BY THE SWEAT OF THEIR BROWS: THE LABOR-GRAPHIC PACIFIC ______
A Thesis
Presented to the
Faculty of
California State University, Fullerton ______
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
in
History ______
By
Herbert Patrick Pullman
Thesis Committee Approval:
Volker Janssen, Department of History, Chair Jessica Stern, Department of History Stephen Neufeld, Department of History David Igler, Department of History, University of California, Irvine
Fall, 2017
ABSTRACT
In an effort to place motive in context, this essay addresses the issue of whether worldviews and histories that emphasize race and geography offer more distractions and less understanding than do studies that focus upon labor. Through the narrative of the murder of whaling captain Isaac Bunker Hussey and the years leading up to his death
(1847 to 1852), this work examines this problem in a way that connects historical actors with historians, and history with early historiography. Though not readily apparent in the nineteenth century or even after, labor offers an opportunity to understand the lives of those who sailed the Pacific in the 1800s. The failure of both Captain Hussey and the whaling industry to recognize his crew through their labors rather than by their race or place of origin contributed to his murder.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ...... ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iv
Chapter 1. BY THE SWEAT OF THEIR BROWS ...... 1
2. WHALING LABOR ...... 5
3. CAPTAIN ISAAC BUNKER HUSSEY ...... 10
4. WORLDVIEW ...... 15
5. KOSRAE ...... 20
6. OAHU HENRY ...... 24
7. CONCLUSION ...... 29
REFERENCES ...... 31
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my wife Sara Pullman for your patience and ability to listen to nineteenth century whaling stories more than any one person should. Thank you to Dr.
Janssen, Dr. Stern, and Dr. Neufeld of California State University, Fullerton’s
Department of History, and to Dr. Igler of the University of California, Irvine’s
Department of History. Most of all, thank you Ethel Willis, my first and best teacher. I wish I could have finished this sooner.
iv 1
CHAPTER 1
BY THE SWEAT OF THEIR BROWS
“Let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it”1
In this passage, Herman Melville portrays the Nantucketers as they saw themselves: common Jack Tars who roamed as masters of vast oceans and ruled their domain through the sheer sweat of their brow. However, had he wanted to accurately represent the diversity of maritime labor2 during his time, Melville might have included the Kanaka Maoli, Maohi, and Maori, along with indigenous peoples of the Americas,
Africans, decedents of Africans, and land fasted itinerant laborers and mariners born to countless ports. Nineteenth-century whalemen and seamen sprang forth from a diversity of locales and sources, but their labors united them in a greater history that also united the
Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, and Indian Oceans.
In the 1850s, Kosrae, and island on the eastern edge of the Carolines group, hosted a diversity of individuals on its shores. As beachcombers, these men either deserted from visiting whalers and merchantmen or they were individuals whose captains
1 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003), 94.
2 The term “labor” appears here broadly as the actions undertaken to procure the material means of survival: potable water, food, shelter, and tools. Oceans in the nineteenth century provided alternative means for numerous economies geographically unable to exist self-sufficiently, as illustrated from Nantucket to Kosrae. From the fur and sandalwood trade to whaling, oceans existed as a gateway to a greater global economy, distant commodities, and foreign lands.
2 purposefully cast them away. Most of this number hailed from island communities scattered across the South Pacific. One of them, Oahu Henry, if his name is any indication, called the Hawaiian Kingdom home. The lone white man of this body, Isaac
Bunker Hussey of Nantucket, set sail from his home as captain of the whaler Planter in
1847 before abandoning his command and crossing Kosrae’s beach in 1850.
A moderate collection of documentation exists to tell Hussey’s story. Born in
1807, Hussey previously captained three whaling expeditions before receiving command of the Planter in 1847.3 In 1849 he murdered one of his crewmen, James Henry Clark, off the coast of Butaritari. Months later, he escaped arrest in Sydney, Australia for this crime.
In 1850, he sought sanctuary on Kosrae and sent the Planter home to Nantucket under the command of his first officer.4 In comparison, Oahu Henry rests nearly anonymous in the historical record. A lack of documentation restricts his story to 1852 when his tale coincides with Hussey’s and both men signed on to fill out the skeleton crew of the whaler William Penn.5
On 11 October 1852, the William Penn of San Francisco departed Kosrae with
Hussey as its new captain and more than a dozen Pacific Islanders, including Henry, serving as hands. A mere twenty-six days into the voyage, on 6 November 1952, Henry led his fellow islanders in mutiny and the murder of Captain Hussey. Unable to seize
3 Isaac B. Hussey commanded the Phoenix 1834-1837 and 1837-1840, and the Potomac 1841-1845. National Maritime Digital Library, “American Offshore Whaling Voyages: Voyages of Hussey, Isaac B,” accessed November 18, 2015, http://nmdl.org/aowv/whMaster.cfm?Name=Hussey, Isaac B.
4 William C. Paddack, Life on the Ocean, or Thirty Five Years at Sea; Being the Personal Adventures of the Author (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1893), 93, 114, 140.
5 Paddack, Life on the Ocean, 152; R. Gerard Ward, ed., American Activities in the Central Pacific: 1790- 1870 (Ridgewood, NJ: The Gregg Press, 1967) 3: 39-42.
3 complete control of the whaler, Henry parlayed with the first mate, “I don’t want to kill you. I have killed all I want to, and if you give me fifteen muskets and a keg of powder, and let me take what provisions I want, I will leave the brig when I see land. But if you do not consent, I will set fire to her and burn you all up.”6 The first mate consented. That evening, Henry and his men left in two whaleboats with all they could carry. Five days later, the whaler Atlantic picked up the mutineers. When the Atlantic’s captain questioned
Henry, the fugitive claimed he and the others deserted and stole the whaleboats while ashore with Hussey. Persuaded and perhaps disinterested, the captain permitted Henry and his followers to go their way. These desperate men managed to row over 500 kilometers and eventually landed on Abemama Island in the Kiribati group. Here, one of the mutineers turned on Henry and killed him.7
Attempting to understand why this murder and mutiny occurred is part of a current rethinking of the Pacific in its history, geography, and ethnic and cultural diversity. Previous attitudes concerning the geography and diversity of the Pacific misunderstood this ocean too broadly and separate from wider events. Contemporary considerations have turned this view on its head and have approached the Pacific as exceedingly diverse and connected to a larger narrative.8 Attention to labor combined with these nuanced interpretations shows that Pacific Islanders existed as similar and dissimilar to one other as Nantucketers did in comparison to other Atlantic expatriates.
6 Ward, American Activities, 3: 40, 4: 362.
7 Ibid.
8 See Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
4
Henry and Hussey’s shared story reveals that little if any difference separated these men and the only notable distinctions emerged from artificially constructed biases. A failure on Hussey’s part to recognize this reality and to recognize Henry’s humanity lead to the events of 6 November 1852.
5
CHAPTER 2
WHALING LABOR
The roots of Henry and Hussey’s story trace back to 1690, when Ichabod Paddock agreed to teach the craft of whaling to Nantucketers. The men of that small sandy island turned to the sea and the horizon to integrate themselves into the Cape Cod economy.
Year after year, as hunting grounds became depleted, their whalers and men ventured further out with every successive voyage, and the island of Nantucket eventually linked with the islands of Hawaii, Tahiti, and New Zealand, with the Carolines, the Gilberts, and the Solomons. Throughout the nineteenth century, Pacific Islanders signed onto visiting whalers that first arrived from the Atlantic and then later embarked from Pacific ports.
These Pacific whalemen, like the Nantucketers before them, stepped into a larger economy as they boarded a whaler. It was on the beach and aboard these ships that indigenous individuals rapidly acquired new technical skills, languages, and cultural concepts that American and European crews brought to the Pacific. Within less than a generation, the labors of a Pacific Islander whaleman became indistinguishable from that of his Atlantic World counterpart.9
9 Archibald Campbell, a visitor to the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1809 wrote, “It is astonishing how soon [the Hawaiian people] acquire the useful arts from their visitors. Many of the natives are employed as carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, and tailors, and do their work as perfectly as Europeans.” A Voyage Round the World From 1806 to 1812 in which Japan, Kamascatka, the Aleutian Islands, and the Sandwich Islands were Visited (Edinburgh: Archibald, Constable and Company, 1816), 144.
6
Whalers, isolated extensions of a global economy, formed both economic and cultural frontiers between the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. In the United States, whale oil provided the lighting and lubrication that drove the mills of the North. The industrial hunger for this product created profits that in turn financed new factories and improved existing ones. Cotton may have been king in the Antebellum South, but whale oil literally lubricated Northern manufacturing. Meanwhile, in the Pacific, a fleet of more than 600 whalers hunted the world’s largest ocean at the industry’s height. Hunts lasted years and the length of these commercial voyages necessitated the procurement of every commodity a whaler required to operate indefinitely. Of these commodities, labor was paramount. Thus, whaling integrated the Pacific and the Atlantic World into an economy worth eight million dollars, annually.10
On Cape Cod’s shores, the history of labor and whaling during the first half of the nineteenth century was a narrative of transition from the familial to the cold and brutal. In
1815, Nantucket’s whaling fleet consisted of only twenty-three vessels. By 1822, the fleet had grown to eighty-four whalers. The end of the War of 1812 characterized American whaling as an enterprise local to Cape Cod’s wharfs. By the beginning of the American
Civil War, whaling had long escaped its nursery and counted San Francisco and Honolulu amongst its homeports.11 The fleets of Nantucket and the emerging port at New Bedford could hardly keep up the industrial demand for whale oil. The increased demand for this product brought about an increased demand for labor, and whereas Nantucket’s neighbors
10 Briton Cooper Busch, Whaling will Never do for Me: The American Whaleman in the Nineteenth Century (Lexington: University of Press of Kentucky, 1994), 3.
11 Ibid., 3, 7.
7 and kin once largely made up whaling crews, commercial demand created a labor force increasingly itinerant and expendable.
Consequently, the evolution of whaling’s Atlantic World labor force directly affected the industry’s working conditions and labor relations. Throughout the 1820s a captain’s crew consisted of relatives and men familiar to him. The 1830s placed strangers on the decks of whalers. Whaling always proved dangerous and dirty work with little comfort, but an outside labor force facilitated an increased callousness on the part of officers. Captains drove these new men harder and owners and investors paid them less.
For their part, this new brand of whalemen demonstrated a propensity for insubordination and an ability to exasperate officers and veteran hands. These men most often revealed their discontent through desertion and to an extent that British colonies began to address the issue.12 The strategy of work stoppage also existed as a means of dissent. Short of mutiny, men refused to carry out their duties as a method of protest, but not to wrest control of the whaler away from the captain. A lack of shore-leave and the quality of food existed as chief amongst grievances that prompted work stoppages. Circumstances often inextricably linked the two. To induce a captain to visit a port and resupply, crews frequently threw the vessel’s provisions overboard.13
During this same period, maritime labor in the Pacific also expanded in response to the demands of whaling. Due to their central location, comparative size and population, and relative political stability after 1820, the Hawaiian Islands presented a
12 Busch, Whaling will Never Do for Me, 7-9; Michael Quinlan, “Making Labour Laws Fit for the Colonies: The Introduction of Laws Regulating Whalers in Three Australian Colonies 1835-1855,” Labour History 62 (May 1992): 21.
13 Busch, Whaling will Never Do for Me, 52-54.
8 ready source of labor. Less than seventy years after Cook’s arrival in the Hawaiian
Islands, twenty percent of the kingdom’s population of working age males served aboard whalers and merchantmen in 1846.14 However, despite this sizable percentage of the
Hawaiian population, Kanaka Maoli represented only part of Pacific Islanders serving aboard ships during the mid-nineteenth century. Alistair Couper cites 335 Pacific
Islanders sailing aboard Tasmanian whalers from 1855 to 1879, twenty-seven percent of who were Maori, nineteen percent Hawaiian, nine percent Maohi from Tahiti, and forty- five percent from smaller islands scattered throughout Polynesia, Melanesia, and
Micronesia.15 Given that Hawaii’s population exceeded other Pacific societies, Couper’s limited sample suggests that other Pacific islands provided nearly the same per capita of their populations, if not exceeding Hawaii’s contribution by percentage.16 When comparing a twenty percent (based on population) Pacific Islander labor participation to a
United States three percent (based on population) participation, it becomes clear that maritime occupations represented a vastly larger part of labor culture amongst Pacific
Island societies than they did within U.S. labor culture.17 Pacific Islander whalemen
14 Kirch and Sahlins cite 659 Hawaiians—representing twenty percent of the Kingdom’s population of males between the ages of fifteen and thirty—served aboard whalers and merchantmen in 1846. Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 103.
15 Alistair Couper, Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 108.
16 Hawaii’s population in 1860 was 69,800, compared to New Zealand’s Maori population of 56,000 in 1858. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu, 106; Ian Pool, Te Iwi Maori: A New Zealand Population, Past, Present & Projected (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1991), 58.
17 According to the United States’ 1860 Census, approximately three percent of United States’ labor—one hundred and fifty-three thousand out of a labor force of approximately five million men, ages eighteen to forty-five—were employed in maritime occupations. Bureau of the Census, Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1864), xvii; Stanley Lebergott, “Labor
9 labored side by side with their itinerant and expendable Atlantic counterparts under the same conditions and circumstances. Isaac Hussey’s and Oahu Henry’s combined story emerges from of this larger history.
Force and Employment, 1800-1960,” in Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States after 1800, ed. Dorothy S. Brady (Washington, DC: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1966), 167.
10
CHAPTER 3
CAPTAIN ISAAC BUNKER HUSSEY
Hussey lived a typical existence for a Nantucket whaling captain in the 1840s. His chosen profession took him away from home for years at time. On 26 April 1846, his wife, Lucretia Paddack-Hussey, gave birth to his son and namesake. Perhaps the death of his infant daughter, who died during his 1841-1845 voyage commanding the Potomac, prompted him to stay away from the sea for his son’s birth. Fourteen months later, on 9
June 1847, Lucretia delivered a second son. The child lived but a day. Whether or not familial love kept Hussey at home from 1845 to 1847, three weeks after burying his second son, he took command of the Planter.18 He encouraged his wife’s sixteen-year-old nephew, William Paddack, to serve on the departing ship. The captain advised the youth,
“You have chosen a life full of toil and hazard, and as this voyage will perhaps be one of great peril, it would be well for you to reflect maturely upon the measure you are about to adopt.” Almost challenging the young Paddack to stay home, he continued: “Consult with your mother, and if you are still determined to go to sea I will give you a berth on board the Planter.”19 With paternal masculinity, Hussey made Paddack a proxy son to replace the one he lost, and the captain and his nephew left on the Planter on 4 July 1847 and
18 National Maritime Digital Library, “American Offshore Whaling Voyages: Voyages of Hussey, Isaac B,” accessed November 18, 2015, http://nmdl.org/aowv/whMaster.cfm?Name=Hussey, Isaac B.
19 Paddack, Life on the Ocean, 3.
11 sailed toward the Pacific.
Ten months into the Planter’s voyage, violence erupted on the whaler’s deck. In
May 1848, while anchored off Butaritari Island, Hussey disembarked to secure barrels of coconut oil he commissioned the local population to process. In his absence, the crew began a work stoppage over the issue of rations and informed the first officer, “they had concluded not to do any more work on board that ship until they had their meat.” The first officer dutifully dispatched word to the captain on the beach. Hussey arrived and ordered the men to return to work, but they gathered in defiance around the forecastle, shouting he could not make them prisoners.20 The captain responded by commanding his steward “to pass up the ship’s firearms” and after loading a pistol, he went forward to his rebellious men and repeated the same demand.21 The crew again defied his orders and
“threatened that there would be blood spilled on deck before any man should made prisoner.” They armed themselves with the “cook’s axe, handspikes, crowbars, and anything they could get hold of.”22 The presence of more than a hundred Butaritari
Islanders gathered on the Planter’s deck and around Hussey and the crew complicated the event. Hussey feared the crew’s actions might undermine his status with islanders on whose deference he depended.
With his control of events rapidly vanishing, Hussey returned aft to the quarterdeck and growled to his officers to put the men in irons. Outnumbered, his officers found their feeble efforts to subdue the crew ineffectual. Unable to control his crew,
20 Paddack, Life on the Ocean, 90-91.
21 Ibid., 93
22 Ibid.
12
Hussey fired blindly down the length of the Planter towards the forecastle. The report of the weapon echoed and when the acrid smoke drifted away on the breeze, crewmember
James Henry Clark lay dead with a ball in his head. The shot startled the visiting islanders and they hastily jumped over the railings and departed in their canoes. Hussey pulled another pistol, and with arm and weapon outstretched, he advanced and hurriedly drove the men below. Eventually the officers brought the crew up one at a time and placed them in irons on deck until the next day.23
Though drastic, Hussey’s actions were not without parallel at the time. Six years earlier, in September 1842, Captain Norris of the whaler Sharon murdered his steward, an
African-American named George Babcock, in a drunken rage when Babcock was unable stand after an earlier beating. The cause of Norris’ rage was that Babcock ate a morsel of meat which Norris had forbidden him to do.24 In 1851, a Boston Commissioner’s Court charged Captain Allen of the whaler E. L. B. Jenney with assaulting three men under his command.25 That same year, the same court charged Captain Charles W. Hussey of the
Emma along with his first and second mates with the assault of two of the Emma’s crew and for “withholding suitable food” from a third.26 In an 1852 editorial to the
Whalemen’s Shipping List, Captain Gardner of the Sylph described the men he flogged under his command as “wretched rowdies who have no homes, no hearts, no position in
23 Ibid., 91-94.
24 Benjamin Clough, “Benjamin Clough to Asa Clough,” in Nineteenth Century Letters, ed. Will D. Howe, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 537.
25 “Charge Against a Captain,” The Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript, June 10, 1851.
26 “Assault at Sea,” The Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript, September 30, 1851.
13 the world.”27 Both Atlantic and Pacific whalemen made up this collection of “wretched rowdies,” as Norris’ first officer commented, “Our Captain was also in the habit of pounding the Kanakas.”28
In the case of the Planter and Captain Hussey, the crew capitulated and returned to work without their meat. Never again did the crew defy their captain. However,
Hussey’s actions held consequences. In October 1849, nearly a year and half after the murder of Clark, the Planter anchored in Sydney Harbor. After a week in the frantic port,
William Paddack recalled, “ . . . there were such hard stories about Captain Hussey in regard to the mutiny that he went on board the ship James Loper and remained for some ten days.”29 While onboard, Hussey arranged with the captain of the whaler Endeavor for transportation to Lord Howe’s Island. By November, the captain left the Planter with no ceremony and transferred his possessions to the Endeavor. As his small craft pulled alongside the ship, another boat approached with a British officer and a warrant for
Hussey’s arrest. The defiant captain stood and pulled “a pair pistols from his belt and told the officer that if he came alongside of his boat he would shoot him.” The British officer ordered his oarsmen to come about and row a hasty retreat and with that, James Clark’s murderer escaped.30 Two months later, the Planter under the command of the first mate rendezvoused with Hussey on Lord Howe’s Island.
Hussey’s flight from the authorities illustrates his concern over the legal
27 Gardner, “Discipline in the Whaling Fleet,” The Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants’ Transcript, November 9, 1852.
28 Benjamin Clough, Nineteenth Century Letters, 538.
29 Paddack, Life on the Ocean, 112.
30 Ibid., 113-114.
14 ramifications of his actions. A year later, in December 1850, these consequences once again drew his concern. While gaming with Emily Morgan in the Carolines, Hussey conferred with his friend, Captain Ewer. As they discussed the linked events of the murder of James Clark and Hussey’s near arrest in Sydney, Ewer advised his fellow captain to settle for a time on an amiable island and send the Planter back to New
England. Fully understanding the difficulties in returning to Nantucket, Hussey conferenced with his first officer and they decided to set sail for Kosrae Island where the captain disembarked and sent the Planter home to the Atlantic.31
31 Ibid., 140.
15
CHAPTER 4
WORLDVIEW
Hussey’s decision to seek refuge on Kosrae was not a haphazard choice. Scholars cannot ascertain Hussey’s particular views of the Pacific Island communities he visited or the Pacific individuals he interacted with. No record of his personal views exists.
However, the earliest historical works of the Pacific constructed from the accounts of
Europeans and Euroamericans and predating post-colonial and decolonized methodologies and considerations offers some insight into a nineteenth century worldview.
In one of the earliest efforts to examine the underlying aspects of beachcombing,
H. E. Maude succumbed to the distraction of ethnicity. Maude reluctantly confined his research to Atlantic “expatriate beachcombers” while also acknowledging Hawaiians in
Tahiti, Tahitians in Samoa, and Samoans in Kiribati often featured much larger numbers of beachcombers. Maude delegated this greater narrative to anthropology, and believed the events that constituted Islander-to-Islander cross-cultural contact remained “not necessarily identical” to Atlantic-Pacific contact and required “separate discussion.” In resigning “the problems arising from intra-regional cross-cultural contact” as a “factor of considerable importance to the anthropologist,”32 Maude missed an opportunity to study the historic beachcomber experience holistically. The Hawaiian in Fiji was as much a
32 H. E. Maude, Of Islands and Men (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 135.
16 stranger in a strange land as the Nantucketer. Furthermore, the Nantucketer’s experiences on the beach were his own and not necessarily the same as those of the New Yorker merely because both sailed from the Atlantic. However, his choices and conclusions were not a matter of simple expediency. Rather, Maude’s efforts were subject to the confines of recognized evidence, and Europeans and Euroamericans simply produced the vast majority of documents in the nineteenth century.33 Since Maude’s publication Of Islands and Men, later historians have benefited from employing cross-discipline and interpretive methodologies and evidence considerations unavailable to this pioneer.34
The limits that confine Maude’s efforts trace back to even earlier historical studies of the Pacific, and specifically to some of the goals of the scholars that produced those efforts. Often, it was not only a lack of documentation that set these limits, but epistemologies as well. Much of the earliest historical works on the Pacific emerged during or near the end of the colonial period when the United States and Europe’s empires held vast economic, military, and political possessions across the region.35
R. S. Kuykendall’s three-volume The Hawaiian Kingdom may well be the most foundational work of this field.36 Kuykendall began the epic in 1922 at the nascent
33 See Maude’s Appendix. Maude, Of Islands and Men, 170-77.
34 This comes across as a tragedy, as Maude’s efforts and those of many of his contemporaries often pressed the questions answered by later generations of scholars.
35 An argument exists that colonialism in the Pacific continues to the present. The scholarship during the post-colonial period took shape at a time when these powers still held many of the islands in the Pacific. The United States admitted the Hawaiian Islands as the forty-ninth state in 1959. The French Republic organized its Pacific possessions—one-hundred and eighteen islands—into an overseas territory in 1946 and an overseas collectivity in 2003. Since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, Maori sovereignty remains inextricably intertwined with the descendants of colonists after 1947 and the Statute of Westminster.
36 R. S. Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom 1778-1854 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1938).
17
Historical Commission of the Territory of Hawaii’s behest to create a “general narrative of a thousand pages or more, [and] sufficiently documented to ensure
‘authoritativeness.’” Starting only twenty-nine years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian
Kingdom, he produced fifteen-hundred pages spanning one-hundred and fifteen years of
“official” and “authoritative” history of this nexus of the Pacific. In this, he regarded
“himself as a reliable chronicler rather than as an interpreter or reinterpreter of events.”37
As he drew primarily from documents produced by Europeans and Euroamericans,
Kuykendall laid a cornerstone of a consequential part of Pacific history, forcing scholars to either work with or around his efforts ever since. Many of the details he unearthed remain invaluable even as his interpretations fall short today.
Possessing no single argumentative thesis, The Hawaiian Kingdom offers a chronical of the Kingdom’s trajectory towards its own end, serving to legitimize political realities present in 1922 rather than critically examine the events that led to those realities. Blurring the lines between primary and secondary source, Kuykendall’s epic informs the scholarship nearly as much of the Hawaiian Territory as it does the Hawaiian
Kingdom. To a small extent, the narrative still reverberates as Kuykendall’s assertion that
“To the Hawaiians, Captain Cook was the god Lono” still rings, though louder in anthropology than history.38 Robert Borofsky detailed the contemporary debate running from 1981 to the present, adeptly citing epistemological differences as proximate cause
37 Gavin Daws, forward to The Hawaiian Kingdom, by R. S. Kuykendall (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1938), vii.
38 Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom 1778-1854, 16.
18 or as Herb Kawainui Kane acknowledges, “That the Cook [apotheotic] story has become a Rorschach test, perceived according to the viewer’s cultural programming.”39
The extent of Pacific geographic delineation perhaps surpasses the desire to define this ocean ethnically. The reddish-orange glowing circle on a map showing the geological Ring of Fire appeals to a desire for simplicity and clear boundaries. Here is the
Pacific. O. H. K. Spate explained “there was not, and could not be, any concept ‘Pacific’ until the limits and lineaments of the ocean were set: and this was undeniably the work of
Europeans.” Spate further states, “The fact remains that until our own day the Pacific was basically a Euroamerican creation, though built on an indigenous substructure.” The act of historical study provided a colonial structure. Echoing Spate, David Armitage writes of the Atlantic: “It was a European invention not because Europeans were its only denizens, but because Europeans were the first to connect its four sides into a single entity, both as a system and as the representation of a discrete natural feature.”40 Likewise, Spate remarks that the “written or geographical record,” or the “placing of facts on enduring record was basically a European achievement.”41 With so much emphasis on
39 Robert Borofsky, “Cook, Lono, Obeyesekere, and Sahlins,” Current Anthropology 38, no. 2 (1997): 255- 64; Herb Kawainui Kane, “Comments,” Current Anthropology 38, no. 2 (1997): 265. See also Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metophors and Mythic Realities: Structure in Early History and Mythic Realities of the Sandwich Island Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981); Marshall Sahlins, “Captain Cook at Hawaii,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 98, no. 4 (1989): 371-423; Greg Dening, “Sharks that Walk on the Land: The Death of Captain Cook,” Meanjin 41 (1982): 427-37; Jonathan Friedman, “Captain Cook, Culture, and the World System,” Journal of Pacific History 20, no. 4 (1985): 191–201; Steen Bergendorff, Ulla Hasager, and Peter Henriques, “Mythopraxis and History: On the Interpretation of the Makahiki,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 97, no. 4 (1988): 391-408.
40 David Armitage, The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 12.
41 O. H. K. Spate, The Pacific Since Magellan: The Spanish Lake (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), 2. See Also Matt K. Matusda, “The Power of Naming the ‘Pacific’ has been that of creating intellectual cohesion by imposing an encompassing European vison of water on Palauan atolls, the Japanese Nan’yo (South Seas), or the moana and marae of the Maori and the Hawaiians.” “The Pacific,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 763.
19 documentary evidence, a great temptation exists to create the document that creates history. That is, to draw the line on the map. It is little wonder that the British Admiralty sent James Cook—whose surveying abilities equaled his seamanship—to seek Samuel
Wallis’ southern Pacific continent.
20
CHAPTER 5
KOSRAE
In December 1850, Hussey found himself in the unique position of deciding where to make himself a castaway. As he had a ship and a loyal first officer, his options proved an embarrassment of riches. He could go anywhere. Hussey required an island large enough and with enough resources to accommodate his presence indefinitely, but not so large as to draw prolonged attention from authorities. His new home also needed to be politically stable with a single authoritarian ruler with whom Hussey could deal with.
Lastly, he needed to settle on island that ships called upon in the event he wished to depart. In Hussey’s mind, Kosrae presented the best solution to these criteria.
The island’s monarch, a warrior named Keru—who went by the moniker King
George—ruled as an autocrat. He personally controlled Kosrae’s resources, and all its inhabitants in both their labors and bodies. His reign began sometime between 1836 and
1838 when he overthrew the previous king, Ahua Na Sru, during a period of civil war that occurred over the issue of forcing the island’s girls and women aboard visiting ships.
The purpose of the practice was to entice foreign vessels to call upon the island. King
George’s predecessors whole-heartedly strove to end this exploitation, while he led a faction to continue it.42
42 Benjamin Snow, “Ship ‘Harriet’ and Brig ‘Waverly’: Strong’s Island, Feb. 4. 1854,” The Friend, November 22, 1854.
21
This era of strife on the island began in 1835, with burning of the Hawaiian brig
Waverly and the murder of its crew for the kidnapping of several women. Six months later, warriors of then King Sru attacked and killed most of the crew of the trading schooner Honduras in a preemptive attempt to thwart this practice. The Honduras’ First
Officer and steward repulsed a follow-up assault on the ship and managed to set sail for
Hawaii, where they reported what happened.43
Kosrae’s conflict ended in 1842, some years after Keru deposed Sru, and crowned himself King George. While anchored in Lelu Harbor on the western side of the island, the British whaler Harriet came under attack from islanders in response to King George sending a group of women and girls aboard the vessel the night before. Once again, the
Kosraeans murdered the entire crew. Fearing King George’s retribution, those involved burned the whaler and disposed of the equipment taken off it. Unsurprisingly, this last assault incurred the wrath of King George, who tortured and executed twenty-five
Kosraeans in a response that cemented his rule and ended future acts of rebellion.44
Captain Hussey, who visited Kosrae in 1843 while commanding the Potomac, knew the island’s history and appreciated the extent of King George’s power over his people and his ability to maintain that power.45 He likely understood that if he ingratiated himself and proved useful to the monarch, that King George would have protected him from not
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 On 16 October 1843, Hussey’s First Officer aboard the Potomac wrote, “In heaving up the anchor a small chain apparently belonging to a brig was brought up.” He continued, “This is that vessel known to have been taken at this Island … the Ship Harriet of London and a brig belonging to Oahu. Both vessels were taken in the lee harbor with their crews murdered and the ships burned.” 1845 Journal aboard the Whaleship Potomac, Isaac B Hussey master, 1841-1845. MR 87. Mystic, CT, G W Blunt White Library.
22 only British and United States authorities but from the island’s indigenous population and other beachcombers.
Hussey inserted himself into this political and cultural environment when he left the Planter. Unable to return to America, fearing he might face charges of murder, he became a beachcomber. However, he found himself in fierce and direct competition with other deserters and castaways, and unlike other Pacific sovereigns, King George did not rely on beachcombers to conduct trade with visiting vessels. This factor complicated the lives of beachcombers on Kosrae by eliminating a key occupational niche and increasing competition in other areas. Despite this environment of contested survival, Hussey made himself a favorite of King George. He built several houses for his patron and added to the king’s prestige among his people and visitors alike.46 Successful cultural adaptation and an ability to integrate himself into the island’s economy certainly endeared the former captain to the royal family, but his achievements provided him advantages and comforts that in turn projected him into a privileged class among other less efficacious beachcombers.
Kosrae represented a temporary proposition for Hussey. Before he left the
Planter, he planned to send his nephew home to Nantucket with instructions to return with Lucretia Paddack Hussey in the hope that the three of them could obtain a schooner and make a life as traders in the South Pacific. Over the next two years he waited for news from America, and bided his time among the native population and his fellow beachcombers. Eventually, Hussey received intelligence informing him of his wife’s
46 Francis X. Hezel, The First Taint of Civilization: A History of the Caroline and Marshall Islands in Pre- Colonial Days, 1521-1885 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), 117, 137.
23 death and that grand jury proceedings in Massachusetts returned no bill against him.47
With this news in his possession, circumstances in late 1852 provided him an opportunity to escape his beachcomber’s existence and begin his life as a captain anew.
47 Paddack, Life on the Ocean, 149.
24
CHAPTER 6
OAHU HENRY
In October 1852, the whaler William Penn of San Francisco arrived off the coast of Kosrae. Here, Oahu Henry’s documented story begins and joins with Hussey’s. The
William Penn’s departure from its homeport without a master and Hussey’s recruitment as its captain when the whaler arrived at Kosrae remains a curious affair. Hussey knew of the events that occurred in New England during his absence. He might have managed to get word to associates of his desire to return to captaining and a responsible party may have sent the William Penn expressly to Kosrae to retrieve him. Another alternative that would explain this unlikely pairing includes the gold rushes on either side of the
Pacific—California in 1849 and Australia in 1851—that created a dearth of capable captains.48 Many knew of Hussey’s presence on Kosrae and the William Penn’s investors may have sent the whaler to there to procure his services. Lastly, investors may have given Christian Nelson command of the vessel, but his inexperience might have motivated him to attain Hussey’s aid when the whaler anchored off Kosrae. In his published journal, William Paddack reported second hand that the whaler put into Kosrae for supplies and one of the whaler’s owners present on the William Penn gave Hussey
48 K. R. Howe, “Tourists, Sailors and Labourers: A Survey of Early Labour Recruiting in Southern Melanesia,” The Journal of Pacific History 13, no. 1 (1978): 24.
25 command of the vessel.49 This claim remains dubious as Paddack does not name this owner nor does he appear in any other narrative. Whatever the reason, by 11 October
1852, Hussey had command of the William Penn, and a crew made almost exclusively of islanders, including Henry.50
These whalemen were hardened veteran hands who knew of Hussey’s reputation.
While familiarity between captains and crew often helped facilitate a captain’s authority, no such amiable bond existed between these men and their new captain. Indeed, these men had unsuccessfully competed against him on Kosrae for more than two years. No doubt, Hussey expected that once at sea, the power dynamic between captain and crew superseded any animosity. He was wrong.
Less than a month later, on 6 November 1852, Hussey lay on the hard-grained deck of the whaler William Penn, choking on his last breath. The first officer, Christian
Nelson, awoke to the sounds of his captain’s groans on the deck above him. Ignorant to the nature of the unfolding violent events, Nelson hurried from his bunk and toward the sounds of a melee. When he reached the upper deck, Oahu Henry, delivered a blow to his head.51 As Nelson’s awareness of the situation crystalized he came to the uncomfortable realization that the recently recruited Pacific Islander beachcombers-turned-crew murdered Hussey in an act of mutiny. Confused, wounded, outnumbered, and empty handed, Nelson unsuccessfully sought parlance with the rebellious men. Steadfast, Henry pressed his attack and forced Nelson to retreat to the forecastle’s companionway to avoid
49 Paddack, Life on the Ocean, 152.
50 John D. Jones, Life and Adventure in the South Pacific (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1861), 250.
51 Ward, American Activities, 3: 39; Paddack, Life on the Ocean, 90-91, 137, 150; “Examination of all the Witnesses as to the Identity of the Kanaka Harry,” The Pacific Commercial Advertiser, April 16, 1863.
26 the spades and harpoons hurled by Henry’s collaborators. Alerted by the commotion, the second mate, John Halsey, and the other officers rose from their bunks and joined their first officer in the shadows beneath the deck.52
The mutineers threatened the officers from the entry to the forecastle, unaware the men had secretly made their way to the captain’s cabin. They intended to acquire weapons and reclaim their ship, however, while they secured several muskets they also discovered moisture had ruined the charges and thus rendered the weapons useless. As panic set in, they heard padded feet on the quarterdeck above them and knew the crew had discovered their deceit. Desperate, Nelson formed a plan to “blow the house up with a keg of powder which was in the cabin, hoping thereby to put an end to most of the natives.” The trapped men set the keg, braced themselves in the hold, and laid ready to counterattack. Sadly, the damp powder only flashed violently and sparked a fire in their refuge which severely burned two of them. Miraculously, they managed to put out the conflagration and once again secured the cabin.53
Hours dragged on, and during the stalemate, Henry conferred with Nelson: “I don’t want to kill you. I have killed all I want to, and if you give me fifteen muskets and a keg of powder, and let me take what provisions I want, I will leave the brig when I see land. But if you do not consent, I will set fire to her and burn you all up.”54 Nelson considered his untenable position and agreed to Henry’s demands. The uninjured surrendered the cabin and retreated to the forward sections of the ship. As sunset came,
52 Ward, American Activities, 3: 39-40.
53 Ibid, 40.
54 Ibid, 40-41.
27 the mutineers provisioned two whaleboats and departed the William Penn. With the whaler once again in his possession, Nelson recovered the bodies of Captain Hussey and the cook George Reed. The ship’s steward, a Chinese man the crew called “Amoy,” also suffered wounds from the attack and succumbed to his injuries two days later.55
Isaac Bunker Hussey’s murder stemmed from his inability to fully understand
Pacific Worlds and Pacific Islanders on their own terms. He was a man of the Atlantic
World and viewed the Pacific and its peoples through that objectified lens. Hussey suffered from a myopic condition that Nicholas Thomas described as a “notion that
Islanders are in situ, they inhabit particular places, they are ‘local’ opponents, translators, or recipients of ‘global’ forces, meanings and commodities, emanating largely from the
West.”56 Nothing could have been further from reality.
Oahu Henry’s phrase “I don’t want to kill you. I have killed all I want to,” and “I will leave the brig when I see land” speaks to the mutineers’ motive of returning to their respective homes. Common practice for nineteenth century whalers at the end of an expedition was to set a course for Cape Horn or the Indian Ocean and head directly for their Atlantic ports, and to discharge Islander crewmembers onto the first bit of land along the way before departing the Pacific. Admiral John Erskine (1806-1887) of the
British Navy remarked that Pacific Islander seamen and whalemen received “a trifling remuneration for their services and [where] often turned adrift when no longer wanted, at any island where the ship may chance to touch.”57 Once ashore, these individuals needed
55 Ibid.
56 Nicholas Thomas, Islanders, 3.
57 John E. Erskine, Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific (London: John Murry, Albemarle Street, 1853), 345-346.
28 to sign aboard the next ship that arrived, and hope to eventually return home and avoid a repetition of abandonment. The cycle of signing on, sailing, and becoming castaways could occur several times before arriving home.58 As beachcombers, Henry and his fellow conspirators likely arrived on Kosrae’s shore due to this cruel practice. The
William Penn represented a means of returning home for not only for Hussey, but for the
Pacific Islanders he recruited as well. The difference being that whereas Hussey held an assurance that he would return home, the men under his command possessed no such promise.
58 David A. Chappell, “Secret Sharers: Indigenous Beachcombers in the Pacific Islands,” Pacific Studies 17, no. 2 (June 1994): 4.
29
CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSION
Hussey lacked an ability to see past his own worldview and consider individuals for their labors and not necessarily for who they were or where they were from. That is, he relied upon a common understanding of a world constructed upon race and geography.
Pondering that “the Pacific was basically a Euro-American creation,” O.H.K. Spate allowed himself a rare luxury for one focused on the past: he made a prediction. He acknowledged History’s evolution, noting that “change will demand a new historiography, which is indeed in hand; for this, despite inclination, I have not the skills, and my work will perhaps appear as a Requiem for an era of historiography, which yet must serve as a basis for that which is to come.”59
Despite the critique presented, methodologies that manage historical study along lines of ethnic, geographic, and other categories of analysis hold an immense value. They consider attributes shared within identities in understanding unfolding events. And while each personal perspective is unique, the similarities between the experiences of individuals of like identities allows scholars to draw informed inferences and model theory. Focusing on labor is no different. The scholar investigates the individual and shared experiences of a particular group and constructs larger conclusions based upon the evidence. The study of labor in any context is not a panacea or unifying theory in
59 Spate, The Pacific Since Magellan, ix.
30 understanding history. However, it asks primal central questions concerning the acquisition of the material means of survival while factoring in—after the asking—other categories of analysis.
31
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