Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (39 page)

But then, being a believer in vertical integration, he used part of his fortune to acquire a whole or half interest in forty thousand acres of Hawaiian government land, which he then wanted government permission to irrigate. When the ministers were slow with their approval—perhaps they were beginning to realize just who they were dealing with—the king had them awakened in the wee hours of the morning to receive their resignations.
4
Perhaps no man of commerce in the islands changed from best friend to bête noire so quickly.

Ruth Ke‘elikolani was among those who found him the essence of everything they despised about
haole
businessmen. Spreckels knew that she owned more land than anyone else in the country. After pointed negotiations, he thought he had tricked her into a disastrous deal to sell him all her “right, title and interest” in the vast crown lands for only ten thousand dollars. She told him she thought it was half hers. Spreckels paid her willingly, only to learn later that the crown lands were the exclusive domain of the sovereign, and Ke‘elikolani had no interest in them whatever: The crown lands had nothing to do with her personal holdings. Ruth outsmarted him and made an easy ten thousand dollars. (Spreckels, however, went to the government and received fee-simple title to a 24,000-acre
ahupua‘a
on Maui in settlement for
his
interest, whatever that was, in the remainder of the crown lands).
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*   *   *

On November 5, 1880, Mauna Loa erupted with a powerful effluence of lava, which gave rise to an incident in which Princess Ruth’s participation became legendary, though the legend has been called into question in more recent years. During the spring of 1881 the eruption continued, feeding a lava flow that made its way eastward, but heavy jungle impeded its progress toward the city of Hilo. By late summer the lava had burnt through most of the forest, and it became apparent that Hilo would be consumed. Prayer meetings were held; Lili‘uokalani sailed down from Honolulu, arriving on August 4. Urgent plans were made to try to save the city by diverting the lava either by erecting an earthen barricade or by dynamiting a diversion channel, but still the lava advanced.

Hawai‘i’s now sixty years of Christianization had left many pockets of people who, though many could read and write, never converted to any Christian denomination. (Visitors could still be unnerved by the islanders’ frankness about sex: Dr. Nelson Bird, arriving in 1880 on the steamer
Australia
and finding the hotels full, rented a room in a commoner’s house. Great was his consternation when his host “offered me any one of the women downstairs as a bed fellow, and wondered at my refusal. His wife smiled also at my innocence and offended … virtue.”
6
) On the Big Island especially, people still feared Pele though there were no
kahunas
to continue her cult. The residents of Hilo went to their island’s former governor, relying on her as the only royal who had never betrayed the traditional gods with a profession of Christianity, and implored her to make a sacrifice to Pele and stop the lava. Exactly what Ruth did is no longer known, for accounts of it, like a medieval miracle play, became exaggerated with retelling. Some have her progressing to the edge of the lava with chants and sacrificing
‘ohelo
berries into the burning stream, which would make sense because those were known to be sacred to Pele. Other descriptions have her sacrificing a pig, or a bottle of brandy, and/or thirty red handkerchiefs, having raided Hilo merchants of all they had. One account had her laying down her 440-pound body for the night in the lava’s path.

All that is known with certainty is that the lava halted on August 9. Ralph Kuykendall, Hawai‘i’s leading English-language historian, wrote in 1967 that the whole incident may have been apocryphal, for no contemporary newspaper accounts mention it. The Bishop Museum, however, preserves a couple of documents of the time that do. “Many thanks,” wrote Hawai‘i resident Ursula Emerson to her son, for his “account of the lava flow, or what had been the flow and had caused so much anxiety.… Keelikolani is not like the Kapiolani of olden time, who was so steadfast in her trust in Jehovah.… I fear she has not her piety.” Kuykendall also wrote that Lili‘uokalani made no mention of such an incident in her memoirs, but then, she hardly would have after having journeyed to Hilo for prayer meetings and consultations with her civil engineers, and been so thoroughly shown up.
7

In spite of her ferocity, Ruth was known to be capable of great tenderness. When Miriam Likelike bore Victoria Ka‘iulani to continue the Kalakaua dynasty, Ruth acted as her godmother and gave her ten acres of her Waikiki lands, which became the new heiress apparent’s ‘Ainahau estate in downtown Waikiki. Ruth watched over her upbringing, advocating that she receive the education that would best fit her for monarchical responsibility, despite her own exclusion. Ka‘iulani grew up addressing her as Mama Nui, her “Great Mother.”

When Kalakaua was on his world tour, much talk in the country centered on the construction of the new ‘Iolani Palace in Honolulu, which was being built to replace the old frame pavilions. Ruth, who preferred living on her Kona estate, decided to have a town house, Keoua Hale, built in Honolulu to reside there. Ruth used a different architect from the palace’s, Charles J. Hardy of Chicago, then employed at a lumber mill in Honolulu, but the style—late Victorian Italianate with a Pacific accent—was so similar that the two dwellings could have come from the same drawing board. But where the palace repeated the mistake of the first ‘Iolani Palace by being intended almost entirely for ceremonial purposes with a dearth of actual living space, Keoua Hale was designed for sumptuous, gracious living. As the house took shape, people saw a mighty stone edifice, its corners fully rusticated in the best Italian fashion, broad flights of steps surmounting a raised basement to a
piano nobile
, a second floor above that, a mansard roof with dormer windows above that, and a tower above that. Wings sprouted from the central bloc; there were bay windows, balconies, broad
lanais
on the first and second stories; and inside, plasterers sculpted the coat of arms of the kingdom in the ceiling of the grand drawing room.

Gossip flowed freely around Honolulu that Ruth had deliberately built Keoua Hale to outshine the just-completed ‘Iolani Palace, pouring money into the gargantuan villa to spite Kalakaua,
8
and not coincidentally demonstrating that she was still vastly more wealthy than he—and that she did not owe the sugar planters for it. Nor could it have been a coincidence that Ruth inaugurated the grand home with a luau for a thousand people and an evening ball on February 9, 1882, perfectly timed to upstage the new palace and the eighth anniversary of the king’s investiture.
9
The beautifully engraved invitations, not to make too fine a point, were surmounted by a generic-looking crown, and headed “Ka Mea Kiekie, Ka Alii Ruth Keelikolani: ‘Her Royal Highness, the Chiefess Ruth Keelikolani.’”
10

Not long after the vast mansion was finished, there was a small echo of the contest with Claus Spreckels when the sugar baron’s son John insisted on showing off his new mansion to Queen Dowager Emma. As their carriage passed the Ali‘iolani Hale, where the sugar barons were dining with Kalakaua, Emma lowered the veil from the brim of her hat, which Spreckels “firmly demanded that I open.” Spreckels, whose father the sugar cabal regarded with increasing venom, wanted them to see what exalted company he was keeping. Emma was offended by the incident, kept her veil down, and later pronounced Ruth’s Keoua Hale “much nicer from top to bottom” than the Spreckels mansion.
11

Ruth paid for her grand gesture, though. After hosting in the vast house, her health began to decline. She returned to her favorite residence, the Hale Pili on the grounds of the Hulihe‘e Palace in Kailua Kona, where she was most comfortable. She didn’t know how sick she was. Not until some of her servants wrote to Bernice Bishop, entreating her to send a doctor, did the country learn of her condition. Bernice alerted Queen Dowager Emma, and together they hastened from Honolulu to her bedside, but upon arriving in Kailua Kona found the Hale Pili crowded with visitors, and Ruth propped up on her favored yellow cushions, laughing and holding court. She became quite provoked at the servants who had mailed Bernice the alarming letter, and she asked for the news from the capital. Kalakaua put into Kailua when he heard of her illness, and continued on to Hilo upon being assured that she was in no danger. That evening found her, according to Emma, “so cheerful and full of jokes” that her precipitous overnight decline took everyone by surprise.

She took a high fever, and both Bernice and Emma were with her when she died, “at 9 o’clock precisely on the morning of the 24th, Queen Victoria’s birthday.”
12
Ruth’s body was taken to Honolulu, where she lay in state for three weeks in her magnificent Keoua Hale, with six men fanning her casket with
kahili
. It was an awkward time, for by custom the vigil was to be kept jointly by all nobles, and Bernice and Emma, the principal mourners, were seated with Lili‘uokalani and Miriam Likelike. At the funeral Emma was given precedence, and the crown princess made no complaint, at least in public; Ruth was laid to rest in the Kamehameha crypt at Mauna ‘Ala.

In her will Ruth provided land for a half dozen favored tenants living on her properties, but they were for life tenure only; at their deaths the lands would revert to her estate, the entirety of which she bequeathed to her much-loved cousin Bernice.
13
Ruth’s concern was to keep the vast royal patrimony—some 353,000 acres, or nearly 10 percent of the entire country—intact. Bernice, too, honored this intent, and the Kamehameha lands became the nucleus of the trust that funds the Kamehameha Schools to this day.

To the Americans and American-Hawaiians intent on the country’s cultural Westernization and economic grafting to the United States, Ruth Ke‘elikolani had been a somewhat comical figure—crude, ungainly, primitive. But to the native people, both the
kanakas
who looked to her as Ku‘u Haku, and her peers who understood her abilities and her intentions, she was a protectress of the island culture. She spent her life championing the language, the customs, and the heritage, and when she died her huge estate, which she had shrewdly managed and maintained intact, became the single greatest guarantee of their survival. That was a powerful legacy that has not been sufficiently appreciated.

16.
Queen at Last

After the death of Princess Ruth, Bernice took up residence in the cavernous Keoua Hale, which her cousin had left her. Five years younger than Ruth, she also entered a decline. A voyage to San Francisco to consult a specialist resulted in a diagnosis of breast cancer, and she submitted to an operation to treat it. She returned to Hawai‘i in the company of Likelike, took up residence first at her Waikiki retreat and then once more in Keoua Hale, but her mortality could not be stayed, and she died on October 16, 1884. Bernice’s birth parents had been the
hanai
parents of Lili‘uokalani, and despite the dynastic tension the two women had remained close. In her will Bernice left her numerous properties. Kalakaua benefited nothing from the Kamehameha lands, leaving him to finance his lifestyle and the government on his own, which meant increasing debt to the pro-American sugar industry. With increasing concern over his debts, he requested his sister to turn some of her lands over to him, and she caused something of a family rift when she refused.

No sooner had Bernice Pauahi passed from the scene than Dowager Queen Emma began to fail noticeably. Only forty-nine, she had suffered a series of small strokes over the previous year, which may have affected her behavior,
1
and she died six months after Bernice, on April 24, 1885. After her death, as was the custom, she lay in state, at the capacious Rooke House, where her father had practiced medicine and entertained on the first floor as the family lived on the second, and which had been her principal residence her whole life. She was laid out in white silk trimmed with gold, a jeweled circlet on her brow. Four weeks was the usual time for a royal wake, but an incident occurred, almost stunning in its bad taste, that exhibited the reach if not the impudence of American arrogance. Early in the course of the vigil over Emma, her business manager, Alexander Cartwright, and several others spirited her remains away to Kawaiaha‘o, the church of the American Congregationalists and the last place in the country that Emma would have wished to lie. Their justification was that Rooke House was not large enough to accommodate the throngs of mourners that they expected; that made sense, insofar that the Anglican cathedral for which Emma had raised money had barely begun construction, but the incident aroused the indignation of her “Emmaite” partisans and the sympathy even of others such as Lili‘uokalani, who despite their differences regarded her with great respect.

Kalakaua had shown himself perhaps the most agnostic of all the monarchs, but that was less the cause of his discredit with the American and English element than his self-indulgent reign. He had proved himself a capable representative of the kingdom when abroad, but at home he was a profligate gambler and capacious drinker who should have been more careful about the friends he kept. He finally parted with Claus Spreckels, not over Spreckels’s near-monopoly on the sugar industry, but because one night at cards when Kalakaua demanded to know where a missing king was, Spreckels carelessly remarked that
he
was the other king. It was an expensive divorce, but the king obtained it. After appointing Walter Murray Gibson to the house of nobles and then to a succession of cabinet posts, he had an able servant to deliver his legislative needs, but every time Gibson acted it seemed to cost the king
haole
support.