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New history books
fill in the gapsBy Burl Burlingame
Star-BulletinWE know enough about the late 1800s in Hawaii to be able to debate the issues -- Kalakaua's profligate ways (which nonetheless resulted in placing Hawaii on the world culture map), the political coup that unseated Liliuokalani and derailed rule by royal fiat (creating sympathy for the queen a century later), the ins and outs of sugar production and military home-basing (shifting Hawaii's economy into dependence on outside forces) -- and these issues still have great resonance today, which is why they're still studied.
But post-contact Hawaii in the early half of the 1800s is still largely unknown. Most of us can press the general pop-history buttons, like Kamehameha seizing all the islands with the aid of Western technology, the arrival of the missionaries, the abolishment of the kapu system, whaling, the Great Mahele -- and that's about it.
That's mostly because records for that period are scanty or lost. The reason the missionaries occupy such a prominent place in Hawaiian history is because they not only kept records for posterity, their descendants became the core of Hawaii's power structure and wrote most of the history themselves.
This era, running roughly from Cook's first land-ho in 1778 to the death of Kamehameha III in 1854, is among the most interesting of any nation's history and among the least documented.
Here was a cohesive, indigenous people with long-established cultures and traditions and religious beliefs, who largely threw them all out the window within a few years of contact with the West, and only in the last 50 years have attempted to regain much of what was lost. How did this happen?
Stepping into the gap are two handsome new books about this period. Both fill important, previously empty niches in Hawaiian history.
"Hawaii Joins the World," by Walter F. Judd (Mutual Publishing), 228 pages, $15.95
WALTER F. Judd (yes, a missionary descendent) goes for the big picture in "Hawaii Joins the World," told from the point of view of Hawaii and Hawaiians discovering the rest of the world, and how that impacted life here. It's an inclusive work, with a fussy attention to detail, characterized by the chapter citations not only being well-documented, but printed in spot color on every page.
Judd also devotes a lot of fussbudget hyphens to period spellings, such as Kamehameha being written as Ka-mehameha. This attempt to be context-correct comes across as more of an literary affectation than a useful tool.
On the other hand, Judd has an interesting, oblique writing style that is simultaneously declarative and informal, like advertising copy. It makes what would be a fairly dry discourse highly readable.Judd also personalizes the period by paralleling the life of Mataio Kekuanao'a, probably Hawaii's first politician and bureaucrat and Governor of Oahu. Judd has a wry sense of detail; the royal family's excessive drinking is often described, for example.
He treads lightly around the sandalwood issue, one of the primary triggers of upheaval in Hawaii in the early 1800s. Greed for Western goods caused Hawaiian chiefs to create press-gangs of Hawaiian sandalwood-cutters who denuded the hills, not only creating a major environmental problem, but throwing a prehistoric barter-economy headlong into the cold world of capitalist haves and have-nots. The subject deserves a fuller treatment.
Although "Hawaii Joins the World" is well-illustrated with period drawings, they're in the usual history-book graphic ghetto, set aside into separate sections. The cover illustration, a detail of a period painting of the Honolulu fortress, may make sense philosophically, but it's a little on the dull side.
RATHER than trying to grasp the big picture, Emmett Cahill opts for an intimate portrait in "The Life and Times of John Young," the first serious attempt at a biography about the British seaman-adventurer who, on his 46th birthday, was marooned in Hawaii.
Young became the highly trusted principal advisor to Kamehameha, and probably the first white citizen of the islands. He married into the royal family, and was the grandfather of Queen Emma.
It's likely that, without Young's counsel and expertise, Kamehameha's empire-building might have foundered. Young was a catalyst for Hawaii's entry onto the world stage.
Despite Young's importance to Hawaiian history, virtually nothing is known about the man, only where and when he was born (and even that is subject to challenge from supposed distant relatives and descendants) and his rank of boatswain's mate (bo'sun) when he was abandoned here by the American cargo ship Eleanora after a bloody run-in with Hawaiians. So Cahill's narrative is inevitably filled with should-haves and what-ifs.
For example, a bo'sun was generally a highly regarded, professional member of a ship's crew, so Cahill is able to make reasonable inferences about Young's abilities.
Ironically, as the book moves into the more heavily documented 1800s, Young, as he gets older, does less and less until he dies at age 91 in 1835. Cahill goes on to discuss the impact of Young's family on Hawaii, and even devotes a chapter to Young's character references. Even so, it's a slim book, but it's hard to imagine anything else being added.
"John Young" is also blessed with the illustrations of Hawaii artist/historian Herb Kane, which does much to bring the era alive. Design and readability are first-rate.
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