that rewarded gigantism; all economies of scale were working against it: its dependence on subcontractors and especially, the segmented landscape of kona Molokai, with its small watersheds, vertical gulches, bad transportation, and lack of a harbor. But its demise was in all likelihood because of water, or the lack of it. Based on Lindgren’s findings, its wells must have had limited capacity, especially in dry periods, even if there were no salinity problems. Its surface water must have been affected by grazing and deforestation in the uplands above. Kamalo‘o was “the dry place” to the old Hawaiians; it must have been drier still once the cows, goats, and sheep had proliferated on the mountain slopes and canyons that loom above the shore. It was an unlikely place for the sugar dream to thrive, so late in the game. Even had it had unlimited water, the company’s structure—with local, middle-class owners; leased kuleana lands; and a part-time local workforce—was no match for the capital requirements of the sugar business. And the experience of the ASC had shown that without enough water, no amount of capital could save the day. A B IG G E R , B E T T E R HAWA I ‘I

One of the most persistent dreams of the Americans in Hawai‘i was the dream of homesteading, settling the islands with yeoman families on the Jeffersonian model. The earliest missionaries had thought of it; businessmen had talked of it. They were in rare agreement on the matter, believing that all the Christian and capitalist virtues of the American republic had bloomed from this stout trunk and further that if Hawai‘i and the Hawaiians were to saved, a cutting from it must be successfully grafted. But the dream was always thwarted by Hawaiian conditions: monopoly control over the best land by chiefs, myriad obstacles to a market economy, remoteness, and perturbations of all kinds—political, climatic, and biological. After the Mahele, control of the land ended in haole hands, giving the dream fresh impetus, but the obstacles in a certain sense became less moveable. Even less good land with water was available for settlers, and the agricultural environment was dominated by plantations and competitive Chinese and Japanese farmers and distorted by imported food from the mainland. The failure of Campbell and Dillingham’s colonization plan at Honouliuli in 1886–1889 had not helped the cause, instead resulting in fantastic growth for the sugar industry and its control over a huge new class of lands once thought too dry for sugarcane. With annexation the anxieties only grew: about reliance on a single industry dependent on an insecure US tariff, on cheap foreign labor, and on food imports. But shining through this angst came a luminous idea: reclamation. The triumphant

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march of arid-lands irrigation in the western United States had captured the American imagination; it seemed natural to extend the vision to the new Hawaiian Islands territory. The most complete and significant effort was made by Frederick Newell, commissioner of the federal Bureau of Reclamation and a true believer in the project of “homemaking” on the nation’s arid lands. Newell toured the islands to assess conditions and issued a report to Congress in 1909.34 Behind the Hawai‘i of sugarcane and beaches, he saw a climatic and social landscape not unlike that of the US West: mostly arid, mostly underpopulated, and with big potential for irrigated settlement. “It is popularly supposed that the Islands are saturated with moisture,” he began, but in fact one-third of the land area is dry for the greater portion of the year, and counting all arable soils, one-half the arable area of the territory would benefit from irrigation. He admitted that most arable land suitable for sugarcane had already been irrigated by private enterprise, and this included the best of the public lands. But this area was proportionally tiny: just 34,000 acres, or 2 percent of the 1.6 million acres of public lands. Of the remainder, the lion’s share, 500,000 acres, was under grazing leases, with 273,912 acres in forest reserves and another 300,000 acres envisioned as reserves.35 The cane and forest lands need not be—and must not be—touched, he insisted, since sugar provided “the main support of the islands.” The opportunity lay in the ranch lands: “100,000 acres of land now practically useless or furnishing only indifferent grazing can be reclaimed.” With farms of twenty acres each on average, it would mean five thousand homesteads: “On this basis there would be added to the pop of the territory at least 20,000 persons, including 5,000 voters.”36 Producing five thousand voters might not seem like enough to justify a likely federal expense of tens of millions of dollars, but the question of voters went to the heart of the problem that homesteading was meant to solve and that Congress and everyone else was well aware of: the time bomb of race. Newell couched his concerns in the pieties of the time, but he aimed his analysis squarely at it. American values were perpetuated by citizenship and voting. To illustrate the situation in Hawai‘i, he provided pie charts of the “nationality” of voters and of schoolchildren divided into these categories: American, Hawaiian and part Hawaiian, European, Portuguese, and Oriental. The crisis was not an immediate one: Americans and other whites, who together made up just 12,000, or 7 percent, of a total population of 170,000 had effective political control of the islands, since the majority “Orientals,” 95,000 people, or 56 percent of the population, were excluded from voting, and the 35,000 Hawaiian and part Hawaiians tended to vote in alignment with the white, Republican-dominated legislature. The problem was demographic: Americans made up about 14 percent of voters, but their children made up just 5 percent of schoolchildren. While just one in one hundred Chinese could vote (plus one in ten Japanese—all because they were naturalized before annexation), Newell pointed out that the children of these immigrants would be birthright citizens and

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would “take an active part in legislation.” Here was the real question facing Congress: “As to the attitude which may be taken by these future voters on territorial and national questions it is impossible to predict.”37 The analysis was clear: “There is a conspicuous lack of the body of citizenship which has made possible the existence of the American commonwealth, namely, the ‘plain people,’ property owners of moderate means with thrift, energy, and high civic ideals.” The solution was equally clear: “The supreme need of the islands from the standpoint of the national interest” was to encourage white American immigration. This was, he wrote, assured, “favored by natural conditions and popular sentiment. The chief obstacles arise from the overshadowing interests of the great sugar industry and the resulting presence of Oriental or other low-grade labor, which tends continually to crowd out or take the place of the citizen engaged in individual enterprise.” Newell understood that Hawai‘i faced a bind: its masters, Americans, could not afford much immigration of their countrymen because they were locked in competition with low-wage competitors elsewhere in the world and needed the land, water, and labor they enjoyed to remain unencumbered by other uses. Big Sugar, Newell frankly acknowledged, impeded American settlement, always passively, sometimes actively. The “newcomer” would be welcomed hospitably but would find no work as a laborer or mechanic, at least not at wages he would consider; a farmer “will be more than welcome in sentiment, but from a business standpoint he will find it difficult to learn of a piece of land which can be secured on reasonable terms.”38 Commissioner Newell acknowledged another problem: the internalized sense of self-worth of most Americans was built on racism. He told Congress: “The tendency is for the white settler to endeavor to have his work done by Orientals. He tries to secure a larger piece of land than he could cultivate himself and to work it by cheap labor rather than take the small area and intelligently till it by his personal efforts.” Far from blaming a hot climate for Americans’ inability to compete, as others had done, Newell acknowledged that it was simply “not customary” in Hawai‘i “for the white man to do work which can be performed by Japanese.”39 He was acknowledging that Americans’ fiercely held ideology of racial stratification was an obstacle to their success but not that it was contrary to their ideology of democracy—egalitarian, Jeffersonian, and based on the inherent dignity of labor. He laid out for Congress the salient facts about the sugar industry: that it was “conducted by about 65 corporations . . . The stock of these is held by 7,000 persons living largely in California and in the islands, and possibly to a less extent in England and Germany.”40 And yet this radical concentration of land, water, and wealth he did not comment on, neither as profoundly opposed to—indeed offensive to—the Jeffersonian principles of reclamation that Newell espoused nor simply as an immoveable block to its success. Nor that, in accepting a Hawai‘i economically and politically stratified by race, Americans in Hawai‘i had become

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imperialists and racist overlords. They could not at the same time be Democrats and yeoman farmers. In closing, Newell ignored the issues he had so carefully raised and blithely returned to the Bureau of Reclamation’s dogma. He granted that homesteading efforts in Hawai‘i in the past had failed when the settlers had become discouraged with the obstacles and had sold out to plantations but argued that the lands had been in too-small blocks and had not been well chosen—nor, possibly, had the homesteaders themselves. A better-designed homestead program, like those that had succeeded in the United States, would do the trick, chiefly by building irrigation into the fabric of the scheme. Commissioner Newell was in Hawai‘i at the invitation of the territorial forester, Ralph Hosmer, as part of a concerted campaign to draw federal help. In 1908, a US Geological Survey mapping project had been started, looking for, among other things, potential water projects, which Hosmer hoped would be “preferably conducted under the Federal Reclamation Service—whereby considerable areas of potentially valuable public land, now semi-arid and unproductive, can, through irrigation, eventually be made available by American home seekers.” In 1909, the US Forest Service, by invitation, sent an expert to do a study of eucalyptus in Hawai‘i. Hawai‘i delegations were sent to irrigation and conservation conventions on the mainland to lobby for the extension of the Reclamation Act to Hawai‘i. All of this was, in Hosmer’s words, “another step . . . taken in the campaign for a bigger, better Hawaii.”41 Homesteading aside, the task of irrigation in the islands continued to be more than ably shouldered by the private sector. Hawai‘i stands out in the history of water development in America and her territories by the fact that, with the exception of a handful of municipal water projects, mostly for Honolulu, all irrigation and water supply work has been proposed and accomplished by private enterprise. A review of the history shows that, far from following the lead of the mainland, private sugar companies in Hawai‘i pioneered many techniques of tunneling, diversions, siphons, clay-lined reservoirs, groundwater pumping, and ditch delivery systems and served as a training ground for many engineers who would later return to the mainland and take the lead in important public water projects there, including Michael O’Shaughnessy, who would be head engineer for San Francisco in building its Hetch Hetchy project, and Joseph B. Lippincott, who spearheaded the diversion of the Owens River to Los Angeles. The McKinley Tariff Act had slowed down the sugar industry, but the industry picked itself up again after annexation, and irrigation was crucial to its growth. Irrigation schemes in the American era abounded in ambition, with some projects ten times larger than the biggest of the first irrigation heyday of Klaus Spreckels and Alexander and Baldwin on Maui. In 1901, Alexander and Baldwin built the Lowrie Ditch, delivering sixty million gallons per day; O’Shaughnessy built the Makaweli canal on Kaua‘i, running 13 miles from Olokele Valley to Makaweli, and

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the Koolau Ditch on Maui, which had 7.5 miles of hard-rock tunnel out of 10 miles in total length.42 Tunneling for water, not just to transport it, became a specialty of engineers working in Hawai‘i. O’Shaughnessy published an article in 1906 detailing a unique method of tunneling into lava dikes to intercept or “develop” water caught or concentrated in lava formations. He described a success at Waianae, O‘ahu, in a place where no sign of water was visible but a five-hundred-foot tunnel hit buried treasure. It was like hard-rock gold mining, an artfully speculative science.43 Lindgren had proposed a scheme including intercepting tunnels for Molokai. It also included an elaborate system of eight dams to divert and store water in gulches in the northern summit region, mostly in the Waikolu Valley watershed; flumes and ten-inch riveted pipes to convey it across gulches on the south side after emerging from the main tunnel; and three reservoirs, including Meyer’s Lake, lined with clay, to hold it above the fields of the gap before distribution. He also outlined a maximalist plan to extend tunnels to the Pelekunu and Wailau Streams.44 For the moment, his employers were unable to contemplate such an investment and went back to running the Molokai Ranch lands as a cattle operation. But elsewhere in the territory, sugar interests pursued irrigation at a dizzying rate. P R O DU C I N G F O R E ST S

Commercial interests in Hawai‘i had long recognized that their livelihood depended on water supply and therefore on the upland forests. The planters as a group included many men who had been highly educated in the best European and American universities and who kept up with the latest scientific thinking in relevant fields. As early as 1856, Dr. William Hillebrand, a distinguished botanist who was later medical director of the Queen’s Hospital and a member of the privy council, read a paper before the sixth meeting of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society (RHAS) invoking Alexander von Humboldt’s theories of rainfall in relation to deforestation, which he referred to as “the influence of forests upon the absolute quantity of rain or precipitate of atmospheric moisture.”45 While this mechanism was understood only vaguely, there was already in Hawai‘i stark agreement on the seriousness of the threat—forests were in rapid retreat almost everywhere one looked—and on the principal culprit: “Of all the destroying influences man brings to bear on nature, cattle is the worst,” Hillebrand said. He pointed to the “startling fact” that “the whole plateau of Waimea in Hawai‘i has been spoliated entirely of its original forest which only 25 years ago formed an impenetrable thicket, by the agency of wild cattle.” He called for protection, for rangers, and for the introduction of nonnative plants for reforestation. In fact, Hillebrand was the first to articulate a vision of reforesting the Hawaiian Islands to counter man-made desertification and to expressly produce surface water: “Springs will soon bubble

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forth again from every nook and corner, between rocks and from under the ferntree, to unite in streams which encased in a framework of bamboo canes and lianes will pour out of every valley and cover with fertility the now arid and sterile plains.”46 The Hawaiian planter community consistently employed European and American scientists, technicians, and engineers and funded institutional programs for research to support their economic and social goals. The RHAS had been founded in 1850, and though it lasted only six years, it laid the foundation for a series of organizations, including the HSPA, which eagerly funded agricultural science. Growers and individuals, as well as institutions, carried on a constant effort at acclimatizing imported species, searching tirelessly for the holy grail of the perfectly suited commercial crop but also for reforestation trees, pasture grasses, useful ornamentals, and oddities. Queen Emma’s enthusiasm for new trees was general in the educated population. There are reports of eucalyptus being planted by a private landowner on Maui by 1870—right in sync with the eucalyptus craze in California. King Kalakaua sent back seeds and cuttings from his world tour in 1881 and “thus gave impetus to reforestation.”47 It may be unsurprising that in a kingdom that depended almost solely on the revenue of one industry, there should have been a thorough symbiosis between government and the private sector. Forestry, beginning in the 1890s and continuing for almost fifty years, embodied the perfect expression of a common agenda and worldview between the government agencies and the sugar corporations—it might without joking be called the forestry-industrial complex, and it had a controlling and transformative hold over one-quarter of the main islands’ land area and, arguably, a similar fraction of their economic potential. On January 4, 1893, the legislature (just days before the fall of Lili‘uokalani) established a commission of agriculture and forestry.48 One forester and historian has argued that a thirtythousand-acre fire in the Hamakua, Hawai‘i, reserves the previous year galvanized the HSPA to demand that the government act.49 From the outset, the commission was primarily concerned with protecting the water supply of the sugar industry through reforestation. It brought in Scottish forest nurseryman David Mitchell Haughs, who, working for the commission and its successor, the territorial division of agriculture and forestry, grew as many as four hundred thousand trees a year to be planted on private and public lands. The question of the declining forests had always been of greater import than just protecting the corporations’ water supply by planting trees and excluding cattle and goats. Diagnoses of the forest health conundrum were intertwined with theories of social evolution fashionable in the Euro-American scientific community, and a narrative that explained both the decline of Hawaiian trees and of Hawaiian people as functions of the same historical and evolutionary vectors began to be fleshed out. Both were “decadent” forms, unfit for survival in a world

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of beneficial competition and strenuous evolution. Forestry in Hawai‘i, at least as articulated and organized by many of its leading practitioners, advanced this theory in its self-proclaimed role as the scientific–institutional spokesman for the industrial interests that nurtured it and that it served, legitimating haole and corporate control of Hawaiian land, resources, and finally, Hawaiian institutions. A writer in Thrum’s Hawaiian Almanac and Annual of 1875 wrote: “I am inclined to believe that it is due to a law of nature that demands that varieties of trees shall succeed each other; and that the koa is now giving way, in its ancient habitats, to other species . . . as the centuries roll around they witness the change of habitat of trees, as they do that of men.”50 This narrative prescribed that scientific forestry solve the problems of the forests by finding one or more species that would replace Hawaiian natives in creating a new, reliable, “water-producing” forest. This task was the twin of that shouldered by an increasingly American agricultural practice and science in Hawai‘i, which was to find the right crops or strains—on one hand, to be sure, to support plantation agriculture but on the other, the right crop to bring American settlers to Hawai‘i. This second crop could not be rice, fit only for Asian farmers because it was grown in low, hot, humid places; it had to be an “American” one, suitable for a profitable family farm under conditions similar to those expected on the mainland. The desire for more “diversified industries,” in the words of Joseph Marsden, the commissioner of agriculture and forestry in 1893, was fueled in part by worry about overdependence on a single crop—worries made real in the wake of the McKinley act depression—and in part by a muted recognition that Hawai‘i could not indefinitely compete in sugar with low-wage countries in the tropics, more and more of which were entering the business with each decade. Like many before him, Commissioner Marsden was bullish on Hawai‘i’s agricultural future, and he saw coffee as the means: it grew in cooler upland areas on steep, rocky soils unfit for sugar and was well suited to small family farms: “The coffee industry in these Islands has brilliant prospects before it, and will surely become one of our main staples.” On Molokai, the enthusiasm was shared by some of its haole residents, including a Dr. Mauritz, reported to be “planting coffee extensively near Wailau” in 1894, and E. G. Hitchcock, who advertised the ahupua‘a of Kalua‘aha for sale in 1895 by specifying its potential for the crop: “Containing 1,200 acres of land, of which 200 acres are Good Coffee Lands, and the balance good grazing land and some kalo land. A good house and a fine well of sweet water are included.”51 But coffee had one problem: it ripened one season per year and needed more labor than a single family could provide to do the picking; a sustainable industry would need another crop to employ its labor force year-round. Accordingly, the commission set its sights on several crude fiber crops, such as sanseviera, which needs reasonably good soil and moisture, and sisal (Agave sisaliana), which has the

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advantage of growing in harsh, dry, rocky land, of which the territory abounded; “We have tens of thousands of acres of such lands that are now practically useless,” Marsden wrote, “but which by means of the sisal plant may be made to support thousands of people and add to the wealth of the country far beyond the dreams of the most sanguine. In the Bahamas the change from severe commercial depression to a state of assured prosperity has been like a fairy tale.”52 Accordingly, both public and private actors participated in a wide-open program of introduction, testing, and evaluation of different trees and plants for a variety of potential purposes: rubber, chalmoogra, silkworms, tobacco, and literally hundreds of types of fruit trees were tried. Animals of all descriptions were also introduced, including “several varieties of the lady bug family, Cocinellidae, and one of toads,” topminnows (mosquito fish), oysters (from Sayville, Long Island, New York, introduced into Pearl Harbor and Kaneohe Bay), and even a container load of rainbow trout (from a US hatchery in Utah) released into Kaua‘i’s Waimea River.53 Set against the feverish program of introduction and acclimatization was a deep and growing fear of foreign diseases. Recent experience fanned the fears. Modern Hawaiian agriculture had from the time of Captain Cook been plagued by plagues—weeds, insects, blights, and pathogens of all sorts; with ever-increasing globalization and insecurity, the sugar industry had good reason to worry. More widely and viscerally felt, the trauma of mai pake had, perhaps fatally, sapped the Hawaiian people’s spirit, and an outbreak of bubonic plague in December 1899, which resulted in the “prophylactic” burning of Honolulu’s Chinatown, stoked fears of Asian immigration and heightened tensions between all groups in the territory.54 In direct response, the Planters Labor and Supply Co. paid to bring California entomologist Alfred Koebele to Hawai‘i for three years to study insects and blights.55 After traveling all over the islands for a number of years, Koebele determined that the forest problem was not the result of any plagues. He cataloged various complex interrelationships between native insects, fungi, parasites, and their host plants. While he found numerous cases of severe infestations and outbreaks, these were occasioned by the disturbance of normal ecosystems thrown out of balance by “the total destruction of undergrowth in the koa forests, and the drying up of the ground.” The culprit was abuse by cattle—which he called “the worst and most destructive [enemy] ever introduced among tropical forests.” He noted that koa reproduced well if “fenced off, or entirely undisturbed” by animals. He continued: “The changes have been brought on to the benefit of the very few, to the detriment of the whole Islands and community. Today, especially on the leeward side of the Islands, the cancer spots are visible everywhere and growing continuously; the grass has disappeared, each successive rain takes away more of the soil, and during the sunny days the wind is taking the same far out to sea.”56

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It was clear to Koebele that the Hawaiian forest “problem” was the direct result of a political economy that favored the actions of a minority of stock grazers over vast areas of land. His understanding was general and had been since at least Hillebrand. Even the writer cited before who compared the demise of native trees to that of native races of men acknowledged the real solution: “Hence while I point out traces of the decadence of our forests, I would suggest a remedy. Enclose lands lying to leeward of the forests: and in a few years the forests will take possession. . . . there are but few trees of greater beauty than the koa.”57 The simple prescription of more fences for more koa continued to be widely acknowledged by scientists and lay observers and acted upon by some private landowners. The Molokai Ranch, for example, built an eight-mile fence from 1898 to 1899 to keep cattle out of its steep, upland holdings. The ranch manager from 1908 to 1947, George Cooke, reported that the results were dramatic: ridges that he had seen as a schoolboy in 1898 covered with only hilo grass had, some decades later, been completely retaken by native forest. “The same ridges that we were able to gallop over are now so swampy that they may be traversed only on foot and with great difficulty,” he wrote. And “the return of much growth of the native forest,” he said, had paid off in water: flow records over twenty-five years at the diversion intakes in upper Kaunakakai Gulch showed a marked increase in runoff.58 Yet, at the institutional level, fencing and animal control were less enthusiastically pursued than were the testing and planting of new, exotic species. With US territorial status in 1900 came new impetus to create a larger, more ambitious—more American—scientific-bureaucratic agency to take the place of the commission of agriculture and forestry that had been established in the waning days of Queen Lili‘uokalani’s reign. Act 44 of the Territorial Law of 1903 established a board of agriculture and forestry; its first superintendent, mainland forester Ralph Hosmer, was hired on the recommendation of Gifford Pinchot, chief of the US Forest Service. Hosmer, who served from 1903 to 1914, was first and foremost committed to the establishment of forest reserves taking in both public and private lands, to be managed for watershed values, primarily. He was uniquely empowered to achieve his goals: reserves were “selected” by him and then made so “by executive order of the governor after review by the board.” At the beginning of his tenure, no officially designated forest reserves existed; the first, 913 acres of territorial land on O‘ahu, was created in November 1904; when Hosmer resigned in 1914, there were thirty-seven reserves, totaling 798,214 acres—546,222 of them territorial land (68 percent). On February 1, 1913, Hawai‘i governor Walter F. Frear proclaimed the creation of the Molokai Forest Reserve, comprised of 44,674 acres of government and private lands, all above fifteen hundred feet elevation, stretching from Kala‘e to Hālawa.59 Of this, 13,268 acres were composed of territorial land (0 percent of the total); the rest was private. (Some private landowners, including the Meyer brothers, complained, to no effect, about parts of their pastures being

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included.)60 An aggressive reforestation program was pursued, including fencing, livestock reduction, and tree planting—particularly the proven eucalyptus from Australia.61 To propose and test more exotic candidates for introduction, Hosmer brought in outside expertise, hiring as consultants the College of Hawai‘i botanist Joseph “Papohaku” (“rock” in Hawaiian) Rock and the HSPA experiment station chief of plant pathology Harold Lyon. Even with such a large agency effort and the designation of significant acreage, forest dieback and other problems continued, especially on private lands. Hosmer and his allies among the HSPA membership mounted a concerted campaign over many years calling on private owners to protect the resource lest it “cease to be of use for the purpose which it originally served, viz: the retention and conservation of our water supply,” in the words of Frank Giffard, a Maui planter, writing in the Hawaiian Planters’ Record in 1913. The message seemed to be that God had given Hawai‘i’s sugar planters the forests to provide irrigation water, and they must honor his intention. Articles tended to stoke fears of deforestation-induced drought and often featured photos of denuded landscapes paired with pristine, healthy ones: cattle-free versus cattle-killed forests or, from the 1913 article, two photos with the caption: “This is not China. This is a dry district on the windward side of Lana‘i, where formerly there was enough water to grow taro.”62 Giffard and others exhorted planters to undertake their own efforts toward fencing, hunting, and planting.63 For his part, Superintendent Hosmer told the assembled HSPA in 1911 that since at that point everyone knew the arguments for forest protection well, “it is high time that every plantation here represented should in the terms of the street, ‘get busy’ with forest work, and that at once. The sole reason why this demand can be made here is that such work will pay . . . This whole matter is purely a business proposition. The only excuse for the existence of forestry at all is that it is good business to use part of the land for raising trees.” Hosmer’s successors, Charles S. Judd (superintendent 1914–1939) and William Crosby (superintendent 1939–1955), would continue the work. At the end of his term, the Yale-trained Judd tallied up 221,746 animals “eradicated,” 309 miles of stock-proof fence installed, 382 miles of trail built, 34 miles of phone lines strung, and 1,055,646 acres of land added to the reserve system, 66 percent of it public. He noted that this amounted to “approximately 25% of the total land area of the eight islands”—a very good figure, compared to only 2 percent of Puerto Rico in similar reserves.64 F O R E ST E U G E N IC S

No person did more to change the shape of the Hawaiian forests than Harold Lyon, for close to four decades the director of the HSPA experiment station on O‘ahu. Born in 1879 in Hastings, Minnesota, and educated at the University of Minnesota,

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Lyon came to Hawai‘i in 1907 to take the post of assistant pathologist at the HSPA’s new division of plant pathology—the first such department at any experiment station in the United States. He was made head of the department in 1909 and later director of the station. In these positions he traveled widely in Hawai‘i and the global tropics, studying cane diseases, and became convinced that it would be more effective to bring in disease-resistant cane varieties than to pursue more work on chemicals. His bosses disagreed, leery of importing plagues like the “sereh” disease that had destroyed crops in Java and others afflicting cane in the Caribbean and Mauritius. Stymied by the import ban, Lyon instead crossed plantation canes with “wild” types—actually, old cultivated Hawaiian varieties found persisting where protected from animals behind rock walls and in gulches; many of these were collected from Molokai.65 A biographer of Lyon’s, Constance Hartt, claimed that “two of the new hybrids were so successful that in a few years the once-faltering world sugar crop was producing in overabundance.”66 Not until the 1920s, amid serious losses, did the HSPA allow Lyon to import new cane varieties—and even then, the new seeds were sent “packed in moist charcoal, in sealed metal containers” to a series of quarantine houses at Kanoa, Kawela, and Mapulehu, Molokai, where they were carefully germinated and grown under observation in specially set-aside fields and ranges.67 It was not the first time Molokai had been used to quarantine potential pathogens, and it would not be the last. The project, according to Hartt, “was so successful that by the mid-1940s cane diseases in Hawaii were insignificant.” Lyon also worked on issues of reforestation, beginning with a 1907 tour of East Maui with H. P. Baldwin in 1907, where he was shown areas of rapid, unexplained dieback in ohia lehua forests. While he recognized the multiple threats to native forests—listing in one example woodcutting, cattle, invasive uluhi ferns and grasses, dessication, and fire as contributors—he tended to minimize the effects of cattle, even after fencing: “Where the cattle have been excluded the Hilo grass is keeping up a relentless attack, and little by little is pushing the forest line back towards the summit of the mountains.” Indeed, Lyon seems to have been firmly convinced from the outset that native species were constitutionally—evolutionarily—incapable of resisting these forces. “They quickly succumb to the forces turned against them. They possess no ability to recuperate. They regain no lost ground,” he wrote. “Each tree that dies exposes its neighbors to added pressure from the natural forces destroying the forest.”68 Areas of forest dieback were common on all the islands and seemed to be spreading, even in relatively pristine, cattle-free forests. Foresters and land managers were baffled and gave voice to a sense of resignation before the inevitable. An experience Lyon had in the winter of 1908–1909, while studying dieback on Maui, led him to believe that the crisis was due not to some agent, whether cattle or pathogen, but was the expression of a large-scale evolutionary failure in the structure of

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Hawai‘i’s forests. He described a strip of dying trees penetrating a forest on windward East Maui that happened to be “coextensive with” a newly built ditch system traversing the area. Trees growing on steeper slopes did much better than those in flatter areas, such as the summit bogs, but all affected trees died. The dead trees had surface roots that were purplish or black. He ruled out fungi since none were seen and because all the affected trees were killed and ruled out insects since there was “not a sufficient number . . . in the district to make collecting interesting.” The soil was wet and stagnant and “excites attention,” he wrote, “because of its peculiar appearance and consistency. It is light gray in the first four or six inches and iron gray below this depth.” The top layer was acid, while below it no acid reactions occurred, but a strong hydrogen sulfide smell was emitted when the soil was disturbed. Hydrogen sulfide is a plant poison that turns harmless compounds present in soils into toxic ones, including changing harmless ferric (iron) compounds into poisonous ferrous ones. Nearby, he found a heavily rust-encrusted pickax lying in the surface water, where it must have been for some time after the ditch construction. As an experiment, he buried it in the soil for twenty-one days; on digging it up, the rust nodules washed right off, leading Lyon to conclude that “the hydrogen sulphide in the soil reduced the rust (ferric hydrate) to ferrosoferric hydrate and possibly iron sulphide,” which killed the roots and then the trees. Apparently, hydrogen sulfide had been produced by naturally occurring bacteria in the soil when it was deprived of oxygen by being inundated with water. (The reaction does not take place in the presence of oxygen.) “The sudden and simultaneous dying of the forest throughout the length of the ditch system is, without doubt, due primarily to the activities of bacteria in the soil,” he stated. He did not address the question of why this change occurred only along the ditches and nowhere else— was it the introduction of bacteria; or the compaction of the soil by workers or cattle; or the interruption of normal surface drainage by roads, the ditches themselves, or other man-made changes? Instead, Lyon leaped over the question of immediate and probably man-made causation to a far more general conclusion: the cause of the dieback here was the inability of the native trees to grow in poorly drained, wet soil—which must be true anywhere and everywhere in the Hawaiian Islands. The only remedies, he stated, were either to drain every flat or boggy area in the forests or to plant different trees tolerant of anaerobic soils.69 He proceeded to develop an elaborate biogeographic theory to explain the native trees’ weakness. The trees’ ancestors “came to these islands many, many years ago, when the soils were new.” They thrived since they had come from a place that had well-drained soils, and because they were so adapted, “require[d] such soils in order to grow to best advantage.” Then, through an accident of geology, no plants adapted to “old” or poorly drained soils arrived because “plant migration was stopped . . . through the isolation of the Islands, and the plants which should and would naturally constitute our flora at the present time never reached here.

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Consequently, our present native flora is but the residue of a flora adapted to new soils, but lingering on in old soils because no plants of the proper type for these soils have come upon the scene.” As evidence, Lyon supplied photographs of native trees growing on adjacent lava flows on Hawai‘i: the trees on the new flows were healthy, while those on older flows were seen “in a conspicuously decrepit state, and it only needs slight interference to cause it all to die out.”70 In Lyon’s theory, no further evolution of plants could occur after arrival in Hawai‘i. This would mean that all species in the islands must have migrated from elsewhere, or if speciated here from different ancestors, their genetic changes must have been limited to physical features and not to soil-chemistry adaptation. In any event, nature had glaringly failed to equip Hawaiian forests with the ability to survive any “slight interference.” All the millions of acres of healthy trees growing in boggy soils (recall that Waldemar Lindgren had stated definitively that all forests on Molokai were confined to boggy areas) and on any place on those islands composed entirely of “old” soils—Ni‘ihau, Kaua‘i, O‘ahu, Molokai, Lana‘i, and West Maui—would eventually succumb. He stated categorically: “There are natural and uncontrollable factors now operating which will eventually eliminate the native forest trees, or at least reduce their numbers to such an extent that they will no longer constitute an adequate forest cover.” He warned that the situation was dire: “Continued neglect of these watersheds is suicidal, for everything fails with the failure of our water supply.”71 And he proposed a plan of action: “The only method of procedure therefore by which we can hope to rehabilitate our old forests and create new forests is to plant introduced trees which will be able to thrive and spread in spite of the opposing factors which are proving too strong for our native forest trees.”72 It would be Lyon’s task to do what nature had failed to do. Unimpressed by the performance of koa and ohia replanted on trampled ground, he decided that these species would not work; eucalypts and grevilleas grew well but did not coexist with the dense, matted understory—Hillebrand’s “framework of bamboo canes and lianes”—that most scientists recognized as critical in the retention of rainwater in the shallow Hawaiian soils, where hardpans often formed just inches below the surface, confining the roots to an easily compacted horizon often just a few inches deep. Lyon understood this and called for “the formation of congenial plant societies” made up of species carefully selected by experts: “No plants will be given a trial whose known habits and propensities make them undesirable citizens of our forests.”73 Lyon’s list of desirable traits is somewhat surprising: weediness or invasiveness were reckoned excellent, as we will soon see; having sound, hard wood was not— Lyon insisted that no trees suitable for timber be planted so as not to tempt anyone to ever cut them down. Only softwoods or brittle, quick-rotting hardwoods would be considered.74 There was only room in Lyon’s forests for one economic use—the “production” of water for irrigating sugar.

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Lyon was not the first determined acclimatizer in Hawai‘i—Francisco de Paula Marin holds that honor—and he joined many of his colleagues in an ongoing and very concerted effort. David Haugh alone planted over one hundred species of pines looking for a high-altitude tree to replace the scrubby mamane on the summits of Hawai’i and Maui, and his division of agriculture and forestry grew around four hundred thousand tree seedlings a year from 1908 to 1933 to be planted on public and private lands; from 1934 to 1941 the US Civilian Conservation Corps took over the work and planted an average of nearly two million trees per year on reserves, plus building trails, roads, buildings, phone lines, and signage and collecting tons of seed.75 Yet Lyon was prodigious in his efforts. In 1918 he established the HSPA’s nursery on land offered by Mary E. Foster on Vineyard Street in Nu‘uanu, and in 1819 he arranged to use the Manoa land that would become the Lyon Arboretum.76 He personally traveled all over the tropics, bringing back seeds and specimens, and corresponded with people all over world, carrying on a large commerce in plants. He also had a knack for deputizing others to collect for the cause, such as Papohaku Rock, of the College (later University) of Hawai‘i, who, he wrote “is now in the Orient collecting seeds for us.” Far from seeing the dangers in such massive introduction, for fear that some might escape and become weeds, Lyon was unabashedly proweed: “There seems to be a strong prejudice against any tree, shrub or vine that spreads naturally under existing conditions. This is the wrong attitude entirely,” he wrote. What was instead needed was a kind of social-Darwinist program applied to the natural world: “We must bring these trees together on our watersheds, pit them against each other, and they will work out their own salvation by eventually resolving themselves into a balanced society, which will give us the complete forest cover on our watersheds that we now desire to create.” He enthusiastically defended guava, which covered tens of thousands of acres of uplands with impenetrable thickets of economically useless brush.77 Not surprisingly, Lyon himself (unwittingly) let loose a prodigious weed: Spathoglottis plicata, an orchid from the Philippines that Lyon, an ardent orchid fancier, had planted in his collection at the Foster garden; it spread, probably in pots of tree saplings to be planted out, to all of the major islands and grows wild over vast areas (Puna, Hawai’i, is one notably infested area). In the course of his travels, Lyon felt that he had found the grail: the fig tree. “What better could we ask for than this magnificent tree with which to build the core of our new forests? It has every character that we could wish for. It will give vertical depth to our forests; it will permit undergrowth to grow right up to its very bole; it will prevent soil erosion, and it is quite free from the attack of insect pests or fungous diseases,” he wrote. Also, it could accommodate grazing: “You could run cattle in a Ficus forest without endangering the lives of the trees.”78 There are six hundred species of Ficus distributed worldwide, and Lyon found it “most remarkable” that no fig had made it to Hawai‘i. Twenty-two species had been

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introduced there and grew well, but none was able to reproduce—this was due, in Lyon’s words, to “the non-arrival of the specific insects which are essential to their seed production.” Figs are pollinated only through a symbiosis with tiny parasitic wasps that crawl inside the fruit and deposit their eggs; each fig species depends upon a specific species of wasp, without which it cannot set seed. Experiments elsewhere had shown that introducing the correct wasp species could initiate reproduction of trees far from their native range. Lyon enlisted the help of entomologists in Hawai‘i and Australia and succeeded in establishing the wasps specific to Ficus macrophylla (Moreton Bay fig) and F. rubiginosa (Port Jackson fig). In his description of the first year of seed bearing of the Moreton Bay figs in Honolulu, one can sense the pride he felt in the program’s success: “When the tree in Emma Square produced its first heavy crop of fruit it was visited by many people of the neighborhood, who gathered the fruits as fast as they fell from the tree. One of these collectors informed us that the fruits made excellent pies and puddings.” Lyon orchestrated an extraordinary campaign to spread his Ficus throughout the territory; it seemed little short of a general mobilization, involving ordinary citizens, forestry, and agricultural workers, and even the United States military. He and his colleagues set out to propagate 100,000 seedlings of F. macrophylla and 150,000 of F. rubiginosa; to plant them, he wrote, “We most earnestly solicit the cooperation of everybody interested in the welfare of these Islands in getting these trees into the ground over as wide a range as possible in order that this species may become established and actively participate in the spontaneous reforestation of our denuded watersheds.”79 The spontaneity he referred to was the rapid reproduction and spread of figs—called biological invasion by scientists and a weed by everyone—into every corner of the Hawaiian Islands. The “material aid” of private landowners was asked for and granted “in most cases” in planting out seedlings and scattering tons of seeds along trails. Lyon even convinced the US Army Air Force to fly missions over the mountains of O‘ahu in which tons of fig seeds were spread over virgin forests. Lyon wrote in a letter to a colleague: “In setting out tree seedlings, our idea has been to infect the forest with vigorous blood at as many points as possible.”80 He looked at the question of Hawai‘i’s forest health as he had the question of sugar diseases in the cane fields: as a problem of epidemiology—of diagnosing the disease, its vector, and its host—and then of genetics—finding plant species or varieties that were immune to the plague or pathogen, then introducing, cross-breeding, and so on until the entire population, field, plantation, or forest had been made free of the threat. Nowhere in this calculus was a value figured for the complex and varied Hawaiian ecosystems, each one unique in the world and, had he noticed, many under the imminent threat of extinction. The public relations campaign and the institutional machinery he set up accordingly gave no consideration to these risks—to be plain, Lyon’s campaign itself probably constituted the greatest threat to

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Hawaiian forests since the introduction of cattle. The introduction program was massive and systematic but also random, undirected, and mindless in a fundamental way—a kind of mad science. It intended to reach its end, “the formation of congenial plant societies,” by any means necessary, whose components, sequence, and consequences could not be anticipated—and indeed did not matter. Over the decades, tens of millions of trees were planted on public lands and a similar number, on private lands, made up of at least 1,057 species (75 of them eucalypts, 43 of them Ficus) grown at twenty-two field arboreta.81 In addition, seven experimental fruit orchards tested 597 fruit tree types.82 Seeds were sown repeatedly from the air: over the Waianae Mountains on O‘ahu in the 1920s, over a burn on Hawai’i in 1929, and in the early 1930s in West Maui and the Pupukea reserve on O‘ahu. “The results of all this work have been the creation of virtual ‘botanic gardens’ occupying thousands of acres on all the larger islands of the State,” wrote the forester in charge of Hawai‘i Island, Roger Skolmen, who participated.83 Reforestation on Molokai was extensive: from a nursery at Puko‘o, trees were planted out in the upland areas, mostly above about two thousand feet, in an arc from the northern limits of Kala‘e above the pali overlooking Kalaupapa east and south along the mountain flanks to mauka Kalamaula, then bending eastward below the summit region to Kamalō, with isolated plantings as far east as Pu‘uohoku.84 Many of the plantations were inaccessible, isolated high in the Molokai Forest Reserve, which was made up of territorial lands in the summit region and windward valleys as well as mauka lands leased from the Meyer estate and 5,572 acres leased from the Molokai Ranch in 1939.85 In other areas, however, the results were plain to see. Much of upper Kala‘e was transformed from grassland to dense forests of Eucalyptus robusta, Formosan koa, and Casuarina (Australian ironwood)—such as the ironwoods that now envelop the Nanahoa “penis stone,” which before reforestation in the 1930s could be seen on the horizon from many miles around.86 On the road over the Pu‘uohoku ridge to Hālawa Valley can be seen another reforestation area, densely grown with Formosan koa and eucalyptus. As to the success of the effort in maintaining the watershed, George Cooke had these thoughts in his memoir, published in 1949: I believe that we were poorly advised by the Board of Agriculture and Forestry in the selection of trees for us to plant. . . . From my observations over a number of years, these trees have not satisfied our needs and are injurious to the land. The leaves poison the soil under and near them. The Eucalyptus is reputed to absorb a huge amount of available moisture from the soil, when used on watershed areas. The moisture is too valuable to be lost in this manner. The varieties recommended to us which we planted have proven useless for lumber, firewood, or fence posts. If our efforts had been devoted to planting Norfolk Island Pine, Cypress, Sugi, Juniper, Silver Oak, Australian Koa, Wattle, etc., I feel that our watershed would be in far better condition today for conserving moisture.87

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Damage to Molokai’s forests extended beyond the reforested areas. Between them, introduced species multiplied vectors of destruction for native species: rats ate birds, insects, and seeds; mongoose, instead of eating rats, as they were supposed to do, also devastated birds; deer and goats ate endangered plants and denuded slopes, causing erosion; pigs and cattle uprooted vegetation and soil and left holes where water stood, breeding mosquitoes. Between 1933 and 1937, the Hawaiian Bird Survey explored large tracts of native forest in the East-Central uplands but located just one single native bird, an ‘apapane (Himatione sanguinea). One surveyor, George Munro, thought he heard an oloma‘o or Molokai thrush (Phaeornis obscurus rutha), but none was sighted. The last ornithologist to have seen a number of Molokai natives, William Bryan, did so in 1908: the black mamo (Drepanis funerea), the crested honeyeater (Palmeria dolei), and the kākāwahie, or Molokai creeper (Paroreomyza flammea). It is likely that the ‘o‘u (Psittacirostra psittacea) and the Bishop’s ‘ō‘ō (Moho bishopi) were already extinct by that date.88 In subsequent years, the Maui amakihi (Hemignathus virens wilsoni) and the ‘i‘iwi (Vestiaria coccinea) were found in low numbers in the most remote canyons and plateaus of the island, around Mount Olonui above Wailau Valley—the sad remnants of a once-spectacular native bird fauna. T H E F O R E ST RY- I N DU ST R IA L C OM P L E X

For five decades, until its waning in the 1960s, the Hawai‘i forestry program was an unprecedented example of cooperative government-private sector land management. Looked at in another way, the program amounted to a determined economic development effort by government in the service of a single industry—sugar. It would be inaccurate to describe the arrangement as the capture of a government agency by industry, since the agency was formed expressly to serve that industry’s interests and maintained that focus for decades, using its budget, resources, and jurisdiction over public lands to subsidize it and discourage competition from other economic uses of the forest lands and waters. The history of Hawaiian forestry is remarkably continuous in two senses: 1) in its steadfast concern with the water supply function of forest lands; and 2) in its bold and effective demands that the government exercise control over forests to safeguard private interests. This can be seen as early as the 1846 law asserting government ownership of “the forests and timber growing therein,” meant to curb woodcutting and pulu fern and mushroom gathering.89 This was echoed and reinforced by the Mahele’s granting of control over traditional uses on ahupua‘a uplands—a move that was, on one hand, aimed by the ali‘i at uppity commoners but, on the other, was an assertion of control by corporate interests (in the form of elite Hawaiians with business plans and frequently, haole partners or lessees) over native wildcatters—in effect, small would-be capitalists.

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Interested in spurring economic diversification as sugar began to decline, in 1957 the territorial legislature voted to ask the US Forest Service for aid; the service assigned research forester Robert E. Nelson to Hawai‘i to survey forest resources and possibilities for development. Given the US Forest Service’s own broad bias in favor of the timber industry in the United States, it is unsurprising that Nelson took special interest in stands of valuable timber and their exploitation. However, he found roadblocks everywhere, put up by the sugar industry, which feared losing its cheap, captive labor and water and water supplies to an upstart industry: “Competition for labor . . . made the timber industry unwelcome . . . There was no significant support for diversified enterprises in Hawai‘i until about 1955, when labor began to be in surplus.” The sugar industry had for fifty years, he wrote, resisted all attempts at establishing timber businesses, pushing to have logging permits denied, even on private lands. He found his own efforts at encouraging a nascent timber industry “constrained by his superiors and the strong influence of the sugar (water) interests.”90 The singlemindedness of Harold Lyon’s career can be understood in the light of sugar’s hold over Hawai‘i—a grip maintained over its land; water; economy; government; and at some level, its mind. Lyon was a man devoted in every sense to agriculture; he was a plant pathologist, not an ecologist, interested in the welfare of cash crops, not native species or ecosystems. In December 1940, he delivered an address to the HSPA titled “Sugar—the Foundation of All Progress on Earth.” In it, he detailed a curious global strategy. He argued that all energy on Earth—wood, peat, alcohol, and animal power—can be seen as ultimately deriving from plant sugars, with coal, oil, and gas as organic residues. The United States’ energy policy, he argued, ought to be based on this truth. Farming once supplied the energy-transport market, in the form of feed for beasts of burden, but was squashed by unfair subsidies to fossil fuels, which will soon run out. Crops should be grown to make sugar and alcohol, solving the national malady of unemployment, and stored against the future, like gold in Fort Knox. “Every acre in the United states that can grow sugar beets or cane ought to be” so used, he urged.91 Not everyone shared Lyon’s convictions. In an interview after Lyon’s death in 1957, his long-time colleague, the botanist Otto Degener, confessed this opinion: Though I always liked and respected him, I as a botanist considered him increasingly a danger to the science of botany in the Hawaiian Islands. He never fully sensed the sacredness of our endemic plants . . . that had taken millions of years to evolve. It was, of course, his duty as an employee of the Sugar Planters’ Experiment Station to increase the fog drip and the holding capacity of our soils, thus increasing available water for the irrigation of sugarcane. It was his rash aim, consequently, to introduce and scatter banyan and other ficus species throughout our islands. . . . this blasphemous project fortunately failed.92

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Even with such a massive effort, little more was achieved than studding the forests with “botanical gardens” whose acreage, on an island-wide scale, was insignificant. On Molokai’s 163,211 acres, just 2,411 acres were “established forest plantations,” while kiawe and ohia forest each occupied 33,000 acres, grass covered 38,751 acres, and agriculture claimed 18,325 acres.93 Nor was Lyon’s dream of the superweed fulfilled. Experience showed that in spite of the tremendous variety of species attempted, very few thrived, and none—other than old pests such as guava, Brazilian pepper, and haole koa—spread: “We have found that the original plantings often failed and were overplanted with Eucalyptus robusta or other hardy species . . . before the weeds set in,” reported Skolmen.94 On Hawai‘i, the most planted tree was Eucalyptus robusta (2.3 million trees), Grevillea robusta (2.2 million), Melaleauca quinquenervia (1.7 million), and Acacia koa (1.1 million). In the Molokai plantations, the most common species persisting in the early 1980s were eucalypts (covering 1,159 acres, or 48 percent) and pines (covering 756 acres, or 31 percent). Lastly, the ohia dieback phenomenon that convinced Lyon and others that the Hawaiian forest trees were doomed to extinction has come to be understood by ecologists as a normal, cyclical occurrence of senescence on boggy soils, a process that could be accelerated by disturbances caused by cattle, goats, or pigs compacting the shallow soils to hardpans, or by periodic parasite infestations. When these are controlled, the native species thrive. The career of Harold Lyon was an apotheosis of the Sugar Era: he was typically American, confident in the ability of technical and bureaucratic management to solve problems for the common good, but his view of that commonweal was dangerously myopic because he was steeped in a worldview deeply imbued with the assumptions of cultural evolution, Caucasian racial superiority, and the practice of eugenics as public health and policy. Lyon was a great exemplar of American dreams in this period, especially of their contradictions. He was a faithful and indefatigable servant of corporate, oligarchy-controlled agribusiness in Hawai‘i. Its legacy, and his, are both impressive in their achievements and troubling in their abuses: of the apparatus of government to serve elite interests, of the land, and of the people of Hawai‘i.

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From Lonely Isle to Friendly Isle Economic Struggles in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries and the Future of “the Most Hawaiian Island”

To feed the growing Hawaiian sugar industry in the twentieth century, immigration continued on a large scale—often in avoidance of federal restrictions—and continued to change the human face of the islands. The Asian majority became larger, while native Hawaiians were increasingly marginalized in landholding, business, and politics—as a group reduced to an economic and social status in their own land like that of the Indians in America, needing, in the view of some, resettlement on reservations to save them from immiseration and disappearance. “Empty” Molokai would be the main test bed for their “rehabilitation.” In the wake of the failure of the sugar enterprises on Molokai, the island community struggled to find a steady economic base. Efforts at diversified agriculture on the whole faltered, while cattle and sheep grazing expanded enormously, taking over nearly all unforested lands and reworking them with increasing scientific sophistication and capital resources. The traditional economy, such as kalo production and fishing, gradually declined. The windward valleys were abandoned, while the mana‘e valleys struggled to steer a middle road between old and new worlds. East End village centers, such as Ualapu‘e and Kamalō, lost population and gravity as government services and businesses moved west to Kaunakakai, nearer the nexus of ranching on the West End, which became the island’s only town. When the pineapple industry arrived in Molokai in the 1920s, it marked the island’s first agricultural success story since the heyday of Hālawa Valley. It was in a sense a modern, American echo of the ancient Hawaiian achievements: an extensive, massive, irrigated (the reclamation projects were built not in the end to benefit homesteaders, but California corporations) monoculture, efficiently run by a small caste of managers for nonresident owners who expatriated the profits and 155

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worked by a low-wage, low-status lumpenproletariat segregated among themselves by nationality and from the rest of Molokai in company “towns.” Molokai’s historical structures—malolo/west and mana‘e/east, ko‘olau/windward and kona/ leeward, wet and dry, prosperous and penurious—were turned upside down. Along with them were changed the island’s landscape, communities, economy, politics, and future. E C O N OM IC S T RU G G L E S

The first decades of the twentieth century were fairly prosperous for the Hawaiian sugar industry. Molokai, having failed to sustain either large or small cane operations, was left to find other economic avenues. In the windward valleys, kalo growers initially provided the island’s best economic story: Hālawa continued to supply Maui plantations, while Wailau and Pelekunu had a contract with the territorial government to supply pai’ai to the leper settlement. A traveler who made the climb over the pali to Wailau in 1912 reported it to be full of farmers and kalo patches, a small community led by the charismatic Jennie Wilson, the Pelekunu-born Hawaiian wife of engineer and several-time Honolulu mayor John H. Wilson.1 Yet the small scale of the Molokai producers worked against them, as the sugar industry elsewhere became gigantic and looked for large-scale suppliers. O‘ahu growers underbid the Molokai valleys’ Kalaupapa contract, depriving them of their only cash income.2 Without connections to the market economy and drawn to the modern world outside, “the windward people” gradually abandoned the isolated valleys. The archaeologist Kenneth Emory, touring the island in 1916, described seeing at Pelekunu “nine rather dilapidated . . . houses, taro patches almost neglected.”3 By 1922, W. J. Coelho, who had been a supervisor at Kalaupapa and an elected representative from Kalaupapa and Maui, visited the valleys and reported that the Hawaiians had left, while Chinese had moved in. “Wailau was plainly visible with her beauty. There stood the uninhabited houses. There were natives at the time when natives furnished Kalaupapa with poi but when the work passed to the Chinese, the lands of the natives were finished. There are six Chinese in Wailau but no Hawaiians. So it is with Pelekunu . . . all the natives went away. There are four Chinese there now.”4 As they had all over the islands, numbers of Chinese who had fulfilled their plantation contracts moved into agriculture, typically in well-watered coastal landscapes where they could grow rice or kalo and frequently leasing or purchasing kuleana lands from Hawaiians or simply taking over abandoned plots. In Papalaua Valley, a small upper tributary of Hālawa, a traveler reported in 1921 that “the natives in this valley have all gone away. Only Chinese taro cultivators live by the stream.”5 As this example illustrates, they were willing to live in remote places where transport problems and lack of ice all but precluded bringing fresh foods—

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vegetables or fish—to market. On Molokai, people living on the land worked mostly for their subsistence. Nevertheless, many Chinese, familiar with aquaculture from home, took over fishpond leases all over the islands. In 1901, fifteen ponds were in commercial use, most of them tended by Chinese.6 Where did the Hawaiians go? Most had long before left for the towns for work or for places where someone in their ‘ohana had found work—off-island, or to Kaunakakai. The early twentieth century saw an unprecedented population shift from the East End and the windward valleys to the West End: in 1910, 1,006, not counting 785 at Kalaupapa.7 Kaunakakai became the island’s only “town,” serving as the supply nexus for the Molokai Ranch and increasingly as the government center as jobs and facilities were established there or moved from the East End. The courthouse and tax office moved from Ualapu‘e in 1935.8 Elsewhere on the south shore, residents attempted an array of crops, searching as ever for a way to make Molokai pay. Many were well suited to the terrain and climate: sisal agave from Mexico grew well everywhere but was costly to harvest and transport and faced stiff competition from huge, low-wage Mexican producers; cotton reportedly was grown in the gap, Kalaupapa, and the kona shore but was ravaged by bugs. Pineapple was grown widely at small scale, including at a reported plantation in Pelekunu, and struck many promoters as the next bonanza crop for parts of Hawai‘i unfit for sugar. Frogs were “farmed” in wells and kalo lo‘i and were occasionally shipped to Honolulu hotels. Boats, guitars, and hats were manufactured at one time or another. None of these industries prospered.9 One that did was honey: the American Sugar Company put in its first hives in 1901 in the kiawe strips along the Kaluako‘i coast; the product was so abundant that the company added more hives two years later and began selling honey offisland in 1904. It had itself a hit: honey became one of the biggest, most reliable producers for the Molokai Ranch. From 1904 to 1909, the largest buyers were the United States and Australia; from 1909 to World War I, Germany was the biggest customer; during the war, sales went back to America. At its zenith at the end of the period, the Molokai Ranch had 2,250 colonies of bees, making nearly three thousand cases of honey and eighty cases of beeswax yearly, an output said by one source to have made it the largest single producer in the world at the time.10 Producers elsewhere on Molokai added to this total. In 1937, the bees were devastated by a parasite, American foulbrood, which, for all practical purposes, shut down the industry.11 THE EAST END

During the early part of the century, a settlement pattern emerged in East (and to some extent, Central) Molokai that would remain constant until very recent years: one of extended families, often of mixed ethnic heritage, engaged in diversified

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agriculture split between home consumption and the local, and sometimes regional, market—more or less on the Meyer model. There was often a mix of fruits and vegetables; kalo in small, remnant lo‘i; and other crops for whatever cash market could be anticipated, plus some home industries, combined with fishing or fishpond aquaculture. Often a breadwinner or head of family also held one or more jobs for government or private employers or was self-employed in a trade, frequently part-time or seasonally. One of the largest and most prominent Molokai families, like the Meyers a European-Hawaiian family, was started by Eduoarde Henri Duvauchelle, a chef from France who had accompanied his brother on a French expedition to New Zealand but, after an unfortunate romantic tangle with a Maori girl, had gone on to Hawai‘i.12 There, he cooked for Kamehameha V (Lot) and Kalakaua and married a part Hawaiian named Mary Lynch, the daughter of a local woman and a haole carpenter and whaleboat builder at Lahaina who sojourned in Molokai, around 1866. His son, Edward Kekuhi Duvauchelle, had fifteen children, three boys with a woman named Alapa‘i, then six boys and six girls with Annie Wood Duvauchelle. All of them lived together on a property clustered with several houses, in the old Hawaiian fashion, facing the fishpond at Puko‘o, a village fifteen miles east of Kaunakakai and nine miles west of Hālawa. The brothers from the first marriage lived in one house; Annie, Edward, and their children in the main house. Their Hawaiian grandmother insisted that the children speak only Hawaiian to her, as she understood no English, while the father wanted them to speak only English.13 Edward was primarily a fisherman, taking his sampan, with a shifting crew of his sons and various Hawaiians, Japanese, and Portuguese, all over Molokai waters and selling the catch in Lahaina or Honolulu. He was also a rancher, with around one hundred head on leased pasture “up mauka” Puko‘o Valley from the pond, and at various times the deputy sheriff; the county road overseer; the postmaster for the East End (the post office was in the house); the hotelier for the East End, running a five-room hotel in the house; and a “country” lawyer, arguing cases before the German-Hawaiian district judge Chris Conrad, as often as not opposite his neighbor and fellow rancher and lawyer Rex Hitchcock, descendent of the missionary.14 Sometimes he raised frogs in an old well or, after wet periods, collected tadpoles, then took them to Pelekunu and dumped them in an old kalo lo‘i until they were big enough to be packed in honohono grass and shipped to the kitchen at the Moana Hotel in Honolulu. By Molokai standards the family was neither rich nor poor; it could raise enough cash, usually by fishing, to buy one of the first Delco thirty-two-volt battery systems on the island to run electric lights and a washing machine; to buy a piano for oldest daughter Zelie (who would go on to be an important Hawaiian-language teacher and translator); or, in 1916, to buy a Ford Model T—only the fourth on the island.15 For many years the only cars were owned by the Molokai Ranch; Dr. Homer Hayes, the doctor at the Ualapu‘e hospital; and Rex Hitchcock. These, plus the

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Duvauchelles, were soon joined by Eddie McCorriston and Olaf Tollefson, a Swedish mechanic and fisherman.16 The kona shore east of Kamalō—the East End—was called mana‘e side, from mana‘e, east, versus malalo, or west of Kamalō. It was like one very long, thin, small town, made up of extended families, where everyone knew everyone else and helped one another with business and family matters. On the far East End before Hālawa, the Browns owned Pu‘uohoku; Olaf Tolleson lived at Moanui; Jules Dudoit, the son of a nineteenth-century French consul at Honolulu, lived at Kumimi; Judge Conrad lived up Mapulehu Valley; and Theodore Meyer was a neighbor of the McCorristons at Kamalō.17 Laura Duvauchelle Smith, Annie and Edward’s sixth child, born in 1909, reported that all of them were considered to be of the same social class; the founding men were haoles who had married Hawaiian or part-Hawaiian women and had large families. Mana‘e side was called “the long ranch” because one would run into so many cattle standing in the road all the way to Hālawa.18 There were no fences, just brands and familiar names, like Jack Johnson, the Duvauchelle’s big black bull, who stirred up trouble with the neighbors by repeatedly ripping through their garden fences. Puko‘o remained a town of sorts, with the Duvauchelle’s house acting like an administrative center containing the post office, the hotel, and the county office, which had one of the island’s only phones—a party line. Nearby was a poi factory owned by a Hawaiian named Aipa, a cluster of Chinese stores (Ah Pun store, Ah Sing store, Apaiona store), Ah Soon the Chinese baker, the Japanese farmers who lived up the road, the Chinese lady who lived up the valley with all the fruit trees, and several Hawaiians who took part-time work as cowboys for Hitchcock or the Browns.19 When each rancher had enough animals ready to ship, he would take his cattle to the pen at Puko‘o, from where they were driven into the water and tied to a skiff that took them out to the steamer Mikihala, too deep drafted to come alongside the dilapidated and crumbling Puko‘o wharf, and then hoisted with a strap around the belly into the ship and sent to Honolulu.20 Puko‘o pond had been awarded in the Mahele to Ilae Napohaku, the infamous first tax collector of Molokai.21 From 1905 it was owned by the Duvauchelles and maintained in the traditional way of a loko kuapa pond, stocked with mullet and ama fry, or pua, netted outside the makaha and put inside to fatten up on the algae that thrived in water made brackish by freshwater springs below the tide line. George Kane, traveling in 1912, stayed at Annie Duvauchelle’s house and reported: “Puko‘o is a beautiful land for its chest is broad as it faced Ka‘anapali and Honokawai and others. The hills are at its back with deep gulches. These were not the only things that appealed to the eye but also the big fishponds lying before its face. Catching all kinds of fish at this place is like playing, women and children did it. I have heard with my ears of fish being kicked with the feet on Molokai and this is the first time I’ve seen it done.”22

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Edward “believed in buying land,” according to his daughter Laura, so that each of his fifteen kids would have a place of their own someday.23 He bought land at auctions whenever possible, leased mauka grazing lands, and in 1918 took over the lease on the government fishpond at Ualapu‘e for $81 a year.24 This pond was also kept stocked and was guarded from poachers by a hired caretaker, Sakanaki, or one of the boys, who would sleep overnight in the hale makaha, a little shack on the seawall. When it was time to harvest, a net was dragged through with one person walking behind it. Barracuda were often inside the pond and on occasion jumped over the net, hitting and possibly injuring the person minding the net. The pond also sheltered crabs, shrimp, limu seaweed, and small Japanese clams introduced from O‘ahu, which thrived explosively for awhile, such that the first six inches of sand seemed to be solid clams, before they were suddenly wiped out by a disease around 1925.25 All of the children worked in the ponds, gathered food in the ponds, and played in them. The ponds allowed the family a reliable and ready source of food, supplemented by venison shot on the Molokai Ranch lands (with permission), by beef and pigs from home, and by fruits and vegetables from the garden and the neighborhood. The Duvauchelles were well aware that the ponds and the life they helped support were pieces of a vanishing world. The ponds themselves were in danger of disappearing: of silting in, as many to the west already had, and by filling with mangroves, which had been imported from Australia by George Cooke’s Molokai Ranch manager James Munro just a few years before and were already making their way eastward.26 The ancient connection between wai and kai, freshwater and the sea, which had sustained people in Molokai for centuries, had effectively been severed by the erosion created by grazing animals from above and by the invasion of alien species carried by wind and waves. In a shorthand sense, the demise of the traditional Hawaiian ecological economy in Molokai can be blamed on cattle, goats, and weeds. The place where the two met and mixed was preeminently the kalo lo‘i and the fishpond below it. By the 1920s the only kalo grown mana‘e side was at Moanui, “at a small area,” and at Waialua, according to Henry Duvauchelle, Edward and Annie’s third child, “but other places very few.”27 West of Puko‘o, the only kalo patch was at Ka‘amola, near where in 1927 the first commercial airplane flight from California to Hawai‘i, piloted by Mssrs. Smith and Bronte, crash landed “in a kiawe tree.”28 (As before and since, modernity came crashing in to Molokai but had little permanent impact.) The Duvauchelle clan at Puko‘o was very typical of mana‘e Molokai in the early twentieth century: suspended between old and new Hawai‘i, just as it was mixed between haole and Hawaiian, with one foot in the new, capitalist economy and one in the vanishing ‘ohana, subsistence one. By hanging onto that subsistence lifestyle to the extent that it could, the East End retained a stubborn independence, but the power and the future lay to the west, as this anecdote from Henry illustrates, telling of how many locals, uniformly with

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Democratic sympathies, came to vote for George Cooke, a Republican, for territorial senator for Molokai: “The Republicans controlled the jobs. And everybody worked for them, so they were all Republicans, too.”29 M A K I N G M O L O KA I F O R C AT T L E

The Duvauchelles and other families hung on in their East End valleys, and a small town grew up at Kaunakakai, but most of the island was home to few or no people, just to grazing animals in increasing numbers. Soon after the turn of the century, intensive ranching covered the entire West End and the gap and spread eastward along the coast and the mauka slopes that extend above the “canyon country” and below the forested summit plateau. By far the largest operation, the Molokai Ranch led the way, investing considerable resources in remaking the landscape for efficient cattle production. In 1898, thirty-five Devon bulls were added to the motley herd that had been acceptable for producing tallow and hides to begin improving the breeding stock.30 A professional hunter was brought in from California to cull the wild goats and deer that roamed the ranch lands. A prolonged campaign was started to improve the range according to the latest scientific techniques: a paddock system of grazing rotation was started; the invasive guava, lantana, and pamakani plants that choked thousands of acres were gradually removed; new species of grasses were planted—paspalum, dilitatum, panicum molle, para grass, Rhodes grass, and feather sedge grass.31 In 1904 the ranch had 5,598 cattle, 13,918 sheep, 298 horses, 272 pigs, and 1,614 colonies of bees. In 1907 the sheep herd peaked at 17,000, mostly merinos bred with Shropshires and Southdowns, and some Tunis.32 In 1908, Charles Cooke came to Molokai and took a forty-five-mile tour of the ranch. Liking what he saw, he bought out the hui partners that year. To manage the property, he sent his son, George, and his wife, Sophie Judd Cooke, to Molokai.33 Their arrival, on March 31, 1908, represented the beginning of a new era on the island: one in which the ranch would dominate the economic, social, and political life of Molokai by virtue not only of controlling the lion’s share of its usable land area—more than sixty-nine thousand acres—but also by becoming its largest employer and philanthropist, reaching out to embrace the community around Kaunakakai in a close, paternalistic manner (see figure 10).34 When George and Sophie landed at Kaunakakai, they brought with them their servants, whom Sophie described as “our Japanese couple,” and moved into the big wooden house at the ranch headquarters at Kauluwai, 1,450 feet up on the cool slopes of Kala‘e not far from the old Meyer homestead.35 In a certain sense, their arrival also represented a strong continuity—with the long tradition of the powerful outsider owner coming to take possession of a fiefdom on the West End. Like the several Kamehamehas who had preceded them, the Cookes were the new malihini chiefs from O‘ahu. They came to Molokai as representatives and products of a world distant to Molokai,

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marked by education, experience, and family and social connections to the upper reaches of Hawaii’s ruling missionary-business oligarchy. Both were descended from missionaries: George Cooke from Amos S. Cooke and Juliette Montague Cooke, who had arrived in Honolulu from Boston in 1837; Sophie Judd Cooke was the granddaughter of Gerrit Parmele Judd, who had come over with the third company from Boston in 1828 aboard the bark Parthian and became the powerful minister of the Interior under Kamehameha III and the primary architect of the Mahele.36 Her father, Albert Francis Judd Jr., was a graduate of Yale Law School and was chairman of the board of trustees of the Bishop estate and the Kamehameha schools. After annexation placed restrictions on Chinese and Japanese immigration, he had been, Sophie wrote, “sent by the sugar industry to the Philippine Islands to go around and become acquainted with the best tribe of Filipinos for laborers.” After eight months he “decided on the tribe of Ilocano.”37 Her brother Lawrence would be territorial governor from 1929 to 1934. George himself was territorial senator from 1911 to the mid-1930s, when he served as president of the Senate.38 The conservative Republican values of the Cookes and their extended family were consistent with and good examples of those common to the educated business elite in Hawai‘i in the early part of the century: they believed in the moral discipline of capitalism, of landownership, and of the enlightened corporation. They were beneficiaries and defenders of a society strictly divided by racial and ethnic categories— with their own in firm control. In the introduction to George Cooke’s memoir, Mo‘olelo o Molokai: A Ranch Story of Molokai, the writer, Nils P. Larsen, described with pride the “pure virility” and anticommunism of Cooke’s ranching career, an exemplar of “the philosophy of the capitalistic system at its best.”39 This is not to say that the Cookes did not have deep and sincere feelings for the Molokai community and work and invest for its betterment. The ranch sponsored dances, rodeos, and picnics and treated its longtime employees with great loyalty. George Cooke guided the ranch operation through a tumultuous period of labor strife in Hawai‘i that reached its climax on Molokai in the pineapple strike of 1937, when one thousand mostly Filipino workers of the Molokai plantations walked out and camped in the county park in Kaunakakai. In his memoir, Cooke recalled the strike as orderly and detailed how, for lack of engagement on the part of the plantations’ management, the strikers themselves provided policing, and the staff of the Molokai Ranch extended material aid to the strikers’ camp.40 It is also not to say that the Cookes did not work long and hard in the difficult circumstances of West Molokai. George often spent sixteen-hour days on horseback checking the windmills that brought up brackish water for the cattle in the driest, most remote pastures of Kaluako‘i. Drought always haunted the ranch. Sophie remembered that there was no rain at Kualapu‘u—a comparatively moist upland spot—from April 1908 to February 1909. Five hundred cattle died.41 On the far West End, droughts sometimes lasted for years. “Of course, one of George’s first

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figure 10. Molokai Ranch Headquarters, 1913. Source: G. P. Cooke, Moolelo O Molokai.

jobs was to prospect for more water in the mountains,” she wrote, which he did with much success, looking for locations to impound and divert water from gulches down to the gap.42 Sophie and her daughter Phoebe became proficient at dowsing for underground water with forked sticks, a technique they were introduced to by an Australian pastor, Reverend H. Mason, who had been brought over in 1912 by the Molokai Ranch and the Lana‘i Company to search for water. Walking across the ground with sticks made of any kind of tree, Mason had some success, as did they over the years.43 Wells were drilled and windmills, pipe systems, and stock tanks installed to keep the animals alive in dry periods. Nevertheless, profits were elusive, and the Cookes learned what the ranch’s previous owners had found out in the past: cattle raising on Molokai was a tough business. Still, life was mostly good. The house at Kauluwai had a pipe system to supply fresh water to the house and to irrigate an expanding forest of exotic trees in the garden, including a banyan, as well as macadamia nut trees from Tasmania, spread from a tree planted by Sophie’s cousin Charles Sheldon Judd, a graduate of the Yale forestry school and the territorial forester. Sophie had a rare ‘iliahi (sandalwood) tree planted by Charlie. In her memoir she repeated the story told about common Hawaiians uprooting ‘iliahi seedlings because of ill-treatment by the chiefs during the sandalwood era.44 Good years or bad, the progress toward transforming the landscape into a cattle factory never faltered. After 1917, the ranch gradually abandoned sheep in favor of cattle, as more money could be expected from cattle; fewer diseases afflicted

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them; and the sheep, unable to graze in the lower kiawe belt because their tender feet were pierced by the thorns, denuded the good upland pastures that the cattle needed during droughts.45 In 1923, the breeding stock was shifted to Hereford bulls, and within a decade seven-eighths of the ranch herd consisted of Herefords—a total of around twelve hundred head, run for most of the year in the kiawe forests where they ate the nutritious bean pods and seasonal grasses.46 Piping measuring 110 miles was installed to provide stock water. Irrigated pastures watered with rotating sprinklers were set up where wells were possible—not coincidentally, the largest one was at Olo‘olo, west of Kaunakakai, tapping the groundwater that had once made the famous spring flow. The Cookes understood the cost of the grazing economy to the land. “Mauna Loa was once covered with trees— hau, hala, wiliwili and other kinds,” Sophie wrote, “but the cattle, sheep, goats and deer have since browsed on them and eaten them off, leaving only a few sturdy ones surviving in the gulches.” Sophie reported that in spite of periodic control efforts and being hunted to provide meat for the ranch employees, goats still “ran wild all over the plains and valleys near Mahana”—just the spot where, in 1893, Reverend Hyde had marveled at the richness of the native trees.47 George Cooke related being told in 1914 by Henry Meyer, then in his sixties, of native forest still in the gulches and on the summit of Mauna Loa. By midcentury, Cooke reported only remnants: “Isolated clumps of Kukui, Puhao and Hau are still evident, and deadwood of the Naio, Pua and Aalii are to be found.” He saw the remains of kalo patches at the head of Waihi‘i Gulch, “proving . . . that the forest had helped with the conservation of moisture. It is to be regretted that when the springs dried up there was a consequent depopulation of this section, so that much of the construction work there of the ancient Hawaiians has been lost. The overstocking of Molokai with cattle, sheep, goats and deer has increased erosion and killed off some of the old forest covering.” He related being told by “old-timers, among them Rex Hitchcock,” that the nalu (cloud wave) that forms over the Mauna Loa ridge during trade winds had once been one thousand feet lower than it was in Cooke’s years but had retreated due to less moisture retained in the soil due to deforestation by animals and the supply of firewood to Kaunakakai.48 The erosion on Mahana Hill and elsewhere was so severe that by the 1930s the US Soil Conservation Service was called in to reseed the most critically scarred areas with African foxtail grass, molasses grass, Natal redtop, and feather finger grass.49 In just a minor irony among many larger ones, the ranch employed at least one full-time “poison man,” Takujiro Egusa, formerly one of four head beekeepers, based at Halena on the south shore of Kaluako‘i. After the foulbrood disease decimated the hives, Takujiro had moved with his wife, Kimi, to lonely Kamaka‘ipo Beach, near La‘au Point, where he was responsible for spraying herbicides on kiawe trees emerging in the pastures, as well as for maintaining the Cooke’s beach cottage at Kaupoa.50

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Other Molokai ranches had roughly fifteen hundred cattle and three thousand sheep, including the fourteen-thousand-acre Pu‘u O Hoku Ranch on the far East End, purchased from the Browns in the late 1930s by San Francisco millionaire Paul I. Fagan, and other smaller ranches at Kainalu, Mokolelau, Puko‘o, Ualapu‘e, Kamalō, Moanui, and Keawanui, as well as the Meyer Ranch at Kala‘e.51 Meanwhile, the dream of sugar never died. In 1918, cane grower Hans Faye of Kekaha, Kaua‘i, came to the ranch’s board of directors with a plan to lease Molokai Ranch lands for sugarcane, in the event that his Kaua‘i leases were not renewed, in order to resettle native Hawaiians on the land—a plan beginning to be discussed in Honolulu. The directors were amenable, and so Faye hired Frank F. Conant to search for water sources. From 1919 to 1921, Conant prospected and drilled test wells along the coast from Pala‘au east to Kawela, developing “a total of 6,000,000 gallons” per day to prove the feasibility of irrigating sugar, according to Cooke.52 The plan was shelved after the Hawaiian Homestead Act, passed in 1921, explicitly excluded existing commercial leases from resettlement. In 1922, Jorgen Jorgensen (an engineer who had also been employed by the Hawaiian Homes Commission to look for water on Molokai) was hired by the ranch to build a diversion from Kawela Gulch westward to a million-gallon tank at Poholua, upslope from Kualapu‘u, crossing ten gulches en route in three-inch-diameter wooden pipes.53 In 1920, after serving in the legislature for nearly ten years, George Cooke returned to Molokai and began an “experiment,” he wrote, “to demonstrate my theories.”54 He had come to the conclusion that “homesteading in Hawaii should be devoted to supplying the local markets” with traditional farm produce, rather than trying to grow cane or pineapple for export. Since Dillingham had subdivided Honouliuli on O‘ahu, the homestead cane plantation model had been repeatedly pursued but had failed to attract many white settlers to the territory or to keep those who did go into the business. The reasons for this failure were many, beginning with those that Frederick Newell had listed of difficult access to land and competition with Asians and continuing with a list that Cooke made: high capital costs, long planting-to-harvest cycles, and the expense and uncertainty of selling to an overseas market. Instead, he looked for an enterprise that “could develop from a small beginning which could bring immediate returns” and decided to start a dairy operation, something “much needed on Molokai.” The key to his theory was the observation that much of the available land in the islands, like the East End of Molokai, was too small in scale for the plantation model: “Here, no large agricultural development could take place under one corporation as the terrain is broken into many small valleys and ridges. However, these valley bottoms have rich tracts of land.”55 From his father, he bought eighteen hundred acres in Mapulehu Valley—rather larger than a typical homestead—and set up a dairy operation consisting of a concrete barn housing forty-eight cows, an ice-making plant and cold-storage building, and irrigated corn and alfalfa fields for growing feed. To

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deliver the milk to customers in Honolulu, he had built a sixty-five-foot, dieselpowered sampan, the Leleiona, which was skippered by Eddie Duvauchelle.56 The business was a success, making two trips per week to O‘ahu. Yet beyond employing “a number of people up manai [sic],” it failed to provide the spark of enterprise that Cooke had hoped: “William A. Meyer of Ohia was the only resident who showed interest enough in dairying to supply us with some milk for sale.” Not only was there little enthusiasm for the business model, there was apparently resentment in the community too. In 1937, “a miscreant (unknown to this day) poisoned sixteen of our cows and one bull by introducing arsenic into their feed.” It was “a deep disappointment” to Cooke, who sold the land and took the remaining animals back to Kauluwai, “having failed in our experiment of helping people in that section of the island.” The misunderstanding and mistrust between Cooke and some members of the mana‘e side community was a manifestation of a long-standing tension between the people of the East End, engaged in their ‘ohana-based, partly subsistence lifestyle, and the West End, generally in the form of the Molokai Ranch, perceived as haole outsiders bringing an unwelcome capitalist system that would reduce the Hawaiians to plantation peonage. The latest instance of the old Molokai habit of poisoning joined another earlier grim episode: Frank Conant had been killed in 1923 by a stick of dynamite wired to the ignition of his car parked in his garage in Kaunakakai. No motive nor any suspects were ever found.57 To some extent this resentment has remained alive in the background of Molokai life ever since and survives to this day. HAWA I IA N HOM E ST E A D S

As the new century progressed, the land settlement question continued to defy resolution. Since the Mahele, numerous schemes had been attempted to make land available for homesteading.58 Native Hawaiians had been specifically targeted, but the results were discouraging: the lands set aside were frequently ill-suited for farming: either too rocky, steep, dry, remote, or small. Infrastructure, such as roads and water supply, was lacking, as was access to capital, equipment, and training. Homesteaders typically ended up selling out, and the parcels were aggregated into large commercial holdings. As time went on, the failure of most native Hawaiians to find a place in business or agriculture inflamed fears of the imminent doom of the Hawaiian race. In the tax rolls for 1919, a mere 6.23 percent of privately held land in the territory belonged to Hawaiians— and most of that to “approximately a thousand wealthy Hawaiians, the descendents of the chiefs.”59 To many observers, it seemed that the sole solution was to return the Hawaiian people to the land through government intervention. A movement led by Prince Kuhio Kalanianaole, who had served as the territorial delegate to Congress, gathered steam. Prince Kuhio voiced its tenets:

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The Hawaiians . . . must get out in the sun, in the rain, and dig into the soil . . . they must be like most of the farmers on the mainland who are hard workers and good American citizens in their community—our ancestors were not clerks, they were farmers and fishermen, and we should be like them; it is more healthy and we will be happier . . . we are gradually losing out (in the business and political jobs in the Territory), and the only place left for us is in these Rehabilitation Lands and if we do not get in and work and think for ourselves we will be lost.60

A new plan for “rehabilitation” through colonization was drawn up: native Hawaiians would be given homesteads on land suitable to the purpose; necessary infrastructure, in particular water and roads, and access to capital would be provided at reasonable cost; and the land grants would not be alienable but instead must be passed on to descendents who met a blood quantum requirement of “not less than one-half ” native Hawaiian, or forfeited. With much lobbying by Kuhio and others, the Hawaiian Homes Commission (HHC) Act of 1920, guided by these principles, passed Congress in 1921, to be funded in part by 30 percent of territorial income from cane leases and water licenses. Two hundred thousand acres of government lands were opened for consideration, theoretically one-twentieth of the territory’s land area, but expressly limited to lands not under lease for sugarcane or forest reserves and requiring a finding by the US secretary of the Interior to abrogate other leases. Thus, the sugar-forestry-industrial complex was totally protected, leaving very slim pickings for homesteading. Immediately after being chosen, the commissioners began to survey potential colonization sites, beginning, unsurprisingly, on Molokai. They quickly decided that the first trial would be on a strip of flat, kiawe-covered lowland at Kalamaula, west of Kaunakakai and just mauka of the Kapuaiwa coconut grove. Once again, Molokai would be the last place of salvation for the most beleaguered of the Hawaiian people, its empty spaces transformed in the eye of the reformers from a waste place of serial failure to a landscape of hope and redemption. There was great excitement in the Hawaiian community. Those few who went to Molokai to assess the prospects reported back that they seemed excellent. W. J. Coelho in 1922 also looked over the site, which, he noted, looked up at the ridge of Ka‘ana on Mauna Loa: “Famous for the lehua blossoms of Ka‘ana. The hill still stands but kiawe trees are where the lehuas used to be.” Then, apparently not seeing the sad irony of being inspired by a scene of brutal deforestation and desertification or of being encouraged by the success of a non-Hawaiian entrepreneur (just as Reverend Hyde had been, in the exact same spot, thirty years before), he wrote: We did not see the lands for rehabilitation because they were covered with kiawe trees. Because I know those places so well, I can say that the people who will get the lands surveyed will be fortunate. Here is George Cooke raising quantities of corn and alfalfa. Here he is raising hogs. He has some large ones close to the land of rehabilitation.

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From Lonely Isle to Friendly Isle There are many kiawe blossoms for the bees to make honey with. The Cookes are getting a ton of corn per acre annually. If Cooke can get this wealth from a few acres of tilled land, why then couldn’t those who rehabilitate?61

That year, the Kalanianaole Settlement was opened, with twenty-two farm lots, thirty-three house lots, community pastures mauka, roads, and a community hall. Most of the water was piped from nearby shallow wells, with some additional flumed down from sources high on the mountain above. Mules and equipment were provided to help homesteaders clear the abundant kiawe and rocks. In 1924, the first year of produce brought to market was a bumper crop: homesteaders got up to ten croppings of alfalfa and their tomatoes “controlled the Honolulu market,” according to the HHC.62 Potatoes, melons, and pigs brought good cash. It was called the “Molokai Miracle.”63 The second phase of the commission’s Molokai plan also opened in 1924: the Ho‘olehua/Pala‘au Settlement, sprawling across the upland slopes of those two ahupua‘a, made up of 153 farm tracts of forty acres each plus ten house lots, all arranged on a big grid connected by wide dirt roads. There was also a school and a school farm, a community hall, an HHC office, and community pasture land stretching out to the Mo‘omomi bluffs.64 In all, three-quarters of a million dollars was spent on the Molokai experiment, one-half million of it on water development.65 Water from mountain wells and dammed drainages was piped down to tanks, at first of redwood and over time replaced with steel and concrete. By 1935 the storage capacity was 9,340,000 gallons; each homestead also had its own 2,000- to 10,000-gallon tank. The system could deliver 1,760,000 gallons a day at its maximum, but this was enough only for household needs and to water small kitchen plots. No provision for irrigation of the forty-acre farm lots had been made, though the HHC Act had explicitly called for water supply to be provided. Even if more water had been available, the domestic rate—already heavily subsidized—was too high to sustain irrigating any but the smallest gardens. Most of the time, far less water was delivered: over time the small pipes closed from mineral deposits and had to be replaced, and yield dropped radically in the dry season to a minimum of fifty thousand gallons per day—not enough for baths or cleaning, much less to irrigate gardens. Months-long periods of drought were common, and it sometimes persisted for years.66 Still, 131 homesteaders and their families were there by 1929, and they threw themselves into farming what they could in the wet season, trying all of the likely dryland crops: corn, wheat, melons, cucumbers, and squash. Many years later, residents reported “vivid memories of ‘Pumpkin Poi’”—a substitute for kalo poi made with pumpkin mixed with flour.67 But the success of the Molokai Miracle was not repeated at Ho‘olehua, where dirt farming was literally a tough row to hoe: “Too much wind, not enough water, infestation by pests and diseases . . . and a lack

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of certainty as to the success of any agricultural enterprise, making systematic marketing difficult . . . make farming almost impossible,” according to Keesing. Even so, by 1930, the dry, windy Ho‘olehua homesteads began to look good from the vantage of Kalamaula, which “had fallen upon evil days.”68 The early bumper crops shrank, then shriveled and burned, as the old Molokai curse returned—the wells had turned saline, killing the fields; the upslope water was not enough to replace it. The Kalamaula people were offered lots in Ho‘olehua, but few had the money to relocate there. Kiawe retook the fields. It is worth noting the conviction of many Molokai people that the experiment failed due to the choice of substandard lands for the homesteads specifically because they were unwanted by the commercial interests that the HHC commissioners, including George Cooke, represented. Henry Duvauchelle had these thoughts many decades after the fact when he was interviewed in 1989: “[George] Cooke was the first man in charge of the Hawaiian Homes Commission in Moloka‘i. When he was in charge of that he wanted the homestead to be down in Kaunakakai section, Kalama‘ula and Kapa‘akea, which was not fit for growing anything. You couldn’t even live on the land, let’s put it that way. But that’s where he wanted it.”69 And yet the homestead experiment had turned Central Molokai into a bustling place—at least in comparison with the low population ebb of “the lonely isle”: in 1910, the entire island, minus Kalaupapa, listed just 1,117 inhabitants; by 1922, it had fallen as low as 600 or 700.70 In 1924, there were 278 people living on the homesteads alone; in 1934, 1,244; and in 1935, nearly 1,400—part of a total island population of about 4,500 (4,427 by the census of 1930).71 Who were they? The homestead lessees, half of them women, all at least half Hawaiian, had in most cases moved over from Honolulu, where they had been employed in professions, trades, or as laborers—just 12 of 107 men who listed an occupation were farmers; one a fisherman.72 Around them a fairly diverse economic community sprang up, centered at Kaunakakai and including many whites in professions and small business. But the farming that sustained this prosperity was not what the drafters of the Hawaiian Homes Act had had in mind. FAC T O R I E S I N T H E F I E L D S

Pineapple is well adapted to much of Molokai, above the immediate coast and below the forest line, where rainfall is above the twenty-five-inch minimum for the plant, and fog drip is common at night. In the teens, pineapple was already being grown fairly widely but on a small scale, from Waialua eastward to Hālawa. Due to the usual list of shortcomings—topped in this case by the poor roads and lack of a harbor, the Molokai growers never found a stable market.73 The perfect match between Molokai and pineapple was not consummated until sufficient capital

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arrived, in the form of Libby, McNeill, and Libby, a California agribusiness concern, which leased a big piece of Kaluako‘i from the Molokai Ranch in 1923. The company’s move followed its unsuccessful attempt to purchase the island of Lana‘i in 1918 through a proposed leasing deal with James Dole’s Hawaiian Pineapple Company (HAPCO), the O‘ahu firm that had built the Hawai‘i pineapple business into a national and international success (Dole’s HAPCO itself bought Lana‘i from Frank and Harry Baldwin of Maui in 1922 for $1.1 million).74 The company planted one thousand acres on the flanks of Mauna Loa, ideal for pineapple with twentyfour to forty inches of annual rainfall; built a headquarters and workers’ housing west of the peak, called Maunaloa town; and, as the dirt road to Kaunakakai was steep and easily washed out, built a new road south to a spot on the shore the Hawaiians had called Kaumanamana (but which the company, for presumed ease, called Kolo after a nearby gulch) where it constructed a new wharf to ship the fruit to canneries in Honolulu.75 Profits were excellent, and the operation expanded to seven thousand acres. In 1925, the HHC reported an interest in growing pineapple in the eastern portion of the Ho‘olehua Settlement, which is nearly ideal for the plant, having an average of thirty inches precipitation, but no concerted effort was made.76 In 1927, the California Packing Corporation leased land from the Molokai Ranch at Kualapu‘u and planted it in “pine.” It was quickly followed in by Libby, which made a deal with the homesteaders to buy any pineapple they raised at Ho‘olehua.77 Before long, it became apparent that the company could achieve economies of scale unavailable to the individual homesteaders, which made it profitable for both to leave the farming to the company in exchange for an annual rent check for the homesteader and a guaranteed job if he or she wanted it. The rehabilitators would become landlords and farm workers instead of farmers. Some took the job, most took the check—if not carefully husbanded, it was barely enough at the end of the year to cover taxes. Very quickly, leasing became the norm. Libby established a separate plantation at Ho‘olehua, plowing across the lines of the forty-acre farm lots to make a single operation, with the five-acre house lots left as lonely islands in a sea of pineapple. The transformation of the west and central parts of the island was total. Where in 1853, 96 percent of the population lived east of Kamalō or in the windward valleys, in 1935, 74 percent of a population of 5,677, approaching the historical highs recorded in the early nineteenth century, lived west of Kamalō.78 The pine business was a steady success. In 1946, a macadam highway was built connecting Maunaloa with Kaunakakai for the first time. By the 1950s, Libby’s operation had grown to ten thousand acres: three-fourths at Maunaloa and one-fourth in the Ho‘olehua homesteads, all of it leased land. The Maunaloa plantation was the subject of a classic sociology study, Pineapple Town by Edward Norbeck, who lived there and worked as a clerk to accomplish his research. He described the company as an

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“irregular pyramidal arrangement common enough in most American business concerns, proceeding from one person, the manager, at the apex to a mass of field laborers at the base.”79 But this pyramid had a clear racial structure: white salaried clerks, managers, and supervisors at the top, followed by Japanese lunas, and mostly Filipino hourly laborers (three-fourths), joined by a few Hawaiians and part Hawaiians, all of whom worked at Ho‘olehua. In Norbeck’s words, “socioeconomic mobility [was] limited by ethnic affiliation.”80 Libby’s top managers visited from California only occasionally to supervise an on-site management echelon that was uniformly white and male and typically made up of mainlanders who would return when their tour was over. Sixty-five percent of the company’s employees were single and male; 78 percent of them lived in Maunaloa Town—a company town in the purest sense, without families or much community except that allowed by the infrastructure of each racial living bloc. It boasted two stores; a post office; a café; a movie theater; a filling station; a Catholic church; a school; a poolroom/barbershop; an office for the visiting dentist; and various company offices, warehouses, sheds, and yards. The town was laid out in a grid according to a strict racial hierarchy: Filipino town, with wooden dormitories, lay at the lowest point on the slope; Japanese town, with wooden, shared houses, was adjacent and slightly mauka; “the Hill,” for the whites, was upslope, with American-style concrete-block houses complete with plumbing and electricity.81 Maunaloa plantation was a factory in the fields, in Carey McWilliams’s phrase, nominally a form of rural farming but really “an industrial concern whose product is agricultural” and which happened to be located in a remote area.82 It employed a low-wage, urbanized workforce using intensive mechanized methods to produce a single item for export. This was a basic business principle, according to Norbeck: “Profitable operation of the plantation means intense mechanization of all tasks. Wherever possible, machines have replaced men.”83 Once the rows were prepared, the pineapple shoots were planted out, then treated with fertilizers, herbicides, and hormone sprays to encourage flowering, which was applied from planes and trucks whenever possible to minimize labor. The typical regime was as follows: sheets of tarpaper or plastic “mulch” were laid down over four hundred pounds per acre of DD or another soil fumigant, to kill fungi and animals; after planting, four pounds per acre of an herbicide such as CMU was applied, followed by two to three courses of two pounds per acre; heavy, continuous applications of fertilizer were used throughout the crop cycle, typically thirteen hundred pounds per acre; small amounts of hormones were sprayed to induce fruiting; and twenty-four pounds per acre of malathion or another insecticide were used during each cycle.84 The fruit was ready to harvest after fifteen to twenty-four months, then the plant produced ratoon crops every twelve months—after two to four of which the field was disked and prepared again. An average yield was forty tons per acre. Weeding and picking were done by hand, but the picked, boxed fruit was put onto a boom

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conveyor belt that dropped it in the truck that carried it to Kolo wharf to be barged to Honolulu, usually arriving at the cannery within twenty-four hours of picking. During harvest, picking went on all night, under truck-mounted lights.85 During the same period, agriculture on the rest of the island reached a historical nadir: eighty acres of mangoes were grown along the kona shore (one-third of the commercial crop of the territory); fifty acres of kalo were tallied before 1953 but just fifty acres after; rice, which had been grown in Kawela and several other valleys, was out of business by 1932 due to low prices. And the homestead lands, nearly ten thousand acres, contributed no more than three hundred to four hundred acres of “diversified crops”—most of it pasture land.86 In a certain sense, the pineapple industry repeated many features of the dryland intensification seen in Hawai‘i in late prehistory: monoculture production maximized for surplus put the stratification and concentration of land, water, and labor in the hands of a tiny, outsider elite. The system was successful, in terms of its output, but the price paid by local communities and the land itself was high. The mostly Filipino and Japanese workers brought to Molokai to staff the plantations were isolated in company towns, participating little in the community and economic life of the island and contributing no more, since most components of their existence, from social life to food, were imported—making the towns in effect islands within an island. The homesteaders who leased their lands to the company similarly became isolates: functionally unemployed; producing few crops for local consumption; and physically isolated in their houses, each an island surrounded by thirty-five acres of pineapple rows. For all the population growth tallied during the pineapple decades, Molokai accumulated little in the way of economic or cultural capital. The profits reaped were exported to the corporate parent in California and to shareholders beyond. The traces of the industry’s abusive land-use practices are still visible there: mile after mile of the slopes of Mauna Loa and Ho‘olehua are today littered with shredded black plastic sheeting, used by the plantations as “mulch” to discourage weeds and still embedded in the ground; and the heavy diet of herbicides and insecticides used for decades still taint the soils of West Molokai—indeed, vegetable growers on the homestead and lower Pala‘au lands today have some difficulty selling their produce due to the taste of chemicals remaining in the soil.87 T H E M O L O KA I P R OJ E C T

Even as the West End bloomed with pineapple fields, a bustling population, and steady profits for its owners, the dream of irrigating the dry side with the streams of the windward coast never died—but its care was taken over from the private sector by government planners. Waldemar Lindgren’s recommendations were carefully read and updated by a string of water engineers. Fred Ohrt, head of the

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Honolulu board of water supply, published a plan in 1919 for diverting Waikolu Stream to Kalaupapa; a subsequent version included a pipeline out to Ho‘olehua.88 Jorgen Jorgensen, then superintendant of public works for the territory, proposed a plan in 1925 that included a 103,600-foot tunnel from Wailau Stream to the gap.89 Hugh Howell, another engineer who had built a number of reservoirs, intakes, and pipelines for the Molokai Ranch in the early 1930s, was assigned by the secretary of the Interior, in 1935, with the geologist Harold Stearns, to study the Hawaiian irrigation question for the Bureau of Reclamation—after Newell’s report had languished for almost three decades.90 Howell’s plan, published in 1938, proposed ten tunnels linking both valleys to the gap; a bill to fund the scheme was introduced into Congress that year but was not passed.91 Howell foresaw a $5 million project cost, with $2,250,000 to be charged to national defense. This was a novel justification for a Molokai project: he saw the windward diversions not only as “the only salvation” for the HHC lands but as the only way to save the territory from its crippling dependence on food imports—63 percent of Hawai‘i’s consumption. He wrote: “There is a growing consciousness in the minds of the thinking people of the islands, and especially of the Army and Navy, that our isolated position . . . calls for strenuous efforts to make the islands more nearly self-feeding.”92 In January 1941, Hawai‘i’s congressional delegate, S. W. King, introduced a bill before Congress to authorize construction of the Molokai Project. George Cooke traveled with King to Washington, DC, to lobby for its passage, yet it was tabled by a senator from Maryland. Cooke was bitterly disappointed: “I felt that a real opportunity for developing diversified farming on this island was frustrated by political intrigue. However, one may prophesy with confidence that some day these arid plains will be lush and fertile and covered with farms and irrigated fields, true homesteads of people ‘living off the land.’”93 The years 1941–1942 saw eighteen months of drought on the West End, resulting in the deaths of eleven hundred cattle and serious losses to the plantations.94 In part due to this, Congress in 1942 authorized more study of the Molokai Project—but no money for construction. In 1944, H. A. R. Austin and Stearns, then in charge of a US Geological Survey study of Hawaiian groundwater resources, proposed a plan substantially like Jorgensen’s but with an added 1,760 feet of siphon and a shorter main aqueduct. Stearns and Austin advised the Molokai Ranch to drill wells on its eastern property at Kalamaula mauka—which it very wisely did, as subsequent events would prove (see map 4).95 With the war over, Hawai‘i settled into years of unprecedented economic growth, led by export agriculture but buttressed by a steadily growing tourism industry. Molokai settled into the rhythms of the pineapple companies—now three, with the addition in 1945 of another operation run by the Pacific Pineapple Company on leased homestead land near Kualapu‘u.96 The year 1953 saw another brutal drought on West Molokai, all but wiping out the homesteaders and hitting

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5 miles 10 km Leper Colony TT M T F

O

R

TT

T

T E

S

T T M

M

T

M M

M M

Pineapples

Uncultivated land

T

Pasture

Homesteads

M Market gardens

MT

Taro

N

Forest

map 4. Molokai land use. Map based on John Wesley Coulter, Population and Utilization of Land and Sea in Hawaii, 1853 (New York: Kraus, 1971).

the pine companies hard. The next year, the Hawai‘i irrigation authority asked Stearns to revise his plan, and it was this plan that formed the basis for the project that would ultimately be built. It included a diversion dam on Waikolu Stream; a five-mile tunnel from there to the southern fork of Kaunakakai Gulch; a five-mile long, twenty-inch steel pipeline from there to a butyl-rubber-lined reservoir (which would be the largest in the world with 1.4 billion gallons capacity) behind Kualapu‘u; and thirty miles of smaller pipe to get the water to the Ho‘olehua fields. The tunnel alone would cost $4 million at 1956 prices and take five years to complete; the project’s cost would be $7 million, not including additional tunnels that might be built later to Pelekunu and Wailau Valleys—nor did it include the twelvemile pipeline to Maunaloa that the plan anticipated.97 Who was going to pay for it all? In February 1956, construction was started with territorial funds on the access road to Waikolu and on the mouth of the tunnel. There was precedent: the territory had already gone ahead and built portions of two of the three Hawai‘i projects that Congress had previously directed the Bureau of Reclamation to study: the Waimanalo Project on O‘ahu and the Waimea Project on Hawai‘i. But each was puny in comparison with the Molokai Project. The territory did not have the resources to finish the job—this is clear from the secretary of the Interior’s report to the president of the United states of March 28, 1958, in which he recommended that the federal government step in with funding, in the form of a long-term loan, to finish the project but not to take over its ownership or

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management.98 It is also evident that this was the intention of the project’s planners from the outset. The Molokai Project was a radically new kind of reclamation project—not in any technical sense, but in the political-economic one. Indeed, it is unique in the history of reclamation in that it had next to no reclamation function, as defined by the National Reclamation Act of 1902: settling yeoman farmers on free homesteads carved from the arid public domain, each of no more than 160 acres, which the homesteader was required to improve, farm, and occupy for five years before being granted title.99 All of the lands the Molokai Project proposed to irrigate were already in full production without additional irrigation, and no additional lands were realistically expected to be brought into production. And, while it did not violate the letter of the Reclamation Act’s acreage limitation, since the ownership of the Ho‘olehua lands remained with individual homesteaders in fortyacre chunks, its benefits were explicitly directed at giant corporate farmers. And, as it is abundantly clear that the Maunaloa extension was an integral part of the project-planning and repayment schemes and the six thousand acres to be served there belonged to a single corporation, this would be in violation of the law. The matter was conveniently dealt with by having the territory start the project, exempting the entire thing from the provisions of the Reclamation Act. In 1955, the territorial legislature had passed a special law that allowed the sale of “excess water” to private corporations, thus making the repayment math work out. The project would be an economic development package, in the guise of a generous government loan guarantee, rather than a reclamation project for “homemaking,” as Commissioner Newell had earlier envisioned. Interior Secretary Seaton made no bones about it, admitting that “the landownership pattern is unusual in that, of the total of 13,650 acres to be served, over 6,000 are owned by a corporation and leased to a single pineapple packer for operation.”100 The remaining HHC lands were also leased to two “large pineapple packers.” The project was being built to irrigate lands already profitable as rain-fed farms—a fact the bureau sought to justify by anticipating a 50 percent increase in pineapple production with irrigation. The cost-benefit ratio appeared to pencil out. It would cost $7.6 million in 1956 dollars; amortized over fifty years at 2.5 percent interest, the annual payment would be $277,000, plus annual operating costs of $132,000 ($67,800 for electricity to pump the water uphill, mostly to Maunaloa, paid to a private generator burning diesel), for a total yearly cost of $409,000. This would easily be covered by the direct benefits to “increased net farm income of $1,053,000 and indirect benefits of $939,000,” according to Eaton.101 The Maunaloa system would cost its owners $2,380,000, for a total project cost of $10 million. Still, the numbers worked out beautifully. Irrigation would increase yearly pineapple production by 50 percent, or a gross amount of $2.5 million. This translated into $185 per acre gross income bonus for the growers. They would net $97 per acre at Ho‘olehua and $66 per acre at Maunaloa. Each homesteader would see a $430 annual income increase (based on their continuing to use five of their forty acres).102

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The Molokai Project would be a huge publicly subsidized windfall for three private agribusiness corporations, none of which grew any essential foodstuffs and none of which would cease doing business without the government’s intervention. This was a fact freely admitted to by the commissioner: “Continuation of pineapple production . . . on essentially the same basis as at present is expected in the future, irrespective of whether the Molokai project is constructed.”103 Further, the projected expansion of acreage in the project description—from 7,150 to 7,500 acres at Maunaloa and from 5,600 to 5,750 acres at Ho‘olehua—was dependent entirely on the pineapple market, not on the additional water, the commissioner acknowledged: “This expansion is related to market demands and consequently is not dependent on construction of the Molokai Project.”104 The planners also projected an increase in acreage tilled for diversified crops, but this was highly improbable: Molokai vegetable farmers could not compete with the mainland without a huge subsidy, so they certainly could not bear the costs of the project water; further, they needed a deepwater harbor to attempt it, which was not funded (Kaunakakai wharf accommodates—to this day—only barges, which must transfer cargo to ships at Honolulu for the trip to the West Coast). Already in 1956, there were clear doubts on the economics of this claim. Much of the planned acreage expansion was in the coastal flats at Pala‘au, where soil salinity would likely preclude most farming. Even a Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association study concluded that “only in a very small area of land” could acreage be added.105 Most pathetically—or boldly, depending on one’s perspective—was this admission by the commissioner: he stated frankly that there was “no prospect” that the Hawaiians at Ho‘olehua would ever take over farming on their own lands. In 1950, only 255 acres were in use for diversified farming—many of them the five-acre house lots the homesteaders used for subsistence gardening, not export to market. In designing a $10 million irrigation project to serve almost fourteen thousand acres on Molokai, the United States government allowed only enough water surplus to the needs of corporate pineapple growers to irrigate 250 acres of diversified crops—five acres fewer than were actually in use.106 The Molokai Project was spectacular both in its flaunting of the purposes of the Reclamation Act and of the justification of national defense given by its highestprofile boosters.107 And yet no one seemed to notice, or care. In 1956, the Hawai‘i territorial legislature appropriated funds to begin construction of the Waikolu Valley access road, diversion dams, and the five-mile tunnel. Work began the next year. At statehood in 1959, the federal Small Reclamation Projects Act of 1956 was extended to Hawai‘i as part of the Hawai‘i Omnibus Bill, allowing the state to apply for a federal loan to complete the project, totaling $4.4 million.108 State involvement brought with it an effort to justify the expenditure for a slightly broader set of goals than just increasing corporate pineapple yields, and the Bureau of Reclamation’s 1957 plan was revised to include a proposal for additional acreage: 3,150

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figure 11. Inter-Island Airways Sikorsky S-43 in flight past windward Molokai, circa 1935–1940. Source: National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.

acres of pineapple at Ho‘olehua and 660 acres of diversified farming in a new agricultural park to be located on state land south of the airport in Pala‘au and leased to Maui County, intended to open access to the project water to nonhomesteaders.109 A fifteen-acre diversified demonstration farm was set up to study the feasibility of the notion. Over the next decade, a spate of studies appeared, most funded by the state, as sociologists, geologists, and economists descended on Molokai to tease apart its knot of agricultural and economic failures. The land areas and soils were inventoried and classified; the social, ethnic, and community mores cataloged and analyzed; and the future market conditions modeled.110 All of it was part of a programmatic, statewide planning process to encourage rural development in order to make Hawai‘i less dependent on the mainland for food and on the military and tourism for cash (see figure 11). Econometric studies of the potential of diversified agriculture were published; not all came out positive. One feasibility study of the prospects of Molokai farmers exporting to the West Coast concluded that high capital, shipping, and electricity costs would require “cooperation” between farmers to be competitive, in the form of shared expenses for

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equipment, marketing, and production scheduling, on a scale beyond anything that existed in the state; it frankly saw success as unlikely and gave a negative recommendation.111 Regardless, the project went forward. The irrigation system was largely complete in 1967, and in 1969 the 1.4 billion-gallon reservoir behind Kualapu‘u was brought online.112 The Molokai Irrigation System (MIS), as it was renamed as a territorial, then state, project, had been built at a cost of $9.9 million, $4.4 million of it in the form of a federal loan.113 R E T U R N T O STAG NAT IO N

What were the results of the water, delivered at great expense and effort from the wet, windward cliffs to the dry, windy slopes of Central Molokai? The minor intended use, diversified agriculture, saw little improvement. In 1966, the island produced 0.7 percent of the state’s diversified agriculture revenue, while O‘ahu produced 51 percent.114 After the project water became available, pineapple acreage increased, more fully using the homesteaders’ lands and more fully employing the homesteaders themselves, leaving little land or energy for truck farming by the Hawaiians. In spite of Molokai’s high unemployment rate, there were few new, available farmers to take advantage of the water, and “diversified agriculture on Molokai came to be no more than a few home gardens.”115 While the water in the abstract may have represented an opportunity in a dry land with fertile soils, the reclamation equation failed to incorporate any of the other factors that made Molokai what it was: high winds, poor transportation and no harbor, little available land, poor access to credit, a decreasing population untrained in farming, high electricity rates, and poor integration with outside markets, to name a few.116 Hence, the equation that penciled out on paper in Washington did not do so in the red Ho‘olehua dirt. The physical reality of smallness in Molokai was mutually reinforced by a culture of smallness: in this, Ho‘olehua was no different from mana‘e side (the East End). The island’s traditional success story, Hālawa Valley, saw decades of slow decline capped by the destructive tsunami of 1946, when all commercial kalo growing in the valley was abandoned.117 Small businesses faced grim odds: the only commercial dairy folded in 1960; twelve small hog farms operated in the 1960s but had a total of just five hundred animals. One was forced out of business by health department regulations barring feeding garbage to pigs, and those remaining struggled with the high cost of imported feed barged in because of a dearth of local growers.118 Outmigration took a heavy toll on young people and those with an entrepreneurial bent. To a greater extent than elsewhere, people on the East End relied on subsistence farming and fishing (and on welfare) rather than the market economy. On the reverse side of the coin, East End communities were more family-

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centered and stable than Ho‘olehua and Maunaloa and less likely to be “alienated” from the land, in the sociologists’ language.119 On the West End, business was being done, but it was an extraction economy, shallow and unsustainable—in the sense that the pineapple companies brought lease payments to the Hawaiians and paychecks to some of them but mostly to the imported, foreign workers, few of whom would stay. And there was an extraction economy, literally, as sand was exported from the West End, starting in 1962, from Kanalukaha Beach, near Hale o Lono harbor, and from Papohaku Beach to build up the lucrative tourist strands at Waikiki and Santa Monica, California. The sand-mining operations brought income to the Molokai Ranch and fulfilled Sophie Cooke’s prescient suggestion, decades before, that Papohaku’s sand could be profitably exported. It was outlawed by the state legislature in 1975, but its legacy of diminished beaches at those two sites remains a stark reminder of how Molokai has served as a literal and figurative quarry for outside economic interests.120 Interior Secretary Seaton had been correct in saying that the fortunes of the Molokai pineapple industry depended not on irrigation water but on the market. If only he had known just how correct: almost as soon as his project was finished, global market forces closed in. They had been circling for some time. By the early 1960s, the Hawaiian pineapple companies had already begun moving overseas in response to imports of cheaper foreign fruit. In 1963 Dole opened a plantation in the Philippines. Castle and Cooke (which owned the island of Lana‘i) opened in Honduras and the Philippines between 1964 and 1968. The Dole Corporation bought Libby, McNeill, and Libby’s plantation in 1970 but two years later announced plans to close it within three years.121 Del Monte, which had bought the California Packing Corporation, made a similar announcement. The state hurriedly formed a task force to look at how to save Molokai. But the news should not have come as a shock. In 1973 pineapple workers in Hawai‘i were paid $2.79 an hour, while workers in Taiwan made seventeen cents.122 Dole moved into Thailand and Honduras by 1974. Dole remained the biggest producer in the world, even while it scaled back its Hawai‘i operations.123 Five thousand acres of Hawaiian homestead land was in pineapple in 1975, when the Dole shutdown came. The landing was hard: in May of that year, Hawaii Business listed Molokai as “one of the most economically depressed areas in the nation,” with one in five workers unemployed and “nearly half of the island’s 5,200 residents on some type of government relief.”124 The business hung on for a few more years: Del Monte, which was bought by R. J. Reynolds in the 1970s, closed its O‘ahu cannery in 1983 and shifted all of its Hawai‘i production to fresh fruit, keeping the Molokai plantation going until 1988, when it shut its doors for good.125 The MIS, designed to serve 16,400 acres of pineapple plus 1,060 acres of diversified agriculture, watered no more than 13,700 acres of pineapple and 300 acres of other crops at its maximum utilization.126 Because there has never been enough

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demand from irrigators, the system has never even been fully put online: the two wells in Waikolu Valley are not pumped, and the Waikolu Stream surface flow plus the confined dike groundwater intercepted in the five-mile tunnel have yielded an average of 3.38 million gallons a day, far less than the system’s advertised total yield of 9.5 million gallons a day.127 KA LUA KO‘I

What would provide the next salvation of Molokai? Statewide, of course, the shift from agriculture to tourism was in full swing (see figure 12). Tourism was hailed frankly as “a new kind of sugar,” and the sugar and pineapple companies stood first in line to harvest its wealth, since they controlled the land and the water that resort development, no less than plantations, depended on.128 In 1970, even after the completion of the three big state-federal irrigation projects, 90 percent or more of irrigation water in Hawai‘i was provided by private systems.129 Sugar plantations had developed extensive water supply infrastructures covering much of the state, and these more often than not became the nuclei of water systems built for tourism and urban growth. On many islands, the combined company systems had near monopolies on public and private water provision, delivering water frequently taken from leased state lands.130 The state of Hawai‘i’s land management agencies have encouraged this arrangement, continuing the territory’s old forestry policies that placed government and the public domain at the service of corporate economic interest—albeit now serving a sugar industry that no longer grows cane but thrives (often in new corporate guises) by channeling its water, literally, to tourist development. Not surprisingly, the state currently allows the Molokai Ranch to operate the MIS in its stead. For most of the century, tourism in Molokai made few advances from the days of Jules Remy: besides the Duvauchelles’ humble auberge at Puko‘o, there was no hotel on the island; visitors to the Molokai Ranch had to stay in the Cookes’ home, including US commissioners of reclamation Frederick Newell and Elwood Mead.131 The first tourist hotel, the Hotel Molokai, was built at Kamiloloa, east of Kaunakakai, in 1967.132 Until 1973, there were fewer than one hundred hotel rooms on the island.133 But the ranch, foreseeing the end of its pineapple leases, planned to embark on a major development project on the West End. In 1969, it partnered with Louisiana Land and Exploration, a conglomerate of mostly oil and gas companies one hundred times the size of Molokai Ranch, to form the Kaluako‘i Corporation.134 Kaluako‘i bought from the ranch sixty-eight hundred acres of the ahupua‘a of the same name, along the west coast from Papohaku to Kawakiu, with an option to buy another forty-three thousand acres—most all of the West End. It prepared plans to build a resort development and residential subdivision on its sixty-eight hundred acres, as well as plans for an eventual city of thirty thousand if

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figure 12. Dirt road along Hawaiian homesteads, Ho‘olehua, 1973. Photo by Charles O’Near.

the option were exercised—which would quintuple Molokai’s population.135 In 1971, the partnership managed to get the state land use commission to redistrict thirty-three hundred of its acres from agricultural to urban zoning; after challenges, the commission in 1974 finally agreed to redistrict 1,521 acres as urban— ready for dense resort-style development. The “agricultural” acreage left over could nevertheless have water and electric service installed and sold for five, ten, twenty, and forty-acre house lots, called the Papohaku Ranchlands.136

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To supply the new resort with water, the corporation applied to rent unused capacity in the MIS to convey water from its two wells, the Kalakahale well, which it had earlier drilled near the west portal of the Waikolu Tunnel high above Kaunakakai, and well number 17, located a mile east of Kualapu‘u Reservoir, which it had bought from the California Packing Company.137 The ranch’s application limited its use of the pipeline to conveying (or wheeling, as transporting another entity’s water in one’s own canal is called in the American West) a maximum of two million gallons a day of its own water, but local residents and farmers feared that it was a Trojan horse to let the ranch siphon off surplus irrigation water to support its tourist development, usurping any hope of an agricultural future for the island. By law, the homesteaders could exercise preferential rights to as much as two-thirds of the system’s capacity.138 State officials pointed out that the agreement was a rental of pipeline and reservoir space only, not of water, and that it would provide revenue to repay the project loans, helping forestall water price increases to the growers. They imposed conditions on the deal: the developer had to inject an additional 10 percent (0.2 million gallons a day) to make up for any system losses, and it had to guarantee water quality; if it failed to do so or to maintain the homesteaders’ priority in time of drought or shortage, the deal was revocable. The company would have to pay to pump the water from Mahana, where the state system terminated, one thousand feet up Mauna Loa to another set of plasticlined reservoirs, from where it would flow by gravity down to the resort. For the Kaluako‘i partners, a deal was critical: their well water was too salty to use for drinking unless it could be mixed with the fresher Waikolu water, and without piggybacking on the government’s infrastructure investment, developing its West End property would probably be impossible. George Cooper and Gavan Daws, in their book Land and Power in Hawaii, offered evidence that the Kaluako‘i partners colluded in private with officers of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) to use their influence with state government to gain approval for the deal, in return for the ILWU’s exclusive right to organize the resort’s workers when it opened.139 After an eight-year delay, the company received permission in 1972 from the Board of Land and Natural Resources for the wheeling, but this was tied up by a court challenge until 1976. The previous year, construction had started on the Sheraton Molokai Resort: 298 hotel rooms facing Kepuhi Beach, north of Papohaku, with a pool and an eighteen-hole golf course.140 The golf course used most of the water Kaluako‘i pumped through the system— an average of one million gallons a day in the 1980s, less than half the water it had the right to import.141 Nevertheless, many in the Molokai community continued to mistrust and fear the intentions of Kaluako‘i and the Molokai Ranch. Kaluako‘i obtained initial planning clearance for three thousand more residential units, many of them condominiums, which would push its total water use to two million gallons a day. Add to this the expected residential build-out of the Papohaku

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Ranchlands lots, and the West End might require 3.0–4.3 million gallons a day.142 While the MIS was designed to yield 9.5 million gallons a day, it had to date yielded an average of 3.38 million gallons a day, prompting real fears that the Kaluako‘i development, able to pay more than the struggling growers, would get its hands on the MIS water and never give it back. None of these feared consequences materialized, as the resort went belly-up in the 1990s after a long period of decline after the sale of the facilities by Sheraton to a Japanese businessman who bled the operation of cash and allowed it to run into the ground—another foreign owner, another business failure on Molokai. Nevertheless, fear remained: the resort’s “big” plan for a city of thirty thousand people on the West End was never formally renounced, and it would use up to thirteen million gallons a day. The tension between community activists and developers would continue to grow, inexorably becoming a dominant fact of life on Molokai. M A R G I NA L I T Y A N D M O L O KA I

Molokai as a whole has always been characterized by a lack of development compared to much of the rest of the Hawaiian Islands. With the exception of the pineapple decades, the massive changes brought to Hawai‘i by plantation agriculture barely touched the island. Especially on the East End, families and lifestyles continued mostly oblivious to the modern world. This remained true even as in the 1960s much of the rest of the state began to develop its coastlines for mass international tourism and its valleys and hillsides for housing. Residents of the East End were startled, and many increasingly appalled, by the explosive growth of Maui‘s Ka‘anapali coast in the 1970s and 1980s only eight miles across the channel from Molokai—its tall hotels visible by day and its entirety brightly lit at night. By contrast, the road through “the long ranch” would not be paved until 1980, and as of 2018, there is still not a single traffic light on Molokai. How to explain it? Certainly, it is not for lack of interest on the part of outsiders and some Molokai residents. Every conceivable crop and scale of agriculture has been attempted, with most failing outright or struggling to remain afloat. Government tried to bring self-sufficiency to the island, especially to the beleaguered Hawaiian people, by importing both Hawaiians and supporting infrastructure, at least three times: the leper settlement at Kalawao, the Hawaiian Homesteads, and the MIS. All, to varying degrees, were notable failures in achieving their stated goals. Government assistance has been extended across the spectrum: both to individuals on public assistance and to corporations that benefited from infrastructure subsidies—into which category fall the Hawaiian Homesteads, made ready for pineapple production by the state; the MIS; and the long-running and diverse cooperation between government agencies and the business sector exemplified by the history of forestry in the islands.

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Welfare dependency is often raised as a contributing factor to the resistance to economic development in a place with chronically high unemployment. One, unverified, statistic put the degree of subsidy paid by Maui County to support services on Molokai in 1970 at $4.75 million—$900 per resident per year.143 Even in the last days of pineapple, in 1972 before the Dole Corporation announced it would close its recently purchased Molokai operation, the island’s unemployment rate was 16 percent, versus a statewide average of 7.5 percent.144 In 1983, unemployment reached 20 percent, or 550 workers out of a labor force of 2,700.145 It is a common lament, heard from outsiders and from some long-time East End residents equally, here voiced by Henry Duvauchelle in an interview in 1989 at the age of eighty-six: “I think the future of Molokai is pretty dim. The simple reason is because the people—the Molokai people—want to live their own way, their old-style way. . . . Most of them are on welfare, so because of that, they feel that they’re perfectly happy. They got everything they want, so why should they develop the place. Leave it like it is so, no more jobs, so we don’t have to work.”146 Welfare dependency is a factor, but not the only one nor a simple one: in 1982, to take one picture of the situation, more people were on public assistance, 307, than were employed by agriculture, 288 (another 369 people worked for government entities, out of a total labor force of 1,845); yet the agricultural workers earned three times as much annually, $4.2 million in aggregate (18.6 percent of total income), where welfare recipients received $1.3 million (5.7 percent of total income).147 The farm jobs, while not a huge percentage of employment (15.6 percent), were relatively high paying because of a modest rebound of diversified agriculture, including alfalfa grown for export by Na Hua Ai Farm and the Molokai Ranch, and seed corn grown by seven companies, including Hawaiian Research (which chose Molokai for the same reasons that the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association chose it to quarantine sugarcane varieties), making the island the global leader in seed corn research and production.148 Molokai’s split is radical and graphic in several interlocking senses. In a geographical sense (dry West vs. moist East), an economic sense (in that seven landowners, all but one of them headquartered off-island, control 84.4 percent of the land area—all of the island except small pieces between Kaunakakai and the East End) (see table 5 on major landholdings on Molokai in 1984), and an ethnic sense (Hawaiian versus non-Hawaiian).149 In 1984, Molokai’s 6,215 people accounted for just 1 percent of the state population, but 44 percent of them were Hawaiian or part Hawaiian, versus 1 percent of the state population being Hawaiian or part Hawaiian.150 The ethnic split is mirrored in geographic distribution and in economic status, with the Hawaiians occupying a disproportionate part of the bottom of the chart, many relying on subsistence strategies to supplement market employment and public assistance within the ‘ohana unit. Many of them live apart, in the homesteads or elsewhere, in a cultural world where the traditional practices of subsistence hunting, fishing, and

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farming have come to equal Hawaiianness, and the desire to preserve the lifestyle and culture of the people takes on a posture of resistance to outside agents of change. Proposals of “development,” even if they might benefit the community, are often seen as a threat to these values and are vehemently opposed by a vocal, if often small, segment of the population. This resistance has continuities with Molokai’s history of pule o‘o, including, at times, its most unfortunate incidents, such as the poisoning of George Cooke’s dairy cows in 1937. But it is also a modern phenomenon, an outgrowth of political developments in recent decades in Hawai‘i, which took firm hold on Molokai perhaps because of its limited success on other islands. C O N T E M P O R A RY M O L O KA I

In the 1970s, a movement in Hawai‘i began to coalesce around a new embrace of traditional Hawaiian culture and history in the revival of Hawaiian language, ritual, agriculture, arts such as hula, and canoe voyaging. Alongside this broad movement, collectively known as the Hawaiian Renaissance, was a political movement demanding recognition of and some form of sovereignty for native Hawaiian people, informed and energized by the contemporary examples of the Alaskan Native and American Indian movements. Demands ranged from being granted a special sovereign status within the state of Hawai‘i, such as American Indian tribes enjoyed, to the reversal of US annexation and complete Hawaiian independence. In most cases, racial status played a determinative role: many leading writers and organizers of the movement advocated an ancestry-based special status for people of Hawaiian blood; some of them claimed to be themselves descendents of the former ali‘i class, thus conferring on them the right to reestablish the Hawaiian monarchy. For local activists, federal and state laws protecting archaeological remains began to be used as tools to block, slow, or minimize development plans and to assert the rights of contemporary Hawaiians to hunt, fish, and gather on private lands. In 1975, a group of Molokai activists, including Molokai residents Walter Ritte and George Helm, formed the organization Hui Alaloa to push for access to the ancient Hawaiian coastal trail, called the alaloa (long path or road), that skirted the West End on Molokai Ranch and other private lands. They were ultimately successful in opening trails for fishing and beach gathering, as well as in stopping the mining of sand from Papohaku Beach—establishing an important precedent for native Hawaiian rights in private lands in Hawai‘i.151 The US military incited particular ire, with its large footprint of bases, especially on heavily populated O‘ahu, and its often destructive training exercises. Since 1953, the navy had used Kaho‘olawe, a forty-four-square-mile island lying eight miles south of Maui, as a bombing range. During the 1970s, Hawaiian activists increasingly pointed out that the island was thick with ancient archaeological sites, few of which had ever been surveyed, and demanded a stop to the bombardment. On

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January 6, 1976, a flotilla of activists calling themselves Protect Kaho‘olawe ‘Ohana set sail from Maui toward Kaho‘olawe, intending to occupy the island.152 Most were intercepted at sea by the navy and coast guard, but nine people managed to land: Walter Ritte, Emmett Aluli, George Helm, Gail Kawaipuna Prejean, Stephen K. Morse, Kimo Aluli, Aunty Ellen Miles, Ian Lind, and Karla Villalba of the Puyallup/Muckleshoot Tribe of Washington State.153 Though they were apprehended and returned to Maui, the group was undeterred—instead it was spurred to continue its attempts. Ritte in particular trespassed on the island three more times, the final time a little over a year after the first, on January 30, 1977, along with Helm, Richard Sawyer, Charles Warrington, and Francis Ka‘uhane. All were arrested except Ritte and Sawyer, who hid out, with little food or water, managing to live on gathered resources, for thirty-five days before finally being located by search helicopters and arrested. While the two men remained fugitives, with each passing day the military manhunt for the two got wider airplay in the state, including on the evening television news, exciting discussion of the US government’s treatment of Hawaiian landscapes and, by extension, of its native Hawaiian people. Public opinion began to shift in favor of the activists. At the end of the episode, believing that Ritte and Sawyer continued to elude capture and were in danger, their companion George Helm, along with Maui surfer Billy Mitchell and fisherman and park ranger Kimo Mitchell, set off from Maui to attempt a rescue. Dropped near the island by boat, the three landed using surfboards, only to find that Ritte and Sawyer had been arrested. The following day, not seeing the small boat expected to meet and take them off of Kaho‘olawe, they attempted to return across the rough channel to Maui using only surfboards and swim fins. Realizing en route that conditions were too rough, Billy Mitchell paddled the longest surfboard back to Kaho‘olawe to alert the coast guard, while his companions Helm and Kimo Mitchell continued on, but were never seen again.154 Ritte and Sawyer served six months in a maximum security prison in Honolulu, where they were treated by the other inmates as heroes.155 The two friends who had died trying to save them were anointed martyrs to the Hawaiian cause. Once released, Ritte leveraged his fame to successfully campaign for the 1978 “Hawaiian package” of amendments to the Hawai‘i state constitution that affirmed traditional rights of access to religious and subsistence sites, including on private lands, and created a state Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA). In the 1980 elections to choose the agency’s first board of trustees, opened to native Hawaiians only, Ritte won the highest vote total. His tenure was marked by controversy, both because of his publicly combative political style, which alienated many, and a growing record of brushes with the law, including a conviction in 1984 for illegal hunting and felony firearms charges. Though the conviction was later overturned, it and other incidents prompted the OHA board to vote to remove him.156

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On Molokai, he kept a somewhat lower profile, launching a grant-funded program to restore an ancient loko kuapa fishpond on the East End while teaching youth traditional practices. He remained active with the Hui Alaloa’s efforts to block the Molokai Ranch’s development plans, including a 1985 lawsuit against a proposed 150-unit condominium project at Kawakiunui, a pristine, undeveloped beach north of the Kaluako‘i resort, which convinced a court to reverse the grant of permits (made by the state in 1974) because the permitting agency had failed to determine if historical or archaeological sites would be affected.157 The bombing of Kaho‘olawe finally ceased in 1990, and the island was returned to the state, burnishing Ritte’s credentials, and yet he continued to find conflict. In 1998, he and another man were tried for vandalizing five miles of water pipeline owned by the Molokai Ranch; though a jury acquitted him, two years later he pleaded guilty to the arson of a ranch building and was placed on probation. To many people, on Molokai and elsewhere, Ritte has been viewed as little more than a thug, capable of riling up a minority of native Hawaiians to oppose any and all development plans, with the effect of blocking badly needed jobs for the community. In 2002, when the Holland America line announced that it was exploring the possibility of having its cruise ships call at Kaunakakai—a boon prospect for the town’s merchants—Ritte stoked local opposition, in part on the grounds that the town wharf lacks sufficient restroom facilities; hand-painted signs against cruise ships appeared on the island and “no” voices were raised in local forums, prompting the company to turn away.158 In 2005, he led protests against Monsanto’s testing of genetically modified crops on Molokai, relying in part of funding from wealthy mainland anti–genetically modified organism (GMO) campaigners.159 In 2006, Ritte again got himself on the Honolulu evening news when he traveled to O‘ahu to help galvanize protests against the University of Hawai‘i’s plans to pursue patents on genetically engineered strains of taro, arguing that shutting the program down was a matter of cultural prerogative: “If you understand the Hawaiian point of view, then maybe you understand why life forms can’t be owned.” At one point padlocking meeting room doors to prevent the university’s regents from convening, Ritte’s tactics succeeded, and the university backed down. For the Molokai Ranch, decades’ worth of planning to make its lands on the West End pay through real estate development and resort growth had yielded mostly frustration—even as landowners on all the other major islands cashed in on Hawai‘i’s development bonanza. In part due to resistance from parts of the Molokai community, often led by Walter Ritte, the ranch had tried and failed to build a 375-room hotel on Pu‘u Kaiaka just south of the Kaluako‘i resort; the 150-unit condominium complex at Kawakiunui; a Highlands golf course and clubhouse at Nā‘iwa near Ho‘olehua on the island’s midsection; and a new water well and pipeline at Waiola, nearby.i In 1987, the ranch was acquired by the Singaporebased investment group BIL Investments Limited, based on the promise of its land

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holdings on the sunny West End. It invested in efforts to expand tourism by building lightweight, minimal-infrastructure facilities on the ranch’s uplands, including ecovillages of “tentalows,” offering visitors mountain biking, horseback riding, hiking, and shooting sports. In 2001, BIL bought back land at Kaluako‘i that it had previously sold, hoping to regenerate the golf course and resort there. All were costly failures, and in 2003, the company hired New Zealander Peter Nicholas, an experienced resort property manager, to devise a rescue plan for its cash-starved Molokai Properties Limited (MPL) division. Believing that community buy-in was essential to moving any development plans forward in Molokai’s contentious climate, Nicholas invited a wide range of island leaders to join a voluntary committee to work out a land-use plan for the sixty-five-thousand-acre ranch—one that would benefit both the ranch and the community. The vehicle he chose was the Molokai Enterprise Community (EC), a body formed to compete for a US Department of Agriculture program designation and funds for community-based agricultural planning—an award it won in 1998.160 Over two and a half years, Nicholas and the EC negotiated a land-use plan that seemed to be a huge win for the community: more than 50,000 acres of the ranch were to be transferred—26,200 acres to a Molokai Land Trust to safeguard as a natural reserve “for the community” and 24,950 acres “placed into protective easements for agriculture and open space.” Ten thousand acres would remain under the ownership and management of MPL but with development limited to reopening and modestly expanding the Kaluako‘i resort and developing two hundred two-acre residential lots on the remote stretch of dry coastline extending eastward of La‘au Point, at the island’s southwest tip.161 The island would not only gain control of the lion’s share of the ranch but would see jobs return to Kaluako‘i and sixty new permanent jobs created at La‘au Point at its full build-out, envisioned in 2023.162 Nicholas’s careful efforts to include the Molokai community seemed to bear fruit: “Ranch Talks Are Healing Old Wounds on Moloka‘i,” exclaimed a Honolulu newspaper headline in 2004. Hawai‘i governor Linda Lingle indicated her approval and support.163 It appeared to be a win-win for embattled Molokai, if a last-ditch effort—a fact admitted by Nicholas, who told EC members during one meeting: “I need something, and you need something.”164 In 2005, the EC committee voted yes, nineteen to six.165 Colette Machado, a former Kaho‘olawe activist allied with Walter Ritte and a current EC committee member as well as trustee of the OHA, voted in favor, explaining to her constituents in an ad taken in the Molokai Dispatch newspaper: “It was not an easy decision to make.” She called the plan “a realistic settlement of a 30-year struggle.”166 Unsurprisingly, among the no votes was Walter Ritte’s. And, while he was in a small minority of Molokai opinion leaders on the EC, he acted as though he in fact represented the island’s majority and set in motion a by-then-familiar campaign

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strategy. He attacked the ranch’s offer to deed the bulk of its territory to the community as a red herring: “If you look at this through Hawaiian eyes, that land was never going to be developed, anyway.”167 In contrast, he argued that allowing the ranch to develop the two hundred homesites at La‘au Point would initiate a “malignant cancer” that would consume Molokai: “Once it starts,” he said, “you cannot stop it.” At the same time, he claimed to be in favor of reopening the resort, at one public meeting wearing a T-shirt emblazoned, “No! La‘au Point Yes Kaluako‘i Hotel.”168 Again, hand-painted signs saying, “‘A‘ole La‘au” (Not at La‘au) sprouted around the island, especially in Ho‘olehua, near Ritte’s own home at his mother’s homestead. Even though a majority of its members had voted in favor of the land-use plan, the EC formed a subcommittee in 2005 to seek an alternative approach, specifically to the ranch’s core strategy of developing two hundred homesites on the coast stretching eastward from La‘au Point. With the help of two outside consultants, (architect and land-use planner Clark Stevens of California and Ian Robertson of Hawai‘i Island), and after conducting site visits and working meetings, the Alternative to La‘au Point Development Committee (ALDC) released a report in October 2005 laying out its “‘vision’ for a self-sustaining, culturally based, empowered rural community on Moloka‘i,” having defined the island as a Hawaiian “cultural kipuka” (a kipuka is a pocket of forest left intact by lava flowing around it).169 It recognized the ranch’s legitimate fiduciary need to realize the value of its assets, assigning the land to be developed a market value of $100 million, and explored two pathways to achieving a “win-win” solution for both the ranch and the Molokai community. The first was to propose that the immediate coast be left undeveloped while instead up to two hundred lots be planned on the slopes above, from onehalf to one and a half miles from the beach, with a view to “framing views (creating the perception of proximity to the coast from the dwelling).” The second was to explore the possibility of buying out the ranch because “the best way to control development of land is to own it.” Possible sources of the $100 million might include philanthropists, grants, residents on-island or off, businesses with the appropriate low impacts (such as forestry and permaculture), or people of native Hawaiian ancestry, which it estimated at four hundred thousand, to establish a “sanctuary for their Hawaiian heritage.” The document repeatedly articulated a fear of outsiders, or malihini. Its goal was “to avoid, if possible, the development of a pristine coastline, the impact of two hundred homes in the several million dollar price range on the community, 200 wealthy families on an island with less than 2,000 families, up to $750,000,000 of new construction over the next 7–10 years with its attendant social strains.” It went on: “People in Hawai‘i are aware of the possible consequences of the introduction of malihini (foreigners) to the Island culture, Estimates of the population of the Islands pre-1778 range from 800,000 to 2,000,000. By the mid-1800’s, the population of Native Hawaiians had fallen

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to 50,000. What seems to concern the people of Moloka‘i most of all is the threat to their way of life. The Hawaiian word for nonnative plants is malihini la‘au. Historically, the introduction of non-native plants has redefined the Hawaiian landscape.” The report embodied the fundamental clash of worldviews and aspirations that has roiled the island for generations: on one hand, of those interested in what is called economic development and engagement with the wider world and on the other, of those committed to warding it off. With the rise of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, many of the latter were increasingly committed to carving out a de facto Hawaiian homeland on Molokai by insisting on a local activist veto over development decisions. The persistent refrain was the maintenance of “subsistence hunting fishing and gathering rights for the Moloka‘i community” on the ranch lands—in other words, the repudiation of a cash economy, an aim hard to square with the need to make MPL whole with $100 million dollars in cash. The report ended with the phrase, in bold type: “Pule o‘o,” evidently meant in a positive sense, though its historical function of deterring outsiders would seem more apropos. Predictably, its recommendations were not pursued. In September 2006, Ritte organized a demonstration against the plan in Ho‘olehua and then led a group to La‘au Point itself to build a traditional Hawaiian hale house, with a number of people camping at the site in “occupation.”170 On October 7, a group estimated at 250 persons walked the four miles from the nearest road at Dixie Maru beach to join the La‘au campout. The Molokai Ranch provided bottled water to the marchers, while ten of its employees—many of them friends and relatives of the protesters—watched.171 For years, Molokai’s newspapers were filled (and as of 2018, continue to be filled) with charges and countercharges relating to the land-use plan. Some homestead residents alleged that the ranch’s development plans hinged on taking water from the MIS intended for agriculture, in the process threatening to “encroach on” the livelihoods of those (few) homestead residents dependent on irrigation.172 Ritte and his allies announced the formation of a group called Buy the Ranch, urging the OHA to use state funds to buy out all sixty-five thousand acres of Molokai Ranch property, enumerating on its wish list: “The Kaluako‘i Hotel, the Lodge, Mo‘omomi dunes, Naiwa makahiki grounds, industrial park, Maunaloa town, Kaunakakai ballfield, wells and reservoirs, Kawela burial grounds, hula grounds, La‘au.”173 Stymied, the ranch made no move to reopen the resort, and the opposition of the Ritte-led faction showed no signs of abating. Tensions continued to rise. In 2007, Ritte and other local hunters voiced loud opposition to the plans of the Nature Conservancy to employ a professional hunting firm from the mainland to eliminate nonnative goats from its Kamakou preserve in the mountains of Central Molokai. The conservancy argued that the program was crucial to its efforts to protect what was left of the native Hawaiian forest ecosystem on the island and

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that local deer and pig hunters lacked the technical resources to track and eliminate feral goats from the steep, inaccessible regions of the preserve where the hunting firm would employ helicopters to do the job. Ritte and others dismissed their arguments, instead alleging racism, and publically threatened violence if the job was not given to Molokai hunters.174 The same year, the Hawaii Superferry company, its plans to run high-speed ferry service between islands already under attack on Kaua‘i, announced it would start service between Honolulu and Kahului, Maui. Predictably, Ritte used the occasion to warn the company not to stop at Molokai, even though such a service might benefit island residents dependent on expensive airline connections to reach other islands. For Ritte, again, the plan represented a threat from “outsiders” to take away the Molokai lifestyle: “For us, tourism is just a way for outsiders to take our best places and then offer to pay us to change their sheets. We’re proud to be the only island that’s pretty much self-sufficient in food, and we want to preserve our traditional Hawaiian lifestyle.”175 In 2008, Nicholas declared defeat: claiming to have posted losses of $37 million dollars from 2001 to 2006, the Molokai Ranch would cease operations, eliminating 120 jobs.176 Despite the failure of the land-use plan, he announced that sixteen hundred acres of ranch land on the north coast of the West End would be leased for ninety-nine years to the Molokai Land Trust for preservation and restoration. The rifts in the community widened. Those concerned with the loss of jobs and decades of blocked economic development complained of the stranglehold Walter Ritte and a minority of activists and their “Stop Everything Movement” had gained over the island’s “silent majority,” turning Molokai into the “unfriendly isle.”177 Others complained that welfare dependency and special exemptions granted to some Molokai residents—the island was one of a handful of US communities granted exemptions to welfare reform laws, and native Hawaiians on Molokai had been granted an exemption from the state’s ban on gill nets—fostered a culture of dependency and lawbreaking that hid behind the rhetoric of defending a traditional subsistence lifestyle. The economic numbers told a familiar tale: the island’s unemployment rate shot up from 6.2 percent in 2007 to 13.7 percent in 2009. To put the 120 jobs lost from the ranch’s closing in context, one-tenth of the island’s workforce—about 240 workers out of a total island workforce of 2,400 (from a population of 7,300)— were employed by GMO seed companies Monsanto and Mycogen Seeds, Molokai’s largest employers. As tourism was vitiated, a single employer—Monsanto with 140 workers—became the island’s largest, and Molokai once again became dependent on a single outside corporation, plus government jobs and handouts: roughly onethird of Molokai residents receive food stamps, double the rate on Maui and triple the rate on O‘ahu.178 Regardless of these facts, Walter Ritte continued to defend his role in the island’s malaise as a defense of “us” versus “them” and dismissed the real

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economic pain and family dislocation it was causing as a necessary price to pay for keeping “them” off of Molokai. He told an interviewer for Hana Hou magazine (published by Mokulele Airlines) in 2010: Moloka‘i is very hard to put your finger on. Very few people can feel the pulse of Moloka‘i. I’m one of the guys who’s been trying to do that for thirty years. Right now, what’s happening is people on Moloka‘i are scared. There’s a huge influx of strangers coming in. We hardly recognize anybody when we go to the supermarket nowadays. And no one knows what to do about it. They all expect me to do something about it. Okay, so, how do you control it? You don’t go with big developers, you go with your community. The process calls for some suffering. That’s the part people don’t like. If one of their kids cannot have a job over here, they get really pissed off. But that’s the way it is. You got four kids, maybe two gotta move off the island. Some kids aren’t gonna like the rural lifestyle anyway. I got two kids on Maui, in [expletive deleted] Kihei! You cannot make this island for everybody. It just doesn’t work that way.179

And, the rifts in the community, once thought of simplistically as East versus West and locals and native Hawaiians versus outsiders, also multiplied and spread, pitting groups once considered allies against one another in unforseen ways. In May 2008, after closing the ranch, MPL threatened to cut water service to residential customers in Central and West Molokai, citing expensive new state requirements being forced on it after a threatened lawsuit by some homesteaders. The residents, on the mostly haole West End and in mostly nonhaole Kaulapu‘u town, saw common cause for perhaps the first time. As prospects for tourism development faded, plans to generate industrial-scale wind electricity on Lana‘i and Molokai for export to O‘ahu brought a new wave of prospectors. One company, First Wind of Boston, entered discussions with the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands (DHHL) to develop a wind farm on homestead lands at Ho‘olehua, exciting enthusiasm for possible revenues from some homesteaders and opposition to “outside” interests from others. When the Federal Aviation Administration ruled that turbines must be placed a certain distance from the airport, limiting the possible number of towers on DHHL land, another plan proposed splitting the difference: with a first phase of twenty 2.5-megawatt turbines to be constructed on homestead land and a second phase of eighty turbines on ranch land. On June 3, 2006, First Wind announced it had abandoned the DHHL part of the project, leaving only the possibility of locating turbines on ranch land. One homestead resident, the president of Ahupua‘a o Molokai, a prowind group, Kammy Purdy, expressed her frustration in a newspaper advertisement: “We are disappointed that our opposition succeeded in preventing us from acquiring our homesteaders list of needs which we collectively put together at our community meetings. We are even more disheartened that a corporation, foreign at that, has been given our economic opportunity.”180And so it continued. Nicholas and other ranch officials

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denied negotiations with First Wind, and the company responded by appearing to offer $50 million to Ritte’s Buy the Ranch group to acquire the land—an offer that was reportedly refused as too low.181 Had it been accepted, it would have made Walter Ritte and his allies not principled defenders of the subsistence Hawaiian lifestyle but just another economic development group in league with an outside corporation to control Molokai’s land and economic future. As of 2018, no wind generation deals have been struck on Molokai. As the Molokai Ranch lay mothballed, other development plans for the island stalled, and the knock-on effects were felt across the economy. The number of visitors to the island slid from 103,477 in 1990 to 59,132 in 2014—a rout of 43 percent. In the fall of 2014, the unemployment rate wobbled between 11 and 14 percent—more than twice the statewide rate—and, more tellingly, 35 percent of the island’s residents, 2,564 people, received federal nutrition assistance in the form of EBT cards. Molokai shares the rare distinction of being one of the few places in the United States where unemployment has not dropped below 10 percent in decades, making it exempt from recently imposed welfare-to-work time limits for recipients. According to Hawaii Business Magazine: “Many residents worry the exemption has created ‘generational welfare.’”182 In 2017, 55,575 acres of the Molokai Ranch were offered for sale for $260,000,000. A headline on Bloomberg.com summed up the essence of the opportunity, at least as seen from Molokai: “Paradise is on the Market. Thirty-five percent of Hawaii’s Molokai Island is for sale, with 20 miles of undeveloped beaches. But let the buyer beware.”183 A sort of postmortem, in the form of an unfortunate affirmation of continuity, came from Kammy Purdy, whose missive ended: “As they say in the corporate world, ‘Money Is Power.’ As we say on Molokai, Molokai, Pule O‘o.”

Conclusion Two Experiences of Settlement

Throughout this study, water has provided the focus for understanding interactions between people and the environment. Hawai‘i is shaped by a fundamental wet/dry dichotomy imposed by weather and topography. Because water is so unevenly distributed, access to water resources is key to life: irrigated agriculture was at the base of Polynesian Hawai‘i’s economy, religion, and competitive social order. The language reflected this fact: wai (freshwater) is associated with life; as kanawai, it is law; doubled, waiwai, it is wealth; malo‘o (dryness) is associated with death. Control of water is more important than control of land because land is always shaped by water—islands are limited by the sea, terrains are shaped by the abundance or scarcity of rain—and has no value independent of it. Water’s extent, forms, seasons, and geographies are constitutive of the Hawaiian landscape and culture. It is no stretch to say that to write a water history of Hawai‘i is to write a history of Hawai‘i. Here is a radically brief version of such a history, like a flip-book that one can thumb over in the time it takes to read a paragraph. Human societies exploit water (wai); appropriate it; and use it to create wealth (waiwai), space, and regimes of production (kanawai), which in turn reproduce the social order. These activities often set in motion processes of environmental degradation, including extinction and habitat loss, and a series of impacts that are water effects: deforestation and denudation lead to erosion, which destroys productive landscapes, seascapes, fishponds, and fishing grounds, and to dessication, the drying of streams and springs, and desertification (all malo‘o). Over time, environmental degradation undermines the productive base of the small, dispersed, economically diversified communities that characterized the earliest settlement pattern. This leads to concentration in 194

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valleys, irrigation dependency, and later, in some areas, to extensive dryland field systems, with an associated shift toward a more stratified social structure in both cases, which in turn creates rising pressure for agricultural intensification—that is, production for a surplus meant to create wealth for the owners. Since intensification requires far more capital and labor, and greater control of that labor than does production for subsistence, there is a corollary tendency toward more and more social stratification. More intensification causes more environmental degradation, which destroys common resources—especially water resources—but also forests, fishponds, reefs, and nearshore fishing grounds; small, diversified, less-stratified communities suffer, while larger, more hierarchical, more intensified ones take advantage of the impoverishment of the environment and assert control over the smaller ones. Again, by feedback, this social intensification in turn promotes more environmental degradation. The outcome of this trajectory is a highly stratified, caste-based society controlled by a small elite, which is in large part defined by heredity, resting on an economic base of the mostly irrigated monoculture of a surplus crop limited to the best—that is, most well-watered—fertile valley lands. A key finding of this study is that the sequence described in the last paragraph is clearly and repeatedly visible in both the Polynesian period and in the postcontact period, where water remains at the center of the economic and therefore political and social life of both the nineteenth-century Hawaiian kingdom and the twentieth-century American territory and state. These aspects of life flowed, literally, from the monopoly control of water to irrigate sugarcane and pineapple. As water becomes more and more important to sustaining the economic and political structures, more and more of it is “developed,” in the engineers’ parlance—and then, paradoxically, it becomes more and more scarce, in the sense of maldistribution across the landscape, physical and social. This apparent repetition is striking. I refer to it as an historical isomorphism: the similarity of form or structure between two things or organisms with different ancestry, arrived at through convergence. Seeing this isomorphism in Molokai indicates that deep structures unique to the place pushed apparently very different human societies at very different times toward assuming similar forms. The challenge is to explicate, first, what those deep structures of place are and how they work and second, how the nature of the societies—their cultures—are worked on by them and work on them in turn. A certain number of patterns are visible in the long history of Molokai and Hawai‘i, which together add up to what I call a socioenvironmental calculus. First, because of the uneven distribution of water in an often marginal environment, the control of water resources is critical to sustaining life and to maintaining control of the political level in a competitive society. Likewise, the control of water implies and makes possible the control of land and of labor. The three go hand in hand, and each one is necessary to achieve and maintain the others. Roughly speaking,

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water is power in Hawai‘i. Second, the control of natural and human resources tends, where the environmental conditions for bigness (what I call resource thickness) exist, to become concentrated in a few hands and reinforces the tendencies toward intensification and stratification. I refer to this outcome as social bigness. It does not happen “naturally”; it happens because of the desires and efforts of elites to obtain monopoly control of the power of resources and other people’s labor. Both Polynesian and postcontact Western society in Hawai‘i were (the latter remains) highly competitive cultures, ruled by aggressive, dominating elites who sought (and seek) the control of limited resources for their own advantage. In this sense, the two cultures were not so different as we might assume by looking at their material technologies or trappings. It has been said that when Captain James Cook stepped ashore at Hawai‘i’s Kealakekua Bay in December 1778, greeted by hundreds of Hawaiian chiefs, warriors, and priests, it was not simply another collision between the Stone Age and modern, industrializing Europe but an encounter, from a certain point of view, between two remarkably similar societies. The ships of the Royal Navy, each miniature models of the British class system, strict rank hierarchies buttressed by caste and run with autocratic discipline, found their counterparts in the Hawaiian chiefdom as baroquely stratified and authoritarian as any in the Pacific. “At Kealakekua,” the anthropologist Patrick Kirch has written, “one chiefdom met another, recognizing in the other the essential structures of hierarchy and power.”1 The participants may also have recognized another point of similarity—that theirs was an encounter between two of the greatest seaborne colonizing societies in history—and they likely recognized that the cultural similarities made the success of each in the venture possible. It is equally clear from the historical record that monopoly control of water and land resources exacerbates and drives the feedback loop of environmental degradation; destruction of common resources; and the decline of small, subsistence-based communities, further reinforcing intensification and the control of monopolists. This helps to explain the rapid social change and very high degrees of agricultural development in both the Polynesian and postcontact periods and helps to explain the rapid and severe environmental degradation seen in both periods. But bigness neither always happens nor happens everywhere. Many places and times in Hawaiian history, in fact, show a strong tendency toward its opposite: smallness, characterized by small, dispersed communities engaged in a diversified subsistence economy, usually also marginal to and therefore mostly overlooked by the large political and social centers. This tendency has characterized the Kala’e area of Central Molokai and the corrugated small valleys of the East End, minus larger Hālawa Valley. Not uncommonly, efforts to make bigness simply fail, usually because the resource base is too thin to support it. The American Sugar Company gave textbook testimony to this fact. Except in the biggest, wettest, thickest places,

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bigness is perpetually haunted by overshoot—that is, by exceeding the capacity of its environment and degrading it to the point where smallness takes hold again. Bigness and smallness are visible in both periods and are in fact always visible, no less today, and are in constant conflict and competition with each other for living space in the Hawaiian landscape. What this study shows is that both outcomes are, in important ways, determined by interactions between society and the environment—but how, specifically? As much as bigness is the result of a drive on the part of some people or classes, smallness is often the result of active resistance by some people and classes to bigness. It might be described as a class struggle, or as a difference in cultures, but what pushes the outcome in one direction or another is the environment in a dynamic interaction. Bigness cannot arise unless the resources it controls are sufficient to sustain it—that is, big enough. The character of the resource base, its bigness (what I also call thickness) or its smallness (what I also call thinness—the overlap in phrases to describe the human and the physical is intentional), in part determines or limits the kind of human—social, political, economic—bigness or smallness that can arise. Small valleys do not produce enough wealth to support armies, and small islands do not produce powerful, conquering chiefs. The same can generally be said of supporting profitable plantations or large corporations that can underwrite and control a government. Human bigness grows on natural bigness: for example, in Polynesian Hawai‘i, the largest, wettest valleys always produced the higheststatus elites and sustained major aggregations of population, infrastructure, and wealth. A fairly thin resource base, especially if circumscribed in a limited area, cannot support the leap from small, subsistence communities to larger, surplusproducing ones. Smallness, on the other hand, can survive only where the environment is either too marginal for plantation (monoculture) agriculture or not at all marginal but limited to too small an area to achieve the scale effects that bigness requires. To ward off the bigness that is always stalking it, smallness requires a balance between environmental conditions and location size that is fairly narrow and not common everywhere. When the environment is too marginal, even small economic scales have a hard time sustaining themselves, especially if the pieces of land available are small. When ecological marginality is combined with large size, however, intensification by extension, or extensification—best exemplified by cattle grazing—can make such lands profitable. Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield have pointed out that size has everything to do with it: people who work highly fertile land can still be socioeconomically marginalized and impoverished if they have only a small amount of it, and ecologically marginal land can, “if a holder has enough of it, offer the basis for a highly profitable commercial operation.”2 What matters is the intensification, not the technological process by which it is imposed. Thus, the irrigation hypothesis discussed in chapter 1 correlates well with evidence from Molokai

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that large-scale irrigation tends toward social stratification. But irrigation is not the only land management strategy that leads to social stratification—we have seen that intensification in the form of labor-intensive and extensive dryland field systems on Hawai‘i and Maui achieved the same result without irrigation. Both forms, the irrigation of pineapple and the extension of cattle ranching over vast areas, have characterized the West End of Molokai in the modern era. A corollary of this opportunity for bigness is that the effort to wring more profit/surplus out of marginal land tends to at least partially ruin it by misreading its capacity and weakening it. Literally and figuratively, pushing land beyond its capacity erodes its capacity, thus eroding its ability to sustain communities—and even, at times, becoming so bad as to threaten the economic viability of large landholdings. The dynamic between big and small in both the human and the natural senses operates at many scales: within a valley, within a district, within Molokai, and within Hawai‘i. Molokai, being comparatively small, has often been subjected to larger outside forces that tend to subjugate it and reorganize its space and population to fit their needs. It has been, as I have said, a kind of doormat and a place of experimentation and testing, a laboratory for outsiders to try their hand at new conquests and ventures. For historians, Molokai is also an ideal laboratory for watching globalizing processes at work. Its history is one of repeated settlement by outside groups, each one in succession more powerful than the last, with new, better techniques of environmental and, not coincidentally, social and political control. This is not a new or unique thing, in Hawai‘i or anywhere else. It is a global pattern and, I would argue, is the pattern of globalization. Fernand Braudel wrote that in the development of the world economy, foreign demands impose “an intrusive monoculture, destructive of local balance.”3 The history of Molokai, Hawai‘i, is expressive of this rule.

Appendix

TA B L E 1 . M O L O KA I M A H E L E G R A N T S — H I ST O R IC A H U P UA’A

Koolau District 1. Hālawa: [konohiki: V. Kamamalu LCA 7713 RP 4475]—kuleana grants: 51 2. Wailau: [not awarded. But: Kuakamana Enoka LCA 8660 RP 495 72 ac.]— kuleana grants: 33 3. Pelekunu: [konohiki: Kapuaipoopoo (w) LCA 5575 RP 7262 5345 ac.]—kuleana grants: 36 4. Waikolu: [not awarded]—kuleana grants: 20 5. Kalawao: [government]—kuleana grants: 10. Ili Manienie [government] 6. Makanalua: [konohiki: Kekauonohi, Miriam]—kuleana grants: 1 7. Kalaupapa: [not awarded]—kuleana grants: 29 Kona District 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Kaluakoi 1 and 2: [government]—kuleana grants: 0 ‘Iloli: [government]—kuleana grants: 1 Pala‘au: [crown]—kuleana grants: 0 Manowainui: [government]—kuleana grants: 0 Naiwa: [konohiki: Kekauonohi, Miriam LCA 11216 RP 8132 5909 ac. Ahp.]—kuleana grants: 3 13. Ho‘olehua: [government]—kuleana grants: 0 14. Kahanui: [1/2 government, Apana 2 mauka] [1/2 konohiki: owned by Kaluaokamano, Apana 2 makai LCA 7755 RP 6824 1428.81 ac. Ahp. D. 1852 willed to wife Kamokuholohewa, she sold to Haalelea, “now belongs to the king” .201 (incorrectly listed as Kahananui)]—kuleana grants: 0

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Appendix

15. Kalamaula: [crown]—kuleana grants: 1 16. Kaunakakai: [not awarded in Mahele; inherited by B. P. Bishop from brother Kamehameha V; awarded to B. P. Bishop in 1890]—kuleana grants: 0 17. Kapaakea: [not awarded]—kuleana grants: 0 18. Kamiloloa: [west half government] [east half konohiki: Laniheleua]—kuleana grants: 0 19. Makakupaia: [west half government “makakupaia-nui”] [east half “makakupaia-iki” konohiki: Kaleleiki LCA 7779-B RP 8139 1425 ac. Ahp.]—kuleana grants: 0 20. Kawela: [konohiki: Lunalilo, Wm. Charles LCA 8559-B RP 7656 14,787 ac. ahp.]—kuleana grants: 11 21. Makolelau: [not awarded]—kuleana grants: 0 22. Kapuaokoolau: [konohiki: Puhi LCA 3834, 7244 RP 7180 671 ac.]—kuleana grants: 0 23. Kamalo: [konohiki: Leleiohoku LCA 9971 RP 8143 3921 ac. Ahp.]—kuleana grants: 1 24. Kapulei (Kapualei): [konohiki: Kekauonohi, Miriam LCA 8184 1670 ac. including adjoining Kumueli and Wawaia]—kuleana grants: 25 25. Kumueli: [konohiki: Kekauonohi, Miriam LCA 8184 1670 ac. including adjoining Kapulei and Wawaia]—kuleana grants: 20 26. Wawaia: [konohiki: Kekauonohi, Miriam 8184 1670 ac. including adjoining Kapulai and Kumueli]—kuleana grants: 10 27. Pua‘ahala: [not awarded]—kuleana grants: 6 28. Ka‘amola: Ka‘amola 1 [1/2 crown? government?] [1/2 konohiki: Malo, Davida RP 1141 195.6 ac.], 2, 3, 4 [government]; Ka‘amola 5, 6 [1/2 government] [1/2 konohiki: Halualani LCA 3975 RP 2986 25.5 ac.]—kuleana grants: 13 29. Keawanui: [konohiki: Hinau LCA 2715 RP 8163 537 ac.]—kuleana grants: 10 30. Ohia 1 komohana (west): [konohiki: Helehewa MA 30, ]—kuleana grants: 14 (both) 31. Ohia 2 hikina (east): [government] 32. Manawai: [konohiki: Wm. Z Hoonaulu LCA 4600, 6546 Ahp.]—kuleana grants: 22 33. Kahananui: [1/2 government] [konohiki: 1/2 Kaeliwai MA 48]—kuleana grants: 8 34. Ualapue: [government]—kuleana grants: 38 35. Kalua‘aha: [government]—kuleana grants: 30 36. Mapulehu: [konohiki: Aikake Lui LCA3218 RP 7232 2308 ac. Ahp.]—kuleana grants: 38 37. Punaula: [not awarded]—kuleana grants: 0 38. Puko‘o: [Puko‘o 1 government] [Puko‘o 2 konohiki: Ilae Napohaku LCA 8214 RP 7375 96.94 ac. Occupied from 1840 from the king as lunaauhau.]—kuleana grants: 11 39. Kupeke: [konohiki: Peke (Betty Davis, Isaac Davis’s daughter) LCA 8524-B RP 5672 463.5 ac.]—kuleana grants: 16

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40. Ahaino: [1/2 ahup. = Ahaino 1; konohiki: Hanakaipo MA 10] [1/2 ahup. government = Ahaino 2. But: Kuakamauna Enoka. LCA 8660 RP 495 168 ac.]—kuleana grants: 8 41. Kailiula: [government]—kuleana grants: 4 42. Honomuni: [konohiki: Kauwa, JA LCA 8525-B ]—kuleana grants: 9 43. Kamananoni: [1/2 government] [1/2 konohiki: Ha‘alelea LCA 5382 35 ac.]—kuleana grants: 1 —‘ili Kawaikapu: [government]—kuleana grants: 4 44. Kainalu: [government]—kuleana grants: 0 45. Pu‘elelu: [government]—kuleana grants: 1 46. Puniuohua 2: [government]—kuleana grants: 0 47. Puniuohua 1: [konohiki: Kamiona LCA 7758 RP 8119 53.93 ac.]—kuleana grants: 0 48. Waialua: [konohiki: Lunalilo, Wm. Charles LCA 8559-B RP 7655 1168 ac. ahp]—kuleana grants: 34 49. Moanui: [government]—kuleana grants: 10 50. Kumimi: [konohiki: John Stevenson “Kiwini” LCA 11029 RP 4366 125.5 ac.]—kuleana grants: 9 51. Honouliwai: [government]—kuleana grants: 24 52. Honulimalo‘o: [1/2 govt] [1/2 konohiki: Kinimaka LCA 7130 RP 8149 753 ac.]—kuleana grants: 15 53. Lupehu: [1/2 government] [1/2 ahp. konohiki: Kuhalake LCA 62]—kuleana grants: 5 54. Pohakupili: [konohiki: Kaninaualii LCA 7762 RP 8282 220 ac.]—kuleana grants: 3 55. Moakea: [konohiki: Kekauonohi, Miriam LCA 11216 RP 8162 1092 ac. Ahp.]—kuleana grants: 14 56. Keopukauuku: [konohiki: Kuakamana, Enoka LCA 8660 RP 493 401 ac.]—kuleana grants: 10 57. Keopukaloa: [not awarded]—kuleana grants: 3 [not sure how to separate from above]1 sources: Barrere, King’s Mahele; Bureau of Conveyances records.

1. According to “Crown Lands” sheet, these are government ahupua‘a in Koolau: Haulei, Hawaluna, Kainalu (this is in Kona), Keanaokuino, Mahulile, Manienie (‘ili in Waikolu), Pohakuloa. According to “Crown Lands” sheet, these are goverenment ahupua‘a in Kona: Hipu (Kipu in Kalae). Unawarded lands became “unassigned lands”; these are property of the Kamehamehas and end up as property of Bernice P. Bishop.

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Appendix TA B L E 2 . M O L O KA I L A N D T R A N S AC T IO N S , P R E - M A H E L E T O 1 8 5 9

Kuleana: Hawaiian to Hawaiian: 15 Hawaiian to haole: 11 Haole to haole: 15 Haole to Hawaiian: 4 Total: 45 Ahupua‘a: Hawaiian to Hawaiian: Naiwa (Haalelea) Kahanui (Haalelea) Ohia (Kikoopaoa) 1/2 Pelekunu (to Kanaiana from Morrison/wife) Ahupua‘a: Hawaiian to haole: Moakea ahp (to Treadway from Haalelea) Keopukauuku (to Thos. King from Kuakamauna, Enoka) s ou rc e : Bureau of Conveyances records.

TA B L E 3 . M O L O KA I L A N D T R A N S AC T I O N S , 1 8 6 0 –1 8 6 9

Kuleana: Hawaiian to Hawaiian: 26 Hawaiian to haole: 42 Haole to haole: 35 Haole to Hawaiian: 6 Total: 109

(all kona, Hālawa, Kalae—no windward valleys) (all kona, Hālawa, Kalae—one in windward valleys, Wailau) (all kona, Hālawa, Kalae—no windward valleys) (all kona, Kalae—no windward valleys)

Government Purchases: Between October and December 1865: 20 at Waikolu and 10 Kalawao (all kuleanas); 1866, 1 at Makanalua (Haalelea’s konohiki interest, the middle section of the peninsula; 1868, 1 at Kaulaupapa; also 1 from Treadway at Puko‘o (kona), 1/5/1869 Amassments: —Edwin Jones, bought ahupua‘a of Kupeke, Kala‘e cattle —James W. Austin buys at Kapualei, 3 ahupua‘a? —Ha‘alelea sells Naiwa ahupua‘a to John Dominus, who also buys Kawela ahupua‘a, 14,787 acres, from Lunalilo, 7/1/69 —Dominus mortgages Naiwa to John Mott-Smith [paid off 1873]

Appendix

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Ahupua‘a: Hawaiian to Hawaiian: Honomuni (to Kamakahi from Moemalie) 1/2 Pelekunu (to Kapakuhaili from Kanaina) Puuahala (from Peter Ka‘eo to ?) To government: Kalawao (all kuleana); 1866, 1 at Makanalua (Haalelea’s konohiki interest, the middle section of the peninsula; 1868, 1 at Kaulaupapa Ahupua‘a: Hawaiian to haole: Naiwa (to Dominis from Haalelea) Kawela (leased to Dominis from Lunalilo) Kumimi (to Dedrick from Nakookoo) Keopuka (part to Nowlien from B. P. Bishop) Kapulei, Kumueli, Wawaia (to Rogers from Austin from Haalelea) Kupeke (Sylva, husband of Peke, from Auhea?) s ou rc e : Bureau of Conveyances records. n ot e : Auhea (wahine, the premier Kekauluohi over young King Kamehameha III, who had stripped Kahikona the Tahitian of kumimi in 1840) sold ahupua‘a of Kupeke 12/1866 to Antonio Sylva. But Kupeke already belonged to Peke Betty Davis, wife of Sylva on Maui after.

TA B L E 4 . M O L O KA I L A N D T R A N S AC T I O N S , 1 8 7 0 –1 8 8 9

Kuleana: Hawaiian to Hawaiian: 374 Sales of government lands: 53 from Lunalilo, 4 from Lot Kamehameha, 37 from Kalakaua [to Hawaiians and a few Chinese] Hawaiian to haole [including mortgages]: 35 Hawaiian to Chinese: 5 Haole to haole [not including mortgages]: 20 Haole to Hawaiian: 7 Haole to Chinese: 10 Chinese to haole: 2 Total: 548 Ahupua‘a: Hawaiian to Hawaiian: Poniuohua ? RP 2711 1/4 Manawai Kamalo ahp BPB from Ruth 1874 Kainalu RP 3005 ? Ualapue to Poomaikelane from Crown Lands Commission

204

Appendix Ahupua‘a: Hawaiian to haole:

Mapulehu por ahupua‘a 1872 leased from Keone Kana‘e to Samuel G. Dwight Ahupua‘a: Haole to haole: Naiwa ahupua‘a from Mott-Smith to Dominis 1873 Kumimi 39 ac RP 4366 bought by Bal Kiliula RP 2954 bought by Bal Kamiloloa 1/2 ahupua‘a (5,000 acs) 1876 bought by Wm. R. Buchanan Papohaku 1881 bought by CR Bishop s ou rc e : Bureau of Conveyances records.

TA B L E 5 . M AJ O R L A N D H O L D I N G S O N M O L O K A I , 1 9 8 4

Land Owner Molokai Ranch Ltd. Hawaiian Home Lands State of Hawai‘i Kaluako‘i Corp. Murphy Ranch Bishop Estate Meyers Estate Other Total:

No. of Acres 59,300 25,500 18,900 13,800 9,000 4,400 3,000 24,800 158,700

Percent of Total 37.4 16.1 11.9 8.7 5.7 2.8 1.9 15.6 100.0

source: Plasch, Economic Development Strategy and Implementation Program for Moloka‘i, I–9.

notes

I N T R O D U C T IO N : O U T E R I SL A N D, I N B E T W E E N

1. Hawaiian-language words are given in italics for first use unless widely known; subsequent uses are generally not italicized. A glossary of Hawaiian words is provided in the appendix. 2. Harriet Ne, Tales of Molokai: The Voice of Harriet Ne (La‘ie, HI: Institute for Polynesian Studies, 1992). 3. Note on orthography: for the islands taken as a group, whether archipelago, kingdom, territory, or state, I use the anglicized Hawai‘i and Hawaiian; for the individual island, I use (the Big Island of) Hawai‘i. This is for simplicity and clarity, though it is in contrast to recent convention. 4. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: pour une litterature mineure (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1975); English: Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 5. Hawai‘i’s status until 1893 was unique in the Pacific, where by midcentury no other significant island group was left independent. It derived from the complex, precarious balance between Hawaiian political stability and the international visibility of the islands, and the multidirectional chess games between Hawai‘i and competing foreign powers and the various interest groups among their nationals residing on the islands. As time goes forward, Hawai‘i’s continuing independence becomes an ironic artifact of Great Power jockeying but has real effects. Generally, it made permanent a state of tension between internal needs and stabilities and the external demands of governments and especially markets. It helps, for example, to explain why the Hawaiian ali‘i, or noble class, was able for so long to steadfastly refuse the reform of land tenure while at the same time allowing and participating in the de facto dismantling of these same structures.

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6. Harold Whitman Bradley, The American Frontier in Hawaii, the Pioneers, 1789–1843 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1942); Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1968); Lilikala Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires = ko Hawai‘i ‘aina a me na koi pu‘umake a ka po‘e haole: A History of Land Tenure Change in Hawai‘i from Traditional Times until the 1848 Mahele (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1992); Ralph S. Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 3 vols. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1938–1967); Patrick Vinton Kirch and Marshall Sahlins, Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Marshall David Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981); Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). One general interest environmental history of Hawai‘i exists: John L. Culliney, Islands in a Far Sea: Nature and Man in Hawaii (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988). While it is designed to be “about the intersection of natural and human history in the islands,” its forté is natural history, with good chapters on evolution, ecology, and conservation and a laudable attention to the marine side of Hawaiian nature. Extending up to the present, the book does a workmanlike job of outlining environmental history (including a useful sketch of the ruinous history of government “improvements” to forests), but its emphasis on getting the complex and elegant natural science across precludes a much deeper analysis of the said “intersection.” 7. Some main works in book form are Alison E. Kay, ed., A Natural History of the Hawaiian Islands: Selected Readings, vol. 2 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994); Patrick Vinton Kirch, On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before Contact (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Kirch and Marion Kelly, eds., Prehistory and Ecology in a Windward Hawaiian Valley: Halāwa Valley, Molokai, Pacific Anthropological Records, no. 24 (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1975); D. MuellerDombois et al., eds, Island Ecosystems: Biological Organization in Selected Hawaiian Communities, Synthesis Series 15 (Woods Hole, MA: US/IBP, 1981); C. P. Stone et al., eds., Alien Plant Invasions in Native Ecosystems of Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992); P. Quentin Tomich, Mammals in Hawaii: A Synopsis and Notational Bibliography (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1986). This is, of course, the tip of the iceberg. 8. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 2:87. 9. Ibid., 2:2. 10. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 11. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); Pyne, Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998). 12. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (June 1999): 815–816; Stephen Aron, “Lessons in Conquest: Towards a Greater Western History,” Pacific Historical Review 63 (May 1994): 125–147; Richard White, Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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13. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 14. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005). 15. Diamond, Collapse, 11. C HA P T E R 1 . W E T A N D D RY: T H E P O LY N E SIA N P E R IO D, 1 0 0 0 – 1 7 7 8

1. There is considerable, and continual, disagreement among archaeologists on the dating of Hawai‘i’s first settlement, based on the complexity of multiple registers of evidence, changing dating techniques and theories, and uncertainties inherent in the limited archaeological record. In this book I follow Patrick Vinton Kirch’s estimate of AD 1000: Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings: Divine Kingship and the Rise of Archaic States in Ancient Hawai‘i (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), although Kirch in the same year wrote that Hawaiian settlement occured “no earlier than AD 800 based on evidence from sediment cores and AMS dating of Pacific rat bones”: Kirch, “Peopling of the Pacific: A Holistic Anthropological Perspective,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 140. One recent study concluded that settlement likely occurred between AD 1000 and 1100: J. Stephen Athens, Timothy M. Rieth, and Thomas S. Dye, “A Paleoenvironmental and Archaeological Model-Based Estimate for the Colonization of Hawaii,” American Antiquity 79, no. 1 (2014): 144–155. 2. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 238. 3. Kirch, “Peopling of the Pacific,” 140; Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 277. 4. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 243. 5. Ibid., 265. 6. Ibid., 215. 7. Ibid., 303. 8. Kay, Natural History of the Hawaiian Islands, 426; Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 109; Crosby, Ecological Imperialism. 9. E. S. Craighill Handy, Elizabeth Green Handy, and Mary Kawena Pukui, Native Planters in Old Hawaii: Their Life, Lore, and Environment (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1972), 13. 10. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 48. 11. Handy, Handy, and Pukui, Native Planters in Old Hawaii. 12. Hans Konrad Van Tilburg, “Vessels of Exchange: The Global Shipwright in the Pacific,” paper presented at Seascapes, Littoral Cultures and Trans-oceanic Exchanges conference, February 12–13, 2003, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, www.historycoopera tive.org/proceedings/seascapes/. 13. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 304. 14. Ibid., 290. 15. Sonia P. Juvik, and James O. Juvik, eds., Atlas of Hawaii, 3rd ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), 303. 16. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 46.

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17. Kay, Natural History of the Hawaiian Islands, 100, 104. 18. Ibid., 98. 19. Ibid., 93. 20. Juvik and Juvik, Atlas of Hawaii, 49. 21. R. C. Fleischer, C. E. McIntosh, and C. L. Tarr, “Evolution on a Volcanic Conveyor Belt: Using Phylogeographic Reconstructions and K–Ar-based Ages of the Hawaiian Islands to Estimate Molecular Evolutionary Rates,” Molecular Ecology, no. 7 (1998): 533–545. 22. Kay, Natural History of the Hawaiian Islands, 94. 23. Hawaii’s Birds, 6th ed. (Honolulu: Hawai‘i Audubon Society, 2005). 24. Robert H. MacArthur, and Edward O. Wilson, The Theory of Island Biogeography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967). 25. Ne, Tales of Molokai. 26. Patrick V. Kirch, and Mark D. McCoy, “Reconfiguring the Hawaiian Cultural Sequence: Results of Re-dating the Halawa Dune Site (MO-A1-3), Moloka‘i Island,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 116, no. 4 (2007): 385–406. 27. Kirch, “Peopling of the Pacific,” 140. 28. Kirch and Kelly, Prehistory and Ecology, 65. 29. Ibid., 8, 9, 12, 42–54. 30. Ibid., 9. 31. Ibid., 9, 19. 32. Ibid., 73. 33. Ibid., 64. 34. Ibid., 68–69. 35. Ibid., 63; Patrick Vinton Kirch and Terry L. Hunt, eds., Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands: Prehistoric Environmental and Landscape Change (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 267; Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 291–292. 36. Kirch and Kelly, Prehistory and Ecology, 63, 179. 37. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 2:174. 38. Archibald Menzies, Hawaii Nei, 128 Years Ago (Honolulu: printed by the author, 1920), 28–29. 39. Kirch and Kelly, Prehistory and Ecology, 149, 177. 40. Robert J. Hommon, The Ancient Hawaiian State: Origins of a Political Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 75. 41. Natalie Kurashima and Patrick V. Kirch, “Geospatial Modeling of Pre-contact Hawaiian Production Systems on Moloka‘i Island, Hawaiian Islands,” Journal of Archaeological Science 38, no. 12 (2011): 3662–3674. 42. Hommon, Ancient Hawaiian State, 75. 43. Kurashima and Kirch, “ Geospatial Modeling of Pre-contact Hawaiian Production Systems,” 3672. 44. Patrick Vinton Kirch, “Hawaii as a Model System for Human Ecodynamics,” American Anthropologist 109, no. 1 (2007): 8–26; Kirch, The Wet and the Dry: Irrigation and Agricultural Intensification in Polynesia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 294; Kirch and Kelly, Prehistory and Ecology, 151, 162–179, 181. 45. Kay, Natural History of the Hawaiian Islands, 429.

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46. Catherine Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, Pacific Anthropological Records no. 14 (Honolulu: B. P. Bishop Museum, 1971). 47. Joseph M. Farber, Ancient Hawaiian Fishponds: Can Restoration Succeed on Moloka‘i? (Encinitas, CA: Neptune House, 1997), 1–12; Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 140. 48. Kurashima and Kirch, “Geospatial Modeling of Pre-contact Hawaiian Production Systems,” 3665. 49. Lieutenant King, an officer on Captain Cook’s third voyage of 1778–1779, estimated Molokai’s precontact population at 36,000; archaeologist Kenneth Emory estimated a population of 10,500, with most spread along the East End; the missionary H. R. Hitchcock in 1832 estimated 8,000. Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 3. 50. Patrick Vinton Kirch and Roger C. Green, Hawaiki, Ancestral Polynesia: An Essay in Historical Anthropology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 51. Literally, pig altar, a territorial division within an island or moku district, typically defined as a “pie slice” running from high elevation near the island or moku’s center to the sea, often along ridgelines or other watershed features; ahupua‘a (plural) extend radially around each island or moku from its interior high elevations. The division is demarcated on the ground by an ahu (altar), carved in the shape of a pig (pua‘a), a manifestation of Lono, god of agriculture and rain. Here are placed the yearly makahiki offerings to the god, which are collected by the ruling chief (ali‘i ‘ai moku), the chief who eats the land. 52. Kay, Natural History of the Hawaiian Islands, 431. 53. Ibid., 425. 54. Stephen J. Athens et al., “Avifaunal Extinctions, Vegetation Change, and Polynesian Impacts in Prehistoric Hawai‘i,” Archaeology in Oceania 37, no. 2 (2002), 57–78; Athens, “Rattus Exulans and the Catastrophic Disappearance of Hawai‘i’s Native Lowland Forest,” Biological Invasions 11, no. 7 (2009):1489–1501. 55. Patrick V. Kirch, A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief: Island Civiliation of Ancient Hawai‘i (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 109. 56. Athens, “Rattus Exulans and the Catastrophic Disappearance”; David Burney, “Tropical Islands as Paleoecological Laboratories: Gauging the Consequences of Human Arrival,” Human Ecology 25, no. 3 (1997): 437–457. 57. Handy, Handy, and Pukui, Native Planters in Old Hawaii, 146, 153, 181; Kay, Natural History of the Hawaiian Islands, 430. 58. Handy, Handy, and Pukui, Native Planters in Old Hawaii, 511, 514–515. 59. Kirch and Hunt, Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands, 249–250. 60. Stephen J. Athens, “Hawaiian Native Lowland Vegetation in Prehistory,” in Kirch and Hunt, Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands, 261. 61. Kay, Natural History of the Hawaiian Islands, 430, 434. 62. Kirch and Hunt, Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands, 82. 63. Kay, Natural History of the Hawaiian Islands, 432–433. 64. Kirch and Hunt, Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands, 99. 65. Ibid., 54, 61, 258. 66. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 230. 67. F. Raymond Fosberg, “Disturbance in Island Ecosystems,” in J. L. Gressitt, ed., Pacific Basin Biogeography (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1963), 559.

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68. Kay, Natural History of the Hawaiian Islands, 359; Kirch and Hunt, Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands, 53, 57–58, 70; Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 277–280, 315. 69. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 302. 70. Ibid., 315–316. 71. Ibid., 210, 309. 72. Ibid., 56. 73. Ibid., 250–257. 74. Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). 75. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 264. 76. Ibid., 265. 77. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, Vol I: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 199. 78. Hommon, Ancient Hawaiian State, 70. 79. Ibid., 69, 232. 80. Kirch, “Hawai‘i as a Model System for Human Ecodynamics,” 4. 81. Hommon, Ancient Hawaiian State, 61. 82. Kirch, Wet and the Dry, 18, 255. 83. David Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities = Moolelo Hawaii (Honolulu: B. P. Bishop Museum, 1951), 204. 84. Ibid., 61. 85. Ibid., 69, 72. 86. Ibid., 252. 87. Ibid., 68. 88. Ibid., 74. 89. Douglas Yen, “The Origins of Oceanic Agriculture,” Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania 8 (1973): 68–85. 90. Hommon, Ancient Hawaiian State, 233. 91. Ibid., 236, 237. 92. Tom Dye, “Population Trends in Hawaii before 1778,” Hawaiian Journal of History 28 (1994). 93. Kirch, How Kings Became Chiefs, 196. 94. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 309. 95. Ibid., 319. 96. Kirch, “Hawai‘i as a Model System for Human Ecodynamics,” 12. 97. Kurashima and Kirch, “Geospatial Modeling of Pre-contact Hawaiian Production Systems,” 3673. 98. Marshall Sahlins, “Social Stratification in Polynesia: A Study of Adaptive Variation in Culture,” PhD diss., Columbia University, New York, 1954. 99. Irving Goldman, Ancient Polynesian Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 100. Kirch, Wet and the Dry, 11. Patrick Kirch, following French ethnobotanist Jacques Barrau’s paper “L’humide et le sec,” asserts that these two poles “are integral to what

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Fernand Braudel termed the longue duree . . . the contrast of wet and dry environments, crops, and agricultural technologies holds a key to understanding the history of Polynesian agriculture.” 101. Martha Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1970). 102. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 288. 103. Kirch, Wet and the Dry, 5. Pondfield culture yields forty tons per hectare per year; raised bed culture yields twenty tons per hectare per year; pit cultivation yields five to fifteen tons per hectare per year; Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings, 213–214. 104. Kirch, Wet and Dry, 16 105. Ibid., 86, 207. 106. Ibid., 88, 177. 107. Hommon, Ancient Hawaiian State, 220. 108. Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings, 79. 109. Ibid., 184. 110. Handy, Handy, and Pukui, Native Planters in Old Hawaii, 324; Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings, 31. 111. Pali Jae Kealohilani Lee, Tales from the Night Rainbow = Moolelo o na po makole: The Story of a Woman, a People, and an Island: An Oral History of Kailiohe Kame‘ekua of Kamalo, Molokai, 1816–1931 (Honolulu: Paia-Kapela-Willis Ohana, 1987), 23–24. 112. Kirch, Wet and the Dry, 264. 113. Kurashima and Kirch, “Geospatial Modeling of Pre-contact Hawaiian Production Systems,” 3673. 114. Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings, 196. 115. Kirch, Wet and the Dry, 15, 259. 116. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 20. 117. Hommon, Ancient Hawaiian State, 35. 118. Kirch, Wet and the Dry, 263, 264. Kirch notes that this pattern held true in the Society Islands as well, with small, dry Mo‘orea coming to control larger, wetter islands. 119. Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings, 216. 120. George Paul Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai: A Ranch Story of Molokai (Honolulu: Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 1949), 150. 121. “It is interesting to note that there is a hill called Pu‘u kauwa on the SE boundary of Kahanui 2.” Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey. 122. Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, 99. 123. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 2:128. 124. Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 123. 125. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 166, 239–243, 245–246; Worster, Rivers of Empire; Worster, Under Western Skies; Kirch, Wet and the Dry, 261–264. 126. Handy, Handy, and Pukui, Native Planters in Old Hawaii, 325–326. “The large comparative study of despotic power with which Dr. Wittfogel is preoccupied has created in his mind a concept which is somewhat more mechanical than the arrangements that actually existed. The relationship of the planter and his family to the high chief, and to the ali‘i class

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in general, was a very personal one in which ardent affection was the prevailing feeling unless an ali‘i was quite despicable, which was rare.” 127. Kirch, Wet and the Dry, 9–10, 320. “In Polynesia, there is no direct correlation of irrigation and the landesque capital mode of intensification with the development of highly stratified polities.” 128. Among them: Hommon, Ancient Hawaiian State; Patrick Vinton Kirch and J-L. Rallu, The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007); Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings; Kirch, A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 129. Kirch, Wet and the Dry, 267: “Recognition that the contrastive pathways of agricultural intensification followed in Kaua‘i and O‘ahu . . . as opposed to the pathways followed in Hawai‘i and Maui greatly influenced the respective sociopolitical structures of these chiefdoms does not necessitate adherence to some outdated theory of environmental determinism. The particular cultural, symbolic structures that emerged in each region . . . were in no way ‘determined’ by the nature of the agro-ecosystem. But it would be equally facile to suggest that the different modes of agricultural production in western and eastern parts of the archipelago were without impact on the course of Hawaiian sociopolitical change.” 130. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 317. C HA P T E R 2 . T R A F F IC K A N D TA B O O : T R A D E , B IO L O G IC A L E XC HA N G E , A N D L AW I N T H E M A K I N G O F A N EW PAC I F IC WO R L D, 1 7 7 8 – 1 8 4 8

1. Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 18. 2. Samuel Manaiakalani Kamakau, Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii (Honolulu: Kamehameha Schools Press, 1961), 132–133. 3. Kamakau, Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii, 135. 4. Sophie Judd Cooke, Sincerely, Sophie (Honolulu: Tongg, 1964), 58. 5. George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and Round the World, 3 vols. (London: G. G. and J. Robinson and J. Edwards, 1798), 1:180, 187. 6. Menzies, Hawaii Nei, 115, 188. 7. Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 20. 8. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 1:41. 9. Daws, Shoal of Time, 44. 10. Broughton, Voyage of Discovery. 11. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 2:49. 12. Ibid., 2:87. 13. “A Tale of the Kona Side of Molokai in the Days of Kamehameha, the Conqueror,” Ka nupepa kuokoa, May 11, 1922, translated typescript in the B. P. Bishop Museum library. 14. Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 151. 15. James Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, 4 vols, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 86. 16. Vancouver, Voyage of Discovery, 1:201–202. 17. Menzies, Hawaii Nei, 22.

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18. Charles Samuel Stewart, Journal of a Residence in the Sandwich Islands, during the Years, 1823, 1824, and 1825 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1970), 140. 19. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 248; Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theater on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 20. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 70–103; the exceptions are Australia and New Zealand, but both developed late, and slowly. 21. Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1793 (London: Longmans, Green, 1952), 1:4. India is the largest exception; even this is characterized by “mission creep” rather than clear intention. 22. Harlow, Founding of the Second British Empire, 20. 23. David Mackay, In the Wake of Cook: Exploration, Science and Empire, 1780–1801 (London: Croom Helm, 1985); Nigel Rigby, “The Politics and Pragmatics of Seaborne Plant Transportation, 1769–1805,” in Margarette Lincoln, ed., Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth Century (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1998), 10. 24. Cook, quoted in Kay, Natural History of the Hawaiian Islands, 400, 406. 25. Mackay, In the Wake of Cook; Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 12. 26. Arrell Morgan Gibson, Yankees in Paradise: The Pacific Basin Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 56; Ernest S. Dodge, Islands and Empires: Western Impact on the Pacific and East Asia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 104; Rigby, “Politics and Pragmatics of Seaborne Plant Transportation,” 82. 27. John Meares, Extracts from Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789, from China to the Northwest Coast of America, 2 vols. (Honolulu: Hawaiian Historical Society, 1916), appendix, 31–35. 28. Vancouver, Voyage of Discovery, 1:156, 158; 2:115. 29. Gibson, Yankees in Paradise; Richard J. Cleveland, Voyages of a Merchant Navigator, of the Days That Are Past, Compiled from the Journals and Letters of the Late Richard J. Cleveland, by H.W.S. Cleveland (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1886). 30. Mackay, In the Wake of Cook, 18, 125, 147; Harlow, Founding of the Second British Empire, 2:283, 287. 31. Douglas Oliver, Return to Tahiti: Bligh’s Second Breadfruit Voyage (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1988); Mackay, In the Wake of Cook. 32. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 162. 33. Louis de C. S. Freycinet, Hawaii in 1819: A Narrative Account by Louis Claude de Saulses de Freycinet, Pacific Anthropological Records, no. 26 (Honolulu: B. P. Bishop Museum, 1978), 20. 34. Dodge, Islands and Empires, 137–139. 35. Jacobus Boelen, A Merchant’s Perspective: Captain Jacobus Boelen’s Narrative of His Visit to Hawai‘i in 1828 (Honolulu: Hawaiian Historical Society, 1988), n32; Bradley, American Frontier in Hawaii, 19, n68; Cleveland, Voyages of a Merchant Navigator, 154, 204, 209. 36. John B. Whitman, An Account of the Sandwich Islands: The Hawaiian Journal of John B. Whitman, 1813–1815 (Honolulu: Topgallant/Peabody Museum, 1979), 20; Glynn Barrat, The Russian View of Honolulu, 1809–26 (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988), 76.

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37. Adelbert von Chamisso, A Voyage around the World with the Romanzov Exploring Expedition in the Years 1815–1818 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1986), 305. 38. Broughton, Voyage of Discovery, 69. 39. Oliver, Return to Tahiti, 95. 40. Broughton, Voyage of Discovery, 69; Oliver, Return to Tahiti, 89–90, 95, 256; George Hamilton, A Voyage round the World, in His Majesty’s Frigate Pandora: Performed under the Direction of Captain Edwards in the Years 1790, 1791, and 1792 (London: W. Phorson, 1793), 42, 56. 41. Dodge, Islands and Empires, 75. 42. William Ellis, “A Narrative of a Tour through Hawaii,” Hawaiian Gazette, 1917; Archibald Campbell, A Voyage round the World, from 1806 to 1812, 3rd. American ed. (1822; repr., Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1967). 43. Ebenezer Townsend Jr., Extract from the diary of Ebenezer Townsend, Jr., Supercargo of the Sealing Ship “Neptune” on Her Voyage to the South Pacific and Canton, Reprint no. 4 (Honolulu: Hawaiian Historical Society, n.d.); Lady Marnie Bassett, Realms and Islands, the World Voyage of Rose de Freycinet in the Corvette L’Uranie, 1817–1820, from Her Journal and Letters and the Reports of Louis de Saulces de Freycinet, Capitaine de Corvette (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 163; Ross H. Gast and Agnes Conrad, Don Francisco de Paula Marin (Honolulu: University Press of Hawai‘i, 1973), 83; Bradley, American Frontier in Hawaii, 38; Freycinet, Hawaii in 1819, 34, 50, 54, 94–95; Whitman, Account of the Sandwich Islands, 82; Stewart, Journal of a Residence in the Sandwich Islands, 113; Boelen, Merchant’s Perspective, 78. 44. Stewart, Journal of a Residence in the Sandwich Islands, 120. 45. Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World, during the Years 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806, and 1807 (New York: Kirk and Mercein, 1817), 134. 46. John Ledyard, A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean; and in Quest of a North-West Passage, between Asia and America, Performed in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778 and 1779 (Hartford: Nathaniel Patten, 1783). 47. Bradley, American Frontier in Hawaii, 22. 48. Chamisso, Voyage around the World with the Romanzov, 186. 49. Dodge, Islands and Empires, 57. 50. Mackay, In the Wake of Cook, 41, 44. 51. Samuel Shaw, The Journals of Major Samuel Shaw, the First American Consul at Canton, with a Life of the Author, by Josiah Quincy (Boston: Wm. Crosby and H. P. Nicholas, 1847), 171, 298. 52. Ibid., 350; Gibson, Yankees in Paradise, 69, 94, 101. 53. Cleveland, Voyages of a Merchant Navigator, 9. 54. John Boit, Log of the Union: John Boit’s Remarkable Voyage to the Northwest Coast and around the World, 1794–1796 (Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 1981), 45. 55. Gibson, Yankees in Paradise, 155. 56. Broughton, Voyage of Discovery, 41, 44; Meares, Extracts from Voyages, 13, 25, 39. 57. Langsdorff, Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World; Whitman, An Account of the Sandwich Islands, 31, 53; Freycinet, Hawaii in 1819, 87. 58. Once the Hawaiian Islands were united under his rule, Kamehameha set his sights on continued expansion, at various points intending to invade Bora Bora and to ally with

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the Pomares of Tahiti by marriage; Ellis, Narrative of a Tour through Hawaii. Several other Hawaiian chiefs actually mounted expeditions of conquest or trade. Boki, for some time governor of O‘ahu, sailed to the New Hebrides in search of sandalwood and was never heard from again. Marin’s son George Marin mounted a trading expedition to the Wallis Islands, where he assumed the throne after the king was killed in battle; he in turn was killed. 59. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 1:60. 60. Dodge, Islands and Empires, 60; Peter Corney, Voyages in the Northern Pacific: Narrative of Several Trading Voyages from 1813 to 1818 (Honolulu: T. G. Thrum, 1896). 61. Oliver, Return to Tahiti, 31–33. 62. Lissa K. Wadewitz, “The Nature of Borders: Salmon and Boundaries in the Puget Sound/Georgia Basin” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2004). 63. Adelman and Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders. 64. Shaw, Journals of Major Samuel Shaw, 305. 65. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 1:30. 66. Daws, Shoal of Time, 59–60. 67. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 1:58. 68. Barrat, Russian View of Honolulu, 1809–26, 77. 69. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 1:83–84. 70. Jean Fortune Hobbs, Hawaii, A Pageant of the Soil (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1935), 23. 71. Chamisso, Voyage around the World with the Romanzov, 183. 72. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 2:167. 73. Ibid., 1:90. 74. Ibid., 1:4. 75. Richard A. Greer, “Notes on Early Land Titles and Tenure in Hawaii,” Hawaiian Journal of History 30 (1996): 32; Boelen, Merchant’s Perspective, xxvii; Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 1:63, 117–118. 76. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 2:167. 77. Ibid., 1:81, 105. 78. Letter from missionary Artemis Bishop, quoted in Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 1:81. 79. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 1:115. 80. Ibid., 1:143. 81. Ibid., 1:27, 33, 111. 82. Gibson, Yankees in Paradise, 7. 83. L. A. Henke, A Survey of Livestock in Hawaii, Research Publication no. 5 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 1929), 21. 84. Rossie Frost and Locky Frost, “The King’s Bullock Catcher,“ Hawaiian Journal of History 11 (1978): 176. 85. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 1:164; 2:139. 86. Thomas S. Dye, “Wealth in Old Hawai‘i: Good Year Economics and the Rise of Pristine States,“ Archaeology in Oceania 49 (2014): 71. 87. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 1:114. 88. Ibid., 1:82, 106. 89. Gibson, Yankees in Paradise, 163–164.

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90. Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 28. 91. Vernon Charles Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization on Molokai (Master’s thesis, University of Hawai‘i, 1958), 127. 92. Ellis, Narrative of a Tour through Hawaii, 23. 93. Gerrit Parmele Judd, Puleoo: The Story of Molokai (Honolulu: Porter, 1936), 7–8. 94. Missionary Herald no. 32, 1836, in “American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,” Quarterly Letter to the Children of the Sabbath Schools, n.s., supplement to Missionary Herald (Boston, 1862), 295. 95. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 1:120–124. 96. Letter from Hitchcock, dated November 1835, Missionary Herald, no. 32, 1836. 97. Kamakau, Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii, 342; Dorothy B. Barrère, The King’s Mahele: The Awardees and Their Lands (Hawaii: D. B. Barrere, 1994), 132–135, tells of the jockeying that could go on between earlier ahupua‘a grantees and those given land by the new king: the Molokai ahupua‘a of Kumimi had been given, in 1827, to the Tahitian convert to Christianity Kahikona; in 1840, by order of the king, the land was given to Kiwini (John Stevenson). When Kahikona refused to cede, he was arrested and clapped in irons by Ilae Napohaku, the royal tax collector, and held for forty days until freed by the intercession of William Richards. See, by way of comparison, Dorothy Barrere and Marshall Sahlins, “A Tahitian in the History of Hawaii: The Journal of Kahikona,” Hawaiian Journal of History 23 (1989). 98. Charles Wilkes, Voyage round the World: Embracing the Principal Events of the Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1851), 275–276. 99. Estimates of Hawaii‘s precontact population have varied widely. Recent scholarship has tended to settle on four hundred thousand as a likely number, as in Kurashima and Kirch, “Geospatial Modeling of Pre-contact Hawaiian Production Systems,” 3663; Robert C. Schmitt, and Eleanor C. Nordyke, “Death in Hawaii: The Epidemics of 1848–1849,” Hawaiian Journal of History 35 (2001). Mortality statistics for Hawai‘i are unreliable: usually based on just a handful of thirdhand accounts. Different scholars disagree on the severity of the legendary ma‘i ‘oku‘u of 1804 (the “squatting disease”); some claim it was the worst epidemic in Hawaiian history, taking possibly fifteen thousand lives. Kirch and Sahlins believe that the toll of the oku‘u sickness was probably exaggerated. Anahulu 1:44. 100. Gilbert F. Mathison, Narrative of a Visit to Brazil, Chile, Peru, and the Sandwich Islands during the Years 1821 and 1822 (London: Charles Knight, 1825); Mr. Richards’s letter to Wilkes, quoted in Hobbs, Hawaii: A Pageant of the Soil, 20. 101. Greer, “Notes on Early Land Titles,” 32. 102. Hiram Bingham, A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands (Hartford: Hezekiah Huntington, 1849), 60. 103. Robert L. Cushing, “The Beginnings of Sugar Production in Hawai‘i,” Hawaiian Journal of History 19 (1985): 29–30. 104. Gibson, Yankees in Paradise, 250–252. 105. Greer, “Notes on Early Land Titles”; Riley M. Moffat and Gary L. Fitzpatrick, Surveying the Mahele: Mapping the Hawaiian Land Revolution (Honolulu: Editions Limited, 1995), 41: the Bill of Rights of 1839 contained language guaranteeing “Protection” for the land and property “of all the people,” though no mechanism was set out to do so. 106. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 2:130.

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107. Jonathon Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, Dismembering Lahui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 27. 108. Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 331; Osorio, Dismembering Lahui, 31–32. 109. Jon J. Chinen, The Great Mahele: Hawaii’s Land Division of 1848 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawai‘i, 1985). 110. Moffat and Fitzpatrick, Surveying the Mahele, 49. 111. Osorio, Dismembering Lahui, 46. 112. Chinen, Great Mahele, 12–13; Moffat and Fitzpatrick, Surveying the Mahele, 50–51. 113. Kuleana counts vary: the numbers cited are Marion Kelly’s; others place the number of awards as high as 9,337; Lilikala Kame‘eleihiwa tallied 14,195 claims and 8,421 awards. Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 295. 114. Curtis Jere Lyons, “A History of the Hawaiian Government Survey, with Notes on Land Matters in Hawaii: Appendixes 3 and 4 of Surveyor’s Report for 1902,” Hawaiian Gazette, 1903, 40; Greer, “Notes on Early Land Titles,” 44; Moffat and Fitzpatrick, Surveying the Mahele, 50–51; Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, v.1, 9. 115. Moffat and Fitzpatrick, Surveying the Mahele, 33. 116. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 2:118. 117. Moffat and Fitzpatrick, Surveying the Mahele, 153. 118. Greer, “Notes on Early Land Titles,“ 48–49. 119. Lyons, “History of the Hawaiian Government Survey,” 34. 120. Moffat and Fitzpatrick, Surveying the Mahele, 38. 121. Lyons, “History of the Hawaiian Government Survey,” 38. 122. Moffat and Fitzpatrick, Surveying the Mahele, 48. 123. Lyons, “History of the Hawaiian Government Survey,” 36 (italics mine). C HA P T E R 3 . A G O O D L A N D : M O L O KA I AFTER THE MAHELE, 1845–1869

1. G. P. Judd, Puleoo, 10. 2. Ibid., 10. 3. George Washington Bates, Sandwich Island Notes, by A. Haole (New York: Harper and Bros., 1854), 256–259. 4. Bates reported that one hundred pupils were instructed in the mission school in Hawaiian and English. The government school he reported to be in “thriving condition.” He listed the cash contributions of Molokai residents to support the missionary as $3,458.08 from 1845–1852 and $1,389.63 from 1847–1853 to support other Pacific missions. Ibid., 260–265. 5. Ibid., 261. 6. Ibid., 269. 7. Ibid., 273. 8. R. E. Warner, “The Role of Introduced Diseases in the Extinction of the Endemic Hawaiian Avifauna,” Condor 70 (1968): 101–120; Jon Beadell et al., “Global Phylogeographic Limits of Hawaii’s Avian Malaria,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, December 7, 2006. 9. Bates, Sandwich Island Notes, 274–277.

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10. Ibid., 280–281. 11. Ibid., 282–289. 12. Jules Remy, Ka moolelo Hawaii, histoire de l’archipel Havaiien (Paris: Librairie A. Franck, 1862). 13. Jules Remy, L’Ile de Molokai avant la leproserie (Arcis-sur-Aube, France: L. Frémont, 1893—extrait de La geographie) (All translations from French are mine). 14. I have tried to correlate Remy’s lists of plants—with names given in Hawaiian where he or his informants had one, or in French, according to his knowledge of taxonomy—with modern botanical usage and with current understanding of the sequence and extent of plant introductions into the Hawaiian Islands. 15. Remy, L’Ile de Molokai avant la leproserie, 4. 16. Remy calls him only “the king’s farmer.” Ibid., 4–5. 17. Ibid., 6. 18. The last two are naturalized Polynesian introductions. Kenneth M. Nagata, “Early Plant Introductions in Hawai‘i,” Hawaiian Journal of History 19 (1985). 19. At Hālawa, Remy identified “akaakaa” [perhaps akoko, Euphorbia sp. or akia, Wikstroemia sp.]; cyanea lobelias, mucuna [ka‘e‘e, M. gigantea]; wikstroemia [akia]; santalum, “un Viscum sur les lama” [Diospyros sp.]; ohelo [Vaccinium]; pittosporum [hoawa]; kokio [Hibiscus sp.]; manona [Gouldia sp.]; ahakea [Bobea sp.]; “awiari” [kadua?]; ma‘oheohe [probably maohauhele, Hibiscus breckenridgei ]; phytolacca [P. brachystachys]; lycopodium [wawae‘iole, a club moss]; and “several” peperomia [alawainui]. Remy, L’Ile de Molokai avant la leproserie, 8. 20. At Pelekunu he listed these plant species: “Kadua, Labordea, Peperomia, Clermontia, Lobelia, Scaevola, Sapota, Lysimachia, Cyrtandra, Plantago ligneux, Gunnera, Akaakaa, etc., etc.” Ibid., 11. 21. Ibid., 14. 22. In Kauhako crater, he found: “violette frutescente, cassia, neraudia, une caryophyllee, euphorbes ligneuses, bananiers, jambosiers, daphne, phyllanthus, cassytha, ohe, bancoulier, erythrina, halapepe, kakalaioa, ilima, sonchus, etc.” Ibid., 14–15. 23. Ibid., 15–16. 24. Remy’s list of plants seen climbing up the Kalaupapa pali: Scaevola arborescente [naupaka kuahiwi]; makou [describes on p. 14 as “une sorte d’ache (apium) odorante dans toutes ses parties, a grandes feuilles, a gros fruits, a rhizome tubereux, ramifie, comestible, regarde comme un medicament precieux dans les maladies de l’enfance”]; Gouldia, Bobea, maua [Xylosma sandwicensis]; une grande caryophyllee, ohe [Reynoldsia sp.]; puaalualu [probably Hibiscus kokio]; awikiwiki [Canavalia galeata]; lobelioids, artemisia, kului [Nototrichum sandwicense]; achyranthes [Kopiko coffea?]; haa [“euph arborescente”]; mahoe [Alectron macrococcum]; and so on and at the crest: “cyathodes [pukiawe], dodonaea [a‘alii], osteomeles [ulei], myoporum [naio], scaevola [naupaka], etc.” Ibid., 16. 25. Rémy called Kukui [Aleurites molucana] “bancouliers”: bancoulier = Aleurite = 1835 Plante Oléagineuse (Euphorbiacées) d’Extrème-Orient, dont une espèce est le bancoulier, l’autre arbre à huile (Source: Dictionaire Petit Robert). 26. The coastal mat vegetation consisted of “a portulaca [‘ihi], heliotrope [hinahina, Heliotropium anomalum], gnaphalium [‘ena‘ena], a scaevola [naupaka] . . . and ohai [Sesba-

notes

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nia tomentosa], covered “vast spaces” with its “superb red flowers.” Remy, L’Ile de Molokai avant la leproserie, 18. 27. Ibid., 18. 28. He listed “tephrosia, waltheria, argemone, cassythia, plumbago.” Ibid., 19. 29. He saw “ulei, phyllanthus, violette nouvelle, nau [gardenia?], wiliwili, un kauwila (rhamnee), un alani [rutacee], kokio, aulu et keahi (deux sapotacees), une bobea?, cyathodes, awikiwiki, etc., etc.” Ibid., 20–21. 30. Ibid., 23–24. 31. There is confusion among botanists between a native and an alien oxalis. 32. Henke, Survey of Livestock in Hawaii, 22; G. P. Judd, Puleoo, 8. 33. “Appropriation Bill for 1854,” Polynesian, August 19, 1854. 34. Hobbs, Hawaii: A Pageant of the Soil, 46–47, 60. 35. I use Dorothy Barrere’s tabulation of Mahele awards to ali‘i and konohiki, in Dorothy B. Barrère, The King’s Mahele: The Awardees and Their Lands (Hawai‘i: D. B. Barrere, 1994). The historical ahupua‘a shift in number, depending on sources: over time, some lapsed, disappeared, were incorporated into others, or became ‘ilis of others; I follow Kame‘elehiwa’s hierarchy and nomenclature here to describe the Mahele land distribution, as well as her genealogy. Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 227–285. 36. Lilikala Kame‘eleihiwa wrote that these ahupua‘a were Kalaupapa, Kahanui, and Mapulehu, based on citation of a letter from Nama‘au to G. P. Judd, December 15, 1847. Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 238. But this is contradicted by Land Commission documents of actual awards: the last two ahupua‘a have other awardee konohiki. Some confusion remains. 37. Barrere, King’s Mahele, 23. 38. Hobbs, Hawaii: A Pageant of the Soil, 98, 170. 39. Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 27. 40. Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 295–296. 41. Hobbs, Hawaii: A Pageant of the Soil, 99. 42. Kuykendall, Hawaiian Kingdom, 2:137–138. 43. M. L. Napihelua, “‘Uala! ‘Uala! ‘Uala Kalaupapa,” Ka hale Hawaii, March 4, 1857. 44. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 131; Carol A. MacLennan, “Foundations of Sugar’s Power: Early Maui Plantations, 1840–1860,” Hawaiian Journal of History 29 (1995). 45. Charles S. Meyer, Meyer and Molokai (Alden, IA: Graphic-Agri Business, 1982). 46. Rhoda E. A. Hackler, R.W. Meyer Sugar Mill, Moloka‘i: Its History and Restoration (Molokai, HI: Molokai Museum and Cultural Center, 1989). 47. Meyer, Meyer and Molokai, 235. 48. Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 27. 49. G. P. Judd, Puleoo. 50. Meyer, Meyer and Molokai, 105. 51. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 1–2. 52. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 127. 53. Ibid., 128. 54. Polynesian (Honolulu), September 10, 1859.

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55. Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 23. 56. G. P. Judd, Puleoo, 10. 57. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 80. 58. “Naiwa, Kahanui, Kipu, Manawainui: Meyers lease for pasturage, also pasturage leases of Edwin Jones, & J.W. Austin; ‘and Hitchcock holds no lease but has cattle and occupies land for which rent is due.’ Kapualei, Kumueli, Wawaia: adjoining each other. Native rents. 1/2 of kamanoni—small, no natives living on it. [LCA 5382] Makanalua: native rents House lot on Ohia, sold to a native, unpaid. Fornander has endorsed a note for it.” Barrère, King’s Mahele, 23. 59. Osorio, Dismembering Lahui, 55. 60. Ibid., 56. 61. Ibid., 76, 78; Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 2:167. 62. Osorio, Dismembering Lahui, 54. 63. Ibid., 54. 64. Ibid., 55. 65. Ibid., 73. 66. MacLennan, “Foundations of Sugar’s Power,” 43–44. 67. MacLennan, “Hawai‘i Turns to Sugar: The Rise of Plantation Centers, 1860–1880,” Hawaiian Journal of History 31 (1997). 68. Ibid., 1. 69. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 2:118. 70. G. P. Judd, Puleoo, 17. 71. “Marine Journal,” Polynesian, November 15, 1862. 72. Polynesian, February 23, 1861; April 4, 1863; Hawaiian Gazette, September 16, 1868. 73. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 45–46; G. P. Judd, Puleoo, 10; Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 79. 74. Gavan Daws, Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1973), 74; Ted Gugelyk and Milton Bloombaum, The Separating Sickness: Ma‘i Hooka‘awale (Honolulu: Separating Sickness Foundation, 1996), 6–7. 75. Daws, Holy Man, 210. 76. Gugelyk and Bloombaum, Separating Sickness, 9, 26–28. 77. Christopher Hofgaard, “The Story of Piilani,” in The Kaua‘i Papers (Lihue, HI: Kaua‘i Historical Society, 1991). 78. Meyer, Meyer and Molokai, 69. 79. Ibid., 42. 80. Ibid., 26. 81. Ibid., 71. 82. Only one kuleana sale is listed in the Bureau of Conveyance records, although twenty-nine kuleana grants are listed in the Mahele records—what happened is not clear. 83. Gugelyk and Bloombaum, Separating Sickness, 22. 84. Ibid., Separating Sickness, 67. 85. “Marshall’s Sale,” Polynesian, July 20, 1861.

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86. Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 307. 87. J. H. Kanepu‘u, “Travelling About on Molokai,” Au okoa, September 5, 1867 (translated typescript in the B. P. Bishop Museum library). All the following quotes and observations from pp. 1–12. 88. Isabella L. Bird, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands (1881; repr., Honolulu: Mutual, 1998), 186. C HA P T E R 4 . T H E B O NA N Z A HO R I Z O N : M O L O KA I I N T H E SU G A R E R A , 1 8 7 0 – 1 8 9 3

1. Alfons L. Korn, ed., News from Molokai: Letters between Peter Kaeo and Queen Emma 1873–1876 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1976), 69. 2. Emma was a daughter of John Young, as was Ka‘eo‘s mother, Gini Lahilahi. After the death of her husband Alexander Liholiho (King Kamehameha IV) in 1863, she was dowager queen until her death in 1885. Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 269–288; Barbara Bennett Peterson, ed., Notable Women of Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1984), 188–122. 3. Bureau of Conveyances records; Ka‘eo sold the ahupua‘a of Pua‘ahala to Kunuiakea in March 1863. He had inherited in 1857 at the death of his uncle, Keoni Ana, Queen Emma’s brother and King Kauikeaouli’s second cousin and also interior minister from 1846–1854. Ka‘eo’s mother was also the king’s mistress and gave birth to twin boys from him. Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, 269. 4. Korn, News from Molokai, 107. 5. Ibid., 126. 6. Ibid., 72. 7. Bird, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands, 296. 8. Ibid., 176. 9. Ibid., 308. 10. Ibid., 177. 11. Mark Twain, Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands (Honolulu: Mutual, 1990), 31. 12. Bird, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands, 301–302. 13. Meyer, Meyer and Molokai, 71–72. 14. Ibid., throughout; Moffat and Fitzpatrick, Surveying the Mahele, 57. 15. Meyer, Meyer and Molokai, 57–58. 16. Ibid., 42–43. 17. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 128; Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 23; G. P. Judd, Puleoo, 10; Meyer, Meyer and Molokai, 29. 18. Meyer, Meyer and Molokai, 95. 19. Menzies, Hawaii Nei, 79. 20. Bates, Sandwich Island Notes, 172–173. 21. Tin-Yuke Char, The Sandalwood Mountains: Readings and Stories of the Early Chinese in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1975), 54; H. A. Wadsworth, “A Historical Summary of Irrigation in Hawaii,” Hawaiian Planters’ Record 27, no. 3 (1933), 137.

222

notes

22. Wadsworth, “Historical Summary of Irrigation in Hawaii,” 137. 23. Bradley, American Frontier in Hawaii, 240. 24. Wadsworth, “Historical Summary of Irrigation in Hawaii,” 138. 25. MacLennan, “Foundations of Sugar’s Power,” 34. 26. Ibid., 36. 27. Ibid., 49–51. 28. MacLennan, “Hawai‘i Turns to Sugar,” 101. 29. Bird, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands, 185. 30. Daws, Shoal of Time, 205. 31. MacLennan, “Hawai‘i Turns to Sugar,” 102. 32. Ibid., 98. 33. Wadsworth, “Historical Summary of Irrigation in Hawaii,” 140–141. 34. All facts in this paragraph from Kuykendall, Hawaiian Kingdom 3:59–66; Michael Dougherty, To Steal a Kingdom (Waimanalo, HI: Island Style Press, 1992), 135–181. 35. John Wesley Coulter and Chee Kwon Chun, Chinese Rice Farmers in Hawaii, Research Publication no. 16 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 1937), 9–22. By 1892 about two hundred rice plantations, ranging from one to three hundred acres and occupying collectively sixteen thousand acres, produced twenty-one million pounds. For comparison, figures for the year 1899 give rice production worth $1,562,051 from 9,130 acres versus a sugar crop of $18,762,996 from 65,687 acres. (No reason is given for the diminution of rice acreage.) 36. MacLennan, “Hawai’i Turns to Sugar,” 115. 37. “A Visit to Hālawa,“ Ka lahui Hawaii, August 2, 1877 (translated typescript in the B. P. Bishop Museum library). 38. Meyer, Meyer and Molokai, 96–100; Hackler, R. W. Meyer Sugar Mill, 11. 39. Hackler, R. W. Meyer Sugar Mill, 12. 40. Meyer, Meyer and Molokai, 99–100. 41. G. P. Judd, Puleoo, 10. 42. Ibid., 2, 12. 43. Wadsworth, “Historical Summary of Irrigation in Hawaii,” 132. 44. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 80. 45. S. P. K. Malihinihele, “Hina’s Windy Island,” Ka Lahui Hawaii, August 31, 1876 (translated typescript in the B. P. Bishop Museum library). 46. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 75; G. P. Judd, Puleoo, 12. 47. Newspaper clipping in the State of Hawai‘i Survey Office, file fol. no. 65. 48. Meyer, Meyer and Molokai, 255. 49. Newspaper clipping in the State of Hawai‘i Survey Office, file fol. no. 65. 50. Bureau of Conveyances records. 51. From Abraham Fornander, An Account of the Polynesian Race: Its Origins and Migrations, vol. 2 (London: Trubner, 1880), 73. 52. Probably the same person as Kamaipelekane, former konohiki and government official. The records of the Bureau of Conveyances and other records list both names as Molokai konohiki contemporaneously. 53. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 2:166–167.

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54. Barrere, King’s Mahele, 29–30. 55. Meyer, Meyer and Molokai, 31–32. 56. The Bureau of Conveyances records list W. S. Akana and Co. (Wong Sun) and Wong Leung Co. purchasing land at Moanui, the latter mortgaged by Charles Reed Bishop. 57. Bureau of Conveyances records. 58. Evening (Daily) Bulletin, July 31, 1889; Hawaiian Gazette, May 11, 1886; July 27, 1886; November 15, 1887; April 10, 1888; October 2, 1888; June 11, 1889; July 2, 1889; August 6, 1889; August 13, 1889; September 3, 1889; December 3, 1889; January 7, 1890; January 21, 1890; January 20, 1891; June 30, 1891; November 17, 1891; December 19, 1893; May 22, 1894. 59. The census of 1872 gave Hawai‘i, 16,000; Maui, 12,334; Molokai and Lana‘i, 2,697; O‘ahu, 20,670; Kaua‘i, 4,960; the “recent census” gave Hawai‘i, 17,034; Maui, 12,109; Molokai and Lana‘i, 2,795, O‘ahu, 20,236; Kaua‘i, 5,634. Hawaiian Gazette, January 28, 1880. 60. Evening Bulletin, May 5, 1884. 61. Evening Bulletin, October 19, 1886. 62. Evening Bulletin, August 15, 1889. 63. Hawaiian Gazette, November 3, 1891. 64. James N. K. Keola, “A Trip to the Land of Molokai-nui-a-Hina,” Puka la Kukoa, May 22, 1893 (translated typescript in the B. P. Bishop Museum library). 65. From a letter to the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, July 27, 1867, describing the hills above Lihue, Kaua‘i: “The country was undergoing the process of denudation. Non-resident landlords, large landholders, have in most cases leased out their lands by long leases to vandal-like tenants, who are making the most of their time and their bargain by cutting down the forests, and supplying the sugar mills, shipping, and even Honolulu with wood. . . . Sixteen years ago, where beautiful kukui groves gladdened the scene, is now a barren plain.” Quoted in MacLennan, Hawai‘i Turns to Sugar, 107. 66. Keola, “Trip to the Land of Molokai-nui-a-Hina.” 67. James Keola, “Molokai: A Local Tourist’s Impressions,” Hawaiian Gazette, June 13, 1893. 68. Keola, “Trip to the Land of Molokai-nui-a-Hina.” 69. Keola, “Molokai: A Local Tourist’s Impressions.” 70. Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 72. 71. Ibid., 71. 72. “The Spring of ‘Olo‘olo, Molokai,” Ka nupepa kuokoa, May 4, 1922 (translated typescript in the B. P. Bishop Museum library). 73. Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 84–85. 74. Southwick Phelps, A Regional Study of Molokai, Hawaii (typescript, 1938, in University of Hawai‘i library), 15: “Intermittent storms ran into most of the ponds and sediment would thus be deposited, especially in times of heavy and sudden rainfall brought by the kona storm. To keep this from filling the pond, a weighted bamboo rake was used. This kope ohe was towed behind a canoe and the collected matter taken to the sluice. At ebb tide, while the fish were kept in by nets or the gate, the mud was swept into the auwai and so carried out.” 75. “Spring of ‘Olo‘olo, Molokai.” 76. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 46; Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 77, 86.

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notes C HA P T E R 5 . A B IG G E R , B E T T E R HAWA I ‘I : M A K I N G A N A M E R IC A N M O L O KA I , 1 8 9 3 – 1 9 5 7

1. Dougherty, To Steal A Kingdom, 143. 2. Ibid., 141–175. 3. C. M. Hyde, “Rambling Notes on Molokai: Descriptions of Places Recently Visited,” Hawaiian Gazette, September 17, 1895. 4. Wadsworth, “Historical Summary of Irrigation in Hawaii,” 145. 5. Ibid., 146. 6. Worster, Rivers of Empire, 84–88. 7. Wadsworth, “Historical Summary of Irrigation in Hawaii,” 146–147. 8. James D. Schuyler and G. F. Allardt, Culture of Sugar Cane: Report on Water Supply for Irrigation on the Honouliuli and Kahuku Ranchos, Island of O‘ahu, Hawaiian Islands (Oakland, CA: Jordan Arnold, 1889). 9. Wadsworth, “Historical Summary of Irrigation in Hawaii,” 146–151. 10. The published sale notice gave the estimated number of animals on the ranch lands as 4,500 cattle, 14,500 sheep, 170 horses, and 4,000 goats. “Sale of Molokai Ranch,” Hawaiian Gazette, January 11, 1898; G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 2. 11. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 86. 12. Hawaiian Star, January 28, 1898. 13. “Will Develop Molokai—McCorriston’s Plantation to Be Started,” Hawaiian Star, May 26, 1897. 14. “A Neglected Island,” Hawaiian Star, April 24, 1897. 15. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 2. George Cooke, son of the original American Sugar Company shareholder, wrote that “one reason for its formation at this time was that after annexation” no corporation owning over one thousand acres could be formed. Whether they believed this or not, no such restriction was ever enforced. 16. G. P. Judd, Puleoo, 11–12. 17. G. P. Cooke, Sincerely, Sophie, 72. 18. Hawaiian Gazette, May 20, 1898. 19. Waldemar Lindgren, The Water Resources of Molokai, Water Supply Paper no. 77 (Washington, DC: US Geological Survey, 1902). 20. Ibid., 20–21. 21. Ibid., 21. 22. Ibid., 26–30. 23. Ibid., 38–41. 24. Ibid., 49. 25. Ibid., 50. 26. Ibid., 50. 27. G. P. Judd, Puleoo, 10. 28. Bureau of Conveyances records. 29. Lindgren, Water Resources of Molokai, 26. 30. The Independent, October 14, 1899, reported that four Hawaiians had leased lands to the company. 31. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 87.

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32. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 87–8, 130–131. 33. All information about the Kamalo Sugar Company from Kamalo Sugar Company, “Record Book of Paid-Up Stock, 9-13-1899 to 8-25-1903,” Archives of Hawai‘i. 34. Frederick Haynes Newell, Hawaii, Its Natural Resources and Opportunities for HomeMaking, US 60th Congress, 2nd sess., Senate doc. 668 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909). 35. Ibid., 10–11. 36. Ibid., 24. 37. Ibid., 36–37. 38. Ibid., 42–45. 39. Ibid., 46–47. 40. Ibid., 39. 41. Ralph S. Hosmer, “Some Aspects of the Forest Question in Hawaii,” Hawaiian Planters’ Record, 1910, 86–87. 42. Wadsworth, “Historical Summary of Irrigation in Hawaii,” 151. 43. Michael M. O’Shaughnessy, “Irrigation Works in the Hawaiian Islands,” Journal of Electricity, Power, and Gas, December 1, 1906, 459–465. 44. Lindgren, Water Resources of Molokai, 51–55. 45. Kuykendall, Hawaiian Kingdom, 2:70–72, 180. 46. William Hillebrand, “The Relation of Forestry to Agriculture,” Hawaiian Planters’ Record, March 1920 (extract from Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society at its Sixth Annual Meeting, July 1856.) 47. Russell K. LeBarron, “The History of Forestry in Hawaii: From the Beginning through World War II,” reprinted from Aloha Aina 1, no. 2 (April 1970) and 1, no. 4 (June 1970) (Honolulu: Department of Land and Natural Resources, 1970), 12. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid.: “The HSPA was a leading influence in the adoption of the legislation and for several decades continued to be an active supporter of forestry, especially on private lands.” 50. F. L. C., “Decadence of Hawaiian Forests,” Thrum’s Hawaiian Almanac and Annual, 1875, 19–20. 51. Hawaiian Gazette, August 21, 1894; Hawaiian Star, April 15, 1895. 52. Joseph Marsden, “Diversified Industries,” Hawaiian Annual, 1893, 94–97. 53. Thomas Thrum (unsigned), “Bureau of Agriculture and Forestry,” Thrum’s Hawaiian Almanac and Annual, 1893, 93–94; Charles Sheldon Judd, Forestry in Hawaii (Honolulu: Division of Forestry of the Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry, 1938); “Retrospect for 1921,” Hawaiian Annual, 1922, 140, 169. 54. Thomas Thrum (unsigned), “Honolulu’s Battle with Bubonic Plague,” “Threatened Plague,” and “Destruction of ‘Chinatown,’” Hawaiian Annual, 1901, 97–105, 168–9, 171; Alfred Koebele, “Hawaii’s Forest Foes,” Hawaiian Almanac, 1900, 97. 55. Thrum, “Bureau of Agriculture and Forestry,” 93. 56. Koebele, “Hawaii’s Forest Foes,” 90–97. 57. F. L. C., “Decadence of Hawaiian Forests.” 58. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 62. 59. “Proclamation,” Maui News, February 1, 1913.

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60. “Create New Forest Reserves,” Honolulu Star Bulletin, August 26, 1912. 61. LeBarron, “History of Forestry in Hawaii,” 12. 62. Walter M. Giffard, “Some Observations on Hawaiian Forests and Forest Cover in their Relation to Water Supply,” Hawaiian Planters’ Record, 1913, 532. 63. Ibid., 517; Giffard, “An Appeal for Action on Forestry Work,” Hawaiian Planters’ Record, 1918. 64. C. S. Judd, Forestry in Hawaii, figures cover 1919–1937. 65. E. L. Caum and W. W. G. Moir, “Native Canes on Molokai,” Hawaiian Planters’ Record 24 (1921). 66. Constance Endicott Hartt, ed., Harold Lloyd Lyon, Hawaiian Sugar Botanist (Honolulu: Harold L. Lyon Arboretum, University of Hawai‘i, 1980). 67. J. P. Martin, “Molokai Cane Importation Project,” Hawaiian Planters’ Record 35 (1931). 68. Harold Lloyd Lyon, “Forestry on O‘ahu,” Hawaiian Planters’ Record 31 (1927), 288. 69. Harold Lloyd Lyon, “The Forest Disease on Maui,” Hawaiian Planters’ Record, 1909. 70. Harold Lloyd Lyon, “Some Observations on the Forest Problems of Hawaii,” Hawaiian Planters’ Record 21 (1919): 290–291. 71. Lyon, “Fig Trees for Hawaiian Forests,” Hawaiian Planters’ Record 26 (1922): 71. 72. Ibid., 78. 73. Lyon, “Some Observations on the Forest Problems of Hawaii,” 293. 74. Harold Lloyd Lyon, “Letter on Forestry from Lyon to Agee,” July 23, 1923, in Hartt, Harold Lloyd Lyon, Hawaiian Sugar Botanist. 75. L. W. Bryan, “Twenty-Five Years of Forestry Work on the Island of Hawaii,” Hawaiian Planters’ Record 51 (1947); LeBarron, “History of Forestry in Hawaii,” 13. 76. Hartt, Harold Lloyd Lyon, Hawaiian Sugar Botanist. 77. Lyon, “Some Observations on the Forest Problems of Hawaii,” 295. 78. Ibid., 297. 79. Lyon, “Fig Trees for Hawaiian Forests,” 86. 80. Lyon, “Forestry on O‘ahu,” 284; and verbatim, Lyon, “Letter on Forestry from Lyon to Agee,” 48. 81. Roger G. Skolmen, Plantings on the Forest Reserves of Hawaii, 1910–1960 (Honolulu: Institute of Pacific Islands Forestry, Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, US Forest Service, [1980?]); Robert E. Nelson and Philip R. Wheeler, Forest Resources of Hawaii—1961 (Honolulu: State of Hawai‘i Forestry Division; Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, US Forest Service, 1963); Nelson, A Record of Forest Plantings in Hawaii (Berkeley, CA: US Forest Service Res. Bull PSW-1, Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, 1965). 82. Bryan, “Twenty-Five Years of Forestry Work,” 8. 83. Skolmen, Plantings on the Forest Reserves of Hawaii, ii. 84. Trees were planted in the Molokai Forest Reserve in the mauka portions of the ahupua‘a of Pala‘au, Makakupaia, Kamiloloa, Kapa‘akea, Kahanui, Kawela, and Pu‘uohoku and outside of the reserve on the Ho‘olehua homesteads, the Puko‘o nursery, Kamalo, Waikolu, Kaunakakai, Kaulahuki, Keopukaloa, and Kalamaula. Michael G. Buck, Multiresource Forest Statistics for Molokai, Hawaii (Portland: US Forest Service, US Department of Agriculture, 1986).]

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85. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 21, 146. 86. Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 28. 87. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 63. 88. Frank Richardson, “The Status of Native Land Birds on Molokai, Hawaiian Islands,” Pacific Science 3 (July 1949). 89. LeBarron, “History of Forestry in Hawaii,” 12. 90. Robert E. Nelson, The USDA Forest Service in Hawaii: The First 20 years, 1957–1977 (Berkeley, CA: Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, 1989). 91. Lyon, “Sugar—the Foundation of All Progress on Earth,” December 1940, in Hartt, Harold Lloyd Lyon, Hawaiian Sugar Botanist. 92. Otto Degener, “Contribution from Otto Degener,” in Hartt, Harold Lloyd Lyon, Hawaiian Sugar Botanist, 39–40. 93. In 1983, the total forested area on Molokai was 163,211 acres, 71 percent of it privately held. Of the total, 27 percent is in forest reserves, and of this, 47 percent is government owned, 42 percent is private, and the remaining 11 percent is held by the Hawaiian Homes Commission. The two major forest types are kiawe and ohia, each covering 33,000 acres. Eighty-three percent of kiawe forest is private, while 65 percent of ohia forest is private. Guava and kukui occupy 20 percent of the remaining forest reserve lands. Timberland occupies 14 percent of the forest reserve land (23,494 acres), including 2,411 acres of established forest plantations, 72 percent of which are in the forest reserves. The most common species are eucalypts (covering 1,159 acres, or 48 percent of the timberland area) and pines (covering 756 acres, or 31 percent of the timberland area). Eighty percent of eucalyptus sawtimber is E. robusta. Of the remainder of the island, 38,751 acres are covered in grass, and agriculture occupies 18,325 acres. Buck, Multiresource Forest Inventory of Molokai. 94. Skolmen, Plantings on the Forest Reserves of Hawaii, iii. C HA P T E R 6 . F R OM L O N E LY I SL E T O F R I E N D LY I SL E : E C O N OM IC ST RU G G L E S I N T H E T W E N T I E T H A N D T W E N T Y- F I R ST C E N T U R I E S A N D T H E F U T U R E O F “ T H E M O S T HAWA I IA N I SL A N D”

1. George K. Kane, “My Eyes Have Seen Puko‘o and Wailau, Molokai,” Ka nupepa o kuokoa, August 2, August 9, 1912 (translated typescript in the B. P. Bishop Museum library); Center for Oral History, Ualupue, Molokai: Oral Histories for the East End (Honolulu: Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawai‘i, 1991), 419; G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 106; John R. K. Clark, The Beaches of Maui County (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989), 93–94. 2. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilizationai, 88. 3. Kenneth Emory, “Windward Molokai: The Story of a Sampan Trip,” Mid-Pacific Magazine 12, no. 5 (1916): 443. 4. W. J. Coelho, “Ka Huakai Makaikai ia Molokai = A Trip to Molokai,” Ka nupepa o Kuokoa, July 6, 1922 (translated typescript in the B. P. Bishop Museum library). 5. Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 173.

228

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6. Farber, Ancient Hawaiian Fishponds, 22. 7. From the US Census 1930. Lucille Deloach, “Molokai: An Historical Overview,” in Henry T. Lewis, ed., Molokai Studies: Preliminary Research in Human Ecology (Honolulu: Dept. of Anthropology, University of Hawai‘i, 1970), 134. 8. Center for Oral History, Ualupue, Molokai, xxviii, 1. 9. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 89; Emory, “Windward Molokai.” 10. G. P. Judd, Puleoo, 17. 11. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 60. Twenty-two hundred of the ranch’s hives were destroyed, leaving just 240 on the West End. The business never recovered. 12. Center for Oral History, Ualupue, Molokai, 3–4. 13. Ibid., 6. 14. Ibid., 6–7; G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 130. 15. Center for Oral History, Ualupue, Molokai, 43. 16. Ibid., 35. 17. Ibid., 478; G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 129–130. 18. Center for Oral History, Ualupue, Molokai, 482–483. Described by George Cooke as a Norwegian. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 153. 19. Center for Oral History, Ualupue, Molokai, 45, 56. 20. Ibid., 38, 417. 21. Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 137–138; Center for Oral History, Ualupue, Molokai, 442. 22. Kane, “My Eyes Have Seen Puko‘o.” 23. Center for Oral History, Ualupue, Molokai, 54. 24. Ibid., xxviii, 23. 25. Ibid., 17. 26. Ibid., 19; Summers, Molokai: A Site Survey, 78. A typical entry on the state of fishponds is that of Punalau (meaning “many springs“) pond at Kahanui: in 1901 it still encompassed twenty acres and was used commercially; in 1922 it had almost filled with mud; by 1970 it had filled in. 27. Center for Oral History, Ualupue, Molokai, 21–22. 28. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 88. 29. Center for Oral History, Ualupue, Molokai, 64. 30. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 46–47. 31. Ibid., 38, 44. 32. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 90. 33. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 7. 34. Ibid., 1. 35. S. J. Cooke, Sincerely, Sophie, 58; G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 111–112. 36. Bingham, Residence of Twenty-One Years, 619. 37. S. J. Cooke, Sincerely, Sophie, 4. 38. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 96. 39. Ibid., xv–xvii. 40. Ibid., 92–93. 41. Ibid., 5, 22.

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42. S. J. Cooke, Sincerely, Sophie, 59. 43. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 30–31, 148–149. 44. S. J. Cooke, Sincerely, Sophie, 6–7. 45. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 53–54. 46. Ibid., 46–49. 47. S. J. Cooke, Sincerely, Sophie, 66, 71. However, Sophie Cooke said that naio remained quite prevalent. 48. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 63–64. 49. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 44; Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 91, 103; there is more on Molokai Ranch’s range management in Norman K. Carlson, “Grazing Land Problems, Molokai Island, Territory of Hawaii,” Journal of Range Management 5, no. 4 (July 1952). 50. Clark, Beaches of Maui County, 80. 51. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 104–106. 52. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 30–31; Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 95. 53. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 32; ibid., 32–33. 54. Ibid., 40. 55. Ibid., 41. 56. “Molokai Notes,” Maui News, January 14, 1921. 57. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 14, 78. 58. Beginning with the distribution of about 300,000 acres of the government lands; also the “nationalization” of the crown lands by the Dole government, whereby the remaining crown lands, 985,000 acres, were transferred to the government for potential distribution (including 22,000 acres on Molokai). Hobbs, Hawaii: A Pageant of the Soil, 108. 59. Felix Maxwell Keesing, Hawaiian Homesteading on Molokai, Research Publication no. 12 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 1936), 17; G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 30. 60. Keesing, Hawaiian Homesteading on Molokai, 11. 61. Coelho, “Ka Huakai Makaikai ia Molokai.” 62. Keesing, Hawaiian Homesteading on Molokai, 56. 63. Ibid., 27–28. 64. Ibid., 28. 65. Ibid., 31. 66. Ibid., 47–49. 67. Ibid., 57. 68. Ibid., 30. 69. Center for Oral History, Ualupue, Molokai, 46. 70. Jan K. Ten Bruggencate, Hawai‘i’s Pineapple Century: A History of the Crowned Fruit in the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: Mutual, 2004), 74. 71. Keesing, Hawaiian Homesteading on Molokai, 27, 31. 72. Ibid., 37–38. 73. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 95; Ten Bruggencate, Hawai‘i’s Pineapple Century, 45. 74. Ten Bruggencate, Hawai‘i’s Pineapple Century, 28, 55.

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75. Ibid., 74, 80; G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 91; G. P. Judd, Puleoo, 15. 76. Keesing, Hawaiian Homesteading on Molokai, 57; Ten Bruggencate, Hawai‘i’s Pineapple Century, 81; Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 15. 77. Edward Norbeck, Pineapple Town: Hawaii (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 27. 78. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 13. 79. Norbeck, Pineapple Town, vii–25. 80. Ibid., 153. 81. Ibid., 41–49. 82. Ibid., 152; Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939). 83. Norbeck, Pineapple Town, 20. 84. DD was D-D, a soil fumigant manufactured by Shell Chemical. Its active ingredients were a mixture of dichloropropane and dichloropropene. CMU was a common herbicide in the postward decades: herbicide 3-(p-chlorophenyl)-1,1-dimethylurea. Harold L. Baker, Molokai: Present and Potential Land Use, Bulletin no. 1 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Land Study Bureau, 1960), 69. 85. Norbeck, Pineapple Town, 19–21. 86. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 98–99. 87. Personal communication from market farmers at Kualapu‘u and Pala‘au, 2005–2015. 88. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 55. 89. Hugh Howell, United States Bureau of Reclamation, Final Report on Water Supply Studies, Hawaii. F.P. no. 45, Island of Molokai (Wailuku: Maui, 1941), 10. 90. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 33. 91. Howell, Final Report on Water Supply Studies, 10. 92. Ibid., 7. 93. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 34–35. 94. Ibid., 22–23. 95. H. A. R. Austin and Harold T. Stearns, Report to the Hawaii Irrigation Authority, Territory of Hawaii, Covering Methods for Development of Water for Irrigating Hawaiian Homes Commission Lands at Hoolehua, Island of Molokai (Honolulu: May 15, 1944). 96. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 25, 93. 97. W. A. Dexheimer, “Proposed Report of the Commissioner of Reclamation,” in Molokai Project, Hawaii: The Report of the Department of Interior on the Proposed Molokai Project, Territory of Hawaii, Pursuant to the Act of August 23, 1954, 68 Stat. 773 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1958), viii–xi. 98. Fred A. Seaton, “Letter to the President, March 28, 1958,” in Molokai Project, Hawaii, vi. 99. Worster, Rivers of Empire, 170–174. 100. Seaton, “Letter to the President,” vi. 101. Seaton gave a direct benefit-cost ratio of 2.57:1 and a total benefit-cost ratio of 4.87:1. He foresaw a $10 million cost. Seaton, “Letter to the President,” vii. 102. Dexheimer, “Proposed Report of the Commissioner of Reclamation,” viii–ix. 103. Ibid., 35. 104. Ibid., 37.

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105. Bottenfield, Changing Patterns of Land Utilization, 127. 106. Dexheimer, “Proposed Report of the Commissioner of Reclamation,” 39. 107. Including: Hawai‘i Territorial Planning Board, Report of a Subcommittee of the Land Planning Committee on the Molokai Irrigation Project (Honolulu: Territorial Planning Board, 1939); Hawaiian Engineering Association, Remarks on the Molokai Irrigation Project Report by Hugh Howell (Honolulu: 1939). 108. Hawai‘i Department of Land and Natural Resources, Environmental Statement of Non-impact on Kaluako‘i Corporation’s Application for the Use of space within the Water Facilities of the Molokai Irrigation System (Honolulu: Hawai‘i Department of Land and Natural Resources, 1972), 4; Stephen R. Koletty, “The Role of the Private Sector in Hawai’i’s Public Water Supply” (master’s thesis, University of Hawaii, 1983), 79. 109. Joyce D. Kahane, The Molokai Irrigation System: A Management Study (Honolulu: Legislative Reference Bureau, State of Hawai‘i, 1987), 21; Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, Environmental Statement of Non-impact, 5. 110. Land Study Bureau, University of Hawai‘i, Detailed Land Classification—Island of Molokai, L.S.B. Bulletin no. 10 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 1968); Elaine Y. L. Dung, “Economic Analysis of Two Water Pricing Proposals for the Molokai Irrigation System” (Master’s thesis, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, Honolulu, 1987); H. C. Hogg, The Diversified Crop Demand for Molokai Irrigation Project Water, 1965–1970 (Honolulu: Hawai‘i Agricultural Experiment Station, 1966). 111. Douglas John McConnell, Preliminary Studies on the Feasibility of Producing Vegetables on Molokai, Progress Report no. 1–3 to the Tripartite Committee, Molokai Demonstration Project (Honolulu: Hawai‘i Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Hawai‘i, 1962). 112. Koletty, “Role of the Private Sector,” 79–80. 113. Hawai‘i Department of Land and Natural Resources, Environmental Statement of Non-impact, 2. 114. According to a First National Bank of Hawai‘i report, 1966. Deloach, “Molokai: An Historical Overview,” 139. 115. Koletty, “Role of the Private Sector,” 77. 116. Baker, Molokai: Present and Potential Land Use, 56–59. 117. Clark, Beaches of Maui County, 96; Deloach, “Molokai: An Historical Overview,” 139. 118. Molokai County Extension Advisory Council, Molokai County Extension Situation Report (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Cooperative Extension Service, 1966), 12–16. 119. Deloach, “Molokai: An Historical Overview,” 141–145. 120. Clark, Beaches of Maui County, 78, 80, 83; S. J. Cooke, Sincerely, Sophie, 99. 121. Ten Bruggencate, Hawai‘i’s Pineapple Century, 53. 122. Cooper and Daws, Land and Power in Hawaii, 201. 123. Ten Bruggencate, Hawai‘i’s Pineapple Century, 60. 124. Koletty, “Role of the Private Sector,” 75–77. 125. Ten Bruggencate, Hawai‘i’s Pineapple Century, 65. 126. Koletty, “Role of the Private Sector,” 80. 127. Ibid., 83.

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128. Ibid., 68. 129. Ibid., 43. 130. Ibid., 61; 131. G. P. Cooke, Moolelo o Molokai, 133. 132. Deloach, “Molokai: An Historical Overview,” 140. 133. Koletty, “Role of the Private Sector,” 80. 134. Cooper and Daws, Land and Power in Hawaii, 69; originally named Kalua Koi Corporation, renamed Kaluako‘i Corporation in 1983, 202. 135. Cooper and Daws, Land and Power in Hawaii, 201–202; Koletty, “Role of the Private Sector,” 80–81. 136. Koletty, “Role of the Private Sector,” 81. 137. Hawai‘i Department of Land and Natural Resources, Environmental Statement of Non-impact, 7–8; Kahane, Molokai Irrigation System, 29. 138. Cooper and Daws, Land and Power in Hawaii, 202. 139. Ibid., 74, 203. 140. Ibid., 204. 141. Koletty, “Role of the Private Sector,” 67, 81–83. 142. Ibid., 84–85. 143. James R. Berg, “Unfriendly Isle,” “Stop Everything Movement,” “Time for the Silent Majority to Get Together and Speak Up,” Molokai Journal, January 2010. 144. Cooper and Daws, Land and Power in Hawaii, 201. 145. Bruce S. Plasch, An Economic Development Strategy and Implementation Program for Moloka‘i (submitted to the Hawai‘i Department of Planning and Economic Development, Honolulu, June 1985), I–7. 146. Center for Oral History, Ualupue, Molokai, 67. 147. Kahane, Molokai Irrigation System, 16. 148. Ibid., 22. 149. Plasch, Economic Development Strategy and Implementation Program, I–1. 150. From the 1980 census, the island population excludes Kalawao County, i.e., Kalaupapa. Kahane, Molokai Irrigation System, 8–13. 151. “George Helm, Music, and the Hui Alaloa,” Mo‘olelo Aloha ‘Aina, November 9, 2010, http://moolelo.manainfo.com/2010/11/george-helm-music-and-the-hui-alaloa/. 152. Wikipedia, “George Helm,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Helm. 153. Kamuela Vance, “George Helm—A Hawaiian Legacy,” Kingdom of Hawaii (Wordpress blog), March 7, 2011. 154. Wikipedia, “George Helm. 155. Curt Sanburn, “A Road Less Taken,” Hana Hou: The Magazine of Hawaiian Airlines 10, no. 1 (February–March 2007), www.hanahou.com/pages/magazine.asp?Action=Draw Article&ArticleID=538&MagazineID=34&Page=3. 156. Ibid. 157. Cooper and Daws, Land and Power in Hawaii, 70; 68 Haw. 135. Hui ALALOA, AppellantAppellant v. Planning Commission of the County of Maui;  and Cam Molokai Associates, a Hawai‘i General Partnership, AppelleesAppellees. Hui ALALOA, AppellantAppellant v. Planning Commission of the County of Maui; and Kalua Koi Corporation, a Hawai‘i Corporation, AppelleesAppellees. Nos. 10078, 10079 (Supreme Court of Hawai‘i,

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August 23, 1985). Reconsideration denied September 12, 1985, www.hawaii.edu/ohelo/court decisions/Alaloa85.htm. 158. Christopher R. Cox, “Molokai’s Dilemma: When a Major Cruise Line Decided to Call on Hawaii’s Most Proudly Unspoiled Island, Residents Began to Ask: How Much Tourism Is Too Much?” Travel and Leisure, May 6, 2009, www.travelandleisure.com/articles /molokais-dilemma. 159. John Entine, “Hawai‘i Anti-GMO Activists Rely on Mainland Millionaires for ‘Grassroots’ Campaign,” Forbes, October 2, 2013, www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/2013/10 /02/hawaii-anti-gmo-activists-rely-on-mainland-millionaires-for-grassroots-campaign/. 160. Molokai Dispatch, November 9, 2006. 161. Molokai Dispatch, September 14, 2006. 162. Molokai Island Times, September 27, 2006. 163. Sanburn, “Road Less Taken.” 164. Molokai Island Times, February 9, 2005. 165. Molokai Dispatch, September 21, 2006. 166. Molokai Dispatch, September 14, 2006. 167. Molokai Island Times, February 9, 2005. 168. Molokai Island Times, February 9, 2005. 169. Clark Stevens, New West Land Company, and Ian Robertson, Robertson Company, “Report to the Ke Aupuni Lokahi, Inc. Moloka‘i Enterprise Community (EC) and Subcommittees of the EC: The Land Use Committee (LUC) The Alternative to La‘au Point Development Committee (ALDC),” October 8, 2005 (unpublished report). 170. Molokai Dispatch, September 14, 2006; Molokai Dispatch, September 21, 2006. 171. Molokai Dispatch, October 7, 2006. 172. Molokai Dispatch, September 14, 2006; Molokai Dispatch, November 9, 2006; Molokai Dispatch, July 13, 2006; Molokai Dispatch, October 25, 2007. 173. Molokai Dispatch, October 26, 2006. 174. Molokai Times, September 26, 2007. 175. Christopher Pala, “Not in My Tropical Backyard,” New York Times, December 30, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/travel/30heads.html. 176. Andrew Walden, “Molokai Activists Seek Control of Ranch,” Hawai‘i Free Press, September 23, 2008. 177. James R. Berg, “Unfriendly Isle,” “Stop Everything Movement,” “Time for the Silent Majority to Get Together and Speak Up,” Molokai Journal, January 2010. 178. Anita Hofschneider, “Molokai Has the Most to Lose, but Least to Say in GMO Debate,” Honolulu Civil Beat, July 14, 2014, www.civilbeat.com/2014/07/molokai-has-the -most-to-lose-but-least-say-in-gmo-debate/. 179. Sanburn, “Road Less Taken.” 180. Molokai Dispatch, June 16, 2010. 181. “Ranch Denies Wind Negotiations,” Molokai Dispatch, July 7, 2010. 182. Lavonne Leong, “Facing Future,” Hawaii Business Magazine, March 17, 2015, www .hawaiibusiness.com/facing-future/. 183. James Tarmy, “Real Estate: A Vast, $260 Million Chunk of Hawaiian Paradise Is on the Market,” September 20, 2017, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-20/a-third -of-hawaii-s-molokai-island-is-for-sale-for-260-million.

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1. Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 248; Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language. 2. Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield, Land Degradation and Society (New York: Routledge, 1994), 21. 3. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, vol. 3, The Perspective of the World (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 40.

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Index

Adelman, Jeremy, 9, 56 Advertiser, 128 agriculture: agricultural intensification, 20, 34, 36; colluvial slope cultivation, 21; dryland, 21, 23, 31–35, 41, 127, 129–130, 168; fallow periods, 36; fertilizer, 20, 36; gender roles in, 32, 40; Hawai‘i (Big Island), 32, 39, 52–53, 110; irrigation, 6, 21, 41, 105, 111–112, 127, 133–134, 139, 164, 173–175, 178, 180, 197–98; Kaua’i, 32, 36, 65, 108, 110; landesque capital intensification, 20; malo’o, 36–40; Maui, 32, 39, 69, 76, 89, 97, 108, 110, 130; Molokai, 2–3, 5, 10, 20, 32–33, 36, 45, 47, 61, 69, 72, 74, 76–77, 80, 84–86, 99–125, 157, 160, 167–168, 170–73, 175, 178–79; mulching, 20, 36; mulching, lithic, 32; O‘ahu, 32, 36, 46, 65, 69, 89, 110, 130; planting mounds, 32; Polynesians, 6, 14, 36, 41; pondfields, irrigated, 14, 21–23, 25, 32, 40; population and, 35; terracing, house, 21, 32; terracing, stone, 20–21, 32; swidden cultivation, 20, 29, 81; Tahiti, 37; wai, 36–40 agroecosystem, 22 Ah Pun, 159 Ah Sing, 159 Ahupua‘a o Molokai, 192 Aipa, 159 Akumakai, 135 Akoni, 78 Alapa‘i, 158

Alexander, R., 77 Alexander, S. T., 111, 139 Algeroba, 101–102, 103 Allardt, G. F., 130 Alternative to La‘au Point Development Committee (ALDC), 189 Aluli, Emmett, 186 Aluli, Kimo, 186 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), 71, 109 American Civil War, 89, 109 American Sugar Company, 131, 157, 196 Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii (Marshall Sahlins, Patrick V. Kirch), 8–9 Ancient Polynesian Society (Irving Goldman), 35 Anderson, Edgar, 13 Andrews, Richard Claudius, 75 Anson, George, 50 anthropogenic environmental change, 28–31 Apaina, 159 ‘apapane, 152 Arc islands, 13–14 Armstrong, Samuel T., 89 Aron, Stephen, 9, 56 arrowroot (pia), 21 Astor, John Jacob, 56 Athens, Stephen, 27 atolls, 14

253

254

index

Aubert, Pere, 78 Austin, H. A. R., 173 Austin, J. W., 86, 135 Bachelot, Pere, 86, 101 Baker, Ms., 106 Bal, Eugene, 116, 118, 120 Baldwin, Dwight, 64 Baldwin, H. P., 111, 139, 146 bananas, 19, 21 Banks, Joseph, 51, 52 Bates, George Washington, 71–75, 78, 79, 97, 108 battle of Nu‘uanu, 46–47 Bayonet Constitution, 128 BIL Investments Limited, 187–88 Bingham, E. K., 121 Bingham, Hiram, 62, 64 Bird, Isabella, 98, 103–5, 109–10 Bishop, Artemas, 59, 89 Bishop, Bernice Pauahi¸ 95, 107, 121 Bishop, Charles Reed, 107, 108, 119, 128 Blaikie, Piers, 197 Bligh, William, 51, 56 Bloomberg.com, 193 Board of Commissioners to Quiet Land Titles, 66 Board of Land and Natural Resources, 182 Boki, 64 breadfruit, 21, 37 Brewer, C. III, 109 Brewer Plantation, 109 Bronte (Mr.), 160 Brookfield, Harold, 197 Broughton, William, 46 Browns, 159, 165 Bryan, William, 152 Buchanan, William R., 119 Bureau of Conveyances, 120 Burning Bush (Stephen J. Pyne), 9 Butler, Charles, 88 Buy the Ranch, 190, 193 Byron, George Gordon, 50, 59, 65 C. Brewer and Co., 110, 131 California Packing Company, 182 California Packing Corporation, 170, 179 Campbell, James, 130, 136 Canton, trade with, 54–57, 59 Carter, Alfred W., 131 Carter, George R., 131 Castle, Henry N., 121 Castle, Samuel N., 96

Castle and Cook, 110, 179 Castor oil, 72, 74–75 cattle, 50, 52, 60, 61, 86, 88–89, 92, 107, 119, 154, 155, 161–66; destructive qualities of, 60, 69–70, 79, 143, 145, 151, 164; Jack Johnson, 159; Molokai, 69–70, 79, 116–17, 130, 136, 140, 161–66; Ni‘ihau, 79; O’ahu, 79, 130 Chamisso, Adelbert von, 54, 58 Changes in the Land (William Cronon), 9 Cheerful, 85 Citizens’ Committee of Safety, 129 Cleveland, Richard, 51 coconut, 19, 133 Coelho, W. J., 156, 167 coffee, 65, 108, 131, 142–143 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Jared Diamond), 10–11 College of Hawai‘i, 145, 149 competitive involution, 31 Conant, Frank F., 165, 166 Conrad, Chris, 158 Conrad, Judge, 159 Cook, James, 39, 45, 47, 49–50, 51–52, 53, 54, 143, 196 Cook Islands, 13, 30, 31 Cooke, Amos, 96, 162 Cooke, Charles Montague, 131, 161 Cooke, George, 135, 144, 151, 160–63, 164, 165–66, 167–68, 170, 173, 180, 185 Cooke, Juliette Montague, 162, 180 Cooke, Phoebe, 163 Cooke, Sophie Judd, 161–63, 164, 179 Cooper, George, 182 crested honeyeater, 152 Cronon, William, 9 Crosby, Alfred W., 9, 13, 49 Crosby, William, 145 Crown Lands Commission, 120 Damien (Father), 100, 102 Darwin, Charles, 17 Davis, Isaac, (Aikake Lui), 81, 96 Daws, Gavan, 8, 57, 182 de Camera, V., 135 Dedrick, William, 96 deer, 87, 131, 152, 164, 191 deforestation, 8–9, 27–28, 29, 123, 125; fig trees and, 149–51 Degener, Otto, 153 Del Monte, 179 Department of Hawaiian Home Lands (DHHL), 192

index

255

de Varigny, Charles, 96 Diamond, Jared, 10–11 Dieback, forest, 146–47 Dillingham, B. F., 130, 136 disease, introduced, 8, 53, 56, 63–64; birds, 72, 75; leprosy, 93–95, 99, 100–1; sugar cane, 146; trees, 146 disharmony, ecological, 17 dogs, 13, 19, 20, 105 Dole, James, 170, 179 Dole, Sanford Ballard, 121, 129, 131 Dole Corporation, 179, 184 Dolphin, 59 Dominis, John, 96, 119 Drepanidae (Hawaiian honeycreepers), 17, 152 Dudoit, Jules, 159 Duvauchelle, Annie Wood, 158, 159, 160, 180 Duvauchelle, Edward Kekuhi, 158, 159–60, 166, 180 Duvauchelle, Henri, 158 Duvauchelle, Henry, 160, 169, 184 Duvauchelle, Zelie, 158 Dye, Thomas, 60 Dwight, (Mr.), 71, 75, 85

Fleurieu, Charles Pierre Claret de, Comte, 54 Forbes (Reverend), 98 Fornander, Abraham, 119 Foster, Frank, 134 Foster, Mary E., 149 Fosberg, Raymond, 29 Frear, Walter F., 144 French, William, 108 Fugi, 135

East India Company, 54, 56 Easter Island (Rapa Nui), 13, 29; human colonization, impact of, 30–31, 50; political structure of, 35; population “overshoot,” 30–31 Ecological Imperialism (Alfred Crosby), 9 Egusa, Kimi, 164 Egusa, Takujiro, 164 Ellis, William, 61 Emory, Kenneth, 156 Empress of China, 54–55 Endeavor, 51 erosion, 8, 15, 28, 122–25; attempts to slow, 32, 164; slope, 22, 29 eucalyptus trees, 139, 141, 151, 154 Everett, Edward, 96 Ewa Plantation Company, 130

H. Hackfield and Co., 110, 116 Ha‘alelea, Levi, 63, 81–82, 86, 87, 88–89 Ha‘alou, 63 Haloa, 24 Halualani, 81 Hamakua Ditch project, 112 Hana Hou, 192 Hanakaipo, 63, 81 Handy, Elizabeth, 15, 38, 41 Handy, F. S., 15, 38, 41 Harbottle, 82, 83, 87 Harris, Charles, 96 Hartt, Constance, 146 Hartwell, Alfred S., 130–131 Haugh, David, 149 Hawai‘i, Big Island of, 22, 48; agriculture, 32, 39, 52–53, 110; archeological record, 39; seath to disease, 64; Hualalai, 15; Hamakua, 141; Ka‘u, 32; Kealakekua Bay, 49, 52, 196; Kilauea, 15; Kohala, 37, 47; Kona, 32, 39, 58; land management agencies, 180; Mauna Kea, 16, 60; Mo‘okini, 37; political structure, 46; population, 33, 39, 46; Puna, 37; religion, 37 , 39; sugar plantations, 110; taxation, 32; tourism, 180–83; Waha‘ula, 37; Waimea, 32, 140; Waimea Project, 174; warfare, 45–47, 56; West, 39

Fagan, Paul I., 165 Faye, Hans, 165 Federal Aviation Administration, 192 Federal Reclamation Service, 139 fig trees, 149–51 Fiji, 14 Fire in America (Stephen J. Pyne), 9 First Wind of Boston, 192–93 fishing, 19, 43; awa, 23; fishponds, 23–25, 40; makaha, 23

Galápagos, 17 Geertz, Clifford, 31 genetically modified organisms (GMO), 187 Gibson, Arrell Morgan, 60 Gibson, Charles Murray, 112, 128 Gifford, Frank, 145 goats, 50, 60, 79, 136, 152, 154, 164, 190 Gold Rush, California, 60–61, 63–64 Goldman, Irving, 35, 42 Golovnin, V. M., 58 Grant, Ulysses, 110 Greeley, Horace, 130 Gulick, Orramel, 86, 88 Gulick, Peter, 86

256

index

Hawaii Business Magazine, 179, 193 Hawai‘i Omnibus Bill, 176 Hawaii Superferry company, 191 Hawaiian Annual (Thomas Thrum), 104 Hawaiian Bird Survey, 152 Hawaiian Gazette, 122, 123–24, 131–32 Hawaiian Government Survey, 68 Hawaiian Homes Commission Act (HHC), 165, 167, 168, 169, 173 Hawaiian Homestead Act, 165 Hawaiian Investment Company, 135 Hawaiian islands/Hawaiians, 14, 29’ Americans in, 138–39; archaeological record, 27, 41, 185; birds, 28–29, 72; census, 1778, 64; census, 1850, 64; census, 1876, 64; demise of, 1830s1840s, 58–61; demographics, 22, 104–5, 127, 137–39; environmental impact of settlement, 21–22, 27–28; Europeans in, 13, 20, 27; first discovery of, 15; forestry-industrial complex, 152–54; fur trade, 53–57; insularity of, 15, 17, 44; land division and ownership, 25–26, 64–66; native flora and fauna, 17–18; political economy, precontact, 34; Polynesians’ appearance in, 13; population in 1866-1872, 104; property rights, foreigners, 66–68, 80–84; religion, 24–25, 36–37; Republic of, 129, 131; 1600 A.D., 27; 1778-1848 A.D., postcontact period, 44–68; social/political structure, 23–25, 32, 34–35, 57, 59–60, 64–65, 90–92; state constitution, 186; Supreme Court, 67, 90; taxation/tribute payments, 32, 57, 64–65, 99–100, 104–5, 109, 131, 136;United States, annexation into, 131; United States control of, 126–129; untouchables, 38; voting rights, 129; wages, 107–8; water, relationship to Hawaiian culture, 42–43, 194–95 Hawaiian League, 128–29 Hawaiian Pineapple Company (HAPCO), 170 Hawaiian Planters’ Record, 145 Hawaiian Research, 184 Hawaiian Star, 131 Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA), 126, 141, 145, 149, 153, 184 Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Monthly, 116 Hawaiki, 37 Hayes, Homer, 158 Helm, George, 185, 186 Henderson Island, 13, 14, 31 Hetch Hetchy project, 139 high islands, 14 Hillebrand, William, 140 Hing, Ah¸135

historical isomorphism, 6 Hitchcock, D. H., 88, 97–98 Hitchcock, Edward G., 95, 96, 142 Hitchcock, H. R., 61, 71, 75, 82, 83, 86, 87–88, 98, 134–35 Hitchcock, Rex, 158, 164 HMS Blonde, 59, 65 HMS Carysfort, 59 HMS Discovery, 46 Hoapili-wahine, 61 Hobbs, Jean, 81, 82 Hoe, 82 Holland America, 187 homesteading, 136–40, 166–69, 171–72, 175–76, 179, 183 Hommon, Robert, 21, 33, 37, 39 Honolulu Rifles, 128–29 Honolulu Sugar Company, 130 Honolulu Sugar Manufacturing and Refining Co., 96 Ho‘olehua/Pala‘au Settlement, 168–73 Hoolepanui, 47 Ho‘onaulu, William, 81 Hopkins, Charles L., 121 Horses, 50–51, 52, 61, 70, 71, 75–76, 79, 105, 123, 127 Hosmer, Ralph, 139, 144–45 Hot spots, 13–14, 15 Hotel Molokai, 180 Hove, Anton, 51 Howell, Hugh, 173 Hui Alaloa, 185, 187 Hustace, Frank Ward, 134 Hyde, Charles C., 129, 132, 164, 167–68 Ii, John, 71, 92 International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), 182 ‘Iolani Palace, 129 ironwood, 151 Japan Emigration Co., 135 Jones, Edwin, 86, 88–89, 119, 120 Jorgensen, Jorgen¸165, 173 Judd, Albert Francis Jr., 162 Judd, Charles Sheldon, 145, 163 Judd, Lawrence, 162 Judd, Gerrit Parmele, 162 Ka lahui Hawaii, 114, 117 Ka‘ahumanu, 9, 58 Ka‘eo, Peter¸ 95, 100–3, 105, 107

index Kahahana, 45 Kahanu, David, 1120 Kahekili, 45, 46 Kaho‘olawe, 2, 16, 185–86, 187 Kahuku Plantation Company, 130 Kaiana, 78 Kaie, D. W., 97 Kaikioewa, 108 Kaiwi Channel, 45, 129 Kala‘e Sugar Mill, 116 kalaipahoa, 27 Kalaimoku, 63, 82 Kalakaua, David, 88, 103, 107, 127–28, 141, 158 Kalanianaole, Kuhio, 166–67 Kalanianaole Settlement, 168 Kalanikupule, 45 Kalanimoku, 64, 81 Kalawao Girls’ Choir, 102 Kaleleokalani, Emma, 96, 100–3, 141 kalo, 19–21, 36, 45, 72 , 76, 97, 133, 160, 164, 172; family structure, relation to, 23–24 Kaluako‘i Corporation, 180–83 Kamaipelekane, 95 Kamakau, Samuel, 32, 59, 65 Kamalo Sugar Company, 116, 120, 121, 124, 134–36 Kamamalu, Victoria, 76, 81, 96 Kamchatka, 15 Kame‘ekua, Kaili‘ohe, 38 Kame‘eleihiwa, Lilikala, 8, 83 Kamehameha, 3, 9, 39–41, 46–47, 51–52, 60, 78, 81, 119; trade, 52, 55–57 Kamehameha II, 58, 63 Kamehameha III, 65, 81, 82, 108, 162 Kamehameha IV, 86 Kamehameha V, 86–87, 107, 158 Kana‘e, 75 Kanaina, Charles, 88, 95 Kāne, 24, 36–37, 38 Kane, George, 159 Kaneloa, 37 Kanepu‘u, J. H., 96–98 Kapakuhaili, H. Kalama, 95–96 Kaua’i, 1, 15–16, 22, 123, 148, 191; agriculture, 32, 36, 65, 108, 110; birth rates, 64; cession of, 55; fishing, 143; Koloa, 65, 108; Makaweli, 139; Makaweli canal, 139; Mount Waialeale, 16; Olekele Valley, 139; population, 33; precipitation, 16, 36; sugar plantations, 110; taxation, 32; warfare, 40, 46 Ka‘uhane, Francis, 186 Kauikeaouli, 60, 65, 66, 92, 120. See Kamehameha III

257

Kaulawe, 48 Kauma‘ea, Z. P., 65 kava, 21 Kee, Sam Wo Hop, 135 Ke‘elikolani, Ruth, 107, 119, 120 Kehekili, 52 Kekauluohi, 81 Kekauonohi, 81, 82 Kekauonohi, Miriam, 81, 82 Kekuelike, 119 Keola, James, 123–24 Kimo, 76 Kinau, 81 Kinau, Kaho‘anoku, 81 King, S. W., 173 King, Thomas, 88 Kirch, Patrick V., 8–9, 12–13, 20, 23, 29–35, 47, 49 57, 58, 196 koa (Acacia koa), 16, 143–44, 151 Koebele, Alfred, 143–44 Kohala, 32 Kū, 37, 38, 39 Kuaihelani, L., 95 Kuakamauna, Enoka, 88 Kuakini, John Adams, 81 Kualapu‘u Reservoir, 182 kukui nuts, 21 Kuleana Act, 82, 90 Kula o Kahua, 102 Kurashima, Natalie, 23, 34 Kure Atoll, 15 Kuril Trench, 15 Kuykendall, Ralph, 8 La Perouse, Jean-Francois de Galaup, comte de, 50 Lahainaluna, 65, 67, 77 Lana‘i, 1–2, 16, 48, 106–8, 131, 148, 179, 192; birth rates, 64; warfare, 46 Lana‘i Company, 163 Land and Power in Hawaii (George Cooper and Gavan Daws), 182 Land Commission, 66, 120; Buke mahele, 66 Larsen, Nils P., 162 L’Artemise, 59 Ledyard, John, 53–54 Lee, William, 79 Leleiona, 166 Leleiohoku, William Pitt, 81 Lelia Byrd, 51, 56 Libby, McNeill, and Libby, 170, 179 Liholiho, 65, 75. See Kamehameha II

258

index

Liholiho, Alexander, 65, 75, 107. See Kamehameha IV Lili’uokalani (Queen), 96, 129, 141, 144 Liloa, 39 Lind, Ian, 186 Lingle, Linda, 188 Lindgren, Waldemar, 132–35, 140, 148, 172 L’Ile de Molokai avant la leproserie (Molokai Island Before Leprosy) (Jules Remy), 75 Line Islands, 13 Lippincott, Joseph B., 139 Lono, 37, 38 Louisiana Land and Exploration, 180 lo‘ulu palms, 18, 27, 79 Lowrie Ditch, 139 luakini heiau temples, 37 Lunalilo, William Charles, 81, 88, 96 Lynch, Mary, 158 Lyon, Harold, 145–51, 153–54 Lyon Arboretum, 149 Lyons, C. J., 68 M. Philips and Co., 135 M. W. McChesney and Co., 135 Machado, Colette, 188 Mackay, David, 50 MacLennan, Carol A., 109 Mahele, 9, 65–68, 152, 159, 166; first, 81; Land Commission, 89; Molokai after, 69–98 makahiki festival, 37 makatea islands, 14 Malihinihele, S. P. K., 117–18 Malo, David, 32, 60, 65, 81 mamo, 18, 152 Mangaia Island, 14, 29, 30–31, 34–35 Mangareva, 13, 30 mangoes, 172 Marchand, Etienne, 54 Marin, Francisco de Paula, 64, 149 Marquesas, 13, 19, 29–30; 35 Marsden, Joseph, 143 Marx, Karl, 41 Mason, H., 163 Maui, 1–2, 18, 47, 48, 61, 186; agriculture, 32, 39, 69, 76, 89, 97, 108, 110, 130; economy, 114; forests, 146; Haleakala, 15, 32; Iao Valley, 111; Ka‘anapali coast, 183; Kahikinui, 32, 78; Kahului, 191; Kaupo, 32; Lahaina, 71, 72, 73, 85, 130, 158; Makawao, 108, 113; Paia, 111–112; population, 33, 39; religion, 39; schools, 65, 77; social/political structure, 45, 52; sugar plantations, 110–11; warfare, 44–46

Maunalei Sugar Company, 135 Mauritz (Dr.), 142 McCandless Brothers, 130, 132 McClellan, A. D., 131 McColgan, J., 121 McCorriston, Daniel, 106, 116, 120, 121, 134 McCorriston, Eddie, 159 McKinley, William, 131 McKinley Tariff Act of 1890, 128, 131, 136, 139, 142 McWilliams, Carey, 171 Mead, Elwood, 180 Meares, John, 51 Meiji Seamount, 15 melons, 52, 77, 97 Menzies, Archibald, 21, 46, 48, 107 Meyer, Henry, 106, 119, 144, 164 Meyer, Otto, 116, 119, 144 Meyer, Rudolf Wilhelm, 85–87, 93, 94, 105–7, 114, 117, 119, 158 Meyer, Theodore, 159 Meyer, William, 166 Meyer Ranch, 132, 165 Miles, Aunty Ellen, 186 missionaries, 62–64, 71, 75, 82, 162, 163 Missionary Herald, 63 Missionary Record, 62 Mitchell, Billy, 186 Mitchell, David, 141 Mitchell, Kimo, 186 moa, 29 Moana Hotel, 158 Moanui Sugar Plantation, 116, 120 Moemalie, Julie¸95 Mokapu, 79 Mokoli‘i , 122 Mokulele Airlines, 192 Molokai, 40–41; agriculture, 2–3, 5, 10, 20, 32–33, 36, 45, 47, 61, 69, 72, 74, 76–77, 80, 84–86, 99–125, 157, 160, 167–68, 170–73, 175, 178–79; archaeological record, 4, 19, 22–23; birds, 152; birth rates, 64; Chinese residents, 156–57; contemporary, 185–93; death to disease, 64; definition of name, 2; deforestation, 123, 125, 164; demographics/ethnic split, 118–19, 184–85; development period, 20; drought, 130–31, 162–63; East End, 19, 24, 48, 61, 70, 78, 82, 96, 100, 133, 157–61, 165, 178, 183; economic struggles, 156–57, 178–80; 1850s, 84–85; 1853-1854, 70–80; 1845-1869, 69–98; 1893-1957, 126–154; 1870-1893, 99–125; 1830s1840s, 61–64; environmental variation, 5;

index Filipino workers in, 162, 171; first accounts of, 47–48; fishing, 2–3, 40, 47, 69, 75, 80, 93, 95, 124, 157, 160; flora, indigenous, 78–79; Hālawa, 18–19, 23, 45, 70, 74–75, 76, 82, 95, 96–97, 101, 106, 123, 156, 159; Hālawa Stream, 19; Hālawa Valley, 20, 22, 40, 61, 71–72, 100, 151, 178, 196; Hale o Lono, 179; Honomuni, 97; Honouli, 80, 100; Ho‘olehua, 124, 131, 168–73, 175–76, 177, 179, 189–90; Ka‘amola, 160; Kahanui, 134; Kalamaula, 81, 124, 151, 167; Kalawao, 76, 82, 94–95, 100–5, 113; Kala‘e, 40, 42, 61, 70, 72, 74–75, 77, 82–83, 96, 106, 125, 151, 196; Kala‘e kula, 80; Kalakahale, 182; Kalua‘aha, 62, 71, 72, 73, 75, 82, 85, 88, 98; Kalaupapa, 61, 73–74, 76, 79, 80, 82, 84–85, 105, 107, 156–57, 173; Kalaupapa Peninsula, 19, 22, 33, 94; Kaluako‘i, 77, 107, 164, 170, 180–83, 187, 188; Kamaka‘ipo Beach, 164; Kamalō, 18, 61, 78, 88, 100, 124, 131, 132, 134–36, 151, 155, 159, 170; Kamiloloa, 180; Kanalukaha Beach, 179; Kapuaiwa grove, 87, 167; Kauhako, 76; Kaulapu‘u town, 192; Kaumanamana, 170; Kaunakakai, 72, 73, 87, 106, 123, 129, 132, 157, 161, 162, 164, 166, 170, 180, 182; Kaunakakai Gulch, 144, 174; Kaupoa, 164; Kawakiunui, 187; Kawela, 22, 60, 61, 78, 123, 135; Keopuka, 100; Keopukaloa, 82; Kepuhi, 77; Kepuhi Beach, 182; Kihei, 135; Kiholo, 47; Kolo, 47, 170; Kona district, 18, 47; Ko‘olau district, 18; Koolau Ditch, 140; Kualapu‘u, 23, 162, 165, 170, 173; Kukui, 78; Kumini, 47; Kumueli, 78; La’au Point, 164, 188–90; Lanikaula, 72, 75; as a leper colony, 2, 93–95, 99, 100–1, 113, 156; lighthouse, 106, 133; livestock, 69–70, 79, 100, 116–18, 123, 130–31, 135–36, 140, 160, 161–66, 178; location of, 1–2, 18, 47; lumber industry, 140–45; Mahana, 182; Mahana Hill, 164; mahele in, 80–84; Malama, 87; Mana’e, 159; Manowainui, 82; map from 1897, 80; Mapulehu, 75, 81, 88, 97, 135, 159; marginality and, 183–85; market transition of the 1860s, 89–93; Mauna Loa, 15, 19, 22–23, 27, 40–41, 78–79, 164, 167, 170, 172, 182; Maunaloa town, 170, 171–72, 174, 175, 179; missionaries, 62–63, 71; Moanui, 98; Mo‘omomi, 77, 79; Naiwa, 82, 86, 119, 124; naming, 18; Nanahoa, 151; native flora and fauna, 17–18; Olo‘olo, 164; oral history of, 38; Pala‘au, 78, 81, 82, 86, 93, 100, 107, 124, 172, 176; Papala, 76; Papalenui Gulch, 86; Papohaku, 77, 179, 182; Papohaku Beach, 185; Pelekunu, 76, 88, 101, 113, 156, 157, 174; Pelekunu Valley, 18, 40, 61; pineapple

259

industry, 155–57, 169–73, 176–77, 179, 184; poisonings, history of, 3, 40–41, 185; Poholua, 165; Polynesians, arrival of, 5–7, 12; Poniohua, 97; population, 4, 33, 61, 63, 69, 70, 118–19; precipitation, 19–20, 32–33, 169; precontact period, 1, 3; property sales, records of, 70, 87–90, 95–98, 118–22, 135–36; Puaahunui, 76; Puko‘o, 70, 87, 88, 95, 151, 158, 159, 180; sand mining, 179; schools on, 63, 71, 106; settlement of, 18–23; social/political structure, 40, 52; sugar plantations, 110, 113–16, 130–32, 134–35, 140, 155–56, 165; topography study, 132–34; tourism, 180–83, 188–91; trees, 100–5, 132–34, 148, 151; Ualapu‘e, 81, 98, 106, 135, 155, 157, 160; unemployment on, 178–80; volcanoes, 33; Waialala, 77, 97, 156; Waihi‘i Gulch, 164; Waikolu Stream, 173, 174, 180; Waikolu Tunnel, 182; Waikolu Valley, 18, 40, 76, 113, 180; Wailau Valley, 18, 22, 40, 88, 101, 113, 174; warfare, 40, 44–47; water needs, 130–32, 134–36, 164, 173, 179–80, 182–83, 197–98; welfare dependency, 184, 193; West End, 16, 18–19, 23, 27, 46, 47, 48, 77, 83, 86, 96, 100, 129, 130, 172, 173, 179, 183, 188, 192, 198 Molokai creeper, 17, 152 Molokai Dispatch, 188 Molokai Enterprise Community (EC), 188–89 Molokai Forest Reserve, 144–45, 151 Molokai Irrigation System (MIS), 178, 182, 183 Molokai Land Trust, 188, 191 Molokai Miracle, 168–69 Molokai Project, 172–78 Molokai Properties Limited (MPL), 188 Molokai Ranch, 117, 131, 140, 144, 151, 157–58, 160, 161–64, 166, 170, 173, 179, 180, 182, 184, 185, 187–88, 190, 193 Molokai Store, 105–6 Molokai o Pule o‘o (Molokai of the Powerful Prayer), 1 Mongoose, 152 Monsanto, 191 Mo‘olelo o Molokai: A Ranch Story of Molokai (Nils P. Larsen), 162 Morrison, Joseph H., 88 Morse, Stephen K., 186 Munro, George, 152 Munro, James, 160 Mycogen Seeds, 191 Na Hua Ai Farm, 184 Nahienaena, 81 Nahin, G. S., 123

260

index

Napohaku, Ila‘e¸ 88, 159 National Reclamation Act of 1902, 175 Native Planters in Old Hawaii (F. S. and Elizabeth Handy, Mary Kawena Pukui), 15, 36 Nature Conservancy, 190 Necker, 13, 22 Nelson, Robert E., 153 New Caledonia, 14 New South Wales, 52, 53 New Zealand, 13, 14, 15, 29, 30, 50, 53 Newell, Frederick, 137–39, 165, 175, 180 Newton, R. , 96 Nicholas, Peter, 188, 192–93 Ni‘ihau, 1, 16, 64, 148; birth rates, 64; death to disease, 64; livestock, 79; warfare, 46 Nihoa, 13, 22, 27 Nootka Crisis of 1790, 54 Norbeck, Edward¸170–71 Nordyke, Eleanor C., 64 Northwest Indians, 55–56 Nowlien, Michael J., 95 O‘ahu, 1, 2, 4, 18, 47, 71, 148, 160, 191, 192; agriculture, 32, 36, 46, 65, 69, 89, 110, 130; Anahulu River, 9, 58; archeological record, 19, 27; Bellows dune site, 19; death to disease, 64; Diamond Head, 27; erosion sequences on, 28; ‘Ewa Plain, 27, 130; famine, 9; fishing, 143; garrisoning of, 9; Honouliuli, 130; Honolulu, 46, 48, 54, 60, 65, 87, 101, 106, 111–12, 129, 136, 143, 158, 191; House of Nobles, 65; Kahuku, 130; Kawailoa, 130; livestock, 79, 130; Mākaha Valley, 22; Manoa Valley, 65, 108, 149; military use of, 185–86; Pearl Harbor, 131, 143; population, 33; precipitation, 36; sandalwood campaigns, 58; social/political structure, 45, 52, 161; sugar plantations, 110, 130; trees, 150; taxation, 32; Waialua District, 9, 23, 58, 60; Waianae Mountains, 151; Waikiki, 68; Waimanalo Project, 174; Waimea, 21; warfare, 40, 44–45, 46, 47 O‘ahu Sugar Company, 130 Obeyesekere, Gannanath, 50 Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA), 186 ‘ohana extended family, 3, 23 ohi‘a lehua, 16 o‘hia lehua, 27 Ohrt, Fred, 172–73 Ola‘a Sugar Company, 135 oloma‘o, 152 olonā, 21 Olowalu Sugar Company, 135

Omai, 50 On the Road of the Winds (Patrick Kirch), 30 ō‘ō, 18–19, 152; pule, 40–41 O’Shaughnessy, Michael, 139–40 Osorio, Jonathan, 65–66, 90 Pā‘ao, 37–38 Pacific islands: archeological record, 29, 41–42; European exploration of, 49–57; natural history of, 15–18; Near Oceana, 30; patterns from Pacific anthropology, 28–31, 34; population density, 30; Remote Oceana, 30 Pacific Pineapple Company, 173 Pacific Plate, 15 Paki, 76 Papohaku Ranchlands, 181 Paris Botanical Garden, 101 Parker Ranch, 135 Partian, 162 Pauahi, Joseph, 114 Paulet, William, 59 Peacock, 59 Peleioholani, 45 Pierce and Company, 111 pigs, 13, 19, 20, 29, 50, 52–53, 60, 119, 154, 178, 191 Pilika‘aiea, 37 pineapple, 155–57, 169–73, 176–77, 179, 184, 195 Pineapple Town (Edward Norbeck), 170–171 Pinchot, Gifford, 144 Pioneer Mill Company, 130 Pitcairn Islands, 13, 31 Planters Labor and Supply Co., 143 poi, 72–73, 84–85, 113 Poincianas, 102–103 Polynesian, 93 Polynesians: agriculture, 6, 14, 36, 41; ancestral origin, 12–13; animals introduced by, 13, 29; archeological record, 12, 30–31; arrival in Molokai, 5–7; boats, 12–13; crops transported by, 13; culture, evolution of, 12–13; environmental degradation caused by, 30–31; fertility, attempts to control, 33–34; first contact with Europeans, 13; in Hawaii, 1000–1778 A.D., 12–43, 15, 37; religion, 36–37; population density of, 30–31; social hierarchy, 31, 34, 37–38, 41; voyaging era, 37 Poomaikelane, 120 poultry, 13, 50, 60 Prejean, 186 Protect Kaho‘olawe ‘Ohana, 186 Punahou School, 111

index Pukui, Mary Kawena, 15, 38, 41 Purdy, Kammy, 192, 193 Pu‘u O Hoku Ranch, 165 Puyallup/Muckleshoot Tribe, 186 Pyne, Stephen J., 9 Queen’s Hospital, 140 R. W. Meyer Sugar Mill, 114–16 radiation, ecological, 17 Ragsdale, Bill, 94, 105 Rarotonga, 14 rats, 13, 19, 27, 152 Reclamation Act, 139 Reciprocity Treaty, 110, 112, 118, 128 Remy, Jules, 75–79, 81, 97, 180 Reynolds, R. J., 179 Reynolds, Stephen, 108–9 rice, 113, 129, 172 Rice, W. H., 111 Richards, Charles, 119 Ritte, Walter, 185, 186–87, 188–93 Rivers of Empire (Donald Worster), 10 Riviere, 92 Robertson, George H., 131 Robertson, Ian, 189 Rock, Joseph “Papohaku,” 145, 149 Rogers, 97 Royal Botanical Gardens, 51 Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society (RHAS), 79, 140–41 Royal Navy, 49–50 Royal Patent #474, 82 S. B. Wheeler, 92 Sahlins, Marshall, 8–9, 34–36, 39, 40, 42, 47, 57, 58, 62; “Social Stratification in Polynesia,” 34 Sakanaki, 160 sand mining, 179 sandalwood, 9, 55–56, 59–60, 61; attributes of, 57–58; campaigns, 58 Sarah, 71, 92 Sawyer, Richard, 186 Schmitt, Robert C., 64 Schuyler, James D., 130 Seaton, Fred A., 175, 179 Shaler, William, 51 Shaw, Samuel, 54–55, 57 sheep, 50, 79, 136, 155, 163–64 Sheraton Molokai Resort, 182–83 Shibayama, 135 Simpson, E., 121

261

Skolmen, Roger, 151, 154 Small Reclamation Projects Act, 176 Smith, Laura Duvauchelle, 159–60 snails, 17, 20, 27–28, 76 socioenvironmental calculus, 41–43 socioenvironmental involution, 31, 39 Society Islands, 13, 31, 37; Bora Bora, 46; Huahine, 50 Soon, Ah, 159 species extinction, 8, 28–29, 60, 152 species, invasive, 8, 50, 53, 143, 149–52 Spencer, C. N., 106 Spreckels, Klaus, 112, 139 Spreckels Ditch, 112 State of Hawai‘i Bureau of Conveyances, 87 Stearns, Harold, 173–174 Stevens, Clark, 189 Stevenson (Kiwini), John, 75, 81, 96, 128–29 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 105 Stewart, Charles, 48–49, 53 sugar plantations, 19, 51, 69, 89–91, 99, 107–11, 126–28, 130–32, 134–35, 137–38, 145, 153; Chinese workers, 108, 110, 113, 114, 135–36; Hawai‘i (Big Island), 110; irrigating, 111–12, 195; Kaua’i, 110; Maui, 110–11; Molokai, 110, 113–16, 130–32, 134–35, 140, 155–56, 165; O’ahu, 110, 130; profits from, 109–10; wages on, 114–15 Sugar Planters’ Experiment Station, 153 Summers, Catherine, 86, 124 sweet potato (‘uala), 13, 21, 23, 31–32, 36, 41, 76, 97 Tahiti, 13, 14, 37, 50, 51–52, 56; agriculture, 37; fishing, 37; Pomares clan, 46, 52, 56; political structure, 35, 38, 46 Tamaahmaah, 45, 46 taro, 13–14, 114, 123, 145, 156, 187 Territorial Law of 1903, 144 Thrum, Thomas, 104 Thrum’s Hawaiian Almanac and Annual, 142 Thurston, Lorrin, 128 Tilly, Charles, 29 tobacco, 52, 71 Tokelau, 34 Tollefson, Olaf¸159 Tonga, 31, 34, 35, 50 tourism, 180–83, 188–91 Travels in Hawaii (Robert Louis Stevenson), 105 Treadway, Peter H., 88, 97 tree hibiscus, 18

262

index

Trimble, George, 121, 134 Twain, Mark, 16, 59, 104 Type I societies, 34 Type II societies, 34 Type III societies, 34–35 Umi-a-Liloa, 39 Union Colony, 130 United Exploring Expedition, 63 United States Army Air Force, 150 United States Bureau of Reclamation, 10, 126, 139–37, 139, 173–74, 176–77 United States Civilian Conservation Corps, 151 United States Department of Agriculture, 188 United States Forest Service, 139, 153 United States Geological Surveys, 126, 139, 173 United Exploring Soil Conservation Service, 164 University of California, Berkeley, 12 University of Chicago, 34 University of Hawai‘i, 187 University of Minnesota, 145 Vancouver, George, 21, 45–46, 48, 51–52, 60 Villalba, Karla, 186 Viva, 122 volcanoes, 13–15, 17, 33; Haleakala, 15, 112; Hualalai, 15; Kilauea, 15; Mauna Kea, 16; Mauna

Loa, 15, 19, 22–23, 27, 40–41, 78–79, 164, 170, 172, 182 von Humboldt, Alexander, 140 Waha, Dorcas Malama, 85, 95 Wai, 24 Waialua Agricultural Company, 130 Waianae Sugar Company, 135 Wakea, 24 Wallis, Samuel, 50 Warrington, Charles, 186 Warwick, 92, 94, 101 wauke (paper mulberry), 21 Wellington, 72 White, Richard, 9 Wilkes, Charles, 63 Wilkinson, John, 65, 108 Wilson, Jenny, 156 Wilson, John H., 156 wind farms, 192 Wittfogel, Karl, 41 Wo, Chin, 135 World War I, 157 Worster, Donald, 10, 41, 42 Yale University, 162, 163 Yamashita, 135 Yams, 13, 21, 36