Gibson moved to Honolulu in September, 1872, and, supported by his hefty income from Lanai, entered politics. His first move was the promotion of a scheme for repopulating Hawaii. He advised importing people from the Orient or Malaysia—he strongly recommended Sumatra—to replace the declining Hawaiians and to supply labor in the fields. He founded a Hawaiian Immigration Society which advised the government on such matters, and the fact that Hawaii is today so strongly Oriental stems partly from his activity.
But sending memorials to the government was not his idea of politics. He had a much grander field of operation in mind, but for such achievement he required that the Hawaiian throne be occupied by the kind of king who would fit in with his grandiose plans. The present king, Kamehameha V, had not the commanding mind of the great ruler whose name he bore, but even so, Gibson could not make any headway with him. Fortunately for Gibson, Kamehameha V died without having named his successor, so Hawaii was free to elect a king.
Gibson looked over the two candidates, Prince William C. Lunalilo, a high-born chief with liberal opinions, and Colonel David Kalakaua, a politician and newspaper editor. Apparently he thought highly of neither, for there is some evidence that before the election he tried to organize a revolution which would have established a republic with Gibson as president; but this scheme failed, so he came out strongly for Lunalilo, and his candidate won overwhelmingly.
Yet Gibson had made a poor choice, for Lunalilo proved himself to be a fairly good king and one quite unprepared to follow Gibson’s leadership in anything. Gibson, now fifty-two years old, a wealthy, influential man with a handsome black beard and commanding presence, decided to attain power without the king’s assistance. His skill in oratory, and especially his mastery of the Hawaiian language, gave him command over the popular imagination, aided by his editorship of a paper called Nuhou, or “gossip.” He appealed to the natives’ fear of foreigners and missionaries, and for his own ends stirred up racial hatred. Ironically, the cry of this Caucasian messiah was “Hawaii for the Hawaiians!” and his demagogic articles and lectures poured scorn on the “grasping and unscrupulous whites.” Clearly aiming at the private goal of “Hawaii for Gibson!” he stirred up hatred of all non-Hawaiians, but particularly those who had long resided in the islands and were prominent in business and social life.
Then Lunalilo died after less than thirteen months of sovereignty, and Gibson had another chance to pick himself a king. This time he made no mistakes. Backing David Kalakaua vigorously, he opposed the more logical candidate, Queen Emma, a brilliant woman and widow of Kamehameha IV. Of her Gibson shouted piously that she should refrain from running, for “the Hawaiian people will love her as a benefactress and hate her as a politician.” When the legislators met, thirty-nine voted for Kalakaua and only six for Emma. The queen’s supporters attacked the Courthouse and a riot broke out that was quelled only by the landing of forces from British and American warships in the harbor.
At last Gibson had the king he wanted. Kalakaua, destined to be the last male monarch of the Hawaiian kingdom, was truly a “merry monarch,” but also a visionary, one who believed in Hawaii’s high destiny. Fourteen years younger than Gibson, he had been born on November 16, 1836, in Honolulu; but he came of a prominent family of the Big Island—Hawaii—and could trace his ancestry back to legendary times when chiefs had reached there from Tahiti. He was a practiced public speaker and writer in both English and Hawaiian, and had once edited a newspaper, Star of the Pacific. In 1888 his name was to appear as author of Legends and Myths of Hawaii, edited by R. M. Daggett, the first important book in English dealing with these old tales. He also loved music, and composed the words of the national anthem, “Hawaii Ponoi.”
Kalakaua started his reign auspiciously, and won wide popularity by attaining a reciprocity treaty with the United States. To aid the cause he made a visit to that country, and thus became the first king of any nation to do so. Americans, of course, have always gone mad over royalty, and King Kalakaua was widely hailed as a democratic king. But he dreamed of restoring the strong personal rule of the early Hawaiian monarchs, and his reign was marked by an increasing march toward autocracy.
Burly in figure, with luxuriant side whiskers, Kalakaua Rex was imposing in the glittering uniforms in which he loved to dress. He was a living paradox, both kingly and democratic. Stevenson, who spent six months in the islands in 1889, called Kalakaua “the finest gentleman I ever met” and “a very fine intelligent fellow,” but added, after the king had lunched on the writer’s yacht Casco, “what a crop for the drink! He carries it, too, like a mountain with a sparrow on its shoulders.” Henry Adams, whose education was advanced by a visit to Hawaii in 1890, noted that Kalakaua “talked of Hawaiian archaeology and arts as well as though he had been a professor.” Charles Warren Stoddard, another author, remarked: “Oh, what a king was he! Such a king as one reads of in nursery tales. He was all things to all men, a most companionable person. Possessed of rare refinement, he was as much at ease with a crew of ‘rollicking rams’ as in the throne room.” John Cameron, who as master of a steamer running to Kauai often found His Majesty seated among his retainers on mats on the afterdeck, termed him “easy to approach and difficult to leave; unfailingly genial; kind to high and low alike; beloved by his subjects.… It was not strange, I think, that many adventurers took advantage of Kalakaua’s liberality and joviality to intrigue for their own miserable ends.” The chief intriguer was Walter Murray Gibson.
Under Kalakaua, as under Lunalilo, Gibson continued his intrigues to obtain favorable leases on more Lanai lands. He was elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1878 from Lahaina, and took an active part as a supporter of the king and a champion of the natives. He worked for sanitation and better care of lepers.
Further, Gibson supported an appropriation to build a more commodious palace, observing in his rich prose that it was “essential to the dignity and security of a throne that it should be upheld by appropriate surroundings of domain and mansion.” He also took the lead in proposing a fitting celebration of the centenary of the discovery of the islands by Captain James Cook, and an appropriation of $10,000 was made for a statue of Kamehameha I to be erected in Honolulu. Some people commended Gibson’s efforts in this session, but the Hawaiian Gazette sourly wrote: “He got up more special committees, made more reports, and by his officiousness and vanity kept the legislature in a continual ferment of excitement, merely to enable him to air his inordinate ambition to shine as a leader of the Assembly; and par excellence, the special friend and protector-general of the remnants of the Hawaiian race.”
The statue turned out to be a typical Gibson project. As committee head, he felt he had to go to the United States, and in Boston commissioned the sculptor Thomas R. Gould to design an idealized statue of Kamehameha the Great, which would be erected across from the new palace in downtown Honolulu. Somehow, the expense of this statue ran into big money; the pedestal alone cost the kingdom $4,500, and the statue itself sank when the ship that carried it caught fire off South America.
Now occurred one of those accidents which try the politician’s soul. And Gibson must often have contemplated wryly the irony of a situation in which he introduced into Hawaii his own worst enemy. Some years before, while knocking around Washington, he had met an ingratiating Italian adventurer, Celso Caesar Moreno, whom he had casually invited to Hawaii. Long after the invitation had been forgotten, Moreno turned up brightly on the Honolulu docks. He immediately charmed King Kalakaua, and with Gibson’s support wangled $24,000 for a steamship line to be run by Moreno, showed how an opium concession in Hawaii would make millions, tried to borrow $1,000,000 to lay a transpacific cable to China, and set up a plan for educating likely Hawaiian boys at overseas universities at government expense.
This was the kind of big thinking that appealed to King Kalakaua, and startling as it seems, exactly 274 days after the enterprising Celso Caesar Moreno landed in Hawaii, the king prorogued the Assembly, forced his entire ca
binet to resign, and appointed Moreno premier of Hawaii!
A tornado of protest at once arose against the interloper. Various people advocated the crowning of Emma, the abdication of Kalakaua, the lynching of Moreno, or immediate annexation of the kingdom by the United States. Under this storm of indignation, the king reluctantly dismissed Moreno, but to save face gave him the position of escorting some young Hawaiians abroad to study in Italy. Moreno departed, suspected of some sinister mission.
Gibson must have breathed a sigh of enormous relief when the gallant Italian disappeared, for Moreno had done exactly what Gibson wanted to do, and only the popular revolution against the appointment made it possible for Gibson himself to attain the post of premier. His election, however, was to come more slowly than Moreno’s dazzling rise.
Posing as the savior of the declining Hawaiian race, Gibson had been busy giving medical advice toward that end. He rightly asserted that the race “which cared not for the chastity of its females must not hope for independence or perpetuity.” Completely without the aid of the medical profession, he wrote a book of sanitary instructions for the native Hawaiians, which would help them avoid malaria, smallpox and leprosy. The main source of his rules was, as he wrote to one editor, “the first and most eminent writer on sanitary conditions known to us—and that is Moses.” Gibson made a good deal of money on this volume and obtained a post on the Board of Health.
Gibson’s real power began to accumulate when he acquired the influential newspaper, Pacific Commercial Advertiser, in whose columns he continued to play the champion of the Hawaiian people, the enemy of grasping Caucasians, and the only logical savior of the islands. He had plenty of space in which to advance these views, for all the respectable business leaders had pulled their ads out of his paper.
Kalakaua Rex departed in January, 1881, on a trip around the world, the first king to make such a tour. He was accompanied by his chamberlain, Colonel C. H. Judd, and his attorney general, W. N. Armstrong. His valet Robert, a decayed German baron who was an accomplished linguist, went along as interpreter. The king went abroad presumably to study the immigration problem, but one of his ministers said his only object was to gratify his curiosity and that it was “pure poppycock and Gibsonese” to say otherwise. Kalakaua went first to San Francisco and then visited Japan, China, Siam, India, Egypt and the capitals of Europe. In all of these places he was given royal honors and hearty entertainment, and in Tokyo nearly succeeded in arranging a marriage between his lovely niece, the Princess Kaiulani, and one of the imperial princes of Japan.
During the king’s absence, Gibson built up his political power and came to be considered a public leader. He was appointed a member of the privy council, and when Kalakaua returned, Gibson continued to instill in him a love of pomp and aggrandizement, for the king was easily dazzled by show.
While in England the king had ordered two golden crowns, set with precious jewels. On February 12, the ninth anniversary of Kalakaua’s election to the throne, the coronation was held in a pavilion on the grounds of the new Iolani Palace. While eight thousand people watched, the elected king, Napoleon-style, put on his own head and that of his queen the royal crowns. Years later, runs the legend, on the night the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown, an officer of the Provisional Government forces found his men in the palace basement throwing dice for jewels gouged out of these royal diadems. The biggest diamond was sent by an Irish sergeant to his Indiana sweetheart, who always considered it just a lump of glass.
During the election of 1882, Gibson’s opponents tried to overwhelm him by publishing a satirical exposé entitled The Shepherd Saint of Lanai. It revealed in lurid detail the shadiness of his early career and predicted a revolution if Gibson continued to stir up hatred. This pamphlet failed to ruin him, however, because it was printed in English, and few of his native supporters could read it! Again his political cunning and his oratory enabled him to be elected by a large majority.
The 1882 session of the legislature was one of the most corrupt that had ever met in Honolulu. One of its first acts was to convey to Claus Spreckels, a California sugar magnate, a large tract of crown lands at Wailuku, Maui, to settle a claim he had bought from a local princess for $10,000. Gibson supported an opium-licensing bill, another big loan bill, a bill to permit sale of spirituous liquors to natives and another for nonsegregation of lepers. Another bill led to the minting of the silver coins which in 1884 were put in circulation bearing the bust of Kalakaua; on this coinage deal, Spreckels made a profit of $150,000, and the dumping of silver currency for a time threatened the entire Hawaiian economy.
Such flagrant misgovernment could not be tolerated by sensible men, and Kalakaua’s entire cabinet resigned. This was Gibson’s supreme chance, and he prevailed upon the king to appoint him premier and minister of foreign affairs. Thereafter, until his sudden downfall five years later, Gibson had everything his own way. He proved himself an adroit politician and held each of the cabinet posts in turn, occasionally several at once. Whenever the conservative elements in the kingdom tried to unseat him, he threatened them with his staunch Hawaiian supporters, and made his position secure by continuing to flatter the hula-loving, poker-playing king.
The Gibson rule was one of utter confusion, but slowly a Reform party, solidly organized, began to coagulate and it managed to defeat some of the wildest Gibson measures, even though the premier used patronage and government funds shamelessly to support his program. He favored his son-in-law with sinecures and showered the young man’s father with building contracts. Among the more trivial scandals of the Gibson regime were the sale of public offices, the ruination of the civil service by purges, misuse of royal privilege to defraud the customs revenue, illegal leasing of lands to the king, neglect of the roads of the kingdom and the sale of exemptions to lepers, who could thereby escape confinement on Molokai.
Now Gibson was in a position where he could revive the dreams of his youth, and he launched a systematic program of corrupting Kalakaua’s judgment and subtly introducing his own grand design. Hawaii must head a vast coalition of island states including Tahiti, Samoa, Tonga, the New Hebrides, the Solomons, the Gilberts and all the islands in between—and the king of Hawaii would become the emperor of the Pacific.
Gibson’s studies had shown him that in the past, the Hawaiian Islands had not only striven for their independence but had at times tried to play a bigger role in Pacific politics and to annex other regions. He recalled that Kamehameha the Great, the “Napoleon of the Pacific,” had dreamed of going far beyond his unique achievement of uniting the baronial, war-torn Hawaiian Islands under himself as ruler. During the last years of his reign that powerful monarch, who died in 1819, was reported to have opened negotiations with King Pomare II of Tahiti on the project of having a son and daughter of Kamehameha marry Pomare’s offspring. An alliance of that kind might have been the first step in organizing a spreading Polynesian League in the Pacific before too many islands had been grabbed by European powers.
Gibson also remembered the disastrous expedition of Governor Boki and his two Hawaiian brigs in search of a sandalwood island in the New Hebrides in 1830. Trying to recoup his lost fortunes, Boki and nearly five hundred of his followers had mysteriously disappeared in the South Seas. Gibson deduced that Boki had probably carried secret orders to annex some of those islands to the Hawaiian kingdom. Could Boki’s tragic trip be used as an excuse for annexation?
But most of all, Gibson was familiar with the exploits of one of the strangest men in Hawaiian history. Charles St. Julian never saw the Islands, probably never saw a Hawaiian. He was an underpaid law-court reporter in Sydney, Australia, with little schooling and only an inordinate personal vanity to build upon. As a result of writing innumerable letters to different governments, he was—almost accidentally—allowed to serve as de facto consular agent for Hawaii in Sydney.
That was all the purchase he needed, for he thereupon launched a veritable blizzard of reports, fantastic plans, involved nego
tiations and scatterbrained attempts at consolidating most of the island groups in the Pacific under Hawaiian rule. With his own money he purchased a lovely atoll just east of the Solomons called Sikaiana, and tried to give it to Hawaii. It is doubtful if any kingdom ever had a more loyal servant than Charles St. Julian. For twenty years he tried to get the Hawaiian kings to accept the “Primacy of the Pacific” and take the lead in establishing protectorates over islands that had not yet been seized by the great powers.
But Hawaii, without a Walter Murray Gibson on hand at the time to appreciate the Australian’s energy, treated St. Julian badly. He got little or no pay, no support. Not even his atoll was accepted, but he did enjoy moments of grandeur. He was allowed to design his own uniforms, and by all accounts was one of the handsomest and most glittering consuls ever to operate in the Southern Hemisphere. He also initiated, on his own account, a florid, bejeweled decoration, the Order of Arossi, which he gave to himself for extraordinary services to the people of Polynesia.
Usually such dreamers reach a bad end, but Charles St. Julian gladdens the heart by his accomplishments. Despairing of getting anywhere with the unimaginative Hawaiian kingdom, he transferred his cyclonic talents to Fiji, where he appeared grandly as “Charles, Muara of Arossi and Sovereign Chief of Sikaiana.” He completely bedazzled that island group and talked himself into the job of lord high chief justice. Then, as he was about to leave Sydney for his new post, he received notice that Hawaii, whom he had pestered for years seeking some kind of honors, had finally awarded him “a Cross and Diploma as Knight Commander of the Order of Kamehameha I.” With tears of gratitude overflowing upon the paper, he reported that he would accept the offer, because he would now be able to appear in Fiji as Sir Charles, which would “look better” and be “more fitting.”