Captive women in paradise 1796-1826: The kapu on prostitution in hawaiian historical legal context

American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Volumn 35, Issue 4, 2011, Pages 39-55

  Arista, Noelani ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII   (United States)

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EID: 84856066568     PISSN: 01616463     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17953/aicr.35.4.4268810535747523     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Michener's refrain "the islands waited" is inspired by one of the central themes of "The Charge," the mission and Congregational clergy's injunction delivered to Reverend Hiram Bingham and Reverend Asa Thurston before an assembled congregation at Boston's Park Street Church one week before they departed for the Sandwich Islands on October 23, 1819. This was the first missionary company to be dispatched by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (hereinafter referred to as ABCFM) from Boston to the Sandwich Islands. "The Charge" reminded the ministers of an important passage from Isaiah 42:4, "He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set judgment in the earth: and the isles shall wait for his law," which linked biblical prophecy of the spread of God's word to the farthest reaches of the earth, to their mission to the Sandwich Islands. Reverend David L. Perry, "The Charge," in Heman Humphrey, The Promised Land, A Sermon, Delivered at Goshen at the Ordination of the Rev. Messrs Hiram Bingham and Asa Thurston as Missionaries to the Sandwich Islands, September 29, 1819 (Boston: S. T. Armstrong, 1819), 33-37.
2. James A. Michener, Hawaii (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002), para. 1: 15
3. Hoapili to Ka'ahumanu, October 24, 1827, Non-Missionary Letters, 1820-1900, Hawaiian Children's Mission Society Library (hereinafter referred to as HCMSL), Mission Houses Museum, Honolulu.
4. Journal of the Sandwich Islands Mission, April 4, 1820, ABCFM Archives, 1819-1824 (ABC 19.1 Hawaiian Islands Mission [hereinafter referred to as ABC 19.1]), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Boston.
5. See George Gilbert, The Death of Captain James Cook, Hawaiian Historical Society Reprints, no. 5 (Honolulu: Paradise of the Pacific Press, 1926).
6. Also see John Ledyard, Journal of Captain Cook's Last Voyage, ed. James Kenneth Munford (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1963)
7. George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and Round the World in which the Coast of North-West America, Has Been Carefully Examined and Accurately Surveyed. Undertaken by Hist Majesty's Command, Principally With a View to Ascertain the Existence of any Navigable Communication Between the North Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans and Performed in the Years 1790, 1791, 1792, 1793, 1794, and 1795, in the Discovery Sloop of War, and Armed Tender Chatham, Under the Command of Captain George Vancouver. In Three Volumes, vol. III (London: Printed for G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798), 44-45
8. Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, vol. I, 171-72.
9. Michener, Hawaii, 16.
10. I am in the process of investigating this phenomenon more fully across a broader spectrum of histories that address the subject of Hawaiian women and prostitution. For one glaring example of interpretive confusion, see James H. Ellis, Mad Jack Percival: Legend of the Old Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002).
11. Journal of Elisha Loomis, April 28, 1825
12. The Journal Collection, 1819-1900, HMCSL.
13. Loomis Journal, August 6, 1825, Journal Collection, HMCSL.
14. Loomis Journal, April 28, 1825, Journal Collection, HMCSL.
15. Journal of Levi Chamberlain, April 28, 1825, ABC 19.1.
16. Loomis Journal, April 29, 1825, Journal Collection, HMCSL.
17. Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, vol. II, 228.
18. By 1822, the ali'i had begun to publish rules notifying masters of vessels that sailors found "riotous or disturbing the peace in any manner" shall immediately be "secured in the fort," where they would be detained until "thirty dollars is paid for the release of each offender." "Notice," Mission Press, O'ahu, March 8, 1822, Broadside Collection, HMCSL.
19. Most historical treatments of the outrages focus on the anger of foreign sailors and ship captains against the mission. See Harold Whitman Bradley, The American Frontier in Hawaii: The Pioneers 1789-1843 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1942)
20. Gavan Daws, Honolulu The First Century: The Story of the Town to 1876 (Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 2006)
21. and Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press).
22. Also see Ralph Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1778-1854: Foundation and Transformation (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1938). One of many unfortunate consequences of this unexamined historical claim has been the production of historical analysis that views the arrival of the ABCFM in Hawai'i as evidence of US colonialism as early as 1820.
23. See Daws, Shoal of Time, 61-75, 291-92.
24. Also Lawrence H. Fuchs, Hawaii Pono: A Social History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961), 6-17, 43.
25. Although Fuchs was writing a history of twentieth-century Hawai'i, his characterization of the state of Hawaiians and their society during the nineteenth century is one of "decay" and "decline." Missionary descendants were, in contrast, "born to rule." See Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 117-26, for a more complex view of the adoption of law as part of a process of negotiation.
26. See also Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 67-68, 242-43, on the subject of missionaries as law bringers.
27. See also Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo'ole Osorio, Dismembering Lahui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002), 13
28. and Noenoe Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
29. What is striking is that American historians and historians of Hawaiian history and postcolonial studies all agree in their assessment of missionary power and influence in the creation of law beginning with this period in 1825. In a somewhat different assessment, political scientist Juri Mykkänen describes the moment of the outrages over prostitution as the "beginning of politics" and the emergence of political discourse. He characterizes the response to the outrages as a fight between foreigners to extricate Christian law from civil law. Juri Mykkänen, Inventing Politics: A New Political Anthropology of the Hawaiian Kingdom (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003), 91-102.
30. Loomis Journal, January 27, 1826, Journal Collection, HMCSL.
31. Loomis Journal, January 27, 1826, Journal Collection, HMCSL.
32. Loomis Journal, February 1, 1826, Journal Collection, HMCSL. What was perhaps more shocking was the revelation later that day from a Hawaiian teacher who informed Loomis that "Capt. P. had applied to a girl" in Loomis's school to "live with him." The stones were to be used for building purposes.
33. Journal of Stephen Reynolds, February 20, 1826. Pauline N. King, ed., Journal of Stephen Reynolds (Honolulu: Ku Pa'a Inc., 1989), 124.
34. Loomis Journal, February 21, 1826, Journal Collection, HMCSL.
35. Reynolds Journal, February 21, 1826.
36. Chamberlain Journal, April 1, 1826, Journal Collection, HMCSL.
37. Journal kept at Lahaina, Maui, by William Richards, June 13, 1826, HMCSL.
38. Journal of the Sandwich Islands Mission, November 10, 1824, ABC 19.1.
39. Letters of the Sandwich Islands Mission, "Deposition of Mr. Richards," William Richards to Jeremiah Evarts, August 14, 1829, Missionary Letters, 1820-1900, HMCSL. Although the ABCFM policy cautioned against missionary intervention into local politics, it did not prevent Reverend Richards from being a keen observer of political structures of chiefly governance and the ways that kapu was pronounced and observed.
40. a nui ko malama,'a'ole e kipi 'ia ko aupuni." Ke Kumu Aupuni: Ka Mo'olelo Hawai'i no Kamehameha Ka Na'i Aupuni a me kana aupuni I ho'okumu ai (Honolulu: 'Ahahui 'Olelo Hawai'i, 1996), 167.
41. As Marshall Sahlins notes, "usurpation is typically marked, either as means or consequence, by the appropriation of the ranking woman of the deposed line: to produce a child not only tabu by mother right but, as descendant at once of the usurper and the usurped, a child that synthesizes the contrasting qualities of rule, mana and tabu, in the highest form." Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 12.
42. See Merry, Colonizing Hawai'i, 63-76. Merry considers the kapu law of 1820s as "religious law" and the "adoption of Anglo-American law" as one process.