Unfamiliar Fishes

Sarah Vowell traces the Americanization of Hawaii from the arrival of New England Protestant missionaries in 1820 to the United States' annexation of the islands in 1898. Blending archival research, site visits, and personal reflection, Vowell argues that the 78 years between those events constitute a case study in what political scientist Steven Lukes called "soft power": the process by which one people gets another to want what they want.

Vowell opens in present-day Waikiki, sitting under an imported banyan tree with a plate lunch, a takeout meal whose components represent the layers of immigration and colonization that reshaped Hawaii. A 2003 visit to the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor led her to Iolani Palace, where she learned about the 1893 coup d'état that deposed Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last monarch. The contrast between Pearl Harbor, deeply embedded in American memory, and the largely forgotten overthrow prompted Vowell to investigate how Hawaii transformed from a Polynesian kingdom into an American territory. She notes Hawaii's dual identity as a painful tale of native loss and an idealistic multiethnic saga, connecting the story to her own ancestry as a descendant of both Cherokees forced onto the Trail of Tears and Swedish immigrants.

Vowell begins with Captain James Cook, the British explorer who became the first European on record to land in the Hawaiian archipelago in 1778, naming it the Sandwich Islands. Cook was killed at Kealakekua Bay in 1779. In the following years, the warrior Kamehameha acquired Western guns and haole, or foreign, advisors from visiting ships and waged civil wars that united all the major islands under his rule by 1810, founding the Kingdom of Hawaii.

The catalyst for the missionary expedition was Henry Obookiah, a Hawaiian orphan born around 1792 whose parents were killed by Kamehameha's warriors. Obookiah sailed to America on a trading ship and ended up at Yale, where Timothy Dwight, the university's president and a leading figure of the Second Great Awakening, a widespread Protestant revival movement, took him in. Obookiah studied at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, run by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), but died of typhoid fever in 1818. The ABCFM published his memoir, which generated widespread support for a Sandwich Islands mission.

In October 1819, the first company of missionaries departed Boston on the brig Thaddeus. The group included ordained ministers Hiram Bingham and Asa Thurston, their hastily married wives Sybil Moseley and Lucy Goodale, and several other families and Hawaiian assistants. The ABCFM gave them contradictory instructions, directing them to remake Hawaiian society through literacy, Bible translation, schools, and churches while refraining from political interference.

When the Thaddeus arrived in spring 1820, the missionaries learned that a revolution had already occurred. Two of Kamehameha's widows drove the change. Keopuolani, the highest-ranking noble in Hawaii, and the politically powerful Kaahumanu pressured the new king, Liholiho (Kamehameha II), to abolish the kapu system, the religious and legal code governing Hawaiian life. Liholiho publicly broke the eating kapu and ordered the destruction of temples and idols. The missionaries interpreted this as divine preparation for their arrival.

Liholiho granted the missionaries a one-year trial period. Over the following years, Sybil Bingham nursed Kaahumanu through a serious illness, and the queen became a devoted convert. With royal support, the missionaries invented a written form of Hawaiian using a 12-letter alphabet and translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek. Their printing presses produced an estimated 113 million sheets of material. Within about four decades, Hawaii achieved a 75 percent literacy rate, higher than Western Europe or the United States at the time.

The missionaries' fiercest opponents were their fellow Americans: the whaling sailors who used Honolulu and Lahaina as ports between whale fisheries off Peru and Japan. The missionaries persuaded the Hawaiian government to restrict liquor and outlaw prostitution, provoking violent confrontations with crews who resented the restrictions.

Vowell devotes particular attention to Princess Nahi'ena'ena, daughter of Kamehameha and Keopuolani, whose short life embodied Hawaii's cultural division. Ancient tradition called for the princess to marry her brother, King Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III), to continue the sacred royal line, but missionaries insisted the Bible forbade incest. She lived torn between two worlds, increasingly turning to alcohol. She bore a child, probably her brother's, who died the same day. She herself died around 1836 at roughly 20 years of age. The native Hawaiian population was similarly devastated by foreign diseases. Estimated at over 300,000 when Cook arrived, the population had fallen to just 34,436 pure Hawaiians by the 1890 census.

Vowell traces Hawaii's constitutional development. King Kauikeaouli hired missionary William Richards as a political science tutor, but the king and his chiefs, working with Hawaiian scholars including David Malo, who recorded ancient traditions in writing, drove the creation of the Declaration of Rights of 1839 and the Constitution of 1840, establishing a constitutional monarchy. The Great Mahele land division of 1848 privatized land previously controlled by the king, but commoners received less than one percent of the total. After foreigners were allowed to purchase land in 1850, haole landowners came to control roughly 90 percent by 1890.

Sugar agriculture, boosted by the reciprocity treaty of 1876 that allowed Hawaiian sugar to enter the United States tax-free, transformed Hawaii's economy and demographics. Laborers were imported from China, Japan, Portugal, Korea, and the Philippines, deliberately diversified by ethnicity to prevent organized strikes. By 1900, Asian workers comprised nearly 57 percent of the population, while Hawaiians had become a minority. Vowell connects the plate lunch tradition to this era: Plantation workers from different backgrounds shared food at lunchtime, a practice that evolved into the mixed-plate format.

King Kalakaua, elected in 1874, championed Hawaiian cultural revival, restoring the hula and publishing the ancient creation chant, the Kumulipo. His spending, gambling, and corruption, however, gave his opponents ammunition. In 1887, the Hawaiian League, a secret organization of haole businessmen led by attorney Lorrin Thurston, forced Kalakaua to sign the "Bayonet Constitution," which stripped the king of most powers, imposed property requirements that disenfranchised two-thirds of native Hawaiian voters, and barred Asian residents from voting. That same year, Pearl Harbor was ceded to the United States as a naval coaling station.

After Kalakaua died in 1891, his sister Liliuokalani became queen. When she attempted to promulgate a new constitution restoring royal authority and expanding voting rights in January 1893, responding to petitions signed by an estimated two-thirds of registered voters, Thurston's Committee of Safety acted. Backed by U.S. Minister John L. Stevens and troops from the USS Boston, the committee seized the government. Sanford Dole, an alumnus of Punahou School, an academy originally founded for missionaries' children, was installed as president. Liliuokalani surrendered, but only to American force, expecting the U.S. government to reverse the action.

President Grover Cleveland withdrew the annexation treaty, concluding the overthrow was unjust, but the Dole government refused to restore the queen. A failed royalist counterrevolution led to Liliuokalani's imprisonment in Iolani Palace, where she was coerced into abdicating under threat that captured loyalists would be executed. Annexation stalled until 1898, when the Spanish-American War made Hawaii's strategic location urgent. Naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan had argued in his 1890 book The Influence of Sea Power upon History that national greatness depended on sea power and strategically placed coaling stations, ideas championed by Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Native Hawaiian organizations gathered over 20,000 signatures on anti-annexation petitions, successfully blocking a formal treaty. Because a treaty required a two-thirds Senate vote, annexationists used a joint resolution needing only simple majorities. President William McKinley signed it on July 6, 1898. On August 12, the American flag was raised at Iolani Palace.

Vowell notes that the acquisitions of 1898 sparked fierce debate between imperialists and members of the Anti-Imperialist League, who warned that empire would cause America to share Rome's fate. She closes with images of Hawaiian cultural persistence: students performing hula near David Malo's grave, men rowing outrigger canoes, and Hawaiians greeting each other by touching noses and breathing each other in.