On August 19, only eleven days after the Kaimiloa had departed, a squadron of four German warships did arrive at Apia. The American consul there believed that, had the Hawaiian ship lingered until that time, it might well have been blown out of the water. Even Hawaii itself, as Bismarck had threatened, might have been attacked. On August 25, the squadron proclaimed Tamasese as King of Samoa, and unlucky Malietoa was deported. The Germans proclaimed martial law, and they threatened war with Hawaii if it aided the Malietoa faction in any way. Gibson’s vision of Hawaiian empire had led only to a very real danger to Hawaii’s home islands from German cannons.
But Gibson was not around for the final debacle. Weeks before the collapse of empire, the man’s follies had come home to roost, and his own neck was in danger. Had Germany known the true state of affairs, she might well have thought of armed intervention in Hawaii, for a revolution was simmering there. Gibson’s attempts to use Kalakaua for his own selfish ends, plus his cabinet machinations and his stirring up of racial prejudice for political purposes, made pilikia—trouble—inevitable.
The election campaign of 1886 had been a riot of vilification by both parties. Gibson’s royalists had the edge, however, because they could use the king’s privilege of importing liquor duty free. Their henchmen served waiting lines of thirsty voters from a galvanized washtub full of straight gin, poured into tumblers from a coconut-shell ladle. The going price for votes was five dollars. Gibson won.
During the legislature of 1886, Gibson found the government heavily in debt to Spreckels and faced by the need to mortgage its revenue to the man who was being called “the second king of Hawaii.” Public money continued going down the drain. The appropriations bill passed in 1886 exceeded four and a half millions. As the Gazette wrote: “The money borrowed has been used for every folly that the brains of a vain and foolish man could invent.”
Now a worse scandal was about to break. For many years Gibson had abetted Kalakaua in reviving native customs and traditions, which opened the leaders to charges that they were “licensing sorcery and the hula and sacrificing black pigs.” They had also founded a society which, it was charged, was set up “for the propagation of idolatry and sorcery.” This was the Hale Naua or House of Ancient Science, a secret society combining aspects of Masonry with the rites of pagan chiefs. According to its charter from the privy council, it was organized forty quadrillions of years after the foundation of the world and 24,750 years after Lailai, the Hawaiian Eve. One historian believed that it was intended “partly as an agency for the revival of heathenism, partly to pander to vice, and indirectly to serve as a political machine.”
The king dabbled in “scientific” theories such as the notion that Hawaii was the remains of a large Atlantis-like continent which his race had once dominated—a theory that would appeal to the Mu enthusiasts of today but which evoked contemporary laughter. Kalakaua also founded a “Hawaiian Board of Health” which his critics termed an organized body of kahunas, medicine men. Gossips whispered of palace orgies at which the heathen pastimes were revived, including the hale ume, in which the companion of a night’s pleasure was chosen by rolling a ball of twine in the direction of the selected charmer.
Other gossip concerned the private life of Gibson, who was still the Lothario. The sixty-four-year-old premier was courting a twenty-eight-year-old widow, Flora Howard St. Clair, who had come with her sister from their home state of California in February, 1886. She was a book agent and while canvassing for sales soon met Gibson. They immediately found a common interest in British painters. He told her that his life was lonely and remarked, “There is nothing like a true, loving heart.” A day or two after Christmas, according to her testimony in court, he proposed marriage to her on the veranda of his home; but later he denied the engagement, and in May, 1887, when Gibson had his hands full with politics rather than with affairs of the heart, her lawyers brought a suit for breach of promise and asked $25,000 in damages. The suit did not come to trial until after Gibson’s downfall, and in October, 1887, a jury awarded Mrs. St Clair the sum of $10,000 heart balm.
As if no collapse were imminent, on November 16, 1886, Gibson had helped to celebrate King Kalakaua’s fiftieth birthday with a grand hookupu, or gift-giving. Each guest brought a present suitable to his station. Premier Gibson led off with a pair of elephant tusks on a koa-wood stand with the inscription: “The horns of the righteous shall be exalted.” The police department, more practical, tendered a bank check for $570. The ensuing jubilee pageantry and hula performances lasted more than a week.
Such scandals and the drain on public funds had hopelessly alienated most of the white residents as well as many of the natives. Early in 1887 a secret society called the Hawaiian League had been formed to fight for a less autocratic constitution. Hundreds of islanders joined, and as a last resort were ready to overthrow the monarchy, set up a republic and apply for annexation by the United States. The League members obtained arms and drilled regularly, and were ready to fight if necessary to obtain their rights.
The immediate occasion for the Revolution of 1887 was an act of blatant corruption. A disgruntled rice merchant named Tong Kee, alias Aki, disclosed that he had paid a bribe of $71,000 to cabinet officials for an opium monoply in the kingdom, but that the license had been given to the Chun Lung syndicate, who had paid a bribe of $80,000. Both Gibson and the king were unquestionably involved. When the news broke, one firebrand advocated a march on the palace by the Honolulu Rifles, the armed militia of the League. Instead, the aroused citizenry held a mass meeting on June 30. Unanimous resolutions were passed demanding that the king dismiss his cabinet and other officials concerned, and that he pledge himself never again to interfere in politics.
There was no bloodshed. Most of Kalakaua’s troops had deserted him, and the battery of field guns he had bought in Austria on his world tour for $21,000 was of little value in defending him from his irate subjects. Hurriedly he fired Gibson and appointed a new cabinet, which drew up a less imperious constitution that he signed on July 6. The unfortunate Aki never got his money back, for the supreme court decreed that the king could not be sued.
What happened to the deposed premier? Taking advantage of the fear and confusion of the revolution, his opponents came within an ace of lynching him. The leader of the Honolulu Rifles dragged Gibson down to the docks and announced that he must hang from the yardarm of one of the vessels at the wharf, as a horrible example to those who would seek to overthrow the new government. But at the last minute the British consul intervened and the aging expremier was rescued from hanging.
He was hurried off to jail, where he remained until brought to trial on July 12 on charges of embezzlement, but the government decided not to prosecute. To save embarrassment, Gibson was allowed to leave Hawaii on a ship headed for the United States. His dreams of empire had vanished.
If Gibson’s sense of drama had inspired him to seek out a proper death, he would have died in a California gutter, in accordance with the Mormon malediction directed against him. Instead, he died comfortably in bed, in St. Mary’s Hospital, San Francisco, on January 21, 1888.
His body was embalmed and returned to Honolulu, where it was put on view at his late residence on King Street. Hordes of mourners came to pay their respects to the dreamer of the Pacific. “Native Hawaiians,” reported a newspaper, “exceeded all other nationalities in numbers, and their manifestations of sorrow and grief were touching.” A solemn funeral was then held at the Catholic Cathedral. Among the dignitaries who attended in formal attire were diplomatic representatives of the United States, Great Britain and Portugal. The bishop who conducted the services, aware of the tensions accompanying this funeral, ended his peroration with an admonition: “Let him who is without fault among you cast the first stone.” Gibson’s estate, according to local rumor, totaled more than a million dollars.
In writing of Gibson, one is constantly tempted to dismiss him as another of the confused visionaries who have tormented the Pacific,
but to do so is to blind one’s self to the authentic magnificence of this foolish man. True, he was the gaunt dreamer; but he was also an inspired prophet.
It is amazing how often Gibson was right, and if we tick off the areas in which he clearly foresaw the future, we find ourselves in the presence of a remarkable man.
The people of Sumatra won their independence from the Dutch in much the way that Gibson had envisaged. The Malaysian islands he loved have confederated into a powerful nation, as he predicted. No doubt the Malays of neighboring Malaya will one day do the same.
Hawaii has developed pretty much along the lines he predicted. The role of the native Hawaiian has diminished under the very pressures he foresaw and warned against. Concurrently, the Oriental population has achieved a status which in some respects he anticipated, for it was he who paved the way for their entrance. If he did not foresee the dominant role to be attained by these Chinese and Japanese immigrants, he was aware that energy like theirs was needed if Hawaii was to prosper.
He was right in his theories about the need for treatment of leprosy, in his general ideas on the health of native peoples, and in many of his advanced views on agriculture. He also foreshadowed the essential role to be played by Caucasians in politics—at least during the early years—and was one of the ablest practitioners of this difficult art of convincing full-blooded Hawaiians that they should elect a Caucasian immigrant to represent them. That he held power so long proves his gift of persuasion.
In one nebulous but increasingly important field he was spectacularly correct. With unexpected insight he explained the precautions that ought to be taken by a white, highly organized, mechanized, capitalistic society to preserve the existence of a primitive, non-mechanized, communal group. Gibson was one of the first to see that the native cultures of the Pacific were threatened with extinction, and although he himself did many things contrary to his own preachments, he clearly perceived that the native Hawaiians would have to be supported and protected in many psychological ways if they were to maintain themselves. He advocated the preservation of ancient Hawaiian artifacts, the cultivation of Hawaiian culture and the study of indigenous songs and chants. The museums of the Pacific and the work of various cultural commissions exemplify his dreams.
Gibson’s vision of a united Pacific under the leadership of Hawaii has not come to pass, but if he were alive today he would applaud the logic of America’s governing hundreds of the islands west of Hawaii, some of them from naval headquarters in Honolulu. This is close to what he advocated.
The important South Pacific Commission operating out of New Caledonia in the interests of the entire South Pacific is a fulfillment of his plans, and within the next hundred years we can expect some kind of South Pacific federation similar to the one he envisaged, although it will probably not depend upon Hawaiian leadership.
Curiously, even the Mormon Church, which he abused so badly, has developed its Pacific missions largely as he predicted it would; and the church, in spite of the hurt Gibson did it, has accomplished about what he had originally hoped for it.
In view of Gibson’s excellent foresight, and his accomplishments as a practical politician and his marked success in business, one might expect him to have enjoyed the reputation such attainments merit. Instead, by most people except his beloved Hawaiians, he was hated during his lifetime and ridiculed in death. Two grave defects in character nullified his accomplishments. First, he was cursed with an intemperate enthusiasm and imagination. The modern reader shares Nathaniel Hawthorne’s amusement as he watches Gibson in England, his mind inflamed by the obsession that in infancy he had been swapped for a baby of noble lineage. We can also imagine the self-delusion in which Gibson dispatched the pathetic Kaimiloa to ensnare Samoa. His ridiculous enthusiasm constantly invited ridicule. Second, he was driven by an insatiable personal vanity. Most of his political excesses stemmed from this, as did most of his bitter enmities.
Time and again in his stormy career, Gibson allowed these two defects to seduce him into real folly. His mistakes then became so blatant as to invite condemnation, and his real accomplishments were overlooked.
Gibson’s day in court will come when his voluminous and elegantly written diaries are published. They will disclose a poetic dreamer, an Old Testament prophet and a contentious man whose ambition destroyed him. No more moving passage will be found than a prophecy he uttered at the age of forty on the island of Lanai. A powerful conspiracy of his enemies had humbled him momentarily and in his despair he caught a glimpse of his destiny: “There will be treasons as now, I shall die in the isles by the deed of an island foe, but I shall love them to the end, and it shall be said of me he was a worker of good among his fellow men and above all a lover of the weak island races that had no friend.”
5
Bligh, Man of Mutinies
During World War II, several million Americans experienced the crushing boredom of troopship life. While their rolling transports plodded back and forth across the vast wastes of the wartime Pacific, they yearned for recreation, and almost without exception their tedium was lightened by some enthusiastic amateur who could make barking noises like Charles Laughton.
This Thespian in khaki would grab a microphone, plant himself athwart an after hatch and dig up some straight man who could mimic Clark Gable. Then, in burlesque that was frequently excellent, these seafarers would shout selected scenes from “Mutiny on the Bounty,” a film which had recently enjoyed great popularity.
“Mis … ter Christ … ian!” the improvised Captain Bligh would bellow. “Who stole my co … co … nuts?”
“Are you suggesting, sir—” the long-suffering mate would plead.
“Suggesting? Suggesting, Mis … ter Christ … ian? Damn your filthy eyes, I’m charging you with rob … ber … y!”
Our men never tired of this act, and there must be many in civilian life today who recall with nostalgia the terrifying shout that so often swept their doleful ships: “Mis … ter Christ … ian!” It was an appropriate cry for the Pacific.
Those who heard the bellow at sea were apparently only slightly more impressed than the general public, to whom Captain William Bligh had become the arch tyrant of the oceans. Moviegoers around the world have enshrined him as the demented bully, the terrible-tempered ogre.
But was he a tyrant and a monster? Or was he a highly competent naval officer cursed by an evil fate which moved him into positions of command whenever a violent mutiny was about to erupt? To answer these questions, let us look at the evidence. Perhaps the real Captain Bligh is a more dramatic figure than the stereotype of the silver screen.
Bligh first strode onto the pages of history in an episode that reflected much credit upon both his bravery and his common sense/That was in the year 1776, when he was selected, at the age of twenty-one, to serve as sailing master for Captain James Cook. That great and gentle explorer was about to set forth on his third expedition to penetrate the farthest reaches of the Pacific.
Cook always felt that he had chosen wisely in selecting young Bligh for so important a position, and had the great explorer, in his hour of mortal peril, been fortunate enough to have had Bligh in his launch, Cook would surely have lived for even more profound explorations. Unfortunately, a lesser officer commanded the guard boat, and the world lost its noblest explorer.
At that fateful time, Cook’s flagship, the Resolution, dismasted by a sudden tropical storm, rested in Hawaii’s spacious Kealakekua Bay, where the natives were beginning to steal much precious equipment from the white visitors. “I am afraid,” the reluctant captain told his aides, “that these natives will oblige me to use some violent measures.”
The night of Saturday, February 13, 1779, was filled with alarms. A marine on guard at the shore camp where the Resolution’s foremast was being repaired saw creeping figures and fired. At dawn Cook found that the sailing cutter anchored a dozen yards away from the bow of his other ship, the Discovery, had been stolen. The time for “violent measures
” had come.
This sparkling blue bay where Cook had anchored near the jagged lava cliffs of the Kona coast was a long way from the Yorkshire farm cottage where he had been born fifty-one years before. Cook had learned seamanship as a boy in a North Sea collier. His skill in navigation and in mapping the coasts of Newfoundland had qualified him to head the famous 1768 expedition to Tahiti, where astronomers wished to observe the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. During the next ten years he became the foremost discoverer in the Pacific region. The tracks of his ships crisscrossed the world’s largest ocean. He was the first man to set foot on all of the six major continents, and only bad luck—stormy weather when he was seventy miles from its ice barrier—kept him from discovering Antarctica.
In January, 1778, he had discovered the Hawaiian Islands, and now, returning from an exploration of Alaskan and Siberian waters in search of the Northwest Passage, he had come back to these hospitable shores. And just as he had been worshiped as a god when he had discovered the northern Hawaiian islands of Oahu and Kauai ten months before, so when the Resolution reached Kealakekua he was greeted with divine honors.
The Hawaiians had decided that he was the reincarnation of one of their most beloved demigods, Lono. A former king of Hawaii, Lono had killed his wife in a moment of anger, and had gone mad with remorse. He wandered throughout all the islands of the Hawaiian chain, working off his irritation by boxing and wrestling with the local champions. Then he set out, in an odd-shaped canoe, for distant lands. His people had made him a god, and in his honor set up an annual sports festival, a kind of Hawaiian Olympics, at the time of the makahiki, or harvest season.