or stealing food; those who were caught were killed by the ali‘i or burned alive. Death also claimed many of the occupiers, according to Broughton: “It was computed that Tamaahmaah had lost six thousand of his people by the conquest of this island, and subsequent calamities.”
Once again, while preparing to conquer the next island in his advance up the chain—this time Kaua‘i—rebellion on Hawai‘i drew Kamehameha and most of his forces back to the Big Island, leaving O‘ahu in the hands of governors. When he returned in 1804, he would conduct his occupation differently. He realized that canoes and guns alone made a shallow foundation for controlling distant territory; to make his rule permanent, he would need to make his garrison self-supporting and to make the countryside productive with stone walls and water. He ordered his seven thousand to eight thousand Hawai‘i warriors to become farmers, settling them all over O‘ahu on under- or unused lands, including in the Nu‘uanu and Manoa Valleys and in the upper Anahulu River watershed in Waialua, on the north shore.11 Here, Kirch and Sahlins uncovered evidence of the systematic clearing and terracing of what had been uninhabited, lightly exploited forests and their transformation in a few years into a “newly-created, intensive-settlement landscape.”12
No systematic inventory exists of Kamehameha’s troop resettlements in the Hawaiian Islands, but the king did order a significant settlement in Molokai. When the king returned to Kohala, Hawai‘i, “some years after the battle of Nu‘uanu,” he asked his lieutenant Hoolepanui of Kiholo, North Kona, who had served him well in the conquests, “Where on the island of Hawai‘i would you like to dwell?” The warrior responded: “Nowhere on Hawaii.” The chief again asked, “Where would you like to go and dwell?” Hoolepanui answered, “On Molokai, where the fish is plentiful, at Kalamaula, Piliwale, Hoolehua, Holi and on to the cape.” The Hawai‘i people came, and “the natives of the land were ordered to move inland or on the lands set apart for them on the eastern side.” Along the coast of Hoolehua and Pala‘au, they built brackish water kalo lo‘i and extensive fishponds (see figure 2).13
FIGURE 2. East Molokai.
MOLOKAI PASSED BY
The first accounts of Molokai recorded by foreign sailors describe the island as a passing shore, intriguing but not offering enough inducement to halt between the known havens of the main islands. The scale and speed of Euro-American navigation rendered Molokai, a necessary stop for canoe voyages, little more than a curious sight on the one or two-day passage between Maui and O‘ahu. Along its north shore, sheer cliffs up to three thousand feet high plunge into pounding seas. Along the calm south shore, though it is alee of the trade wind and swell and shadowed by Lana‘i from kona storms and southerly swells, there are few real harbors interrupting the fringing reef and the continuous expanses of shoal waters as shallow as three feet that stretch up to three thousand feet seaward from shore from Kolo to Kumini. Instead of paddling her canoes, “Molokai ko‘ola‘au” (Molokai poles with a stick).14
The lack of extensive tree cover also deterred landing parties. Cook, coasting along the south shore, set the tone: rounding the West End, he saw “a small bay . . . with a fine sandy beach [perhaps Kaumana or Kaupoa]; but seeing no appearance of fresh water” continued to O‘ahu.15
Vancouver described the East End this way: “The face of the country, diversified by eminences and valleys, bore a verdant and fruitful appearance. It seems to be well inhabited, in a high state of cultivation; and presented not only a rich but a romantic aspect.” But the West End “showed a gradual decrease in population, uncultivated, barren soil. This part of the island inhabited by the lower orders of the islanders, who resort to the shore for the purpose of taking fish, with which they abound.”16
Here is Menzies’s version of the same passage: “The trade wind freshening again at night enabled us to pass the west end of Molokai, which, like Lana‘i, presents a naked, dreary barren waste without either habitation or cultivation; its only covering is a kind of thin withered grass, which, in many parts, is scarcely sufficient to hide its surface apparently composed of dry rocky and sandy soil.”17
Molokai was attractive neither to trade nor navigation nor to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Euro-American Romantic aesthetic sensibility. The missionary Charles Stewart, passing the island en route from major ports in Honolulu, Maui, and Hawai‘i, was typical in writing: “The islands of Lana‘i, Molokai, and Kahulawe . . . at the distance of fifteen or twenty miles, are as dreary as the gloomiest imagination could paint them. Almost constantly enveloped in lowering clouds, they are as emphatically the dark mountains of the natural, as they are figuratively those of the intellectual and spiritual world. We here look in vain for those beauties in nature with which we once feasted our admiration to enthusiasm; for Objects we find none, Except before us stretched the toiling main, And rocks and wilds in savage view behind.”18
Molokai, close at hand but far away, familiar yet inaccessible, remained comparatively isolated and insulated from the changes brought by foreign vessels, at least for a time.
TRADE AND BIOLOGICAL EXCHANGE IN THE PACIFIC
It has been said that when Captain Cook stepped ashore at Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island in December 1778, greeted by hundreds of Hawaiian chiefs, warriors, and priests, it was not simply another collision between the Stone Age and modern, industrializing Europe but an encounter, from a certain point of view, between two remarkably similar societies. The ships of the Royal Navy, each miniature models of the British class system, strict rank hierarchies buttressed by caste and run with autocratic discipline, found their counterparts in the Hawaiian chiefdom as baroquely stratified and authoritarian as any in the Pacific. “At Kealakekua,” Patrick Kirch wrote, “one chiefdom met another, recognizing in the other the essential structures of hierarchy and power.”19 The participants may also have recognized another point of similarity—that theirs was an encounter between two of the greatest seaborne colonizing societies in history. As Crosby and others have shown, Europe’s “portmanteau biota” was as critical to its expansion as the Polynesians’ was to their own colonization of the Pacific Islands. Cattle, white clover, wheat, weeds, and diseases underwrote the efforts of the British and others to colonize most of the world and, in temperate climes, to create “neo-Europes,” full-dress biological recreations of the home landscapes. Whereas in the Atlantic in previous centuries ecological imperialism had been a subordinate part of the project of implanting European colonists or garrisons, in the Pacific from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, imperialism’s strategy aimed primarily at implanting not populations but preferential, advantageous relations and trade flows between mobile agents of the European metropole and native groups in situ.20 Biological traffic was both a means and an end to this effort, and the transfer of organisms was quickly organized and systematized to provide fuel for an intricate globalization machine.
Cook has been called the “avatar” of the “Second” British Empire: an imperialism reconfigured after the loss of the American colonies and the atrophying of the mercantile system and no longer interested in territorial jurisdiction or conquering native peoples but in spreading a newly articulated, more humane form of control, whether by direct or indirect sovereignty, manifested through trade and diplomatic relations.21 “We prefer trade to dominion,” asserted one British official in 1782. The British-French wars of 1790–1815 left the imperial project tired, spent, and distracted; its limited resources available outside the North Atlantic theater were deployed to search for “footholds” and way stations and a supply archipelago to support the Royal Navy, advancing trade and scientific exploration. On his Pacific cruise to attack Spanish shipping from 1740 to 1744, George Anson attempted to establish a South American base—a “halfway house” like the Dutch had at the Cape of Good Hope.22 The voyages of Byron in 1764–1766, Wallis in 1766–1768, and Cook’s three voyages from 1768 to1779 marked, in addition, a renewed search for the Northwest Passage, a British dream dating from the Tudor era, and the supposed terra australis, or southern continent. In all of these efforts, the figure of