PLANTER’S PARADISE: NATURE, CULTURE, AND HAWAIʻI’S

SUGARCANE PLANTATIONS

A Dissertation

Submitted to

the Temple University Graduate Board

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

by

Lawrence Helfgott Kessler

May 2016

Examining Committee Members:

Andrew Isenberg, Advisory Chair, Department of History

Beth Bailey, University of Kansas

Petra Goedde, Department of History

Richard Immerman, Department of History

John McNeill, External Member, Georgetown University

ii

©

Copyright

2016

by

Lawrence Helfgott Kessler

_____________

All Rights Reserved

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ABSTRACT

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Hawaiian sugar industry rose from

economic insignificance to become one of the world’s most efficient and productive

sugarcane plantation systems. "Planter's Paradise" traces the transnational environmental

history of cane planting in Hawaiʻi, from Polynesian settlement to the early twentieth

century, to explore how an export-based mono-culture plantation system eclipsed

diversified farming, how cultural encounters between indigenous and Euro-American

groups influenced agriculture and natural resource use, and how the politics of planting

contributed to the rise of American hegemony over the islands. With research grounded

in plantation records, agricultural association publications, popular media, and personal

correspondence, I address sugarcane planting as a point where ideas about nature,

methods of converting nature into commodities for consumption in distant markets, and

nature itself influenced each other within the context of U.S. imperial expansion.

I argue that the ascendance of Hawaiʻi’s sugar industry was the result of cultural

encounters, economic relations, and environmental conditions at the local level, but cane

planting also connected the archipelago to particular transnational networks of economic,

ecological, and cultural exchange. Sugarcane planting introduced to Hawaiʻi foreign

ways of relating to the natural world, a host of alien organisms, and advances in

agricultural science and technology that impacted all of Hawaiian society. These

introductions contributed to planters' power. By the early twentieth century, Hawaiʻi had

become a planter's paradise: a society and environment transformed for the industrial

cultivation of sugarcane.

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For Allison

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation is the result of seven years of work in the History Department at

Temple University. Andrew Isenberg, my advisor, introduced me to environmental

history and helped me to see the interactions of ecology, economy, and culture in history.

Drew also gave me crucial early encouragement and support, pushing me to apply for

doctoral school hardly a month into my first semester as a Masters student and

nominating me for a University Fellowship. Drew’s comments on my drafts of this

dissertation have made it much stronger. My dissertation committee members, Beth

Bailey, Petra Goedde, and Richard Immerman have also improved this project

significantly. Beth’s attention to my writing and repeated questions of agency have

helped me focus on the human actors and individual decisions that propelled this history

as I veered into more abstract questions about industries, islands, nations, and peoples.

Petra gave my writing the structural push to assert my arguments more plainly and helped

me investigate cultural encounters in Hawaiian history. Richard helped me think of my

dissertation within the broader context of U.S. transnational history. Each of these

committee members led seminars at Temple helped me to develop the ideas I put forward

here. John McNeill joined my dissertation committee later; his work on environmental

history in the Pacific region and plantation systems has had a significant impact on this

project.

Several other faculty members, students, and groups at Temple helped me

develop produce this dissertation. Bryant Simon helped me pay attention to questions

about the labor involved in sugarcane planting--and took me to France to present some of

my work. David Watt gave me insight into the religious ideologies that influenced the

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history of sugarcane in Hawaiʻi. The students in the seminars, colloquia, and workshops

at the History Department and Center for the Humanities all helped me write and refine

this dissertation. The Center for the Humanities at Temple and the Department of History

Colloquium provided opportunities for me to present chapter drafts. I also received

generous funding from the Center for the Humanities, the Center for the Study of Force

and Diplomacy, the College of Liberal Arts, the Graduate School, and the Global Studies

Program at Temple.

I am grateful to the many archivists and librarians who have helped me conduct

research, including Barbara Dunn at the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library

and Hawaiian Historical Society; Jodie Mattos and Stewart Dawrs at the Hamilton

Library at the University of Hawaiʻi; and Patty Lai at the Hawaiʻi State Archives. Dan

Lewis, Peter Blodgett, Brooke Black, Jenny Watts, and Bill Deverell were all

exceedingly helpful during my research at the Huntington Library.

Other readers and conference participants whose comments have improved this

dissertation include Elizabeth Varon, Mark Fiege, Erin Mauldin, Mart Stewart, Harriet

Ritvo, Jenny Newell, Jared Orsi, and David Igler. Brenda Frink and Mark Rodriguez at

the Pacific Historical Review, Merry Ovnick at the Southern California Quarterly, and

Sarah Hamilton at the World History Bulletin and the reviewers they enlisted all provided

insightful comments and guidance as I prepared parts of my research for publication.

Babak Ashrafi at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and

Etienne Benson, Jody Roberts, and Jeremy Vetter at the Consortium’s working group on

environment and history helped me see my project in a different light and pushed me to

consider new questions. I owe special thanks to Seth Archer and Gregory Rosenthal for

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their close reading, advice, and friendship. Those who hosted me during my research,

including Leslie and Mitch Aiken in Pasadena, Ruby Goodall in Oakland, Howard Wiig

in Honolulu gave me much more than hospitality. At the University of Hawaiʻi, Kieko

Matteson, John Rosa, Noelani Arista, and Jon Kamakawiwo'ole Osorio were welcoming

and helpful.

Friends and family have been truly crucial to whatever success I have achieved. I

am humbled by all the love and support I have received from too many people to make an

exhaustive list, and trust you know who you are. I am especially grateful for the support I

received from Ann Helfgott, David Kessler, and Vivian and Alan Goldberg. Most of all, I

owe everything to Allison, whose love and understanding, as well as her very close and

frequent reading, made this dissertation possible. I could not have done any of this

without her. On the other hand, I definitely could have done this without Ezra and

Zahava. They did not read a word of this, nor did they contribute any reasonable insights.

They did, however, make the process more interesting, more fun, and infinitely more

worthwhile.

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CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ v

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: ISLANDS HITCHED TO EVERYTHING ELSE ...... 1

The History of Hawaiian Sugar in a Transnational and Translocal Framework .......................... 3

Historiography ............................................................................................................................. 4

Dissertation Outline ................................................................................................................... 12

CHAPTER 2: NO PERFECT GARDEN: HAWAIIAN ENVIRONMENTS,

SETTLEMENT, AND AGRICULTURE ......................................................................... 25

Hawaiian Geology, Climates, and Environment ........................................................................ 29

The Polynesian Invasion ............................................................................................................ 37

Western Invasions ...................................................................................................................... 48

CHAPTER 3: SUGAR WITHOUT RUM: HAWAIʻI’S MISSIONARIES AND THE

FOUNDING OF THE SUGARCANE PLANTATION SYSTEM, 1821-1850 ............... 61

Sugar and Rum ........................................................................................................................... 68

Encouraging “Pious Merchants” ................................................................................................ 82

Promoting Self-Reliance ............................................................................................................ 84

Toward a New Definition of Labor and Class Relations ........................................................... 94

Plantations as a Remedy for Depopulation ................................................................................ 99

CHAPTER 4: EXPORTS AND IMPORTS, 1850-1876 ................................................ 106

The Tariff and Annexationism ................................................................................................. 111

Native Hawaiian Labor and Agricultural Expertise ................................................................. 116

Foreign Labor: Coolies and Slaves .......................................................................................... 126

The Torch of Science ............................................................................................................... 129

“Overcoming Nature by Nature” ............................................................................................. 137

“King of the Sugar World” ...................................................................................................... 142

CHAPTER 5: REVOLUTIONS, 1876-1893 .................................................................. 147

Irrigation .................................................................................................................................. 152

Kānaka Maoli-Haole Cooperation ........................................................................................... 155

Planter Organization and integration with Transnational Networks of Sugar ......................... 173

The Costs of Entering the Global Sugar Market ...................................................................... 175

Chinese Immigration and Demographic Change ..................................................................... 177

The Bayonet Constitution ........................................................................................................ 180

Ewa: A Revolutionary Plantation ............................................................................................ 184

Revolution ................................................................................................................................ 187

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CHAPTER 6: BIOLOGICAL PEST CONTROL, DIVERSIFIED FARMING, AND

HAWAIIAN SUGARCANE PLANTERS’ CAMPAIGN FOR ANNEXATION, 1893-

1898................................................................................................................................. 191

Insects and Annexation ............................................................................................................ 193

Ideas and Innovations in Agricultural Pest Control ................................................................. 197

Planters Unite For Annexation ................................................................................................. 204

Attracting White Americans to Hawaiʻi .................................................................................. 208

Biological Control Comes to Hawaiʻi ...................................................................................... 211

Annexation Achieved; Diversified Agriculture Abandoned .................................................... 225

CHAPTER 7: PLANTER’S PARADISE ....................................................................... 230

Victims of their Own Success .................................................................................................. 232

“Burying the Hatchet”.............................................................................................................. 237

Stopping the Leafhopper .......................................................................................................... 239

Cane Breeding .......................................................................................................................... 242

Only Sugar ............................................................................................................................... 246

Planter Paternalism .................................................................................................................. 249

Controlling the Environment ................................................................................................... 253

From Periphery to Core ........................................................................................................... 255

Epilogue ................................................................................................................................... 257

BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 261

Primary Sources ....................................................................................................................... 261

Secondary Sources ................................................................................................................... 270

1

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: ISLANDS HITCHED TO EVERYTHING

ELSE

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it

hitched to everything else in the Universe.

John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra1

Before the nineteenth century, the plant called kō dotted the Hawaiian Islands in

wild stands and small cultivated plots. By the early twentieth century, this same species

of grass, known to the Anglophone world as sugarcane, spread across nearly 250,000

acres of the archipelago.2 Hawaiʻi’s fast ascent to the ranks of the world’s top sugar

producers was almost unparalleled. The rise of sugarcane was also far from a natural

occurrence. Rather, it was the result of culturally specific ways of seeing the natural

world and the place of people therein; of tactical efforts of individuals to gain political

and economic power, in both domestic and international contexts; and of key innovations

in agriculture, science, and technology.

This dissertation tells the story of how sugarcane came to take such a prominent

role in Hawaiian history. It examines the rise of sugarcane cultivation in Hawaiʻi, the

environmental changes that accompanied it and the consequences of those changes for

the islands and their human inhabitants. The rise of sugarcane planting was a political as

well as an ecological process. To extend their control over the Hawaiian environment,

planters wrested control of the land from Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) and thus

1 John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911), 211.

2 Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1977),

360.

2

opened the way for the absorption of Hawaiʻi into the American empire. Planters’

resulting enhanced political position allowed them to further extend their control over the

Hawaiian environment.

It may seem as though the rise of sugarcane planting in Hawaiʻi was the

inevitable, or at least logical, result of climatic and economic conditions: year-round

warm temperatures, abundant sunshine, and an adequate water supply made cane planting

possible; international demand made sugar production profitable. In this view, it would

seem only natural that people in Hawaiʻi planted cane. Little was natural, nevertheless,

about the rise of the Hawaiian sugar industry. A web of interactive cultural, economic,

and environmental factors gave rise to what I call the Hawaiian sugarcane plantation

system. As the term “plantation system” suggests, disparate things formed a complex

whole in which interactions produce unanticipated outcomes.3

The plantation system is a system because it orders life and society around it. The

sociologist Edgar Thompson described the plantation as a “settlement institution”—

something that cannot exist apart from certain territorial and ecological requirements—

which “accommodates and settles people of diverse backgrounds on the land.”4 As in a

farm or manor, the land is a working partner in a plantation, giving the plantation

influence over patterns of social, economic, and, not least of all, political interaction.

Where and how communities form and types of opportunities available for education and

3 Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1997).

4 Edgar T. Thompson, “The Plantation as a Social System,” in Plantation Systems of the New

World: Papers and Discussion Summaries of the Seminar Held in San Juan, Puerto Rico Social Science

Monographs VII (Washington, D. C.: Pan American Union, 1959), 27.

3

commerce, for example, depend upon the way land is enlisted into the plantation

enterprise. Historically contingent ways of understanding the environment and land use,

government policies toward international trade and domestic production, and

unanticipated environmental changes operated together to create this system.

The Hawaiian sugarcane plantation system eventually pervaded Hawaiʻi. By the

end of the nineteenth century, it wed fields to factories and laboratories, informed

religious and political ideology, and touched Hawaiian ecosystems far beyond plantations

themselves, from mountaintop forests to coastal reefs. As with other plantation systems

throughout the world, the Hawaiian plantation system became hegemonic in the efforts of

its creators to achieve control over land, labor, and inherently dynamic economic and

environmental conditions.5

The History of Hawaiian Sugar in a Transnational and Translocal Framework

Although the rise of the plantation system was the result of actions and events

located in Hawaiʻi, and the plantation system caused localized changes in the islands, the

environmental history of the Hawaiian sugar industry stretches far beyond Hawaiʻi’s

shores. Indeed, the history of the Hawaiian sugarcane plantation system is rooted in

encounters that connected one of the most remote and isolated archipelagos in the world

to networks of cultural, economic, and environmental exchange. The incursion of foreign

ideas, economic forces, technologies, and plant and animal species remade Hawaiʻi, yet

Hawaiians were not passive recipients of foreign invasions. They adopted and adapted

5 For a global perspective on plantation systems as forces working toward stability in land, labor, economic,

and environmental conditions, see Frank Uekotter, ed., Comparing Apples, Oranges, and Cotton:

Environmental Histories of the Global Plantation (New York: Campus Verlag, 2014).

4

foreign elements, and later were active importers of others, as they negotiated their global

position. The history of sugarcane in Hawaiʻi is thus an integral part of the history of how

Hawaiʻi became hitched to the rest of the world.

Just as sugarcane touched many aspects of Hawaiʻi’s environment and society, so

too does this dissertation engage many disparate historiographies: that of Hawaiian

history, environmental history, the history of Hawaiʻi-U.S. relations, the history of the

global sugar industry; and the histories of agriculture and agricultural science and

technology. The goal of situating this project in conversation with these subfields is to

better understand two related questions: how did plantation agriculture come to dominate

Hawaiʻi’s economy and environment, and how did plantation agriculture influence the

rise of American hegemony over Hawaiʻi?

Historiography

Through the middle of the twentieth century, the historian Ralph Kuykendall

dominated the field of Hawaiian history. His magisterial The Hawaiian Kingdom,

published in three volumes between 1938 and 1967, remains a valuable source for

scholars interested in Hawaiian political and economic history. The historians Gavan

Daws and Merze Tate likewise produced in the late 1960s informative histories of

Hawaiʻi and the United States that primarily focused on policy-making elites. Social and

labor historians later addressed the history of Asian immigration to Hawaiʻi and

conditions these immigrants faced as they worked on Hawaiʻi’s plantations. The late

twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen a rise in scholarly work examining

5

Native Hawaiian history, with particular emphasis on makaʻāinana, or native non-elites.

Jonathan Osorio, Gary Okihiro, Noenoe Silva, and Tom Coffman have all produced work

ascribing greater agency to these Hawaiians, whose voices were often neglected in earlier

works. This recent scholarship on Hawaiian history told a valuable story of resistance and

adaptation on the part of Native Hawaiians, and collectively it has dispelled old notions

that Hawaiians welcomed U.S. annexation and did little to oppose their loss of political

sovereignty.6

These recent works rightly emphasized the contingency of the political turmoil of

the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in which many of the Hawaiian haole (literally,

“foreigner”; later, “white”) community attacked Hawaiian sovereignty and ultimately

facilitated annexation to the United States. These works also demonstrated that

Hawaiians contested the rise of haole power. While this development offered a crucial

corrective to the histories that silenced native voices as they celebrated the spread of

American democracy, it has also obscured the long processes operating in Hawaiian

history. In Hawaiʻi, the people who overthrew the monarchy were in the position to do so

because they had accumulated power and capital over the course of the previous half-

6 Ralph S. Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom 3 vols. (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press,

1938, 1953, 1967); Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (New York:

Macmillan, 1968); Merze Tate, Hawaiʻi: Reciprocity or Annexation (East Lansing: Michigan State

University Press, 1968). For ethnicity and labor histories of the sugarcane industry in Hawaiʻi see Clarence

E. Glick, Sojourners and Settlers: Chinese Migrants in Hawaii (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii,

1980); Edward D. Beechert, Working in Hawaii: A Labor History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,

1985); Ronald T. Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaiʻi, 1835-1920 (Honolulu:

University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1983); and Gary Y. Okihiro, Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in

Hawaiʻi, 1865-1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). Jonathan K. Osorio, Dismembering

Lāhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002); Gary Y.

Okihiro, Island World: A History of Hawaiʻi and the United States (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2008); Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Tom Coffman, Nation Within: The History of the American

Occupation of Hawaiʻi Revised edition (Kihei, Hawaiʻi: Koa Books, 2009).

6

century. The means by which they gained power and capital—cooperation with Hawaiian

elite and the formation of a sugarcane plantation system—must be examined in order to

understand the 1893 revolution and annexation.

The methods of environmental history offer the opportunity for such a

contextualization. The drastic ecological changes that followed the islands’ modern

encounter with the outside world as well as the reliance of Hawaiʻi’s economy on its

natural resources point to the significance of environmental agents in Hawaiian history.

Additionally, Hawaiʻi’s geographic isolation and the rich documentary record regarding

the introduction of foreign species to Hawaiʻi render the islands a compelling subject of

study for environmental historians. Environmental history and Hawaiʻi seem like a

particularly good match, yet environmental historians have largely ignored the subject.

The historian and scholar of American Studies David Stannard, the marine biologist John

Culliney, and the anthropologist Carol MacLennan have written histories of Hawaiʻi that

use some environmental history methods, but they leave much work still to be done.7

Carol MacLennan’s work is particularly significant in the application of environmental

history to the history of the Hawaiian sugar industry, and many of the same subjects that

she focused on are addressed in this dissertation. MacLennan’s work, however, pays

greater attention to the local history of sugar in Hawaiʻi and the impact that it had on the

7 David E. Stannard, Before the Horror: The Population of Hawaiʻi on the Eve of Western Contact

(Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1989); John L. Culliney, Islands in a Far Sea: The Fate of Nature

in Hawaiʻi Revised Edition (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2006); Carol A. MacLennan,

Soveriegn Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2014). See

also, Alfred Crosby, “Hawaiian Depopulation as a Model for the Amerindian Experience,” in Terence

Ranger and Paul Slack, eds., Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 175-202.

7

islands’ environments than it does to the processes of exchange, the push toward stability,

and the hybridity of plantation environments that is presented here. This dissertation

addresses this gap in environmental historiography, and uses environmental history

methodology to examine how haole sugar interests came to consolidate power and capital

in Hawaiʻi.

Environmental history includes a variety of methods and foci, but at its core it

posits that people’s surroundings matter to history. Environmental conditions influence

human actions and are in turn influenced by those actions. The question of how to find a

balance between environmental and human causes of historical change has been an

ongoing preoccupation of environmental historians. Early works of environmental

history, correcting the wide-scale neglect of environmental actors by historians, often

tended toward ascribing causal agency to environmental actors alone. The influential

environmental historian Alfred Crosby, for example, presented the environmentally

determinist view that European conquest of the New World depended upon factors

beyond human control or intention.8 More recent environmental history has grown more

nuanced, however. Scholars acknowledge that people and the nonhuman world are in

constant interaction, creating hybrid landscapes and histories in which human actions on

and in their environments, environmental conditions, and ideas about nature are

8 Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

8

intertwined. Even extreme cases of environmental agency—such as epidemics and

droughts—operate alongside human economies and cultures to propel history.9

This dissertation answers the environmental historian Donald Worster’s call for

an ecological approach to the history of food production, with particular attention to the

influence of capitalist economies on land use. Worster’s assertion that the specialized

production of food monocultures for gain in capitalist markets has fundamentally

reorganized the way people interact with the environment may be tested by studying

Hawaiʻi’s sugar plantations.10

However, what Worster calls capitalist agroecology cannot

suffice as a tool for analyzing history; it considers human actions almost exclusively in

terms of the market.11

By contrast, as the environmental historian Arthur McEvoy argues,

ecology, production, and cognition are mutually constitutive forces of historical change.

McEvoy’s insight illuminates how sugarcane plantations, Hawaiian and haole cultures,

and the environment were inter-embedded agents of change. It constitutes the analytical

foundation for this dissertation.12

9 Paul S. Sutter, “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History,” Journal of

American History 100, no. 1 (June 2013): 94-119. See also, Richard White, “From Wilderness to Hybrid

Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History,” Historian 66 (Fall 2004): 557-64; Richard

White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995);

Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West (Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 1999).

10 Donald Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in

History,” Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (March, 1990): 1087-1106.

11 William Cronon and Richard White raised this objection to Worster’s paradigm in the same

Journal of American History roundtable. William Cronon, “Placing Nature in History,” Journal of

American History 76, no. 4 (March 1990): 1122-1131; Richard White, “Environmental History, Ecology,

and Meaning,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1111-1116.

12 Arthur F. McEvoy, “Toward an Interactive Theory of Nature and Culture: Ecology, Production,

and Cognition in the California Fishing Industry,” Environmental Review 11, no. 4 (Winter, 1987): 289-

305.

9

Such a focus on ecology, economy, and culture requires an examination of the

transnational networks formed by sugar plantations. Monoculture plantation agriculture

rests on a Western cultural attitude toward land ownership and use, brought to Hawaiʻi by

explorers, missionaries, whalers, traders, and entrepreneurs. Additionally, the market and

financing for Hawaiian sugar came from the United States. Invasions of foreign ideas and

capital were just as significant a source of environmental change in Hawaiʻi as were

invasions of alien biotas. These invasions helped tie Hawaiʻi to the United States

economically and culturally, and ultimately contributed to the islands’ annexation.

Haole planters were not simple agents of United States imperialism, however. In

the 1830s, when the first plantations were founded, U.S. power was not yet established on

the Pacific coast of North America, let alone on an archipelago over two thousand miles

away from California’s shores. Great Britain and France seemed more eager and more

capable than the United States to assert control over the Hawaiian Kingdom. Much of the

scholarship on the United States and Hawaiʻi operates from the perspective of U.S.

foreign policy makers and American imperialist culture during the second half of the

nineteenth century, when U.S. power in the Pacific was on the rise. But the presence of

American-identified planters in Hawaʻi predates any significant presence of the U.S.

nation-state. American haole in Hawaiʻi may have been cultural imperialists, but it must

not be assumed that the early planters had an interest in extending U.S. sovereignty to

Hawaiʻi.13

13

For interpretations of Hawaiian history that focus on empire, see Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest

Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Thomas

J. Osborne, “Empire Can Wait”: American Opposition of Hawaiian Annexation, 1893-1898 (Kent: The

Kent State University Press, 1981); Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture

10

Not only was the influence of the United States in Hawaiʻi weak at the inception

of Hawaiʻi’s sugar industry, the United States was hardly the capitalist power that it

would later become. This dissertation focuses on sugar interests in Hawaiʻi, the networks

they developed, and the markets they built. To understand the growth of the Hawaiian

sugar industry, one must look to local actions and conditions in addition to global

markets. Arif Dirlik’s notion of translocalism, which incorporates the operation of the

capitalist world-system with place-specific networks of culture and politics, provides a

useful framework for understanding how sugar planters in Hawaiʻi thought and

operated.14

Cultural ties to New England, business ties to San Francisco, and political

connections to Washington, D.C., for example, as well as planters’ relationships with

Hawaiian authority and access to Hawaiian resources all played a part in the planters’

world-views. These planters were not simply entering a well-established market

dominated by the United States; they were agents in forming that market.

The Hawaiian sugar market may have been a novelty in some important ways, but

the global sugar trade was well established by the nineteenth century. Scholars have

examined in great depth the history of sugar and sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean,

labeling the seventeenth-century changes to Atlantic sugar islands underwent the “sugar

revolution.” The sugar revolution is a broad term with no universally accepted definition,

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). Stuart Banner applies the model of settler colonialism to the

Pacific. Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to

Alaska (Cambridge, MA, 2007).

14Arif Dirlik, “Performing the World: Reality and Representation in the Making of World

Histor(ies),” Journal of World History 16, no. 4 (December, 2005): 391-410. On translocalism in Pacific

history, see also Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. 5-6.

11

but at its core it posits that sugarcane precipitated economic, demographic, social, and

political change, and catalyzed modernity in the places it was cultivated on large

plantations. Historians have applied the theory that sugarcane was in some ways

determinative almost exclusively to the Atlantic world.15

Other scholars have focused on

sugar production in Asia, and have produced particularly insightful work on cultural

encounters related to land use, the development of an economy dependent upon export

agriculture, and the use of technology.16

This dissertation extends the idea of the sugar

revolution to nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi.

Finally, historians have recognized that the circulation of agricultural science and

technology was crucial to the development of sugar-producing regions. Science and

technology were a medium for negotiation between cores and peripheries and connected

different plantation systems.17

This dissertation adds the Hawaiian case to the

historiography of sugarcane planting, and uses the broader historiography of sugarcane to

15

Classic work on sugarcane and the Atlantic world includes Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves:

The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 1972), Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History

(New York: Penguin Books, 1985), and J. H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical

Geography from its Origins to 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For an in-depth

appraisal of the idea of “sugar revolution,” see B. W. Higman, “The Sugar Revolution,” Economic History

Review 53, no. 2 (2000): 213-236.

16 John A. Larkin, Sugar and the Origins of Modern Philippine Society (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1993); Sucheta Mazumdar, Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology, and the

World Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); G. Roger Knight, Commodities and

Colonialism.: The Story of Big Sugar in Colonial Indonesia, 1880-1942 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2013); G.

Roger Knight, Sugar, Steam and Steel: The Industrial Project in Colonial Java, 1830-1885 (Adelaide:

University of Adelaide Press, 2014).

17 Richard A. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the

Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Stuart McCook,

States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760-1940 (Austin:

University of Texas Press, 2002).

12

contextualize the Hawaiian case. Questions of relations between both producer and

consumer societies and geographically separated producer societies help position this

dissertation in the broader context of commodity exchange and agricultural capitalism.

Dissertation Outline

Chapter 2: No “Perfect Garden”: Hawaiian Environments, Settlement, and

Agriculture

This chapter examines the long pre-contact history of sugarcane in Hawaiʻi and

early American impressions of Hawaiian agriculture and the Hawaiian environment.

Whereas the sugar islands of the Atlantic World only first saw acquired sugarcane after

the voyages of Christopher Columbus, sugarcane’s roots in Hawaiʻi are as deep as those

of the archipelago’s first human inhabitants—they arrived together sometime around

1000 CE. Cane was one piece in a complex of ecological imports to the islands. The first

settlers brought what the historian Alfred Crosby called a portmanteau biota: pigs, dogs,

taro (kalo in Hawaiian) bananas, and other foodstuffs in addition to sugarcane.

Inadvertent imports were also members of this portmanteau biota: fleas, rats, lice,

possibly some diseases. Third, these settlers imported the ideas and attitudes regarding

the environment that they developed in their society of origin. The chapter explores what

the original Hawaiian settlers found and what they brought to the islands.

The overall climate of Hawaiʻi was familiar to the Polynesian migrants, sharing

similar characteristics such as mean annual temperature and sunshine with other

Polynesian islands. The plants that the settlers brought were easily adapted to Hawaiʻi.

13

The animals they brought also found hospitable conditions in Hawaiʻi. The imported pigs

and dogs—small Asian breeds—remained closely tied to human settlements and did not

experience large population irruptions or go feral on the islands. Sugarcane was a small

but significant part of Hawaiian subsistence. Taro was the staple crop; pigs, dogs, and

fish were all used as protein; yet sugarcane served many functions. It was both a snack

and a sweetener of other foods, an ingredient in traditional medicines, and an ingredient

in animal feed, building materials, and dyes.

Native Hawaiians developed extensive irrigation and land reclamation projects in

order to meet their agricultural needs. They dammed and diverted mountain streams in

order to flood taro paddies, with small clusters of sugarcane and banana at the fringes of

these paddies. Hawaiians also changed the islands’ environment by building aquaculture

works and hunting some native bird species to the point of extinction. The Hawaiʻi that

the Polynesians discovered and inhabited was thus significantly different from that which

James Cook encountered when he discovered the islands in 1778.

When Europeans first arrived in Hawaiʻi, they sought to classify the islands

within existing European ideas of tropical islands. Yet the high degree of cultivation in

Hawaiʻi in some ways confounded European and American visitors. Early encounters

between Hawaiians and foreigners were directly linked to different cultural perspectives

on land use, agriculture, and the environment.

Chapter 3: Sugar without Rum, 1820-1850

14

When American Congregationalist missionaries arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1820, many

initially opposed sugarcane planting for its worldliness and for the negative effects they

perceived it was having on the Hawaiians they sought to convert. Foremost among

missionaries’ complaints against sugarcane planting was its connection with distilling

rum, a crucial source of revenue for cane planters throughout the world. However,

missionary ideology proved to be flexible; and economic, environmental, and social

factors all contributed to changes in missionaries’ positions toward sugar. Though

resolute in their opposition to distilling rum, missionaries came to embrace sugarcane

planting by the middle of the nineteenth century. Missionary support was instrumental to

the rise of a distinct Hawaiian plantation system which upheld the missionary ideal of

temperance, but encouraged missionaries and other haole to have greater involvement in

economic affairs than they originally intended.

The eventual missionary acceptance of sugarcane planting contributed to the

development of government policies geared toward plantation agriculture and an

economy based on the export of an agricultural commodity. Yet missionaries’ influence

prevented the adoption of rum distilling, which made it significantly more difficult to

develop profitable plantations. The result was that the sugar industry quickly became

consolidated in the hands of a small number of well-financed operations. As under-

capitalized plantations failed, those that remained expanded and came to exert greater

control on government policy and the Hawaiian economy.

By focusing on missionaries, the goals of agricultural development, and the ban

on distilling rum, this chapter explores some of the ways the Hawaiian sugar industry was

15

exceptional among the world’s sugar producers, and the implications of these unique

factors for the development of the Hawaiian sugar industry. Moreover, in examining

missionary influence over the rise of the sugarcane plantation system, I make the

argument that agriculture and sugar production were much more than economic

endeavors, but acts imbued with deep-seated cultural, ideological, and political meaning

which took priority over immediate economic self-interest.

Chapter 4: Exports and Imports, 1850-1875

At the mid-point of the nineteenth century, with support for sugar production

among Hawaiʻi’s native and foreign elite, and domestic policies geared toward the

establishment of large plantations, Planters then turned their attention outward, so that

they might enter the international sugar economy. This entailed the development of trade

relations that gave planters access to foreign markets free from import duties that

rendered their product uncompetitive, the acquisition of a cheap and tractable labor pool,

and the participation in the global circulation of knowledge and technology directed

toward sugar production.

Much of the sugar producing world possessed the international framework for its

produce as a result of its colonial history. The sugar islands of the Greater Caribbean

established their plantation systems with the help of access to the markets of their

European metropolitan cores. Additionally, the establishment and expansion of plantation

systems in the Atlantic World depended upon the expansion of slavery. Moreover,

16

agricultural expertise and technology often traveled along imperial networks from core to

colony.

Hawaiʻi had no colonial relationship to facilitate the sale of its sugar, nor a slave

system to facilitate sugarcane cultivation, nor a metropole invested in building

agricultural knowledge in Hawaiʻi. It was not until 1875, after years of intensive

lobbying, that Hawaiʻi and the United States signed a reciprocity treaty, allowing planters

to export their sugar to the U. S. duty-free. The treaty led to a meteoric rise in profits, and

access to the capital necessary for large-scale importation of foreign plantation workers.

In the meantime, though, as planters and the government worked persistently but

ineffectively for profitable access to the American market, they needed to find other

means of making sugar pay.

In order to overcome adverse conditions of the international market, planters set

about importing foreign technology and expertise. This increased plantation efficiency

and improved the quality of Hawaiʻi sugar, both of which helped to improve plantation

profits. However, technology and expertise were not alone in helping Hawaiian planters

overcome the challenges of producing and selling sugar profitably. Environmental factors

made key contributions to the Hawaiian plantation system.

Hawaiʻi possessed many areas of highly fertile soil that had not suffered

exhaustion after years of intensive cultivation. Hawaiʻi also enjoyed an absence of the

tropical storms that often plagued other cane-growing regions. Finally, while other crops

were subject to the depredations of newly introduced crop pests, sugarcane proved

relatively resilient to animals. These environmental factors all contributed to the

17

expansion of sugarcane planting and made the sugar industry increasingly important to

the Hawaiian economy and government policy. The environment thus helped Hawaiʻi

shift from more diversified agriculture to an economy dominated by a single crop.

Efforts to connect the islands to foreign markets came at a cost. The introduction

of new species, ideas, technologies, and economic relationships brought more cane under

cultivation and altered the Hawaiian environment. A more immediate change for

Hawaiians, though, was agricultural marginalization and a culture that erased Hawaiian

presence from the land and influence on agriculture in Hawaiʻi. As planters reached out

across oceans to bring the sugar world to Hawaiʻi, they made room for their imports by

ignoring Native Hawaiian agricultural practices. Consigning Hawaiians to a doomed race,

haole planters imposed their agricultural vision upon the Hawaiian environment.

Chapter 5: Revolutions, 1876-1893

If land reform marked the birth of a sugarcane industry in Hawaiʻi, the reciprocity

treaty signed between the Hawaiian Kingdom and the United States in 1875 launched its

dominance. The elimination of a duty of between three and four cents per pound of sugar

transformed Hawaiian cane cultivation from a marginally profitable enterprise to a cash

cow. The number of plantations, acres under cultivation, and quantity of sugar exports all

increased dramatically after reciprocity. Most importantly, sugar rose to account for over

ninety percent of the value of Hawaiʻi’s exports. This chapter explores the political,

social, and environmental consequences of sugar’s dramatic rise in the last quarter of the

nineteenth century.

18

Reciprocity unleashed sugarcane’s full potential to transform the Hawaiian

economic landscape. With a sense of security in sugarcane’s profitability, those with the

capital to invest in production were able to assert dominance on the industry. Large

planters and sugar factors—businesses that acted as multi-purposed intermediaries

between plantation and market—accelerated the trend toward vertically integrated

operations, gaining larger stakes in more plantations and controlling nearly every aspect

of the industry. Sugar money spread further into related businesses; inter-island

transportation and shipping, railroads, foundries, and banks became part of the sugar

factors’ commercial domain. Planters and factors were also able to integrate horizontally

through space, consolidating landholdings as well as the rights to surrounding resources.

The number of factors decreased as the more successful among them pushed out smaller

operations. Creating a business environment akin to what the historian David Igler

labeled the “industrial Far West,” sugarcane interests directed labor, land, and capital

toward the industrial production of sugar.18

Reciprocity thus reordered domestic relations

in Hawaiʻi as well as Hawaiʻi’s economic relationship with the United States.

Political instability followed the reciprocity treaty. In 1887 a group of haole elites,

with the support of a secretly organized militia, forced Hawaiʻi’s King David Kalākaua to

sign a new constitution which granted white landholders much greater power in the

Hawaiian government. Five years later, after the new monarch, Queen Liliʻuokalani, tried

to restore the country’s old constitution, the same haoles staged a coup with help from the

18

David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-

1920 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 7. See also Steven Stoll, The Fruits

of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1998).

19

U.S. Minister to Hawaiʻi and a company of Marines. President Grover Cleveland

rebuffed the initial requests for annexation by Hawaiʻi’s new Provisional Government, so

on July 4, 1894 the Provisional Government gave way to the Republic of Hawaiʻi. Four

years later, with William McKinley occupying the U.S. presidency, the haole oligarchy

achieved their aims of annexation to the United States.

As the plural name of the chapter suggests, this dissertation posits multiple

revolutions. Environmental and economic revolutions centered around reciprocity

predated and were intertwined with the political revolution of 1893. This chapter

examines the decisions and events that led from those revolutions to open rebellion

against the Hawaiian monarchy, and the role of sugarcane in the political conflict.

Situating the conflict of the 1880s and 1890s in the context of the history of the cane

planters’ rise to power, the chapter asks how the different Hawaiian revolutions are

related, and how the overthrow of the Hawaiian government developed out of the

revolutions that came before.

Chapter 6: “Overcoming Nature by Nature,” 1893-1903

Following the 1893 overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani, planters and their allies

expected quick annexation to the United States. Even those planters who did not support

the revolution hoped to achieve annexation so that their sugar would be a domestic

product of the United States, and therefore receive the price protection and market access

that domestic status entailed. Annexationists, however, soon met with disappointment, as

U. S. President-elect Grover Cleveland came out against annexation. Anti-imperialist

20

outrage over American involvement in the coup and a lobbying battle between supporters

of Queen Liliʻuokalani and supporters of the new Provisional Government unfolded in

Washington.

Planters were concerned that their success over the past two decades had given

Hawaiʻi a reputation as a plantocracy filled with Asian workers, and that this made

Hawaiʻi appear undemocratic and inassimilable to the American public. The United

States in the 1890s experienced what Rayford Logan and other historians have called the

nadir of American race relations. Post-Civil War Reconstruction had given way to Jim

Crow in the South and anti-Asian legislation in the West. Planters therefore perceived

that if they were to convince Americans that Hawaiʻi should become the first extra-

continental territory of the U.S., they would need to counter the view of Hawaiʻi as

dominated by sugar and its nonwhite workforce with their own vision of Hawaiʻi as a

place fit for white American settlement.

To further their political goal of annexation, planters took the counter-intuitive

step of working against their own immediate interests by encouraging the development of

diversified agriculture and the immigration of white American small farmers. Planters

promoted homesteading legislation and also facilitated agricultural research in crops

other than sugarcane. Sugarcane was too capital intensive to be accessible to most

Americans, and the requirements for large economies of scale created vast plantations.

Planters understood that the American cultural ideal, epitomized in Thomas Jefferson’s

view of republican virtue based on small-scale agriculture and more recently articulated

by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who in 1893 lamented the closing of the

21

American frontier, must be brought to Hawaiʻi. Planters thus proposed to create a new

American agricultural frontier in Hawaiʻi.

To achieve the goal of developing diversified agrculture, however, planters and

other annexationists needed to deal with an unlikely obstacle: insects. Due to a complex

of factors related to Hawaiʻi’s geography and settlement, sugarcane suffered relatively

little damage from agricultural pests, but other agricultural crops were so vulnerable to

infestations that would-be farmers often failed or replaced their crops with sugarcane.

Hawaiian annexationists needed to find a way to control insect pests if they were to

succeed in establishing a society of white American agriculturalists.

If insects posed an unlikely problem for annexationists, they also provided an

equally unlikely solution. Planters became early adopters of biological pest control—the

use of insectivorous or parasitic insects to prey upon insect crop pests. With cutting-edge

entomological research, Hawaiʻi’s sugarcane planters became leaders in the field of

biological control. Biological control helped build up diversified agriculture in Hawaiʻi,

but these gains were short lived. In 1898, once annexation was achieved, planters

maintained their commitment to agricultural science and research, but they no longer

supported efforts to develop a white American community based on diversified

agriculture. This chapter demonstrates the connection between Hawaiian sugarcane

planters’ political agenda and their adoption of innovative scientific agricultural

practices. It argues that planters were conscious of their image, and that they committed

to transforming the Hawaiian environment into a suitable place for idealized American

agriculture when doing so suited their political ends.

22

Chapter 7: Planter’s Paradise, 1903-1937

As the twentieth century dawned, sugarcane planters in Hawaiʻi were ascendant.

The market stability they had sought for so long was finally achieved with annexation in

1898. Moreover, their dedication to technological development and scientific research

was paying significant dividends. Field, factory, and laboratory merged as technological

and scientific expertise helped Hawaiʻi become the world’s most efficient producer of

sugar per acre of cane and per worker. This chapter concludes the dissertation by

examining Hawaiʻi’s dramatic transition from a remote and insignificant place at the edge

of the sugar-producing world to a center of scientific innovation and technological

development. It further asks how Hawaiʻi, as a center of world sugar production,

contributed to global environmental change.

Hawaiʻi’s experiences with biological pest control in other agricultural fields

became a significant asset to sugarcane planters when, at the beginning of the twentieth

century, the sugarcane leafhopper invaded the archipelago. This pest was poised to

devastate the Hawaiian sugar industry, destroying over one sixth the entire sugar crop in

1903. Entomologists, however, were able to quickly control the leafhopper and other

pests, and soon island plantations were regularly setting new records in sugar production.

Not only were plantations becoming increasingly productive, they were also

expanding. The infrastructural system upon which cane planters relied blossomed after

annexation, as plantations acquired the capital necessary to invest in new irrigation that

dwarfed previous projects. The increase in irrigation gave planters the ability to put more

23

land under cane cultivation, and thus gave planters increasing dominance over the

Hawaiian environment. To process all the sugarcane grown on new plantation lands,

planters built larger and more sophisticated mills, developing what became the industry

standard in the extraction of sucrose from cane stalks.

Increased monoculture acreage caused Hawaiʻi’s cane fields to become

increasingly prone to crop pests and diseases, but planters again pioneered new solutions

to historical checks on the size of plantation operations. Plant scientists in Hawaiʻi bred

new varieties of sugarcane that were more resistant to pests and diseases. The

development of biological control, irrigation, and lab-bred canes far surpassed visions

from the mid-nineteenth century of how planters could alter the Hawaiian landscape, yet

they also reflected how thoroughly earlier planters had managed to gain control over

Hawaiʻi’s environment and economy.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, Hawaiʻi’s sugarcane fields hardly

resembled those of a century earlier. Planters had engineered a new environment for

sugarcane. They introduced insects from far-off places to help protect cane, redesigned

watersheds to bring water and cane to lands that were formerly unable to support

intensive plantation agriculture, and even engineered new varieties of the plant better

suited to their needs. Though sugarcane planting remains rooted in nature, little of

Hawaiʻi’s twentieth-century sugar producing process can be said to be natural. Hawaiʻi’s

planters carefully designed an artificial paradise to help them maximize the amount of

sugar they could produce.

24

Hawaiʻi’s planters not only remade their own environment, but the global

sugarcane environment, too. Hawaiʻi became a center for the diffusion of expertise,

capital, plants, and animals throughout the sugar-producing world. Hawaiian sugar

experts soon moved to other sugarcane plantation systems, bringing with them the

expertise they acquired in Hawaiʻi. Planters began investing in plantations in the

Philippines, where they industrialized sugar production. Hawaiian-bred varieties of

sugarcane such as H-109, one of the early successes of Hawaiʻi’s cane breeding program

became common throughout the world. And planters re-exported the biological control

animals that they had previously imported, sometimes causing drastic environmental

crises in other plantation regions. Sugarcane, a simple grass, thus remade Hawaiʻi’s

economy, culture, environment, and place in the world.

25

CHAPTER 2: NO PERFECT GARDEN: HAWAIIAN ENVIRONMENTS,

SETTLEMENT, AND AGRICULTURE

Nothing, nothing that ever existed on this island reached it easily.

James A. Michener, Hawaii1

When one expects perfection, one is bound to be disappointed. Such was the case

when in September 1840 Charles Wilkes, commander of the circumnavigatory United

States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842, arrived at Hawaiʻi. “From the published

descriptions of the Hawaiian Islands,” Wilkes wrote, “I was prepared to see them, and

particularly Oʻahu, a perfect garden…I regret to say, any side of [Oʻahu], when seen

from the sea, is very far from having an inviting appearance.”2 For Wilkes, the “perfect

garden” described in other published accounts of the archipelago was nothing more than

a mythologized Hawaiʻi, an impossible place.

While Wilkes’s comments may seem churlish, Oʻahu and the other Hawaiian

Islands are indeed no perfect garden. Nor are they a paradise of the Pacific, as many

called the archipelago later in the nineteenth century. To call a place a perfect garden or

earthly paradise is to suggest it is unchanging; the natural world is dynamic, even

chaotic.3 Calling Hawaiʻi a perfect garden denies the archipelago its natural complexity,

ignores the contingency of environmental change, and obscures human agency in

manipulating the environment. These things are all anathema to environmental history.

1 James A. Michener, Hawaii (New York: Random House, 1959), 7.

2 Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838,

1839, 1840, 1841, 1842 Vol. III (London: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), 373.

3 Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 156-170.

26

Far from a static paradise, the Hawaiian Islands that Wilkes encountered had been

undergoing environmental change since they rose from the sea, change that has

accelerated since humans first settled the archipelago.

The natural world is, of course, very real. Yet the ways we experience, interpret,

and ascribe meaning to the world around us are rooted in our cultures. We rely on

received knowledge and culture as well as our observations to understand the world

around us, seeing places through the filter of what we think they should be like. We

create what the historian Alan Taylor has called a dialectic between environmental

experiences and environmental storytelling.4 We transform observed environments into

communicated landscapes—verbal or visual representations of a place that reflect our

culture and contribute to a shared sense of what that place is.5 In other words, while an

environment is material fact, a landscape is a social construction.

Idealized descriptions of Hawaiʻi’s environment–and the more general notion of

tropical paradise—are just such social constructions that reveal as much about the views

of the people who use them as they do the places to which they are affixed. “The

‘tropics,’” wrote the historian David Arnold, “were invented quite as much as they were

4 Alan Taylor, “‘Wasty Ways’: Stories of American Settlement,” Environmental History 3 (1998),

291-310; esp. 293.

5 The geographer John Kirtland Wright articulated landscape as a historically contingent social

construction and the imaginative qualities of geography: John K. Wright, “Terrae Incognitae: the place of

Imagination in Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 37 (1947): 1-15. See also

David Lowenthal and Martyn J. Bowden, eds., Geographies of the Mind (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1976); David Arnold, “‘Illusory Riches’: Representations of the Tropical World, 1840-1950,”

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21, no. 1 (March 2000): 6-18; and Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing

Tropical Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).

27

encountered.”6 Wilkes’s statement neatly illustrates this point. Earlier accounts of

Hawaiʻi as well as a culturally constructed idea of the tropics prepared Wilkes for what to

see in the islands. Wilkes’s disappointment upon seeing Oʻahu was the result of his belief

in a Western cultural ideal of what Hawaiʻi should be. By comparing his own view of

Hawaiʻi with “published descriptions,” Wilkes used his own cultural background as a

frame of reference for seeing the islands.

The ways people relate to the natural environment, the landscapes we see, are

dynamic as well. Not only were the tropics invented, they are continually reinvented and

transmitted through ongoing representations of that place. These landscapes have the

power to shape human behaviors toward the land. As Taylor and other scholars have

argued, we act toward the environment as our culture trains us to; culture finds material

expression in the built environment. Nature and culture mutually condition each other as

both change and respond to each other. Yet people do not simply contemplate nature

from a dispassionate remove—we must use it. Society and nature meet at the point where

matter becomes a resource, and it is through resource use that cultural attitudes toward

the natural world take shape. Ecology, economy, and culture are inextricable drivers of

human history. Each facet changes according to its own logic and rhythm, yet each must

respond to changes in the others.7

6 David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800-1856

(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 6.On the social construction of nature see, William

Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in William Cronon, ed.,

Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995), 69-

90.

7 Andrew C. Isenberg, “Environment in the Nineteenth-Century West: Or, Process Encounters

Place,” in William Deverell, ed. A Companion to the American West (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 77-

92. The relationship between people and nature is mediated through use in pre-modern economies, as well.

28

Wilkes’s remarks on Hawaiʻi are thus more than mere rhetoric. By adding his

own narrative to the many published descriptions of Hawaiʻi, Wilkes joined the

explorers, missionaries, and merchants who preceded him to the archipelago, and the

Polynesian migrants who preceded them, in the act of constructing landscapes of Hawaiʻi

and thus influencing how people acted toward the environment. Moreover, Wilkes’s visit

to Hawaiʻi only three years after the founding of the islands’ first sugarcane plantation

offers a window into how Americans saw the islands, their environment, and their

agricultural and economic potential at a crucial time in Hawaiʻi’s history. Coming from

an officer of the U.S. Navy on a government expedition, Wilkes’s observations on

Hawaiʻi’s agricultural and economic potential had the capacity to influence U.S. policy

regarding the islands and their resources.

The chapter that follows tracks the early history of Hawaiʻi as a place in nature,

culture, and production—its dynamic environment, landscapes, and economies. It

examines the long history of Hawaiʻi’s natural environment through Polynesian

settlement and early contact, the landscapes they saw, and the economies they imposed.

The conditions that formed the archipelago created a unique and particularly benign

environment insulated by the vastness of the Pacific Ocean.

See Marshall D. Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976);

Patrick V. Kirch, “Transported Landscapes,” Natural History, December 1982, 32-35. The notion of

“transported landscapes” is a significant factor in scholars’ understandings of pre-contact Hawaiian society.

“Transported landscapes” hold a cultural component, but the original meaning is of a material environment

transformed by a society according to a specific set of cultural guidelines. This should not be confused with

the idea of “landscape” as used by Stepan and others (see note 5). “Landscape” in that sense is a completely

cultural construct: the representation of a place through some type of medium.

29

An understanding of Hawaiʻi before human settlement demonstrates just how

drastically human settlement changed the environment. The environmental conditions of

pristine Hawaiʻi made the archipelago attractive to human settlers, conducive to

agriculture, and sensitive to change. Once people reached the islands, they exerted

pressure on this environment. Like all human societies, the Polynesians exploited and

manipulated nature according to the demands of their culture and economy. The chapter

then discusses the ecological changes wrought by the Polynesians who first peopled the

islands, the landscapes of Hawaiʻi they constructed, and the ways they used the land. A

new set of dynamic forces disrupted Hawaiian society and introduced new agents of

environmental change after the 1778 “discovery” of the archipelago by James Cook. As

the ethic of improvement and the reach of capitalism spread to the islands, Hawaiians and

foreigners began to view Hawaiʻi in terms of commercial agriculture, and the cultivation

of sugarcane in particular. Finally, the chapter returns to Wilkes; his encounters in

Hawaiʻi and the expectations he brought there reveal the environmental, cultural, and

economic conditions of the islands at the earliest stages of commercial sugarcane

planting.

Hawaiian Geology, Climates, and Environment

The eight main islands of the Hawaiian Archipelago are the youngest peaks of a

vast submarine mountain range that stretches 1,600 miles northwest across the Pacific

Ocean to Kure atoll, and then another 1,400 miles north along the Emperor Seamount

chain. These mountains were formed over the past 85 million years as magma from deep

30

within the earth forced its way upward to the planet’s surface. The location of the

magma’s upwelling, known as the Hawaiian Hot Spot, has remained stationary for at

least the past 40 million years while the Pacific Tectonic Plate has slowly shifted above

it, creating a chain of volcanic mountains and islands. Each seamount and island

throughout the Hawaiian-Emperor chain grew over the course of several million years;

each in turn drifted farther away from the hot spot at a rate of about nine centimeters per

year; and over several million more years each succumbed to erosion and subsidence

and—excepting the main islands and some immediate neighbors—eventually sank back

to the sea, leaving a chain of atolls and reefs behind. Five and a half million years ago,

the oldest of Hawaiʻi’s main islands, Kauaʻi, rose from the sea. The island of Hawaiʻi,

also known as the Big Island, is still growing today.8

Over the course of geologic time the Hawaiian Islands can be expected to follow

their predecessors and recede into the Pacific, but for now they are high oceanic islands

towering over the sea that surrounds them. The Big Island’s Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa,

the highest mountains in the archipelago, stand 13,796 and 13,677 feet above sea level

and over 29,500 feet from their bases on the ocean floor—taller than Mount Everest.9 As

the youngest of the islands, the Big Island has been exposed to the elements for the

8 David A. Clague and G. Brent Dalrymple, “Tectonics, Geochronology, and Origin of the

Hawaiian Emperor Volcanic Chain,” in A Natural History of the Hawaiian Islands: Selected Readings II,

ed. E. Alison Kay (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1994), 5-40; John L. Culliney, Islands in a Far

Sea: The Fate of Nature in Hawaiʻi, revised edition (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2004), 3-24;

Alan C. Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, Ecology, and Evolution (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi

Press, 2002), 17-31.

9 Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, 169-183; Marie Sanderson, introduction to Prevailing Trade

Winds: Climate and Weather in Hawaiʻi, ed. Marie Sanderson (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press,

1993), 5.

31

shortest amount of time. The mountains of the older main islands have eroded and

subsided to a greater extent, leading to some important differences between the

environments of individual islands. Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, Molokaʻi, and western Maui have

developed with age a larger number of perennial streams and more extensive coral reefs

than younger eastern Maui and Hawaiʻi Island. Lānaʻi, Niʻihau, and Kahoʻolawe, the

smallest of the main islands, are older than Hawaiʻi and eastern Maui but their size and

position leeward of larger islands inhibited the development of perennial streams.

Age has caused relative inter-island ecological differences, but each island’s

volcanic mountains create particular environmental and climatic similarities among the

islands, too. The key feature of Hawaiʻi’s mountains is the creation of a stunning

diversity of microenvironments on each island, turning them into what the geographer

Marie Sanderson has called “continents in miniature.”10

The mountains act as giant mid-

ocean windbreaks for the Pacific trade winds, creating a strong orographic effect—

otherwise known as a rain shadow. For most of the year the trades consistently blow

moist air from the northeast toward Hawaiʻi. The air rises and cools as it comes into

contact with the mountains. As the air cools and loses the ability to hold moisture it rains

on the mountainsides. Bereft of its former moisture, the air then passes over the

mountains and the plains behind them. Average annual rainfall varies widely over very

short distances: some places on the windward slopes are inundated with as much as 445

annual inches of rainfall while areas only a few miles away in the leeward southwest

10

Ibid.

32

receive 10 inches per year.11

As a result, there are at least 38 distinct Hawaiian plant

communities within short distance of each other. Over a span of thirty miles, a person

moving inland from the Big Island’s coast to the peak of Mauna Kea can see desert,

grassland, mesic forest, rainforest, subalpine scrubland, and alpine desert.12

The trade winds dominate Hawaiʻi’s climate for most of the year—they blow over

80 percent of the time in the summer and between 50 and 80 percent in the winter—but

their strength can vary from year to year. Shifts in atmospheric and sea level pressure

systems can lead to great interannual differences in the intensity of the winter trades, with

a correlating variability in precipitation. Violent storms may occur frequently when the

trade winds are weaker, while droughts correspond to the ocean pressure and temperature

disturbances of El Niño events. Annual rainfalls may vacillate between extremes, rarely

approaching the cumulative mean or median.13

In addition to elevation and wind patterns, the sun and the ocean are major

defining factors of Hawaiʻi’s climate. But while elevation and wind contribute to a varied

climate in Hawaiʻi, the latter two tend more toward consistency. The archipelago’s

position in the northern tropics means that there is little variation in the amount of

sunlight it receives throughout the year, and thus little fluctuation in average temperature.

The expanse of the Pacific Ocean surrounding the archipelago contributes further to land

11

Sonia P. Juvik and James O. Juvik, eds., Atlas of Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi

Press, 1998), 59.

12 Patrick V. Kirch, “Hawaii as a Model System for Human Ecodynamics,” American

Anthropologist 109 no. 1 (2007): 11.

13 Thomas Schroeder, “Climate Controls,” in Prevailing Trade Winds: Climate and Weather in

Hawaiʻi, ed. Marie Sanderson (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1993), 12-36.

33

temperature consistency. The sea moderates Hawaiʻi’s air temperatures through its high

latent heat relative to air: it absorbs excess heat from the air in hot times and transfers

heat to the air in cooler times, acting as a natural thermostat. Additionally, water and air

temperatures are somewhat cooler in Hawaiʻi than in places of similar latitude because

the North Pacific Current moves cold water from the Bering Sea to the islands.14

The coastal lowlands—the most commonly inhabited areas—have generally mild

temperatures and plenty of sunshine throughout the year. Leeward lowland air

temperatures vary only 6.4°F on average, from 78.4°F in August to 72°F in February, and

temperatures above 90°F or below 60°F are rare. Humidity is consistently low (though

was possibly slightly higher in the pre-human era, when forests covered more of the

islands) and breezes are usually gentle and steady.15

The overall climatic result of

Hawaiʻi’s geographic and topographic conditions thus simultaneously embraces both the

erratic and the uniform.

The diversity of Hawaiʻi’s climates and geographies may be matched by the

archipelago’s remoteness. The plants and animals that first colonized Hawaiʻi had to

somehow cross thousands of miles of ocean. For many organisms, getting to Hawaiʻi was

impossible. Several higher taxonomic groups never established populations on the

islands, thus rendering Hawaiʻi’s biotic communities “disharmonic” or “depauperate” in

biogeographic terms. Two species of bat were the only land mammals to reach Hawaiʻi;

the loulu is the single native Hawaiian palm genus out of the hundred Polynesian palm

14

Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, 69-84.

15 Ibid.; Culliney, Islands in a Far Sea, 302.

34

genera; no mosquitoes or ants lived on the archipelago before the late eighteenth century;

and there are no native Hawaiian amphibians.16

Hawaiʻi’s relatively few colonizers arrived at the archipelago by riding water,

wind or birds. The North Pacific Current, which moves in an ovoid circuit from the

coasts of Japan to California and then back west to the Philippines, is responsible for

bringing most marine life and some terrestrial biota to Hawaiʻi. While the trade winds

blow from the northeast most of the year, the jet stream gusts at a higher elevation from

Southeast Asia to Hawaiʻi during the winter months and probably brought many of

Hawaiʻi’s founding plants and insects. Birds transported seeds and insects in their

digestive tracts or stuck to their bodies. Most of these colonizers came from Asia and

Polynesia, though about a third of Hawaiʻi’s avian pioneers may have come from the

Americas. Hawaiʻi’s earliest environment thus bore a strong resemblance to the

environments of other Pacific islands.17

The resemblance to other Polynesian environments was only passing, however—

Hawaiʻi’s environment is indeed unique, almost a world unto itself. The organisms that

managed to breach Hawaiʻi’s isolation and establish populations there found an

environment that fostered the evolution of new species. The biologist John Culliney

noted that “many biologists now consider the Hawaiian Islands to be the world’s finest

natural laboratory for the study of evolution.”18

Disharmony reduced ecological

16

Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, 157-68.

17 Ibid.

18 Culliney, Islands in a Far Sea, 35.

35

competition and predation, and natural boundaries such as the distance between islands in

the archipelago promoted the process of adaptive radiation, by which populations of a

single species divide and evolve into separate species. Hawaiʻi’s honeycreepers—birds in

the finch family—evolved through adaptive radiation from a common ancestor into at

least 57 species and subspecies.19

As a point of reference to contextualize the

evolutionary power of the Hawaiian Islands, the finches of the Galapagos—maybe the

most famous example of adaptive radiation—evolved into a mere fifteen different

species.

The combination of difficulty for plants and animals getting to Hawaiʻi and

opportunities for adaptive radiation has led to an exceptionally high rate of endemism—

that is, many of Hawaiʻi’s plants and animals are native to nowhere else on the planet. In

fact, Hawaiʻi’s biota is the most highly endemic on the planet. Eighty-two percent of

Hawaiʻi’s bird species and subspecies (including now extinct species) are endemic to the

archipelago and ninety-five percent of Hawaiian land snails—some 762 species—are

endemic.20

These species evolved in an environment largely free from predators, a fact

that influenced the course of evolution. Without the selective force of predation, as is

common among oceanic island biota, Hawaiian species lost many defensive evolutionary

traits. For example, endemic bird species including ducks, geese, ibises, and rails grew

19

Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, 266; David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island

Biogeography in an Age of Extinction (New York: Scribner, 1996), 230-1.

20 Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, 252, 157.

36

larger, lost the ability to fly, and decreased the number of eggs laid per clutch. Non-

human nature in Hawaiʻi had thus evolved to be diverse, unique, and vulnerable.21

With few initial checks on population growth, Hawaiʻi’s indigenous biota

flourished for millennia. In Hawaiʻi the planetary phenomena of plate tectonics, wind

patterns, and ocean currents converged with the contingency of island biogeography and

evolution to create a place unlike any other. Understanding these processes, however,

belies the chaotic nature of Hawaiʻi’s colonization. Colonizers needed to defy extremely

long odds to reach the islands. An episodic shift in the winds and pressure systems may

have allowed a storm to carry some plants and animals to the islands or a bird may have

wandered from its normal migratory path. Most organisms that somehow reached the

archipelago died without establishing populations: many made landfall at a place without

adequate nutrients. They may also have lacked a mate or the ability to reproduce.

Hawaiʻi’s colonizers represent a very small selection of organisms, dependent on the

confluence of favorable conditions and chance.

The first human colonizers of Hawaiʻi must be viewed in similar terms.

Extraordinary luck, skill, and will brought Polynesian settlers to Hawaiʻi. The

environment they encountered was equable, yet it was also poorly adapted to absorb the

ecological disturbances caused by humans. The first Hawaiians—with and without

intention—introduced a host of ecological changes to the Hawaiian environment as they

built a new society.

21

Ibid., 277-288; Culliney, Islands in a Far Sea, 303-9; Quammen, Song of the Dodo.

37

The Polynesian Invasion

With no written record of Hawaiian history before the arrival of James Cook in

1778, much of the early Hawaiian past is unknown. However, a rich oral tradition

transcribed in the nineteenth century and many years of archeological field work provide

a great deal of information on the Hawaiian environment and society before contact with

other peoples.

Humans probably first colonized Hawaiʻi from the Marquesas and Society Islands

sometime around the year 1000 CE.22

These immigrants, between twenty and one

hundred people in one or more large double-hulled canoes, brought with them between

forty and fifty species of plants and animals. About twenty-seven of these were

intentionally transported while the rest were stowaways or inadvertently carried onto the

canoes in bundles of food or supplies. The voyagers brought a common Polynesian suite

of food and utilitarian plants and animals, including chickens, dogs, pigs, taro, breadfruit,

and sugarcane. Geckos, several weeds, and the Polynesian rat were among the

stowaways—though it is possible the rat was intentionally transported as a food source

for dogs.23

These organisms form what the environmental historian Alfred Crosby called

22

The designation of 1000 CE as the time of initial settlement is a relatively new development in

Hawaiian archaeology, based on advances in radiocarbon dating and a reconfiguration of migration patterns

throughout Polynesia: Patrick V. Kirch, “When Did the Polynesians Settle Hawaiʻi? A Review of 150

Years of Scholarly Inquiry and a Tentative Answer,” Hawaiian Archaeology 12 (2011), 3-26. Other

calculations date settlement as early as 300 CE, and many have theorized two waves of migration. The

ascription of first settlement to around the turn of the millennium holds significant implications for

understanding the relationship between early Hawaiians and their natural environments; in particular, it

suggests human population growth and environmental change both happened at faster rates than previously

thought.

23 Ibid.; George W. Cox, Alien Species in North America and Hawaii: Impacts on Natural

Ecosystems (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999), 176; Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, 321-328.

38

a “portmanteau biota”: the companion travelers of human groups. Species in a

portmanteau biota, such as horses and smallpox in North America, can cause widespread

ecological change independent of the people responsible for their introduction.24

The Polynesian portmanteau biota, like the plants and animals that arrived in

Hawaiʻi before them, would have needed to adapt to their new surroundings. However,

they had evolved in an environment less depauperate than Hawaiʻi and were in many

cases better suited for ecological competition. Moreover, the Polynesians and their

portmanteau arrived in Hawaiʻi all at once, not singly over the course of millennia. This

sudden influx of new organisms was an overwhelming blow to Hawaiʻi’s native biota.

Alfred Crosby called such an influx “ecological invasion.” Invasion is usually a value

laden-term, yet it is an apt way to describe the first peopling of the islands. As the

invaders colonized Hawaiʻi, they preyed upon native organisms, outcompeted them for

resources, destroyed their habitats, and disrupted their reproductive cycles. As invaders

and environment adapted to each other, the environment became prone to greater degrees

of change.25

24

Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 89-90.

25 Andrew Clark and Charles Elton were two of the earliest scholars to address the subject of

human ecological invasion: Andrew Clark, The Invasion of New Zealand by People, Plants, and Animals

(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949); Charles Elton, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals

and Plants (London: Chapman and Hall, 1958). Alfred Crosby established the significance of ecological

invasion to the European settlement of the Americas: Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange:

Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972); and Alfred W.

Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1986). Environmental historians have done much to expand upon Crosby’s work. See

William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor Press, 1976); Elinor G. K. Melville, A

Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1994); Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82

(New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic

Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); John R. McNeill,

39

Ecological invasion was not the only source of environmental change in Hawaiʻi.

In addition to their portmanteau biota, the Polynesian settlers brought their culture to the

islands. Building on the work of Edgar Anderson, the archaeologist Patrick Kirch has

applied the concept of “transported landscapes” to his examination of prehistoric

Hawaiʻi. The first human invaders of Hawaiʻi introduced their way of seeing, using,

controlling, and ordering the environment and its resources that they and their ancestors

had developed throughout Polynesia.26

Following patterns of Polynesian culture, the

settlers planted their crops and organized their society in a familiar way. In Polynesian

fashion, they first colonized Hawaiʻi’s stream-fed bottom lands in communities bound by

kinship ties and organized according to lineage-based rank, and they used the familiar

methods of swidden agriculture, pondfield terracing, and irrigation as the basis of

production. What these settlers produced was also part of their transported landscape.

Other than the stowaways, the portmanteau biota the migrants brought were selected to

serve the same functions that they served their cultivators in the Society Islands: taro,

yams, and sweet potatoes were agricultural staples; bananas, breadfruit, mountain apples,

and sugarcane were supplementary crops; and candlenut, coconut, paper mulberry, and

Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2010).

26 Kirch, “Transported Landscapes.” Kirch has made many very influential contributions to

Hawaiian archaeology and natural history, prominent among them being the idea of transported landscape.

Kirch has demonstrated that the Polynesian settlers of Hawaiʻi changed the archipelago’s environment

according to their cultural understandings of the relationship between people and non-human nature. Like

Stepan, Arnold, and other historians who use landscape to examine representations and social constructions

of nature (see note 4 above), Kirch’s landscape has roots in culture. But Kirch’s concept moves beyond

culture to the material environment. A “transported landscape” in Kirch’s definition is an environment

changed by people to conform to their views of what an environment should look like and how it should be

used. In other words, Kirch’s transported landscape is a material construction based on social construct.

This concept has been used widely by other scholars of Hawaiʻi’s environment. See Culliney, Islands in a

Far Sea, 314 and Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, 331-337.

40

twisted beardgrass served utilitarian functions such as providing construction and

clothing materials.27

Ecological invasion and transported landscape operated in interdependent and

mutually reinforcing ways to alter the Hawaiian environment. If, as Crosby suggests,

European settlers of the temperate parts of the New World created “neo-Europes”

through the introduction of their portmanteau biota and transported landscapes—that is,

ecological invasion caused many American environments to resemble European ones—

the Polynesian migrants created what can be considered a neo-Polynesia in Hawaiʻi.

Through ecological invasion and deliberate environmental manipulation, Hawaiʻi’s

pioneer settlers reduced the archipelago’s ecological uniqueness and made it more like a

general Polynesian environmental template.28

Hawaiʻi’s lowland forests were particularly vulnerable to such change. With no

natural predators, Polynesian rats quickly multiplied and invaded lowland forests, where

many plant species had lost defensive evolutionary traits. The rats gnawed and ate seeds

and seedlings, and they may also have preyed upon the eggs and hatchlings of forest

birds. In John Culliney’s vivid description, “a tsunami of rats might have swept through

the defenseless forests,” disrupting ecosystems with implacable force.29

Rats were

certainly not alone in the devastation of Hawaiʻi’s forests, however; the Polynesians and

their other portmanteau animals would have asserted their presence as well. Early settlers

27

Kirch, “Transported Landscapes;” Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, 322-323.

28 Crosby, Ecological Imperialism.

29 Culliney, Islands in a Far Sea, 312.

41

relied heavily on Hawaiʻi’s forest resources as they established their first communities.

Lowland forests provided materials for construction and fuel, and the forests’ inhabitants,

especially the many large, flightless, and unwary bird species, provided a ready source of

food. Such disruptions then gave invading seeds and weeds opportunities to establish

populations within these forests, introducing new competition for space and resources

among plants and sometimes crowding out native species.30

The Polynesian practice of swidden agriculture compounded the pressure of

ecological invasion and prevented the forests from returning to their former ranges.

Hawaiians often used fire to clear fields for planting, which could easily burn beyond

control on dry, windy plains. In a series of newspaper articles on pre-contact Hawaiian

history first published in 1869, Samuel M. Kamakau, the Hawaiian scholar, legislator,

and jurist, noted that until the arrival of metal tools and draft animals, “fire was a man’s

plow and his clearing implement.”31

Sharp increases in charcoal particles found in

archaeological sites and dated to around the turn of the millennium further attest to the

prevalence of human-induced forest burning. Comprised mostly of the slow-growing

loulu palm, Hawaiʻi’s lowland forests were ill prepared for such activity. Predation,

competition, and environmental manipulation together overwhelmed the forests.

Evidence indicates that the forests were gone in probably less than a century, replaced by

twisted beardgrass and other alien plants. Birds, snails, and other creatures that inhabited

30

Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, 324-26; Kirch, “Hawaii as a Model System for Human

Ecodynamics,” 15; Kirch, “Transported Landscapes.”

31 Samuel M. Kamakau, The Works of the People of Old: Na Hana a ka Poʻe Kahiko, trans. Mary

Kawena Pukui, ed. Dorothy B. Barrère (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1976), 23.

42

these areas were either extirpated or forced to shift their biotic ranges to higher

elevations.32

Comprising an area larger than anywhere else in Polynesia other than New

Zealand, Hawaiʻi’s hospitable environment encouraged exponential growth of the human

population for about the first five hundred years after first arrival. People spread over the

main islands, creating many polities variously aligned through chiefly kinship and

alliances. As they spread over the land, they built public works to increase agricultural

productivity. Lasting irrigation systems on windward Oʻahu and Molokaʻi which can be

dated as early as 1250 CE brought water increasingly further distances to feed

Hawaiians’ taro paddies. These pondfield systems were large enough to create significant

food surpluses, an indication of some form of administrative control over production.

Major environmental engineering projects spread over the next few centuries from the

optimal agricultural sites already in use to less productive areas. Large pondfield systems

terraced up hillsides and fed by canals covered nearly all cultivable land on Oʻahu by

about the fifteenth century.33

After about two centuries of settlement, the Polynesian transported landscape

gave way to a new Hawaiian one with innovations in land use and social organization.

The Hawaiian environment was highly managed and engineered, geared toward

32

Culliney, Islands in a Far Sea, 312; Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, 331-332.

33 Patrick V. Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings: Divine Kingship and the Rise of Archaic States in

Ancient Hawaiʻi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 128-145. Historians have suggested

irrigation projects demand social hierarchies that control labor. See Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire:

Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Richard White, The

Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995); and Mark

Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of Agricultural Landscapes in the American West (Seattle: University of

Washington Press, 1999).

43

agricultural production and controlled by an entrenched upper class. Increased social

hierarchy and labor-intensive environmental engineering projects accompanied

population growth, demonstrating both greater need and improved ability to regulate land

and resource use.

Beginning in the fourteenth century, groups on Oʻahu, Kauaʻi, and Molokaʻi

developed a distinct mode of aquaculture with large stone-walled fishponds extending

into the sea.34

Around 1490 CE Māʻilikūkahi, the ruler of Oʻahu, instituted an

administrative system based upon the division of the island into roughly pie slice-shaped

units radiating from the center of the island, called ahupuaʻa. This system of land

division insured that each unit would have access to resources from multiple vegetative

zones—though the irregular shape of the island limited some ahupuaʻa. Residents of

each ahupuaʻa could fish the seas, farm the lowlands, and hunt and gather in upland

forests. Rulers appointed members of the chiefly class to govern, manage, and tax each

ahupuaʻa; they in turn allocated control over sequentially smaller administrative areas,

down to commoner family groups’ farming plots. The ahupuaʻa system likely spread

from Oʻahu to the other islands during the sixteenth century, creating a distinctly

Hawaiian regime of land organization.35

Though chiefs still claimed power and status through kinship ties and genealogy,

affiliation based on territory and agricultural production became more socially and

34

Samuel Kamakau claimed that over ten thousand men were employed in the construction of

some ponds: Kamakau, The Works of the People of Old, 47.

35 Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings, 83-93, 154-155, 210; Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History,

334; Culliney, Islands in a Far Sea, 313-324; Jon J. Chinen, The Great Mahele: Hawaii’s Land Division of

1848 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1958), 1-8.

44

culturally significant. Presence upon the land, and the right to claim its produce became

the defining characteristic of Hawaiian society in a distinct manner from the Polynesian

model of society originally brought to the archipelago. Multiple dimensions of interaction

influenced Hawaiian social relations, yet the centrality of land and land use to social

definition is reflected in the terms used to differentiated classes. The term for Hawaiian

commoners, makaʻāinana, underwent an illustrative change. The term is derived from a

Polynesian word that refers to a group’s lineage, but in Hawaiʻi it came to mean “the

people that attend the land.” Hawaiian social relationships were defined through the land,

and commoner’s rights to reside on the land depended not on kinship, but on meeting

agricultural obligations—a required amount of labor on chiefly plantations and the

payment of a tax in the form of agricultural produce. Correspondingly, Hawaiian high

chiefs were called aliʻi-ʻai-moku, or chiefs who eat the land.36

As they remade the

Hawaiian environment through agricultural development, ancient Hawaiians also remade

their society, dividing and defining themselves as agricultural producers and consumers.

As the Hawaiian population grew agricultural development spread to other, less

productive lands on the leeward areas of the Big Island and Maui. These younger islands

had more nutrient-rich soil than Kauaʻi and Oʻahu but lacked the streams necessary to

support irrigation and the coral reefs necessary for productive fisheries. Hawaiians on

these islands instead relied on precipitation to cultivate sweet potatoes and dryland taro.37

It was a decidedly more precarious venture than established methods of stream-fed

36

Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings, 24-26, 41-49, 204.

37 Kirch, “Hawaii as a Model System for Human Ecodynamics,” 16-18.

45

pondfield agriculture. Interannual variability in rainfall made dryland planting risky, and

the maintenance and cultivation of dryland crops demanded greater labor inputs than the

pondfield system. It therefore might not come as a surprise that in the years following the

expansion of intensive cultivation to these marginal agriculture sites, the incidence of

warfare between island groups seems to have increased as well. Violence between

different factions certainly existed earlier, but the nature of warfare changed from raiding

to battles of conquest for productive agricultural areas.38

Hawaiian laws governing resource use, as recorded by Hawaiian scholars after the

arrival of foreigners, demonstrate the need to regulate consumption as well as the ruling

chiefs’ ability to do so. A legal system of riparian rights, for example, mandated the

conservative development of waterways. People living downstream from a potential dam

site held recognized rights to the continuous flow of water: no irrigation channel was

permitted to take more water than what remained in the stream below the dam. Rules

governing the collective use of irrigated water were exacting, with specific spans of time

allotted for the sluicing of water based upon population numbers and agricultural need.

Finally, the law included severe penalties for the subversion of waterways: a person

caught destroying a dam could be put to death, and his or her body would be placed in the

dam as warning to others who might attempt similar action.39

38

Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings, 209.

39 Emma Metcalf Nakuina, “Ancient Hawaiian Water Rights and Some of the Customs Pertaining

to Them,” Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1894 (Honolulu: Press Publishing Co., 1893), 79; see also

Herbert H. Gowen, The Paradise of the Pacific: Sketches of Hawaiian Scenery and Life (London:

Skeffington & Son, 1892), 59.

46

Such laws indicate a powerful central authority, able to develop public irrigation

works and control their private use. They also suggest the pressures of population on

agricultural production resulted in growing food shortages. As the sites of established

agricultural communities faced nutrient exhaustion and as cultivation expanded to sites of

low agricultural productivity, greater inputs of labor resulted in diminishing returns and

competition for available resources. Kamakau’s writings provide anecdotal support that

hunger was a significant concern and that those on marginal lands had to struggle to feed

themselves. “Sometimes famine, bitter famine, came over the land because it had become

parched through the excessive heat of the sun and the lack of rain.”40

Further, Patrick

Kirch suggests that increasing social stratification and population growth among a large

and powerful elite class placed heavier demands for tribute and taxation on Hawaiian

commoners.41

Together, natural climatic variability and social organization tended

toward scarcity for Hawaiian commoners.

One means of alleviating famine was turning from agriculture to foraging. David

Malo, a missionary-educated nineteenth-century Hawaiian scholar, listed the many

different wild plants that served as food in time of famine.42

Hawaiian planters also

responded to famine by breeding new crop varieties. Kamakau wrote that in times of

hunger planters cultivated some sweet potatoes that could be harvested in as little as four

to five weeks, and when food was more abundant they planted varieties that took longer

40

Kamakau, The Works of the People of Old, 31; see also p. 25.

41 Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings, 190-210.

42 David Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, trans. N. B. Emerson (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Co.,

Ltd., 1903), 68.

47

time to mature but bore fruit that was less susceptible to rot. Indeed, Hawaiians

developed a multitude of plant varieties from their original portmanteau biota, not only to

address food shortages, but to maximize productivity in diverse microclimates, fulfill

different medical, ritual, and utilitarian needs, and offer great variety of diet. From the

small stock of original crop plants in the Polynesian portmanteau biota, Hawaiian farmers

bred an array of cultigens.43

Hawaiians thus adapted their original Polynesian imports to meet conditions on

the archipelago, even as they altered the Hawaiian environment to suit the needs of those

imports. The Hawaiian environment had become an anthropogenic one as the social

structures, agricultural practices, legal systems of the Polynesian transported landscape,

as well as the very components of the Polynesian portmanteau biota, became distinctly

Hawaiian over the centuries of settlement. Hawaiians developed a society and culture that

prioritized the productive development of agricultural land, defined social class based on

agricultural production, and favored centralized, hierarchical control of land and

resources. The relationship between people and environment would undergo major

disruption with the advent of new imports to Hawaiʻi beginning in the late eighteenth

century.

43

Kamakau, The Works of the People of Old, 27, 34, 38-39. For greater detail on the varieties of

Hawaiian crops see E. S. Craighill Handy, The Hawaiian Planter, vol. 1, Bernice P. Bishop Museum

Bulletin 161 (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1940) and E. S. Craighill Handy, Elizabeth Green Handy,

and Mary Kawena Pukui, Native Planters in Old Hawaii: Their Life, Lore, and Environment, Bernice P.

Bishop Museum Bulletin 233 (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1972).

48

Western Invasions

In 1778 the famed British explorer James Cook landed at Hawaiʻi on his third

voyage of discovery, ending at least 500 years of complete isolation and unleashing a

new wave of ecological invasion upon the archipelago. While some early Hawaiians may

have maintained sporadic contact with the Society and Marquesas Islands for a few

generations following first settlement, the Polynesian invasion can be thought of in

general terms as a single event. This is categorically different from the western

invasion—or rather invasions—which initiated an era of continual contact between

Hawaiʻi and the outside world. If the former was a case of a few invaders sneaking over a

gate, the latter saw a host of invaders batter the gate down. Indeed, even the designation

of a “western” invasion is inadequate in describing contact. Though Americans and

Britons were the most common visitors to Hawaiʻi, people from many regions of Asia,

the Americas, and Europe contributed to the invasions that began in the late eighteenth

century. The publication of Cook’s voyage narratives in the early 1780s, with news of a

potential Pacific fur trade and the story of Cook’s death in an altercation on the Big

Island, brought regular outside attention to and contact with Hawaiʻi. The first trading

ship stopped there in 1785; frequent visits from whalers, merchants, and well publicized

expeditions by several renowned explorers followed. Each new visit was an opportunity

for the ecological invasion of plants, animals, and diseases, the cumulative effects of

which radically changed Hawaiian environment and society.

Along with non-Hawaiians and their portmanteau biota, contact brought new

cultural and economic invasions. Cook and those who followed him did not simply note

49

Hawaiʻi’s existence; they placed it within their framework of knowledge regarding

Pacific and tropical islands. They arrived in Hawaiʻi with an established notion of what a

place like Hawaiʻi should be like. Further, the foreigners who arrived at the islands were

not indifferent to the islands. They saw the islands as something to be used, just as they

saw other places and their resources. These cultural and economic invasions operated

with ecological invasion to destabilize Hawaiian society and alter the archipelago’s

environment.

Among the new invasions, cattle stand out as a case of ecological and cultural

forces amplifying each other. George Vancouver introduced four cows and two bulls

from California to Hawaiʻi Island in 1793, which alone might have caused significant

disruption on the island: Hawaiian flora lacked natural defenses such as thorns or toxins

that are found in plants that have coevolved with ungulates, and cows spread invasive

weeds into forests as they ate and trampled native plants. Cultural conditions on Hawaiʻi

intensified this invasion’s impact, however. Vancouver, wanting to establish in Hawaiʻi a

depot for resupplying British ships, convinced Kamehameha I, then the king of the Big

Island, to proclaim a kapu (a Hawaiian religious proscription, the etymological sibling of

the Polynesian taboo) against killing cattle for ten years. Motivated by the prospect of

good trade relations with Vancouver, Kamehameha readily agreed to his request. The

cattle population on Hawaiʻi, and then on the other islands, irrupted quickly. These and

other quadrupeds, especially goats and European pigs—which are much larger and more

50

aggressive than their Polynesian counterparts—went feral in Hawaiian forests, destroying

native plants and the native fauna that depended upon those plants.44

Early nineteenth century observers noted the depredations cattle caused to

Hawaiian crops. The Russian explorer Urey Lisianski wrote that by 1805, “Some cattle,

which Captain Vancouver left in this island, have very much multiplied…It is said, that

some time ago a herd came down from the mountains, and committed great ravages in the

plantations in the valleys.”45

A year later, Hawaiians had transported a bull to Maui,

where according to the New England trader Amasa Delano, he “made great destruction

amongst their sugar canes and gardens, breaking into them and their cane patches, and

tearing them to pieces with his horns and digging them up with his feet.”46

Cattle were

thus invaders of both Hawaiʻi’s natural and agricultural environments. Hawaiian farming

sites, based upon a Polynesian transported landscape unaccustomed to ungulates, were

nearly as defenseless against roaming cattle as the native forests. The cultural disruption

caused by cattle goes beyond the familiar conflict between farmers and pastoralists,

though. Cattle challenged the Hawaiian system of land use, property rights, and

44

Culliney, Islands in a Far Sea, 326-330; John Ryan Fischer, “Cattle in Hawaiʻi: Biological and

Cultural Exchange,” Pacific Historical Review 76 (2007): 347-372. Historians have noted the intertwined

ecological and cultural ramifications of quadruped introduction and population irruption in various

contexts. See Crosby, Ecological Imperialism; Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental

Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Virginia

DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2006).

45 Urey Lisiansky, A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1803, 4, 5, and 6 Performed by Order

of His Imperial Majesty, Alexander the First, Emperor of Russia in the Ship Neva (London: John Booth,

1814), 135.

46 Amasa Delano, Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres:

Comprising Three Voyages Round the World Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery in the

Pacific and Oriental Islands (Boston: E.G. House, 1817), 389.

51

liabilities. Constructing adequate protections against roaming cattle, developing a system

to address issues of liability for the damage they caused, and addressing the destruction

of forest commons resources were all consequences of Hawaiʻi’s bovine invasion. The

interactions of a western desire to use Hawaiʻi to support global trade and travel, the

Hawaiian religious and political authority, and the habits of these large animals thus had

a significant on Hawaiian environment and society.

Other examples of the impact of ecological invasion abound. In 1826, a whaler

drained its water casks at a stream near Lāhainā, inadvertently introducing what were

possibly the first mosquitoes (Culex quinquefasciatus) to Hawaiʻi. The mosquitoes were

vectors for bird pox and avian malaria, which quickly spread to many of Hawaiʻi’s

endemic birds. Hawaiʻi’s celebrated avifauna, which evolved with no immunity to the

disease, were consequently essentially banished from elevations below 3,000 feet,

territory now claimed by the mosquitoes.47

In addition to causing the extinction of many

species, avian malaria disrupted the birds’ former habitats, where coevolved plants

dependent upon these birds to spread pollen and seeds and other members of these

ecosystems.

The changes caused by cattle and mosquitoes, though severe, were far less

devastating for Native Hawaiians than the invasion of human diseases. Syphilis, cholera,

smallpox, influenza, and other pathogens previously absent from Hawaiʻi struck

throughout the nineteenth century, claiming thousands of lives. Hawaiʻi’s early censuses

tell a tragic story: the kingdom’s first census counted 130,313 people in 1831, a decline

47

Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, 353-54; Culliney, Islands in a Far Sea, 243.

52

of 67 percent from an estimated population of 400,000 before Cook’s first visit. A

century after contact, the census of 1878 counted 44,088 Hawaiians and 3,420 people of

partial Hawaiian descent, a decline of 88 percent from the estimated pre-contact

population.48

Though some of that decrease was doubtless caused by factors unrelated to

disease, such as emigration, the decline is nonetheless a stark contrast from the rapid

population growth experienced before the invasion of alien diseases. These figures also

correspond with the geographer William Denevan’s model for tropical virgin soil

epidemics. Denevan calculated that native populations of North American tropical

lowlands decreased at least 90 percent in the first century after contact with European

diseases.49

Even allowing that the exact size of the pre-contact Hawaiian population remains

unknown, the introduction of diseases demoralized the Hawaiian people and destabilized

their society. The Hawaiian social order, based upon agricultural production as the link

between commoner and elite, faced crises of supply and management. As disease ravaged

the Hawaiian population, the chiefly class compensated for shortages by pressing the

48

James King, second lieutenant on Cook’s expedition, estimated the Hawaiian population to be

around 400,000. While contemporary observers and more recent scholars have debated King’s accuracy,

calculations by Kirch and others support King’s figure. European and American visitors to Hawaiʻi in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as scholars in the twentieth century, argued that King grossly

overestimated the Hawaiian population, which may have been as low as 100,000. In the late twentieth

century, David Stannard argued that the pre-contact Hawaiian population was closer to 800,000: David

Stannard, Before the Horror: The Population of Hawaiʻi on the Eve of Western Contact (Honolulu:

University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1989). Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings, 129-130. For Hawaiian census

numbers and epidemics, see Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu: University Press

of Hawaii, 1977), 7, 25, and 58.

49 William M. Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of

the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 369-85.

53

commoners for greater contributions of tax and labor.50

Inter-island warfare increased as

well, and bloody campaigns aided by foreign military technology further weakened the

populace. Kamehameha I, a high-ranking chief on the Big Island at the time of Cook’s

arrival, initiated a series of wars in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,

ultimately unifying the Hawaiian Group under his control. The diversion of commoners

from agricultural to military activities and the destruction of agricultural land further

destabilized Hawaiian society and its subsistence patterns.51

Demands on commoners increased further as Hawaiʻi joined the world economy.

What had once been an insular system, in which labor and produce remained in Hawaiʻi,

became more porous. The elite saw status and utility in western goods which foreign

traders and whalers traded for food supplies. Kamehameha I monopolized the lucrative

sandalwood trade in 1811, requiring commoners to harvest the wood from mountain

forests and then contracting with traders to sell it in China. Commoners also found

opportunities to sell their labor as sailors aboard vessels that landed in the islands.

Diminished in numbers and occupied supplying chiefs and traders, the people who had

farmed Hawaiʻi so intensively retreated from many agricultural lands.

The Hawaiʻi that westerners first saw was thus in a state of drastic flux following

the initial western ecological invasions. As many scholars have demonstrated in the

examination of colonial North American, the environments that European settlers

encountered in the decades and centuries following initial ecological invasion were much

50

Caroline Ralston, “Hawaii 1778-1854: Some Aspects of Makaʻainana Response to Rapid

Cultural Change,” Journal of Pacific History 19 (1984): 21-40.

51 Robert C. Schmitt, “Famine Mortality in Hawaii,” Journal of Pacific History 5 (1970): 109-115.

54

emptier of humans and closer to the notion of a pristine wilderness than they were at the

moment of first contact.52

Unaware of many of the changes ecological invasion had

caused, however, early western visitors to the islands attempted to make sense of Hawaiʻi

and its environment within the context of social constructions of the tropics and other

Pacific islands.

Western conceptions of the archipelago relied on a tradition of Orientalism and

geographic determinism. Centuries of colonialism and exploration had produced a system

of geography that divided the world into different climatic regions. According to this

scheme, European climates were the balanced, temperate ideal against which scholars

and travelers contrasted other climates. Tropical climates were intemperate; their extreme

heat and humidity produced abundance of both the benefits and hazards of the natural

environment.53

Through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Europeans

and Americans saw the earth’s hotter regions as places of fertility, where many plants

could grow with little cultivation, but they were also places that could weaken the

constitutions of people from temperate climes, and where rampant disease could claim

their lives.54

Alexander von Humboldt, the preeminent German explorer and naturalist,

systematized western understandings of the tropics by delineating global isothermal lines

52

See Denevan, “Pristine Myth” for an overview of this argument.

53 Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze, 110-115; Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 15-

24.

54 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,”

The William and Mary Quarterly 41 (1984), 213-240; Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of

Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006).

55

and climatic zones based on average temperatures, weather patterns, and the presence of

certain types of plants and animals. According to Humboldt, in the tropics plants such as

sugarcane, coffee, and bananas could grow without much need for human cultivation.

Humboldt reified the notion of the tropics as over-fecund and luxuriant. In his view, the

abundance of plant life retarded the progress of civilization. Humboldt wrote, “The very

wealth of nature has retained [native inhabitants of the tropics] in indolence and

barbarism.” Europeans and Americans relying on Humboldt thus categorized tropical

climates with material observations which formed the basis for ethnocentric and

racialized inferences about the region’s human inhabitants.55

Early accounts of the Hawaiian Islands depicted a land of tropical fertility and

beauty. An article for the North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal dated May

1816 claimed that in Hawaiʻi “all the tropical fruits, and most of the productions of the

temperate zone are, or may be produced in profusion.”56

Otto von Kotzebue, the leader of

a Russian expedition to the Pacific in the years 1815-1818, wrote, “Woahoo [sic] is

acknowledged, both by Europeans and by the natives, to be the most fruitful of the whole

group; it is called the garden of the Sandwich islands, and it has a right to this name, on

account of its extraordinary high state of cultivation, united with the greatest natural

beauties…Close to the shore you see verdant vallies [sic] adorned with palm and banana-

55

Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctal Regions of America,

During the Years 1799-1804, by Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, vol. 2, ed. and trans.

Thomasina Ross (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852), 289; Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 35-43.

56 “Sandwich Islands,” The North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal, May 1816.

56

trees, under which the habitations of the savages lie scattered.”57

Descriptions such as

these abounded during the first decades of the nineteenth century, as Euro-American

interest in the archipelago grew.

Not only were European and American visitors common in Honolulu and

Lāhainā—the major port on the island of Maui—in the early nineteenth century, but

Hawaiians began to travel abroad, as well. Regarded by western ship captains as good

sailors, many Hawaiians joined the crews of visiting ships. By 1804 Hawaiians were

living in Oregon fur posts, and by 1809 at least three Hawaiians came to New England.

Of these, Henry ʻŌpūkahaʻia was the most well-known and influential. His encounter

with Protestant revivalists fomented the rise of Christian interest in the islands, and in

1820 the first delegation from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign

Missions (ABCFM) arrived in Hawaiʻi.

After the establishment of ABCFM missions, dispatches from Hawaiʻi became

regular features in American religious newspapers in addition to scientific, literary, and

general interest magazines. The missionary Charles Stewart published several editions of

his Journal and had the work excerpted in American and British Christian newspapers.

Upon his arriving at Oʻahu for the first time, Stewart wrote that the island

Burst on the eye in beautiful panoramic view; presenting first the bay of

[Waikiki], encircled by heavy groves of the cocoa-nut, and other luxuriant

trees…There was much of natural beauty before us. All was in a glow of

brightness; but there was a want of life and elasticity, that forced itself at

57

Otto von Kotzebue, A Voyage of Discovery, into the South Sea and Bearing Straits, for the

Purpose of Exploring a North-East Passage, Undertaken in the Years 1815-1818, at the Expense of his

Highness the Chancellor of the Empire, Count Romanzoff, in the Ship Rurick, Under the Command of the

Lieutenant in the Russian Imperial Navy, Otto von Kotzebue, vol. 1, trans H.E. Lloyd (London: Longman,

Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), 319

57

once on the notice: a stillness…of a torrid clime, whose enervating and

depressing temperature was plainly to be seen in the strong vibrations of

heated air…[I saw] naked inhabitants, lounging about in listless

inactivity.58

Stewart saw Oʻahu as a typical place of tropical extremes—of beauty and vegetative

growth, but also of enervation and barbarism.

The stillness that Stewart remarked upon, however, belied the reality of Hawaiian

society. Though certainly suffering from the consequences of western ecological

invasions, Hawaiians had built a burgeoning economy tied to the whaling industry and

maritime trade. With the only protected harbors near mid-Pacific whaling grounds and

forests of valuable sandalwood, Hawaiʻi’s ports were becoming increasingly busy.

Between 1828 and 1840, approximately one hundred whaling vessels and thirty merchant

ships visited the islands annually.59

Like Stewart, the missionaries of the ABCFM came to Hawaiʻi with a distinct and

powerful conception of the state of cultivation on the archipelago and their own role in

agriculture there. Upon arriving in Honolulu in 1828 after enduring the trials of a five-

month ocean voyage from Boston, Laura Fish Judd, along with her husband Gerrit, began

long and momentous careers as missionaries to Hawaiʻi. She wrote in her journal that she

and her compatriots were to work in Hawaiʻi “until the land is filled with churches,

58

Charles Stewart, Journal of a Residence in the Sandwich Islands, During the Years 1823, 1824,

and 1825: Including Remarks on the Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants; an Account of Lord Byron’s

Visit in the H.M.S. Blonde; and a Description of the Ceremonies Observed at the Interment of the Late

King and Queen in the Island of Oahu, 3rd

London ed. (London: H. Fisher, Son, & P. Jackson, 1830), 92-

93.

59 Richard MacAllan, “Entrepôt to the World: Richard Charlton’s Observations of Trade via

Hawaiʻi, 1828-1841,” The Hawaiian Journal of History 34 (2000), 93-111.

58

schoolhouses, fruitful fields and pleasant dwellings.”60

The ethic of improvement—the

religious obligation to cultivate the land—tied Christianity, civilization, and agriculture

together for Judd and the ABCFM. Hawaiʻi, according to the missionaries, could not

have “fruitful fields” without Christianity. Though the Hawaiian environment was an

anthropomorphic one, ABCFM missionaries often failed to see it as such.

When the U.S. Exploring Expedition arrived at Hawaiʻi in 1840, Commander

Charles Wilkes found a place that combined tropical exoticness with temperate

familiarity. “Dusty roads and barren plains [of Honolulu] can, in a few minutes, be

exchanged for one of the most agreeable and delightful climates in the world, by a short

ride to the valley of Nuʻuanau. The contrast is like passing from the torrid to the

temperate zone.”61

Yet even if Honolulu’s natural environment evoked the torrid zone, its

built environment did not. Oʻahu had “more the appearance of civilized land, with its

churches and spires, than any other island in Polynesia.”62

Hawaiʻi had indeed been

significantly altered to conform to western ideals of agriculture, society, and

environment.

Wilkes, like many Europeans and Americans who preceded him to the

archipelago, was influenced by discourses of land use, cultivation, and improvement in

his view of Hawaiʻi. Wilkes repeatedly noted that Hawaiian land could become profitable

under American cultivation. Wilkes’s narrative reads at times like a catalog of business

60

Laura Fish Judd, Honolulu: Sketches of Life in the Hawaiian Islands from 1828 to 1861, ed.

Dale L. Morgan (Chicago: The Lakeside Press, R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company, 1966), 7.

61 Wilkes, Narrative, vol. 3, 390.

62 Ibid, 373.

59

opportunities. In a representative example of many entries, he reported: “On the banks of

the ʻEwa [on Oʻahu] are many thousand acres of land wholly unoccupied, which are

capable of growing cotton, sugar-cane, indigo, the mulberry, &c. to any extent.”63

Cane,

again, was prominent among the agricultural uses Wilkes saw for Hawaiʻi.

Within two generations of contact, the Hawaiian agricultural system of taro and

sweet potato cultivation and the social system of hierarchy mediated through control of

land was facing a challenge from western invasions. Hawaiian society was in the process

of reorganization in order to adapt to multiple disruptive ecological invasions and the

intrusion of the world economy. Wilkes and the Exploring Expedition found a place that

had undergone two drastic ecological invasions and had been remade by two cultural

invasions. The environment was never a static paradise, but it was ecologically isolated.

The remoteness of the archipelago had allowed native organisms to evolve with fewer

agents of natural selection than present in continental environments: few predators, little

competition for food and habitat. Ecological invasion changed that. Hawaiʻi’s native

biota gave way first to Polynesian and then to European, Asian, and American plants and

animals.

Successive ecological, cultural, and economic invasions remade Hawaiʻi from a

place manipulated to support its local population to one where wealth was extracted in

the form of agricultural produce. Changes in the land as well as changes in how people

63

Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition During the Years 1838,

1839, 1840, 1841, 1842, vol. 4 (London: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), 75; see also ibid., 58, 101, 214, and 250

for similar entries.

60

saw, related to, and used the land positioned the archipelago to become one of the

world’s foremost sugar producers in the ensuing decades of the nineteenth century.

61

CHAPTER 3: SUGAR WITHOUT RUM: HAWAIʻI’S MISSIONARIES AND

THE FOUNDING OF THE SUGARCANE PLANTATION SYSTEM, 1821-1850

As well might you expect an oak to arrive at its

imposing maturity, in a year, or two or three. It is

impossible. It requires centuries to perfect it.—And the

nature of things renders it absolutely necessary that it

should have all that time, in which to grow, and knit its

fibres together.

And perfectly analogous to this, is the condition of a

degraded nation, in its attempts to rise. The influences

required to produce the result, are manifold; and few, very

few of them are indigenous. Almost all of them must be

introduced as exotics,—and undergo the slow acclimating

process.

Edwin O. Hall, ABCFM missionary to Hawaiʻi, 18481

In 1851, at the first annual meeting of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society

(RHAS) in Honolulu, a heated debate occupied the society’s members for the better part

of two days. One member proposed a resolution that the society petition the Hawaiian

Legislature to repeal an 1840 law banning the manufacture of alcohol and allow

Hawaiian sugarcane planters to distill rum “to aid them in carrying on their plantations.”

The response to this proposal was fierce. William Little Lee, a native of Sandy Hill, New

York, Harvard Law School alumnus, founding president of the RHAS, Chief Justice of

the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court, Speaker of the Hawaiian House of Representatives, and a

partner in the newly founded Lihue Plantation Company on the island of Kauaʻi, said he

1 Robert Crichton Wyllie, Answers to Questions Proposed by His Excellency, R. C. Wyllie, His

Hawaiian Majesty’s Minister of Foreign Relations, and Addressed to All the Missionaries in the Hawaiian

Islands, May, 1846 (Honolulu, 1848), 94.

62

would “sooner sink his interest, or burn it, before he would distil [sic].” The proposed

resolution failed by a wide margin.2

Rum—essentially a byproduct of sugar—had historically been a significant

revenue stream for sugarcane planters throughout the Greater Caribbean, where most

plantations had their own distilleries.3 Rum might have provided Lee and other Hawaiian

planters with similar advantages without much trouble. Opportunities abounded to make

2 Journals of Stephen Reynolds, typescript, August 14 & 15, 1851, Hawaiian Collection, Hamilton

Library, University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa (HL). The “Law Prohibiting the Manufacture and Use of

Intoxicating Drinks” was enacted October 1, 1840; Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, Translation of the Constitution of

the Hawaiian Islands, Established in the Reign of Kamehameha III (Lahainaluna, 1842), 161-62. The

historian Ralph Kuykendall ascribes the first ban on distilling to sometime about the summer of 1838;

Ralph S. Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1778-1854: Foundation and Transformation (Honolulu:

University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1947), 163. The official minutes of the meeting praised those who debated the

resolution for the “courteous…calm and deliberate manner” of the debate; Royal Hawaiian Agricultural

Society Transactions 1, no. 2 (1851), 18-20. The Polynesian, Honolulu’s leading newspaper, discussed the

debate over rum distilling at length August 30, September 6, September 13, and October 4, 1851.

3 The anthropologist Sidney Mintz noted the ubiquity of distilleries in the British Caribbean,

Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985),

35, 44, 49. The anthropologist Frederick H. Smith noted that “rum making became increasingly important

to Caribbean sugar planters in the nineteenth century; Frederick H. Smith, Caribbean Rum: A Social and

Economic History (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005), 194. The precise importance of alcohol

to the bottom lines of the world’s sugarcane planters is unclear because the colonial powers governing

sugar colonies often heavily taxed or otherwise regulated alcohol in order to favor metropolitan distilleries,

and planters distilled spirits for local markets rather than, or in addition to, export. Alcohol was

nevertheless an important product for planters. Barbados first began to export rum in the seventeenth

century while other islands of the British Caribbean entered the market in the eighteenth century, until

“nearly every planter had a still house;” Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class

in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 196. Small

Jamaican plantations were exporting rum as well as sugar in the mid-eighteenth century; Michelle Harrison,

King Sugar: Jamaica, the Caribbean, and the World Sugar Industry (New York: New York University

Press, 2001), 13. In the late eighteenth century some Brazilian cane regions specialized in producing

alcohol (rum, cachaça, and aguardente), but even the regions that did not specialize in distilling found that

“sugar allowed them to break even, cachaça provided the profit;” Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in

the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985),

214, 121, 162-163. Cuban sugar producers began distilling rum for export by the end of the eighteenth

century; Manuel Moreno Fraginals, The Sugarmill: The Socioeconomic Complex of Sugar in Cuba, 1760-

1860, trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 122. In the early nineteenth

century, many large plantations in Martinique used the byproduct of sugar production to produce rum for

export and, more often, cheaper and lower-quality tafia for local consumption. Unlike Hawaiʻi, wood was

scarce in Martinique, and some Martiniquais found alcohol production unprofitable in part because of the

need for timber to fuel distilleries; Dale W. Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the

World Economy, 1830-1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 184-185.

63

money through making liquor. Hundreds of whaling and merchant ships with thousands

of thirsty sailors stopped at Hawaiian ports annually, offering a ready market for alcohol.

The costs of importing foreign liquor were high, and domestic producers might have

easily competed for this trade.4

Lee’s vehement opposition to distilling rum is all the more striking in the context

of the Hawaiian environment and economy. In 1850-51, Lihue Plantation was afflicted by

drought and a severe downturn in the market for sugar.5 In October 1851, one of Lee’s

partners at Lihue bemoaned the “awfully hard times for planters and all other

agriculturalists just now.”6 Lee himself acknowledged in March 1852, “[M]y operations

in the farming line have as yet brought me no income.”7 It would seem that Hawaiian

sugarcane planters such as Lee could have embraced rum production and the profits that

4 For a discussion of the Hawaiian liquor trade and the various attempts of the Hawaiian

government to control the production and sale of alcohol, see Richard A. Greer, “Grog Shops and Hotels:

Bending the Elbow in Old Honolulu,” Hawaiian Journal of History 28 (1994): 35-67. It is possible that

some sugarcane growers or mill operators produced illicit rum, but demand for and the importation of

alcohol remained high, suggesting rogue domestic distilling did not have a significant presence in the

market. For example, Judge Lorrin Andrews, who came to Hawaiʻi as an ABCFM missionary in 1828,

observed that merchants diluted their alcohol in order to cover the costs of business, making it difficult for

visiting sailors to imbibe to the point of drunkenness. “Judge Andrews’ Address,” Friend, January 1, 1848.

The success of domestic beer producers suggests that sugarcane planters could have sold rum on

advantageous terms. See the Polynesian, February 19, 1848 on the popularity and commercial success of

local beer.

5 William Little Lee to Joel Turrill, Honolulu, March 24, 1852, Joel Turrill Letters, Hawaiian

Collection, Hamilton Library, University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa (HL). William Little Lee to Mrs. Stephen Lee

(mother), Honolulu, July 26, 1852, Frederick B. Richards Collection, Crandall Public Library's Center for

Folklife, History and Cultural Programs, Glens Falls, NY.

6 Charles Reed Bishop to Joel Turrill, Honolulu, October 9, 1851, Joel Turrill Letters, HL

7 Lee to Turrill, Honolulu, March 24, 1852, Joel Turrill Letters, HL.

64

flowed from it in order to support their fledging sugar enterprises. Why, then, did Lee and

his fellow planters undercut their own economic interests and produce sugar but no rum?8

The short answer is that many of Hawaiʻi’s influential early sugarcane planters

were temperance men. Honolulu supported a robust community of haole teetotalers

which sought to limit the havoc drunken sailors periodically visited upon Hawaiʻi’s port

towns and to mitigate the depredations alcohol caused among Kānaka Maoli.9 But

planters’ rejection of alcohol stemmed not only from a desire for law and order. Most

Hawaiian sugarcane planters of the 1840s and 50s rejected alcohol production because

their religious and cultural roots lay in the Protestant revivals of early-nineteenth-century

New England and western New York.10

Opposition to the production and sale of liquor

was one expression of the moral identity that subsumed their identity as planters.

8 Sugarcane planters in the Greater Caribbean faced their own economic obstacles in the mid-

nineteenth century in the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. One important distinction between these

cases is that in the Atlantic metropolitan governments imposed abolition upon colonial planters, while in

Hawaiʻi planters themselves imposed restrictions. See Alan H. Adamson, Sugar Without Slaves: The

Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838-1904 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). As Adamson

argues, the political power of Guianese planters enabled them to maintain control in the face of abolition.

Likewise in Hawaiʻi, the political power of sugarcane planters enabled them to build a plantation system

that conformed to their cultural ideals.

9 Honolulu and Lāhainā, Maui, the archipelago’s two main ports, were the sites of several riots and

near-riots related to intoxicated sailors and sexual access to Hawaiian women in the 1820s and 30s. Riots

also occurred occasionally in the 1840s and early 50s. See Hiram Bingham, A Residence of Twenty-One

Years in the Sandwich Islands; or the Civil, Religious, and Political History of Those Islands: Comprising

a Particular View of the Missionary Operations Connected with the Introduction and Progress of

Christianity and Civilization among the Hawaiian People, 3rd ed. (Canandiagua, New York: H. D.

Goodwin, 1855; repr. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969), 274, 286, 313, 408. See also the Polynesian,

November 21, 1846; Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1778-1854, 122-23, 231, 311-12.

10 On the relationship between alcohol and early-nineteenth-century Protestantism, see Paul E.

Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New

York: Hill and Wang, 1978); W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

65

Growing sugarcane was much more than agriculture; it was an act invested with cultural

and political meaning.11

The religious ideology that moved Lee and other planters to oppose distilling first

arrived at Hawaiʻi in 1820, when the first company of the Boston-based American Board

of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM) established the Sandwich Islands

Mission. The proscription on distilling left a lasting mark on much of Hawaiian history,

including the rise of the Hawaiian sugarcane plantation system.12

During the years when

11

Mintz, Sweetness and Power, remains the standard work to discuss the cultural meaning of

sugar. While Mintz examined changes in the meaning of British consumption of sugar, others have

examined cultural meanings of sugar production. A “planter class,” as the term suggests, requires some

form of group identity and consciousness. See Dunn, Sugar and Slaves; Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall

of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990);

Thomas D. Rogers, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

12 On how missionaries developed the persuasive power to influence in early-nineteenth-century

Hawaiʻi, see Peter R. Mills, “Folk Housing in the Middle of the Pacific: Architectural Lime, Creolized

Ideologies, and Expressions of Power in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii,” in The Materiality of Individuality:

Archaeological Studies of Individual Lives, ed. Carolyn L. White (New York: Springer, 2009), 75-91. The

anthropologist Carol MacLennan recently argued that missionary ideologies of property and free labor

“established an important course of action that bred the foundation for plantation capitalism.” Carol A.

MacLennan, Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi

Press, 2014), 2. See also Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (New York: The

Macmillan Company, 1968); Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi: The Cultural Power of Law

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Paul T. Burlin, Imperial Maine and Hawaiʻi: Interpretive

Essays in the History of Nineteenth-Century American Expansion, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,

2006); Jennifer Fish Kashay, “Agents of Imperialism: Missionaries and Merchants in Early-Nineteenth-

Century Hawaʻi,” The New England Quarterly, 80 (2007): 280-298 for discussions of the role of

missionary ideology in mid-nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi.

Many scholars have used the term “plantation system” with varying definitions. This essay uses

the term to mean a culture, economy, and government policy directed toward the widespread use of land

and natural resources for producing a monoculture export commodity. See Donald Worster,

“Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History,” Journal of American

History 76, no. 4 (1990): 1087-106; Rogers, The Deepest Wounds. Mintz noted the agro-industrial nature of

the plantation system: “neither mill nor field could be separately (independently) productive.” As such, it

demanded discipline, organization of the labor force into interchangeable units, strict scheduling in order to

process perishable crops, the separation of production and consumption, and the separation of the worker

from the worker’s equipment; Sweetness and Power, 51-52. Alan H. Adamson posited five components to

the plantation system: relatively large size, agricultural production directed toward sale and export, the use

of laborers from outside the family owner, the use of authority to organize collective action, and the

investment of great capital in production processes; Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 9-10. John R. McNeill

66

members and former members of the Sandwich Islands Mission were prominent in the

Hawaiian government—roughly the second quarter of the nineteenth century—their ideas

and ideals about agriculture, trade, and social development influenced the formation of

the plantation system. Though sugar production was erratic at this time, Hawaiian sugar

exports increased from 4 tons in 1836 to 375 tons in 1850.13

Hawaiʻi did not become a

major exporter of sugar until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when two

reciprocity treaties (1876 and 1887) and then annexation (1898) gave Hawaiian

sugarcane planters duty-free access to U.S. markets. Yet it was during the earlier decades

of the nineteenth century—from the mid-1820s to mid-1850s, a time characterized by

many failed and undercapitalized sugar ventures—that attitudes and policies promoting

sugarcane planting took hold in Hawaiʻi.

The ban on distilling notwithstanding, the Hawaiian plantation system was no

simple product of a unitary missionary ideology transplanted from New England.14

stressed the ecological changes resultant in the appropriation of lands by the plantation system, particularly

deforestation, increased vulnerability to diseases, and soil exhaustion; John R. McNeill, “Envisioning an

Ecological Atlantic, 1500-1800,” Nova Acta Leopoldina 114, no. 390 (2013): 21-33.

13 Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1977),

418.

14 Some have presented a view of missionary influence on the rise of Hawaiian sugarcane planting

as monolithic and deterministic. Carol MacLennan, most notably, argued that “Hawaiʻi’s economy and its

sugar-friendly political system in the 1930s can be traced back directly to the changes in Hawaiian land

tenure and political economy that resulted from contact with Euro-American ideology of property as the

source of human freedom, wealth, and the basis of civilization… The particular characteristics of the

missionary-settler community determined the evolution of property and production in the islands after

1850.” MacLennan, Sovereign Sugar, 79-80. Scholars have come to question the idea of American cultural

hegemony, and more often see cultural change as a combination of localized agents and influences. See

Petra Goedde, “The Globalization of American Culture,” in A Companion to American Cultural History,

ed. Karen Halttunen (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 246-262. See also Arif Dirlik, “Performing the

World: Reality and Representation in the Making of World Histor(ies),” Journal of World History 16, no. 4

(December, 2005): 391-410.

67

Hawaiʻi marks a spot where two historical trajectories of sugarcane converged: one that

took the plant in the canoes of Pacific Islanders from its likely point of origin in New

Guinea to islands throughout Oceania, and another which wound through Asia, India, the

Middle East, the Mediterranean, Southern Europe, and the Atlantic World.15

Along each

of these routes, people developed different methods of cultivation, use, and signification

of sugarcane. What it meant to plant sugarcane in Hawaiʻi in the mid-nineteenth

century—and therefore what Hawaiʻi’s sugar industry looked like—was the product of

cultural encounters, adaptations, and negotiations; conscious decisions to turn to

sugarcane planting for strategic purposes; and responses to ecological conditions dating

back to the late eighteenth century.

The members of the Sandwich Islands Mission at first expressed antipathy toward

cane planting. This contributed to social and political conflict between missionaries and

those who wanted to develop commercial agricultural enterprises, including white,

Chinese, and Hawaiian entrepreneurs. Hawaiʻi’s missionaries initially supported policies

to develop a society of small farmers, whose independence and industry would lead, they

hoped, to Christian virtue. Gradually, however, missionaries and their allies came to

embrace large-scale cane planting. The plantation system they sought was something

similar to John Winthrop’s invocation to the Massachusetts Bay Colony: a city upon a

hill, which placed religious morality and social commitment above the pursuit of personal

gain. Missionaries sought to constrain sugarcane cultivation and use it to further a

Yankee Protestant cultural agenda. The plantations the missionaries hoped to develop

15

For the historical geography of sugar, see J. H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: An

Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

68

were to conform to their religious ideals, such as sobriety. Yet the ABCFM’s imported

ideology underwent a process of creolization, and as challenges arose, missionary

attitudes toward plantation agriculture shifted. By the early 1850s, with influential

positions in government and persuasive power in Hawaiian society, missionaries lent

crucial support to the development of a mode of agriculture they had previously opposed.

What began as an effort to use sugarcane as a means of supporting the Sandwich Islands

Mission, inducing cultural and social change among Hawaiians, and promoting Hawaiian

interests as the missionaries perceived them, transformed into a system of directing

Hawaiian policy to promote the interests of sugarcane planters. By midcentury, political

and popular opposition to distilling rum was one of the few remnants of the Sandwich

Islands Mission’s plantation upon a hill.

Sugar and Rum

Unlike the sugarcane plantation systems of the Greater Caribbean, which had no

sugarcane before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, Hawaiians had been cultivating

cane since their Polynesian ancestors brought the plant to the archipelago, some time

around 1000 CE. From possibly a few distinct imported cane cuttings, Hawaiians

developed over twenty named varieties of cane, each with different properties and uses.

Though pre-contact Hawaiians did not produce sugar, sugarcane played a significant role

in Hawaiian diets, culture, and ecology.16

The nineteenth-century Hawaiian scholar

Samuel Kamakau noted that in pre-contact Hawaiʻi sugarcane was an important source of

16

S. Schenck, et al., “Genetic Diversity and Relationships in Native Hawaiian Saccharum

officinarum Sugarcane,” Journal of Heredity 95 (2004): 327-331.

69

sustenance during times of famine and a highly prized snack in times of plenty.17

People

chewed raw cane and used its juice as a food sweetener; cane juice was an ingredient in

some medicines; and the juice of several different varieties of cane were used in

traditional love potions. Cane stalks were fashioned into spears and burned to make a

dye, the leaves served as a wall covering, and the tassels were used as mulch. The tops of

cane also served as articles of amusement; Hawaiians crafted them into darts, and used

them to line hillside sled courses to reduce friction.18

Hawaiians grew cane in dedicated

fields and small home gardens, on the fringes of irrigated taro pondfields, and on the

embankments surrounding dryland taro and sweet potato plots. Sugarcane thus played an

important role in the Hawaiian agricultural complex by supporting the cultivation of

Hawaiʻi’s staple crops. Lining pondfields, cane acted as a windbreak and absorbed taro

paddies’ seepage. In dryland field systems, Hawaiian farmers used sugarcane to create a

micro-orographic effect: rows of cane planted between fields and perpendicular to the

trade winds pulled moisture from the air and onto the upwind sides of their fields,

effectively irrigating taro and sweet potatoes planted amid the cane.19

17

Samuel M. Kamakau, The Works of the People of Old: Na Hana a ka Poʻe Kahiko, trans. Mary

Kawena Pukui, ed. Dorothy B. Barrère (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1976), 39.

18 Handy, Handy, Pukui, Native Planters in Old Hawaii, 187; Beatrice H. Krauss, Plants in

Hawaiian Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1993), 68, 89, 95. Archibald Menzies, Hawaii

Nei 128 Years Ago, ed. William Frederick Wilson (Honolulu, 1920), 76 is the only source that notes the use

of cane trash as mulch. According to the missionary William Richards, dry sledding was a favorite pastime

of Hawaiian chiefs; see William Richards to Charles Wilkes, March 15, 1841, in Marshall Sahlins and

Dorothy Barrère, eds., “William Richards on Hawaiian Culture and Political Conditions of the Islands in

1841,” Hawaiian Journal of History 7 (1973): 18-40.

19 T.N. Ladefoged et al., “Agricultural Potential and Actualized Development in Hawaiʻi: An

Airborne LiDAR Survey of the Leeward Kohala Field System (Hawaiʻi Island),” Journal of

Archaeological Science 38 (2011): 3607.

70

Hawaiian cultivation of sugarcane took on new relevance in 1778, when James

Cook first arrived at Hawaiʻi. At the time of first contact between Europeans and

Hawaiians, European sugar consumption was increasing and European explorers

expressed interest in the development of potential sources of sugar production. The world

sugar economy was a dominant force driving tropical colonialism. In 1776, Adam Smith

noted the profits of sugarcane cultivation were “generally much greater than those of any

other cultivation that is known either in Europe or America.”20

Demand for and

production of sugar rose throughout the eighteenth century. The 1791 revolution in the

French Caribbean sugar-producing colony of Saint-Domingue crippled sugar production

in one of the most important Atlantic sugar colonies, raising prices as well as concerns

over the stability of plantation systems based upon slave labor. Though distance would

have precluded any significant shift away from Atlantic sugar producers, interest in

promoting sugarcane cultivation in other regions—such as the British East India

Company’s efforts in Bengal—grew.21

Beginning with Captain Cook, haole visitors to Hawaiʻi expressed interest in the

islands as a potential source of sugar, and made particular note of cane growing in both

cultivated and wild settings.22

Archibald Menzies, surgeon and naturalist for George

Vancouver’s 1792-1794 expeditions, reflected in his journal, “it might be well worth the

20

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 2 (New

York, P. F. Collier & Son, 1902), 82.

21 Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry, 198-201.

22 See, e.g., Archibald Menzies, Hawaii Nei 128 Years Ago, 75, 77; Levi Chamberlain, Journal,

vol. 9, July 18, 1828, HMCS.

71

attention of Government to make the experiment and settle these islands by planters from

the West Indies, men of humanity, industry and experienced abilities in the exercise of

their art would ere in a short time be enabled to manufacture sugar and rum from

luxuriant fields of cane equal if not superior to the produce of our West India

plantations."23

The Russian explorer Urey Lisiansky similarly, though more succinctly,

observed that the production of sugar and rum could “yield a tolerable revenue.”24

These

men envisioned Hawaiʻi as a colonial sugar and rum producer in a mercantilist system,

cultivating cane not as a fringe crop in the Polynesian agricultural complex, but as a

commodity to supply distant markets.

Growing sugarcane and making sugar are two very different undertakings; while

Hawaiians had a great deal of experience with the former they had no knowledge of the

latter. Turning sugarcane into sugar demands disciplined labor, equipment, and expertise.

In the early nineteenth century this was an arduous process that, as Sidney Mintz argued,

wedded the field to the factory and brute labor to artisanal expertise.25

Mature Hawaiian

cane, about fifteen to twenty feet tall, with a tough stalk and narrow, serrated-edge leaves

that can grow to between five and six feet long projecting from the cane, must be cut

close to the ground, where the sugar content is highest. The sucrose in cane degrades

soon after cutting and so must be milled within twenty-four hours of harvesting. Once the

cane was pressed, sugar boilers heated the extracted juice in a series of cauldrons where

23

Menzies, Hawaii Nei 128 Years Ago, 79.

24 Urey Lisiansky, A Voyage Round the World, in the Years 1803,4, 5, & 6….(London: John Booth

and Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1814), 128.

25 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 46-52.

72

water was evaporated and impurities removed. A sugar master would watch the boiling

liquid closely to determine when the liquid had reached that point that sucrose crystals

could form. This muddy-looking substance was then moved to large cases where it

cooled and formed crystalline sugar and molasses. Once cool, it was transferred to

vessels that drain the molasses from the sugar, which then could be packaged for storage,

shipment, and sale.

Sugarcane is also the primary component of rum. Rum may be distilled either

from the skimmings and molasses that are byproducts of sugar manufacturing or from the

less-processed juice of the sugarcane.26

Cane-juice rum, which requires less specialized

equipment or technical expertise than sugar production, was the first step away from the

Hawaiian system of sugarcane cultivation and use. Hawaiians produced other fermented

beverages, but there is no record of using sugarcane to make alcohol until the advent of

European distilling knowledge and metal containers.27

The voyager John Turnbull, who

sailed throughout the Pacific from the year 1800 to 1804, observed that in Hawaiʻi King

Kamehameha employed “Europeans settled in his dominions to extract spirits from the

sugar canes, which grow there of an excellent quality.”28

26

There is little regulation of the term “rum,” and it has been applied to alcohol from a number of

different sources. The French made separate designations for cane-juice rum (rhum agricole) and molasses

rum (rhum industriel).

27 Distilling technology was not applied only to sugarcane. The use of rudimentary stills to distill

the root of the ti plant was common among aliʻi. Archibald Campbell, A Voyage Round the World, from

1806 to 1812…. 2d Amer. ed. (New York: Broderick and Ritter, 1819), 133

28 John Turnbull, A Voyage Round the World: In the Years 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803, and 1804….

vol. 2 (London: Printed for Richard Phillips by T. Gillet, 1805), 66.

73

Similar enterprises followed in which foreign entrepreneurs collaborated with

aliʻi (members of the Hawaiian chiefly class), who could control land and labor. Don

Francisco de Paula Marín, a Spaniard with knowledge of horticulture, winemaking, and

distilling, operated a sugar mill in Honolulu, possibly in partnership with the King from

about 1812 to 1825.29

Thomas Thrum, a publisher and antiquarian in late-nineteenth-

century Honolulu, wrote in 1875 that in the early nineteenth century sugar and molasses

production “doubtless with the view of rum making” was extensive in early-nineteenth-

century Hawaiʻi.30

These cases of sugar and rum production were very limited, sporadic,

and directed toward local consumption or small trade.

When the first ABCFM missionaries arrived at Hawaiʻi in 1820, they found these

small sugar- and rum-making operations, as well as other enterprises directed toward

supplying visiting whalers and the intensive extraction of Hawaiian sandalwood, which

was highly valued in China. The Sandwich Islands Mission soon developed an

adversarial relationship with resident haole merchants, who accused the missionaries of

stifling business through their efforts to direct Hawaiians’ attention to religious, not

worldly matters. However, Hawaiʻi’s missionaries were a more ideologically diverse and

flexible lot than their detractors often acknowledged. Significant differences in theology

and degree of commitment as well as more mundane generational differences

characterized the missionaries, who arrived in the islands as twelve separate companies

29

Robert L. Cushing, “Beginnings of Sugar Production in Hawaiʻi,” Hawaiian Journal of History

19 (1985): 17-34.

30 Thomas G. Thrum, “Notes on the History of the Sugar Industry of the Hawaiian Islands,”

Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1875 (Honolulu, 1876), p. 35. Before he turned to publishing, Thrum

spent five years in the 1860s working in the sugar industry.

74

over the course of twenty-eight years.31

Geography also kept the missionaries apart: most

worked in their own isolated mission stations across the archipelago, and only convened

as a group in Honolulu every year or so for the Sandwich Islands Mission’s annual

meeting. The ABCFM itself was also changing in ideology and practice through the

nineteenth century.32

Missionary attitudes toward sugarcane cultivation and agriculture in general were

ambivalent and laden with tension. On one hand, in the 1820s, the ABCFM altered its

theoretical approach to missionary work by emphasizing “Christianizing” over

“civilizing” the people they hoped to convert.33

Missionaries were to maintain a narrow

focus on preaching and promoting religious morality, and to avoid involvement in secular

and political affairs.

31

Similar cases of English Protestant settler societies turning to sugarcane planting occurred in the

Greater Caribbean. English Puritans established the short-lived Providence Island colony in 1630; see

Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630-1641: The Other Puritan Colony (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1995). Anglican missionaries with the Society for the Propagation of the

Gospel in Foreign Parts, originally in Barbados to convert slaves, became planters and slave owners

themselves. As a result, the SPG’s ideology concerning slavery softened to the point that it damaged the

organization’s credibility; see Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery

in the Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

32 Most ABCFM missionaries were Congregationalists while a minority was Presbyterians. The

historian Gavan Daws wrote that the ABCFM and Sandwich Islands Mission were more concerned with

saving souls than with any particular doctrinal affiliation; Daws, Shoal of Time, 62. For an account of early

missionary theology, see Sandra E. Wagner, “Mission and Motivation: The Theology of the Early

American Mission in Hawaiʻi,” Hawaiian Journal of History 19 (1985): 62-70. Paul William Harris,

Nothing but Christ: Rufus Anderson and the Ideology of Protestant Foreign Missions (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1999) offers an informative account of both ideological diversity within Sandwich Islands

Mission and changes within the ABCFM. The motivations and attitudes of early-nineteenth-century

American missionaries were often complex and varied; see, for example, Andrew C. Isenberg, “‘To See

Inside of an Indian’: Missionaries and Dakotas in the Minnesota Borderlands,” in Conversion: Old World

and New, ed. Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 218-

240.

33 Harris, Nothing but Christ.

75

On the other hand, in their minds Christianity and “civilization” were two closely

interrelated attributes of the same culture. This broader attitude toward missionary work

found expression in the original mandate of the Sandwich Islands Mission. Rev. Hiram

Bingham, a member of the first company of missionaries who also became influential

among Hawaiʻi’s ruling chiefs, wrote that the object of the Sandwich Islands Mission was

not only to turn Hawaiians to “the service and enjoyment of the living God” but also to

“extend among them the more useful arts and usages of civilized and Christianized

society, and to fill…those important islands with schools and churches, fruitful fields,

and pleasant dwellings.”34

Further supporting the mission’s interest in “fruitful fields,”

Daniel Chamberlain, a farmer, accompanied the first company of missionaries as a non-

ordained assistant missionary. However, “there not being a demand for his labor as a

farmer,” Chamberlain left Hawaiʻi.35

Whatever their internal differences and distinctions between Christianization and

civilization, the ABCFM missionaries shared a common set of values that, as the

anthropologist Sally Engle Merry noted, “prefigure the values of industrial capitalism”:

industry, thrift, self-governance, self-restraint, and commitment to the enduring, property-

owning family.36

The tension between narrowly religious and broadly cultural goals of

the missionaries became more complicated as the missionaries established close

34

Bingham, A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands, 60-61.

35 Rufus Anderson, History of the Missions of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign

Missions: Hawaiian Islands, vol. II (Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1875), 380.

36 Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi, 225-26. See also, Harris, Nothing but Christ, 11 for a discussion on

the false dichotomization of “Christianization” and “civilization.”

76

relationships with Hawaiʻi’s ruling chiefs. In 1825, missionaries had converted

Kaʻahumanu, the kuhina nui (approximate equivalent of a regent or prime minister) of the

kingdom and the head of a powerful elite Maui family group, along with other politically

powerful aliʻi. As a Christian, Kaʻahumanu implemented laws that conformed to her

religious morality, especially concerning sexual behavior, restricting activity on Sundays,

and sobriety. Apart from a brief struggle for political power following Kaʻahumanu’s

death in 1832, ABCFM missionaries remained close to Hawaiʻi’s rulers, first as informal

teachers and advisors, and then in the 1830s and 40s as formal government officials.37

Close personal relationships with Hawaiʻi’s ruling aliʻi were crucial for

agricultural enterprise because those chiefs controlled Hawaiian lands and could exact

labor from Hawaiian makaʻāinana (commoners). Hawaiʻi’s rulers distributed lands in

units of administrative control based on descending social and political rank and

decreasing in area from entire islands (mokupuni) to progressively smaller regions (moku,

ahupuaʻa, and ʻili). Commoners resided on their lands on the basis of family history and

the fulfillment of obligations to chiefs in labor and goods. All lands remained under royal

control; all subordinate land rights were revocable at a chief’s or the monarch’s will.38

37

Merry, Colonizing Hawaiʻi, 40-50; Patrick V. Kirch and Marshall Sahlins, Anahulu: The

Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, vol. 1, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press:

1994), 120-22. The missionary William Richards left the mission in 1838 to become a government advisor

and ambassador; Gerrit Judd, a missionary doctor became Minister of Finance in 1842; the missionary

Lorrin Andrews became a judge in 1845; and the missionary Richard Armstrong became Minister of Public

Instruction in 1848.

38 The Constitution of 1840 described all Hawaiian lands as historically held and managed by the

monarch on behalf of the people. On Hawaiian land tenure, property rights, and labor, see David Malo,

Hawaiian Antiquities (Moolelo Hawaii), trans. Nathaniel B. Emerson (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Co.,

Ltd., 1903); Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu; Lilikalā Kameʻeleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires: Pehea

Lā E Pono Ai? How Shall We Live in Harmony? (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1992); Patrick V.

Kirch, How Chiefs Became Kings: Divine Kingship and the Rise of Archaic States in Ancient Hawaiʻi

77

The cooperation of governing chiefs was therefore crucial to any business that needed

secure access to land, natural resources, and a large labor force.

In the 1820s, the Hawaiian economy, chiefly attention, and commoners’ labor

were primarily focused on the sandalwood trade. Sugar making in the 1820s was so

rudimentary that missionaries and the government rarely gave much notice to the

enterprise, and it continued as before with foreigners and individual chiefs partnering for

small operations. In February 1826, John Wilkinson, who arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1825 with

experience planting cane in the British West Indies, was in the process of erecting a

watermill for a sugarcane plantation at Mānoa, at the outskirts of Honolulu. Despite the

setback of losing part of his mill’s dam to a rain swell, Wilkinson told Levi Chamberlain

(no relation to Daniel Chamberlain), the mission’s secular agent, that in another six

months he expected the approximately 6 ¼ acres he had planted in cane to produce 10

tons of sugar.39

Chamberlain did not record how Wilkinson came up with his estimate for

sugar production, but it seems like a highly optimistic one. Calculations for sugar

production in Jamaica at the turn of the nineteenth century posited about 160 tons of

sugar per 300 acres of cane for the average plantation on that island—just over 1 ton per

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Sahlins notes that hierarchical power over land and labor

was not absolute or uncontested; Kameʻeleihiwa notes that commoners had many rights and protections

within the Hawaiian system, and argues that social order was in many ways based on reciprocal relations.

Nevertheless, ultimate power over land and labor rested with the monarchy and its allied chiefs.

39 Levi Chamberlain, Journal February 24, 1826. Other sources indicate that Wilkinson’s

plantation may have been as large as about 100 acres; see Thrum, “Notes on the History of the Sugar

Industry of the Hawaiian Islands,” Hawaiian Almanac, 1875. The discrepancy may be attributed to the area

of land under his control and the area of cane under cultivation at that time.

78

2 acres.40

Conditions were significantly different on Jamaica and Hawaiʻi: Jamaica’s soil

and forests had been depleted, but its plantations also had the benefit of greater

economies of scale, more advanced milling equipment, more experienced mill operators,

and a larger, enslaved labor force. By the 1840s other Hawaiian plantations with better

mills than Wilkinson’s were producing an average of one ton per acre.41

Such optimistic

predictions of early Hawaiian planters suggest just how out of touch they were with the

ways of the sugar industry.

In Wilkinson’s case, an over-optimistic view of planting gave way to a much

more somber reality: he died that September, and management of the plantation

transferred to Boki, the governor of Oʻahu. Boki employed over one hundred Hawaiian

laborers at a rate of two dollars per week at his plantation and was also able to have a

good cart road built, yet he could not keep the mill working. Chamberlain visited again in

November of 1826 and found that the mill was only able to boil enough sugarcane juice

to make half a barrel of sugar.42

Boki did not abandon the mill. He partnered with a group of haole Honolulu

merchants, and the plantation soon had about 100 acres in cane planted and a distillery

40

Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies, vol. 2 (London:

T. Miller, 1819), 287-290 cited in Deer, The History of Sugar, vol. 2, 333-334.

41 Polynesian, August 1, 1846, p. 42; J. B. De Fiennes, Report on Koloa Plantation, June 4, 1845,

Appendix U, no. 4 Report of the Proceedings and Evidence in the Arbitration between the King and

Government of the Hawaiian Islands and Messrs. Ladd & Co. (Honolulu: Government Press, 1846),

Appendix 102.

42 Levi Chamberlain Journal, November 30, 1826, HMCS.

79

built.43

The distillery attracted particular missionary attention. In February 1827, Levi

Chamberlain recorded in his journal that “a hula or native dance has been performed this

afternoon at the sugar plantation Manoa, attended by the King and others as spectators.

The performers were we are told persons belonging to Honolulu—The amusement was

connected with intemperance. Just at evening we saw a company returning on horse back

[sic]—some of them apparently the worse for liquor. In the company were several

foreigners.”44

That July, a merchant observed that Boki was making sugar “with fine

success.” By December 1828, Dr. Seriere, “a man of much information, having traveled

to most parts of the world,” had built a large distillery at Mānoa, but failed to produce

much rum.45

Chamberlain and the missionaries of the ABCFM came from the same

schools and religious backgrounds as those who fervently called for total abstinence from

alcohol in the 1810s. These early temperance advocates saw alcohol as a civic, moral,

and religious scourge.46

The missionaries shared this view, and also perceived in liquor a

potent threat to Kānaka Maoli health, industry, and chances of acquiring American

civilization.

In this instance, political divisions among the Hawaiian elite doomed Boki’s

operation and facilitated a temperance attitude toward sugar. Kaʻahumanu saw Boki as a

political rival and sought to limit his wealth and influence; Kaʻahumanu’s Christianity

43

Gavan Daws, “The High Chief Boki: A Biographical Study in Early Nineteenth Century

Hawaiian History,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 75, no. 1 (1966): 79.

44 Levi Chamberlain Journal, February 9, 1827, HMCS.

45 “Honolulu in Primitive Days,” Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1901 (1900)74-87.

46 Rorabaugh Alcoholic Republic, 191.

80

and close ties with the missionaries gave her the justification to take action against the

plantation and distillery.47

Meanwhile, Rev. Hiram Bingham, an early missionary leader,

saw the distillery as a major threat to his mission. Bingham argued that “the culture of the

cane, tobacco, and the poppy, is right, only where the probability is that the result will be

good, and should not be encouraged where the probability is strong that the result will be

evil.”48

He encouraged Kaʻahumanu to have Boki’s cane plantation ripped up and the

distillery razed. Bingham’s argument subordinated the agricultural and economic

development of the islands to the missionaries’ religious morality.49

Other missionaries were not quite so absolutist as Bingham, and were willing to

look upon sugarcane as more than just the precursor ingredient to rum. Some

missionaries even took to growing cane and making sugar. These efforts were

amateurish, geared toward local consumption rather than trade, and certainly not aimed at

any market beyond Hawaiʻi. In January 1829, Joseph Goodrich processed a crop of

sugarcane and produced “probably more [sugar and molasses] than I shall need for my

own family.” Goodrich’s mill was “one of my own construction consisting of 3 upright

wooden cylinders about 14 inches in diameter…I suppose similar to sugar mills in

general: mine however is turned by hand.”50

Though probably well suited for Goodrich’s

47

Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, vol. 1, 67-81. See also Jennifer Fish Kashay, “Native, Foreigner,

Missionary, Priest: Western Imperialism and Religious Conflict in Early 19th

-Century Hawaiʻi,” Cercles 5

(2002): 3-10.

48 Bingham, A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands, 340; emphasis in the

original.

49 Char Miller, Fathers and Sons: The Bingham Family and the American Mission (Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 1982).

50 Joseph Goodrich Journal, January 9, 1829, HMCS.

81

aims, this was a simple design for a mill. By the early nineteenth century, most sugar

producers had replaced the vertical mill for a layout with three rollers arranged

horizontally, and water or draught animals provided the necessary force. Goodrich’s mill

would have extracted only a fraction of the cane juice—and thus produced only a fraction

of the sugar—that contemporary mills were capable of.

Crude though Goodrich’s mill may have been, his and similar projects were

geared toward inculcating a New England Protestant ideal of virtuous industry among

Kānaka Maoli, either through example or by enlisting their labor directly. In their

mission station reports, missionaries throughout the archipelago recorded their efforts to

teach American farming practices. Many Hawaiians were adept farmers, but missionaries

complained that the work required to grow the staple taro was so slight, and that the

Hawaiian environment was so fertile, that Hawaiians could easily subsist with hardly any

physical effort.51

The missionaries did not simply want Hawaiians to be agriculturalists

(they already were); the missionaries wanted Hawaiians to grow marketable foods likes

sugarcane so that they might acquire the means to purchase the consumer goods that

would help them meet missionary standards of clothing and furniture, and thereby be able

to live in moral Christian fashion.

51

These arguments were clearly based on cultural constructions that dissociated natives with

industry. Focusing on the ease with which taro grows ignores the labor involved. Agricultural labor was

valorized in Hawaiian society. Kamehameha I famously joined the commoners in preparing taro

pondfields. See Campbell, A Voyage Round the World, 115.

82

Encouraging “Pious Merchants”

While the missionaries encouraged small farming, their views on commercial

plantation agriculture were lukewarm. In the minutes of the 1835 annual meeting, the

missionaries resolved that “As to the practicability of introducing improvements in

agriculture, we believe that little can be done at present…we should avoid, as much as

possible, becoming entangled with secular cares…Nevertheless, we regard the subject of

sufficient importance to warrant us to use at least an indirect influence in encouraging the

growth of cotton, coffee, sugar cane, &c. &c. that the people may have more business on

their hands, and increase their temporal comforts.”52

The following year, the mission

requested that the ABCFM send agricultural and industrial teachers so that the Hawaiians

might take steps toward becoming small farmers. The mission was wary of deviating far

into secular matters yet also eager to improve material conditions of the Hawaiians, and

at least tacitly recognized that agriculture was not a wholly secular affair.53

That same year, however, some missionaries seemed willing to move beyond

indirect influence to promote sugarcane planting. The missionaries allied with the

Hawaiian government arranged a fifty year lease worth $100,000 for plantation lands at

Kōloa on the island of Kauaʻi, as well as the ability to hire makaʻāinana, to Peter

Brinsmade and his firm Ladd & Co. Brinsmade, a Connecticut native and graduate of

Bowdoin College and Andover Seminary, advocated sugarcane planting as a means of

52

Extracts from the Minutes of the General Meeting of the Sandwich Islands’ Mission, Held at

Honolulu, June and July, 1835 (Honolulu: Mission Press, 1835), 19.

53 Merze Tate, “Sandwich Island Missionaries: The First American Point Four Agents,” Annual

Report of the Hawaiian Historical Society (Honolulu, 1962): 7-23.

83

promoting industry, morality, and temperance among Hawaiians.54

Brinsmade’s religious

background was crucial to his success—it helped convince the missionaries that Kōloa

Plantation would uplift, rather than oppress, its employees and Hawaiian society.55

The

missionaries considered Brinsmade “a pious merchant” and expected that “he will be a

great benefit to the nation” through the employment of Hawaiians on Ladd & Co.’s

plantation.56

One of the factors that lent Brinsmade and Ladd & Co. the aura of piety was their

opposition to alcohol production. Ladd & Co.’s embrace of temperance carried great

weight for the missionaries. The lease between the Hawaiian government and Ladd &

Co. for the Kōloa plantation stipulated that alcohol would neither be manufactured nor

consumed on any of the lands for the life of the lease. Subsequent leases for sugarcane

plantations continued to ban not only the production of alcohol, but its consumption,

importation, and sale as well.57

That Ladd & Co. was willing to forego rum manufacture was no small sacrifice.

In the Caribbean, rum was a crucial part of sugarcane planters’ livelihood, and distilleries

were found on most plantations. Caribbean cane planters found that the production and

54 Polynesian, April 17, 1847; April 24, 1847.

55 On the relationship between the Sandwich Islands Mission and Ladd & Co., see Alexander

Simpson, The Sandwich Islands: Progress of Events Since Their Discovery by Captain Cook. Their

Occupation by Lord George Paulet. Their Value and Importance. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1843),

33.

56 Juliette Cooke to her sister, August 20, 1839, HMCS Missionary Letters.

57 “Lease of Koloa Plantation,” July 29, 1835, Appendix A, no. 3 in Report of the Proceedings and

Evidence in the Arbitration between the King and Government of the Hawaiian Islands and Messrs. Ladd

& Co. (Honolulu: Government Press, 1846), Appendix p. 15. See also ibid., “Kamehameha III Lease of

Land at Koloa to John Stetson,” January 1, 1841, Appendix A, no. 12, Appendix p. 25; “Contract for

Grants and Leases of Land,” November 24, 1841, Appendix B, no. 1, Appendix p. 31.

84

sale of alcohol was smart business. Made from sugarcane syrup or low-grade molasses,

rum did not interfere with or preclude sugar production. By weight and volume, rum was

worth more than sugar, and its quality improved and value increased with age, so

shipping rum from sugar island distilleries to European and American markets was a

profitable enterprise. Moreover, rum lasted longer in storage than sugar, so a planter had

more freedom to wait for an advantageous time to sell his rum than he did with sugar.58

A

distiller in Hawaiʻi, a bustling center of Pacific trade and whaling, with hundreds of ships

and thousands of sailors visiting annually, would likely have been able to prosper by

making rum.

Promoting Self-Reliance

If Ladd & Co. helped to convince some missionaries to embrace sugarcane

planting, economics in the United States provided further motivation. A sharp downturn

in the U.S. economy known as the Panic of 1837 withered charitable donations to the

ABCFM, which in turn pressed its missionaries in Hawaiʻi into tighter budgets. Several

missionaries reassessed the ABCFM’s policy of supporting its missionaries through a

common-stock system, and determined to find ways to supplement their income. A few

even left the mission over differences concerning funding.59

Some others decided that

58

Frederick H. Smith, Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History (Gainesville: University

Press of Florida, 2005). Historians of sugarcane plantation systems have noted the importance of rum for

sugarcane planters. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West

Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 196-197; Stuart B. Schwartz,

Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1985), 121, 163, 214. In addition to producing their own rum, Caribbean planters also

sold molasses to distilleries in New England.

59 Harris, Nothing but Christ, 59-69; Kashay, “Agents of Imperialism,” 288-94.

85

sugarcane planting was not as bad as they had previously thought. Hiram Bingham, for

example, who was one of the most vocal critics of cane planting, began to do so himself

in 1838. The missionary Amos Starr Cooke noted with some amusement that Bingham

and his wife “made several inquiries…about the sugar cane as they had commenced

planting.”60

With the example of Ladd & Co. and the threat of disappearing support from

the ABCFM, the Binghams and their compatriots turned increasingly toward sugar.

Missionaries saw that raising sugarcane could provide an opportunity to become

less reliant on the ABCFM. In an 1838 essay in the Hawaiian Spectator, a short-lived

journal edited by Peter Brinsmade and published by the mission press, William Ladd

counted twenty-two sugar mills in operation, and noted that “it is a very common opinion

that sugar will become a leading article of export.”61

Similarly, Rev. John Diell, chaplain

of the Honolulu Mariner’s Church, looking forward to improved transportation across the

Central American isthmus, wrote for the Spectator that agricultural commerce would

blossom in Hawaiʻi.62

Indeed, missionaries with concerns their continued support could

observe the development of several sugar operations. Chinese sugar manufacturers

partnered with Hawaiian aliʻi to establish several mills, and the governors of Hawaiʻi

60

Amos Starr Cooke Journal, November 7, 1838, HMCS.

61 William Ladd, “Remarks upon the Natural Resources of the Sandwich Islands: Read Before the

Sandwich Islands Institute, January 30, 1838,” Hawaiian Spectator, April 1838, 76. The Hawaiian

Spectator and its partner organization, the Sandwich Island Institute, demonstrated a new, but fragile,

degree of cooperation between haole entrepreneurs and missionaries in Hawaiʻi. See, Bob Dye, “‘A

Memoria of What the People Were’: The Sandwich Island Institute and Hawaiian Spectator,” Hawaiian

Journal of History 31 (1997): 53-69.

62 John Diell, “Sketch of Honolulu,” Hawaiian Spectator, April 1838, 83-92.

86

Island and Maui both owned sugarcane plantations.63

Hawaiian commoners were also

early sugar entrepreneurs. Two of the three sugar mills operating in Lāhainā, Maui in

1837, for example, were owned by makaʻāinana.64

With Ladd & Co. joining these

diverse sugar producers, missionaries saw the economic potential of sugarcane at a time

when they needed to secure their finances.

Kōloa was one of the largest and—with the help of missionary and government

allies—best-funded sugarcane plantations; but the predominant model for sugar

production was smaller-scale. Missionary Richard Armstrong wrote that “the

multitude…cultivate sugar-cane,” under arrangement with mill owners.65

Providing

crucial instruction for those who might want to venture into sugar production, a letter to

the Spectator described and diagramed a Chinese sugar mill formerly in operation on

Waimea, Kauaʻi. However, the letter writer maintained a collectivist view. The author

lamented the failure “for the interest of all concerned”—that is, cultivators and mill

operators alike—“to keep the mill in operation.”66

Some missions developed a reliance on sugarcane cultivation and simultaneously

began to espouse qualified entry into the market through small-scale agriculture.

Missionaries recognized that they needed commerce. Sugarcane cultivation using

63

Peggy Kai, “Chinese Settlers in the Village of Hilo before 1852,” Hawaiian Journal of History

8 (1974): 39-75.

64 Dwight Baldwin, “Report of Lahaina Station, 1837,” Hawaiian Mission Station Reports,

HMCS.

65 Richard Armstrong, “Journal of Mr. Armstrong on the Island of Maui,” Missionary Herald, vol.

34, July 1838, 249.

66 H., “Chinese Method of Manufacturing Sugar from the Cane,” Hawaiian Spectator, January

1839, 113-115.

87

congregant labor presented an opportunity to advance missionary goals, and by 1838

several missionaries had erected mills.67

In 1839 the congregation at Waiʻoli, Kauaʻi, for

example, planted seven acres of sugarcane and directed the proceeds of the crop’s sale

toward building a meeting house.68

In a second essay for the Spectator, John Diell

discussed missionary ambivalence toward commerce generally, with explicit mention of

the Hawaiian sugar trade: “The command is, ‘Go, disciple all nations.’ But how is the

missionary to reach these nations? On the wings of the wind, by a miracle? or on the

wings of commerce?” Yet Diell also decried the negative influences of commerce,

particularly through the spread of liquor. “Commerce,” Diell continued, “while she

continues to traffick in ardent spirits…will not bear the scrutiny of the great law of

right.”69

Commercial agriculture, when directed with piety—say, for the construction of a

church—could be embraced by the missionaries.

The Kōloa mission’s station report to the ABCFM for 1839 affirmed the initial

faith in Ladd & Co. The mission happily reported that congregation members were

improving their homes, paid greater attention to “decency in personal appearance,” and

maintained a better “estimate of time” than they did in previous years. The station report

attributed this change to the example and employment offered by the plantation

proprietors, and argued that if other prospective planters like Ladd & Co. would be

67

Theodore Morgan, Hawaii: A Century of Economic Change, 1778-1876 (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1948), 176.

68 “Sandwich Islands: Report of the Mission made at the General Meeting May, 1839,” Missionary

Herald, vol.36, June 1840, 224.

69 John Diell, “Commerce,” Hawaiian Spectator, July 1838, 307, 314-15.

88

allowed to establish themselves, “the fields of Kōloa would be crowned with a rich &

abundant harvest, the inhabitants be clad in decent & comfortable garments, lodged in

commodious houses, fed on wholesome food, & merit the name of an industrious

people.”70

Kōloa Plantation was becoming a crucial tool in the missionary project of

civilizing the Hawaiian people.

Kōloa maintained a positive reputation among haole residents of Hawaiʻi in the

quality of sugar produced, treatment of laborers, and moral influence, yet the

predominating sentiment among missionaries and government remained suspicious

toward large-scale planting. The missionaries, “feared the introduction of many

foreigners with great capital. They had no fear from the establishment at Kōloa, but from

similar ones in other hands they had fears.”71

Likewise, members of the Hawaiian ruling

class prioritized small farming over planting as a means of uplift for common Hawaiians.

King Kamehameha III established a mill at Wailuku, Maui in 1840 and contracted with

Hawaiians to grow one-acre parcels of cane.72

The Hawaiian crown also partnered with

Ladd & Co. and other planters to encourage commoners to grow cane on shares, much as

independent farmers. Leases obligated planters to cart and mill cane grown on nearby

70

Koloa Station Report, May 1839, HMCS; emphasis in the original.

71 Testimony of William Richards, August 27, 1846, Report of the Proceedings and Evidence in

the Arbitration between the King and Government of the Hawaiian Islands and Messrs. Ladd & Co.

(Honolulu: Government Press, 1846), 72.

72 “Agreement between the King and Those who Plant by the Acre in Wailuku” September 23,

1840, Interior-Misc., AH.

89

government lands, and evenly split the proceeds of that sugar.73

The goal of the

missionaries, haole government advisers, and the monarchy, which had tight control over

land and labor and thus could effectively block the development of plantations, was small

cane farming and contracted agreements between farmers and mill owners.

Missionary-led sugar projects multiplied and improved: in 1840 at Hilo, Hawaiʻi

Island, a cane plantation collective produced about 5,400 pounds of sugar and 400

gallons of molasses, and used its proceeds to support the mission’s boarding school.74

At

ʻEwa, Oʻahu, Rev. Artemas Bishop and Oʻahu Governor Mataio Kekūanāoʻa established

a mill together. They agreed that locals who supplied the mill with cane would receive

half of the mill’s profits; the other half of the profits were to pay for milling expenses and

the remaining profits were to be split between the owners and mill operator. Bishop wrote

that the mill “has been undertaken not with a view to the emoluments of the business,

which are altogether uncertain, but solely to encourage industry and enterprise among the

people by affording them the opportunity to obtain the avails of their labors.” Bishop was

right not to go into the sugar business for profits: the plantation was far from a success.

Bishop and Kekūanāoʻa sought to sell the mill at a loss but could not find a buyer. They

could not even retain a manager, and Bishop himself was forced to run the mill.75

73

“Contract for Grants and Leases of Land,” November 24, 1841, Appendix B, no. 1 in Report of

the Proceedings and Evidence in the Arbitration between the King and Government of the Hawaiian

Islands and Messrs. Ladd & Co. (Honolulu: Government Press, 1846), Appendix p. 31.

74 Extracts from the Minutes of the General Meeting of Sandwich Islands Mission, Held at

Honolulu, May and June, 1840 (Oʻahu: Mission Press, 1840), 10.

75 Artemas Bishop, "Report for the Station at Ewa [Oahu], May 1839," Hawaiian Mission Station

Reports, HMCS; Levi Chamberlain, Journal, January 26, 1841, HMCS.

90

Ladd & Co. failed as well, and in sensational fashion. A labor strike in 1840 hurt

Kōloa’s finances and undercut its image as a tool for Christianizing makaʻāinana, and in

1841 Ladd & Co. overextended itself and could not repay its debts. Planters traded

accusations and recriminations with the government and the Sandwich Islands Mission;

Peter Brinsmade, once close to those in power, established an opposition press and used it

to vilify his former allies; and a protracted episode of lawsuits and arbitration became a

public spectacle.76

The Ladd & Co. debacle may have scared missionaries away from

involvement in planting, or at least from large-scale agribusiness. The missionaries might

have justifiably wondered whether a Calvinist sugarcane plantation could succeed while

maintaining its religious principles, and whether a group of seminarians from the

northeastern United States was equipped to branch out into such a foreign business.

With the experiment of the “pious merchants” at Kōloa a failure, it was difficult

for missionaries to directly involve themselves in constraining what others saw as

Hawaiʻi’s natural agricultural potential. Missionary allies in Honolulu’s business

community began to advocate greater encouragement of foreign planters, demonstrating

what the scholar of Hawaiian journalism Helen Chapin called “the closing gap between

religious and secular American interests.”77

James Jackson Jarves, a native Bostonian

who in 1840 established the Polynesian, an English-language weekly newspaper with

76

Polynesian, April 17, 1847 and April 24, 1847; Report of the Proceedings and Evidence in the

Arbitration between the King and Government of the Hawaiian Islands and Messrs. Ladd & Co.; on

Brinsmade’s role and aim in founding The Sandwich Island News see Helen Geracimos Chapin,

“Newspapers of Hawaiʻi 1834 to 1903: From ‘He Liona’ to the Pacific Cable,” Hawaiian Journal of

History 18 (1984).

77 Helen Geracimos Chapin, Shaping History: The Role of Newspapers in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu:

University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1996), 23-28.

91

missionary support, ran regular editorials in favor of government policies to build up

Hawaiʻi’s sugar industry. The first series of the paper only lasted a year, but the

Polynesian reemerged in 1844, now sponsored by the government as its official media

organ. In the second issue of the new series, Jarves wrote that the mission of the

Polynesian included the dissemination of agricultural information, “to develope [sic] the

resources of soil or talent which are now lying to a great extent fallow.”78

Jarves

frequently ran pieces praising the missionaries and the cause of Calvinist morality, but

also argued for government support of planters. Celebrating Hawaiʻi’s natural resources,

Jarves wrote, “nothing but lack of energy will prevent us from becoming the West Indies

of the North Pacific.”79

In the eyes of Jarves and many missionaries, Kānaka Maoli lacked the energy and

industriousness necessary to succeed at sugarcane planting. This assessment was no

doubt due in part to racist and ethnocentric attitudes. Although Hawaiians had been

cultivating sugarcane for centuries, and their Polynesian forebears considered it an

important enough plant to transport it on their migration to Hawaiʻi, haole criticized

Kānaka Maoli as poor planters who failed to properly manage their cane fields. At the

McLane plantation on Maui, where the government contracted to have locals plant cane

on shares, Jarves wrote that the Hawaiians’ cane fields were “very indifferently cared for,

choked with weeds and drying up, although fit for grinding. Another portion was in better

78

Polynesian, June 1, 1844.

79 Polynesian, September 28, 1844.

92

order—but the native system of agriculture is careless in the extreme.”80

Similarly, in an

1846-47 survey of missionaries conducted by the Minister of Foreign Relations, the

missionaries generally agreed that agriculture suffered from imagined Hawaiian

indolence.81

Yet the haole perception of Hawaiians as poor agriculturalists was tied to

significant differences between Hawaiian and haole cultures of cane growing. Sugarcane

was a part of what the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called the “poi economy”: a

system that prioritized incremental harvesting and frequent trade among agricultural

regions over highly concentrated harvests.82

Since sugarcane degrades rapidly after

cutting, and since cane served the important function of a windbreak for taro pondfields

in addition to its use as a foodstuff, Hawaiians likely would have cut small amounts of

sugarcane only as needed.83

As Mintz and others have argued, however, sugar production

was an early model of “agro-industry” in which field and mill depended upon each other

to produce sugar; a crop of sugarcane had little value if it was not milled properly, and

likewise a mill needed to process cane crops continually and efficiently if it was to be

profitable. This necessitated a regimented labor force operating under the discipline of a

set schedule, harvesting large areas of cane at once.84

The foreign method of clear-cutting

fields would have been novel to Hawaiians and also would have allowed weeds—of

80

Polynesian, August 1, 1846.

81 Wyllie, Answers to Questions, 6-12.

82 Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, vol. 1, 28.

83 Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, 272.

84 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 47-52.

93

which many species were haole introductions—greater opportunities to establish

themselves.

Two major animal pests for cane planters, the black rat and cattle, were additional

haole introductions to the islands that also disrupted Hawaiian forms of agriculture. Pre-

contact farmers would not have needed to protect sugarcane from these animals. Several

missionaries noted that Hawaiian commoners “have suffered and are now suffering great

damage from the large herds of foreigners and chiefs.”85

Roaming cattle were an

expensive nuisance most Hawaiians could not afford to combat. In 1846, McLane

estimated that cattle caused $1,000 worth of damages to his sugarcane plantation, and

would have done much more had he not hired Hawaiians to guard his fields.86

Local

farmers with small plots of cane would not have had the resources to either keep cattle

out of their fields or sustain the losses that roaming cattle caused.

The biological invasions of pests and differences in agricultural practices led

many haole to conclude that foreigners were needed to lead large-scale sugarcane

enterprises, but following the public controversy of Ladd & Co.’s demise, missionaries

again struck a cautious, if equivocating, note. In 1847 Rev. Ephraim Clark acknowledged

that “honest and industrious” foreigners with capital could promote the mission’s agenda

among Kānaka Maoli. “But,” he wrote, “any great monopoly of plantations, and sudden

influx of a promiscuous foreign population would prove disastrous to the native

85

Wyllie, Answers to Questions, 41. For the history of cattle in Hawaiʻi see John Ryan Fischer,

“Cattle in Hawai'i: Biological and Cultural Exchange,” Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 3 (August 2007):

347-372.

86 Polynesian, October 3, 1846.

94

population…It would, almost inevitably lead to a disregard of native rights, to serious

contentions, and to a system of subjection and servitude, which would soon end in the

slavery or extinction of the native government and race.”87

Though recognizing the

importance of agricultural development, missionaries remained concerned that

unrestrained plantation agriculture would damage Hawaiian society.

Toward a New Definition of Labor and Class Relations

The specter of slavery was indeed a significant factor in how missionaries and

other foreigners understood issues of labor and agriculture. Jarves noted that Hawaiʻi was

“clear from the evils of a slave population” and therefore in a position to build a

plantation system based on wage labor.88

The members of the Sandwich Islands Mission

held strong abolitionist beliefs; some even resigned from the ABCFM because the

organization accepted donations from Southerners.89

However, if Ephraim Clark noted

that foreign capitalists might import slavery, many missionaries soon altered the subjects

in their ideas about slavery in Hawaiʻi. They came to see plantation labor as a way for

common Hawaiians to escape their slave-like position to the chiefs.

Missionaries increasingly characterized the relationship between Hawaiian chiefs

and commoners as one of oppression, approaching slavery. Missionaries such as John

Emerson, Jonathan Green, Titus Coan, and Richard Armstrong argued that the chiefs

87

Wyllie, Answers to Questions, 11.

88 Polynesian, September 28, 1844.

89 Harris, Nothing but Christ, 77-86.

95

maintained an oppressive hold over the common people.90

This argument was rooted in

the Hawaiian land tenure and tax systems, which gave chiefs control over agricultural

output for large regions and the ability to impose heavy taxes in kind and in labor.

Echoing the missionaries, in April 1847, the Polynesian, still the government’s official

newspaper, editorialized that “with soil locked up by a selfish feudalism…this kingdom

must continue in its comparative paralytic state.” The newspaper continued throughout

the year to criticize the chiefs for commanding labor from the commoners while

simultaneously preventing agricultural development on fertile lands.91

Missionaries and haole in government expressed a desire to break the perceived

hold of the chiefs over Hawaiian lands and build up an agrarian middle class. To that end,

the government implemented a momentous reform of the Hawaiian land tenure system.

Under the traditional system, all Hawaiian lands were controlled by the crown. The

monarch distributed lands among chiefs, who divided their lands further and designated

lesser chiefs and landlords as overseers. Commoners owed particular taxes to their

landlords and chiefs, and in turn had recognized rights to live upon and use the land.

William Little Lee, among his many other positions, became president of the Land

Commission, which was responsible for awarding deeds under the Māhele (division).92

Lee was a close ally of the Sandwich Islands Mission—he wrote that “their line of

90

Wyllie, Answers to Questions, 7, 47, 67-68, 92

91 Polynesian, April 3, September 4, 25, and October 9, 1847.

92 On land tenure and the Māhele see John J. Chinen, The Great Mahele: Hawaii’s Land Division

of 1848 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1958); Edward D. Beechert, Working in Hawaii: A Labor

History (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1985); Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu vol. 1; Merry,

Colonizing Hawaiʻi.

96

conduct comes nearer the path marked out by the meek and lowly One than that of any

other Christians I have had the fortune to know”—as well as a strong believer in the

importance of land ownership for common Hawaiians and the Hawaiian nation.93

Lee

sent letters to many of the American missionaries scattered throughout the islands,

imploring them in emphatic language to have the commoners in their districts submit

land claims. He was explicit in his aims: “There must grow up a middle class, who shall

be farmers, tillers of the soil, or there is no salvation for this nation.”94

What haole saw as chiefly oppression may have been an artifact of demographic

change initiated by European contact. Syphilis and gonorrhea, which accompanied James

Cook’s expeditions to Hawaiʻi, caused horrific depopulation among the indigenous

population. Hawaiians probably numbered about 400,000 on the eve of foreign contact;

by 1832 Hawaiʻi held a population of approximately 130,000, and by 1843 the Hawaiian

population fell below 100,000.95

Not only did this destabilize social systems, it also

somewhat paradoxically contributed to an increased social stratification. The population

of commoners decreased much more drastically than that of the chiefs for several

reasons, but the result was that the burden of supporting the chiefly class through taxation

fell on fewer people and was thus felt more acutely. Moreover, as chiefs became ever

greater participants in Hawaii's new economy, consumption of foreign goods took on

93

William Little Lee to Caroline Scott, September 28, 1849, in Barbara E. Dunn, “William Little

Lee and Catherine Lee, Letters from Hawaiʻi 1848-1855,” Hawaiian Journal of History 38 (2004): 73.

94 William Little Lee to Rev. J. S. Green, Honolulu, January 19, 1848, HMCS; emphasis in the

original. Lee sent many similar letters to other missionaries; see William Little Lee letters, HMCS.

95 David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2013), 58; Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 9.

97

signification of status, and chiefs relied upon their commoner communities to support this

consumption.96

With increasing expenses and a decreasing tax base, chiefly demands on

Hawaiian commoners became increasingly onerous. The social system that haole decried

as so oppressive was thus just as much a foreign product as the system they hoped to

institute in its place.

The Polynesian persisted in arguing that chiefs’ domination of commoners

impeded economic growth, and that earlier attitudes toward planting were inadequate half

measures. With a slow whaling season in 1847, the paper predicted the end of that

industry, and exhorted the Hawaiian government to shift the base of its economy from

provisioning whalers to exporting agricultural commodities. “Agriculture is the only sure

reliance of the country,” the Polynesian editorialized. “It will not be sufficient to permit

after long and difficult negotiation certain individuals to obtain lands even at fair rates,

but if a market is to be created for native labor and products, foreign capital must be

invited hither.”97

The active pursuit of foreign capital was a significant shift from the

position that prevailed during the 1830s.

The direction of government policy toward attracting foreign capital and

establishing plantations had likewise reversed. In his 1847 address to the Legislative

Council, King Kamehameha III (Kauikeaouli) declared, “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. I recommend you to consider the best means of inducing

96

Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, vol. 1.

97 Polynesian, January 1, 1848; emphasis in the original.

98

foreigners to furnish capital for carrying on agricultural operations, that thus, the exports

of the country may be increased.”98

The Legislature took up the King’s directive, and in

the legislative session of 1848 worked to promote and protect planters’ interests. The

Legislature discussed greater enforcement of an 1846 law to prevent stray cattle from

roaming onto and damaging agricultural lands, and passed an “Act to Confer Certain

Privileges on the Owners of Plantations,” which allowed planters with over 100 acres to

become licensed retailers, helping them to avoid the fees of some merchants and profit

from selling merchandise to their own laborers.99

These laws embraced plantations in a way that earlier attitudes did not. Large-

scale agriculture was not something to be subordinated to religious ideology or to be seen

as a danger; it was inherently good because it promoted industry among the people. The

Polynesian editorialized that “Christianity has done much for the people, but she needs

all the aid and support which thrift in temporal affairs can give. The mass of the people

want more stimulus to industry. It is vain to expect them to be a virtuous people until they

become industrious.”100

This gave planting greater priority than it had received a decade

earlier. Rather than being one avenue toward virtue, industry, according to the Polynesian

was a prerequisite. Moreover, the most valuable type of agriculture, according to this

reasoning, was not the sort of small farming that made independent yeomen, but larger

agriculture that could employ the greatest number of Hawaiians and render them

98

Polynesian, May 1, 1847.

99 Polynesian, May 6, 1848; June 24, 1848.

100 Polynesian, October 9, 1847.

99

industrious in haole eyes. While the missionaries earlier feared an influx of the wrong

kind of capitalist planters who did not commit themselves to Christian values, the

Polynesian suggested planting was an inherently Christian act by virtue of the

encouragement of industry among Hawaiians, regardless of the overt religiosity of

planters.

Plantations as a Remedy for Depopulation

When epidemics of measles and whooping cough killed 10,000 Hawaiians in the

autumn and winter of 1848-49—about ten percent of the native population—at the same

time that a season of heavy rains struck many parts of islands, the need to attract foreign

capital to develop an agricultural economy seemed all the more urgent. Rev. Titus Coan

observed that following the epidemics, “secular affairs [in Hilo, Hawaiʻi Island] have

received a shock from which they cannot soon recover.”101

Seeing the devastation caused

by disease, many haole who previously hoped to create a nation of yeoman farmers came

to believe that Hawaiian bodies could not survive, let alone subdue, the natural world.

William Little Lee, who only a year earlier wrote of building up a Native Hawaiian

middle class, took on a much gloomier tone in his correspondence: sickness and death

had “brought a cloud over us that well nigh shuts out the fond hopes we have indulged

for the perpetuation and independence of this nation as a distinct race…I fear that in spite

of all the efforts of the missionaries and others for their salvation, they are destined to

101

Titus Coan, Pastoral and General Report for Hilo for the year ending March 1849, Hawaiian

Mission Station Reports, HMCS.

100

give place to the White man.”102

With the Hawaiian population decimated, limiting the

invasion of foreign capital and planters seemed moot. The epidemic reinforced the idea

that if Hawaiʻi’s agriculture was to be developed at all, independent small farmers would

not be the ones to do it.

On the heels of these epidemics, the Sandwich Islands Mission received word

from ABCFM headquarters in Boston that the ABCFM planned to discontinue its funding

of the mission and have its missionaries rely on their local congregations for

compensation. Rev. Dwight Baldwin lamented that after disease and rains afflicted his

congregation and “no strength or courage were left to sustain themselves…came a

general letter from Boston, demanding that they not only sustain themselves, but sustain

the Sandwich Islands Mission too.”103

The removal of support from the American Board

forced missionaries to rely on community contributions for their salaries. Yet it also freed

them to acquire property. Some missionaries sought to acquire lands or enter business,

while others remained in their pulpits. Whatever the case, missionaries now had a greater

interest in building up Hawaiʻi’s economy and the financial resources of Hawaiian

citizens. Commercial agriculture and plantation wage labor provided the missionaries’

congregants with the means to support their pastors.104

With the ABCFM now requiring

that its missionaries join Hawaiʻi’s economy, missionaries’ prior resistance to sugarcane

planting faded.

102

William Little Lee to Simon Greenleaf, Honolulu, March 3, 1849, William Little Lee Letters,

Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

103 Dwight Baldwin, Report of Lahaina Station, 1849, Hawaiian Mission Station Reports, HMCS.

104 Harris, Nothing but Christ, 112-122.

101

At a meeting of the King’s Privy Council on March 6, 1850, William Lee

presented an application from Reverend John Emerson to purchase land on behalf of his

son. “Several objections” were raised to such a grant according to the minutes of the

Privy Council meeting, as Hawaiian law prohibited the alienation of land to non-

naturalized foreigners. Yet the Scottish-born Foreign Minister Robert Crichton Wyllie

argued that missionary children should be treated as native Hawaiian subjects, “by right

of the services of their parents,” and Emerson’s application, as well as one from

Reverend Daniel Dole, was granted.105

That July, the Hawaiian Legislature continued its

trend of state support for sugar planting with an act exempting agricultural implements,

steam engines, and coffee and sugar mills from any import duty. In one of its most

controversial and contested decisions, the Legislature passed an act (proposed by William

Lee) granting aliens the right to purchase lands in fee simple.106

With missionaries no

longer championing the restriction of agricultural development to small, independent

farming, legal obstacles to the development of foreign-owned plantations receded as well.

The following month, Lee convened a meeting in Honolulu for the purposes of

forming an agricultural society. Many of Honolulu’s leading men, including missionaries,

were in attendance, and thirty of the one-hundred and fourteen men who became annual

members of the RHAS that year arrived in Hawaiʻi as part of the Sandwich Islands

105

Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, Minutes of the Privy Council, March 6, 1850: typed transcript of the

originals, scan of the holdings of the Hawaiʻi State Archives (AH).

106 Polynesian, July 13 and 27, 1850. William Little Lee proposed an act giving aliens the right to

hold lands in fee simple to the Privy Council on June 17, 1850; Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, Privy Council

Minutes, June 17, 1850, typed transcript, AH.

102

Mission.107

The formation of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society marked a moment

when Hawaiian agricultural interests were large and developed enough that they were

able to unite to share information and resources and to lobby the government. Just as in

previous decades, the members of the RHAS maintained the missionary opposition to

converting sugarcane into alcohol, yet they had substantially revised their position toward

large plantations. Attracting the capital to fund a plantation system was now among their

top priorities.

In his opening address to the RHAS, Lee lamented the “insignificant” and

“unprofitable” pursuits of agriculture in Hawaiʻi, complaining that uncertain markets,

ignorance of agricultural practices, and poor capitalization doomed most plantations.

However, Lee celebrated the imminent dawning of a new agricultural age in Hawaiʻi.

The extension of U.S. territory to the Pacific Ocean brought with it a large market as well

as civilization, which would lead to greater investment in plantations. “The native

government,” Lee said, “impelled by the irresistible influence and example of the Anglo

Saxon energy and progress, which it sees in every direction, is relaxing its former

tenacious grasp on the arable lands of the Islands, and even inviting and encouraging

their cultivation by foreign skill and capital.” Not only that, plantations were also places

where Hawaiians could find health and vigor. Citing mortality statistics of plantations

107

Stephen Reynolds Journal, April 29, 1850, HL. Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society

Transactions 1, n. 1 (1850): 79-81.

103

during the recent epidemics, Lee argued that on plantations Hawaiians were “less liable

to sickness, and less apt to die when sick.”108

By midcentury, missionary advocacy helped establish sugarcane cultivation based

on large-scale planting. Government policy and missionary rhetoric focused on large

commercial agricultural enterprise, not small farming as they had in earlier decades. As

Charles Reed Bishop, husband of Bernice Pauahi—one of the highest-ranked of

Hawaiian aliʻi—and William Lee’s partner in Lihue Plantation, wrote, “[N]one but those

who have considerable capital can commence and carry on a plantation profitably and

pleasantly.”109

Rather than place restrictions on foreign capital, the Hawaiian government

sought to court it. Foreign Minister Wyllie argued before the RHAS that Hawaiians ought

to emulate Barbados, the sugar capital of the British West Indies. Plantations, Wyllie

wrote, “are public benefactors… [I]n granting them every possible encouragement, the

government will only do its duty, and consult the best interests of the Hawaiian

people.”110

Missionaries, former missionaries, and allied haole of influence had altered

the means to achieving their ends. No longer would common Hawaiians find Christian

virtue through industry and independent farming, but through joining the plantation wage

labor force. Plantations organized by foreign capitalists were no longer a menace but a

source of freedom—freedom from chiefly oppression and the ravages of disease. The

108

Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society Transactions 1, n. 1 (1850): 7, 31. R. W. Wood also

reported there were no deaths at Kōloa Plantation during the 1848-49 epidemic; see the Polynesian,

February 23, 1850.

109 Charles Reed Bishop to Joel Turrill, April 29, 1851, Joel Turrill Letters, HL.

110 Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society Transactions 1, n. 2 (1851):116.

104

only vestige of missionaries’ early opposition to cane planting was the persistence of the

law against distilling rum, which remained in force until 1874.

Even after distilling became legal, it remained somewhat taboo. As late as 1903, a

committee of Hawaiian cane planters sought to identify ways to make use of their waste

products, but noted the existence of “a sentiment among many of the business men of

[Hawaiʻi], resulting perhaps from the training of many of the early settlers, against the

distillation of molasses for the manufacture of any kind of liquor, and the influence of

such men has been so great that their ideas have been accepted by and made the policy of

existing Governments down to the time of annexation.”111

Without rum, underfinanced

sugar producers were less likely to succeed, and foreign capital was all the more

necessary to establish secure operations, and a well-financed, well-connected planter

class was more likely to rise. Moreover, without the ability to salvage through distilling

the waste materials of sugar production, small plantations and inefficient mills were at a

greater disadvantage than large plantations with better equipment. While well-capitalized

planters such as William Little Lee were able to afford the expense of their ideological

commitment, others could not. Indeed, in the 1850s, many plantations fell into

bankruptcy, until by 1857 only five plantations—all large ones—remained in business.112

Though rum was only one of many factors in the consolidation of Hawaiʻi’s sugar

111

“Utilization of By-Products,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 22, no. 12 (December 1903), 552.

Some plantations were simply discarding their waste molasses; see Report of the Hawaiian Commercial &

Sugar Co. (February 1895), 7, HL.

112 Morgan, Hawaii: A Century of Economic Change, 179.

105

industry, the religious ideology of Hawaiʻi’s sugar pioneers helped to establish the

kingdom’s plantation system.

106

CHAPTER 4: EXPORTS AND IMPORTS, 1850-1876

Then on! bear on, the plough is ready

With which to turn the waiting soil;

The torch of science now burns steady,

To light you on your chosen toil;

Then swerve not from the path before you,

But onward with unfaltering tread;

Success shall wave her banner o’er you,

And Hawaii rise, as from the dead.

“Roll on! Roll on!” Composed and performed for the

second annual meeting of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural

Society, 18521

In 1850, Hawaiian sugarcane planters could take pride in several recent

achievements which helped to promote their interests within Hawaiʻi. Many of the

kingdom’s most influential haole, with the support of King Kamehameha III and

Hawaiian aliʻi, established the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society (RHAS). The RHAS

was modeled after similar agricultural societies established in the United States in the

1840s, with the goals of disseminating agricultural knowledge among planters and

encouraging agriculture through the distribution of prizes for agricultural achievements.

New investments in plantations increased exports of sugar from 250 tons in 1848 to 375

tons in 1850, which found an eager market in Gold Rush California. And, most

importantly, the Hawaiian government had passed a series of laws to promote planters’

acquisition of land, equipment, and labor at affordable rates. However, this boom was

short-lived. In 1851, a severe drought afflicted the islands just as San Francisco’s sugar

1 Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1:3 (1852), 15.

107

market experienced a glut. Together, these events caused the bankruptcy of many

plantations. Production plummeted, and only 10 tons of sugar left the islands that year.2

Plantations are often characterized as enclosed, self-sufficient units, yet this

notion ignores the basic need the move the plantation’s produce into a market. Planters

realized that crucial challenges in securing a profitable outlet for their sugar remained.

With internal reforms that facilitated the rise of the Hawaiian plantation system in place

midway through the nineteenth century, planters then turned their attention outward, so

that they might enter the international sugar economy. “Historically and economically,”

the economist Ida Greaves argues, “the plantation system is fundamentally international

in character.”3 This entailed the development of trade relations that gave planters

profitable access to foreign markets, the acquisition of a cheap and tractable labor pool,

and the participation in the global circulation of knowledge and technology directed

toward sugar production.

Much of the sugar producing world possessed access to markets, labor, and

technology that cane planters needed as a result of its colonial history. The sugar islands

of the Greater Caribbean established their plantation systems with the help of access to

the markets of their European metropoles. Additionally, the establishment and expansion

of plantation systems in the Atlantic World depended upon the expansion of slavery.4

2 Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society, 1:3 (1852), 90.

3 Ida C. Greaves, “Plantations in World Economy,” in Plantation Systems of the New World:

Papers and Discussion Summaries of the Seminar Held in San Juan, Puerto Rico Social Science

Monographs VII (Washington, D. C.: Pan American Union, 1959), 14.

4 Philip Curtin posited that slavery and an economy based on supplying distant markets were two

essential components to what he called the “plantation complex.” Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the

Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). On the

108

Moreover, agricultural expertise and technology often traveled along imperial networks

from core to colony.5

However, Hawaiʻi had no colonial relationship to facilitate the sale of its sugar,

nor a slave system to facilitate sugarcane cultivation, nor a metropole invested in building

agricultural knowledge in Hawaiʻi. It was not until 1876, after years of intensive

lobbying, that Hawaiʻi and the United States entered into a reciprocity treaty, allowing

planters to export their sugar to the U. S. duty free. The treaty led to a meteoric rise in

profits, and access to the capital necessary for large-scale importation of foreign

plantation workers. In the meantime, though, as planters and the government worked

persistently but ineffectively for profitable access to the American market, they needed to

find other means of making sugar pay.

Even without any actual colonial relationship, some scholars have depicted

Hawaiian history as one dominated by imperialism, with Americans “Pulling Hawaii into

a global economy.”6 However, the idea of “pulling” Hawaiʻi anywhere denies agency to

people in the islands and ignores the complex of local environmental, economic, and

expansion of slavery and the economics of plantation agriculture, see Adam Rothman, Slave Country:

American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

2005). On the struggles of plantation systems in the face of adverse trade conditions, and the use of cheap,

coerced labor as a way of mitigating those trade conditions, see Alan H. Adamson, Sugar without Slaves:

The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838-1904 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).

5 Richard A. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the

Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Studies in Environment and History) (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1996); Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the

"Improvement" of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); J. H. Galloway, “Botany in the

Service of Empire: The Barbados Cane-Breeding Program and the Revival of the Caribbean Sugar

Industry, 1880s-1930s,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86 (December 1996): 682-

706.

6 Jessica Teisch, “Sweetening the Urban Marketplace: California’s Hawaiian Outpost,” in Cities

and Nature in the American West, ed. Char Miller (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010), 17-33.

109

political factors involved in developing the Hawaiian sugar industry. In the absence of a

colonial relationship to provide the international components necessary for the plantation

system, Hawaiian planters reached out for trade agreements, labor pools, and expertise.

On the first two scores, their efforts were often unsuccessful, so planters attempted to

alleviate the problems of the tariff and labor shortage by adopting advanced sugar

production technology and recruiting foreign expertise. Planters reached out to other

sugar-producing regions in order to appropriate new methods of cultivation and milling

that would increase their output and efficiency. The importation of knowledge helped

build the industry into what the historian Ralph Kuykendall called a “vigorous sapling,”

despite the economic limitations imposed by the American tariff.7

Technology and expertise were not alone in helping Hawaiian planters overcome

the challenges of producing and selling sugar profitably. Environmental factors made key

contributions to the Hawaiian plantation system. The fact that sugarcane proved more

resistant to pests than other commodity crops such as coffee encouraged the expansion of

sugarcane planting and made the sugar industry increasingly important to the Hawaiian

economy and government policy. Environmental conditions thus increased the likelihood

that Hawaiʻi would shift from diversified agriculture to an economy dominated by a

single crop.

Efforts to connect the islands to foreign markets came at a cost. The introduction

of new species, ideas, technologies, and economic relationships brought more cane under

cultivation and altered the Hawaiian environment. A more immediate change for

7 Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom vol. 3, 46.

110

Hawaiians, though, was the rise of a culture that marginalized Hawaiian agriculture and

ignored the Hawaiian presence on the land. As planters reached out across oceans to

bring the sugar world to Hawaiʻi, they made room for their imports by ignoring Native

Hawaiian agricultural practices. Regarding Hawaiians as a doomed race, or, at the very

least a race incapable of developing large-scale sugar operations haole planters attempted

to push Hawaiian agriculture aside and impose their own agricultural vision upon the

Hawaiian environment.

Even as planters pursued a strategy of importing to Hawaiʻi the equipment and

knowledge they needed to succeed as sugar producers, they promoted a notion of the

archipelago as a land naturally disposed to sugarcane cultivation. Though discourse on

Hawaiʻi’s natural affinity for sugarcane obscured planters’ role in creating the conditions

necessary for cane planting to thrive, they were right that nature played a significant role

in their success.8 In particular, the spread of crop diseases that afflicted newer agricultural

imports such as coffee caused more planters to turn to sugarcane cultivation. This in turn

increased cane planters’ political clout and the need of the Hawaiian government to

pursue trade agreements that assisted the sugar industry. It was the interaction of

imported practices among cane planters and local environmental conditions that helped

the sugar industry overcome the problems of steep tariffs and expensive labor.

8 The interaction of introduced agricultural practices with environmental conditions is a common

theme in Western history, often understood in terms of interaction of the “process” of Euro-American

expansion with the local ecological conditions of a “place” as forces for historical change. See, especially,

Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6.

111

The Tariff and Annexationism

In order to promote commercial agriculture and disseminate agricultural

knowledge, the Hawaiian government, leading Hawaiian aliʻi and landholders, haole

merchants, and haole planters founded The Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society.9 The

RHAS established annual meetings and an agricultural fair where it awarded prizes to the

producers of the islands’ best agricultural goods, and it published yearly reports from

committees researching best practices for raising all sorts of animals and plants. The

society also produced reports dealing with issues of labor, infrastructure, pest control,

machinery, scientific research, and international correspondence. The government

supported the RHAS by granting the society fifty acres of land in Honolulu to establish a

nursery and an annual appropriation of five hundred dollars. The RHAS also benefited

from the close ties its members had with the government. The RHAS celebrated the fact

that the society’s chair for the committee on roads, harbors, and inter-island navigation

became the government Superintendent of the Bureau of Internal Improvements, thus

enabling him to direct infrastructure improvements toward connecting remote farms and

plantations to Hawaiʻi’s ports.10

With government officials among its most active

members, the RHAS sought to address several international and transnational challenges

facing Hawaiʻi’s sugar planters.

9 While aliʻi and the monarchy were involved in the RHAS, membership lists indicate that the

large majority of members were haole. Haole who straddled positions in government, the Honolulu

professional community, and plantation ownership, such as William Little Lee and Stephen Reynolds, were

the founders of the Society.

10 The Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1:2 (1851), 6-8.

112

The most pressing task facing planters at midcentury was to affect a reduction of

the thirty-percent ad valorem duty the United States placed on foreign sugars. With the

tariff, planters could not compete in the U. S. market with sugar producers from Manila

and China, where labor and production costs were much lower than in Hawaiʻi. Hawaiian

Minister of Foreign Affairs Robert C. Wyllie had been working for a trade agreement

since 1848, but to no avail.11

At that time the tariff did not cause such great concern.

Demand for Hawaiian sugar was so high in Gold Rush California that planters could sell

their sugar at profitable prices despite the tariff. By 1851, with drought and an economic

depression straining planters’ finances—to the point of bankruptcy in some cases—some

way around the tariff became a greater priority.

The RHAS and the Polynesian both lobbied the Hawaiian government to pursue a

reciprocity treaty with the United States, which would let Hawaiian sugar, syrups,

molasses, and coffee into the U. S. duty free in exchange for the same privilege being

given to American flour, fish, coal, lumber, and staves entering Hawaiʻi. King

Kamehameha III and the legislature passed such an act, and the American commissioner

in Honolulu recommended reciprocity to the U. S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster, but

nothing was done. Lobbying efforts continued, and advocates of reciprocity were

optimistic, but still unsuccessful.

The U. S. tariff was not only an obstacle for Hawaiʻi’s planters to overcome; it

presented a problem of national concern. Hawaiʻi needed a positive balance of trade to

protect its sovereignty, which had been vulnerable throughout the nineteenth century. The

11

Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom vol. 1, 331-332.

113

Hawaiian government had been embarrassed by debts to foreign merchants in earlier

decades, and visits from foreign naval vessels enforced payment. Though France and

Britain had signed a commitment to Hawaiian independence in 1843, French possession

of the Society and Marquesas Islands in 1842 and the British opening of China that same

year indicated to the Hawaiian government that the European powers remained capable

of aggressive expansion in the Pacific. An 1846 article in the Polynesian, referring to

conflict in New Zealand and Tahiti, as well as U. S. dispossession of Native Americans

lamented that the “strong are swallowing up the weak the world over, and hardship and

injustice are to a great extent the necessary result.”12

When, in 1849-50, a French warship

destroyed Honolulu’s fort and imposed several onerous demands on the Hawaiian

government, it was clear that Hawaiʻi needed a sound economic foundation for a strong

state if it was to avoid becoming one of the swallowed weak.

There were few options upon which Hawaiʻi could rely to build its economy.

Though provisioning the Pacific whaling fleet was the primary source of income for

Hawaiʻi in the 1850s, many knew that Pacific whale populations were declining and that

the trade in supplying whalers would necessarily decline as well. Farm and ranch

products California markets, including potatoes and beef, also faced the prospect of

decline as Gold Rush boomtowns developed into more settled communities with their

own farms.13

California could not raise tropical crops though, such as sugarcane and

coffee, and thus Hawaiʻi could continue to supply these commodities. Thus with planter

12

Polynesian, August 15, 1846.

13 Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom vol. 2, 136; Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of

Hawaii (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1977), 539, 551.

114

and national interests overlapping, Hawaiʻi began developing a foreign policy in support

of its sugar industry.

If the United States would not agree to a reciprocity treaty, an alternate way

around the tariff was annexation. The notion of annexation to the United States was not

new; many in Hawaiʻi had noted a rise of American influence since the arrival of the

American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM )in 1820. The

American community in Hawaiʻi, though numbering only 692 out of a total population of

73,138 in 1853, was a vocal contingent in Honolulu and the kingdom’s government;

according to Charles Bishop, “nearly all the good plantations” belonged to Americans.14

And while Hawaiians wanted to maintain their nation’s independence and the United

States expressed little interest in outright annexation of the kingdom, the Hawaiian

government used the prospect of American annexation or the establishment of an

American protectorate as leverage in its continued struggles for autonomy against the

great international powers at a time when these nations were expanding their empires in

the Pacific. In 1849-50, in response to an act of belligerence from the French nominally

involving the import duty on French alcohol but more broadly attuned to strengthening

French commercial and diplomatic power in the islands, the Hawaiian government

14

Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 92. This is the number of people born in the

United States living in Hawaiʻi. Hawaiian-born children of Americans would have increased the number

somewhat. Charles R. Bishop to Joel Turill, Honolulu, February 25, 1851, in “The Turill Collection,1845-

1860,” Sixty-Sixth Annual Report of the Hawaiian Historical Society for the Year 1957 (Honolulu:

Advertiser Publishing Co., Ltd., 1958), 40.

115

arranged a secret provisional placement of the kingdom under the protection of the

United States in the case of a French attempt to occupy the kingdom.15

While French marines destroyed the Honolulu fort and threatened to occupy the

town, relations between Hawaiʻi and France never became strained to the point that

Hawaiʻi formally asked for American protection. Yet Hawaiian sovereignty was far from

secure at midcentury. Navigating foreign relations from a position of vulnerability to the

imperial powers was indeed onerous for Kamehameha III, and a responsibility he hoped

to be rid of. He confided to Richard Armstrong, his minister of public instruction, that

“his sovereignty is becoming burdensome & unless he can [be] more respected by other

powers & more free from the interference of their agents here, he would rather surrender

it entirely.”16

Kamehameha III saw annexation to the U.S. as a way to protect Hawaiʻi from

France and as a way to protect himself and his property from a more violent form of his

removal from power. Better to cede power on his own terms and with compensation, he

seemed to think, than risk losing everything in a hostile invasion or insurrection. Various

schemes for revolution made brief appearances: rumors of California filibusters spread

throughout Honolulu in 1851; a group of New York investors proposed to purchase the

kingdom in 1852; and in 1853 a group of American businessmen in Honolulu known as

the “Committee of Thirteen” began agitating for a coup.17

Although none of these

15

Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom vol. 1, 388-407.

16 Richard Armstrong Journal, March 3, 1851, typescript, HMCS.

17 Kuykendal, 408-416; see also Greenberg, Manifest Manhood.

116

amounted to much, they signified not only a threat to Hawaiian sovereignty but also an

attempt to escape the U. S. tariff and develop a market for Hawaiian sugar. Kamehameha

III died in December 1854, and the crown prince Alexander Liholiho, who had a much

more negative view of the United States, assumed the throne as Kamehameha IV. With

Kamehameha III’s death, the Hawaiian government ceased its willingness to entertain the

idea of annexation. Internal agitation also seemed to dissipate, yet the problem of

acquiring a more favorable market for Hawaiian sugar remained.

Native Hawaiian Labor and Agricultural Expertise

Compounding the problems of the tariff was a perceived shortage of Hawaiian

workers and an unwillingness of Hawaiians to work at rates planters thought were

reasonable. Planters frequently complained about the need for cheap and tractable labor,

and conflicts between labor and plantation management dated back at least to 1840, when

the Kōloa Plantation workers struck. By the 1850s Native Hawaiians often preferred

supporting themselves by remaining within their traditional economy, joining whalers or

merchant ships, raising produce to supply those ships, or working in the Pacific

Northwest and the gold diggings of California.18

Missionary Eliphalet Whittlesey wrote

in 1851 that “Two young men from California during the year past have applied for land

at Honomaile and commenced a sugar cane plantation which is the third in that end of the

island. These plantations give proof of something either that the people are possessed of a

18

The emigration of working-age Hawaiian males was a significant contributor to the labor

shortage in Hawaiʻi as well as a cause for concern among planters, the government, and aliʻi. Janice

Duncan, “Kanaka World Travelers and Fur Company Employees, 1785-1860,” Hawaiian Journal of

History 7 (1973): 93-111.

117

competence and need not labor for others, or that they are so lazy, that they will not work.

Each establishment would employ more hands but they are not to be had.”19

Foreign

capital and industry, in the view of Whittlesey and other haole observers, was being

impeded by inadequacy of the local labor pool.

Hawaiʻi’s labor environment was drastically altered by contact with the outside

world. Like the Caribbean sugar islands in the years following first contact with

Europeans, Hawaiʻi experienced a series of devastating new diseases, known now as

virgin soil epidemics, decreasing indigenous populations by about 90 percent, according

to some estimates.20

With Hawaiʻi’s native population already plummeting from

introduced diseases, a smallpox epidemic erupted in 1853, killing between five thousand

and six thousand people, most of whom were Native Hawaiians.21

The virus most likely

arrived to Honolulu via a ship from San Francisco. Quarantine measures had been in

place for over a decade, but some criticized those procedures as too lax. Once smallpox

had arrived in Honolulu, the government initiated a public health program, though

debates over procedures, accusations of mismanagement, limited quantities of vaccine,

and ineffective batches of the vaccine exacerbated the response.22

19

Eliphalet Whittlesey, ABCFM Mission Station Report for Hana, Maui, 1851, HMCS.

20 On virgin soil epidemics, see Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the

Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 2 (Apr., 1976): 289-299. For an

examination of epidemics in Hawaiʻi, see Seth David Archer, “Epidemics and Culture in Hawai'i, 1778-

1840” (doctoral dissertation, University of California, Riverside, 2015).

21 Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 58.

22 Richard A. Greer, “Oahu’s Ordeal: The Smallpox Epidemic of 1853 – Part I,” Hawaiian

Historical Review 1, no. 12 (July, 1965): 221-241.

118

Sugarcane planting was not the direct cause of this epidemic, or the many others

to visit Hawaiʻi.23

Although, as the environmental historian J. R. McNeill argues,

sugarcane plantations in the Greater Caribbean often contributed to the rise of disease

ecologies, this was true for the mosquito-borne diseases yellow fever and malaria, which

had little presence in Hawaiʻi.24

Smallpox has no insect vectors and is transmitted from

one person to another, either through the air, direct contact, or sometimes through objects

that an infected person had contaminated.25

As a result, relatively remote and isolated

plantations were safer than Honolulu, a busy and more populous port town.

Nevertheless, the plantation system altered the way people in Hawaiʻi understood

the incursion of alien microbes into Hawaiʻi. No longer was disease simply a matter of

public health, nor did it only raise questions among some resident haole about the fitness

of the Hawaiian people in the face of competition from Anglo-American immigrants; in

the plantation economy, disease became a problem of labor. William Lee wrote of the

ravages of disease in Hawaiʻi in emotional and sympathetic language, and he worked

himself to exhaustion to aid Hawaiians during the smallpox epidemic. However, in a rare

moment of insensitivity, Lee wrote bluntly of the epidemic’s impact for the sugar

23

Some scholars have suggested a stronger causal link between plantations and disease in

Hawaiʻi. See Carol A. MacLennan, Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu:

University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2014), 176-190. MacLennan wrote plantation worker housing, “created the

setting for rapid spread of typhus, cholera, and the plague.” Yet she also acknowledged that epidemics were

most prevalent in towns such as Honolulu. Sugarcane planting was not the primary cause of the outbreak or

spread of disease, but it gave significance to disease as an economic problem.

24 J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (New

York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

25 On smallpox, see Elizabeth Anne Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-

82 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).

119

industry’s bottom line, noting in his annual address to the RHAS, the “small pox has

smitten thousands of our best laborers to the ground.”26

This betrayed a prevalent attitude

toward Hawaiians as workers, and acknowledged that if disease was killing off too many

Hawaiian laborers, planters must acquire new laborers from elsewhere.

The editor of the Polynesian made the link between smallpox and foreign labor

explicit. Planters must turn to foreign labor “now that the Small Pox has commenced its

destructive ravages amongst [Native Hawaiians]. It seems evident that the islands cannot

be allowed to remain untilled, especially as the interests already undertaken must be

pursued promptly and efficiently, to secure investments already made. This gives the

subject of LABOR an importance second to no other at present occupying the attention of

planters.”27

These statements prefaced a letter to William Little Lee from John Cass,

captain of the bark Thetis, who had previously brought coolies to Hawaiʻi and wrote to

inform Lee and the other planters of Hawaiʻi that additional Chinese workers could be

readily obtained.

Epidemic disease thus took on a new meaning for those involved in Hawaiʻi’s

sugar economy. Epidemics not only contributed to a discourse on the decline of Hawaiian

society, but they also presented a practical agricultural problem. Planters and other haole

who experienced the demise of the Hawaiian population with a mixture of sadness,

resignation, and condescension now considered disease and depopulation to be a threat to

agricultural production. If diseases introduced from the outside world were killing

26

Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 2:1 (1854), 5.

27 “Labor for the Islands,” Polynesian, July 9, 1853.

120

Hawaiians, then laborers also from the outside world who had greater immunity to these

diseases must replace the Hawaiians as workers on the plantations.28

Concern over the disease-related decline of the Hawaiian population

corresponded with a broader narrative among planters of an overall decline in Hawaiian

civilization and agricultural practice. James F. B. Marshall, manager of Lihue Plantation,

remarked to the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society that “indisputable traces

prove…this beautiful island [Kauaʻi] was one vast garden, highly cultivated,” but the

time when Hawaiians so extensively cultivated Kauaʻi was long past.29

With a narrative

of a vanished agricultural society, planters could view themselves as heirs to Hawaiian

land that had fallen into disuse and the resuscitators of Hawaiʻi’s dormant soil.

Some haole acknowledged the presence and sophistication of Hawaiian

agriculture, and sought out Hawaiian agricultural expertise. The English-born coffee

planter and physician Thomas Rooke, whose marriage to an aliʻi nui (high chief) made

him likelier than many planters to be exposed to Hawaiian culture, detailed the extent of

some Hawaiian agricultural knowledge in his 1855 report to the RHAS on sweet potato

cultivation. Rooke recorded the names and characteristics of fifty distinct varieties of

Hawaiian sweet potato. Rooke wrote that “all observations of the phenomena of nature

were minutely and carefully noted” by Hawaiians, but “the remnants of the knowledge

28

For the application of American discourse on indigenous population decline to Hawaiʻi, see

Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2005), 251.

29 Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1:4 (1853), 49.

121

once common, is now only preserved among a few old fishermen and farmers.”30

There

was, however, no such effort demonstrated in the transactions of the RHAS, Hawaiʻi’s

English-language periodicals, or in the surviving records of contemporary sugarcane

plantations to collect Hawaiian knowledge of sugarcane or to enlist Hawaiians in the

planting of cane.

More common than Rooke’s attention to Hawaiian agricultural expertise was a

contempt for the Hawaiian relationship with the land. In a report to the RHAS on the

history of Hawaiian cane cultivation, the planter Linton Torbert, ignored indigenous

agricultural agency and remarked that “how long [sugarcane] had been here…is a matter

of conjecture. It grows without culture, almost every where [sic].”31

J. W. Marsh quipped

to that the RHAS should import moles to the islands, which “would supply a stimulus to

industry for Hawaiian youth, excite them to skill in the noble art of digging, and prepare

them for profitable toil in California.”32

Marsh’s comment may have simply been

denigrating Hawaiian labor, but it also suggested a remaking of Hawaiʻi that both

imported foreign species and exported Native Hawaiians. Marsh’s vision of Hawaiʻi

relocated Hawaiians to the gold fields of California. Many Hawaiians did indeed travel to

North America during and after the Gold Rush, even prompting the government to enact

a law prohibiting the emigration of Native Hawaiian men.33

Yet Hawaiʻi’s planters

30

Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 2:2 (1855), 38-43.

31 “Paper Read by L.L. Torbert, Before the Royal H. Ag. Society,” Polynesian, January 31, 1852.

32 Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 2:2 (1855), 49.

33 Gregory Rosenthal, “Hawaiians Who Left Hawaiʻi: Work, Body, and Environment in the

Pacific World, 1786-1876” (doctoral dissertation, Stony Brook University, 2015).

122

seemed particularly willing to elide Hawaiian agricultural expertise from their

landscapes; their attention to pulling in from abroad the foreign elements of sugar

cultivation paralleled a willful blindness toward internal agricultural activity.

One of the most suggestive expressions of the haole attitude toward indigenous

sugarcane culture occurred in Honolulu on July 4, 1854. That summer, annexationist

fervor was at its peak, and the American residents of Honolulu, “expressed their hopes of

annexation by a grand celebration of the day,” according to Laura Fish Judd. “A car,

decorated with evergreens, in which were seated thirty-two girls of American parentage,

dressed in white, wreathed in flowers, each bearing the name of a State on her sash, in

large gold letters, was drawn by a power unseen. Next followed ‘Young America,’ a

company of very young men in uniform, with another triumphal chariot, on which was

placed a beautiful boy, the very personification of health, strength, and beauty. ‘Young

Hawaiʻi’ was in tow, and represented by a boat gaily trimmed, in which were eight young

native lads, fancifully dressed, and carelessly eating sugar-cane.”34

The annexationists

who organized the parade were arguing that Hawaiʻi was a place rich in natural resources

yet, in their view, it would require American industry and intelligence to develop

sugarcane from a mere snack to a staple commodity.

Of course, despite annexationists’ rhetoric, Native Hawaiians were indeed

agriculturalists. In 1856, in order to facilitate Hawaiian agriculture, King Kamehameha

IV established the Native Hawaiian Agricultural Society (NHAS; the Polynesian

sometimes called it the Native Agricultural Society or the National Hawaiian Agricultural

34

Laura Fish Judd, Honolulu: Sketches of Life in the Hawaiian Islands from 1828 to 1861, ed.

Dale L. Morgan (Chicago: The Lakeside Press, R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, 1966), 320.

123

Society) as a sister organization to the RHAS. Few RHAS members were Hawaiian, and

those who were, were aliʻi. In contrast, the Crown seems to have organized the NHAS for

commoners, with a message directed toward a Hawaiian agricultural working class. The

Polynesian compared the Hawaiian people to the land, highlighting untapped potential in

both. “Like their native soil, [Hawaiians] are capable of producing more than that of

which they have hitherto given assurance.”35

Yet, according to the Polynesian, most

addresses to the NHAS were critical of Hawaiian laborers, and commonly discussed the

“almost universal want of perseverance which marks the character of the laboring

classes.”36

The Polynesian translated selections from the speech of King Kamehameha

IV, who, the newspaper noted, had been “superintending some agricultural operations of

his own.” As president of the NHAS, King Kamehameha IV faulted Hawaiian culture for

discouraging habits of industry. “[F]oolish hospitality,” the King said, is “extended

everywhere towards the lazy and good-for-nothing equally with those who are worthy of

it…I am well aware that the sharing of food with every stranger and visitor that comes

along is dignified with the name of ancient Hawaiian hospitality. I now tell you it is not

true hospitality.”37

In his 1856 address to the NHAS, Prince Lot Kamehameha made clear his views

on Hawaiian class relations, as well as his ideas about the role of commoners in the

Hawaiian economy. The Prince scolded his audience, “You have no right to grumble.

35

Polynesian, February 9, 1856.

36 Polynesian, December 13, 1856.

37 Polynesian, February 9, 1856.

124

You ought if you are poor and hungry to say, as it says in the Bible, we have been

weighed in the balance and found wanting; the government put everything into our hands

and we were too lazy to do any good with what it gave us.” Alluding to the land and tax

reforms of the 1840s that allowed Hawaiians fee-simple ownership of land and removed

the burden of taxes paid in labor to local chiefs, the Prince lamented the decline of forced

labor in Hawaiʻi: “Now-a-days we see more old people work at regular employment than

young people. The reason is because they were taught to work when they were young by

their Chiefs… [O]ur young people are so independent of the Chiefs that they please

themselves.”38

These remarks suggest the breadth of the divide between Hawaiʻi’s chiefs

and commoners, the chiefs’ desire for a ready supply of laborers for plantations, and their

concern that Native Hawaiians were not willing to join that laboring class.

Foreign Minister Robert Wylie similarly lamented what he perceived as a decline

in labor and industriousness since the abrogation of traditional labor obligations. In his

1857 address to the NHAS, Wyllie drew a provocative parallel to American history in his

speech:

The United States, now a great, powerful, and wealthy people, occupy a

territory which 241 years ago was possessed by natives in appearance

differing little from yourselves…they bought lands of the natives and

cultivated them…but the natives lived by hunting and fishing; they were

too lazy to work; they saw the white men living happily, and becoming

wealthy by their constant labor in cultivating the soil, but without ever

making one effort to follow their example. The consequence was, as the

white man advanced from the seaside, reducing field after field to

cultivation, and hewing down thick forests to open new fields, the wild

animals and game on which the natives lived were frightened away, and

they had to follow such wild animals and game farther and farther to the

38

Polynesian, May 24, 1856.

125

west every year, until all their tribes have nearly disappeared, leaving only

a few wretched wanderers between the Mississippi and Rocky

Mountains.39

Wyllie’s message was stark: adopt Western agriculture or succumb to American

expansion. This rationale at once marginalized extant forms of Hawaiian agriculture and

gave a justification for foreign acquisition of lands and displacement of Native

Hawaiians.

Problematic though they may have been, speeches such as Prince Lot’s and

Wyllie’s (as well as others’) delivered to the NHAS were exhortations that these officials

intended as efforts to increase Hawaiian agriculture. Hawaiians were indeed involved in

sugarcane cultivation, and in March 1858 the NHAS had plans to build a sugar mill

which would manufacture sugar for Hawaiians who would grow cane on their own

lands.40

But the NHAS did not meet again for another year, and by that point the NHAS

mill did not receive mention in the Polynesian. Efforts to stimulate Hawaiian

involvement in the sugar trade seem to have faded; most Hawaiians involved in

agriculture raised the staples taro and sweet potatoes, while some around Kau, Hawaiʻi

and Makawao, Maui raised wheat and around Kona, Hawaiians grew coffee until a blight

destroyed their trees.41

By 1861 no sugar plantations bought cane from native farmers or

ground cane on shares for them.42

39

Robert C. Wyllie, “Address to the Royal Native Agricultural Society of the Hawaiian Kingdom,

read to the Society on the 20th

of April, 1857,” Broadsides, Misc. Hawaiian, AH.

40 Polynesian, March 6, 1858; May 8, 1858.

41 Polynesian, April 16, 1859; June 11, 1859; March 9, 1861.

42 Polynesian, March 23, 1861.

126

Foreign Labor: Coolies and Slaves

Planters looked overseas for plantation workers. The desire for foreign labor was

common among plantation societies because disease had decimated indigenous peoples

and those who remained often chose to avoid plantation labor. However, with no colonial

power to facilitate migration, planters had to take on the expense of acquiring foreign

workers themselves. Lihue Plantation was one of the first to bring in Chinese workers,

under five-year contracts signed in China, with the cost of transportation deducted from

workers’ wages and workers subject to fines or arrest for failure to fulfill their

obligations. Thus Hawaiʻi entered into the coolie trade. After arranging for their

importation in 1852 the plantation manager found Chinese workers “quick to learn,

careful and attentive,” and employed them in skilled positions in the mill and boiling

house, even placing one in charge of its new centrifugal separator, as well as unskilled

positions in the cane fields, where the manger thought one Chinese worker did the work

of three Native Hawaiians.43

The logistics of importing immigrant labor, however, proved

difficult and costly. Consequently, only a few hundred contract laborers came to Hawaiʻi

in the early 1850s.44

Part of the reason the question of labor was so fraught with tension for planters

was their general antislavery attitude. As the predominant mode of labor throughout

many sugarcane plantation systems, and an issue of importance to many American

43

Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1:4 (1853), 57, 124.

44 Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom v. 1, 328-30. In 1853 364 people born in China were living

in Hawaiʻi according to Robert C. Shmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaiʻi, 90; many of these were not

contract laborers but were entrepreneurs or sugarcane planters.

127

residents of Hawaiʻi in the 1850s, slavery loomed over the question of finding plantation

workers. Slavery took on even greater significance in light of attempts to annex Hawaiʻi

to the United States. William Little Lee, who was closely involved in negotiating

annexation in the early 1850s, wrote to a relative about haole excitement over the

possibility of annexation, but worried about the extension of slavery to the islands: “The

prospect is that we shall have the stars and stripes waving over us in the course of two or

three years. The only fear in the matter, is the subject of slavery, Oh, the black curse!”45

Just as Hawaiian planters maintained their commitment to temperance and produced

sugar without distilling rum, they sought to balance their need for labor with their

opposition to slavery. The solution in Hawaiʻi, as in the Caribbean, was a shift to Asian

contract labor that many saw as a compromise between slavery and freedom.46

Hawaiian planters may have abhorred slavery, but they wanted a cheap labor

system. After the RHAS’s Committee on Sugar solicited and received a report on sugar

production from a Louisiana cane planter, the committee took special note of the cost of

labor in Louisiana. In their annual report, the committee members priced five-year

contracts for Chinese workers at fifty dollars, plus monthly wages of three dollars,

expenses that “but very little exceed the cost of feed and clothing for negroes.” The

committee determined that “the comparative cheapness, therefore, of cooly [sic] labor,

45

William Little Lee to Cyrus L. Culver, October 31, 1853, Frederick B. Richards Collection,

Crandall Public Library's Center for Folk Life, History and Cultural Programs, Glens Falls, NY.

46 On the use of Asian labor in the Caribbean and American attitudes toward coolies, see Moon-

Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2006).

128

must forever preclude the possibility of competition, in these Islands, of negro slavery.”47

And it appears as though planters agreed with the committee’s pronouncement. When, in

1858, the newly founded Haiku Plantation solicited George Beckwith of Barrington,

Massachusetts, to be the plantation’s manager, telling him he “could do much good as a

Christian man on the islands,” the plantation first asked that he travel to Louisiana to

research the plantations and mills there.48

Though Beckwith discussed in great detail the

workings of the plantations, he paid no attention to the labor system present in the Deep

South plantations he visited; he and his employers might have wanted to emulate

Louisianans’ sugar-making, but not their labor management nor choice of labor force.

Despite widespread denigration of Hawaiian labor and frequent demands for the

importation of a foreign workforce, Hawaiians made up the large majority of plantation

laborers from the 1850s until the mid-1870s. Of the few hundred Chinese workers who

came to Hawaiʻi in the early 1850s, planters complained that most chose to find new jobs

after the expiration of their initial five-year contracts. It was not until 1864 that a newly

formed Planters’ Society emerged and began to lobby for government sponsorship of

agricultural laborer immigration. The following year William Hillebrand, a botanist and

physician originally from Hamburg, traveled to China as the kingdom’s Royal

Commissioner for Immigration. Hillebrand arranged for the emigration of 530 Chinese

laborers that year, and more workers followed in subsequent years, though numbers

47

Transactions of the RHAS, 2:1, 24.

48 Richard Armstrong to George Beckwith, Honolulu, June 1, 1858, Castle & Cooke Papers,

HMCS.

129

fluctuated from a few dozen to a few hundred.49

However, a survey of the kingdom’s

sugarcane plantations and mills conducted in late 1866 counted a total of 3,172 people

employed in the industry, indicating that the large majority of plantation workers

remained Hawaiian.50

The Torch of Science

With the tariff and labor keeping planting unprofitable, planters needed to become

more efficient at converting cane into sugar. At midcentury, Hawaiʻi’s planters were still

an inexperienced group who relied too much on rudimentary equipment and poor

methods of growing cane and milling sugar. George Wilfong, a former sea captain who

turned to planting sugarcane in 1851, taught himself how to boil sugar, something that

requires great care and precision, and that professional sugar boilers charged dearly to

teach.51

Planters could nevertheless use “the torch of science” to improve their methods

of growing and milling cane.52

As the planter Linton Torbert reported to the RHAS,

“whilst the man who works with a mill of two horse-power and makes only 200 lbs. per

day affords his sugar in the market at 6 cts per lb., the planter who works with a steam-

mill of 40 horse-power, other things corresponding, can afford his sugar at three or four

49

Ursula H. Meier, Hawaiʻi’s Pioneer Botanist: Dr. William Hillebrand, His Life and Letters

(Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 2005), 33; Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii 97.

50 Samuel C. Damon, “Open Despatch [sic] to the Secretary of State at Washington,” Friend,

February 1, 1867.

51 Geo. W. Wilfong, “Twenty Years’ Experience in Cane Culture,” Planters’ Monthly 1, no. 7

(October 1882), 149.

52 The Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society at its Second Annual Meeting 1,

no. 3 (1852), 15.

130

cents per pound.”53

Consolidation and technological advancement were keys to the sugar

industry’s survival under mid-century market conditions.

Few new technologies made as big of a difference to Hawaiʻi’s sugar industry so

soon after their invention as did a device called the centrifugal separator. David M.

Weston, a machinist from Boston, came to Hawaiʻi in 1851 to construct a new mill at

Lihue Plantation. A few months after his arrival, Weston built Hawaiʻi’s first centrifugal

sugar drainers, which could separate crystalized sugar from molasses and syrup—a

process that previously required weeks in large drying houses—in a matter of minutes.

Centrifugals had only just come into use for sugar production. Historians generally

ascribe their first use in the early 1840s in the French West Indies, Mauritius, and

Réunion, though an article in November 1895 Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly claims

Weston was the original inventor.54

The Polynesian called the advent of the centrifugal a

“revolution in sugar manufacturing” and celebrated Weston for his intelligence and

determination.55

Others, too, remarked upon the significance of this innovation. Wilfong

later recalled the centrifugal “was a curiosity to the people, and sometimes a hundred or

53

L. L. Torbert, “Report of the Committee on Sugar,” Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian

Agricultural Society 1, no. 3 (1852): 125.

54 “A Brief Sketch of the Early History and Growth of the Sugar Industry in Hawaii and its Pre-

Eminent Advantages as a Field for Investment of Capital,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 14, no. 11

(November 1895): 497-510. In 1891, a visitor to Hawaiʻi wrote that Hawaiian centrifugals were “of the

Weston pattern,” suggesting that Weston was recognized with at least some form of original invention or

innovation: Arthur T. Robinson, “Cultivation and Manipulation of Sugar Cane in New South Wales and the

Hawaiian Islands,” Planter’s Monthly 11, no. 1 (January 1892): 37. Handbook of the Hawaiian Sugar

Industry, 12 and Vandercook also claim Weston was the original inventor of the centrifugal separator: John

W. Vandercook, King Cane: The Story of Sugar in Hawaii (Honolulu, Hawaiian Sugar Planters’

Association, 1938), 152. Deerr, The History of Sugar vol. 2, 573-574; Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry,

137-138; Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom vol. 1, 326.

55 Polynesian, November 1, 1851; December 6, 1851.

131

more natives came to see it run, the school boys would come every afternoon and run the

machine until night without pay, and would dispute their turn to run it, they would make

it hum.”56

By drastically increasing the efficiency with which sugar could be separated

from molasses, the centrifugal promised to improve the quality of Hawaiian sugar

brought to market. Planters had damaged the reputation of Hawaiian sugar by rushing

poor produce to market during the Gold Rush boom, and thus hoped the adoption of the

centrifugal would help them improve their image as well as differentiate Hawaiian sugar

from cheaper Chinese and Philippine sugars.57

Though it is unclear whether Weston conceived his centrifugal independently or

based it upon the work of someone else, the introduction of the centrifugal to Hawaiʻi at

such an early date indicates the extent to which Hawaiian planters had connected with

other parts of the world. As Ulbe Bosma and Jonathan Curry-Machado argued in their

examination of the Cuban and Javanese sugar industries, transnational access to sugar-

making technologies from the United States, Britain, and France was crucial to

nineteenth-century sugarcane plantation systems, allowing them to increase production

and keep pace with rising world demand for sugar.58

Weston did not simply happen to

appear in Hawaiʻi—the planter Henry A. Pierce recruited him; and, after Weston briefly

returned to Boston, Pierce provided him with the investment capital to found the

Honolulu Iron Works, bringing to the islands milling expertise that early planters lacked.

56

Wilfong, “Twenty Years’ Experience in Cane Culture,” 150.

57 Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1, no. 2 (1851), 119.

58 Ulbe Bosma and Jonathan Curry-Machado, “Two Islands, One Commodity: Cuba, Java, and the

Global Sugar Trade (1790-1930),” New West Indian Guide 86, no. 3-4 (2012): 244.

132

Hawaiʻi’s planters put Weston and the Honolulu Iron Works to good use throughout the

nineteenth century, and used them to adapt foreign technologies to local conditions.

Technological innovation and investment helped some of the better-financed

plantations recover from the dismal market of the first years of the 1850s. In 1853 two

sugarcane plantations operated on Kauaʻi: Kolōa and Lihue. Koloā Plantation was in the

process of improving its mill to more efficiently grind its 450 acres in cultivation and its

estimated crop of 150 tons of cane. Lihue Plantation had 300 acres under cultivation, and

the last crop it took in was 125 tons—half of what was expected due to drought. A

mysterious blight that began after a severe rainstorm destroyed the greater part of its 1853

crop, yet despite these setbacks, Lihue was expanding and improving; James Marshall,

manager of Lihue plantation, planned to increase cultivation to 650 acres, with another 60

acres cultivated by local residents. In order to meet this increased capacity, Lihue ordered

a new 25 horsepower steam engine, which could keep the mill running around the clock,

as well as a separate, smaller engine to power their new centrifugal separator.59

Others involved in the sugar trade sought out practical knowledge and technology

from abroad as well. The RHAS maintained correspondence with planters in Mauritius,

Lima, Sydney, Trinidad, Havana, and many other sugar-growing regions, as well as

agricultural institutions in Washington, D. C., and London to exchange seeds and

expertise.60

George Beckwith’s 1858 tour of Louisiana sugar operations on behalf of the

Haiku Plantation brought back to the islands much-needed information on advanced

59

Transactions of the RHAS 1:4, 49-50, 55.

60 Polynesian, November 13, 1858.

133

milling technology.61

Haiku introduced the first steam-powered mill on the islands, and

by 1860 nine of Hawaiʻi’s twenty-two plantations used steam for grinding cane.62

By

1863 Robert Wyllie, who had recently converted Princeville, his plantation on Kauaʻi,

from coffee to sugar, built a mill far more advanced than those present in Hawaiʻi only a

few years earlier. One observer claimed the mill’s engine, imported from Glasgow, was

“perhaps the finest machinery ever imported” to Hawaiʻi. This engine powered boilers,

clarifiers, and a Wetzel and de Bour pan—“two ingenious inventions that mark an era in

the science of sugar manufacturing.”63

Presiding over this advanced equipment were an

engineer named Webster, who had “large experience on estates in other countries,” and a

manager named McGregor, “well known as a scientific and successful sugar boiler.”64

Planters recruited additional sugar experts, including Louisiana sugar boilers fleeing the

American Civil War. An 1864 report in the American Merchant’s Magazine summed up

the situation: “Heretofore sugar-boiling has been a matter of experiment, but as soon as

experienced men were placed in control of the sugar-houses, the work proceeded with

system and economy.”65

61

Castle and Cooke Papers, HMCS.

62 Thomas G. Thrum, “Notes on the History of the Sugar Industry of the Hawaiian Islands,” The

Sugar Cane: A Monthly Magazine, Devoted to the Interests of the Sugar Cane Industry ,vol. 6 (1874): 159

63 Holstein, “Rural Sketches of the Hawaiian Islands: A Trip to Kauai,” Pacific Commercial

Advertiser, November 26, 1863.

64 Holstein, “Rural Sketches of the Hawaiian Islands: A Trip to Kauai, (Continued)” Pacific

Commercial Advertiser, December 3, 1863; Holstein, “Rural Sketches of the Hawaiian Islands: A Trip to

Kauai,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser, November 26, 1863.

65 Henry B. Auchincloss, “The Sandwich Islands and their Sugar Crop,” Merchants’ Magazine

and Commercial Review 51 (1864): 337-351.

134

Many technological advances were aimed at saving labor and increasing

efficiency. A visitor to James Makee’s plantation at Ulupalakua, Maui, made particular

note of a new cart Makee designed to haul two tons of cane and thus conserve labor.

Likewise the visitor was “struck by the labor-saving arrangements of the mill,”

constructed by David Weston. “Everything,” the observer reported to the Pacific

Commercial Advertiser, “is arranged with the view of saving labor.”66

As Hawaiian

milling practices improved, planters were also able to increase the quantity and value of

their output. New mills extracted greater amounts of sucrose from their sugarcane,

leaving less sucrose in the form of molasses, which was less valuable. Though sugar

exports increased almost every year, molasses exports peaked in 1866 and decreased

rapidly after that. Moreover, as a proportion of gallons of molasses exports to pounds of

Hawaiian sugar exports, molasses peaked at about 9.1% of plantation output in 1853, but

by 1857 had fallen to 4%, fluctuated around there for about a decade, and then declined

steadily to .4% in 1875.67

Relatively rudimentary and low-tech at midcentury, sugar

production had become a much more efficient process in order to reduce labor costs and

find profitability while subject to the American tariff.

The pursuit of advances in sugar production extended beyond the research and

development of better milling practices to the introduction of foreign plants. As some

were bringing to the islands equipment and expertise, others were bringing botanical

specimens, even new varieties of sugarcane. Such imports were not new; the introduction

66

Holstein, “Rural Sketches of the Hawaiian Islands: Maui Revisited,” Pacific Commercial

Advertiser, July 2, 1864

67 Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 551.

135

of foreign plants to Hawaiʻi began with the first European encounter. Haole intentionally

introduced coffee, wheat, cotton, tobacco, citrus, grapes, strawberries, and many other

plants. Sugarcane, however, both predated the arrival of haole and became an introduced

plant. Though Hawaiʻi’s original Polynesian settlers had brought sugarcane with them,

and white visitors noted cane growing wild and cultivated throughout the islands, planters

sought varieties of cane better suited to plantation agriculture—they wanted sugarcane

that grew faster, yielded higher amounts of sucrose, and did not exhaust soils subjected to

continuous planting. For that they looked to other sugar-growing regions, and in 1854 the

captain of a whaler brought two varieties of cane from New Caledonia for a Kauaʻi

planter. The ship ended up depositing the plants at Lāhainā, Maui instead of Kauaʻi, and

as a consequence one of these varieties became known in Hawaiʻi as Lāhainā cane.

Lāhainā cane was said to grow so quickly that the noise of its growing kept its owner

awake at night.68

This story was repeated in the 1860s and 70s, and in the following

decades Lāhainā cane had become the variety of choice on irrigated plantations

throughout Hawaiʻi.69

This story surrounding the importation of sugarcane to a place where people had

been cultivating the plant for centuries demonstrates a paradoxical celebration among

haole planters of Hawaiʻi’s supposed natural fertility and white agricultural talent. But it

68

Hawaiian Gazette, June 27, 1877. Lāhainā cane was likely the Tahitian cane, known as

“Otahite” or “Bourbon,” popular on sugar plantations throughout the world; Hawaiian Sugar Planters’

Association, The Relation of Applied Science to Sugar Production in Hawaii (Honolulu, 1915), 43.

69 D. D. Baldwin, “Lahaina Cane,” The Planters’ Monthly 1 no. 2 (May 1882): 42-43. Noël Deerr,

Sugar House Notes and Tables: a Reference Book for Planters, Factory Managers, Chemists, Engineers,

and Others Employed in the Manufacture of Cane Sugar (London: E. & F. N. Spon, Limited, 1900), 30.

136

leaves no room to acknowledge indigenous agricultural knowledge. In order to unlock the

potential of Hawaiian soil, according to haole planters, white enterprise needed to be

applied; then the Hawaiian soil could perform miraculous feats as the planter slept. Just

as planters had been marginalizing Native Hawaiians and their agricultural practices and

fitness as laborers, the importation of foreign cane suggests that even Hawaiʻi’s own

varieties of sugarcane were not up to the task of plantation agriculture.

The notion that Hawaiian cane was not the ideal plantation crop reveals the

differences between Hawaiian cane cultivation and haole plantation agriculture. It

likewise reflects the fact that Hawaiian cane had been cultivated for centuries with no

thought to monocrop planting or milling sugar. Planters preferred Lāhainā cane for its

rapid growth, deep rooting, resistance to rats, high sucrose content, and the white color of

the sugar it produced.70

Many of these traits were not important to Hawaiian

agriculturalists, but when measured by the standards and desired outcome of planters

producing sugar on a large scale from monocrop fields, Lāhainā cane was superior to

native varieties of sugarcane. That the cane variety used most heavily on plantations

throughout the world spread through Hawaiʻi as well would have significant

environmental implications later in the fight against sugarcane disease epidemics.

Sugar also had an indirect influence on ecological imperialism in Hawaiʻi.

William Hillebrand’s 1865 search for Asian plantation workers as Royal Commissioner

for Immigration also included the provision of funds—from both the Hawaiian

government and the Planters’ Society—to collect suitable plants for introduction to

70

Baldwin, “Lahaina Cane,” Planters’ Monthly 1 no. 2 (May 1882): 42-43.

137

Hawaiʻi and to report on sugarcane planting in Asia. Hillebrand wanted to extend the

work he had done as Corresponding Secretary for the RHAS by connecting Hawaiʻi to a

network of agricultural exchange. In an address before the Planters’ Society, he expressed

a belief that “the agricultural resources of our archipelago might be vastly increased and

varied by drawing upon the vegetable treasures of, and studying their cultivation in” Asia

and the East Indies.71

Though poor health forced Hillebrand to return to Hawaiʻi ahead of

schedule, he nonetheless achieved most of his aims. After arranging contracts for Chinese

laborers to work on Hawaiian cane plantations, he collected botanical specimens from

Singapore, Calcutta, and Java before poor health cut short his mission. Even then, he

brought back twenty-nine Wardian cases of plants to the islands, as well as several

different animal species.72

Hillebrand thus facilitated the international flow of people,

plants, and animals, advancing Hawaiian botany and ecological imperialism along with

the sugar trade.

“Overcoming Nature by Nature”

Though Hillebrand and others dreamed of transforming Hawaiʻi into a garden for

alien plant species from around the world, they faced serious obstacles. Many newly

introduced agricultural plants were vulnerable to crop pests and diseases in Hawaiʻi,

while sugarcane was more resistant to these problems. Worms, weevils, caterpillars,

aphids, rats, and other crop pests ravaged fields. Crop pests faced few endemic predators

71

“Planters’ Society,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser April 8, 1865.

72 Meier, Hawaiʻi’s Pioneer Botanist, 36-37.

138

and little competition for food and habitat space in Hawaiʻi, and so they thrived. In order

to control the pests plaguing many agricultural enterprises, the RHAS began a campaign

to introduce foreign predatory animals. In his “Report on Birds, Bees, Insects and

Worms,” J. W. Marsh argued that the RHAS must take special pains to introduce

“insectivorous and vermivorous” animals. Marsh exhorted, “if we will and must make the

lava bloom, and the desert blossom, in spite of nature, worm and insect, we must at least

submit to the policy of overcoming nature by nature. We…can hold [pests] in check and

diminish their numbers, by cherishing such reptiles, insects, birds and quadrupeds as are

already our allies, and by introducing others to co-operate with them.”73

This call to action was a logical, though subtly different extension of earlier haole

acts of ecological imperialism in Hawaiʻi. Earlier introductions focused on species that

would be useful by themselves: crop plants, food animals, and some ornamental trees.

The RHAs was now introducing support species. The RHAS made several efforts to

import insectivorous birds from California with the support of the Hawaiian government,

which, by 1859, imposed legislation such as fines of one dollar on anyone who killed or

sold a native insectivorous bird and ten dollars on anyone who killed or sold an imported

insectivorous bird.74

Sugarcane was, for the most part, resistant to many crop diseases and pests. The

missionary John Emerson reported to the RHAS that “insects can harm [sugarcane] but

73

J. W. Marsh, "Report on Birds, Bees, Insects and Worms" Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian

Agricultural Society 2:2 (1855), 47-48.

74 “An Act for the Protection of the Kolea, or Plover, and Other Useful Birds,” Polynesian, April

23, 1859.

139

little.”75

A notable exception to this occurred on Lihue plantation on Kauaʻi in 1851-2,

and another blight attributed to the aphid or scale insect struck Kōloa and Lihue in May

of 1857, but the damage was restricted to only a small portion of their fields, and planters

tended to take the view that some crop loses to pests were inevitable.76

In fact, sugarcane

was a beneficiary of crop disease and insects more than a victim. Other crops, notably

coffee, suffered much more dramatically from blight, leading owners of large estates to

turn from planting other crops to concentrating on sugarcane. The blight first noticed on

Kauaʻi’s cane plantations in 1857 first appeared at Kona, Hawaiʻi (now Hawaiʻi’s

premier coffee district) in 1856, where it attacked coffee and orange trees. It spread to the

coffee plantation at Hanalei, Kauaʻi by July 1857, where it was expected to reduce the

coffee crop by one third.77

By September of that year, coffee planters feared their trees

were irreparably damaged.78

The RHAS allocated one hundred dollars to importing from

California insectivorous birds and frogs in the hopes of controlling the insects responsible

for the blight.79

The coffee blight was not a recent invader of Hawaiʻi. Robert Wyllie reported to

the RHAS in October 1858 that the same insect attacked a cotton plantation at Lahaina as

75

Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1:2 (1851), 96.

76 Pacific Commercial Advertiser, May 14, 1857. On the acceptance among nineteenth-century

farmers of some crop loss to pests, see Jonathan H. Brown and H. A. Beecham, “Crop Pests and Diseases,”

in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1750-1850, ed. G. E. Mingay (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1989), 4:311 quoted in J. F. M. Clark, “Bugs in the System: Insects, Agricultural Science,

and Professional Aspirations in Britain, 1890-1920,” Agricultural History 75 (Winter 2001): 85-86.

77 Pacific Commercial Advertiser, July 9, 1857.

78 Polynesian, September 19, 1857.

79 Paficic Commercial Advertiser, October 1, 1857.

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early as 1826, and that it was “generally asserted by natives, that the insect has, so long as

they remember, been known on the islands, as injurious to trees in certain places; and that

the only novelty is the greater ravages during the last two seasons.”80

The “novelty” had a

great deal to do with the implementation of plantation-style agriculture. With large fields

packed with a single crop, plantations facilitated the invasion and diffusion of insect

pests. Decreased biodiversity in monoculture plantation fields helped keep pest predators

away, while pests found plentiful food and habitats and were able to reproduce rapidly.81

Older coffee plantations, where trees were planted more densely and had grown larger

than those on younger plantations, tended to be the most vulnerable to the blight.82

Blight made coffee crops suffer from “an almost invariable rule of alternation,”

vacillating between increasingly meager and abundant crops.83

Moreover, coffee blight

also attacked fruit trees, sweet potato plants, indigo, grapevines, and tobacco, but

sugarcane only suffered lightly. Recovery of coffee and fruit trees from infestation also

takes large amounts of time and money as these trees require years of growing before

they are ready to bear fruit.84

80

Polynesian, November 6, 1858.

81 On pets and agriculture see Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the

Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1995), 91; Annette Atkins, Harvest of

Grief: Grasshopper Plagues and Public Assistance in Minnesota, 1873-1878 (St. Paul: Minnesota

Historical Society Press, 1984); Thomas R. Dunlop, DDT: Scientists, Citizens, and Public Policy

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

82 “The Coffee Blight,” Polynesian, August 13, 1859.

83 Pacific Commercial Advertiser, May 13, 1858. Reports indicate each time the blight came back

it was increasingly severe; see Pacific Commercial Advertiser, August 4, 1859.

84 Steven Stoll, “Insects and Institutions: University Science and the Fruit Business in California,”

Agricultural History 69 (Spring 1995): 224.

141

This volatility and continued depredations of the coffee blight led some to turn to

sugar. Charles Titcomb, a Kauaʻi coffee planter, put his plantation up for sale in 1858.85

Titcomb struggled on without a buyer for two more years, but in 1859, he abandoned his

coffee trees and planted sugarcane.86

A newspaper correspondent writing from Kauaʻi

wrote that the coffee blight had “entirely covered” the island’s two coffee plantations.

Where those plantations thrived only a few years ago, “now all was silent. Not a coffee

gatherer was abroad, and we saw laborers bringing coffee trees upon their shoulders, to

heat the fires under the sugar boilers of Mr. Titcomb… Not only is the blight upon the

coffee trees, but the indigo, guava, fig, koa, kukui, and we know not how many other

plants, shrubs and trees are withering and dying, beneath the fatal and spreading evil.”87

Robert Wyllie, who in 1853 had purchased a coffee plantation at Hanalei, Kauaʻi,

likewise struggled against the blight for a decade. In 1863, he conceded defeat and

planted cane. Coffee exports plummeted from a peak of 311,300 pounds in 1857 to

58,100 pounds the following year, while sugar exports rose from 701,000 pounds to

1,205,000 pounds over that same time. Sugar exports continued to rise in the late 1850s

as new cane fields matured.88

Despite efforts at control, the ravages of pests continued. Isabella Bird, the British

explorer and writer who visited Hawaiʻi in 1872 praised the archipelago’s environment,

85

Polynesian, November 6, 1858.

86 Pacific Commercial Advertiser, November 10, 1859.

87 Friend, September 8, 1860.

88 Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 551.

142

writing, “wherever there is sufficient rainfall, the earth teems with plenty,” but she went

on to write that agriculture was a risky prospect:

The dearth of insectivorous birds seriously affects the cultivation of a soil

naturally bounteous to excess…Though wheat and other cereals mature,

attacks of weevil prevent their storage, and all the grain and flour

consumed are imported from California. Cacao, cinnamon, and allspice,

are subject to an apparently ineradicable blight. The blight which has

attacked the coffee shrub is so severe, that the larger plantations have been

dug up…Oranges suffer from blight also, and some of the finest groves

have been cut down. Cotton suffers from the ravages of a caterpillar. The

mulberry tree, which, from its rapid growth, would be invaluable to silk

growers, is covered with a black and white blight.89

Indeed, sugarcane rose to the pinnacle of Hawaiian agriculture in part because Hawaiʻi’s

island biogeography left newly imported agricultural plants without allied species that

might protect crops from pests. With no natural protections against such blights, diverse

agriculturalists turned increasingly toward sugar.

“King of the Sugar World”

The switch from coffee to sugar among some planters was particularly fortuitous

for the Hawaiian sugar industry, as it immediately preceded a boom in the price of sugar

brought about by the American Civil War. In 1862, the war crippled Louisiana’s

sugarcane plantations and severed their distribution routes; Hawaiian sugar producers

were poised to make up the shortfall this caused.90

Other industries, such as whaling, also

89

Isabella L. Bird, The Hawaiian Archipelago: Six Months Among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs,

& Volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands (London: John Murray, 1875), 455-56.

90 Walter Prichard, “The Effects of the Civil War on the Louisiana Sugar Industry,” Journal of

Southern History 5 (August 1939): 315-332. Some have argued that the Civil War initiated the turn to

sugarcane among Hawaiian planters. See James L. Haley, Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (New

York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), 190. Although the Civil War certainly encouraged Hawaiian planters to

favor sugar, and higher wartime prices gave Hawaiian planters greater profits to reinvest in their operations,

143

suffered. The Confederate warships Florida and Shenandoah harassed the Pacific

whaling fleet, which was already declining from overhunting and an economic shift

toward other commodities.91

The combined effects of the blight and war contributed to a

sharp increase in cane planting. The amount of sugar produced for export in the islands

more than quintupled in the span of three years, from just over 3 million lbs. in 1862 to

15.3 million lbs. in 1865.92

By 1866, over 10,000 acres were planted in cane and the

sugar industry was poised for further growth—Hawaiʻi’s sugarcane plantations held over

112,000 acres of land.93

Foreign writers took notice of, and publicized, the Hawaiian sugar industry’s

expansion. Following the Civil War, Mark Twain visited Hawaiʻi on assignment from the

Sacramento Union to report on business in the islands. Acting more as a booster than

reporter, Twain echoed the sentiments of stories such as that of the Lahāinā cane, and

ascribed an almost miraculous ability of Hawaiʻi to produce sugarcane. Twain wrote that

Hawaiʻi was “a land which produces six, eight, ten, twelve, yea, even thirteen thousand

pounds [of sugar] to the acre of unmanured soil! There are precious few acres of

unmanured ground in Louisiana—none at all, perhaps—which will yield two thousand

the fact that sugar production and exports had already begun to increase before Hawaiian planters could

respond to the war indicates that the blight played a greater role in the initial increase in sugarcane planting.

91 Chalfant Robinson, A History of Two Reciprocity Treaties, the Treaty with Canada in 1854,

the Treaty with the Hawaiian Islands in 1876; with a Chapter on the Treaty Making Power of the House of

Representatives (New Haven, 1903), 113; Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 554.

92 Thomas G. Thrum, “Notes on the History of the Sugar Industry of the Hawaiian Islands,”

Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1875 (Honolulu: Black & Auld, Printers, 1875), 37.

93 Samuel C. Damon, “Open Despatch [sic] to the Secretary of State at Washington,” Friend,

February 1, 1867.

144

five hundred pounds of sugar; there is not an unmanured acre under cultivation in the

Sandwich Islands which yields less.” Twain went on to call Hawai‘i “king of the sugar

world, as far as astonishing productiveness is concerned.”94

Isabella Bird, too, was effusive over the prospects of Hawaiʻi sugar. In contrast to

coffee, cotton, silk, and the other attempted export crops that failed in Hawaiʻi, cane

seemed to be naturally suited to the Hawaiian environment:

Sugar is now the great interest of the islands. Christian missions and

whaling have had their day, and now people talk sugar…150,000 [acres] is

said to be specially adapted for sugar culture. Herein is a prospective

Utopia, and people are always dreaming of the sugar-growing capacities

of the belt of rich disintegrated lava which slopes upwards from the sea to

the bases of the mountains…The magnificent climate makes [sugarcane] a

very easy crop to grow. There is no brief harvest time with its rush, hurry,

and frantic demand for labour, nor frost to render necessary the hasty

cutting of an immature crop... The planters can plant pretty much when

they please…They can cut when they please…and they can plant, cut, and

grind at one time!95

The climate and land were indeed well suited to sugarcane, but Bird’s observations were

not completely accurate, as sugarcane had suffered from occasional, limited blights and

droughts. In 1868, for example, George Dole reported that at Pakikope on Kauaʻi, part of

the plantation he managed was “awfully blighted. The next year a drought was severe

enough that his mill could not grind all its cane, and Dole wrote in his diary that the land

was “all dry & brown; cane all yellow & withered & the ground all cracked open.”96

94

Mark Twain, “The High Chief of Sugardom,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 26, 1866.

95 Bird, Hawaiian Archipelago, 119-20.

96 Dole, George H. and Clara Rowell Dole diaries: typescript, June 13, 1868; March 1, 1869,

Huntington Library.

145

Sugarcane planting was still precarious, but less so than the cultivation of other crops.

Bird’s observation that Hawaiʻi was “specially adapted for sugar culture” had as much to

do with the ecological obstacles to the cultivation of other plants. It was the process of

biological invasion to an environment that had few indigenous insectivorous species that

limited a more diverse agricultural complex.

Twain and Bird both recognized that sugar had risen to the pinnacle of Hawaiʻi’s

economy and become the kingdom’s most important commodity. Yet Bird also noted that

sugarcane’s primacy in the Hawaiian environment placed Hawaiʻi’s economy in a

vulnerable position: “Hawaii thrills to the news of a cent up or a cent down in the

American market. All the interests of the kingdom are threatened by this one.”97

Indeed,

the Hawaiian economy had become dependent upon the sugar industry. In an increasingly

urgent effort to lobby the U. S. government for a reduction of the sugar tariff, on

December 18, 1874, King David Kalākua became the first monarch to address a joint

meeting of Congress. The reciprocity treaty was signed on January 30, 1875 and went

into effect the following year. By that point, sugar and molasses made up sixty-nine

percent of the value of Hawaiʻi’s exports.98

By the enactment of the reciprocity treaty, Hawaiian planters had been reaching

east toward an American market, west toward a cheap labor pool, and across the world

for expertise in developing the technologies of their industry. Yet ecological processes

reached across the oceans, too, in ways that people in Hawaiʻi could not always anticipate

97

Bird, Hawaiian Archipelago, 119.

98 Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii,539-540.

146

or control. Sugarcane and planters were the primary beneficiaries of ecological exchange

in the mid-nineteenth century, largely because other plants that might have competed

with sugarcane for a position in Hawaiʻi’s environment and economy were more

vulnerable to crop pests than cane was. Hawaiian sugarcane planters had survived

through years of high tariffs and expensive labor by seeking out foreign expertise and

labor. Yet advancing the science of sugar production in Hawaiʻi only took them so far.

Environmental factors assisted sugarcane in its rise to dominance over the Hawaiian

economy, which in turn helped planters establish the international market conditions they

needed to succeed.

147

CHAPTER 5: REVOLUTIONS, 1876-1893

What opes up beauty to the sky

From Rose Ranch down to Atooai

And makes Hawaii look—O my!

Sugary.

What whitens all the sea with sails

About these isles, and fills the mails—

Ay, what alone just now avails,

Sugar!

And can I ever cease to be

A zealous follower of thee,

Who art so very sweet to me?

Sugar!

Oh no, the thought I cannot bear,

For sugar making’s all my care,

Moreover thou dost pay my fare.

Sugar!

“Song of the Sugar Boiler,” Wailuku, Maui, April 19,

18641

In 1876, the enactment of the U.S.-Hawaiian Reciprocity Treaty allowing the

duty-free importation of Hawaiian sugars into the United States, long sought by many

Hawaiian sugarcane planters, the Hawaiian government, and allies in the United States,

caused explosive growth in Hawaiian sugar industry. As the historian of Hawaiʻi Ralph

Kuykendall wrote in his classic three-volume history of the kingdom, “the treaty affected

[the Hawaiian sugar industry] in a manner somewhat analogous to that of an uninhibited

pituitary gland in the human body.”2 With the American tariff lifted, the economic

calculus of producing sugar changed dramatically. Residents established twenty-eight

new plantations in 1877 and 1878. More tellingly, sugar came to dominate Hawaiʻi’s

1 “Song of the Sugar Boiler,” Planters’ Monthly 20, no. 2 (February 1901): 96.

2 Kuykendall, vol. 3, 46.

148

export economy. In 1875 and 1876, sugar and molasses made up about 60% of the value

of Hawaiʻi’s exports; in 1877 that number increased to 70%, the year after that it was

78%, then 84% in 1879 and 89% in 1880. After 1883, sugar and molasses never

accounted for less than 90% of the value of Hawaiian exports.3 Plantation profits

increased, too, but not nearly as dramatically or consistently. Planters reinvested their

profits into their operations by importing new machinery, thereby increasing efficiency

and productivity.4 In the early 1880s, planters averaged about twenty-five tons of

sugarcane per acre and about nine pounds of sugar per hundred pounds of cane; by the

turn of the twentieth century those numbers had risen to forty tons of cane per acre and

twelve pounds of sugar per hundred pounds of cane.5

This explosion of sugar production corresponded with an explosive political

climate. King David Kalākaua had been a champion of Reciprocity and a significant actor

in securing the treaty, yet the bonanza of reciprocity brought in capital that soon clashed

with Hawaiian political authority. Concern over the potential expiration of the reciprocity

treaty after its initial seven-year term caused planters to push the monarchy to cede the

area of the Pearl River Lagoon to the United States as an inducement to renew the trade

agreement, a concession that many Native Hawaiians saw as both an immoral betrayal of

the relationship between Hawaiʻi’s aliʻi, makaʻainana, and land, and a politically

3 Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, Table 21.1, pp. 539-540.

4 George B. McClellan, ed., A Hand Book on the Sugar Industry of the Hawaiian Islands;

Together with a List of the Plantations, Agents, Managers, etc. (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Company,

Ltd., 1899), 8.

5 J. N. S. Williams, “New Sugar Mill and Boiling House,” Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for

1905 (Honolulu: Thos. G. Thrum, 1904), 102.

149

dangerous threat to Hawaiian sovereignty. In 1887, dissatisfaction with King Kalākaua’s

policies led many haole to revolt and force the adoption of a new constitution—known as

the “bayonet constitution”—that took political power from the king and people and gave

it to those with land and wealth. And finally, in 1893, with the help of American forces

acting illegally, many resident haole deposed the Hawaiian queen, abolished the

kingdom, and pursued annexation to the U.S.

These were all discrete events, yet their temporal proximity and common set of

characters give them the feel of scenes in a play leading to the denouement of annexation

in 1898. In the aftermath of these political convulsions, many did see a clear linear

progression. Writing in 1899, George B. McClellan made a direct link from reciprocity to

annexation. According to McClellan, reciprocity “was a turning point in Hawaiian

history; for it was at once the decisive factor in making sugar the permanent staple of

Hawaiian commerce, and also the underlying cause which led to annexation. It was

perhaps too much to expect King Kalākaua to see that in enriching his kingdom through

his successful reciprocity treaty with the United States, he also brought in certain

American ideas and commercial forces which must inevitably overthrow the Monarchy

sooner or later.”6 More recently, the historian of Hawaiian politics Jonathan K. Osorio

has argued, “colonialism worked in Hawaii not through the naked seizure of lands and

governments but through a slow, insinuating invasion of people, ideas, and institutions.”7

6 George B. McClellan, ed., A Hand Book on the Sugar Industry of the Hawaiian Islands;

Together with a List of the Plantations, Agents, Managers, etc. (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Company,

Ltd., 1899), 8.

7 Jonathan Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to

1877 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2003), 3. Other scholars have similarly stressed continuity in

150

Reciprocity was indeed part of this slow Western invasion, a result of the turn to

international capitalist agriculture. Yet, though continuities of tension between Hawaiian

and haole cultures, economic models, and political practices certainly existed, during the

critical years between reciprocity and the 1893 revolution, unpredictable changes

associated with the expansion of the sugar industry also served to destabilize the

Hawaiian government.

Hawaiʻi’s political revolutions of the late nineteenth century did not follow each

other quite so neatly. The expansion of the sugarcane plantation system caused a

revolution in the relationship between planting interests, the natural environment, and the

government. Just as importantly, sugarcane planting itself changed dramatically in the

years following reciprocity, becoming increasingly industrialized and technologically

advanced. These revolutions were local phenomena, tied to established ideological

divisions as well as new conflicts. They were also connected to transnational phenomena:

technological developments in sugar production, the circulation of contract workers

primarily from Asia, and major fluctuations in the price of sugar. This combination of

local and transnational factors created an agricultural regime analogous to what the

historian David Igler called the “industrial Far West,” a system based on the “engineering

their attention to the rise of planter power leading to the Bayonet Constitution and the haole coup of 1893.

Such frameworks suggest inevitability and teleology. Merze Tate argues that cane planters in Hawaiʻi

enlisted mainland American allies in a long campaign for closer ties between Hawaiʻi and the U. S.,

culminating in annexation. Carol MacLennan argues that planters in Hawaiʻi successfully set Hawaiʻi on a

path toward transforming Hawaiʻi through Western industrial agriculture by the 1850s. Merze Tate,

Hawaii: Reciprocity or Annexation (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1968); Carol

MacLennan, Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi

Press, 2014), esp. 248.

151

of natural landscapes and mobilizing large labor forces.”8 As Igler argued, industrial

agriculture involved both vertical integration of production and horizontal consolidation

of natural resources. In Hawaiʻi, this depended upon a global industrial revolution in

sugar production.9 Rapid advances in the technology of sugar manufacture increased

planters’ need for capital and land, which in turn altered the place of sugar in Hawaiʻi’s

economy, ecology, and politics.

Reciprocity thus initiated several overlapping and interrelated revolutions in the

Hawaiian sugar industry that together created a rift between planters and the Hawaiian

government. Irrigation opened new lands to sugarcane, which not only increased

production but also divorced planting from Hawaiʻi’s earlier agricultural practices; rapid

immigration of plantation workers from China and Japan created a demographic

revolution that further separated planters from Hawaiian society and agricultural

tradition; and a revolution in planters’ use of agricultural science and technology gave

planters greater control over the Hawaiian environment and greater ability to maximize

their methods of resource extraction. Together, these revolutions pushed the sugar

8 Igler, Industrial Cowboys, 7; Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage.

9 Lassere, G., La Guadeloupe: Etude Géographique, vol. 1 (Bordeaux, 1961) quoted in B. W.

Higman, “The Sugar Revolution,” Economic History Review 53, no. 2 (2000): 215. My analysis is

particularly indebted to, G. Roger Knight, Sugar, Steam, and Steel: The Industrial Project in Colonial Java

(Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2014). As Higman notes, most scholars use the term “sugar

revolution” in analyses of the seventeenth-century West Indies. Higman sees this designation as a result of

the global effects of the rapid development sugarcane planting. The term “revolution,” in other words,

indicates an event with an impact beyond the sugarcane plantations, namely, an increase in the slave trade

and cross-Atlantic trade more generally, changing patterns of consumption, and increased European interest

in tropical colonialism. The “industrial sugar revolution” of the late nineteenth century, according to

Higman’s review of the scholarship, is usually excluded from the more rigid definition of the sugar

revolution. Knight sees an industrial revolution in sugar that circulated the globe between the French

Revolution and First World War, which fundamentally altered the process of sugar production as well as

the major sources of sugar. Historians of Hawaiʻi and its sugar industry have done little to connect it to the

broader industrial sugar revolution.

152

industry to an unprecedented position in Hawaiʻi. They gave planters greater cause to

organize as a political bloc. Planters did not set out to foment the Bayonet crisis of 1887

or the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, but their collective pursuit of industrialized

planting, with its implications for the natural environment, led to a collision with the

monarchy and gave insurgents--some who were planters and some who had looser ties to

the sugar industry--opportunity to start the revolution that ended Hawaiian sovereignty.

Irrigation

One of the first and most crucial changes to the sugarcane plantation system was

the advent of more extensive irrigation works. This was a departure from past modes of

agriculture that fundamentally changed the relationship between planters and the land.

While some irrigation projects dated to the mid-nineteenth century, sugarcane plantations

were primarily on lands with ready access to water through rain and streams. Water

supply, however, was hardly regular. Both drought and flooding were common

occurrences on many sugarcane lands. Planters’ main objective was not necessarily

increasing their supply of water, but regulating it so that their crops and mill had an

adequate supply at all times. In his diary, George Dole, a plantation manager on Kauaʻi,

alternated between comments on a paucity and an overabundance of rain, either of which

could ruin sugar production.10

Likewise, Princeville Plantation, at Hanalei, Kauaʻi

10

See Dole, George H. and Clara Rowell Dole diaries: typescript, September 5, 1870; November

23, 1871; September 17, 1880; and August 14, 1881, Dole Family Papers, The Huntington Library, San

Marino, California for a sample of Dole’s comments on weather and precipitation.

153

suffered severe floods in May 1877; Paauhau Plantation suffered alternately from drought

and floods.11

Before reciprocity, and continuing for a time after the treaty in well-watered

places, sugarcane irrigation often fit into the established Hawaiian agricultural regime by

adapting native agricultural works. Planters encroached on Hawaiʻi’s most productive

taro lands, lands that had been in regular use by Native Hawaiian farmers. This often led

to conflict between planters and Hawaiian farmers, but it also contributed to a sense of

positioning sugarcane planting within the tradition of Hawaiian agriculture. In 1877,

George Dole, for example, made a note in his diary that he took advantage of an “old

auwai [irrigation channel]” for his plantation.12

His plantation supplanted, or maybe in

his view succeeded, the agriculture for which the auwai was built, but it did not

reengineer the land or transform the plantation’s agricultural environment. Dole was not

conquering a land he saw as empty or recasting the role of water and agriculture in

Hawaiʻi, only putting working within an existing agricultural framework to put natural

resources to what he thought was a better use. Punctuating this idea of stewardship and

succession, Dole took the eight-foot-tall idol that the original auwai’s builders had placed

at the site, and moved it to his family dining room, where it stood for several years.13

11

Rhoda E. A. Hackler, “Princeville Plantation Papers,” Hawaiian Journal of History 16 (1982):

65-85; Collection Concerning the Sugar Industry Made by Dan Gutleben, Dan Gutleben Papers, Bancroft

Library, University of California, Berkeley; Diary of a Sugar Plantation [Paahau, Hawaii] 1880-1885, MS

633.61 D54, Hawaiian Historical Society.

12 Dole, George H., Diary, TS, September 29, 1877, Huntington Library HM76334.

13 Ibid.

154

The financial catalyst of reciprocity brought new irrigation projects orders of

magnitude greater than those previously attempted. These projects, and others that

followed, changed planters’ relationship to the land and Hawaiʻi’s agricultural past. The

first of these was the Haiku Ditch, an ambitious 1876 undertaking of the fledgling

plantation company Alexander & Baldwin. Founded in 1872 by Samuel Alexander and

Henry Baldwin, both sons of ABCFM missionaries, Alexander & Baldwin was a

relatively small venture on Maui. The Haiku Ditch, which brought water to Maui’s dry

central plain, delivered approximately forty million gallons of water per day through

seventeen miles of rough terrain, and cost about eighty thousand dollars to construct.

While Dole appropriated an auwai and its idol, Alexander & Baldwin and the

Haiku Ditch conquered an unruly frontier. The construction of the Haiku Ditch

demonstrated planters’ bravado and sense of superiority as well as their inexperience. In

March 1876, seven months before beginning work on the Haiku Ditch, Henry P. Baldwin

lost his right arm in a mill accident when he tried to show his engineer that he thought the

mill’s cane rollers were uneven. Despite losing his arm, Baldwin remained an active

plantation manager and a leader in the ditch project. During the construction of the ditch,

when workers refused to descend the face of a cliff in order to connect irrigation pipe

across a gorge, Baldwin is said to have led the work himself, rappelling down the cliff

with only one arm and shaming his workers into following him. Baldwin repeated this act

every day, until the work was done.14

This is a familiar trope for nineteenth-century

14

Arthur D. Baldwin, A Memoir of Henry Perrine Baldwin, 1841-1911 (Cleveland: Arthur D.

Baldwin, 1915), 32-41. This story became a frequently repeated myth. See Kamehameha, “Home Sweet

Home,” Washington D. C. Evening Star, 26 September 1896; Vandercook, King Cane; Sugar in Hawaii,

19; Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, Sugar in Hawaii: The Story of Sugar Plantations, their History,

155

American history: the taming or winning of the West by white men.15

Americans in

Hawaiʻi often shared this discourse, celebrating the haole “builders” of Hawaiʻi. If Dole

was taking ownership of an established agricultural tradition, Baldwin was building

something new.

Kānaka Maoli-Haole Cooperation

Though Dole and Baldwin displayed a sense of cultural superiority among haole,

theirs was not the only ethnic group involved in sugarcane planting. In the early

Reciprocity era, sugarcane planting continued to be an area of cooperation between haole

and Hawaiians, especially Hawaiian aliʻi.16

Several sugar ventures in the years just after

Reciprocity involved Native Hawaiians, both exclusively and in partnership with haole.

In 1877 King Kalākaua established the Hui Kawaihau, an organization of court retainers,

to settle in Kapaʻa, Kauaʻi and plant sugarcane. Kalākaua partnered with James Makee, a

haole former sea captain who had a plantation Maui, to build a mill and grind the Hui’s

cane.17

On windward Oʻahu, John A. Cummins, an aliʻi nui whose lineage traced through

his mother to the Kamehameha dynasty, established the Waimanalo Sugar Company,

their Methods of Operations, and their Place in the Economy of Hawaii (Honolulu: Hawaiian Sugar

Planters’ Association, 1949), 19; Dorrance and Morgan, Sugar Islands, 67.

15 For an overview on this trope, see Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A

New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

16 Historians have often failed to acknowledge Hawaiians’ involvement in the sugar industry,

focusing instead on the haole majority of sugar interests or the workers who migrated to the islands.

17 Charles S. Dole, “The Hui Kawaihau,” Papers of the Hawaiian Historical Society 16 (October

1929), 8-15. Some seem to have called the organization “Hui Kawaihai;” Dorrance and Morgan, Sugar

Islands, 25.

156

which in the early years of reciprocity was one of the most valuable plantations with a

majority Kānaka Maoli ownership.18

Cummins was closely allied with the monarchy and

on several occasions entertained members of the royal family at his plantation. A mele

(traditional Hawaiian song) from the 1880s even recorded a visit of Queen Kapiʻolani,

“And at Rose Mount [Cummins’s plantation] we view the beauty/of the finest sugar

mills./Now the grinders flater not at their grinding,/and the machine runs always at even

speed./When the steam rises, boiling-time ends./All sweetness is concentrated there.”19

In

1878, T. Akanaliilii, a Native Hawaiian, formed the Huelo Plantation Company on one

thousand two hundred and fifty acres that he owned and another ten thousand five

hundred acres rented from the government in northeast Maui.20

Hawaiian elites were not the only ones working in sugarcane; commoners joined

the industry, too. Hawaiian residents of Kohala, Hawaiʻi worked a plantation established

by the ABCFM missionary Elias Bond, and in 1877, C. F. Hart, Kohala’s haole Circuit

Judge, erected a sugar mill in North Kohala so that he could partner with local Hawaiian

cane cultivators. A royal commission on the development of Hawaiʻi’s resources noted

that the Hawaiian residents of Kohala, as well as others in the Hamakua and Hilo

18

Royal D. Mead, “A History of the Progress of the Sugar Industry of Hawaii since the

Reciprocity Treaty of 1876,” Honolulu Evening Bulletin Industrial Edition, 25 March 1909, 11.

“Ownership of Hawaiian Sugar Plantations,” Planters’ Monthly 2, no. 8 (November 1883), 170-171.

19 Mary Kawena Pukui and Alfons L. Korn, trans., and eds., The Echo of Our Song: Chants &

Poems of the Hawaiins (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press), 164.

20 George Bowswer, “An Account of the Sugar Plantations and the Principal Stock Ranches on the

Hawaiian Islands,” The Hawaiian Kingdom Statistical and Commercial Directory and Tourists’ Guide,

1880-1881 (Honolulu: George Bowser & Co., Publishers, 1880), 428-29; “Statistical Directory of the

Island of Maui,” The Hawaiian Kingdom Statistical and Commercial Directory and Tourists’ Guide, 1880-

1881 (Honolulu: George Bowser & Co., Publishers, 1880), 326.

157

districts, “show a commendable zeal to cultivate on their own account,” and should be

assisted by government-funded infrastructure development.21

Such involvement of

Hawaiians in the sugar industry, though only a minority in the community of island

sugarcane planters, indicates the shared goals that the cane planting could have achieved.

Hawaiians and haole saw planting as a path to both personal and national wealth that cut

across ethnic lines.

Cooperation between Hawaiians and haole did not last long into the Reciprocity

era, however. Reciprocity pushed Hawaiʻi further into an industrial sugar revolution that,

since the mid-nineteenth century, had been changing the sugar-producing world through

the introduction of new, dramatically more effective technologies to a process that had

changed only slightly over past centuries. Hawaiʻi had previously been part of the

industrial sugar revolution, most notably with the invention of the centrifugal dryer,

developed in Hawaiʻi by David Weston in the 1850s, which dried crystallized sugar and

separated the sugar from molasses in a matter of seconds rather than the weeks required

by the previous method, was one such invention.22

Crucial though the centrifugal was, it

did not increase mill capacity, but instead made the final stage of sugar production more

efficient. Another revolutionary invention for the sugar industry was the multiple effect

evaporator: a series of closed chambers that took advantage of the latent heat from

another part of the sugar boiling process to remove water from cane juice. The “Multiple

21

Royal Commission on the Development of the Resources of the Kingdom, Report of the Royal

Commission on the Development of the Resources of the Kingdom: Island of Hawaii (Honolulu, 1877), 2,

11.

22 See Ch. 4.

158

Effect” became an important piece of technology for sugar mills in the late 1860s that

drastically reduced fuel costs and labor requirements in sugar production.23

Hawaiian

planters invested their newfound gains under Reciprocity into new technologies like the

multiple effect, bringing their plantations and mills in line with some of the world’s best

practices in sugar production.24

Investment in new technologies demanded easy access to capital, and none had

better access to capital than a recent entrant into Hawaiʻi’s sugar industry: Claus

Spreckels. Spreckels was a German American who had settled in San Francisco and

established himself as a major figure in the American sugar trade by the mid-1860s. At

first he lobbied against the reciprocity treaty because he feared cheap Hawaiian sugar

would hurt his business interests, but once he accepted its passage, he determined to take

advantage of it. To that end, Spreckels arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1876, on the same boat that

brought news of the treaty’s passage, and began to build a sugar-producing business

empire that for two decades controlled much of Hawaiʻi’s sugar industry. Shortly after

his arrival, Spreckels sought advice on irrigation and sugarcane planting from Alexander

& Baldwin. In 1878, confident that large-scale planting could be made profitable,

Spreckels leased twenty-four thousand acres of dry crown lands in central Maui.

Spreckels needed water rights to irrigate this land, but the Royal Cabinet opposed such a

massive allocation of water to one person. Spreckels extended a forty-thousand dollar

loan and a ten-thousand dollar “gift” to King Kalākaua, who dismissed his Cabinet and

23

Knight, Sugar, Steam, and Steel, 17-19.

24 “The Hawaiian Islands: Their Situation, Discovery, Progress, Attractions, Etc.,” Hawaiian

Almanac and Annual for 1888 (Honolulu: Press Publishing Company, 1887), 65.

159

replaced it with another that would grant Spreckels rights to the necessary Maui

watershed.25

Spreckels brought in an engineer from California to build another ditch on

Maui, dwarfing even the Haiku Ditch. Spreckels’s ditch cost five hundred thousand

dollars and moved sixty thousand gallons per day across thirty miles.26

The scale of the Spreckels Ditch was indeed revolutionary in Hawaiʻi. It opened

up lands to intensive agriculture that previously been far too dry to be productive. People

in Hawaiʻi recognized Spreckels’s project as a momentous change; they compared it to

bringing water and life to wastelands and deserts. Henry M. Whitney, a publisher who

was closely involved in the sugar industry, later recalled, “On the sandy isthmus

connecting East and West Maui, and on a plain which was formerly an arid desert, where

neither a tree and scarcely a blade of grass could formerly be found, can now be seen

green pastures, beautiful flower gardens, avenues of trees and twelve thousand acres of

growing sugar cane, and a sugar mill capable of manufacturing 100 to 110 tons of sugar

per day.”27

Spreckels, with his extensive resources and the political power that he

leveraged from his wealth, showed other planters what was possible, and what they

would have to do if they wanted to be competitive producing sugar.

25

Jacob Adler, “The Maui Land Deal: A Chapter in Claus Spreckels’ Hawaiian Career,”

Agricultural History 39, no. 3 (July 1965): 155-163.

26 Jacob Adler, Claus Spreckels: The Sugar King in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii

Press, 1966).

27 H. M. Whitney, Tourists’ Guide through the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette

Co., 1890), 84. Quoted in Adler, Claus Spreckels, 48. In the 1880s and 90s, Whitney was the longtime

editor of the Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly, the principal organ of the Hawaiian sugar industry.

160

The extensive engineering of Spreckels’s ditch remained the largest irrigation

project on the islands for over a decade, and Spreckels’s lack of roots in the islands, his

great wealth, and the influence he held over the government made him an outsider among

sugarcane planters. But planters could not ignore the advances he brought to the sugar

industry, and the general adoption of new technologies was rapid. The missionary Daniel

Dole, writing to his son George in February 1878 from Wailuku, Maui, “found that many

changes had been made since I was here, 3 years ago. They now use steam power, & burn

coal; & they have a vacuum pan...They expect to make 2000 tons of sugar next year, & to

have new machinery, at least, in part; & the mill, i.e. the rollers, is to be new. It w[oul]d

seem that the machinery for every new plantation is an improvement on what went

before.”28

In 1878, W. Renny Watson, junior partner of the Glasgow firm Mirlees, Tate

& Watson, a world leader in the construction of sugar mill machinery, visited Hawaiʻi

and secured several orders.29

In 1879 the first railroad to be built in the Hawaiian

archipelago was built on Maui, and connected seven plantations to the shipping port at

Kahului. In 1881 construction began on another railroad line through the Kohala sugar

district of Hawaiʻi Island.30

The first steam plow on the islands was used at Hamakua in

1881, and steam plows soon came into wider use on other plantations.31

28

Daniel Dole to George Dole, Wailuku, Maui, February 8, 1878, Daniel Dole Letters, MS61A5,

Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

29 Thos. G. Thrum, “The Hawaiian Islands as a Sugar-Producing Region,” Hawaiian Almanac and

Annual for 1879, 27-28.

30 “Hawaiian Railroads” 43.

31 Sugar in Hawaiʻi; C. Allan Jones and Robert V. Osgood, From King Cane to the Last Sugar

Mill: Agricultural Technology and the Making of Hawaiʻi’s Premier Crop (Honolulu: University of

Hawaiʻi Press, 2015), 46.

161

Many saw the wave of expansion that the sugar industry experienced as an

unequivocally positive development for all of Hawaiʻi. In 1879, at the laying of the

cornerstone for the new royal palace in Honolulu, John Makini Kapena, an aliʻi who held

many high-ranking government positions over the course of his career, marveled at the

recent history of Hawaiʻi and its economic and agricultural development. Kapena asked,

“Fifty years ago, if a prophet had arisen who should have foretold that the

wilderness…should be cultivated; that the rushing streams…that then ran to waste in the

ocean, should be diverted to fertilize the broad plains…that the bulrushes of the swamps

of Ewa and Waikiki should be swept away by the agriculture of a foreign race…what

should we have thought of such a prophet?” Kapena went on to argue how the

government should continue to support its people: “In these last years we have received a

generous national concession [reciprocity], which must encourage and consolidate our

agricultural interests, giving new life to the land.”32

Reciprocity allowed for the

expansion of sugar onto the arid plains of central Maui and Oʻahu, just as it allowed for

the expansion of the monarchy into a new palace more befitting its stature. Kapena saw

sugarcane planting as a collective good, reviving the land, people, and nation.

Not everyone thought the interests of the planters and those of the government to

be as intertwined as Kapena did. For some, a rift between planters and the government

began almost as soon as Reciprocity went into effect. The tension between planters and

government can be reduced to a basic question: was it the purpose of the plantation

system to enrich the nation, or was it the purpose of the nation to enrich the plantation

32

“Hawaiian National Reminiscences,” Hawaiian Annual for 1906 (1905), 79-80. On Kapena’s

life and career, see “John Makini Kapena,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser, October 24, 1887.

162

system? For some planters, the government was not committed enough to plantation

capitalism. In March 1876, before Hawaiʻi had even begun to feel the benefits of

Reciprocity, George Dole complained in his diary, “Out of the $50,000 app[ropriation]

for Immigration, $2700 was spent on the King’s ball.”33

The haole missionary

community, with its values of public industry and thrift, had often been critical of King

Kalākaua’s and other Hawaiians’ spending habits. Taking money from an immigration

appropriation to spend on a ball was particularly unpleasant for planters such as Dole.

Planters had complained of labor shortages since the 1850s, though some of these

complaints reflected planters’ desire for cheaper labor rather than an actual shortage of

workers. With the drastic expansion of cane acreage that followed Reciprocity, the need

for plantation workers became more pressing than ever. The government supported the

introduction of workers from Asia—indeed, the initial appropriation of $50,000 to

promote immigration demonstrates a firm commitment to bringing in workers for

Hawaiʻi’s plantations. But the diversion of funds from immigration to ceremonial display

for the monarchy was nonetheless something planters could perceive as an attack against

their interests, an unjust abuse of power by a capricious ruler, and as a moral shortcoming

with ethnic undertones of a preference for vanity, leisure, and corruption instead of

industriousness.

George Dole, at least, remained unhappy with the government. In 1880, he and

other haole planters sent a memorial to the King, with 400 signatures, asking for the

discharge of the Royal Cabinet Kalākaua had appointed to help Spreckels gain his Maui

33

Dole, George H. and Clara Rowell Dole Diary: typescript, March 18, 1876, Huntington Library.

163

water rights.34

In 1882, a change in the Cabinet had taken place, but it was not to

planters’ liking. The new cabinet was composed of people who were close with

Spreckels, and led by Walter Murray Gibson, a charismatic crony of the King’s, who

campaigned for office on the slogan “Hawaiʻi for Hawaiians.” In May, after learning of

the cabinet change, Dole recorded in his diary, “the general sentiment seems to be that of

apathetic disgust.”35

By October, sugar interests had formed the Planters’ Labor and

Supply Company (PLSC) and held their first convention, in Honolulu, to better organize

and promote their interests. Dole did not travel to Honolulu for the convention, but he

nonetheless was interested enough to record that “a number of planters” went to the

meeting.36

As the name of the company suggests, one of their primary concerns was

acquiring and controlling labor. Yet another of their concerns was their relationship with

and treatment from the government. The first issue of the PLSC’s Planters’ Monthly

argued, “We believe that no class of men in the Kingdom pay their taxes more fairly and

promptly than the Planters; and that they are willing to respond to all fair taxation, but

that they have cause for complaint of the manner in which growing crops are assessed.”37

With sugar accounting for the majority of taxable revenue in the kingdom, planters saw it

as their right to demand a government that worked for them.

34

Dole, George H. and Clara Rowell Dole Diary: typescript, September 10, 1880, Huntington

Library.

35 Dole, George H. and Clara Rowell Dole Diary: typescript, May 23, 1882, Huntington Library.

36 Dole, George H. and Clara Rowell Dole Diary: typescript, October 13, 1882, Huntington

Library. Fifty-five men attended the first meeting, according to published meeting minutes, “The Planters’

Convention,” Planters’ Monthly 1, no. 1, (April 1882), 5.

37 Planters’ Monthly 1, no. 1 (April 1882), 2.

164

Meanwhile, Hawaiians found themselves increasingly removed from sugarcane

planting. By far, most Hawaiians were small farmers, growing taro, vegetables, and

sometimes rice on farms less than ten acres in size, on land that they owned.38

The few

Native Hawaiian efforts to become planters were short lived. The Hui Kawaihau

foundered in 1880 after James Makee died and his son-in-law, Z. S. Spalding took over.

Spalding “lacked the kindly ‘Aloha’ for the hui members which Captain Makee had for

them,” according to George Dole’s son Charles.39

Faced with antagonism from Spalding,

constrictions on their available capital, and a fire that destroyed about a third of their

cane, the Hui’s fields fell into dilapidation. In 1881, George Dole, who managed the

Makee Plantation, wrote in his diary, “We began cutting on the Hui ratoons. It is

wretched stuff & will hardly pay for the grinding. Never had any cultivation or watering

worth mentioning and besides is badly eaten by rats and borers.”40

That was the last of

the Hui’s crop. They sold out to Spalding and most members returned to careers in the

government.

The monarchy more easily profited indirectly from sugarcane planting. It rented

out vast tracts of crown land to planters: forty-seven thousand acres rented to the Naalehu

Plantation; forty thousand acres to Valdemar Knudsen, a Kauaʻi cane planter originally

38

“A Statistical Directory of the Hawaiian Kingdom,” The Hawaiian Kingdom Statistical and

Commercial Directory and Tourists’ Guide, 1880-1881 (Honolulu: George Bowser & Co., Publishers,

1880), 291-351.

39 Charles S. Dole “The Hui Kawaihau,” 13-14.

40 Dole, George H. and Clara Rowell Diary: typescript, May 18, 1881. HM76346 Huntington

Library.

165

from Norway; twenty thousand acres to Hilea Plantation.41

These leases were often given

for thirty years at rates below their market value, but they still represented a significant

revenue stream for the government and gave it an interest in the success of the sugar

industry. The Kalākaua regime also profited from sugar indirectly, through its ties to

Claus Spreckels. As Spreckels built a sugar empire in Hawaiʻi, he helped to personally

finance the government. Direct involvement in cane plantations, however, had declined.

By 1883, Hawaiians had a financial interest in twelve out of the islands’ seventy-three

plantations and mills, but none was solely Hawaiian-owned. The value of Hawaiian

ownership in cane plantations was $641,240, out of a total industry value of

$15,886,800.42

Notable Hawaiians were becoming more critical of haole planters for their role in

making it increasingly difficult to borrow capital. Edward Kamakau Lilikalani, a

Representative to the Hawaiian Legislature and one of the members of King Kalākaua’s

Hui Kawaihau that took up cane planting on Kauaʻi in 1877, argued in a published

manifesto that the inability to borrow capital prevented the Hui from building its own

mill and instead forced it to operate “hidden beneath the foreigners who owned the mill.”

The benefits of Reciprocity, argued Lilikalani, had fallen almost exclusively to the haole

who had the means to take advantage of the treaty. He wrote, “the once barren plains are

green with cane, the old taro patches that had been lying waste for want of hands to plant

41

A Statistical Directory of the Hawaiian Kingdom,” The Hawaiian Kingdom Statistical and

Commercial Directory and Tourists’ Guide, 1880-1881 (Honolulu: George Bowser & Co., Publishers,

1880), 291-351.

42 “Ownership of Hawaiian Sugar Plantations,” Planters’ Monthly 2, no. 8 (November 1883), 170-

171.

166

them are covered with rice crops; the pastures where roamed lean scraggy cattle are now

occupied by new and large breeds, imported breeds of horses, large mules and fine

merino sheep; and all these are signs of the wealth of the land; but all these good things

are on the side of the foreigners only; and not for the Hawaiians.”43

William G. Irwin, a

British resident of Hawaiʻi and agent for Claus Spreckels’s plantation corroborated

Lilikalani’s complaint that access to capital restricted entry into planting, observing that

“Everything on the islands is done on credit. Notes are a great commodity there.”44

Lilikalani and others argued that the only bank in Hawaiʻi, established by Charles Reed

Bishop, gave loans at excessively high interest rates, and the government’s ability to

bring more capital into the country was obstructed by haole members of the Legislature

who opposed any increase to the national debt.

The organization of the PLSC did not improve planters’ relationship with the

government. The two most urgent problems facing the PLSC were a shortage of labor

and work to renew the Reciprocity Treaty, which was approaching the end of its seven-

year term, and members of the company demonstrated little faith that the government

would help them.45

On the issue of labor, the editors of the Planters’ Monthly wrote, “we

do not wish to make any partizan statements, nor to indulge in any unnecessary criticism

43

Edward Kamakau Lilikalani, Move! Excel to the Highest! The Celebrated Lilikalani Manifesto

of the Election Campaign of February 1882: Translated by H. L. Sheldon (Honolulu: Thomas G. Thrum,

1882), 3

44 “Hawaiian Sugar,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser December 21, 1882, reprinted from San

Francisco Tribune.

45 The Reciprocity Treaty stipulated that after seven years, either party could give notice that it

would terminate the treaty in one year. On the PLSC’s priorities, see “Report of the Trustees of the

Planters’ Labor and Supply Company,” Planters’ Monthly 1, no. 8 (November 1882), 172.

167

upon the Government… It remains to be seen whether the Government can be depended

upon to do anything in the direction of assisting the planter in his efforts to obtain

laborers.”46

That was in July of 1882. Such efforts to avoid “partizan statements” soon

gave way, however, to more vituperative attacks. The Hawaiian government had scuttled

a plan to subsidize the immigration of Portuguese plantation workers and then refused to

give government credentials to a member of the PLSC to work with Japan to arrange for

plantation workers from that country. By September, the journal found that the failure of

the government to support laborer immigration “can only be accounted for upon the

theory of official incompetence or of hostility to the planting interest.”47

The Hawaiian government was more interested in subsidizing immigration that

would both supply more plantation workers and also help stanch the decline of the

Hawaiian population. Population decline among Native Hawaiians had been a cause for

concern since the early nineteenth century, and was tied to the rise of sugarcane planting

in the 1840s and 1850s.48

Sugarcane planters had initially argued that plantation labor

could help Native Hawaiians maintain their health through industry and temperance. As

the population continued to decline, however, the monarchy made efforts to encourage

the immigration of a “cognate race” of people who might intermarry with Hawaiians. At

first, sugarcane planters supported this plan by recruiting for their plantations Polynesians

who, it was hoped, would assimilate into the Hawaiian populace. In 1877, the Hawaiian

46

Planters’ Monthly 1, no. 4 (July 1882), 74.

47 “Labor,” Planters’ Monthly 1, no. 6 (September 1882), 113.

48 For responses to demographic collapse, see Archer, “Epidemics and Culture in Hawai‘i, 1778–

1865”; see also Chapter 3 here on population decline as a justification for planting.

168

government launched an immigration program from the Gilbert Islands (Tungaru), a

group of islands and atolls straddling the equator. Though the Gilberts are about 2,400

miles from Hawaiʻi—greater than the distance between Hawaiʻi and California—they are

one of Hawaiʻi’s closest Polynesian neighbors, and thus were one of the primary

candidates for supplying a “cognate race.” The Gilbert Islanders, however, were not

happy with the move to Hawaiʻi; ABCFM missionaries in the Gilberts were concerned

over their treatment on the sugarcane plantations; and planters were not happy with them

as workers or with the expense involved in their immigration.49

As efforts to bring in people who would both work the cane plantations and

integrate into the Hawaiian population produced unsatisfactory results, planters sought an

immigration policy that addressed their need for labor over Hawaiian concerns for a

cognate population. By 1883, planters had enough of any scheme that would attempt to

both repopulate Hawaiʻi and provide plantation labor. In April the PLSC chartered the

brigantine Hazard to recruit three hundred workers from the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), a

South Pacific archipelago over 3,500 miles distant from Hawaiʻi. The labor contracts the

PLSC offered stipulated that workers completing their contract would be returned to the

New Hebrides, and the PLSC explicitly instructed the Hazard’s Captain Tierney not to

recruit workers from islands closer to Hawaiʻi. The PLSC told the Captain, “From past

experience the Company are of the opinion that the brown or Polynesian races from

islands near the equator are unsuitable as out-door laborers in these Islands, you are

therefore...on no account to bring up any natives of the various groups lying between

49

Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom: 1874-1893, The Kalakaua Dynasty, 127-128.

169

these Islands and the New Hebrides.”50

The PLSC had no interest in repeating the failure

of the Gilbert Islands scheme. As long as they could get enough laborers to work on

cheap contracts, planters would be satisfied. Indeed, by early 1884 the PLSC even

abandoned its New Hebrides immigration program in favor of Asian and Portuguese

workers.51

The Native Hawaiian population was not their priority.

On the issue of reciprocity, sugarcane planters had similarly come to see the

government as not supportive—or even an obstacle to—their interests. When the PLSC

met in October of 1882, the Trustees recommended the PLSC send its own agent to

Washington to lobby for the Reciprocity Treaty’s extension. The PLSC wanted to have

an advocate who apparently would not be constrained to limit his work for reciprocity by

loyalty to the Hawaiian government. In all likelihood, this was a veiled reference to

negotiating for the cession of the Pearl River Lagoon on Oʻahu, which, with some

dredging, could become the most important naval harbor in the central Pacific. The idea

of ceding a protected area of coastline for a coaling station and naval harbor had

circulated in Hawaiʻi and the U. S. for years, and though planters were open to such an

arrangement if it secured reciprocity, Native Hawaiians were adamantly opposed to the

cession of any territory.52

As plantations themselves were consuming more Hawaiian

land, the thought of appropriating even more lands, not for agriculture but as a concession

50

“New Hebrides Immigration,” Planters’ Monthly 2, no. 2 (May 1883), 33-34.

51 Planters’ Monthly 2, no. 11 (February 1884), 303.

52 Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui, 248-49.

170

to a foreign nation, must have been particularly galling to those without the capital

necessary to join the sugar industry.

While planters were coming closer to positions that alienated Hawaiian land and

undermined Hawaiian sovereignty, King Kalākaua was far too assertive and authoritarian

for the taste of the planters. The Planters’ Monthly complained that the King was

stacking the ministry and legislature with cronies and buying legislative votes with

patronage. Noting that some prominent Native Hawaiians as well as “property owners”

were beginning to protest the King’s style of rule, the Planters’ Monthly argued, “There

is nothing of race antagonism connected with [criticism of the King]. So far from being

treasonable or seditious in their nature or in their object, such discussions prove that there

is a public spirit in the land, a spirit that will preserve Hawaiʻi from the dangers of

Egyptian darkness.”53

The PLSC sent a memorial to the King expressing dissatisfaction

with his ministers, and requesting he appoint cabinet members “in whom the moneyed

classes and other classes have confidence.” Walter Murray Gibson, the influential

Premier of the King’s Cabinet, who was often antagonistic to the sugar interests,

responded to the PLSC on behalf of the King, cordially acknowledged the “privilege of

any and all subjects of the Kingdom to discuss the conduct of public officers, and to

endeavor by constitutional means to bring about reformation of the public

administration” and then brushed them off.54

Whatever the PLSC hoped would come of

their memorial to the King, Gibson seemed to indicate that no change would be

53

Planters’ Monthly 1, no. 6 (September 1882), 115-116.

54 “Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Planters’ Labor and Supply Company,” Planters’

Monthly 1, no. 8 (November 1882), 169-170.

171

forthcoming. The PLSC’s Board of Trustees then took the matter even further, arguing,

“as the representatives of the greatest if not the only source of revenue the country has to

depend upon, [planters] must decide for themselves how far and how long they may be

satisfied to rest under an administration of affairs that is open to even a suspicion of bias

or favoritism.” Those “great and good friends of this little Island Kingdom,” the Trustees

continued, “who have done so much to raise it from the depths of barbarism and to place

it within the family of nations, will not now quietly and without rebuke look upon an

assumption of autocratical powers which would soon result in a retrogression to the level

from whence its people have been lifted.”55

By that point many Hawaiians held the opinion that planters’ interests were not

their own, and that, as the PLSC put it, “There is no question as to the unfavorable

disposition of a certain class among the native members of the Legislature, as well as

many Government officials, towards...the Sugar Planters of these Islands.”56

Kalākaua,

interested in cultivating an image of authority and power befitting both the Hawaiian

notion of a proper mōʻī (supreme ruler) and the international idea of a head of state,

organized a lavish coronation ceremony in 1883. Planters, who saw themselves as the

nation’s tax base and economic engine, denounced the coronation as a boondoggle.

George Dole grumbled in his diary that the coronation was a “farce.”57

The Planters’

55

“Report of the Trustees of the Planters’ Labor and Supply Company,” Planters’ Monthly 1, no.

8 (November 1882), 173.

56 “Planters and Politics,” Planters’ Monthly 3, no. 4 (July 1884), 435.

57 Dole, George H. and Clara Rowell Dole Diary: typescript, February 12, 1883, Huntington

Library.

172

Monthly complained that the coronation diverted much-needed funds from public health

and internal improvements, “directly damaging the property interests and welfare of the

country.” The journal concluded its report on the coronation with a threat: “Those who

are responsible have a weighty account to meet. There is a law of cost and compensation

which will be vindicated.”58

The relationship between planters and the government continued to deteriorate

through 1883, with increasingly bold threats printed in the Planters’ Monthly. One such

comment warned, “The planting interest of this country knows its strength, and when

forbearance ceases to be a virtue those in office or out of office who attempt to trifle with

public interests and constitutional rights will learn that there is a power in the land with

which it will not do to trifle.” Planters’ disgust with Kalākaua’s government also began to

take on more overt racial animus. The Monthly went on to argue, “The greatest safeguard

to the peace and prosperity of these Islands lies in its property interests, and in the body

of those interested in agricultural enterprises who are animated with the Anglo-Saxon

love for constitutional government.”59

Yet planters also sought to highlight their loyalty

to Hawaiʻi. Noting that planters were “dignified and law-abiding,” the Monthly’s editor

wrote, “Although it [the PLSC] is opposed to the present administration, it is the

strongest and best friend which the Hawaiian Government has.”60

58

“The Coronation,” Planters’ Monthly 1, no. 12 (March 1883), 307.

59 “The Planters and Politics,” Planters’ Monthly 2, no. 6 (September 1883), 121-22.

60 Planters’ Monthly 2, no. 11 (February 1884), 302.

173

Planter Organization and integration with Transnational Networks of Sugar

As Native Hawaiians found themselves increasingly shut out of the sugar

industry, haole planters were connecting with the wider world of sugar production. The

Planters’ Labor and Supply Company, in addition to its focus on renewing the

Reciprocity Treaty and promoting the immigration of contract laborers, also became an

important nexus for the advancement of the Hawaiian sugar industry. The PLSC made an

effort to learn from other centers of sugar production, and particularly took cues from the

Louisiana sugar industry. The PLSC itself was founded five years after the formation of

the Louisiana Sugar Planters’ Association. The LSPA was in its own way a response to

developments in Hawaiʻi. The enactment of the Reciprocity Treaty demonstrated to

Louisiana planters that they needed to organize if they hoped to maintain an advantage in

U. S. markets. The LSPA also concerned itself with the acquisition and control of labor in

the Reconstruction South. Like the LSPA in Louisiana, the PLSC in Hawaiʻi proved to be

a crucial mechanism for helping planters to improve their operations.61

Both cases

indicate a growing connection between planters in different plantation systems, as

knowledge and technology of the industrial sugar revolution circulated transnationally.

The PLSC maintained a strong focus on technological and scientific improvement

of sugar production, providing its members with access to foreign knowledge through the

pages of the Planters’ Monthly. The July 1882 issue, for example, ran articles on the

development of new techniques to insure the purity of milled sugar and reprinted a

61

John Alfred Heitmann, The Modernization of the Louisiana Sugar Industry, 1830-1910 (Baton

Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), Ch. 4.

174

lecture delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on new developments in

the manufacture of sugar. The Planters’ Monthly reminded readers that “Scientific

research is ever confering [sic] new benefits on humanity, its numberless discoveries

made practically available are day by day opening up new manufacturing interests,

introducing new systems of woking [sic] in all branches of trade, or devising new and

ingenious apparatus for determining the actual commercial values on the different

commodities for sale in the world’s markets.”62

The Hawaiian plantation system was no passive receptacle for metropolitan ideas

and technologies. Rather, Hawaiian planters continued their tradition of both adopting

new technologies and developing their own. Whenever they could, planters imported the

latest technologies. By 1883, the Planter’s Monthly was reporting on the triple and

double effect boilers that were the industry standard throughout the world and that

several plantations were installing, as well as the Jarvis furnace, which was also a popular

new technology on Cuban plantations. Planters, however, were also innovating on their

own, with new steamers, evaporators, presses, and furnaces uniquely suited to Hawaiian

conditions, and the Honolulu Iron Works helped planters develop their own technology

by building rollers and boilers.63

Claus Spreckels, though he was an outsider in the planting community, spurred

innovation and investment in new technologies. In 1883, Spreckels had his plantation

62

Planters’ Monthly, July 1882.

63 Planters’ Monthly 2, no. 7 (October 1883), 15-147; 163. For some examples of local inventions,

see, “Cane Trash as Fuel,” Planters’ Monthly 2, no. 10 (January 1884), 292; “Coleman’s Patent Cane

Planter,” Planters’ Monthly 3, no. 10 (January 1885): 629-30.

175

manager devote a five-hundred-acre field to experiments with different fertilizers. In the

mill, Spreckels had installed a furnace designed to burn cane trash with greater efficiency

than older models, and also added a second set of rollers to his cane-crushing array. Not

only did the second set of rollers extract more juice from the sugar cane, but by

separating more juice from the cane stalks, it also made the trash easier to burn as fuel.

Spreckels shared the fertilizer experiment’s results and the furnace’s design with the

PLSC, allowing the planter community at large to benefit from his investment in research

and technological development.64

In 1884, Spreckels hired an agricultural chemist to

study his plantation’s soils and manage the application of fertilizers. This was something

all the other planters working in concert could not even accomplish. The PLSC tried to

recruit an agricultural chemist but could not afford to do so. Spreckels’s chemist, though,

was willing to circulate the results of his experiments to other planters.65

The Costs of Entering the Global Sugar Market

The disadvantages of greater integration into the world of sugar production

became suddenly apparent to Hawaiian planters in 1884, when a global depression of

sugar prices shook the Hawaiian economy and further damaged the relationship between

planters and the government. Planters’ investments in new mill technologies and lands

and their commitment to labor contracts left them poorly prepared for a contraction in the

market for sugar. Several planters without access to adequate capital, such as the aliʻi

64

“Report of the Committee on Fertilizers and Seed Cane,” Planters’ Monthly 2, no. 8 (November

1883), 205; “Report of Committee on Machinery,” Planters’ Monthly 2, no. 8 (November 1883), 250.

65 “Secretary’s Annual Report,” Planters’ Monthly 3, no. 8 (November 1884), 543.

176

John Cummins, sold out to larger planters and the increasingly powerful sugar factors—

the Honolulu firms that provided planters with operating capital and materials, and sold

planters’ sugar to U.S. refiners.66

With sugar prices at unprecedented lows, Thrum’s

Almanac complained that the government’s opposition to “many reasonable desires of the

moneyed interests of the country...widened the breach between the ruled and the

rulers.”67

Thrum complained of “reckless expenditures of the government,” while the

depression of sugar prices forced plantations to retrench and made the need for cheap

labor with government subsidies for immigration all the more pressing.

With costs already sunk in plantation operations, the 1884 depression impelled

further technological innovation so that planters could achieve greater efficiency. Mills

added equipment to “macerate,” or add warm water to sugarcane after the cane ran

through the rollers, and then crush it again. This helped extract an additional fifteen to

twenty-three percent of the cane’s sucrose, and made the cane trash easier to burn--

adding savings in fuel costs to an increased yield in sugar. The first mill equipped with

maceration technology was at Waiākea, Hawaiʻi, where the owners of the Honolulu Iron

66

Pukui and Korn, trans., and eds., The Echo of Our Song, 158; Dorrance and Morgan, Sugar

Islands, 43. There is at least some question over when John A. Cummins sold out. In a history of the

islands’ sugar industry, the Evening Bulletin reported that Cummins was the principal owner until 1893.

Royal D. Mead, “A History of the Progress of the Sugar Industry of Hawaii since the Reciprocity Treaty of

1876,” Honolulu Evening Bulletin Industrial Edition, 25 March 1909, 11. Cummins was listed as the

plantation’s president, proprietor, and manager in 1888, and remained manager of the plantation until at

least 1889. J.C. Lane, ed., Hawaiian Directory and Hand Book of the Kingdom of Hawaii (San Francisco:

McKenney Directory Co., 1888) 203, 356; “Directory of Officers Employed on Sugar Plantations in These

Islands,” Planters’ Monthly 8, no. 3 (March 1889), 125.

67 “Retrospect for 1884,” Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1885, 53.

177

Works built a state-of-the-art mill.68

The cost savings and greater efficiency of

maceration gave planters cause to invest in updated equipment even under the trying

conditions the industry faced, and in 1885, according to Thrum’s Almanac, planters

“have kept the Honolulu Iron Works employed to its full capacity for months past,

requiring a double gang for day and night shifts in order to complete contracts in time.”69

Chinese Immigration and Demographic Change

The depression of sugar prices in 1884 also pushed planters to renew their call for

government support for the introduction of foreign workers. Planters considered the costs

of bringing in Portuguese and Japanese workers too high, and requested that the

government lift its ban on Chinese immigration and admit two thousand Chinese

immigrants to labor on the cane plantations. The monarchy, concerned with the Native

Hawaiian population, and facing a significant anti-Chinese movement, rebuffed planters’

requests. Planters, however, often managed to circumvent the law and bring in new

Chinese workers.70

68

“Waiakea Maceration Mill,” Planters’ Monthly 3, no. 12 (March 1885), 682-83. See also

Dorrance and Morgan, Sugar Islands, 105 for the connection between Waiakea Mill Company and the

Honolulu Iron Works.

69 “Retrospect for the Year of 1885,” Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1886, (Honolulu: Press

Publishing Co, 1886), 63-64. The following year’s Almanac further noted investment in updated and

improved machinery, “Retrospect for the Year 1886,” Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1887 (Honolulu:

Press Publishing Company, 1886), 84.

70 “Retrospect of the Year 1884,” Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1885, (Honolulu: Thos. G.

Thrum, 1885), 54. “Retrospect of the Year 1885,” Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1886, (Honolulu:

Press Publishing Co, 1886), 62. Walter M. Gibson letter to Messrs. Jona. Austin, John M. Horner, A. Unna

and T. H. Davies, Oct. 22, 1884, reprinted in Planters’ Monthly 3, no. 8 (November 1884): 538.

178

The influx of Asian coolie labor led to further divisions between planters and the

government over the issue of labor control and sobriety. In 1886, the government

approved licenses for the sale and use of opium. Many planters remained committed to

the ABCFM support of temperance; many more were committed to the idea that sobriety

was an important characteristic to instill in their plantation workforce. The ban against

distilling rum had been lifted in 1874, but planters still supported legislation outlawing

the sale of alcohol to Chinese and Polynesians. 71

The licensing of opium caused similar

concern among planters for keeping control of their workers. Opium use was common on

plantations.72

The monarchy’s effort to license and profit from opium sales directly

challenged planters’ power to maximize labor from their workers.

Chinese contract labor, though the cheapest and easiest option for planters, had

become another wedge between the planter and Hawaiian communities. With Chinese

immigration came the introduction of foreign pathogens, which further alienated

Hawaiians from the haole planter community. In the years following the beginning of

Chinese contract labor in the islands, Hansen’s disease (leprosy) spread through Hawaiʻi

and caused particular terror. Hawaiians called it maʻi pākē: “Chinese disease.” Although

no incontrovertible evidence demonstrates that Chinese immigrants brought Hansen’s

disease to Hawaiʻi, the first documented case was from 1860, after the importation of

Chinese workers had already begun, and Hansen’s disease was common in China. More

important than the precise route the disease took to Hawaiʻi are the facts that increased

71

“Committee on Legislation Report,” Planters’ Monthly 1, no. 1 (April 1882), 24.

72 Glick, Sojourners and Settlers, 38.

179

immigration changed Hawaiʻi’s disease environment and Hawaiians associated Hansen’s

disease with Chinese immigrants. Moreover, the divergent responses of planters and the

government to this health crisis indicated a deeper conflict over control of the

environment and an understanding of the costs and consequences of environmental

change in the service of the plantation system.

Response to the initial outbreak of leprosy focused on preventing the disease from

spreading. In 1865, official estimates claimed over two hundred and fifty people were

infected and the Hawaiian Legislature established an act to quarantine the afflicted at the

rugged and remote Kalaupapa peninsula on the island of Molokaʻi. Admissions to the

quarantine settlement varied annually from a low of twenty-seven in 1870 to a high of

four hundred seventy-seven in 1873. By the advent of reciprocity a total of one thousand

five hundred and nine people had been admitted to the settlement, of whom seven

hundred and two were still living.73

Life at Kalaupapa was grim, but the quarantine laws

were relatively lenient, and absolute segregation was hardly enforced.

The government’s approach toward leprosy, like much else after Reciprocity,

became politicized across a haole/Hawaiian divide. Haole claims of cultural superiority

and a monopoly on medical knowledge fueled the dispute. In 1882, the Hawaiian

Government helped support an investigation into the natural history of the disease by Dr.

A. Arning, under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences of Berlin. In 1886, however,

the Board of Health dismissed the doctor after he clashed with the Royal Cabinet over the

extent of his authority. Planters saw another example of government ineptitude. The

73

Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 72.

180

Planters’ Monthly accused the President of the Board of Health of demanding Dr. Arning

change his report to the Hawaiian Legislature to better fit the government’s political

views. “The interruption of his important investigations into the causes and nature of

leprosy,” wrote the Planters’ Monthly in an editorial, “calls for and has received general

condemnation.”74

As haole and Hawaiian alike struggled in vain to understand and

control the disease and neither medical tradition proved to be more effective, competing

approaches to leprosy demonstrated the larger cultural divide between the Kalākaua

government and the increasingly powerful haole community. Hansen’s disease was

perhaps the starkest illustration of the existential struggle Hawaiians saw between the

Hawaiian nation and the sugar industry. Not only was immigration overwhelming the

Hawaiian population, but Hawaiians saw those immigrants as spreading disease among

Hawaiians. The sugar industry was thus held responsible for both the increase of

foreigners and the decrease of natives.

The Bayonet Constitution

By the middle 1880s, Hawaiʻi’s planters and government were at odds over just

about everything. The post-Reciprocity expansion of the sugar industry created conflicts

over capital, land, and labor, and raised fundamental questions about the nature of the

relationship between the government and the sugar industry. Tensions became even

worse when in 1886 Spreckels and King Kalākaua had a bitter falling out. Kalākaua

sought to raise capital to get out of debt to Spreckels; Spreckels had no intention of

74

“Leprosy in Louisiana,” Planters’ Monthly 2, no. 12 (March 1884), 327; “Editorial and

General,” Planters’ Monthly 4, no. 10 (January 1886), 256.

181

letting his influence over the king and government policy diminish. Yet Kalākaua

managed to force men loyal to Spreckels out of the government. Though planters whose

roots in Hawaiʻi ran deeper than Spreckels’s may have found him threatening, they

nonetheless found that their political interests often aligned with his. While they would

have preferred that sugarcane planters wield political power, one monopolistic sugarcane

planter wielding power was more agreeable than Native Hawaiians holding power. At the

1886 meeting of the Planter’s Labor and Supply Company, chairman of the legislative

committee J. M. Horner remarked, “While former Cabinets were piloting and steering the

ship of State, with Mr. Spreckels behind the curtain as prompter, we felt safe, although

things were not quite to our liking; but now I feel that we are drifting…” But by now

questions about who was in charge were loaded with blanket judgements about race and

an increasingly stark divide between haole planters and Native Hawaiians. Horner

continued, “We felt safe under the pilotage of former Cabinets, because we knew them to

be intelligent and sprung from the ruling race. I have an exalted idea of the high destiny

of the white man and of his power to control and govern both men and elements.”75

In July 1887 several haole, using the threat of violence, forced King Kalākaua to

adopt a new constitution that removed the monarch’s veto power and command of the

military and established voting laws that gave wealthy haole greater representation in the

two houses of the Legislature. The insurrectionists called themselves the Reform Party,

but were known to their detractors as the “Missionary Party.” They wanted no less than to

reduce the monarchy to a figurehead, to have King Kalākaua reign but not rule. Not all

75

Hawaiian Gazette, October 26, 1886. Also quoted in Adler, Claus Spreckels, 214.

182

planters advocated such a drastic move. Paul Isenberg, a planter of long standing on

Kauaʻi, advocated an attempt for reform that stopped short of constitutional change.76

Isenberg’s, however, was a single voice of dissent in a unanimous chorus of planters. The

Planters’ Monthly celebrated the revolution and the Bayonet Constitution, writing that it

was a “most important change and affects planters more, perhaps, than any other class in

the community...Bad government meant serious loss to the planter. The people of

Honolulu having got rid of the bad government it becomes incumbent on the entire

planting interest to support the present men in office, as long as they do their duty.”77

After the revolution of 1887 placed greater power in the hands of the haole elite,

the new government pursued a path of gratifying planters and alienating Hawaiians. As

the new government pursued an agenda of increasing Asian labor immigration, it also

took greater action to criminalize Hansen’s disease and segregate all infected Hawaiians

at the Molokaʻi settlement. The Legislature passed laws banning large passenger ships

from carrying people suffering from the disease, made the concealment of people

suspected of having the disease a misdemeanor, and gave the board of health authority to

declare people who accompanied afflicted family members to Kalaupapa (mea kōkua;

“helpers”) as legally considered lepers.

Planters supported the increased action against those who had contracted

Hansen’s disease, and understood the government’s obligations for public health in terms

of their own interests. Regarding a proposal for the government to contract with a private

76

Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom: Volume 3: The Kalakau Dynasty, 361-2.

77 “The New Constitution,” Planters’ Monthly 6, no. 7 (July 1887), 295.

183

company to transport people suffering from Hansen’s disease on vessels used exclusively

for that purpose, the Planters’ Monthly wrote that the proposal was “one that will be

seconded by every tax-payer.” Calling lepers “unfortunate wards of the nation,” the

Planters’ Monthly argued that planters would “cheerfully” bear the expense of funding

their removal.78

In 1889, the Planters’ Monthly praised the bayonet government’s

“prompt and successful efforts made to segregate the lepers which had for years been

allowed by former Governments to roam throughout the group, scattering the seeds of

death in every district, hamlet and house that they entered.”79

Looking to Louisiana as

Hawaiian planters did for many things, the Monthly found that physicians in Louisiana

agreed with Hawaiʻi’s policy of segregation.

Native Hawaiians, of course, had different views. The Hawaiian-language press

called the Board of Health, responsible for the leprosy laws, the “Board of Death,” and

the leper settlement was known as the “Grave.”80

Haole argued that Hawaiians

themselves, not the Chinese were responsible for the sickness. The Friend attributed the

introduction of Hansen’s disease to an aliʻi who traveled abroad in the 1840s.81

The sugar

industry had gone from supporting the development of all of Hawaiʻi to facilitating the

demise of the indigenous population.

78

Planters’ Monthly 9, no. 7 (September 1888), 386.

79 “Leprosy in Hawaii and Louisiana,” Planters’ Monthly 8, no. 1 (January 1889), 5.

80 “Leprosy in Hawaii,” The Friend (Honolulu), February 1, 1889.

81 “The First Hawaiian Leper,” The Friend (Honolulu), February 1, 1890.

184

By the 1890s, the Hawaiian sugarcane plantation system was heavily

industrialized, using ever-increasingly sophisticated technology and greater control of

land and labor to fuel its dominance over Hawaiʻi. The Honolulu Iron Works employed

over two hundred men to build Hawaiʻi’s sugar machinery, and in 1890 installed the first

six-roller sugar mill in the islands, which broke the previous record for extraction of

sugar from cane. The Planters’ Monthly estimate that mills were extracting twenty-five

percent more sugar, with much lower costs for fuel and labor than they were capable of

twenty years earlier.82

Several plantation mills had installed electric lights so that they

could operate around the clock.83

Ewa: A Revolutionary Plantation

Many of the innovations of the reciprocity era converged on an arid plain west of

Honolulu. In 1890 the ʻEwa Plain, west of Pearl Harbor, became the site of Ewa

Plantation, one of the most sophisticated and productive plantations to arise in Hawaiʻi.

For years before the plantation’s founding, the dry ʻEwa Plain was covered with native

ʻilima, a flowering plant which made excellent cattle fodder.84

When the plantation was

proposed, overgrazing had turned the plain into an arid scrubland—a “cactus-grown,

sand-blown, rubble-filled plot…cracked and fissured under a burning sun,” in the words

82

“Machinery for Paauhau Plantation,” Planters’ Monthly 10, no. 3, March 1891, 102-103.

83 Planters’ Monthly 9, no. 3, March 1890.

84 Culliney, Islands in a Far Sea,

185

of the plantation’s managers.85

The agricultural potential of ʻEwa changed in 1879, when

James Campbell, who owned a majority of the land in the area, dug the islands’ first

“artesian” well. Campbell, according to contemporary accounts, noticed cattle from his

ranch submerging their heads in the saltwater of the Pearl River lagoon, and concluded

that they must have been drinking from an outflow of subterranean freshwater. The

source of the water, though not completely understood at the time, was from rain that

percolated through Oʻahu’s porous volcanic rock and formed a basal lens resting on top

of the ocean.

Over the next ten years more than one hundred wells were bored around ʻEwa and

Honolulu. The exact nature and quantity of this underground water was unknown, but

Ewa’s founders were certain they could capture enough water to feed one of the most

ambitious plantations contemplated on the islands. Crucially, artesian water did not fall

under the rigid laws of usage that governed the riparian rights of Hawaiʻi’s streams.

Without needing to worry about possible conflicts with small farmers, who lacked the

capital necessary to sink pumps, cane planters now had an opportunity to expand onto

lands previously unsuited to sugarcane cultivation. By 1900, the U. S. Census noted that

irrigation made possible the expansion of sugarcane planting onto lands formerly used

only to pasture cattle.86

Artesian water offered a key to once again loosen the sugarcane

plantation system from its established constraints.

85

Fifty Years of Ewa Plantation Co. (Honolulu: Castle & Cooke, Ltd., 1940), 3.

86 “The Agricultural Development of Hawaii,” Hawaiian Annual (1903), 52.

186

The discovery of Oʻahu’s basal freshwater lens placed the Ewa Plantation

Company in a position to exploit sugar’s industrial revolution. Ewa’s founders set out to

build one of Hawaiʻi’s most technologically advanced plantations. This began with the

use of railroads. Benjamin F. Dillingham, a recent immigrant to Hawaiʻi and an

inveterate entrepreneur, was one of the initial founders of the plantation company, and

also held a contract to build Oʻahu’s first railway line. Dillingham leased the lands of the

ʻEwa Plain from James Campbell, and subleased the plantation land to William R. Castle.

Thus connected by rail to Honolulu Harbor, Ewa was able to get its sugar to market.

Ewa’s sugar mill, with equipment made by Honolulu’s Union Iron Works, was designed

on the latest principles of the diffusion process: a method taken from the beet sugar

industry.87

Ewa’s investments proved to be poorly timed. In April 1891, the United States

Congress passed the McKinley Tariff Act, which did away with all import duties on

foreign sugars and instead gave domestic producers a bounty. The benefits of Reciprocity

for Hawaiian planters disappeared, sending the islands into an economic depression.

Moreover, problems with the diffusion process were making operations too costly and

inefficient. Yet access to capital, a crucial component of Hawaiʻi’s sugar boom, saved the

plantation. Castle & Cooke’s board members contributed their personal finances to fund

plantation operations and used connections in San Francisco to take out a loan. Ewa

87

“A Castle and Cooke History,” unpublished typescript, 658 C27h, HMCS.

187

installed a nine-roller mill, the most advanced in the world’s sugar industry, and began

producing sugar.88

With such ambitious expansion of the sugar industry, planters needed political

and economic stability to protect their investments. After fifteen years of dramatic

expansion, the McKinley Act forced Hawaiʻi’s planters to face the prospect of

competition from other sugar producers that had access to much cheaper labor. The

McKinley Act pushed the sugar factors close to financial ruin.89

By October 1892, the

Secretary of the PLSC complained of the “severe trial for sugar planters.” Planters had

reduced wages by one third but even so, three plantations had already suspended

operations and they expected others to follow. The PLSC did not foresee a quick end to

their hard times.90

Revolution

King Kalākaua died on January 20, 1891 and his sister, Lydia Kamakaʻeha

Dominis assumed the throne as Queen Liliʻuokalani. Queen Liliʻuokalani, with the

support of many Native Hawaiians, sought to revoke the Bayonet Constitution of 1887

and restore some of the previous power of the monarchy. The Queen’s position further

eroded the relationship between the Crown and the sugar interests, with the Planters’

88

“A Castle and Cooke History.”

89 Jared G. Smith, The Big Five: A Brief History of Hawaii’s Largest Firms (Honolulu: Advertiser

Publishing Co., Ltd., 1942).

90 “Eleventh Annual Report of the Secretary,” Planters’ Monthly 11, no. 11 (November 1892),

485-87.

188

Monthly continuing to provide a medium for planters to express their opposition to the

government. On January 17, 1893, after months of secret meetings and correspondence

between Hawaiian annexationists and their allies in the United States, a group of

annexationist haole conspired with U. S. Minister to Hawaiʻi John Stevens to overthrow

the Queen and pursue annexation to the United States. Stevens, acting without official

direction, landed a contingent of marines and sailors to support the insurgents. In the face

of this overwhelming force, Liliʻuokalani conditionally stepped down from the throne

and sought redress in Washington D. C.

Not all planters supported the coup, and several of the wealthiest and most

important figures in the sugar industry were vocal royalists.91

Others, however, joined the

coup with enthusiasm.92

The rapid expansion of the plantation system meant that the

sugar industry was not controlled by a small handful of elite planters, but was instead

spread across the haole community. Two hundred and forty-seven American, British, and

German haole owned stock in sugar companies, and one third of all Americans who were

eligible to vote in Hawaiʻi were stockholders.93

As irrigation, immigration, and

technological development all demanded greater capital investment, and the instability

and economic depression brought on by the McKinley Act threatened those investments,

91

Richard D. Weigle, “Sugar and the Hawaiian Revolution,” Pacific Historical Review 16, no. 1

(February 1947): 41-58.

92 Josephine Sullivan, A History of C. Brewer & Company Limited: One Hundred Years in the

Hawaiian Islands, 1826-1926 (Boston: Walton Advertising & Printing Company, 1926), 160.

93 Weigle, “Sugar and the Hawaiian Revolution.”

189

many of those involved in the sugar industry found motivation to take up arms against the

government that had once championed their rise.

Although planters were on both sides of the overthrow, they saw opportunity in its

aftermath. The Planters’ Monthly wrote,

Whatever our future form of government may be, it is probable that some

alliance with the United States will be made. One result of this union will

be that all our industries will receive an impetus, and will secure the

benefit of any protective duty or bonus given to American products. New

industries will spring up, as by magic, affording to industrious Hawaiians-

-both male and female--new avenues for employment, with increased

opportunities for bettering their domestic and social condition. A union of

Hawaii with that great and prosperous nation will create a feeling of

confidence in the bosom of every man and woman, and settle the long-

disputed question that life is worth living, at least in our own favored and

blissful isles--the Paradise of the Pacific.94

In the years between Reciprocity and the Revolution, sugarcane had come to take up

more land, more capital, and more labor. The only thing the sugar industry had less of

was Native Hawaiian involvement. Kānaka Maoloi investment in cane plantations had

fallen from $641,240 in 1883 to $324,047 in 1893, while the total value of Hawaiʻi’s

plantations had risen from $15,886,800 to $27,964,290 in that same period.95

As more

land came under cane cultivation and the industrial revolution in sugar brought those

lands under the control of more powerful and expensive mills, and as an influx of foreign

workers not only changed Hawaiʻi’s demographics but also introduced a new disease that

94

“The 17th of January,” Planters’ Monthly 12, no. 2 (February 1893), 50.

95 “Ownership of Hawaiian Sugar Plantations,” Planters’ Monthly 2, no. 8 (November 1883), 170-

171; J.S. Walker, “Hawaiian Sugar Plantation Corporations,” Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1894

(Honolulu: Press Publishing Co. Steam Print, 1893), 40-41. In the 1893 statistics of plantation investment,

the Almanac distinguished between Native Hawaiians, who accounted for $38,991 and “Half Castes,” who

accounted for $285,056. Of this latter group, British Hawaiians owned the largest amount of plantation

investment with $168,098 and American-Hawaiians owned the next-largest amount of investment with

$88,900.

190

threatened Hawaiian bodies and their presence on the land, it is little wonder that

Reciprocity created an environment of conflict. King Kalakaua, once a champion of

sugarcane planting, and then Queen Liliuokalani came to see the sugar industry as an

antagonist. With the crises of 1884 and 1891, it is also apparent that planters perceived

the monarchy as an obstacle to stability. The sugar revolutions of the late nineteenth

century thus became political, and sought resolution in the political revolution of 1893.

191

CHAPTER 6: BIOLOGICAL PEST CONTROL, DIVERSIFIED FARMING,

AND HAWAIIAN SUGARCANE PLANTERS’ CAMPAIGN FOR

ANNEXATION, 1893-1898

M[ongoose]—“I was brought here by a big fat man from Jamaica,

for the purpose of killing off the rats.”

C[hinaman]—“Well, why do you not stick to that line of

business?”

M.—“So I did until the rats became scarce, and I found it was

easier to make a living by eating chickens and eggs, and also the eggs and

young of pheasants and other birds which are fool enough to make their

nests on the ground.”

C.—“Well, they will exterminate you because you do not confine

yourself to your business.”

M.—“That's what they say about you. They will deport you, not

because you do not stick to your business, but because you do work that

other people cannot do and would not do if they could.”

James W. Girvin, The Master

Planter; Or, Life in the Cane Fields

of Hawaii1

When, following the January 1893 overthrow of Hawaiʻi’s Queen Liliʻuokalani,

Sanford Dole, associate justice of the Hawaiian Supreme Court, son of New England

missionary Daniel Dole, and a former president of the Planters’ Labor and Supply

Company (PLSC), assumed the presidency of the new Hawaiian Provisional

Government, the future looked positive for Hawaiʻi’s sugarcane planters. Dole and the

other revolutionaries expected to transfer sovereignty to the United States, providing

Hawaiian sugar with all the trade benefits of being a domestic product and reversing the

damage of the 1891 McKinley Tariff Act, which rendered the islands’ sugar

uncompetitive in the U.S. market. Yet annexationists soon met with disappointment, as

U.S. President-elect Grover Cleveland came out against annexation. Anti-imperialist

1 James W. Girvin, The Master Planter; Or, Life in the Cane Fields of Hawaii (Honolulu: Press of

the Hawaiian Gazette Co., Ltd., 1910), 174.

192

outrage over American involvement in the coup and a lobbying battle between supporters

of Queen Liliʻuokalani and supporters of the Provisional Government unfolded in

Washington. The Cleveland administration launched an investigation into the affair,

rumors circulated that he would have American forces restore the monarchy, and

Hawaiʻi’s political future was in a state of uncertainty throughout the year.2 Planters, like

the rest of Hawaiian society, would have to wait and see how their relationship with the

U. S. and its market would develop.

The struggle for annexation and trade stability was certainly not the only problem

confronting the sugar interests. The usual questions of controlling cheap labor, improving

efficiency, and increasing output were ever present. Added to this list, and dovetailing

with other issues in what might seem to be surprising ways, was the issue of insect pest

control. But in the 1890s, planters were not merely concerned with pest control on their

plantations. Instead, they worked to develop pest control practices that would protect and

promote other agricultural pursuits, such as citrus and coffee. In doing so, Hawaiʻi’s cane

planters became pioneers in the development of biological pest control—the use of

predatory and parasitic animals (mostly insects) to manage populations of agricultural

pests.

What at first glance appears to be a story as old as agriculture itself—people

protecting crop fields from unwanted animals—with little relevance beyond plantation

2 For a detailed account of the American political debate surrounding annexation, see Thomas J.

Osborne, “Empire Can Wait”: American Opposition to Hawaiian Annexation, 1893-1898 (Kent, Ohio: The

Kent State University Press, 1981). On the political events in Hawaiʻi in 1893, see Ethel M. Damon,

Sanford Ballard Dole and His Hawaii (Palo Alto, California: 1957).

193

fields, is in fact much more complex.3 Biological pest control in Hawaiʻi was closely

linked to land and labor control and the greater political and cultural agendas of

Hawaiʻi’s ascendant haole sugarcane planters.4 It was a significant front in planters’

increasingly sophisticated scientific and technological campaign for control of the

Hawaiian environment, and connected Hawaiʻi in webs of biological exchange with other

regions of the circum-Pacific. Most importantly, biological control—both on and beyond

Hawaiʻi’s sugarcane plantations—was crucial to planters’ efforts to encourage white

Americans to settle in Hawaiʻi and take up farming there. Pest control thus helped

planters make the argument to people in the United States that Hawaiʻi was a land worthy

of annexation.

Insects and Annexation

Other historians of the Hawaiian sugar industry have focused on infrastructure

and civil engineering developments, especially the expansion of irrigation, but most

3 With some notable exceptions, historians of sugar and historians of Hawaiʻi have paid little

attention to pests and pest control in sugarcane cultivation. Noel Deerr, whose mid-twentieth century

History of Sugar remains one of the most comprehensive and influential works on the subject, briefly noted

that Hawaiian planters were pioneers of insect pest control; Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, vol. 2

(London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1949), 587.

Diseases and pests receive brief mentions in J. H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: A

Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 141-42;

Carol A. MacLennan, Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of

Hawaiʻi Press, 2014), 40-41. For a broad discussion of insect pest infestations of Hawaiian cane

plantations, see C. Allan Jones and Robert V. Osgood, From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill:

Agricultural Technology and the Making of Hawaiʻi’s Premier Crop (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi

Press, 2015).

4 Other works that address connections between agricultural pest control and social control include

Thomas R. Dunlap, DDT: Scientists, Citizens, and Public Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1981) and James C. Giesen, “‘The Truth About the Boll Weevil’: The Nature of Planter Power in the

Mississippi Delta,” Environmental History 14, no. 4 (October 2009): 683-704.

194

scholars have given only brief attention to the work of fighting insects. Yet pest control,

more than these other projects, was tied to planters’ efforts to Americanize Hawaiʻi. In

fact, Hawaiʻi’s sugarcane planters promoted pest control in support of other agricultural

enterprises. In the 1890s, Caucasians still made up only a small portion of the Hawaiian

population: the 1890 census recorded 6,220 whites out of a total population of 89,990.5

Planters saw pest control as a way to encourage American settlement of Hawaiʻi and

decrease their reliance on Asian plantation laborers, thereby making annexation more

attractive to the United States. Better agricultural pest control practices would allow for a

broader array of agriculture enterprises in Hawaiʻi—agriculture that did not demand as

much capital investment as sugarcane or involve the difficult conditions and stigma of

plantation labor. Pest control, annexationists hoped, would help encourage white

Americans to settle in Hawaiʻi and become small farmers.

The racial composition of Hawaiʻi, with its overwhelmingly Asian plantation

workforce, was a significant liability for Hawaiʻi’s newly ruling haole community and

their aspirations toward annexation.6 In the late nineteenth century, not only had the

failure of post-Civil War Reconstruction given way to what Rayford Logan and other

historians have called the “nadir of American race relations,” but anti-Chinese sentiment,

manifest in a global discourse of anti-coolieism, had spread through the Anglophone

5 Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 25. This number comprises all Caucasians,

excluding Portuguese, who were brought to the islands as plantation workers and who were generally

considered separate from other white ethnic groups.

6 William McGowan has argued that Hawaiʻi’s sugarcane planters saw their workforce as a

liability after annexation, yet, as this chapter argues, planters recognized the tensions of maintaining control

over their workers before annexation, too. William P. McGowan, “Industrializing the Land of Lono: Sugar

Plantation Managers and Workers in Hawaii, 1900-1920,” Agricultural History 69, no. 2 (Spring 1995):

177-200.

195

Pacific, from California to Australia.7 Race played a pivotal role in anti-annexationist

sentiment in Washington and the Cleveland administration, particularly in the conduct of

James H. Blount, the Georgia Congressman commissioned with investigating U.S.

involvement in the overthrow of Liliʻuokalani.8 Somewhat paradoxically, this was also a

time of ascendant American imperialism, particularly in the Pacific, where the extension

of American hegemony facilitated economic entry into Chinese markets. The prospect of

American expansion and absorption of nonwhite people was laden with tension as

Americans advocated and celebrated the growth of the American nation but questioned

whether nonwhite people were fit to join that nation.9 Asian workers made Hawaiʻi’s

plantations run, but they made annexation less appealing to Americans.

While Hawaiʻi’s population gave many Americans doubts over the archipelago’s

ability to be absorbed by the United States, its location also made white Americans

question whether they could settle Hawaiʻi in numbers large enough to support

American-style government and culture. In the mid-nineteenth century, American

geographers had developed a discourse on the nature of the North American continent, a

7 Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 (New

York: The Dial Press, Inc., 1954); Mae M. Ngai, “Chinese Gold Miners and the ‘Chinese Question’ in

Nineteenth-Century California and Victoria,” Journal of American History 101, no. 4 (March 2015): 1082-

1105; Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, MD: Rowman &

Littlefield, 2008). Anti-Asian bias and anti-coolieism had become increasingly prevalent in Hawaiʻi in the

1880s and 1890s, as well. See Edward D. Beechert, Working in Hawaii: A Labor History (Honolulu:

University of Hawaii Press, 1985), Ch. 5.

8 Merze Tate, The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom: A Political History (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1965).

9 The paradox of how to expand the borders of the United States and encountering peoples

supposedly unprepared to take on democratic citizenship was central to culture and politics at this time. The

historian Matthew Frye Jacobson called this expansion “the migration of the state.” Matthew Frye

Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-

1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 222, and esp. Chapter 6.

196

sort of geographic equivalent to the political idea of Manifest Destiny, which held that

North America was a discrete unit within which American ideals of government and

culture could flourish.10

This idea of geographic American exceptionalism was reinforced

by the prevalent notion among Americans that a stark divide existed between tropical and

temperate regions of the world, and that white Americans could not easily extend

themselves and their way of life to tropical locales.11

Insects were central to these

perceived differences between North America and the tropics. Scholars have often

focused on the relationship between insects, human health, and imperialism, but

agriculture also played a significant role in the idea that white Americans could not

expand their culture into the tropics.12

Hawaiian annexationists fought against these

ideas, arguing that Hawaiʻi was indeed suitable for American settlement and annexation.

Hawaiian annexationists challenged American ideas that a tropical, white-

minority archipelago with a plantation economy could not absorb American culture or

settlers. Annexationists argued that Hawaiʻi could replace, or at least balance, its Asian

cane workers with Americans, and that Americans could also practice agriculture and

become independent small farmers in the islands. To make these arguments, however,

sugarcane planters needed insect pest suppression. Controlling crop pests enabled the

10

David Igler, The Great Ocean.

11 Paul S. Sutter, “The Tropics: A Brief History of an Environmental Imaginary,” in Andrew C.

Isenberg, ed., Oxford Handbook of Environmental History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014),

178-204. Ronald Takaki claimed that Hawaiian sugarcane planters always saw white Americans as unfit for

agricultural labor in Hawaiʻi. Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920

(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), 66.

12 For insect pest control and American expansionism, see Paul S. Sutter, “Nature’s Agents or

Agents of Empire? Entomological Workers and Environmental Change during the Construction of the

Panama Canal,” Isis 98, no. 4 (December 2007): 724-754.

197

growth of different agricultural enterprises that were not as capital intensive as

sugarcane—especially coffee. Only later, after a major infestation struck Hawaiʻi’s cane

fields, did planters turn to the pest specialists they had recruited—already world-

renowned for their work—to save their cane fields.

Ideas and Innovations in Agricultural Pest Control

Though insects have plagued farmers for as long as there have been farms, the

late nineteenth century saw an increase in the severity of crop pest infestations.13

Until

that time, agricultural pest control was fairly rudimentary; it involved the importation of

predator animals and insects, a good deal of trial and error, and often did as much harm

as good. In 1760, the botanist and progenitor of modern scientific taxonomy Carl

Linnaeus attempted to introduce predacious beetles into insect-infested orchards, without

notable success. Linnaeus’s greater contribution was the idea of the “balance of nature,”

which stated that all animals fit into a certain role in what later ecologists would call an

ecosystem.14

Under the idea of the balance of nature, it was neither possible nor desirable

to eradicate an animal, even an insect pest. The best one could hope for would be to

13

A complex of factors likely contributed to the rise of agricultural pests in the mid- to late

nineteenth century. More extensive development of monoculture plantations, a general warming of the

Earth’s temperature from the last “Little Ice Age,” and an increase in the frequency and rapidity of

transportation between regions all created conditions more benign for the invasion and population growth

of insect pests.

14 Harry C. Coppel and James W. Mertins, Biological Insect Pest Suppression (New York:

Springer-Verlag, 1977), 17.

198

manage relationships between animals and try to make sure no animal populations grew

too drastically.15

Early Hawaiian sugarcane planters stuck to the Linnaean idea of a “balance of

nature,” even if they believed they needed to take a more active role in achieving that

balance. As early as 1855, at the annual meeting of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural

Society, sugarcane plantation manager J. W. Marsh argued that the Society should take

special pains to introduce “insectivorous and verminivorous” animals to the archipelago

to compensate for the dearth of such animals that had arrived in Hawaiʻi without human

aid. As recounted here in Chapter Four, Marsh hoped Hawaiʻi’s planters could import

animals as a means of “overcoming nature by nature.”16

Early agricultural pest control in Hawaiʻi illustrated the harm of unintended

consequences in importing foreign species to a remote setting. In 1865 the Royal

Hawaiian Agricultural Society funded the importation of the Indian mynah bird as a

means of controlling worms. Over a century earlier, the mynah had been successfully

introduced into the island of Mauritius, where it suppressed the red locust (Nomadacris

septemfasciata Serville), which had been infesting sugarcane.17

Yet in Hawaiʻi, the

omnivorous mynah did not limit itself to pests. The mynah also preyed on the eggs of

native birds and fed on the berries of the lantana, a South American bush imported in

1858 as an ornamental plant. With the mynah spreading lantana berries throughout

15

J. F. M. Clark, “Bugs in the System: Insects, Agricultural Science, and Professional Aspirations

in Britain, 1890-1920,” Agricultural History 75 (Winter 2001): 85-86.

16 Chapter 4; J. W. Marsh, "Report on Birds, Bees, Insects and Worms" Transactions of the Royal

Hawaiian Agricultural Society 2:2 (1855), 47-48.

17 Coppel and Mertins, Biological Insect Pest Suppression, 18.

199

Hawaiʻi, the plant soon became invasive, choked off native grasses, and destroyed

significant areas of pastureland in the islands.18

Likewise the Indian mongoose, imported

to Hawaiʻi in 1883 to protect cane fields from rats, expanded its diet to ground nesting

bird species’ eggs. The PLSC made known the mongoose’s reputation for attacking birds,

but planters on the Big Island chose to disregard this information and funded the

importation of the animal from Jamaica.19

A targeted approach to pest control was untenable for early planters in part

because they had difficulty identifying insect pests. In the 1850s and 1860s, when

Hawaiian plantations were undercapitalized and agricultural entomology was in its

infancy, limited knowledge sometimes caused confusion. Hawaiian planters mistakenly

called the most destructive sugarcane pest in the mid-nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi the

sugarcane borer (Diataea saccharalis), an insect that had ravaged sugar islands

throughout the world. Planters sought out information from other plantation regions and

the Linnaean Society, but what Hawaiian planters called the sugarcane borer was in fact a

completely different insect now known as the New Guinea sugarcane borer

(Sphenophorus obscurus Boisduval).20

18

C. E. Pemberton, “Highlights in the History of Entomology in Hawaii 1778-1963,” Pacific

Insects 6, no. 4 (December 1964): 719; John L. Culliney, Islands in a Far Sea: The Fate of Nature in

Hawaiʻi revised ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2004), 137.

19 “Hilo Planters’ Association,” Planters’ Monthly 2, no. 2 (May 1883), 30. Opinions are divided

on the extent of damage that the mongoose caused. The marine biologist John Culliney argued that the

mongoose’s reputation was worse than its impact, while the historian and professor of ethnic studies

Davianna McGregor collected oral histories that blamed the mongoose for the decline of bird populations

even on the island Molokaʻi. Culliney, Islands in a Far Sea 137, 333; Davianna Pomaikaʻi McGregor, Nā

Kuaʻāina: Living Hawaiian Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2006), 218.

20 Honolulu Polynesian, July 13, 1861. Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser, July 27, 1867;

September 14, 1867. F. W. Terry, The Sugar Cane Borer (Sphenophorus Obscurus) in the Hawaiian

200

Confusion over the sugarcane borer is consistent with the state of mid-nineteenth-

century entomology. It was not until the 1860s, when monoculture farming began

increasing susceptibility to crop pests and steam transportation of agricultural

commodities increased the trans-oceanic migration of pests, that American agricultural

and horticultural societies began lobbying their states to employ entomologists (Britain

likewise saw the rise of applied entomology in that decade).21

But more often than

attempting to classify insect pests in Western terms, Hawaiian planters understood pests

in the context of the Hawaiian environment and culture. In the 1870s and 1880s, George

Dole, plantation manager on the island of Kauaʻi and Sanford Dole’s brother, noted the

ravages of insects several times over the course of his career. Peelua, the Hawaiian term

for armyworms, infested a neighboring plantation in 1879; in 1881 borers were in other

plantations; and in 1882 ʻeleao, a type of aphid, or possibly a native parasitic fungus,

afflicted one of his fields.22

In two of these cases, Dole made no evident attempt to

identify the pests beyond the use of their Hawaiian names.

Islands, Report of the Work of the Experiment Station of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association,

Division of Entomology, Circular No. 3 (Honolulu, 1907) 7-8.

21 Conner Sorensen, “The Rise of Government-Sponsored Applied Entomology, 1840-1870,”

Agricultural History 62, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 98-115; Sorensen, Brethren of the Net: American

Entomology, 1840—1880 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995); J. F. M. Clark, “Bugs in the

System: Insects, Agricultural Science, and Professional Aspirations in Britain, 1890-1920,” Agricultural

History 75, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 83-114. On the increase in American monoculture planting and the spread

of crop pests, see James Giesen, “The Truth about the Boll Weevil” and Andrew C. Isenberg,

“Environment and the Nineteenth-Century West,” in William Deverell, ed., A Companion to the American

West (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2004), 77-92.

22 Dole, George H. and Clara Rowell Dole diaries: typescript, April 20, 1879; May 28, 1881; and

October 18, 1882, Huntington Library. For a description of peelua (also written as “pelua”), see

Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society 1, no. 1, 95; J. E. Chamberlain, “The Peelua or

Army Worm of the Hawaiian Islands,” Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1883, 44-50. For a description

of ʻeleao see wehewehe.org, accessed February 10, 2015. Armyworms were possibly introduced to Hawaiʻi

in the 1840s. Culliney, Islands in a Far Sea, 256. Borer infestations were not uncommon. They also struck

Princeville Plantation on Kauaʻi in 1877; Andrew Welch letter to Elisha Hunt Allen, October 13, 1877,

201

Methods of prevention and control were likewise limited. Planters employed

women and children to collect the insects by hand and placed pieces of split cane in their

fields as bait to lure the borers away from growing cane.23

Others attempted rudimentary

chemical controls. A correspondent to the Hawaiian Gazette suggested that, as “many

engaged in raising sugar cane” complained of attacks from the borer, planters should

apply a petroleum emulsion to their fields. This was a “remedy to cure this evil, known to

me from personal experience…having seen it successfully used at the islands of

Mauritius, Java and Ceylon.”24

There is little evidence, however, that petroleum became a

popular agent of pest control among Hawaiian planters. During an 1884 infestation of a

pest Dole simply referred to as a “beetle,” Dole offered laborers one cent for each beetle

they collected, but one week later reduced the bounty to twenty-five cents per hundred

beetles.25

Apparently, the ubiquity of the beetles or the facility of his workers for

collecting them forced Dole to reduce his rates.

Hawaiian pest control took a crucial turn in 1890, when an insect that looked like

a tiny speck of white fluff and was known as the cottony-cushion scale (Icerya purchasi)

began infesting trees in Honolulu. This same insect, originally from Australia, had nearly

obliterated California’s citrus industry in the 1880s, but the U. S. Department of

Agriculture saved California’s orchards with an unprecedented and much-lauded

quoted in Rhoda E. A. Hackler, “Princeville Plantation Papers,” Hawaiian Journal of History 16 (1982):

65-85.

23 F. W. Terry, The Sugar Cane Borer, 15.

24 Hawaiian Gazette, June 11, 1873.

25 Dole, George H. and Clara Rowell Dole diaries: typescript, December 4 and 8, 1884,

Huntington Library.

202

application of a new method of fighting insect pests that came to be known as biological

control. Biological control built upon the Linnaean idea of promoting a balance in nature

by using insects to fight off insect pests, but added a Darwinian understanding of

specialized relationships between certain insect species. The basic premise was the same

as earlier efforts of pest control: introduce a foreign species to destroy another. But

biological control used greater scientific precision to find insect species that preyed upon

only certain pests, and were therefore much more likely to be effective in controlling a

specific pest population and much less likely to become pests themselves.26

Chief USDA entomologist Charles V. Riley directed the fight against the cottony-

cushion scale by sending his agent, the German-born entomologist Albert Koebele,

abroad to find the scale’s natural enemies.27

Riley had been a proponent of biological

control since the 1870s, though he did not have other significant opportunities to put his

theories into practice before the encounter with the cottony-cushion scale. Koebele, who

began working for the USDA in 1881 and had built a reputation as a gifted entomologist,

was likewise an advocate for biological control.28

In 1889, after a year of investigation in

Australia and New Zealand, Koebele introduced to California a species of Australian

vedalia beetle, or ladybug (Rodolia cardinalis; also known as “ladybirds”). In Australia,

26

Richard C. Sawyer, To Make a Spotless Orange: Biological Control in California Henry A.

Wallace Series on Agricultural History and Rural Life (Ames, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1996); May

R. Berenbaum, Bugs in the System: Insects and Their Impact on Human Affairs (Reading, Mass., Helix

Books, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995); Coppel and Mertins, Biological Insect Pest

Suppression.

27 “Vedalia Cardinalis,” Planters’ Monthly 9, no. 5 (May 1890): 228-229. For more on Koebele

and pest control in California, see Steven Stoll, “Insects and Institutions: University Science and the Fruit

Business in California,” Agricultural History 69, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 216-239.

28 “Koebele, Albert,” Encyclopedia of Entomology, 2

nd ed., John L. Capinera, ed. (London:

Springer, 2008), 2093-94.

203

Koebele observed the ladybugs preying on cottony-cushion scales and keeping their

numbers in check. Koebele concluded that the vedalia beetle would control scale insects

better than any pesticide spraying, which would kill all insects indiscriminately and allow

for harmful insects to invade orchards again unless spraying continued at regular

intervals. Koebele’s goal was to introduce an insectivorous or parasitic species which

would create a new ecological balance, in which crop pests remained but were limited to

lower populations. “It is not that we should exterminate our scale insects,” Koebele

wrote, “this is a matter of impossibility even with the best of natural enemies or parasites,

and would be contrary to nature; but we can, with the proper natural enemies, keep these

insects in check to such an extent that they will not injure our trees, and fruit growing will

be possible for all time to come.”29

When the cottony-cushion scale appeared on trees in the vicinity of Honolulu,

Hawaiʻi’s Commissioner of Agriculture sent off specimens to California for

identification. California’s entomologists confirmed the Hawaiians’ fears, and provided

them with shipments of the vedalia, which brought the cottony-cushion scale under

control in a matter of months.30

That Hawaiʻi experienced an infestation of the cottony

cushion scale shortly after California did, and that Hawaiʻi then relied on California for

pest control expertise and biological control agents should not be surprising. The two

places enjoyed a close agricultural relationship in the Pacific World, which itself saw

29

California State Board of Horticulture, Report on the Importation of Parasites and Predaceous

Insects, by the State Board of Horticulture, in Accordance with an Act of the Legislature, Approved March

31, 1891 (Sacramento: A. J. Johnston, supt. state printing, 1892), 11-12.

30 “The Vedalia Cardinalis,” Planters’ Monthly 9, no. 6 (June 1890), 244-45; Planters’ Monthly 9,

no. 8 (August 1890), 338; “Report of the Committee on Forestry,” Planters’ Monthly 10, no. 12 (December

1891), 551-556.

204

frequent transmission of agricultural pests as well as scientific and agricultural practices.

Agricultural ties between Hawaiʻi’s sugarcane planters and California’s orange growers

were particularly strong, with several men migrating from one place and vocation to the

other. In 1892 the Planters’ Monthly, the PLSC's journal, noted, “on the finest avenue in

the city of Riverside,”—then a center of orange cultivation in California—lived “quite a

number of Island people.” Among these was George Dole, the former Kauaʻi plantation

manager, who had thirteen acres of orange trees; R. McKenzie, formerly of the

sugarcane-growing district of Laupāhoehoe, Hawaiʻi, with ten acres of ten-year-old trees;

and R. R. Hind of Kohala, Hawaiʻi, another sugarcane district, who also had ten acres of

orange trees.31

Planters Unite For Annexation

After the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, strengthening ties to the

United States became an even greater priority for Hawaiʻi’s planters. Several of the

largest cane planters opposed the overthrow and initial attempts to secure annexation

because it would end the contract labor system and the immigration of Asian workers, but

many ultimately decided that annexation would provide better governance and economic

stability than they could enjoy under an independent Hawaiian republic.32

Those who did

31

G. O., “Letter from a Hawaiian from Southern California,” Planters’ Monthly 11, no. 3 (March

1892), 116-118.

32 Richard D. Weigle, “Sugar and the Hawaiian Revolution,” Pacific Historical Review 16, no. 1

(February 1947): 41-58. Sugarcane planters and their agents ranged across the political spectrum during the

overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. After the overthrow, however, the Honolulu-based sugar factors who

supported the Provisional Government and Republic Government gained influence. John Whitehead,

“Western Progressives, Old South Planters, or Colonial Oppressors: The Enigma of Hawaiʻi’s ‘Big Five,’

1898-1940,” Western Historical Quarterly 30, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 295-326. The German-American

sugar magnate Claus Spreckels, known as the “Sugar King” of Hawaiʻi, was one of the most vocal and

205

not agree with the annexationist policies of the Provisional Government were

marginalized or pushed out entirely. Joseph O. Carter, president and manager of the sugar

agency C. Brewer & Company, which controlled approximately twelve percent of

Hawaiʻi’s sugar, was voted out of his position in the fall of 1894. Peter C. Jones, a former

president of the company and Minister of Finance in the Provisional Government,

replaced Carter.33

With such internal actions to promote consensus within the community

of haole sugar interests, they were prepared to work as a bloc for annexation.

Hawaiian annexationists, however, feared that the sugar industry created a

negative image in American culture of Hawaiʻi as a plantocracy filled with Asian

workers unfit for American citizenship. Annexationists perceived that they needed to

refute the idea that the overthrow was dominated by the sugar interests.34

An article in the

September 1894 Review of Reviews, reprinted in the 1895 Hawaiian Almanac and

Annual, argued “that the “chief obstacle in the way of democratic representative

institutions in the Sandwich Islands lies in the fact that the great mass of the laboring

prominent planters to argue against annexation, at least in part because of the challenges it would create for

controlling the labor supply. Spreckels’s relatively recent arrival to Hawaiʻi, his ownership of California

refineries, his vast wealth, and his politics, contributed to his position as an outsider and antagonist to the

Hawaiian planter community. Even William G. Irwin, a British resident of Hawaiʻi, and Spreckels’s main

business partner there, favored annexation after the overthrow. For a perceptive analysis of Spreckels’s

evolving opinion on the revolution, see Jacob Adler, Claus Spreckels: The Sugar King of Hawaii

(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1966). Other planters acknowledged the problems annexation

presented, but considered those outweighed by the benefits of becoming domestic sugar producers

unconstrained by import duties. See, for example, Report of the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Co.

(May 1898), 5-6.

33 Josephine Sullivan, A History of C. Brewer & Company Limited: One Hundred Years in the

Hawaiian Islands, 1826-1926 K. C. Leebrick, ed., (Boston: Walton Advertising & Printing Company,

1926), 152.

34 William R. Castle, a Honolulu lawyer with family ties to sugar and a member of the annexation

commission that visited Washington, D. C. after the overthrow wrote of “refuting the assertion that the

movement is a Spreckels one. The enemies of annexation are full of ‘Spreckels and Sugar’ as the secret

springs of this movement,” quoted in Adler, Claus Spreckels, 227.

206

population is unfit for any share in the responsible political life of the community.

Thousands of Chinese and Japanese coolies are at work upon the sugar plantations, and

the element of extremely ignorant Portuguese laborers is a large one. Furthermore, many

of the native Hawaiians themselves are wholly unequal to any intelligent use of the

ballot.”35

This view of Hawaiʻi as dominated by sugar and inundated with foreign

laborers was apt. By 1890, sugar eclipsed all other agricultural enterprises, and accounted

for over ninety percent of the value of Hawaiian exports.36

The Hawaiian population was

also increasingly transformed by the sugar industry. From 1872 to 1890, the combined

Chinese and Japanese population in the islands increased from 2,038 to 29,362, or from

3.6 percent to 27.9 percent of the total Hawaiian population.37

Most of these people came

to Hawaiʻi as plantation workers, though as their initial contracts expired many chose to

leave the plantations in favor of other opportunities.38

Sugar thus dominated Hawaiʻi’s

economy and immigration flows.

Before the overthrow of the monarchy, Hawaiʻi’s sugar interests fought to protect

its contract labor system and to defend it abroad. The Hawaiian government began efforts

to limit Chinese immigration in 1883, but planters worked against anti-Asian agitation

and used their political and economic power to subvert or weaken legislation restricting

35

Albert Shaw, “The New Hawaiian Constitution,” Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1895

(Honolulu: Press Publishing Co. Steam Print, 1894), 48.

36 Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 539-540.

37 Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 25.

38 By 1890, plantation employment was approximately 17,895, made up primarily of Asian

migrant labor. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 359.

207

Asian immigration.39

Planters had been self-conscious of American accusations of

slavery since at least the early 1880s, when the San Francisco Chronicle began publishing

articles claiming mistreatment of a group of Norwegian plantation workers. Planters

made an organized effort to gather affidavits and circulated detailed denials of the

allegations in both California and Washington.40

The prospect of annexation changed planters’ calculus; they acknowledged

critiques of their labor system and sought to address them. The sugar oligarchy wanted

Americans to look favorably upon the annexation of a racially diverse nation with a small

white minority at a time when white supremacist thought dominated U. S. culture.

Hawaiʻi’s planters were well aware of American racial and imperialist thinking, and

faced the dilemma of balancing anti-coolie ideas with their need for cheap labor. Thus, in

1893, in order to decrease the number of Chinese workers in Hawaiʻi, the Provisional

Government adopted a Chinese exclusion law based upon the 1892 U. S. Geary Act.

Sugar interests recognized a need to encourage other forms of agriculture, which did not

rely on Asian labor.41

Thomas Thrum summed up the problem in the Hawaiian Almanac

and Annual for 1895: “The imperative needs of our sugar and rice plantations and the

developing coffee industry for cheap labor keeps continually before the country the

question of supply to meet the demand… With the change of government and its

39

Immigration restriction at first focused on limiting Chinese immigration, and Hawaiians looked

to Japan as a solution to what they considered too many Chinese immigrants. As Japanese immigration

increased, social and political movements arose to end immigration from both nations. Ralph S.

Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, vol. 3, 1874-1893, The Kalakaua Dynasty (Honolulu: University of

Hawaii Press, 1967), Ch. 6.

40 Hawaiian planters believed the American sugar trust was behind the Chronicle’s articles as a

way to fight the renewal of the Reciprocity Treaty. Planter’s Monthly 1, no. 5 (August 1882), 89-92.

41 “The Sugar Industry in Cuba,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 21 no.5 (May 1902), 252.

208

pronounced aim toward annexation with the United States, there arises another important

question for solution, viz.: the alteration of our labor system to conform with the laws we

hope to come under.”42

Theo. H. Davies, who provided supplies and insurance to

plantations and managed the sale of plantations’ sugar through his role as head of one of

the “Big Five” sugar agencies, acknowledged the direct pressure of American opinion.

Davies was a royalist, and during the revolution was in England acting as guardian to

Crown Princess Kaʻiulani as she pursued her education abroad, but he took a pragmatic

position after the event. Davies wrote to the Honolulu Daily Bulletin, “There must be no

misconception as to how much of our prosperity depends on the goodwill of the party in

power in the United States… We cannot afford to add, to our other troubles, the hostility

which might inflict upon us such a penalty as a duty on our sugar.”43

In order to combat

the image of Hawaiʻi as a racially inassimilable plantocracy, planters reasoned, they

needed to show that they were changing Hawaiʻi’s agricultural landscape and workforce.

Attracting White Americans to Hawaiʻi

Supporters of American annexation of Hawaiʻi, in both the islands and the United

States, began a campaign to publicize opportunities for American farmers and

agricultural workers in Hawaiʻi. At the same time that the historian Frederick Jackson

Turner famously lamented the closing of the American frontier, boosters argued that a

new American frontier was emerging in Hawaiʻi, where Americans could find an outlet

42

“Hawaii’s Labor Commission,” Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1895 (Honolulu: Press

Publishing Co. Steam Print, 1894), 75.

43 Theo. H. Davies, Esq., Letters upon the Political Crisis in Hawaii, January and February, 1894

second series (Honolulu: Bulletin Publishing Company, 1894), 25.

209

for their agrarian spirit. Part of this effort came from John Stevens, the former American

minister to Hawaiʻi who in 1893 ordered U. S. sailors and marines to land in Honolulu

and support the overthrow of the monarchy. In 1894 Stevens published the book

Picturesque Hawaii, which promoted American involvement in Hawaiʻi generally and

also stressed the opportunities for Americans to work on cane plantations. Stevens took

his readers on a descriptive tour of a plantation and its labor requirements, noting, “This

may be a plantation and these may be coolies, but man who works by the sweat of his

brow has nowhere an easier lot or is better paid for his labor at its true value than right

here on these cane-fields of Hawaii…The same work now done by Chinese and Japanese

could be profitably done by many American farmers at greater advantage to their pockets

and peace of mind than by continued toiling in the homeland in an uphill struggle with

winter and mortgage and a failure of crops.”44

Planters in Hawaiʻi knew that convincing white Americans to work sugarcane

plantations was a tough sell, though it was not without precedent, as Louisiana sugarcane

planters secured some white tenant cane farmers during Reconstruction.45

Some in

Hawaiʻi acknowledged that white Americans might be reluctant to become plantation

workers, but would instead pursue small farming and homesteading. New agricultural

enterprises had the potential to get Americans invested—financially and otherwise—in

Hawaiʻi. The Paradise of the Pacific, a “monthly journal devoted to Hawaiian interests,”

44

John L. Stevens and W. B. Oleson, Picturesque Hawaii; A Charming Description of her Unique

History, Strange People, Exquisite Climate, Wondrous Volcanoes, Luxurious Productions, Beautiful Cities,

Corrupt Monarchy, Recent Revolution and Provisional Government (Philadelphia: Hubbard Publishing

Co., 1894), 40.

45 John C. Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in

Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, 1862-1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001).

210

that is, promoting the islands to Americans, ran items highlighting opportunities for

Americans to become involved in Hawaiian agriculture. In 1893, “for the investment of

capital by such of our tourist friends as may be seeking the chance to place their money

to good advantage,” the Paradise of the Pacific recommended the Makaha Coffee and

Fruit Company, Limited. Makaha would raise coffee trees as well as “some of the hardy

and choice varieties which thrive in the hot valleys of Southern California,” from

strawberries and grapes to asparagus and horseradish.46

For diverse farming to succeed, however, pest control was essential. While pests

caused relatively light damage on Hawaiʻi’s sugarcane plantations, other agricultural

endeavors were much more vulnerable to infestation. In 1882, John Horner,

superintendent of the Spreckelsville plantation on Maui, summed up Hawaiʻi’s insect

problem for the California Farmer: “Think of the thousands of acres of the richest land

on the earth, capable of producing to perfection wheat, oats, barley, hay, potatoes, in fact,

everything eatable for man or beast, yet all of the above-mentioned articles, and many

more, are imported because the worms will not allow them to grow.”47

The Ceylon coffee

blight, which had crippled Hawaiʻi’s coffee industry in the 1860s, continued to limit

coffee production and also attacked fruit orchards, causing several Hawaiian farmers to

switch from these crops to sugarcane and limiting the agricultural development of

commonly infested districts.48

In 1893, the Provisional Government established a Bureau

46

“A Chance for Capital,” Paradise of the Pacific April 1893, 57.

47 “Insect Enemies of the Sugar Cane,” Planters’ Monthly 1, no. 4 (July 1882), 87.

48 Kessler, Planter’s Paradise, Ch. 3. Of the Kona district, now known as a center for coffee

production, government officials wrote in 1877, “if the blight can be overcome it will be a prosperous

district.” Hawaii Royal Commission on the Development of the Resources of the Kingdom, Report of the

211

of Agriculture and Forestry to fight these pests. According to bureau commissioner (and

sugarcane planter) Joseph Marsden’s first annual report, “One of the first matters the

Bureau had to deal with was the prevalence of many blights and insect pests, which were

affecting the vegetation of Honolulu and its suburbs.”49

The bureau initially ordered

insecticides and sprayers to combat the pests, but soon determined that chemical controls

were only temporary checks to pests, and that “the only means of ridding the country of

them was by introducing the natural enemies of the same.”50

Biological Control Comes to Hawaiʻi

Insects that attacked coffee and fruit trees, taro, and garden plants were all a cause

of concern among Hawaiian residents, and a significant factor restricting the development

of diversified farming.51

In 1893, Joseph Marsden corresponded with Koebele and

received from him cases of ladybugs, toads, and other animals that might help control

insect pests. Hawaiʻi’s planters, businessmen, and government officials celebrated

Koebele as a sort of agricultural superhero who could rid Hawaiʻi of these injurious

insects in an instant. Nor was Hawaiʻi unique in this regard. Biological control became

known as the “Koebele method” in Germany, and in California Koebele was a local

Royal Commission on the Development of the Resources of the Kingdom: Island of Hawaii (Honolulu,

1877), 13. Likewise, in 1882 the Planters’ Monthly observed that coffee and fruit cultivation had not

progressed from the state they were in in 1850; “Thirty Years Progress,” Planters’ Monthly 1, no. 6

(September 1882), 116.

49 “Mr. Marsden’s Report,” Hawaiian Star, September 19, 1894.

50 “Mr. Marsden’s Report,” Hawaiian Star, September 19, 1894.

51 “Still Chasing Bugs,” Hawaiian Gazette, March 6, 1894.

212

hero.52

Marsden eventually offered Koebele a job in Hawaiʻi, but the Hawaiian

government could not afford to pay Koebele the $5,000 annual salary he commanded.

Honolulu’s newspapers ran headlines calling the potential to employ Koebele, “A Chance

to be Seized,” and reported that “Numbers of curious people visited Commissioner

Marsden’s office” to see the toads that Koebele shipped to the islands.53

When it seemed

that the Hawaiian government and Koebele could not come to terms, the PLSC

intervened and offered to fund half of the entomologist’s salary, something it could not

readily afford either. The company assessed an extra fee to its member sugarcane

plantations to secure the money, and though some complained that coffee growers, who

stood to benefit the most from Koebele’s work, should be the ones to pay, cane planters

acknowledged that they were much better equipped to do so than those struggling with

coffee.54

With the sugar industry’s support, Koebele arrived at Honolulu on January 20,

1894. After a tour of parts of Hawaiʻi and some research on local crop pests, Koebele

embarked on an expedition to Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, India, China, and Japan in

a search for biological control agents. The press regularly tracked his progress and

printed his communications with Commissioner Marsden.55

Koebele shipped back to

52

Coppel and Mertins, Biological Insect Pest Suppression, 24.

53 “A Chance to be Seized,” Hawaiian Star, 26 August 1893; “Mr. Koebele is Coming,” Hawaiian

Star, 9 October 1893.

54 “Planters Meeting,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser, January 23, 1894; “Planters in Caucus,”

Hawaiian Star, November 6, 1894.

55 See “Mr. Marsden’s Report,” Hawaiian Star, 19 September 1894; Pacific Commercial

Advertiser, 23 November 1894; “After Blight Destroyers,” Hawaiian Star, 1 April 1895; “Frogs and Bugs,”

Evening Bulletin, 17 June 1895.

213

Hawaiʻi over 250 varieties of ladybug as well as many different types of frogs and

toads.56

One of the first and more prominent targets of these control agents was the

“extensive infestations” of green shield scale (Pulvinaria psidii (Maskell)) on coffee trees

and other plants.57

After a brief return to Hawaiʻi, Koebele then traveled to Mexico and

Central America in search of bats to prey upon the particularly destructive Japanese

beetle.58

These efforts quickly showed signs of success. Charles Miller, manager of the

Hawaiian Coffee & Tea Company, reported to San Francisco’s Overland Monthly that

the White Aphis blight (Dactylopius) had disappeared from his coffee trees and the

Pulvinaria scale, though still common, was manageable. “The most practical and least

costly” method of controlling these pests, Miller wrote, was through the introduction of

their natural enemies.59

The recruitment of Koebele was part of a broader effort on the part of Hawaiʻi’s

planters to bring agricultural scientists to the islands. Planters discussed establishing an

agricultural experiment station for several years, and finally did so in 1895. The PLSC

secured space for a laboratory and reading room in downtown Honolulu, and appointed

as director Dr. Walter Maxwell, an agricultural chemist from Louisiana’s sugarcane

experiment station whose credentials included five years’ experience in the German beet

sugar industry and the directorship of the USDA sugar beet experiment station in

56

“In the Legislature,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 4 March 1896.

57 P. H. Timberlake, “Biological Control of Insect Pests in the Hawaiian Islands,” Proceedings of

the Hawaiian Entomological Society 6, no. 3 (October 1927): 529-556.

58 Hawaiian Star, 4 March 1896

59 Charles D. Miller, “Coffee Planting in Hawaii,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 25

(June 1895), 675.

214

Schuyler, Nebraska.60

The establishment of the experiment station and Maxwell’s

appointment as its director demonstrated planters’ desire to adopt more scientifically

advanced methods of sugarcane cultivation and sugar production. Koebele fit into this

plan as a precautionary defense against cane pests in addition to whatever immediate

service he might provide for the farming of other crops.

Such a precaution was warranted. Few sugarcane pests had established

populations in Hawaiʻi, but other sugarcane plantation systems throughout the world

were experiencing severe pest infestations. Hawaiian planters closely followed news of

pest infestations in other sugar islands, and knew that Hawaiʻi’s cane fields could be

similarly afflicted. In August 1895, reports that the Japanese beetle had attacked

sugarcane in Koʻolau, Oʻahu reinforced planters’ anxiety as well as the anxiety of the

business community at large. The Pacific Commercial Advertiser noted with alarm, “So

long as [the Japanese beetle] attacked only the commercially unproductive plants, it

affected merely the pleasure of people… If it destroys the canes the result will be a

national calamity.”61

An infestation of cane plantations would indeed have been an

economic calamity for Hawaiʻi. Sugarcane constituted ninety-four percent of the value of

all Hawaiian exports that year, and also lent indirect support to the Hawaiian economy

through allied industries, such as shipping.62

In addition to the idea that creating a

diversified agricultural landscape that would be more appealing to Americans, an interest

60

A. R. Grammer, “A History of the Experiment Station of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’

Association, 1895-1945,” Hawaiian Planters’ Record 51, no. 3 (1947), 183.

61 Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 22 August 1895.

62 Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, table 21.1, 539-40.

215

in the prevention of any infestation of their cane fields also motivated sugar planters to

fund biological control.

If funding biological control demonstrated a degree of cooperation between

sugarcane planters and others involved in agriculture, planters were simultaneously

narrowing their interests. Also in 1895, as planters worried about the Japanese beetle, the

PLSC changed its name to the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA). By

removing “labor” from the name of their organization, planters were distancing

themselves from one of the original reasons they founded the organization—the

recruitment of foreign workers. Though the HSPA maintained a committee on labor and

continued to seek ways to increase the availability of cheap workers, the old name

evoked an image of a plantation system that planters’ were trying to shed. Additionally,

by adding “sugar” to their organization’s name, the planters defined their interests more

narrowly. These sugarcane planters no longer assumed they could speak for all Hawaiian

agriculturalists, and no longer conflated the interests of sugar with the interests of all

Hawaiian agriculture. Their hope was that, given some initial encouragement and

assistance, diversified agriculture could grow, and farmers and planters of diversified

crops could organize to represent themselves. By limiting their purview to sugar, the

HSPA was making room for others to organize.

With sugarcane planters still supporting broad biological control efforts but

expressing their interests in narrower terms, the Hawaiian Provisional Government and

the Republic of Hawaii became more active in promoting marginal agricultural industries

that might flourish and attract American immigrants. Many saw coffee as an ideal

agricultural pursuit for Americans. Accordingly, in 1895, President Sanford Dole drafted

216

a new land law with special incentives for settlers on lands in the ʻOlaʻa region of the Big

Island. Dole hoped the law would be beneficial “not only in relation to residents, but also

as an inducement to the immigration of a desirable class of settlers from America and

other countries.” The Hawaiian government offered lands for lease on favorable terms,

with a newly macadamized road running through the area and into the coastal city of

Hilo, from which farmers could ship coffee and other produce to the mainland. “The

government,” Dole declared, “will be unremitting in its endeavors to further promote the

immigration of permanent settlers of a character suitable for the building up of our

population.”63

With new roads, liberal leases, and biological control managing the coffee

blight, Hawaiʻi was set to attract would-be American coffee planters.

To promote these policy initiatives, the Hawaiian government and its allies took

to the American press and print. In 1896, Sereno Bishop, editor of the long-running

Hawaiian English-language newspaper The Friend, and whose missionary father had

established one of Oʻahu’s earliest sugar mills in partnership with the Hawaiian governor

of that island, wrote a series of letters to the Washington, D. C. Evening Star under the

penname Kamehameha, to support the mission of the government and burnish Hawaiʻi’s

image as a land of agricultural opportunity for Americans. Bishop praised Hawaiʻi’s

environment as particularly suited to American annexation, calling the Hawaiian climate

“perfectly adapted to the residence of white farmers working with their own hands the

63

“Land for Homes: A Portion of President Dole’s Message,” Paradise of the Pacific 8, no. 7

(July 1895), 99; “Olaa Reservation: A Portion of the New Land Law,” Paradise of the Pacific 8, no. 6

(June 1895), 85-86. Varied political interests converged in this case. The Republic hoped that by providing

economic stimulus to ʻOlaʻa, it could coopt some of the Native Hawaiian supporters of Joseph Nāwāhi, a

popular leader of the opposition to haole rule: McGregor, Nā Kuaʻāina, 166.

217

year round.”64

The suitability of Hawaiʻi to American-style farming, in Bishop’s view,

set the archipelago apart from other sugar-producing regions dominated by absentee

planters who focused exclusively on cane cultivation. The following year, the Hawaiian

Department of Foreign Affairs published Coffee: The Coming Staple Product, a book

which featured over ninety pages of information on Hawaiʻi’s climate, environment,

economy, and government as they related to coffee cultivation. The book touted coffee as

“essentially the crop of the future” which “bids fair to become as important a staple as

sugar.” But coffee was not only ready to boom; according to the book it was also easy to

get into. The authors argued that coffee “does not require the amount of capital that sugar

does, and it can be worked remuneratively upon a small area.”65

These publicity

campaigns to convince white Americans that they could settle and farm in Hawaiʻi,

predicated on the successful management of crop pests, tied agriculture to race and

nationhood, and formed part of a broader argument that Hawaiʻi could be incorporated

into the United States.

While sugar producers used biological control to help develop and promote

diversified American farming, their investment in Koebele’s salary also provided planters

with a more direct and materially apparent benefit. In 1896, a species of aphis had

attacked the sugarcane at Kilauea Plantation on Kauaʻi. The manager of the plantation

sent word to Koebele, who rushed to the plantation from Honolulu. But, according to

64

Kamehameha [Sereno Bishop], “State of Hawaii,” Washington, D. C. Evening Star, 3 October

1896.

65 Republic of Hawaii, Department of Foreign Affairs, The Hawaiian Islands: Their Resources

Agriculture, Commercial and Financial: Coffee: The Coming Staple Product (Washington, D. C.: Gibson

Bros., 1897), 12.

218

Koebele, insects that he had already introduced made further intervention unnecessary.

Koebele wrote, “We went to the places where the pest had been thickest in the beginning

and it was found that the cane was in a perfectly healthy condition with the blight all

gone. In place of these were myriads of lady birds… These insects mean business for

they are waging effectual warfare against the blight, and before a week is over will

completely wipe it out. There was nothing for me to do[,] for my friends the lady birds

are doing the work.”66

The Hawaiian Star gushed, “Professor Koebele is a jewel. His

latest service is to save cane fields from blight ravages. In any other country the

appearance of the aphis on Kauai would have marked the beginning of devastation. The

foresight of the Planters and the Government has averted a national calamity. As the

Islands have led in several features of sugar making, so they are in advance in adopting

approved scientific methods of guarding against the ravages of insect pests.”67

Scientific methods of sugarcane planting may have protected the sugar industry,

but they did little to combat the prejudice white Americans had against becoming

plantation laborers. To attract American farmers to Hawaiʻi, planters offered to set them

up with small plots of cane and profit-sharing agreements with plantation mills. The

immigration of American farmers would both decrease planters’ reliance on Asian labor

and also improve the sugar industry’s reputation as a force for Americanizing Hawaiʻi.

Ewa Plantation, established in 1890 and located eighteen miles west of Honolulu on the

island of Oʻahu, had successful profit sharing arrangements among Chinese and Japanese

66

“Ladybirds vs. Aphis,” Hawaiian Gazette 28 July 1896.

67 Hawaiian Star, 27 July 1896.

219

agricultural workers beginning in 1891.68

Following the overthrow of the monarchy,

however, profit sharing took on new significance. In his 1894 book Picturesque Hawaii,

John Stevens held up Ewa as an example of planters’ Americanizing influence over the

islands. Ewa’s profit sharing system, Stevens wrote, “presages a radical change in the

labor system of Hawaiian plantations…Successfully adapted to all plantations it would

obviate the necessity of importing laborers from abroad, and would conserve the interests

of Anglo-Saxon civilization.”69

In Stevens’s view, as well as that of Ewa Plantation

manager W. J. Lowrie, profit sharing would free Hawaiʻi from the problem common to

plantation systems throughout the world—an underclass of politically undesirable

plantation workers—while protecting planters and the sugar industry.

Lowrie also agreed with Stevens that it would be ideal to replace Asian plantation

labor with American labor; he therefore sought to extend the profit sharing system from

Asian to American farmers. This became all the more pressing, when, in 1896, Alabama

Senator John Morgan told Hawaiʻi’s Ambassador to the United States that the large

Japanese population in the archipelago posed a problem for annexation.70

The following

year, Ewa began efforts to recruit American farmers to become profit-sharing sugarcane

farmers. In his 1897 report to the Ewa Plantation directors, Lowrie wrote, “Profit sharing

is going on as usual very satisfactorily to all concerned, and with the bright prospects of

68

Ewa Plantation, Annual Report (1891), 7, Hamilton Library, University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa

(Hereafter HL).

69 Stevens and Oleson, Picturesque Hawaii, 39.

70 Tom Coffman, Nation Within: The History of the American Occupation of Hawaiʻi, 2d ed.

(Kihei, HI: Koa Books, 2009), 199-202.

220

annexation, I feel certain we can make a success of this system with White Labor from

the United States.”71

Boosters kept hoping that more Americans would cultivate sugarcane, but white

antipathy toward the work involved leant increasing importance to the development of

other agricultural industries that American farmers might find more appealing. This need

to develop diversified agriculture in turn emphasized the need for biological control,

without which fruit and coffee trees would not render marketable produce. The success of

biological control in Hawaiʻi was indeed remarkable. In an 1897 article in the journal

Nature, R. C. L. Perkins, a British-born entomologist who conducted field research in

Hawaiʻi for the Royal Society and British Association for the Advancement of Science,

observed with admiration the increase in coffee and fruit cultivation that had taken place

in Hawaiʻi. “Few countries,” wrote Perkins, “have been more plagued by the importation

of insect pests than the Hawaiian Islands; in none have such extraordinary results

followed the introduction of beneficial species to destroy them.” The reason for the

success of biological control in Hawaiʻi was “sufficiently obvious,” according to Perkins.

“The remote position of the islands, and the consequently limited fauna,” Perkins wrote,

gave “free scope for increase to new arrivals.”72

Those who could control biological

introductions to Hawaiʻi could thus exert exceptional power over Hawaiʻi’s environment

and economy, and, planters hoped, the islands’ racial composition.

71

Ewa Plantation, Annual Report (1897), 11, HL.

72 R. C. L. Perkins, “The Introduction of Beneficial Insects into the Hawaiian Islands,” Nature 55,

no. 1430 (March 25, 1897): 499-500.

221

Entomologists such as Perkins celebrated this power to manipulate Hawaiʻi’s

biotic communities, even though they understood the costs of biological control. Perkins

lauded Koebele’s actions: “The wisdom of this course [of biological control] cannot be

too highly commended, when compared with the indifference shown by countries

similarly circumstanced, and is set-off against the reckless importation of infected plants

which had been allowed in former years.” Despite his endorsement, however, Perkins

concluded his essay on an ominous note. “I cannot help turning to the darker side of the

picture,” Perkins wrote. He noted that biological control agents were outcompeting

endemic species, and determined, “That success, from an economic point of view, will be

attained there is little doubt, and while industries are threatened, or even the gratification

of aesthetic tastes, it is certain that no consideration will be given to the native fauna.”73

Perkins had witnessed the threat biological control posed to native species during his

extensive field research in Hawaiʻi, and remarked on the spread of the mongoose and

mynah, as well as the extinction of Hawaiian species, in his journals and

correspondence.74

Less than a decade after the advent of biological control in Hawaiʻi,

the environmental impact of the program was already becoming evident, even if planters

and the government ignored this impact.

Perkins’s attention to endemic Hawaiian species reflected his training and work in

“pure” entomology, in distinction to the “economic” or “practical” entomologists, who

studied entomology as it related to agriculture. Yet even economic entomologists such as

73

Perkins, “The Introduction of Beneficial Insects into the Hawaiian Islands.”

74 R.C.L. Perkins Journal, August 15, 1894, and R.C.L. Perkins to Charles Reed Bishop, Honolulu,

February 4, 1896, in Neal L. Evenhuis, ed., Barefoot on Lava: The Journals and Correspondence of

Naturalist R. C. L. Perkins in Hawaiʻi, 1892-1901 (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 2007) 244, 306

222

Koebele understood that biological control had the power to transform the Hawaiian

environment in troubling ways. Even more so than Perkins, Koebele saw economic utility

as a greater priority than the protection of endemic species, but he acknowledged that the

ideal scenario would be to stop the inadvertent importation of invasive species altogether.

To that end, Koebele began agitating for more careful inspection of any imported plant

material and more robust quarantine regulations, for both international and interisland

shipments.75

If entomologists acknowledged that agriculture was transforming Hawaiian

ecology, annexationists argued that it was also Americanizing the islands. In 1897, the

Hawaiian branch of the Sons of the American Revolution—founded in 1895 and the first

branch of the SAR outside the United States—along with the Hawaiian branches of the

Sons of Veterans and the Grand Army of the Republic, published a pamphlet to promote

annexation. The Hawaiian climate, the pamphlet claimed, was “better suited for white

labor than that of a large part of the southern belt of the United States.” The pamphlet

went on to argue that the coup, which was led by “the principal tax-payers [and] the

leaders of industrial enterprises,” catalyzed an attempt to transition from Asian to

American labor. The pamphlet cited Hawaiian planters’ efforts to turn from contract

labor to profit-sharing arrangements, as well as the Republic’s policies to “attract

industrious farmers from the United States to develop our coffee lands.” However, the

Hawaiian Sons of the American Revolution added a warning: “if our overtures for a

closer union with the mother country are spurned, if our products are discriminated

75

“Plant Quarantine,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 12 October 1896.

223

against in American markets, and we are treated as aliens, it is certain that neither of

these undertakings [profit sharing and coffee farming] can succeed. The uncertainty that

will hang over the fate of this country will deter the most desirable class of settlers from

coming here.” “Compatriot” William R. Castle, a Honolulu lawyer and founder of Ewa

Plantation, whose family was part of the sugar agency firm Castle & Cooke, suggested

that if the United States failed to support the Americanization of Hawaiʻi’s agricultural

population through annexation, Japan would eventually accomplish a “peaceful invasion”

of the archipelago through the immigration of plantation workers.76

Seeking to further demonstrate their commitment to bring in American farmers,

and acting on manager Lowrie’s recommendation, Ewa Plantation’s directors met with

the California Commissioner of Labor and then sent Lowrie to California’s Central

Valley on a recruiting mission. Fifteen farmers arrived in October and November 1898

and established the California Farmers’ Colony at Ewa Plantation. The planters hoped to

develop a plantation labor pool that was, “American in spirit, and thus do away with the

necessity of looking to the Orient.”77

The colony, however, was a complete failure. Most

of the men left within nine months. According to Lowrie, they “flatly refused” to do most

of the work that sugarcane cultivation required. The manager concluded that, though

76

An Address by the Hawaiian Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, Sons of Veterans,

and Grand Army of the Republic to their Compatriots in America Concerning the Annexation of Hawaii

(Washington, D. C.: Gibson Bros., Printers and Bookbinders, 1897). The threat of a “peaceful invasion” of

Hawaiʻi by Japanese workers, with ominous implications for the U. S., was common, and even made its

way into popular fiction. See, for example, J. H. Palmer, The Invasion of New York; Or, How Hawaii was

Annexed (New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1897), and, for an analysis of Palmer’s work in the cultural

context of the annexation debate, John Rieder, “John Henry Palmer's The Invasion of New York, or, How

Hawaii Was Annexed: Political Discourse and Emergent Mass Culture in 1897,” in Future Wars: The

Anticipations and the Fears, David Seed, ed., (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 85-102.

77 W. J Lowrie and George F. Renton, Why Hawaii Has So Few White Agricultural Laborers and

Small Farmers (Honolulu, 1900).

224

white Americans were capable of performing all the labor required on cane plantations,

an immigration scheme to substitute Asian cane workers with American ones was

untenable.78

Other similar projects, such as the recruitment of black plantation workers

from Louisiana and Alabama, fared similarly.79

The experience of the California Farmers’ Colony did not deter boosters from

continuing to try to win over Americans and divorce the Hawaiian sugarcane plantation

system from its association with Asian contract labor. Lorrin Thurston, one of the leaders

of the 1893 coup and the annexationist movement, wrote in Outlook that less than one

third of Hawaiʻi’s plantation workers were contract laborers, and it was “confidently

expected that the system will be abolished entirely within a short time.”80

George

McClellan, who worked with the Hawaiian sugar industry and government to compile A

Hand Book on the Sugar Industry in the Hawaiian Islands, wrote that environment and

science alleviated the problems of plantation labor: “The most striking evidence of the

steadily improving results of scientific cultivation, systematized modern methods of

operation, and perfected plants for manufacture, is shown in the increased tonnage of

sugar exported per capita for the total force engaged in its cultivation and manufacture,”

thus reducing the need for reliance on foreign labor.81

Moreover, Hawaiʻi offered a

78

Ibid.

79 “Report of the Commissioner of Labor on Hawaii,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 22, no. 7 (July

1903), 290.

80 Lorrin A. Thurston, “President Dole and the Hawaiian Question,” Outlook 58, no. 6 (February

5, 1898), 318.

81 George B. McClellan, ed., A Hand Book on the Sugar Industry of the Hawaiian Islands;

Together with a List of the Plantations, Agents, Managers, etc. (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Company,

Ltd., 1899), 14.

225

benign and attractive environment for Americans: “white laborers can work successfully

in the Hawaiian climate, since the heat never exceeds 88 degrees, and is much less severe

than that in a harvest field in the States. And it is hoped that an increasing number of

steady industrious American laborers may be led to take up cane cultivation in

Hawaiʻi.”82

Annexation Achieved; Diversified Agriculture Abandoned

Annexationists finally achieved their goal in 1898. President William McKinley

advocated annexation since he took office in 1897, but his treaty was defeated in the

Senate. In July of 1898, U.S. Representative Francis Newlands of Nevada introduced a

joint resolution to annex Hawaiʻi that required only a simple majority rather than the two-

thirds vote necessary for the ratification of a treaty. That several attempts at annexation

failed, and that one succeeded in 1898 only through a joint resolution, suggests that

annexation was indeed a contentious issue in the United States. The racial composition of

Hawaiʻi and the islands’ supposed fitness for white American settlement was but one of

several factors influencing the annexation debate, but it was one that Hawaiʻi’s cane

planters had sought to turn to their advantage.

Indeed, during the brief era of the Republic of Hawaii, those intent on

Americanizing Hawaiʻi through agriculture could look upon some modest successes. The

population of Hawaiian residents born in the United States was increasing, from 1,928 in

1890 to 2,266 in 1896, and would continue to increase to 4,238 in 1900.83

Coffee exports

82

Ibid. 22.

83 Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 25.

226

were also increasing, from 118,800 pounds in 1895 to 824,900 pounds in 1899. By 1900

there were 580 coffee farms covering a total of 6,451 acres. Farmers were also raising

more bananas, pineapples, potatoes, and corn.84

The number of people engaged in

farming—excluding laborers—increased from 5,377 in 1890 to 7,570 in 1896.85

These gains were enough for sugarcane planters’ purposes. With annexation,

Hawaiian sugar became a domestic product of the United States, settling the tariff

question. Along with any doubts over future access to the American market, the need to

promote Hawaiʻi as a paradise for white American farmers dissipated. With annexation,

planters had, according to one analysis, “a sense of security and permanency” that had

long eluded them.86

Sugarcane planters therefore had little reason to continue supporting

efforts to make Hawaiʻi more agriculturally diverse. The HSPA rejected a proposal by the

USDA to merge their agricultural experiment station with a federal one, “as it seemed the

part of wisdom to have the full time of our director devoted to the sugar interests.”87

Planters also had little need to continue efforts to become less dependent upon Asian

labor in their cane fields. On the contrary, planters needed Asian workers more after

84

Republic of Hawaii, Department of Foreign Affairs, The Hawaiian Islands: Their Resources

Agriculture, Commercial and Financial: Coffee: The Coming Staple Product (Washington, D. C.: Gibson

Bros., 1897).

85 Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 552; 335; 122. As coffee trees take three years to

mature, the increase in exports reflects an earlier increase in cultivation.

86 Boris Emmet, The California and Hawaiian Sugar Refining Corporation of San Francisco,

California: A Study of the Origin, Business Policies, and Management of a Co-operative Refining and

Distributing Organization Stanford Business Series No. II (Stanford: Graduate School of Business,

Stanford University, 1928), 1.

87 HSPA Presidential Address of C. M. Cooke, November 1900, quoted in A. R. Grammer, “A

History of the Experiment Station of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, 1895-1945,” Hawaiian

Planters’ Record 51, no. 3 (1947), 187.

227

annexation than before. U. S. law forbade financially assisted immigration, something

that the small numbers of European immigrants that had come to Hawaiʻi under the

Kingdom and Provisional Government relied upon.88

Moreover, the Territorial

Government reversed its insistence that white Americans could become agricultural

laborers on Hawaiian plantations, and instead conceded that “it is simply a physical

impossibility for the Anglo-Saxon satisfactorily to perform the severe labor required in

the sugar fields.”89

Asian laborers seemed to be the only option. In 1898, 9,888 Japanese

workers came to the islands, and in 1899 19,908 Japanese immigrated.90

The Olaa Sugar

Company on Hawaiʻi Island, established in 1899, bought up large tracts of lands only

recently turned to coffee, and planted cane in its place.91

Among the founders of Olaa

were Lorrin A. Thurston, Alfred W. Carter, and Samuel M. Damon—all major figures in

the overthrow of the monarchy and the push for annexation.92

Part of the reason that attempts to diversify Hawaiian agriculture were so small

was that sugar was much more lucrative than any other crop. William Stubbs, the director

of the Louisiana Experiment Station, who visited Hawaiʻi in 1900, did not see much

potential for farming beyond cane. “There are in the islands now two or three settlements

88

“Labor Conditions in Hawaii (From the Annual Report of the Governor of the Territory of

Hawaii for 1904),” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 24, no. 5 (May 1905), 229.

89 “The Governor’s Report on Labor Question,” Honolulu Evening Bulletin Industrial Edition,

November 1901.

90 Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 98. On the strategy of sugarcane planters to delay

Japanese immigration until after annexation was settled, see Coffman, Nation Within.

91 “Island of Hawaii,” Paradise of the Pacific 15 (January 1902), 12.

92 Olaa Plantation’s founders hoped at first to attract American small farmers to grow cane on

shares, without much success.

228

of American farmers,” Stubbs observed, “who are trying to cultivate vegetables for the

home markets. But the attempt will probably be abandoned as previous attempts have

been.” Stubbs determined, “It is extremely improbable that there will ever be any

diversity in farming in Hawaii, for the cultivation of sugar eats up everything else. The

price of sugar will have to fall far below the present price before other crops can be raised

on suitable lands in the islands.”93

Indeed, these agricultural projects were miniscule in

comparison to the sugar industry. The Planters’ Monthly wrote positively of the

“American colony at Wahaiwa,” on Oʻahu, where white farmers were growing oranges,

bananas, pineapples, figs, olives, mangos, peaches, and pears, but the colony consisted of

only fifty-three people cultivating fifteen hundred acres.94

Sugarcane, by comparison,

was planted on one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of Hawaiian land in 1898.95

Though biological control protected coffee and fruit trees from pests, it could do little to

help their produce in the market.

For a brief but crucial moment in Hawaiian history, sugarcane planters worked

with other haole to promote agriculture in crops other than sugarcane by white American

smallholders. Planters used their financial resources and access to cutting-edge

agricultural science to engineer a natural environment conducive to diversified farming,

which they thought would help them Americanize the islands and make annexation more

palatable to Americans. Agricultural science and biological control made diversified

93

“Prof. Stubbs’ Account of His Recent Visit to Hawaiʻi” (reprinted from Louisiana Sugar

Planter’s Journal) Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 19 no. 11 (November 1900): 496.

94 “Agriculture and Forestry in Hawaii,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 20 no.7 (July 1901), 297.

95 Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 359.

229

farming viable, but they did nothing to diminish planters’ power over Hawaiʻi and its

natural resources. On the contrary, though biological control may have been put to use for

the cultivation of citrus, coffee, and other plants, it reflected sugarcane planters’

increasing scientific sophistication and control. Planters had come that much closer to

achieving J. W. Marsh’s half-century-old dream of overcoming nature by nature.

230

CHAPTER 7: PLANTER’S PARADISE

Hawaii has been called, and justly called, the

Paradise of the Pacific. But it is a paradise not only of

natural beauties and wonders; it is also a paradise of

modern industrial combination. In no part of the United

States is a single industry so predominant as the sugar

industry is in Hawaii, and nowhere else, perhaps, has the

centralized control of property reached a state of greater

perfection. Hawaii furnishes a vivid illustration of the way

in which private business organization in its final stages of

development permeates, influences, and controls the life of

a country.

Ray Stannard Baker, “Wonderful Hawaii: A World

Experiment Station,” 19111

Jack, with his unquestionable love of natural

beauty, was ever impressed with man’s lordly harnessing of

the Outlaw, Nature, leading her by the mouth to perform

his work upon the earth.

Charmian London, Jack London and Hawaii, 19182

One decade after the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani, eight years after the

founding of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA) and its sugarcane

agricultural experiment station, and five years after annexation to the United States, a tiny

insect suddenly posed a giant threat to the Hawaiian sugar industry. The sugarcane

leafhopper (Perkinsiella saccharicida) arrived in Hawaiʻi sometime around the turn of

the twentieth century and caused severe damage to Hawaiʻi’s cane plantations by 1903.3

1 Ray Stannard Baker, “Wonderful Hawaii: A World Experiment Station; I. How King Sugar

Rules in Hawaii,” American Magazine November 1911, 28.

2 Charmian Kittredge London, Jack London and Hawaii, (London: Mills & Boon, Limited, 1918),

294.

3 The leafhopper laid its eggs in the leaf or stem of the cane, near where the two meet. The egg

laying and subsequent hatching of the larvae caused harmful scars in the cane; the insects then destroyed

leaves by feeding on their juices; and the excretions of the leafhoppers (called, “honeydew”) attracted fungi

that afflicted the cane with “rind disease” and “root disease,” causing the cane to deteriorate further. R. C.

231

The leafhopper’s arrival could hardly have come at a more perilous time for the Hawaiian

sugar industry. Annexation had increased costs for planters importing foreign goods, such

as Australian coal, which was used for milling cane.4 In 1900, the Hawaiian Organic Act

established the framework for the islands’ territorial government and abolished plantation

labor contracts, which were illegal under U.S. law. As many had predicted, extension of

the Organic Act to Hawaiʻi caused a labor shortage, worker organization, strikes, and

higher wages. In 1901-1902, a global production glut depressed sugar prices. In 1903, the

leafhopper caused over three million dollars in losses for planters (the value of sugar and

molasses sales to the mainland U. S. that year was $25,311,000) as the insect destroyed

enough cane to produce over eighty thousand tons of sugar; total sugar produced dropped

from 437,991 tons in 1903 to 367,475 tons the following year.5 A writer for the HSPA

recalled, “Fields attacked by leaf hoppers blackened, withered, died. The hum of their

devouring presence could be heard at great distances. The swarm of their incredible

billions moved like a visible cloud across the land.”6

This was an inauspicious start to the new century. It was also a predictable

outcome of the expansion of the sugarcane plantation system. As the Hawaiian sugar

L. Perkins, The Leaf-Hopper of the Sugar Cane Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry,

Division of Entomology, Bulletin no. 1 (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Co., Ltd., 1903); R. C. L. Perkins,

“On Some Diseases of Cane Specially Considered in Relation to the Leaf-Hopper Pest and to the Striping

of Cane,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 23 (mislabeled as 24), no. 12, (December 1904), 633-637.

4 “Prof. Stubbs’ Description of Planting Cane in Hawaii,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 20, no.1

(January 1901), 7-15.

5 Territory of Hawaii Board of Agriculture and Forestry, Report of the Division of Entomology for

the Year Ending December 31, 1905 (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Col, Ltd., 1906), 99. Jared G. Smith,

The Big Five (Honolulu: Advertiser Publishing Co., Ltd., 1942); Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii,

table 21.4, 546; Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 418.

6 Vandercook, King Cane, 49.

232

industry expanded over the previous decades, it created greater environmental problems

for itself. Yet even problems such as the leafhopper invasion revealed planters’

increasing control over both the natural environment and society in Hawaiʻi. The

leafhopper’s arrival--and the response of Hawaiʻi’s planters--demonstrated just how great

planters’ power had become. By the early twentieth century, Hawaiʻi had become a

planter’s paradise, where the natural and social environments were optimized for the

production of sugar.

As this dissertation has argued, the rise of the Hawaiian sugar industry over the

course of the nineteenth century was incremental and due to the complex intersection of

multiple factors, from the pre-contact Hawaiian agricultural regime, to the cultural

agendas of haole explorers and missionaries, international politics and trade,

unanticipated environmental changes, and investment in agricultural science and

technology. This last point was key to planters’ continued success in the twentieth

century in the face of challenges such as that posed by the leafhopper. Science and

technology not only helped Hawaiʻi’s planters overcome the leafhopper, it helped them

consolidate their power in Hawaiʻi and become world leaders in sugar production.

Victims of their Own Success

Though the invasion of the leafhopper may have been unintentional, it was hardly

an accident. Planters were victims of their own success. Planters’ policies of expanding

and intensifying their operations had finally caught up with them. Monoculture planting

is inherently vulnerable to pests because planting large areas of land in a single crop

provides an overabundance of food and habitat for the pests and simultaneously destroys

233

the habitats of animals that may prey upon or compete with the pests. The number of

acres devoted to cane planting had been increasing rapidly through the late nineteenth

century. Information on cane acreage is incomplete, but the statistics available

demonstrate a trend of remarkable growth: sugarcane covered 12,225 acres in 1874, two

years before the enactment of the reciprocity treaty with the United States; in 1879 that

number had increased to 22,455; then 39,350 acres in 1882; 60,787 in 1889; 125,000

acres in 1898--more than ten times the acreage of twenty-five years earlier.7 By 1899, the

federal census reported that 75.6 percent of all Hawaiian land under cultivation was

planted in cane.8

Such rapid expansion of sugarcane across Hawaiian lands was largely the result of

new irrigation projects. Between 1890 and 1900, investment in irrigation jumped from

two million to over ten million dollars.9 Planters not only had workers dig new tunnels

and ditches to harness the waters of the islands’ streams, but also excavated new artesian

wells, which added hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day to the available

water supply.10

Tapping into vast basal aquifers, planters were able to turn some of the

7 Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 359-60.

8 Perry Elliott, Production of Sugar in the United States and Foreign Countries U.S. Department

of Agriculture Bulletin No. 473 (Washington, D.C., 1917), 16.

9 Another indication of the increase in the importance of irrigation is that in 1870 it made up seven

percent of total capital in the Hawaiian sugar industry; by 1900 it accounted for twenty-six percent. J. A.

Mollett, Capital in Hawaiian Sugar: Its Formation and Relation to Labor and Output, 1870-1957

Agricultural Economics Bulletin 21 (Honolulu: Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station College of

Tropical Agriculture, 1961), 23.

10 Dorance and Morgan, Sugar Islands, 181. For more on artesian wells in Hawaiʻi, see Kessler,

Planter’s Paradise, Ch. 4. See also, Carol Wilcox, Sugar Water: Hawaii’s Plantation Ditches (Honolulu,

University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1998).

234

sunniest and driest lands to cane cultivation.11

With few cloudy days and little concern

over receiving too much rain at the wrong time, plantations using well irrigation were

able to systematize field operations and produce fantastic sugar yields beyond the reach

of most other plantations. By 1903, Forestry & Irrigation, the magazine of the American

Forestry Association, wrote that Hawaiʻi’s irrigation works made up “probably the most

expensive system in existence, but the cost is justified by the increased productivity.”12

Moreover, unlike Hawaiʻi’s relatively few streams, which had a long history of riparian

law governing their usage, the capacity of basal aquifers appeared to be close to limitless

and had few agricultural claims upon it other than large planters with the resources to

sink and operate wells. As late as 1906, Michael O’Shaughnessy, an Irish civil engineer

who in 1889 began working on irrigation projects for Hawaiian sugarcane planters, wrote

that the “artesian supply of the Island of Oahu is the most peculiar most generous found

in any country of such a limited area.”13

By the late nineteenth century, with annexation promising to bring government

stability and remove the American tariff, investment in irrigation and the expansion of the

plantation system was poised to increase even more dramatically than before. In 1897,

with a wink to annexationist arguments, one booster wrote that “the development of

[sugarcane planting on] Oahu has only just begun. There are thousands of acres yet lying

11

On solar radiation on Hawaiʻi’s cane plantations, see, Jen-Hu Chang, “The Role of Climatology

in the Hawaiian Sugar-Cane Industry: An Example of Applied Agricultural Climatology in the Tropics,”

Pacific Science XVII (October 1963): 379-397.

12 Bristow Adams, “Sugar Irrigation in Hawaii,” Forestry & Irrigation 9 (March 1903), 122.

13 M. M. O’Shaughnessy, “Irrigation Works in the Hawaiian Islands,” Journal of Electricity,

Power and Gas 17, no. 21 (November 24, 1906), 439-43.

235

idle, which energy and engineering skill will develop in the next few years, if political

conditions are only favorable.”14

Workers spoke of landscapes wholly dominated by

cane, where one “couldn’t see anything but cane and some mountains.”15

Any animal

such as the leafhopper that found shelter and sustenance in cane fields had ample space to

thrive.

Even with irrigation leading to the expansion of monoculture cane fields, Hawaiʻi

might have remained free of the leafhopper. The expanse of the Pacific Ocean prevented

insects such as the leafhopper from migrating to the archipelago on their own. As

Hawaiʻi’s superintendent of entomology wrote, “It would be utterly impossible for such

pests to enter this Territory by natural distribution of their own migration.”16

Rather, the

leafhopper came to Hawaiʻi as part of the new portmanteau biota of the industrial

sugarcane plantation system: the species that circulated through the sugar-producing

world along with varieties of cane. Though sugarcane had been growing in Hawaiʻi since

the arrival of first Polynesian settlers, cane planters sought varieties that would be better

suited to plantation agriculture and would help them achieve higher yields of sucrose. By

the late nineteenth century, after decades of heavy cultivation, cane varieties that had

been in widespread use began to fail. This led to a new search for more amenable cane

varieties. In the early 1880s, planters began importing and distributing cane varieties

14

A. T. Atkinson, “Advancement of Oahu,” Paradise of the Pacific 10 (March 1897), 38.

15 Tsuru Yamauchi, n.d., oral history interview, published in Ethnic Studies Oral History Project,

Uchinanchu, 488; quoted in Gary Y. Okihiro, Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865-

1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 31. Also in Ronald T. Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation

Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), 89.

16 Territory of Hawaii Board of Agriculture and Forestry, Report of the Division of Entomology for

the Year Ending December 31, 1905 (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Co, Ltd., 1906), 99.

236

from throughout the Pacific, increasing the likelihood of importing pests.17

In 1901 alone,

Albert Koebele, the celebrated HSPA entomologist who was responsible for

implementing biological control practices in Hawaiʻi, along with three other men

associated with the HSPA, imported thirty foreign varieties of sugarcane.18

As with

previous innovations, the drive to advance cane cultivation with foreign varieties was tied

to a desire to reduce the need for plantation labor. The foreign cane variety Yellow

Caledonia, for example, became popular in wetter cane districts because the cane shed its

leaves on its own, thus eliminating the labor-intensive task of stripping cane leaves.19

This led to the importation of foreign sugarcane pests along with the plants. Planters thus

created near perfect conditions to bring the leafhopper to Hawaiʻi and allow it cause as

much damage as possible once it arrived, which is indeed what happened in the first years

of the twentieth century.

Planters cannot take all the blame for the rise of the leafhopper, however, as

environmental conditions in Hawaiʻi also contributed to the leafhopper’s success. The

leafhopper was known in other places, but was not a particularly harmful pest.20

The

same isolation that made it impossible for many insects to migrate to Hawaiʻi led to the

development of an ecosystem with no natural enemies to insects such as the leafhopper.

Moreover, sugarcane has an unusually long growing season in Hawaiʻi, which makes the

17

“Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Planters’ Labor and Supply Company,” Planters’

Monthly 2, no. 8 (November 1883), 180.

18 Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 20, no. 12 (December 1901): 535.

19 C. F. Eckart, “Varieties of Cane,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 23, no.5 (May 1904), 180.

20 Vandercook, King Cane, 49.

237

archipelago even more hospitable to pests. While in most places the advent of annual

rainy or cold seasons forces planters to harvest their cane one year after planting and

leave an interval between harvesting and the next planting when no cane is available to

feed and shelter leafhoppers, there is no such seasonal constraint in Hawaiʻi. Hawaiian

planters could thus leave their cane in the ground until it has achieved a higher level of

sucrose, usually about eighteen to twenty-four months.21

This extra cultivation time gave

pests extra time to disperse and breed. With large landholdings, Hawaiian planters often

harvested only half of their crop in a given year, or even less. In 1898, out of 125,000

acres planted, planters harvested only 55,235 acres; in 1909, with 201,641 acres planted,

106,127 were harvested.22

This practice ensured a continual habitat and food for crop

pests.

“Burying the Hatchet”

The leafhopper galvanized the sugar industry and increased planters’ cooperation

both in business and in research and development of scientific agriculture and sugar

production. Jared G. Smith, who came to Hawaiʻi as an employee of the USDA’s

Hawaiian Agricultural Experiment Station, saw the incursion of the leafhopper as a

turning point in the history of the relations between different sugar agencies. “Brought

together by the threat of utter destruction of the industry,” Smith wrote, “the warring

21

Another reason planters adopted a longer growing season was that doing so allowed them to

spread planting and harvesting work throughout the year, thus improving labor efficiency and control over

workers. A. J. Mangelsdorf, “Sugar-Cane: As Seen from Hawaii,” Economic Botany 4, no. 2 (1950): 165.

22 Delos Lewis Van Dine, The Sugar-cane Insects of Hawaii, U.S. Department of Agriculture,

Bureau of Entomology Bulletin No. 93 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911), 11;

Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 359.

238

agencies buried the hatchet and mobilized in a common cause.”23

Though it was likely an

exaggeration to call the agencies—Honolulu-based firms that handled plantations’

business affairs—“warring,” the threat of the leafhopper did inaugurate an era of

increased cooperation. The sugar agencies became increasingly integrated, often having

members sit on each other’s boards and holding stock in each other’s plantations, creating

business relationships among plantations and their agencies that were much more

cooperative than competitive. Already struggling to protect their position in the mainland

sugar market, which was dominated by a few sugar refiners, in 1904 thirty-three

plantations representing eighty percent of Hawaiʻi’s raw sugar established a cooperative

to refine their own sugar in California.24

Smith’s observation was apt. Cooperation, consolidation, and integration among

Hawaiʻi’s sugar agencies all increased in the decade after the leafhopper’s arrival. The

1911 U.S. Commission of Labor report on conditions in Hawaiʻi noted, “The past five

years have witnessed increasing centralization of this (the sugar) industry; large

plantations have been combined into still larger plantations; sugar-factor firms, which

represent the center of financial control, are fewer but stronger than in 1905; local

transportation, both by land and by water, is more centralized and in more direct relations

with the sugar-producing interests; and steamship lines to the mainland are more closely

allied than ever with sugar factors and planters.”25

From the several sugar factor firms

23

Smith, The Big Five.

24 Emmet, The California and Hawaiian Sugar Refining Corporation; Hawaiian Sugar Planters’

Association, Sugar in Hawaii, 68.

25 Ray Stannard Baker, “Wonderful Hawaiʻi: A World Experiment Station; I. How King Sugar

Rules in Hawaiʻi,” American Magazine, November 1911, 28.

239

that existed in previous decades, five emerged to control most of the industry by the first

decade of the twentieth century. All five of these were associated with haole families that

had resided in Hawaiʻi for generations. Of these, two were controlled by missionary

families, and merchants originally from New England, Britain, and Germany established

the other three. Rather than curtail operations in the face of leafhopper infestations, these

agencies and their allied planters increased their reliance on sugarcane. They sought to

make up for shortfalls in sugar production by turning more lands to cane cultivation.

Though 1904 output was much lower than that of 1903, it still exceeded that of all

previous years. Planters continued to invest in more ambitious irrigation projects, such as

the Kohala Ditch on the Big Island. Constructed in 1905 and 1906, at the height of

concern over the leafhopper, the Kohala Ditch included nine miles of tunnels and

fourteen of open waterways, and fed water to five different plantations. In 1907, to ship

their sugar to the mainland, sugar interests invested in the Matson Navigation

Company.26

Stopping the Leafhopper

One of the clearest ways planters and agents united was in their support for

agricultural science. The HSPA had already prioritized scientific research in the 1890s

with its investment in biological control. As with the infestations of the cane borer in the

1870s, identification of the leafhopper was at first a challenge, but by this time networks

of communication and knowledge, as well as scientific expertise in Hawaiʻi, had

26

California and Hawaiian Sugar Company, These Islands of Hawaii: A Story of Earth’s Fire,

Sun’s Energy, and Man’s Ingenuity (California and Hawaiian Sugar Co., 194-), 633.61 H31th, HHS.

240

improved. The British entomologist R.C.L. Perkins used his connections to British

entomological researchers as well as the global scientific community to discover the

insect’s origin. “After much correspondence with other countries,” Perkins followed

several leads, and obtained via Germany specimens of Javanese insects, only to discover

the Hawaiian leafhopper was a different species. Six months after Perkins began

searching for the pest’s origin, he found that it was identical to an Australian leafhopper,

and that the Australian leafhopper had probably arrived in Hawaiʻi in a shipment of

Australian seed cane.27

In 1905, with the leafhopper threatening ruin, the HSPA founded

its Entomological Division, which dispatched Koebele and Perkins to Australia to study

the leafhopper and its natural enemies, and continued for years to keep an entomologist

traveling abroad in search of beneficial insects.28

The HSPA’s entomological research put it at the cutting edge of an agricultural

problem that was becoming increasingly pressing throughout the world. An article in the

July 1904 Planters’ Monthly noted that estimates suggested insects destroyed ten percent

of all farm products in the United States. Hawaiian planters, the article argued, were not

willing to accept those losses. According to the article, the successful Hawaiian cane

planter “has become a pretty expert economic entomologist.”29

By contrast, insect control

in other sugar lands had changed little over the course of the nineteenth century. In the

27

R. C. L. Perkins, The Leaf-Hopper of the Sugar Cane Board of Commissioners of Agriculture

and Forestry, Division of Entomology, Bulletin no. 1 (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Co., Ltd., 1903), 7.

28 Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association Experiment Station, The Relation of Applied Science to

Sugar Production in Hawaii (Honolulu, 1915).

29 John Isaac, “Insects Beneficial to Man,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 23, no. 7 (July 1904),

303.

241

West Indies, where labor was cheaper and work cycles followed more pronounced

seasonal fluctuations between high and low demand for labor, planters still had workers

collect eggs of the moth borer pest.30

The search for leafhopper control agents progressed fitfully. Koebele, who had

gone to the mainland U.S. to recuperate from an illness, followed some leads on

leafhopper parasites to Ohio, but nothing he found there performed well in Hawaiʻi. He

and Perkins, and other entomologists then went to great lengths to identify and obtain

many enemies of the leafhopper in Australia, Fiji, and China, but delivering them to

Hawaiʻi alive and healthy, and then establishing populations of the insects in Hawaiʻi

proved to be a challenge.31

Once the HSPA had established populations of control agents,

the association distributed colonies to the plantations. In 1905 conditions began to

improve, yet there was no guarantee that control agents would be effective on all

Hawaiian plantation conditions. Beginning in early 1905, Ewa Plantation, one of the

plantations most vulnerable to the leafhopper, introduced several different biological

control agents to its fields, but the leafhopper persisted. From 1903 to 1906, Ewa’s sugar

output fell from 33,213.9 tons to 29,478.8 tons, until production finally rebounded in

1907. The work necessary to introduce biological control agents was immense. Ewa’s

plantation manager placed in the fields 1,241 colonies of a variety of different control

agent species, or about one colony for every three acres of cane, and replenished the

control agents within each colony every three weeks.32

By May of 1908, Ewa was

30

“Treatment of Insect Pests,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 22, no. 6 (June 1903), 266.

31 Pemberton, “Highlights in the History of Entomology in Hawaii 1778-1963,” 707-708.

32 Ewa Plantation, Annual Report, 1905; 1906; 1907, HL.

242

managing leafhopper infestations well enough that the plantation began boring new wells

to increase cane acreage.33

Cane Breeding

Planters’ cooperation and investment in scientific agriculture spread well beyond

biological control. Plantations implemented greater differentiation between field and mill

operations, employing agricultural chemists and engineers to superintend mills and

compliment plantation managers’ expertise in the field.34

Already by 1900, the U. S.

Census Bureau’s bulletin on agriculture in Hawaiʻi found a sophisticated industry, noting

that Hawaiʻi was third to Cuba and Java in sugar production, and that it surpassed even

those two in average yield per acre. The reason for this, the bulletin observed, was that

“methods employed in cane cultivation are more advanced in Hawaii than in any other of

the world’s sugar-producing centers.”35

Scientific development continued with the

organization of new groups of specialists such as the Hawaiian Sugar Chemists’

Association, which held its first meeting in 1902, and became even more pronounced

after the leafhopper began damaging crop yields. After some debate over the utility and

purpose of the HSPA experiment station, planters also expanded operations with

substations throughout the islands so that the HSPA could run experiments in a variety of

33

“A Castle and Cooke History,” unpublished MS (1950?), 83, HMCS.

34 Ph. N., “On the Superintendence of Sugar Factories,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 24, no. 10

(October 1905), 430-32.

35 “The Agricultural Development of Hawaii,” Hawaiian Annual (1903), 58.

243

diverse climates and environmental conditions.36

The HSPA also invested in cutting-edge

research facilities, building a state of the art microscope installation at the Experiment

Station.37

Further uniting geographically dispersed and plantations and independent-

minded planters, the HSPA enlisted its member plantations to coordinate field

experiments under a uniform standard of scientific rigor so that planters might benefit

from more broadly conducted research.38

As HSPA entomologists worked to neutralize the insects pests that had already

established populations in Hawaiʻi, they also set out to insure that no new insect

invasions would occur. Planters recognized that the threat of foreign insects demanded a

collective response, and the organizational and political power of the HSPA enabled such

action. The HSPA lobbied for the revision of Hawaiʻi’s plant quarantine laws, which had

first been enacted in 1890 but did not establish any mechanism for inspection. In 1902,

Perkins became a consultant for the Bureau of Agriculture and Forestry and began

inspections for all plant imports to the islands. In the following years, with the leafhopper

presenting an increasingly urgent threat, the territorial government built a quarantine and

disinfection complex for imported plants, and the HSPA began having entomologists

inspect the islands’ plantations for signs of infestation. In 1904, the HSPA successfully

lobbied the territorial government to impose an embargo on foreign varieties of

36

“The Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Experiment Station,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 24, no. 10

(October 1905), 432-39.

37 “Reports of Committee on Experiment Station,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 24, no. 11

(November 1905), 521-571.

38 C. F. Eckart, “Field Experiments with Sugar Cane,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 24, no. 4

(April 1905).

244

sugarcane, and by 1905 the HSPA Experiment Station had erected a “special insect-proof

cane propagation house” as a further precaution against stowaway pests on imported

seedling canes.39

With tight regulations on the importation of foreign plants and animals, the HSPA

not only prevented the invasion of new pests, but also prevented the introduction of

several diseases that afflicted sugarcane in other regions, such as sereh, gumming disease,

and Fiji disease.40

The greatest benefit for the sugar industry to come out of the stricter

quarantine, however, was in the development of a sophisticated sugarcane breeding

program. Cane breeding was a recent innovation—it was not until 1889 that sugarcane

specialists in Barbados and Java independently discovered that they could propagate new

varieties of cane.41

While Hawaiʻi’s planters took notice of cane breeding in the 1890s,

the arrival of the leafhopper gave planters new motivation to pursue the development of

new cane varieties.42

As the HSPA entomologists struggled to find and send to Hawaiʻi

39

“Report on Precautions to be Observed with Regard to Cane Importations,” Hawaiian Planters’

Monthly 21 no. 6 (June 1902), 265-272. Pemberton, “Highlights in the History of Entomology in Hawaii

1778-1963,” 723-724; Osgood and Wiemer, “Plant Introduction Needs of the Hawaiian Sugar Industry,” in

Alien Plant Invasions in Native Ecosystems of Hawaiʻi: Management and Research, ed. Charles P. Stone,

Clifford W. Smith, and J. Timothy Tunison, (Honolulu: Cooperative National Park Resources Studies Unit,

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 1992), 727; D. J. Heinz, “Sugarcane,” in Crop Improvement in Hawaii:

Past, Present, and Future, James L. Brewbaker, ed., Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station College of

Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources Miscellaneous Publication 180 (Honolulu: University of

Hawaii, 1982); “Reports of the Committee on Experiment Station,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 24, no. 11

(November 1905), 536.

40 Mangelsdorf, “Sugar-Cane: As Seen from Hawaii,” 169.

41 For an overview of the development of sugarcane breeding, with attention to Barbados, see J. H.

Galloway, “Botany in the Service of Empire: The Barbados Cane-Breeding Program and the Revival of the

Caribbean Sugar Industry, 1880s-1930s,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86, no. 4

(December 1996): 682-706.

42 “How Sugar-Canes are Raised from Seed,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 22, no. 9 (September

1903), 400; “Disease Resisting Canes,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 23, no. 6 (June 1904), 216.

245

natural enemies of the leafhopper, the USDA experiment station released a bulletin

arguing that prevention was a more effective tool than direct combat, and that the best

means of prevention was the cultivation of sugarcane varieties more resistant to the

leafhopper. In mid-1904 a variety of cane that was somewhat less vulnerable to the

leafhopper came to the HSPA’s attention, that their experiment station began its own

cane breeding program; by the following year, they had established eight nurseries for the

propagation of new canes.43

With the embargo on foreign cane varieties in place, the HSPA increased research

into its sugarcane breeding program. The HSPA, with its strong interest in scientific cane

cultivation, closely followed the development of foreign cane breeding programs and the

creation of new cane varieties.44

This led to the development of hardier, sweeter cane

varieties, most notably the variety H-109. The HSPA Agricultural Experiment Station

developed H-109 in 1909, and distributed seedlings to several plantations. In 1914, after a

few years of cultivating enough H-109 cane for seed, Ewa Plantation risked its future by

ripping up the naturally occurring variety known as Lahaina cane in its fields and

replacing it with the new variety. The gamble paid off. H-109 was more resistant to pests

and diseases, grew more cane per acre, and produced more sugar per ton of cane than

Lahaina or any other previously used variety. By 1920 Ewa raised H-109 almost

43

“A Promising Cane,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 23, no. 7 (July 1904), 259-261; A. R.

Grammer, “A History of the Experiment Station of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, 1895-1945,”

Hawaiian Planters’ Record 51, no. 3 (1947), 197.

44 See, for example, “Improving Sugar Canes,” and “Cane Experiments,” Hawaiian Planters’

Monthly 22, no. 2 (February 1903), 62-64; 76-78.

246

exclusively, and soon other plantations followed suit, making H-109 the most popular

cane variety in the islands.45

Only Sugar

Motivated to action by the leafhopper, cane planters became more singularly

focused on their own interests and less supportive of broad agricultural research. The

HSPA no longer promoted diversified agriculture, as it did in the 1890s with its

assistance toward coffee and fruit growing.46

With the sugar industry unwilling to share

its scientific resources, Hawaiʻi became host to three separate groups of agricultural

entomologists: a territorial laboratory with three entomologists, a USDA Agricultural

Experiment Station with two, and the HSPA’s private experiment station, which

employed six entomologists and had an annual budget of $28,000. Albert Koebele and

R.C.L. Perkins, still considered to be the top entomologists and leading experts in

biological control, were no longer government employees, but worked at the HSPA

station.47

The territorial government continued to try to bolster diversified agriculture

without the support of the sugar industry, and connected such efforts directly to the

project of Americanizing Hawaiʻi. In 1902, in connection with a push to found a

45

Fifty Years of Ewa Plantation Co., 18; Transcript, Otto Koch Oral History Interview, October

11, 1971, by Lynda Mair, 4, Watumull Foundation Oral History Project; Noel Deerr, History of Sugar.

46 Kessler, Planter’s Paradise, Ch. 5.

47 F. Silvestri, “A Survey of the Actual State of Agricultural Entomology in the United States of

North America,” Extracts from “Reprint from the Bulletin of the Society of Italian Agriculturists,” 14, no. 8

(April 30, 1909) trans., J. Rosenstein, The Hawaiian Forester and Agriculturist 6, no. 8 (August 1909),

287.

247

Hawaiian branch of the Farmers’ Institute, Jared G. Smith of the USDA Hawaiian

Agricultural Experiment Station told a group of farmers, “If you are successful other

men, other Americans, will want to come here and found homes.”48

In 1905, the

legislature passed two acts establishing the College of Agricultural and Mechanic Arts,

which later became the University of Hawaiʻi.49

Some new agricultural pursuits,

especially pineapple, met with success; others, such as tobacco and rubber, failed to gain

much traction.50

But the HSPA no longer took a leading role as it once did.

Those who witnessed the sugar industry’s success sought similar benefits for

other agricultural enterprises. By 1908, Hawaiʻi’s Territorial Governor Walter Frear

noted that science was the key to producing profitable crops in Hawaiʻi. He told a

conference of U. S. governors, “in spite of various adverse natural conditions,

[sugarcane] has been brought by the application of science to the highest point of

efficiency yet attained anywhere.”51

According to Frear, the success of the sugar industry

rested with the HSPA Experiment Station, which, with an annual budget of seventy

thousand dollars, was “perhaps the finest private experiment station in the world.” Frear

urged the Hawaiian legislature to emulate the HSPA by lending greater support to

48

“Need More Farmers,” Hawaiian Star April 14, 1902.

49 Willis T. Pope, “The College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts of Hawaii,” Hawaiian Forester

and Agriculturist 5, no. 1 (January 1908), 1.

50 Several factors contributed to the rise of the Hawaiian pineapple industry, including canning

technology and the removal of American import duties following annexation; Ethel M. Damon, Sanford

Ballard Dole and His Hawaii, 347. On rubber, see “Hawaiian Rubber Growers’ Annual Meeting,”

“Hawaiian Rubber Growers’ Association: Address by the President,” and Ralph S. Hosmer, “The

Harvesting of Rubber in Hawaii: An Outline of a Cooperative Experiment,” Hawaiian Forester and

Agriculturist 5, no. 12 (December 1908), 307-317.

51 Hon. Walter F. Frear, “Hawaii: A Statement Prepared for Presentation at the Conference of the

Governors,” Hawaiian Forester and Agriculturist 5, no.12 (December 1908), 330-31.

248

scientific research for small farmers. Frear told the Legislature, “We want to enable [the

small farmer] to profit by scientific investigation and instruction just as much as the sugar

planters are profiting through their experiment station and through lines of scientific

work.”52

Territorial Senator William O. Smith was even more emphatic: “Our salvation is

to have other things than sugar…There is no use in bringing small farmers here unless

there is something that they can produce at a profit; unless there is something that a man

with a few acres of land and small means can make a living on.”53

The Farmer’s Institute

attempted to promote scientific agriculture through annual meetings and fairs, but the

Institute remained loosely organized. At the 1908 fair, Queen Liliʻuokalani took second

prize for navel oranges, almost exactly fifteen years after she had been deposed.54

Little,

however, came of the Farmer’s Institute and other efforts to diversify Hawaiian

agriculture.

Cane planters’ success at biological control and plant breeding was not only a

result of funding that others did not have access to. Planters’ control over the natural

environment, and their objective of using that control to maximize sugar production

created an environment that was less hospitable to other agricultural pursuits. The

HSPA’s success in agricultural science did not lie only in monopolizing private capital

and expertise, but also in developing an environment that was particularly attuned to their

52

Conservation of Hawaii’s Natural Resources Before the Legislature, 1909: Addresses by the

Governor and his Conferees who Attended the Governors’ Conference with the President in Washington,

D. C., in May, 1908, and by Others (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Co., Ltd., 1909), 8.

53 Ibid., 21. William O. Smith was a lawyer by trade, and was also involved in the sugar industry.

He was also Secretary of the HSPA in 1908. Though Smith apparently sought to diversify Hawaiian

agriculture, the HSPA still did little as an institution to encourage the production of other crops.

54 “Agricultural Exhibition,” Hawaiian Forester and Agriculturist 5, no. 1 (January 1908), 14.

249

needs. Cane planters could not have imported some of the biological control agents they

needed if they had to worry about other crop planters’ interests. In 1908, Walter Froggatt,

the government entomologist of New South Wales, remarked that some of the insects that

the HSPA used to control the leafhopper were injurious to tea, olive, and other

agricultural plants.55

In 1916, Leland O. Howard, head of the USDA Bureau of

Entomology, noted that Hawaiian cane planters enjoyed “the most favorable conditions

of cultivation, a small number of crops, a restricted and simple fauna, a highly intelligent

body of men in control, with plenty of means, and an altogether admirable force of

scientifically trained employees.”56

Few crops and a “restricted and simple fauna” meant

that fewer pests could harm enter Hawaiʻi to damage sugarcane and that fewer animals

could prevent biological control agents from establishing populations to control the cane

pests that were present. Hawaiʻi could not be the cane planters’ paradise and also allow

for the complex ecosystem created by a wide variety of crop plants.

Planter Paternalism

Just as the sugar industry curtailed the development of other forms of agriculture,

large planters also limited the ability of people of small means to join their ranks. With

heavy investments required for advanced mills and irrigation works, soil analysis and

fertilizers, and pest control research, only those with large amounts of capital could profit

from sugar. After visiting Hawaiʻi, Abraham L. Brick, Congressman from Indiana, noted,

55

“Injurious Insects in Hawaii,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 28, no. 1 (January 1909), 4-5.

56 L. O. Howard, “On the Hawaiian Work in Introducing Beneficial Insects,” Journal of Economic

Entomology 9 (February 1916): 179.

250

“Today there are practically one crop land—sugar—the crop of the magnate; protection

has made Hawaii wealthy, but the wealth is in the hands of the few, for sugar is the

millionaires [sic] crop; the small farmer can not grow it successfully.”57

Jack London,

who—at the behest of boosters among Hawaiʻi’s haole elite—wrote extensively about his

visits to Hawaiʻi, expressed views similar to Congressman Brick’s, “Hawaii is a

paradise—and I can never cease proclaiming it; but I must append one word of

qualification: Hawaii is a paradise for the well-to-do… The one great industry of the

islands is sugar. The unskilled labor for the plantations is already here… For the person

without capital, dreaming to start on a shoe-string and become a capitalist, Hawaii is the

last place in the world. The shoe-string days are past. The land and industries of Hawaii

are owned by old families and large corporations.”58

The concentration of capital, land, labor, material, and expertise necessary to

make sugar in the hands of a few was notable even to London, and while this helped the

sugar industry protect its interests, it also denied others access to similar opportunities.

London wrote, “Hawaii is patriarchal, rather than democratic. Economically, it is owned

and operated in a fashion that is a combination of twentieth century, machine-civilization

methods and of medieval feudal methods.”59

London’s wife, Charmian, who also wrote

57

Congressman A. L. Brick, “The Americanization of Hawaii,” Mid-Pacific Magazine, January

1911, 82.

58 Jack London, “My Hawaiian Aloha,” Cosmopolitan 61, no. 6, (November 1916), 172.

59 Ibid.

251

much about her time in Hawaiʻi, put her view a bit more bluntly: “Hawaii is feudal, but

the masters are benevolent.”60

Observers such as the Londons seemed to consider the planters’ control over

natural resources and their high degree of technological and scientific sophistication to

demand a feudal social structure. According to Jack London, “The Sugar Planters’

Association and the several sugar factors or financial agencies control sugar, and since

sugar is king, control the destiny and welfare of the Islands. And they are able to do this,

under the peculiar conditions that obtain, far more efficiently than it could be done by the

population of Hawaii were it a democratic commonwealth, which it essentially is not.”61

Even the journalist Ray Stannard Baker, who wrote a series of articles decrying Hawaiian

planters’ control over their workers and small farmers, could not help but be impressed

by the mode of agriculture that planter power allowed:

I think no one can visit the islands without being

impressed with the remarkable intelligence and the high

efficiency with which the sugar industry is directed. It has

been in a high degree farming with brains. The planters

have adapted themselves with wonderful flexibility and

ingenuity to all manner of difficult conditions. Marvelous

irrigation systems, ditches, and flumes from mountain

streams and great pumping plants have been developed.

Conditions of soil and rainfall have been studied and the

last perfection of modern farm machinery and modern

methods of fertilizing have been introduced. I have seen

great fields being plowed nearly three feet deep with huge

steam plows--and the stories of the use of fertilizers are

almost unbelievable to a person accustomed to ordinary

farming methods of the middle West.

60

Charmian London journal, Honolulu, Tuesday, August 6, 1907 in Charmian Kittredge London,

Jack London and Hawaii, 171.

61 Jack London, “My Hawaiian Aloha,” 172.

252

Nor is this all. The Planters’ Association maintains

an extensive private experiment station in Honolulu, where

a group of scientists is constantly at work experimenting in

the production of better grades of cane and in seeking better

methods of planting and harvesting the crops…

In a hundred other ways the planters have shown

remarkable constructive and organizing ability. They have

begun a campaign to protect the forests and to plant more

trees, they have developed private docks and private

railroads, and they are seeking out or developing the very

best methods for extracting the sugar in their great mills.62

If cane plantations were to function with the precision of factories, then they could

tolerate no dissent or disorganization, nor could they make room for small planters.

Of course, those who sought to grow sugarcane on a small scale disagreed with

this assessment, and instead saw a small group of capitalists taking advantage of their

position to limit competition. Though several large plantations dominated the sugar

industry, many small farmers still grew cane. In 1909, 1,028 farms reported cultivating

sugarcane, though that may be because so few other crops were marketable.63

The East

Hawaii Cane Planters’ Association, a collective of smallholders who attempted to

cultivate cane, complained that large planters guarded access to the work of the HSPA

and thus forced would-be planters to grow cane at an uncompetitive disadvantage. In a

1915 circular titled, “The Real Issue in Hawaii,” the East Hawaii Cane Planters’

Association complained,

The plantations are farmed with all the skill that money can

buy. Competent, high-priced managers, chemists, engineer

and field overseers, direct all the operations. Frequent

conference of these officials are held to discuss ways and

means of increasing production, and decreasing cost. The

62

Baker, “Wonderful Hawaii: A World Experiment Station,” 30-31.

63 Elliott, Production of Sugar in the United States and Foreign Countries U.S., 16.

253

Hawaii Sugar Planters’ Experiment Station, supported by

the plantations, is probably the most advanced of any

experiment station in the world in studying the science of

sugar… On the other hand, the small grower is a man of

little or no capital, without business training, with

inadequate equipment, and no one to aid in the

improvement of his condition. While the United States

Department of Agriculture and the Territorial Government

support not only an experiment station, but a College of

Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, the chief energy of these

institutions is directed toward the assistance of ‘industries

not heretofore greatly developed in the Territory.’ The

services of the experts and the publication of the Sugar

Planters’ Station are not available to the small grower of

cane. Through some complicated manipulation of affairs,

Hawaii is the only country under the American flag which

has no government bureau working to advance the interests

of the small producer of the staple crop of the country. In

view, therefore, of these conditions of poverty, lack of

equipment and training, and lack of government assistance,

it is no wonder that the small producer of sugar cane in the

islands is unable to assert himself where his interests

conflict with the wealthy and skillful corporate interests to

which he must sell his produce.64

Small farmers continued to cultivate sugar cane, but they did so at the margins of the

industry, with little opportunity to succeed.

Controlling the Environment

Cane planters came to exert influence over all biological introductions to Hawaiʻi,

and thus over the very composition of Hawaiʻi’s ecosystems. While territorial restrictions

on importation of plants and animals appeared to be uniform, the HSPA worked with the

territorial Board of Agriculture and Forestry, which was in charge of wildlife laws, to

create exemptions for the importation of animals that HSPA scientists considered

64

East Hawaii Cane Planters’ Association, The Real Issue in Hawaii, Circular No. 2 (Hilo,

February 1915), 633.61 Ea7 P, HMCS.

254

beneficial to the sugar industry.65

By 1921, the Board of Agriculture and Forestry sought

out the endorsement of the HSPA before allowing foreign birds to be imported. This

extended even to birds that would be beneficial to other industries, such as the Australian

Shepherd’s Companion (Rhipidura tricolor), a bird favored by ranchers for its ability to

control cattle pests.66

The HSPA thus demonstrated clear dominance over other industries

in managing Hawaiʻi’s ecosystems.

The HSPA developed a preservationist policy, hoping not to disturb the

ecosystem it had achieved. In 1926, Fred Muir, entomologist of the HSPA Experiment

Station, expressed his position regarding a two-year debate over the introduction of a

single bird species, the Peking Nightingale, “The sugar industry has suffered enormous

losses in the past through introduced insects, and these have been overcome by the

introduction of parasites and predators...The addition of every animal to our fauna adds to

the complexity of our biological conditions and thereby possibly adds to the increase of

difficulties in biological control. I therefore would take no risks.”67

Though Muir raised

the only objection to the bird’s introduction in opposition to several members of the

Hawaiian Fish and Game Commission and Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and

65

F. Muir to C. S. Judd, Honolulu, May 25, 1915; C. S. Judd to Mr. Agee, Honolulu, July 20,

1915; Fred Muir to The Direct, Experiment Station, H.S.P.A. [H.P. Agee], Honolulu, November 10, 1921,

Territory of Hawaiʻi, Board of Agriculture and Forestry, 1903-1959, Executive Officer, Box No. COM2-

14, File: Birds--Importation of, 1915-1927, HSA.

66 H.P. Agee to J.N.S. Williams, Chairman, Experiment Station Committee, H.S.P.A., Honolulu,

November 21, 1921, Executive Officer, Box No. COM2-14, File: Birds--Importation of, 1915-1927, HSA.

67 F. Muir to The Director, Experiment Station, H.S.P.A. [H.P. Agee], Honolulu, May 20, 1926,

Executive Officer, Box No. COM2-14, File: Birds--Importation of, 1915-1927, HSA.

255

Forestry, the Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry ultimately sided with

Muir until the HSPA eventually lifted its objections.68

From Periphery to Core

Hawaiʻi became a hub for research and sugar production that influenced other

plantation systems throughout the world. The Honolulu Iron Works began manufacturing

sugar mills for export to Puerto Rico, Mexico, Formosa, and the Philippines.69

In 1910,

American planters in Puerto Rico organized a planters’ association modeled after the

HSPA and conducted research on controlling infestations of the white grub, though they

did not find the same success their Hawaiian counterparts did.70

Hawaiʻi also became an

exporter of its locally bred cane varieties, along with other centers of sugarcane breeding

such as Java and Australia. With Hawaiʻi’s scientists exporting their research, a local

editor and author named Alexander Hume Ford launched the Pan-Pacific Union and Mid-

Pacific Magazine. The Union and its magazine were foremost vehicles for boostering, but

they also served to foster cultural and scientific exchange between Pacific nations. The

Union brought together “leading Hawaiians, or Chinese, or Japanese, Korean, Filipinos,

or Portuguese, with the leading white men who were behind the movement...all bent

toward bringing about a working in unison for the mutual benefit of Pacific nations.”71

68

Edw. M. Ehrhorn to George I. Brown, Honolulu, February 11, 1926, Executive Officer, Box

No. COM2-12, File: Birds--Importation of, 1926, HSA.

69 “Hawaii as a Point of International Manufacturing,” Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly 28, no. 5

(May 1909), 158-59.

70 McCook, States of Nature, 72.

71 London, Jack London and Hawaii, 298.

256

Backed by planters and sugar interests, the Union promoted the exchange of ideas about

science and culture in the Pacific World, with Hawaiʻi at its center. In addition to the

expertise that Hawaiʻi exported, the islands also became a center for the dissemination of

capital. Hawaiʻi’s planters and sugar factors began investing in plantations in the

Philippines, Formosa, and the West Indies, applying their capital to emerging plantation

systems.72

The environmental impact of the Hawaiian sugar industry spread throughout the

cane-growing world. Hawaiian sugar technologists and scientists were particularly

effective at exporting new varieties of cane and biological control agents. The Hawaiian

canes H-109, then H-32-8560, then H-37-1933 each successively held the record for

tonnage of sugar per acre of cane.73

The most infamous example, of the Hawaiian sugar

industry’s global impact, though, is the case of the Central American cane toad, Rhinella

marina (formerly Bufo marinus). In 1932, the HSPA brought the cane toad from Puerto

Rico to Hawaiʻi, where it was a serviceable control agent of several agricultural and

garden pests. The HSPA then helped to spread the cane toad throughout the Pacific, from

Taiwan in the north to Fiji and Australia in the south. In Australia, the cane toad became

a particularly harmful invasive pest itself. Not only did the cane toad do little to control

sugarcane pests, it also predated and out-competed native fauna, and still poses a threat to

Australian biodiversity.74

72

Mollett, Capital in Hawaiian Sugar, 61.

73 Deerr History of Sugar v. 1 p. 28.

74 Simon Easteal, “The History of Introductions of Bufo marinus (Amphibia : Anura); A Natural

Experiment in Evolution,” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 16 (1981): 93-113.

257

Epilogue

Though the HSPA managed to reduce leafhopper infestations by about 1907, the

insect continued to hamper plantations for several years. This did not keep the sugar

industry from growing. By 1916 sugarcane covered 246,332 acres of Hawaiian land—

over twenty times the acreage of forty-two years earlier.75

In 1917, about one quarter of

Hawaiʻi’s population was working directly in the sugar industry, with others working in

supporting or related fields.76

It was not until 1923 that the HSPA was finally able to

fully control the leafhopper, using a parasite from Australia and Fiji.77

After about two

decades of fairly static plantation yields, in the mid-1920s Hawaiʻi’s output of tons of

sugar per acre increased.78

In 1923, Ewa Plantation, so ravaged by the leafhopper in the

first decade of the twentieth century, broke the world record for sugar production in a

single field with 18.09 tons per acre. Two years later, Ewa broke the Hawaiian record for

average production of an entire plantation, with 11.87 tons of sugar per acre.79

With

highly specialized entomologists and other agricultural scientists, Hawaiʻi held some of

the world’s most productive cane plantations.

The environment that Hawaiʻi’s planters had built could not last indefinitely. In

the early morning of Monday, September 9, 2013, a leak in a shipping pipeline spilled

75

Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 359-60.

76 Elliott, Production of Sugar in the United States and Foreign Countries U.S., 16.

77 Fifty Years of Ewa Plantation Co. (Honolulu: Castle & Cooke, Ltd., 1940), 16; F. Muir, “The

Sugar Cane Leafhopper and its Parasites in Hawaii,” Hawaiian Planters’ Record 25 (July 1921), 117.

78 Mollett, Capital in Hawaiian Sugar, 15.

79 A Castle and Cooke History, 84; 106.

258

233,000 gallons of molasses into the water of Honolulu Harbor. The molasses was on its

way to California, where it was to be sold as an additive to cattle feed. Unlike oil, which

floats on the water’s surface and can be cleaned with dispersants and skimmers, there was

nothing to be done. The molasses sank to the bottom of the harbor, where it suffocated

over 26,000 fish and other marine animals. Gary Gill, the deputy director for the

Environmental Health Division of the Health Department, called it “the worst

environmental damage to sea life that I have come across.” Gill went on, “this is a biggie,

if not the biggest that we’ve had to confront in the state of Hawaiʻi.”80

This may have been one of the more extreme and unusual vestiges of the

plantation system, but it was hardly the only reminder of the outsized impact that

sugarcane planting continues to exert on Hawaiʻi’s environment. Descendants of people

who came to the islands to work the sugarcane plantations make up a majority of

Hawaiʻi’s inhabitants. Animals such as the leafhopper and mongoose have established

permanent populations on the islands. The Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, now

called the Hawaiian Agricultural Research Center, is an active institution for research on

biological pest control and crop breeding. The agribusiness conglomerate Monsanto now

controls vast landholdings on the Hawaiian Islands, where it experiments on genetically

modified corn, developing varieties that can withstand greater amounts of chemical

pesticides.

80

Tannya Joaquin and Bun Gutierrez, “Underwater Video Uncovers Mass Kill from Matson

Molasses Spill,” Hawaiʻi News Now, September 12, 2013. Accessed September 13, 2013:

http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/23409767/underwater-video-uncovers-mass-kill-from-matson-

molasses-spill. Tanya Joaquin, “25,000 Fish Killed in Matson Molasses Spill,” Hawaiʻi News Now,

September 16, 2013. Accessed October 13, 2013: http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/23448407/25-

thousand-fish-killed-in-matson-molasses-spill.

259

Yet, though the sugarcane plantation system has irrevocably changed the

Hawaiian environment, other forms of agriculture have endured. Even at its apex of

power and geographic expansion, sugarcane never erased Native Hawaiians from the

land. Many Hawaiians perpetuated traditional communities based on subsistence farming,

hunting, and foraging. Hawaiians farming taro in Keʻanae, an ahupuaʻa in the Hāna

district of Maui, could trace their presence there to the first settlers of the area, long

before contact with the west. A tour of Keʻanae in 1910 noted that “Keʻanae is a

sugarless settlement… The natives live contentedly in their homesteads and are unusually

well informed on matters of the world, for dwellers in such an out-of-the-world place.”81

Kīpahulu, also in Hāna, was less removed from sugarcane. A traveller in 1922 recorded

that he saw Hawaiian homes and farms dotting the land near a cane plantation.82

Keʻanae

and Kīpahulu were small enclaves of Hawaiian culture, with fewer than 300 Hawaiians

living in either place, yet they remained bastions of a way of life and mode of land use

that the plantation system could not entirely push out. In the 1931 census, some 4,222

Hawaiians were living in rural districts with populations over fifty per cent Hawaiian,

such as Keʻanae and Kīpahulu.83

Alternatives to plantation agriculture appear poised to reclaim Hawaiian land

from sugarcane. Food sovereignty and sustainable agriculture movements are growing in

Hawaiʻi. It is now easier to find a traditional taro pondfield than it is to find a field of

81

Daviana Pōmaikaʻi McGregor, Na Kuaʻāina: Living Hawaiian Culture (Honolulu: University of

Hawaiʻi Press, 2007), 112.

82 McGregor, Na Kuaʻāina,119.

83 McGregor, 11.

260

sugarcane. On January 6, 2016, Alexander & Baldwin, the Big Five sugar agency started

in the late nineteenth century by two missionary sons turned cane planters, announced

that the Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company, the last remaining sugar company on

the archipelago, would cease all sugar operations.84

Faced with a thirty-million-dollar

loss for 2015 and forecasts for continued losses into the future, the company decided to

transition its landholdings to diversified agriculture, cattle pasture, and alternative crops

such as biofuels. The closing of HC&S relegates sugarcane planting to Hawaiʻi’s past. It

remains to be seen what will become of the fields once planted in cane, or what industries

will rise up in the shadows of Hawaiʻi’s defunct sugar mills.

84

“Alexander & Baldwin Announces Transition of Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company to a

Diversified Farm Model,” http://hcsugar.com/2016/01/alexander-baldwin-announces-transition-hawaiian-

commercial-sugar-company-diversified-farm-model/ accessed January 8, 2016.

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