CHAPTER IV
KAAHUMANU
Kamehameha the first, founder of the realm of the Eight Islands, was a man properly entitled to the style of great. All chiefs in Polynesia are tall and portly; and Kamehameha owed his life in the battle with the Puna fishers to the vigour of his body. He was skilled in single combat; as a general, he was almost invariably the victor. Yet it is not as a soldier that he remains fixed upon the memory; rather as a kindly and wise monarch, full of sense and shrewdness, like an old plain country farmer. When he had a mind to make a present of fish, he went to the fishing himself. When famine fell on the land, he remitted the tributes, cultivated a garden for his own support with his own hands, and set all his friends to do the like. Their patches of land, each still known by the name of its high-born gardener, were shown to Ellis on his tour. He passed laws against cutting down young sandal-wood trees, and against the killing of the bird from which the feather mantles of the archipelago were made. The yellow feathers were to be plucked, he directed, and the bird dismissed again to freedom. His people were astonished. “You are old,” they argued; “soon you will die; what use will it be to you?” “Let the bird go,” said the King. “It will be for my children afterwards.” Alas, that his laws had not prevailed! Sandal-wood and yellow feathers are now things of yesterday in his dominions.
The attitude of this brave old fellow to the native religion was, for some while before his death, ambiguous. A white man (tradition says) had come to Hawaii upon a visit; King Kalakaua assures me he was an Englishman, and a missionary; if that be so, he should be easy to identify. It was this missionary’s habit to go walking in the morning ere the sun was up, and before doing so, to kindle a light and make tea. The King, who rose early himself to watch the behaviour of his people, observed the light, made inquiries, learned of and grew curious about these morning walks, threw himself at last in the missionary’s path, and drew him into talk. The meeting was repeated; and the missionary began to press the King with Christianity. “If you will throw yourself from that cliff,” said Kamehameha, “and come down uninjured, I will accept your religion: not unless.” But the missionary was a man of parts; he wrote a deep impression on his hearer’s mind, and after he had left for home, Kamehameha called his chief priest, and announced he was about to break the tabus and to change his faith. The Kahuna replied that he was the King’s servant, but the step was grave, and it would be wiser to proceed by divination. Kamehameha consented. Each built a new heiau over against the other’s; and when both were finished, a game of what we call French and English or The Tug of War was played upon the intervening space. The party of the priest prevailed; the King’s men were dragged in a body into the opposite temple; and the tabus were maintained. None employed in this momentous foolery were informed of its significance; the King’s misgivings were studiously concealed; but there is little doubt he continued to cherish them in secret. At his death, he had another memorable word, testifying to his old preoccupation for his son’s estate: implying besides a weakened confidence in the island deities. His sickness was heavy upon him; the time had manifestly come to offer sacrifice; the people had fled already from the then dangerous vicinity, and lay hid; none but priests and chiefs remained about the King. “A man to your god!” they urged—“a man to your god, that you may recover!” “The man is sacred to (my son) the King,” replied Kamehameha. So much appeared in public; but it is believed that he left secret commands upon the high chief Kalanimoku, and on Kaahumanu, the most beautiful and energetic of his wives, to do (as soon as he was dead) that which he had spared to do while living.
No time was lost. The very day of his death, May 8th, 1819, the women of the court ate of forbidden food, and some of the men sat down with them to meat. Infidelity must have been deep-seated in the circle of Kamehameha; for no portent followed this defiance of the gods, and none of the transgressors died. But the priests were doubtless informed of what was doing; the blame lay clearly on the shoulders of Kaahumanu, the most conspicuous person in the land, named by the dying Kamehameha for a conditional successor: “If Liholiho do amiss, let Kaahumanu take the kingdom and preserve it.” The priests met in council of diviners; and by a natural retort, it was upon Kaahumanu that they laid the fault of the King’s death. This conspiracy appears to have been quite in vain. Kaahumanu sat secure. On the day of the coronation, when the young King came forth from the heiau, clad in a red robe and crowned with his English diadem, it was almost as an equal that she met and spoke to him. “(Son of) heaven, I name to you the possessions of your father; here are the chiefs, there are the people of your father; there are your guns, here is your land. But let you and me enjoy that land together.” He must have known already she was a free-eater, and there is no doubt he trembled at the thought of that impiety and of its punishment; yet he consented to what seems her bold proposal. The same day he met his own mother, who signed to him privately that he should eat free. But Liholiho (the poor drunkard who died in London) was incapable of so much daring: he hung long apart from the court circle with a clique of the more superstitious; and it was not till five months later, after a drinking bout in a canoe at sea, that he was decoyed to land by stronger spirits, and was seen (perhaps scarce conscious of his acts) to eat of a dog, drink rum, and smoke tobacco, with his servant women. Thus the food tabu fell finally at court. Ere it could be stamped out upon Hawaii, a war must be fought; wherein the chief of the old party fell in battle; his brave wife Manono by his side, mourned even by the missionary Ellis.
The fall of one tabu involved the fall of others; the land was plunged in dissolution; morals ceased. When the missionaries came (April 1820), all the wisdom in the kingdom was prepared to embrace the succour of some new idea. Kaahumanu early ranged upon that side, perhaps at first upon a ground of politics. But gradually she fell more and more under the influence of the new teachers; loved them, served them; valorously defended them in dangers, which she shared; and put away at their command her second husband. To the end of a long life, she played an almost sovereign part, so that in the ephemerides of Hawaii, the progresses of Kaahumanu are chronicled along with the deaths and the accessions of kings. For two successive sovereigns and in troublous periods, she held the reins of regency with a fortitude that has not been called in question, with a loyalty beyond reproach; and at last, on 5th June 1832, this Duke of Wellington of a woman made the end of a saint, fifty-seven years after her marriage with the conqueror. The date of her birth, it seems, is lost; we may call her seventy.
Kaahumanu was a woman of the chiefly stature and of celebrated beauty; Bingham admits she was “beautiful for a Polynesian”; and her husband cherished her exceedingly. He had the indelicacy to frame and publish an especial law declaring death against the man who should approach her, and yet no penalty against herself. And in 1809, after thirty-four years of marriage, and when she must have been nearing fifty, an island Chastelard, of the name of Kanihonui, was found to be her lover, and paid the penalty of life; she cynically surviving. Some twenty years later, one of the missionaries had written home denouncing the misconduct of an English whaler. The whaler got word of the denunciation and, with the complicity of the English consul, sought to make a crime of it against the mission. Party spirit ran very violent in the islands; tears were shed, threats flying; and Kaahumanu called a council of the chiefs. In that day stood forth the native historian, David Malo (though his name should rather have been Nathan), and pressed the regent with historic instances. Who was to be punished?—the whaler guilty of the act, the missionary whose denunciation had provoked the scandal? “O you, the wife of Kamehameha,” said he, “Kanihonui came and slept with you Luheluhe declared to Kamehameha the sleeping together of you two. I ask you, which of these two persons was slain by Kamehameha? Was it Luheluhe?” And she answered: “It was Kanihonui!” Shakespeare never imagined such a character; and it would require none less than he to represent her sublimities and contradictions.
After this heroine, the stone in the precinct of Honaunau had been named. Here is the reason, and the tale completes her portrait. Kamehameha was, of course, polygamous; the number of his wives rose at last to twenty-five; and out of these no less than two were the sisters of Kaahumanu. The favourite was of a jealous habit; and when it came to a sister for a rival, her jealousy overflowed. She fled by night, plunged in the sea, came swimming to Honaunau, entered the precinct by the sea-gate, and hid herself behind the stone. There she lay naked and refused food. The flight was discovered; as she had come swimming, none had seen her pass; the priests of the temple were bound, it seems, to silence; and Kona was filled with the messengers of the dismayed Kamehameha, vainly seeking the favourite. Now, Kaahumanu had a dog who was much attached to her, who had accompanied her in her long swim, and lay by her side behind the stone; and it chanced, as the messengers ran past the City of Refuge, that the dog (perhaps recognising them) began to bark. “Ah, there is the dog of Kaahumanu!” said the messengers, and returned and told the king she was at the Hale O Keawe. Thence Kamehameha fetched or sent for her, and the breach in their relations was restored.
A king preferred this woman out of a kingdom; Kanihonui died for her, when she was fifty; even her dog adored her; even Bingham, who did not see her until 1820, thought her “beautiful for a Polynesian,” and while she was thus in person an emblem of womanly charm, she made her life illustrious with the manly virtues. There are some who give to Mary Queen of Scots the place of saint and muse in their historic meditations; I recommend to them instead the wife and widow of the island conqueror. The Hawaiian was the nobler woman, with the nobler story; and no disenchanting portrait will be found to shatter an ideal.