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BURL BURLINGAME / BBURLINGAME@STARBULLETIN.COM Robert W. Wilcox's statue stands on Fort Street Mall.

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The Pacific’s
‘Roaring Lion’

The statue on Fort Street Mall seems oddly placed, an afterthought, and certainly not grand. But there was nothing about Robert W. Wilcox that was less than grand. After all, beloved of the Hawaiians, the scrappy revolutionary was called Ka Liona Hae O Ka Pakipika, or "The Roaring Lion of the Pacific."

The bronze of Wilcox, in a rough-hammered heroic style that echoes Wilcox's turbulent life, was finished by Big Island artist Jan Gordon Fisher in 1993.

Born of a haole father and a mother of Maui royalty, Wilcox first worked as a teacher and a legislative representative before being dispatched to an Italian military college by King Kalakaua.

There, Wilcox became an artillery officer before being summoned home, where he continued to wear his Italian uniform.

He was involved in failed insurrections -- in the first two, in 1888 and 1889, a Hawaiian jury failed to convict him; in a third, in 1895, he failed to restore Liliuokalani to the throne and was sentenced to death.

Sanford Dole, president of the Republic of Hawaii, pardoned Wilcox after Congress intervened, and Wilcox later became Hawaii's first congressional delegate.

Married twice, to an Italian and a Hawaiian, Wilcox's great-grand-daughter is singer-musician Owana Salazar.

He died while running for sheriff of Honolulu in 1903, his last words being, "Let them alone. I love to hear my children's voices."

In the Honolulu Evening Bulletin, the ancestor of this newspaper, a poet noted, "though at death's door, his armor still he hoped to wear with his people / of them / for them / his constant prayer ..."

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