for the white people.” The largest of these were farmed by white people—and one black one.42 A Captain Butler at Lahaina, Maui, maintained an irrigated plantation that prompted wide admiration and comparisons with England. Anthony Allen, an American freedman, had gardens at Pawa‘a, O‘ahu. A Spaniard, Don Francisco de Paula Marin, arrived in Honolulu from California in 1814 and built up a large capacity in herds, extensive gardens, and vineyards both for the shipping trade, which he for some time dominated, and his own “table d’hote.” Travelers could expect to find there beef, pork, goat, duck, goose, turkey, watermelons, onions, coconuts, bananas, cabbages, potatoes, beans, shallots, citrus fruit, pomegranates, figs, pineapples, pumpkins, tamarinds, and wine made from “Isabella” vines from Madeira. One visitor assessed that Marin was “still not adept at the art of making wine,” though others disagreed.43
Along with these intentional imports came other, unintentional, ones: cockroaches, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, fleas (called uku lele, the jumping louse), and innumerable plant species gone wild across the landscape: thorn trees, puncture vines, feral cabbages, and indigo. European diseases, starting with “the clap,” a gift repeatedly given from Cook’s visits forward, spread unchecked. By the second decade of the century, foreigners’ descriptions of common Hawaiians showed that their physical state had deteriorated markedly. According to Stewart, “the majority are more or less disfigured by eruptions and sores, and many are as unsightly as lepers.”44 Langsdorf wrote: “The islanders we had an opportunity to observe were naked, unclean, not well built, of middle stature, and with dark, dirty, brown skin covered with rashes and sores, probably the result of drinking awa or of venereal disease. Most of the men had no front teeth. According to them they had been knocked out by stones in battles. . . . They were good swimmers and tattooed on their arms and bodies with lizards, billy goats, muskets and other rhombus-shaped figures, which in no way embellished their bodies, as on Nukuhiva, but rather distorted them.”45
HAWAI‘I AND THE FUR TRADE
On Cook’s third voyage, between his first and second visits to Hawai‘i, the British ships cruised the northwest coast from Alaska south, trading for sea otter pelts, which his crew subsequently found to bring fabulous prices in the market at Canton. Publicity for the voyage was immediate in Great Britain and the United States, and especially in the best-selling account by the American-born sailor John Ledyard, the details and routes of a new globe-encircling trade were laid out like a map for others to follow.46 Soon, British traders sailed for the northwest coast and as predicted turned spectacular profits at Canton. As per Cook’s example, Hawai‘i became the natural stopover for refreshment of ships and crews. Fleurieu, chronicler of the French expedition led by Etienne Marchand in 1790, dubbed it “the great caravansary” on the Pacific fur route.47 Honolulu quickly became the most cosmopolitan place many Americans and Europeans had ever beheld, as the German poet Chamisso expressed: “In the Sandwich Islands trading brings together the most varied assortment of all the peoples of the earth. Among the servants of upper-class women I saw a young Negro and a Flathead Indian from the northwest coast of America. Here I saw Chinese for the first time.”48 Hawaiians supplied the shipping industry with water, vegetables, meat, salt, firewood, spars, rope, sailors, and women. The historian Ernest Dodge wrote that it was “doubtful” if the fur trade “could have been carried out profitably . . . without the Hawaiian Islands.”49
Beginning with the Northwest-Canton fur trade, a rapid ramification of trade webs in the Pacific occurred, with Hawai‘i at their center. What is most remarkable about this growth was that it lay almost entirely outside the plans and dictates of mercantilist, imperial planners in Europe. The British trade illustrates the tensions and ambivalences of the new Pacific world. On one hand, Great Britain had been for decades attempting to break the maritime monopoly claimed by the Spanish for its American possessions. British whalers had been forced off the South American coast in the 1780s, and in 1789, Spanish warships seized two British vessels at Nootka Sound, leading to the Nootka Crisis of 1790 and the brink of war.50 On the other hand, at Canton, the British East India Company strictly enforced its monopoly on the China trade, requiring all British-flagged ships to sell to it at listed prices. In addition, it imposed a punitive tax on the sale of any British vessel to foreigners to avoid the restrictions. Samuel Shaw, supercargo on the first American ship to Canton, the Empress of China, in 1784, and later US consul there, noted that these rules “strongly favor the suspicion” that the United Kingdom aimed for a monopoly on tea exports to Europe. Instead, what it built was a situation tailor-made for smuggling. British tea consumption in 1784 was fourteen million pounds, yet the company’s receipts “did not exceed six.” The remainder was shipped by rival countries or by British ships flying flags of convenience—“Renegado Englishmen,” Shaw sniffed. The upside for monopoly-breakers was too good to ignore. “Since the year 1784, the trade here has been constantly tending to the disadvantage of the Europeans. The imports, collectively taken, hardly defray the first cost, and the exports have increased in a ratio beyond all possible conjecture. . . . Such is the demand for this article, that the Chinese hardly know how much to ask for it; and, should the rage for purchasing continue only another year, it is not improbable that its price may be doubled.”51
Shaw recognized an opportunity for American traders. The United States, its economy devastated by the revolutionary war, British blockades, and a crushing specie crisis, desperately needed markets. Shaw suggested that “if it is necessary that the Americans should drink tea,” they pay for it with “the produce of her mountains and forest” as the Empress of China had, with ginseng. Ships left New York with ginseng, but many more sailed to the northwest coast for sea otter furs. Within a few years, New Englanders had taken over the trade. By 1800, one hundred US ships anchored at Canton.52
The traders’ own success drove them to look beyond the fur trade “and this in consequence of the animal’s being almost annihilated.”53 Economical sources of domestic ginseng, too, were soon tapped out. US traders searched out new commodities and diversified markets, but their customers adapted nearly as fast as they did. The Chinese, famously, would look at little besides top-quality furs or silver; Northwest Indians kept careful control over their own sources of furs and salmon, demanding ever-increasing prices; and Spanish officials punished smuggling stiffly, if unevenly.54 From 1810 onward, Americans found that good quality Hawaiian sandalwood fetched good prices in Canton, and a new dimension was added to the circuit. Hawaiian chiefs, allowed progressively by Kamehameha to trade on their own accounts, became prodigious consumers of foreign goods, as conspicuous consumption became an arena of furious social competition between factions of the chiefly class. US captains might leave Boston or New York with cargoes of guns and ammunition for South American rebels and silk dresses, pianos, and bone china for Hawaiian nobles and then pick up furs, salmon, or lumber on the northwest coast; dried beef, hides, and tallow in California; copper in Peru; and sandalwood at Honolulu before sailing for home full of tea from China. As the markets matured, enterprising “gather” merchants combed the Pacific for goods: “Beche-de-mer, tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl, shark fins, edible birds nests, grain, fish, salt, coal, sandalwood and other exotic woods, and crude construction lumber for Asiatic and Australian markets. Copra, copper, cowhides and tallow, arrowroot, vanilla, spices, and guano they delivered to American and European markets.”55 On the horizon the whaling fishery loomed, slowly building from the 1820s toward its golden age from the 1840s to the 1850s.
Kamehameha himself underwent a gradual evolution from warrior to trader, then governor, that is representative of the dynamics of the period. For decades, from Cook’s landfall until the cession of Kaua‘i in 1810, Kamehameha’s control of trade was aimed at acquiring arms, ships, and naval supplies for his conquests. At first he proceeded by direct purchase but quickly got the point of European behavior and instituted a native mercantilism of sorts—asking or demanding that ships leave behind expert European and American carpenters, armorers, and shipwrights to build a fleet of European-style vessels in Hawai‘i. His shipyards bustled with activity, and the skill of the Hawaiian workmen trained by foreigners was frequently remarked upon.56 By 1806 Kamehameha had fifteen vessels, including three-masters, brigs, and cutters; by 1808 he counted more than thirty ships, most under forty tons, built in Hawai‘i, plus the two-hundred-ton