Hawaii by James A. Michener
Fighting back a sardonic smile, Whip leaned forward across the table and said, “It’s a plan that can’t fail. We launch our drive against the ten key targets Immediately fighting begins, American troops storm ashore. What can the Hawaiians think? They’ll reason, ‘The American troops have come to fight against the queen!’ So they’ll throw down their arms and we’ll capture the ten key spots. And as soon as we control them the American Minister will announce: ‘The United States formally recognizes the de facto government.’ At that moment what in hell can the queen do?”
John Janders cried, “How can we lose?”
Soberly David Hale pointed out, “We can lose easily … if Uncle Micah appeals to the world powers against our revolution.”
“He will not do so,” Whip promised.
“He’s a man of great honor,” Hale insisted. “And he’s sworn allegiance to Hawaii.”
“It’s my job to get Uncle Micah on our side,” Whip said flatly. “He’ll be there.”
The Hewlett boys consulted, and one said, “We’ll leave the revolution unless we can depend on Micah Hale to represent us before the world.”
“He will be with us,” Whip promised. “Not in the fighting. He’s too old a man for that. But when it’s over, he’ll step forth as our leader.”
“Can we depend on this?” the Hewlett boys asked.
Whip leaped up and crashed his chair aside. “Goddamn it!” he yelled.
“If our whole success depends on Micah Hale, do you suppose I’m going to let him escape? Of course you can depend upon it. He’ll be with us.”
Then Janders spoke: “Whip’s got to take care of that. We’ve got to stir up public enthusiasm for the revolution. What we need is a big mass meeting on Monday. Lots of speeches about human decency and men’s inalienable rights.”
“But I don’t want to see any of this committee making speeches,” Whip warned. “Get some of the lawyers and men like Cousin Ed Hewlett. He’s part-Hawaiian and rants well.”
Things seemed to be going so well that the Committee of Nine—that is, eight of them—began to relax: the revolution was at hand; the ten key spots were invested; the American Minister had recognized the new government; President Harrison had accepted it as part of the Union; and sugar was more profitable than ever. But Wild Whip brought the conspirators back to reality, pointing out in icy tones: “At the mass meeting on Monday I want everyone to be within quick reach of his guns.”
“Will there be trouble?” one of the Hewletts asked.
“Not if we’re ready for it,” Whip replied.
As the others quietly left the cellar and circulated through the agitated city, dropping ideas here and there, Wild Whip walked eastward on King Street toward the Hale mansion across from the palace, and when he reached the white picket fence and the wide green lawns in which Malama Hale took such pride, he nodded graciously to that stately half-Hawaiian lady and asked, “Is Uncle Micah in?”
“He’s in his study,” Malama said gently.
Whip entered without knocking, and before he spoke he closed the door. His uncle was surrounded by his father’s missionary books, brought over from Lahaina, and by a substantial theological and legal library. As principal adviser to four kings he had been required to give many legal opinions, and his fine mind found pleasure in doing so. From the 1870’s on he had paid little attention to the ventures of H & H, leaving that to the Hoxworths and his nephews; he had gladly accepted his proper share of the firm’s enormous profits and had applied his income to the betterment of Hawaii. The Missionary Home for Lepers at Kalaupapa, the library, Punahou and the church had benefited from his charities, but mainly he had spent his income on helping to run the government efficiently. When one of the kings took a grand tour around the world, stopping off in most of the major capitals, it was Micah Hale who accompanied him at his own expense and who paid for many of the essentials. Most of the legal books owned by the cabinet were also purchased by Micah, for he constantly harangued his contemporaries: “We are all of mission extraction, and until Hawaii is completely stable, the job of our fathers is not completed.” No island throughout the Pacific ever had a better public servant than Micah Hale, for if he was liberal with his money, he was thrice generous with his energy. Of the fine laws that were often cited in Europe to prove that Hawaii was civilized, an astonishing proportion had sprung from his energetic mind; and what was remarkable in that period was his capacity to rise above personal interest: any laws passed in his regime that favored either sugar planters or shippers were proposed not by him but by the Janderses, the Whipples and the Hewletts who proliferated in the government. Four kings had thought of Micah Hale as their one trustworthy American adviser, yet each had known that he favored the ultimate submission of Hawaii to the United States. The present queen knew of his stand, and it had irritated her and she had dismissed him from all of his offices. He was seventy years old, of better than medium height, stately in bearing and with a long, spadelike white beard. He dressed only in white, including white-powdered shoes, and in public refused to wear glasses. This was the man that faced Whip Hoxworth on the night of Saturday, January 14, 1893.
“Uncle Micah,” Whip began forthrightly, refusing the chair offered him, “there’s bound to be a revolution within the next two days.”
“Have you fomented it?” the spare old man asked.
“Yes, sir, I have. And the Hale boys and the Hewletts and Janderses. The Whipples have also joined us and my brother. There can be no retreat.”
Micah leaned back in his office chair and studied his nephew. “So there’s going to be a revolution?”
“Yes, sir.” Whip was accustomed to addressing older people in the style he had been taught aboard the whaler.
“How old are you, Whip?”
“Thirty-six.”
“How many wives have you had?”
“Two.”
“How many knife battles in Iwilei?”
“Twenty, thirty.”
“How many illegitimate children?”
“I’m supporting half a dozen or more.”
“Do you know what they call you around town, Whip?”
“Wild Whip. They call me that to my face. I don’t care.”
“I wasn’t thinking about what they call you to your face. I was thinking of the other name.”
“What other name?”
“The Golden Stud. That’s how you’re known, Whip. And you consider yourself qualified to step forth as the leader of a commune dedicated to the overthrow of a duly constituted government?”
“No, sir, Uncle Micah, I don’t.”
“I thought you said your group was plotting the revolution.”
“We are. And I’m directing it. And when I say, ‘Fire,’ by God, sir, we’ll fire. So don’t be in the way. And I’m well qualified to direct a revolution, Uncle Micah, because there’s nothing on this earth I fear, and within two days I’ll have a new government in Hawaii. But I am not qualified to step forth as the public leader of the revolution. You’re right on that, and I know it.”
“Who is to be the leader?”
“You are.” As Micah gasped at this suggestion, Whip sat down.
The two men, so unalike, stared at each other, and each sensed the tremendous New England force of the other. Micah Hale lived by a code of fierce rectitude and he persuaded those who associated with him to do the same, while Whip Hoxworth had never outgrown the brawling fo’c’s’ls of the Pacific. He knew that all men were swine and that they enjoyed being kicked into line; yet on the eve of the revolution he also knew that certain focal points of history required a man better than himself to stand forth as leader. There were limits to what even Whipple Hoxworth could attain without the assistance of decency.
“This is pretty much a sugar revolution, isn’t it, Whipple?” Micah asked.
“From my point of view, yes, sir. From yours, no, sir.”
“How can there be two interpretations of an evil act, Whipple?”
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“Not so, Whipple. The day will come when Washington will see the inevitability of annexation.”
“Never! Only actions make things inevitable.”
“Justice and dawning conscience produce inevitability. Slowly, Washington will see what the right step is. And we must rely upon Washington to take it.”
“No! If you live to be a hundred, you’ll die talking about the slow inevitability of justice. There’s going to be a revolution, my revolution, and you’re going to lead it so that your dream of justice can come true.”
Micah Hale rose slowly and stared down at his vigorous young nephew. “I am appalled, Whipple, that you so misjudged me as to think that I would be partner to such an evil action. I will not divulge your plans, although I should. But now you had better go.”
To his surprise, his scar-faced nephew did not rise. Insolently he kept his position, raised one foot to kick his uncle’s chair into place, and said, “Now we understand each other. Sit down, Uncle Micah, and let’s talk about revolution. Let’s forget everything we’ve said so far. And you might as well forget about threatening to divulge our plans to the government. Charley Wilson knows about them and wanted to arrest us all but the cabinet didn’t have the guts to back him up. So let’s see what you and I can do for one another. You despise my position and I think yours is pathetic. Okay, let’s not revert to that again. Uncle Micah, there’s going to be a revolution in two days. You can’t possibly stop it. We’ve got the American Minister waiting on the edge of his chair to recognize our de facto government. We’ve got American troops out there in the harbor just itching to swarm ashore and protect decent Americans against Hawaiian savages. We’ve got our targets pinpointed and our schedules laid. Even if you were to inform the queen herself, you’d only move up the timetable by the hours you stole from us.” He leaned forward and looked hard into his uncle’s eyes. “It’s a revolution, Uncle Micah.”
Micah Hale was not the kind of man to find his lips going dry at moments of crisis. He had weathered too many abortive revolutions when only his courage had saved the government from irresponsible outrage, and he did not sense any unusual quickening of his pulse now. With eyes as hard as his nephew’s, but from a different cause, he said, “You’ve thought of everything.”
“Let’s accept the revolution as accomplished,” the young sugar planter proposed. “I’m not the man who ought to stand before the bar of world opinion and explain why it was necessary. My record wouldn’t read very well in London or Berlin. So let’s say my part of the revolution has been successful, and that all it represents is my personal greediness … sugar … land. What happens then? America won’t accept us. Maybe Japan would.”
The idea that Wild Whip was developing had several other subsidiary clauses, but bearded old Micah Hale did not hear them, for with the mention of the word Japan he was suddenly transported to the mysterious city of Tokyo in the year 1881, when he served as privy councilor to the last king of Hawaii on the latter’s triumphal journey around the world. The royal party was stopping in a Japanese mansion that contained no chairs; the floors were of the most exquisite wood polished by centuries of use and the sliding doors were joyous to behold. It was March and a horde of busy gardeners scurried about pruning pine trees with gnarled red branches. A row of plum trees showed white blossoms, cherries were eager to burst into bloom, and as the first warm days of the year approached, the Hawaiian party relaxed to enjoy the gracious scenery.
Suddenly Micah had looked up and asked, “Where’s the king?” No one knew. At first there was excitement; then, as the hours passed, there was panic, on the part of both the Americans and the Japanese, for the King of Hawaii was clearly missing. No one had seen him leave the spacious grounds of the mansion and a frantic search revealed no betraying signs of foul play. He had vanished, a great hulk of a man dressed in conspicuous western clothes and a long black London-tailored coat. It was one of the few times that Micah Hale had experienced real dread, for he was aware that in relatively recent years Japanese samurai, outraged at the invasion of foreigners, had sliced off the heads of several. Consequently he knelt in the chairless room and prayed: “God, save the king! Please!”
In the third hour of panic, the king appeared, in jovial mood, holding his shoes. He had obviously been crawling through the stream that separated the mansion from the Imperial Palace, and he had obviously been having a rare time. He refused to explain where he had spent the missing three hours and he went to bed that night highly pleased with himself. In the morning the emperor’s chamberlain waited until the king was occupied with other matters and then quietly slipped in to see Micah.
“Utterly extraordinary,” the little man in the shiny black London morning coat said in good English. “Yesterday afternoon we heard this strange noise at the Imperial Palace, and the guards were about to shoot an intruder when I saw that it was your king. He was barefooted, muddy, laughing. His great brown face was wet with perspiration when he pushed aside the shoji, walked with his dirty feet over the tatami and said, ‘I’d like to talk with the emperor.’ We were appalled, because nothing like this had ever happened before, but Mutsuhito is a superb man and he said, ‘I’d like to talk with you.’ And they went into Mutsuhito’s private audience chamber. And what is astonishing, they stayed there for nearly three hours.”
Micah Hale wiped his forehead and straightened out his beard. “Believe me, Excellency, it was not I who sent the king.”
“Hardly,” the chamberlain replied. “In view of what he talked about.”
“What did he speak of?” Micah probed.
“Don’t you know?” the Japanese asked.
“No.”
“The king said, ‘Hawaii is tired of being pushed this way and that by America and England and Russia. It is a Pacific power and must remain so.’ ” The chamberlain paused for effect and it became apparent that Micah was expected to pursue the inquiry.
Instead he relaxed, bowed to the chamberlain and said, “I am grateful to you for having looked after my king.”
“Are you a subject of his Majesty?” the Japanese asked.
“Yes. When I took service with the government, I swore allegiance to Hawaii.”
“How interesting. Would you care to join me in a cup of English tea?”
“I’d be delighted,” Micah said. They walked through lovely pine-laden gardens and came to a small rustic house, where a serving-maid waited.
“What your king proposed,” the Japanese said, afraid that Micah was not going to ask, “was that the heir to his throne, the Princess Kaiulani, be given in marriage to the son of the emperor, so as to bind Japan and Hawaii closer together.”
Micah lost his aplomb. He choked on his tea, spilled it, slammed the cup down, and gasped, “What did you say?”
“He proposed an alliance of mutual interest, to be sealed by the marriage of the princess to one of our princes. When I heard the facts, Mr. Hale, I choked, too.”
The two diplomats stared at each other, aghast. Finally Micah stammered, “What had I better do?”
“You’d better get the king out of Japan immediately.”
“Of course, of course. But I mean … with the emperor?”
“A formal offer of marriage has been extended. It’s got to be considered by the Imperial family … and the staff. In a year or so we’ll send an answer.”
“Excellency, please take pains to insure that the answer is no.”
“It is now beyond my control. How old is your
“Let me see, she’s six.”
“We have time.”
That night Micah completed plans to whisk his unpredictable king out of Japan, but as they sat at supper, the king still having said nothing concerning his impromptu visit with the emperor, Micah studied his fat, jolly face and thought: “I wonder what transpires in that surprising brain? How did he think up a state marriage with the Japanese royal family? Where did he get the idea for an alliance with Japan? Such a thing would destroy all hope of eventual union with America! My goodness, what can we expect him to do when he gets to Europe!” From that prophetic day, Micah Hale had appreciated the inherent danger that Hawaii might one day associate itself with Japan. He had therefore fought against the importation of Japanese farmers onto the sugar plantations, but greedy men like John Janders and the Hewlett boys had insisted upon it. He was frightened by the adroit manner in which the little Japanese, who had begun arriving in the 1880’s, accommodated themselves to Hawaiian life, and he had tried to pass laws forbidding them to leave the plantations and open stores. When alone with friends he often referred to the “Yellow Menace,” and he foresaw that the Japanese would multiply and grasp for political power in a way that the more easygoing Chinese never would. Therefore he had constructed an international-relations platform that had only two planks: “Make Hawaii American. Keep the Japanese away.”
Consequently, when Wild Whip uttered the phrase, “It begins to look as if Japan might …” vibrant chords were struck in Micah Hale’s memory. “What was that last point, Whip?” he asked his nephew.
“I was saying that if you want to see your basic dream come to pass, you can do it only through me.”
“I mean about Japan,” Micah explained, and suddenly Whip realized that his uncle had heard nothing of his last statements. He had been daydreaming about some forgotten incident that Whip didn’t know about, but with sure instinct, Whip knew that his uncle’s reverie concerned Japan and that it had produced fear. He therefore decided to play upon that fear.