August 2005 Hawaii, A History: From Polynesian Kingdom to American Statehood, Ralph S Kuykendall and A Grove Day (1948)

I'm now down to the books that I neglected to keep any notes on. I thought that would mean my book reviews would be getting shorter now, but rewriting this paragraph retrospectively I see I was mistaken. I guess Pete is right: I'm incapable of writing anything brief.

I've had this book for several years. I think I must have seen it at a bargain price at a used book store once upon a time. I had been interested in early Hawaiian history before that, and it was on my (long) list of topics I'd like to study some day. When I saw this book, I recognized Kuykendall's name from having seen it on several other denser and more serious volumes at the library (one of which I had borrowed but not gotten very far into). I read the first few chapters right away, and did so again at least twice more in the ensuing years, but each time somewhere around the death of Kamehameha I, my interest waned and the book was abandoned. ("Kamehameha", I've come to realize, at least as applied to the second, third, fourth and fifth monarchs of that name, is not so much a name as a strange hybrid of name and title, sort of like the Stefans of medieval Serbia or the Ptolemies of Egypt.)

Among colonization histories, Hawaii's stands out in several ways. Of the isolated island nations, it's by far the largest. From our U.S.A. perspective, we tend to think of Hawaii as far out in the oceanic distance, but within the world of Pacific islands it lies in the northwesternmost corner. That combined with its unusual abundance of resources made it a natural stop for ships bound to and from the Pacific Northwest (Alaska, California, Nootka Sound). It's not just a coincidence of imperialism that Hawaii today is closely associated with America's other states on the Pacific Coast. The connection has a geographic logic in addition to the political.

Hawaii is also unusual in that it was never really conquered militarily; and although native Hawaiians did suffer from the usual importation of Old World diseases, the population was not decimated as it was in much of America. Hawaii did eventually succumb to the greater force and technology of the outsiders, but, although a few incidents stand out (notably, the coup against Liliuokalani), the absorption of Hawaii was remarkably gradual.

Hawaii had the good fortune of being united under a strong leader at just the right time. Other nations subjected to colonialism have had periods of united strength in their history, and Hawaii had plenty of years in which it was not united, but Kamehameha I's strong and effective leadership happened to come along right when the Europeans were arriving. Early imperialism followed the path of least resistance, and the visitors found it easier to establish diplomatic relations with Hawaii than to conquer it. Later, Hawaii benefitted from a balance-of-power relationship among the colonial powers whereby each of them preferred to see Hawaii independent rather than owned exclusively by one of the others.

One other way in which Hawaii stands out from other colonized nations is that Hawaiian culture was unusually xenophilic. Most nations that were colonized or otherwise absorbed by European expansion have had their xenophilic streaks — Pocahontas, for example, was famously xenophilic (making her Disney portrayal as a spokeswoman for supposedly Native American values all the more ironic...) — but in Hawaii it was particularly strong. When foreign ships started arriving in Hawaii's port, many Hawaiians were fascinated. Hundreds of young men, inspired by a hunger to see the world, were eager to be on the ship when it set sail.

One of my buddies from high school, Frank (who will stand with me at the wedding), was, like so many nerdish teenagers, enchanted by the idea of space travel. I distinctly remember him telling me that when space travel becomes a reality (I would say "if", but he would have said "when") he would say yes to the lowliest job just to be on that ship. That, I imagine, is how it was for many Hawaiians. That's why, when reading histories of voyages and explorations in other parts of the Pacific, and even other oceans, it's fairly common to encounter Hawaiians (in those days more likely called Kanakas, Owyhees, or Sandwich Islanders). For example, Hawaiians were among the earliest arrivals in the California Gold Rush of 1849.

Last summer Hawaii was on my mind again. I had just finished the biography of Baranov, which included a brief discussion of Russia's imperial venture to Kauai from the Russian point of view. I had read equally brief discussions of this from the Hawaiian side, without any idea how it fit into Russian policy. The new perspective piqued my interest in reading it one more time from the Hawaiian angle. More pertinent, Ericka and I were planning our own trip to Hawaii. Looking for a few books to take on the trip, the never-finished Hawaii history seemed a natural choice.

Unlike the young Hawaiians I romanticized above, I don't like to travel. If I do travel, I like to visit nearby places, I like to be in a car rather than on a plane, and I like to do it without spending much money. A great deal of my personal inertia had to be overcome to get me to Hawaii, the one state that we can't drive to. If it were just a matter of Ericka's personal desire for a vacation, we never would have ended up in Honolulu, and certainly not in a hotel on Waikiki Beach. I forget how it came up, but at one point in the travel planning phase the question arose: how low would the price have to be for me to consider the trip a good deal? (Ericka and I had to scrimp, save, and borrow in order to make the trip, and so, though I didn't realize it at the time, did everyone else who attended.) In considering the question, I realized that for me the number was less than zero: Even if the airfare, the hotel room, and the rental car were completely free, I still would have preferred to stay home. I guess I'm just an old stick in the mud. I moved to Seattle because it's my favorite part of the world. I like to be here, and I like to be home. Now that home and here are the same, I have no desire to be anywhere else.

But just as money is not my primary positive motivation for anything, neither is it my primary negative motivation. Our decision to visit Hawaii had nothing to do with money. Ericka's brother was getting married. For some reason that I don't need to fathom, it was important for him and his wife for it to happen at the Royal Hotel on Waikiki Beach. Equally important for them (and much more understandably to me) was for their close family to be with them for the occasion.

And so we went. Ericka and I had been together only about six months when the invitation arose, but I was already family by then. We knew that, though I'm not sure everyone else did then. Especially in my family, where my extreme aversion to both travel and spending money were better known, I think there was some surprise that I made the trip. Yes, I grumbled and complained, and I may have even let slip an opinion that the wedding may as well have been booked in Hell, but there was really never any question that we'd go.

The wedding was lovely and we were very glad to be there. The rest of the trip was less lovely, but it had some nice points. If you have to go somewhere, I figured, you may as well enjoy it as much as you're able. I was coaxed into the ocean only slowly. Near the end of the trip, Ericka boasted that she actually caught me enjoying myself snorkeling, which is true — not because I cared to look at the stuff on the ocean floor, but because it was a way to lie face down without turning my neck and still be able to breathe. I sleep best lying on my stomach, but some time in my early 30s I had to give it up because it was causing me neck problems. I love those massage tables where there's a face hole just big enough for your nose. Maybe some day I'll get one of those.

The snorkeling incident was also the occasion for me to get sunburn for only the second time in my life. I dislike being in the sun, so I never stay in it long enough to get burned. If the sun is out, I hide in the shade, or at least I keep my clothes on.

The best money we spent was on a rental car, which others in the family had chosen to forgo since all the planned events were within walking distance in the dense Waikiki community. That made us the designated chauffeurs when someone needed to be schlepped around, but it was worth it in order to have a way to occasionally escape the hellhole that is Honolulu. One of my old friends from California now lives over the hills on the "windward" side of Oahu. Unfortunately, she was out of town for most of the week when we were there, but we got in a brief visit before the wedding, and later we made another trip around the island on our own. The windward shore is nice. I did enjoy driving around there, and I'd consider doing it again if it were possible to drive there from here.

The contrast between the Honolulu metropolitan area and the rest of the island is striking. I've lived in Western states all my life, so I'm used to the extremes of urban and rural. The difference is that on Oahu the distances are so much shorter. From downtown Honolulu to Kailua is less than 20 miles, but on the one side of the hills it's a huge metropolis and on the other it's nearly empty. This baffles me. I can't imagine why more Hawaiians wouldn't prefer, like my friends Lori and Dave, to live outside of Honolulu. The commute is only 30 or 40 minutes — mild by San Francisco standards — and most of that time is not the commute per se, anyway, but just getting through Honolulu, which you'd have to do no matter where you live.

Honolulu is an awful city drive in. Other crowded cities have obnoxious drivers, but usually they're at least predictable. In Honolulu they weren't. For almost the entire week, Ericka resisted saying what we were both thinking. I'm half Chinese, so I can say it loud: There's a large Asian population in Hawaii. (That might explain Vancouver as well....) I've been in other cities where one is never allowed to turn left — in San Francisco, coming south on 101 through the Presidio there's a sign that says something like "no left turn, next 3 miles", which pretty much sums up the entire city — but in Honolulu it almost seems as if the streets are deliberately designed to thwart automobile traffic. Maybe they are. One quirk about Honolulu that I did like: There is a law that forbids honking one's horn except in emergency. I can see why. Me, I'm not a honker, but I sure saw plenty of driving that would surely have inspired honking anywhere else.

Oh yeah, the book. Somewhere along the way, while hiding in our hotel room away from the sun and the cars, or maybe it was mostly during the long airplane rides there and back, I did in fact read the entire book. I don't remember much from it now, except that it was kind of nifty to be reading about the people that the streets we drove on were named after (Kalakaua, Kapiolani).

One august personage in Hawaiian history I noticed mostly for how little the book had to say about him. In my days as a member of the San Francisco classical vocal music community, I crossed paths a few times with a nice fellow named Sanford B Dole. When I first encountered him he was assistant choral director in the SF Symphony Chorus, but now he's better known as a fairly large fish in the limited pond that is Bay Area composers of contemporary classical vocal music.

At SFSC rehearsals he occasionally made reference to "my family" back in Hawaii. I think most of us recognized the connection to the famous pineapple brand, but it wasn't until the second or third mention that I associated the name with a vague memory from some encyclopedia somewhere. I don't know if I ever got around to asking Sanford if his middle initial stood for "Ballard", which would have made him not only a relative but an exact namesake of the fellow who was the first governor of the U.S. Territory of Hawaii and the first and only president of the short-lived Hawaiian republic.

With a resume like that, I expected Sanford Ballard Dole would be a leading character in the story of Hawaii's history. In this book, however, he gets about a dozen mentions, but simply as "President Dole" or "Governor Dole" with virtually no discussion of who he was or where he came from. From my encyclopedia I know that he was born in Hawaii to a missionary family, was educated in Massachusetts, and returned to Hawaii to embark on a legal career. The sugar and pineapple empire was founded about a generation later by a different Dole, James D Dole, whose insight it was to invest in local cannery, which gave him the success to buy out most of his plantation rivals. I assume the two Doles were related somehow, but neither the book nor my encyclopedia actually confirms that.

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