Molokai land transactions, pre-Mahele to 1859
3. Molokai land transactions, 1860–1869
4. Molokai land transactions, 1870–1889
5. Major landholdings on Molokai, 1984
Foreword
Donald Worster
Like the celebrated Galápagos Islands of the South Pacific but far more romantically lush, green, and hospitable to Homo sapiens, the Hawaiian Islands offer an extraordinary window into the planet’s evolution. But Darwin never saw Hawai‘i. After traveling to the Galápagos in the 1830s, he published his masterwork, On the Origin of Species (1859), which launched the science of evolution, the foundational truth of modernity. Evolution tells us a true, if sometimes disturbing, story of species emerging out of competition and through an ancient, merciless struggle for survival. In the Galápagos that story was revealed to Darwin through the mute testimony of finches, tortoises, and swimming iguanas. But if he had gone to Hawai‘i, the story would have become far more complicated.
Evolution in Hawai‘i would have to include cycles of people succeeding other people, a process of social and cultural evolution. If Darwin had gone to Hawai‘i instead of the Galápagos, he might have found things too confusing and tangled. He needed a simpler, less-peopled place to suggest questions and provoke a revolutionary theory about the natural order.
To understand the more complex intertwining of ecological and social evolution would require the combined efforts of scientists, anthropologists, economists, philosophers, and historians—and even more than Darwinism, that multilayered perspective would lead us beyond science and into questions of ethics and value. We could not avoid asking who or what should triumph, and who or what should lose? This book about Hawai‘i’s history, because of its combined natural and social dimensions, leads us into that maelstrom. Always in that place, and in books about it, we become embroiled in human controversy.
Some four decades ago, I discovered the Hawaiian Islands—not long after I had discovered Charles Darwin so that henceforth the two discoveries would be firmly linked in my mind. After living there nearly a decade, I was forced to leave the islands and escape their devastating mold spores, which for me were deadly allergens blowing down from the rainy highlands on the soft trade winds—a threat I was not naturally well adapted to meet. As one of nature’s “unfit,” I abandoned my ambition to write about Hawai‘i’s complicated evolution through deep time. Now I look back with fond memories on that ravishingly beautiful place, mixed with darker memories of hospital emergency wards but also with a sense of missed opportunity. Someone else, I have had to tell myself, must tell that amazing history of competing waves of migrating plants, animals, microorganisms, and peoples of diverse races and cultures.
Now Hawai‘i has found its environmental historian in Wade Graham, an exceptionally talented writer and scholar. He has carefully read the archives, gathered statistics, tracked down travelers’ reports, learned island natural history, and actually lived in the place long enough to know it like a native. His book is rich in theory and insight, and it should stand for a long time as an exceptional piece of history—a provocative tale of evolution.
Thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean separate the Hawaiian archipelago from the big continental landmasses so that the first plants had to arrive more or less accidentally by ocean and wind currents and flying birds. Over a period of 27.5 million years, one plant species made it here every 100,000 years. Radiant evolution occurred among those early migrants, until the islands became home to eleven hundred different kinds of plants, along with many species of endemic animals—a lush Garden of Eden but one without a Creator. The first Adams and Eves of this place showed up about one thousand years ago, arriving in Polynesian canoes loaded with still more plants and animals and introducing an all-too human urge to burn forests, plant taro, create artificial fishponds, and kill birds to make brightly hued feather cloaks. Their descendants still believe that they are the “rightful” owners of the place—the kama‘aina, or children of the land, who supposedly have lived for centuries in “harmony” with the rest of nature.
For good reason, Graham does not succumb to such a myth, charming though it may be and worthy of some respect. He has gathered plenty of evidence that the First Hawaiians committed ecological destruction, suffered from overpopulation, practiced violence, endured class stratification, and witnessed land monopolization that spoil any notion of idyllic harmony. Like the emperors of Rome and China, like the Medici bankers of Florence, the power elite of Polynesian Hawai‘i could be ruthless, greedy, and cruel, yet they were accepted meekly by those they dominated. Hawai‘i’s archaic state must tell volumes about the course of social evolution.
No societies, we learn from comparative study, are immune to internal competition for natural resources. Some may try to limit that competition, but they never stop it completely or achieve a perfect symbiosis between people and the rest of nature. Such a conclusion I take to be the main argument of this book. Graham goes on to theorize that the “thickness” or “thinness” of environments in terms of water, soil, and other resources is a strongly determinative force behind structures of power. Hawai‘i evolved toward “social bigness” because it was richly endowed with natural resources but not so endowed for every valley or shore. In some places “bigness” proved difficult to create or sustain. A rich endowment always brought a higher population density, and eventually, it brought a concentration of power and wealth among those most adept at competition. Thus, Hawai‘i’s native leaders, the ali‘i, managed by the mid-nineteenth century to gain control over some four million acres, including the best lands for accumulating riches. That initial concentration of “bigness” owed little to other later invaders coming from Europe, Africa, America, or Asia.
Graham focuses most of his attention on Molokai, a small island situated in the middle of the archipelago, where the habitat was comparatively “thin,” providing only a few small patches of high productivity amid a generally fragmented and stingy set of environments. The Hawaiian elite, therefore, tended to pass over poor Molokai, for it lacked much scope for their aggrandizement, and so did the white settlers who came in the nineteenth century with dreams of religious missions along with sugar, pineapple, and coffee plantations. Molokai proved unsuitable for sugar growing on a modern scale and instead became a primitive grazing frontier for cattle, sheep, and goats. Then there was that small thumb of lava rock jutting below towering sea cliffs, a tiny place named Kalaupapa, which offered a quarantine site for lepers. The rich, powerful, and healthy never found much to attract them there.
In part the excellence of this book comes from the author’s skill in moving back and forth among the various scales of history, from the local to the global. He steps back from Molokai to take in the whole island chain and then the entire Pacific Ocean and then the ever-tightening global web of commerce so that what was isolated and local can take on transoceanic and international significance. This mixing of scales is one of environmental history’s greatest contributions to the writing of history, and Graham is masterful in weaving those scales into a single, compelling narrative.
The white Americans who led a second major human invasion of the Hawaiian Islands came full of Protestant piety and, paradoxically, smug social Darwinist beliefs. They saw themselves as the “fittest,” morally and intellectually, in any competition. By the 1890s they had managed to overthrow the native monarchy and even get the islands annexed to the United States. After those triumphs, they proved as remorseless—and even brutal—as anyone in history. In their own eyes, and especially in the eyes of the sugar planters, they had to become the “keystone species”; that is, the arbiters of good land use, the rightful heirs of plenty, and the people best equipped to create and maintain a new and better ecology.
One of the most ardent of their agents was Harold Lyon, a plant pathologist employed by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association. Enthusiastically, he served both their self-interest and his own by promoting the wholesale importation of new tree varieties from every part of the world and releasing them onto the islands to create a new and better forest. These imported plants he would pit against each other, letting them “work out their own salvation.” The result, he hoped, would be a tougher, more resilient forest that would stop erosion and runoff and save precipitation