Hawaii by James A. Michener
“I beg your pardon,” the German professor spluttered.
“I mean that whereas your facts on Tahiti may be correct, those on Hawaii are definitely in error.”
“Don’t you stand when you address remarks to your professor?” the Leipzig-trained scholar demanded, growing red. When Hoxworth got to his feet, Albers referred to his notes and began quoting an impressive list of sources: “The journals of Ellis, Jarves, Bird, the researches of Amsterfield, de Golier, Whipple. They all tell the same story.”
“If they do,” Hoxworth said, “they’re all wrong.”
Professor Albers flushed and asked, “What is your name, young man?”
“Hoxworth Hale, sir.”
“Well!” Albers laughed. “Your testimony on this matter is hardly unimpeachable.”
This contempt goaded Hale into making a reply that infuriated the professor: “You cited Jarves. Have you ever read Jarves?”
“I do not cite sources I have not read,” Albers fumed.
“Jarves happened to be a friend of some of my ancestors, and they held him in keen regard because he was the first impartial observer to defend the missionaries, and I’ve read what he wrote, in the original papers in which he wrote it, and what he wrote, sir, simply doesn’t support your thesis.”
The class broke up in something of a scandal and for some weeks the word missionary had a curious force of its own at Yale. Professor Albers, goaded by his young tormentor, marshaled an impressive battery of anti-clerical critics whose gibes at all churches and their nefarious skill in capturing the land of backward countries pleased the young iconoclasts of that day, and for several biting weeks the professor carried the day, and the dormitories rang with the famous gibes against the Hawaiian missionaries: “They came to the island to do good, and they did right well.” “No wonder the islands were lighter when they left; they stole everything in sight.” “They taught the natives to wear dresses and sign leases.” And most cutting of all: “Before the missionaries came to Hawaii, there were four hundred thousand happy, naked natives in the mountains killing each other, practicing incest, and eating well. After the missionaries had been there awhile, there were thirty thousand fully clothed, miserable natives, huddled along the shore, paying lip service to Christianity and owning nothing.” In Professor Albers’ classes such lines of reasoning became increasingly popular, and for the first time Yale, the source of missionaries, took a serious look at what they had really accomplished. In those exciting days it was downright unpleasant to be a Whipple or a Hewlett, for the fact was often cited that Dr. John Whipple had abandoned the church to become a millionaire, and that Hewlett had left to steal land from the defenseless natives.
In the fifth week of the intellectual investigation, Hoxworth Hale, then a junior, nineteen years old, asked for time to read to the class the results of some work he had been doing on his account, and in cold, dispassionate phrases he developed this thesis: “In the third decade of the last century a series of little ships brought missionaries to Hawaii. There were twelve ships in all, bearing a total of fifty-two ordained missionaries, brought to the islands at a cost of $1,220,000. At the end of nearly thirty years of religious and social service in the islands, the missionaries controlled practically no land, except in the case of one Abraham Hewlett who had married a Hawaiian lady and whose family lands have always been kept in her name for the welfare of her people. The Whipples owned no land whatever. Nor did the Hales except, in later days, a few building lots on which their homes have been built. In fact, in 1854 the Hawaiian government took cognizance of the unfortunate position of the mission families and passed a special law allowing those who had served the islands well to buy small parcels of land at favorable prices. And the government did this, Professor Albers, because they were afraid not that the missionaries would take over the islands, but that they would go back to America and take their children with them. The minutes of the government on this matter are explicit: ‘June, 1851, the missionaries who have received and applied for lands have neither received nor applied for them without offering what they considered a fair compensation for them. So far as their applications have been granted, your Majesty’s government have dealt with them precisely as they have dealt with other applications for land. It will not be contended that missionaries, because they are missionaries, have not the same right to buy land in the same quantities and at the same prices as those who are not missionaries. But, besides what is strictly due to them, in justice and in gratitude for large benefits conferred by them on your people, every consideration of sound policy, under the rapid decrease of the native population, is in favor of holding out inducements for them not to withdraw their children from these islands. We propose a formal resolution declaring the gratitude of this nation to the missionaries for the services they have performed, and making some provision to insure that their children remain in these islands.’ ”
At this point Hoxworth looked directly at his professor and continued: “Dr. Albers, the provisions of this resolution were carried out, and the investigating committee found that the missionaries who had worked so long in Hawaii had acquired so little that the community as a whole applauded when the government provided that any missionary who had served in the islands for eight years be allowed to buy 560 acres of government lands at a price of fifty cents an acre lower than what the average white newcomer would have to pay. Since the average price at that time was $1.45 an acre, this represents a reduction of exactly 34.5 per cent, or one percent per year for arduous and faithful service. So far as I can find, the missionaries acquired land in absolutely no other way, and even so, most of them were then too poor to take advantage of the government’s offer.
“Hawaii desperately wanted the mission families to stay in the islands, and it has been justly said that the most significant crop grown by the missionaries was not sugar, but their sons. Now, if you want to argue that the brilliant young mission sons who left Hawaii, studied here at Yale and then returned to the islands, usurped a disproportionate number of important jobs in medicine, law, government and management, you would be on good grounds, but if you do so argue, don’t blame the missionaries. Blame Yale.
“I conclude that it is neither fair nor accurate to accuse these families of stealing land which they never came into possession of. It was the non-mission families, the New England sea rovers, who got the land. Then, the land having been obtained by these men, it is true that mission sons managed it, for a fee, but would you have had it lie fallow? The facts you cite apply to Tahiti. They simply do not apply to Hawaii.”
He sat down, flushed with excitement, and expected the applause of his classmates for having dared argue with the arrogant professor, but what Hoxworth had said was not popular. It ran against the grain of the age and was not believed. Jokes about missionaries continued, and Hale saw that whereas he had gained nothing with his contemporaries he had placed himself at a serious disadvantage with the faculty. But what grieved him most was that his Punahou associates, Hewlett Janders and the others, felt rather ashamed that a subject which would have died with only momentary embarrassment had now been so thoroughly ventilated as to force all members of the class to be either anti-missionary or pro, and nearly everyone fell into the first category, and the Punahou men were infuriated that one of their own number had stirred up the mess.
So Hoxworth Hale’s first venture into public argument backfired rather badly, but his studies had disclosed to him his ancestors, so that no matter how witty the gibes against missionaries became, he knew what the facts were, and this knowledge, in the subtle way that knowledge has, fortified him in many ways and made him a stronger man.
His preoccupation with researches into Hawaiian history developed an accidental concomitant which outraged all of Yale and led to his temporary withdrawal from the university. He was in the library one day, reading files of an early Honolulu newspaper, the Polynesian, for he wished to refresh his mind as to what that journal’s excitable editor, Jame
He hurried from the library and went to the exhibition hall where one of the glories of Yale University stood: the collection of early Italian masterpieces gathered together by a curious man named James Jackson Jarves, who had lived in Florence in the 1850’s. Hoxworth hurried into the gallery and walked among the strange, faraway, gold and blue painting of an age he could not even begin to comprehend. He was unprepared to like the art he saw in the Jarves collection, and he did not try to do so, for it was in no way similar to the work of Raphael and Rembrandt, which he had been taught was true art; but as he gazed at the affectionate little paintings—more than a hundred of them—he sensed that they had been collected by someone who had loved them, and he asked an attendant, “Who was this man Jarves?” The man didn’t know, so Hale sought out another, and finally the curator: “Who was Jarves?”
The curator had a brief memorandum on the forgotten donor and said, “An American writer on art who lived in Florence in the middle years of the last century. A close friend of Elizabeth and Robert Browning and John Ruskin. In his own way, an eminent man, and America’s first writer on art.”
“Did he ever live in Hawaii?”
“No. But late in life he did write the first book in English on Japanese art. He discovered prints as art forms, so he must have lived in the Orient, although I have no knowledge of the fact.”
“Hawaii isn’t in the Orient,” Hale explained.
“Isn’t it considered part of Asia?”
“No,” Hale replied sharply and left. In those days he did not think much of faculty members.
He was puzzled. It seemed most unlikely that two men of such dissimilar natures as the rambunctious Hawaiian editor and the polished Italian art connoisseur could have been the same man, and yet there was the name. James Jackson Jarves; so he continued his researches and discovered at last that his Hawaiian Jarves had failed to make a living with his Polynesian and had fled in disgust to Florence, where he became the first great American collector of paintings, the first American art philosopher, and the first writer on Japanese aesthetics. He felt a proprietary interest in the strange man and thought: “That’s not bad for a Hawaii boy!”
And then, as he looked into the peculiar circumstances whereby Yale acquired the Jarves paintings, he became appalled at the unsavory tricks the college had used to steal them, and he forgot all about missionaries and began digging into the events of 1871, when the former editor of the Polynesian was fifty-three years old and in sore need of money. Yale had loaned him $20,000 on his paintings, and he had been unable to repay the debt, so the college put the entire collection up for public auction, 119 masterpieces in all, worth $70,000 or $80,000 then … over a million dollars in 1917. But college authorities had quietly forewarned potential bidders that any buyer must take the entire collection in one lump, and the rumor had circulated that even if this were done, the college would not yield clear title to the pictures, so that any prospective buyer must beware of lawsuits; and on the day of the sale there were no bidders, and Yale acquired the collection for what Jarves owed the college.
“This is a scandal!” Hoxworth cried, and to his amazement he found himself deeply involved in art problems, and now when he passed through the Jarves collection, he thought: “These marvelous masterworks!” He wrote a long letter to the college paper, asking why a college with Yale’s background should have conspired at such a nasty business, and hell broke loose.
Hoxworth was defamed on the Yale campus as a radical who had raped the reputation of his own college; but a Boston art critic wrote: “The general outline of the facts so patiently developed by young Mr. Hale have long been known in art circles but hitherto they have not been publicly aired, out of courtesy to a revered institution whose deportment otherwise has been above reproach.” So once more one of the most essentially conservative young men Hawaii ever sent to Yale found himself the center of controversy, and this one far exceeded in general interest his spirited defense of the missionaries, for it involved the honor of the university itself.
At the height of the controversy the campus newspaper evolved a logical way for Hoxworth to apologize, but just as he had refused to accommodate himself to Professor Albers’ erroneous data on Hawaii, so he now refused to condone what Yale had done to his favorite Hawaiian editor, James Jackson Jarves. Yale had stolen the pictures, and Hoxworth bluntly reiterated his charges. And then late one afternoon as he walked disconsolately through the collection a completely new thought came to him: “It really doesn’t matter to Jarves now whether Yale stole the pictures or not, just as it doesn’t matter whether the missionaries stole the land or not. What counts, and the only thing that counts is this: What good did the institution accomplish? If Yale had not picked up the pictures, forcibly perhaps, where would they be now? Could they possibly have served the wonderful purposes they serve here in New Haven? If the missionaries had stepped aside and allowed Hawaii to drift from one degeneracy to another, what good would have been accomplished? Yale is better by far for having had such a solid beginning for its art school, and Hawaii is better for having had the missionaries. The minor blemishes on the record are unimportant. It doesn’t matter what an arrogant fool like Albers says. Janders and the rest were right to ignore him. The fact is that in Hawaii today there are sugar plantations, and pineapple, and deep reservoirs and a lot of different people living together reasonably well. If Yale stole the pictures, they’re entitled to them because of the good use to which they put them. And I’m not going to argue with anyone any more about the missionaries stealing Hawaii. If they did, which I don’t admit, they certainly put what they stole to good purposes.” He saw then, that gloomy afternoon when he was being hammered by his friends, that there were many ways to judge the acts of an institution, and the pragmatic way was not the worst, by any means.
Thus he started his education, that marvelous, growing, aching process whereby a mind develops into a usable instrument with a collection of proved experience from which to function, and he was suddenly tired of Yale, and Punahou men, and professors trained at Leipzig, and problems relating to James Jackson Jarves. Consequently, he walked casually out of the gallery, nodded a grave farewell to the pictures he would never bother to see again, and reported to the New Haven post office where, on April 28, 1917, he enlisted in the army and went to France.
ON AUGUST 19, 1916, an event occurred which was to change the history of Hawaii, but as in the case of most such events, it was not so recognized at the time. It happened because one of the German lunas was both drunk and suffering from a toothache, the latter condition having occasioned the former.
Normally, the plantation lunas were a tough, cynical, reasonably well-behaved lot. Imported mostly from Germany and Norway—with one man sending for his brother and both calling upon a cousin, so that luna families were constantly being refreshed from the old country—they were employed by firms like Janders & Whipple to supervise field hands for two reasons. It was unthinkable that an Oriental could rise above minor roles, partly because few ever learned to speak English and partly because none intended to remain in Hawaii, but mostly because haoles could not visualize Chinese or Japanese in positions of authority. And from sad experience, the g
Therefore Hawaii was forced to import Europeans to run the plantations, and if the upper crust of Hawaiian society consisted of New England families like the Hales and the Whipples, the second and operating layer was built of Europeans who had once been lunas but who had now left the plantations for businesses of their own. Of the Europeans, the Germans were the greatest successes, both as lunas and as subsequent citizens, and it was ironic that the historical event of which I speak should have been precipitated by a German, but his toothache can probably be blamed.
He was on his way through Ishii Camp at six o’clock one morning, his boots polished and his white ducks freshly pressed. Of late he had been pestered by Japanese laborers in the long bunkhouses who had taken to guzzling large amounts of soy sauce in order to induce temporary fevers, which excused them from work that day, and he was determined to end this farce. If a man claimed a fever, he personally had to breathe in the face of the German luna, and God help him if he smelled of soy sauce.
In the nineteenth century, lunas had had a fairly free hand in abusing Oriental labor, and there were instances in which sadistic foremen lashed the pigtails of two Chinese together and tied the knot to a horse’s tail, whipping the beast as he dragged the terrified Orientals through the red dust. Other lunas had formed a habit of beating either Chinese or Japanese as one would thrash a recalcitrant child, and by such methods the Europeans had maintained a ruthless dictatorship of the cane fields, but with the coming of pineapple, where an abused man seeking revenge could easily pass down a row of flowering plants and knock off hundreds of the tiny individual flowers, so that the resulting fruit would lack some of the small squares of which it should have been built, the lunas by and large surrendered their old prerogatives of lash and fist, and life in the plantations was not too bad.