Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii by James L. Haley

Author:James L. Haley [Haley, James L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466855502
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

13. Mountains of Sugar

Whaling, which once anchored the islands’ commerce with the outside world, had peaked in the early 1850s. But the decline in the number of whales, then losses of Northern ships to Confederate raiders, and the discovery of petroleum all damaged the industry. In April 1871 many of the remaining vessels sortied from Honolulu for the Arctic. Hunting was poor; they stayed too long and were trapped by ice. The crews were rescued, but thirty-nine ships with their cargoes were crushed and lost. Late in Lot’s reign, fewer than fifty whalers a year called at Honolulu and Lahaina for supplies and recreation. The only resource on the horizon that could fill this gap in the economy was sugar, and sugar, they discovered, made a vastly different footprint on the islands. In supplying whalers, Hawai‘i was a beneficiary but a bystander of an operation that required nothing of the islands. The whalers extracted a resource from the open ocean; it required no commitment of vast tracts of land, no financial investment, other than buying goods to profitably resell to the sailors. It did not rearrange the Hawaiians’ landscape, maim their environment, or dislocate their society.

None of that could be said of sugar, at least after it came to dominate the economy, but in the beginning just getting an industry started was a struggle. The techniques of growing and refining sugar were learned by trial and error; down in Kohala, Elias Bond did not bring in a viable crop until January of 1865, and by then he owed his banker/agents, Castle & Cooke, thirty-five thousand dollars. Torn between his benevolent instincts and the need to convince his people that they must work, he dismissed a foreman whom he caught beating a lazy kanaka, but his people, when they looked at the labor needed to produce sugar, simply shrugged and moved to Hilo or Honolulu.1 The bad news for any country dependent upon an agricultural base was that there was no escaping work. Coffee plantations were undergoing a blight, and an experiment at exporting pulu, which were tree-fern fibers used for mattress stuffing, was as much work as sugar, and was not a major factor in the economy.

Since the end of the reign of Kamehameha III, the simple export tonnage of Hawaiian sugar told an accurate story of both the laws and the times. In 1851 the crop failed, and the country exported a mere ten tons of sugar. The following two years it rebounded to about 300 tons, which was roughly similar to exports before the collapse. Six years later, after passage of the Alien Land Ownership Act—allowing time to acquire land, put it into production, and bring in a crop—the importation of coolies had begun, and with incrementally increased mechanization in the processing, exports tripled to more than 900 tons. By 1862, when the Civil War opened California to as much sugar as they could send, it was 1,500 tons, and two years later, 5,200 tons, and one year later, 7,600 tons.

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