THE VICTORIAN VISITORS ALFONS L. KORN THE VICTORIAN VISITORS An Account of the Haiuaiian Kingdom, 1861-1866, Including the Journal Letters of Sophia Cracroft, Extracts from the Journals of Lady Franklin, and Diaries and Letters of Queen Emma of Hawaii THE UNIVERSITY O E HAWAII PRESS Honolulu 1958 Copyright © 1958, by the University of Hawaii Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Kenneth Kingrey First printing, 1958 Second printing, December 1969 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 58-11691 I{ Elua 'oi o he ao nei, O Wikolia ho Lakana, O Kuini Ema ko Hawaii, Kohukohu i ha lei halaunu. Ha'ina ia mai ka puana Kaleleonalani he inoa. There are two great women in the world, Victoria of London And Queen Emma of Hawaii, Worthy of wearing crowns. This concludes my praise Of the name of Kaleleonalani. From The Song of the Rebel (Lei o he Kipi) CONTENTS INTRODUCTION THE VISITORS 2 THE ISLAND KINGDOM WELCOME 20 SCENES OF TWO ISLANDS 36 LETTERSBYTHEWAY 82 THE SOCIAL WHIRL 94 IN PERENNIAL SPRING 124 FAREWELL 152 THE FLIGHT OF THE CHIEFS KALELEONALANI 176 EMMA IN ENGLAND 202 EMMAINFRANCE 256 EPILOGUE LASTYEARS 280 REFERENCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Biographies 291 Notes 309 Note on Transcriptions 336 Acknowledgments 339 INDEX 343 ILLUSTRATIONS Map of the Sandwich Islands 38 Menu of State Banquet • Honolulu 113 INTRODUCTION THE VISITORS PROMPTLY AT 12:30 O'CLOCK ON THE AFTERNOON OF APRIL 9, 1861, THE CLIPPER bark Yankee, carrying cargo, nine passengers, and the first American news­ papers announcing the evacuation of Fort Sumter, sailed from San Francis­ co bound for Honolulu. Among the passengers, most of whom were Amer­ icans, were three Englishwomen—Lady Franklin, the elderly widow of Admiral Sir John Franklin; her devoted middle-aged companion, Sophia Cracroft, a niece of the famous Arctic explorer; and Buckland, Lady Frank­ lin’s maid, whose other name was Sarah—three visitors to Hawaii from the England of Queen Victoria. On April 20, having been speeded by favorable trade winds, the Yankee lay off Oahu. “We made an excellent passage," wrote Miss Cracroft in her first letter from the Sandwich Islands, "reaching the anchorage outside Honolulu on the tenth day, late at night, in splendid moonlight.” It had been, on the whole, an uneventful voyage. At first Lady Franklin and Miss Cracroft had planned to remain in Hawaii for no more than a fortnight. But obviously they had not allowed for emergencies and possible delays. Neither had they much considered the insidious effect of Hawaiian hospitality. In any event, their tour through the Hawaiian Kingdom of a hundred years ago stretched to more than two full months—to a total of sixty-six days. Almost half that period the ladies spent in the capital city, Honolulu. Thanks to the native sovereign, King Kamehameha IV, they also enjoyed four weeks as guests of the nation, with all expenses paid, during a sight-seeing trip to Hilo, the volcanic region of Mauna Loa, and the Kona Coast of the Island of Hawaii. Later, as guests of Robert Crichton Wyllie, the chivalrous Scotsman who was Kamehameha IV’s minister of foreign relations, they made a second excursion, this time to Wyllie’s Princeville Plantation in Hanalei Valley on Kauai. When Lady Franklin and Miss Cracroft sailed on the Comet for San Francisco on June 25, 1861, it was therefore with feelings of satisfaction mixed with regret that they waved their farewells to “a country which has taken a firm hold upon our affections as well as our interest.” At the mo­ ment of parting, they fully believed that they would never forget the group of small subtropical islands in the middle of the Pacific where they had spent two of the most delightful months of their lives. And, in fact, for the next five years, from 1861 to 1866, their enthusiasm persisted. In con­ versation no less than in letters and journals they often spoke fondly of Hawaii, its scenery and people—"the exquisite sunsets, cocoanut trees and natives’ houses . the intense blue of the sea, the black coastline with the ever-changing fountains of snowy spray”: that gentle land, with its pecul­ iarly civilized "repose” (Miss Cracroft’s own word), where native Hawaiians 3 and foreign settlers alike, including even Yankee missionaries, had wel­ comed the world travelers with almost royal honors. Fortunately, Lady Franklin and Miss Cracroft each kept records of their Hawaiian experiences. “The Island Kingdom,’’ the first part of this book, is largely made up of the journal letters of Sophia Cracroft written in Hawaii between April and July, 1861, to her family in England. How­ ever, in the several introductory sections interspersed among the letters, I have also drawn liberally from the useful but rather disorganized and scrappy Sandwich Islands Journal of Lady Franklin. In “The Flight of the Chiefs,” the second and concluding part, the narrative continues with some of the same persons but in another hem­ isphere, The Prince of Hawaii, the small son of Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma, is dead; so is his father the King, at the age of twenty-nine, Emma’s "dearest Alex,” in whom Lady Franklin and Miss Cracroft believed they had found "one of the most gifted ancl remarkable men to be met with anywhere.” These, then, were some of the changed circumstances when the widowed Queen Emma, in 1865 and 1866, made a widely publicized tour of England, France, Northern Italy, and Southern Germany. During Emma’s London sojourn she visited Lady Franklin and Miss Cracroft for a period of about four months at Upper Gore Lodge, Lady Franklin’s house in Kensington Gore, a district which in 1865 adjoined the open fields of Hyde Park and still bore traces of its eighteenth-century ms in nrbe air. Thus the two parts and their interrelated worlds, the Hawaiian episodes and their English and European aftermath, complement one another. The letters of Sophia Cracroft contain an account of the Hawaiian Islands in 1861 as seen through the eyes of an observant, traveled, sometimes satirical but by no means unromantic. and wholly detached English spinster of forty- five. In the later sections, where I have used materials from numerous Hawaiian sources, including recently discovered letters written by Emma in Europe, the English and French scenes are presented at least a part of the time from the point of view of the young Dowager Queen of the Sand­ wich Islands. In thus juxtaposing the impressions and attitudes of the English gentlewoman in Hawaii and the Hawaiian Queen in England and on the Continent, I did not intend simply to display in obvious relief cer­ tain national and racial differences. Sophia Cracroft and Queen Emma were both individuals, and their differences were stronger than race and wider than social background. Indeed, it may well be that their unlike­ ness lay in some mysterious depth of the feminine character not easily to be explored in a book which is purely historical. 4 The problem of Lady Franklin is another matter. Her fame as one of the numerous “representative” women of her time seems reasonably secure. By necessity she has figured prominently, as his second wife and devoted widow, in the biographies of her husband; and her own life as revealed in her voluminous journals has been depicted by Frances J. Woodward in a full-scale modern study, Portrait of Jane.1 If the reader is looking for a comprehensive, balanced account of Lady Franklin’s larger experience of her century in its entire panoramic scope, and not just the scherzo of the Sandwich Islands visit, he should know Miss Woodward’s book. For the important and difficult years when Sir John served as Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, with his wife a powerful but complicating influence never very far in the background, the indispensable source is Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Sir John Franklin in Tasmania, 1837-1843.2 If what is required is a quick capsule of essential information, The Annual Register for the year 1875 has special interest inasmuch as its facts were supplied the obituarist by Miss Cracroft herself, who for thirty-five years had never been far from Lady Franklin’s side: Lady Franklin, the widow of the renowned Arctic explorer, died at her house in Phillimore Gardens on July 18, at the age of 83. Jane Franklin was the second daughter of John Griffin and his wife Mary, nee Guillemard, whose family took refuge in England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Her father was by habit a traveller, and this passion for travel descended to his daughter, who accompanied him in his yearly journeys through England and the Continent. In November 1828 she married Capt. Franklin, and between that date and 1844 she travelled with him in the East, in Van Diemen’s Land, to which her husband was appointed governor, and in New Zealand, and was the first lady who travelled overland from Melbourne to Sydney. A few months after their return Sir John was offered the command of the expedition to be sent to the Northwest Passage, and with Her Majesty’s ships Erebus and Terror he left England for the last time on May 18, 1845. In 1848 the anxiety which prevailed with regard to the expedition led to the formation of the search expeditions conducted by Sir John Richard­ son and Sir J. C. Ross. After the search by the Government had closed with the return of Sir Edward Belcher’s expedition in 1854, the communica­ tions made in the same year by the Esquimaux to Dr.