§ 3. Houses, Mechanical Arts
Captain King observed that in some respects the natives of the Sandwich Islands approached nearer in their manners and customs to the Maoris of New Zealand than to their less distant neighbours of the Society and Friendly Islands, the Tahitians and the Tongans. In nothing, he says, is this more observable than in their method of living together in small towns or villages, containing from about one hundred to two hundred houses, built pretty close together, without any order, and with a winding path leading through them. They were generally flanked towards the sea with loose detached walls, intended for shelter and defence.[10] The shape of the houses was very simple. They were oblong with very high thatched roofs, so that externally they resembled the top of hay-stacks or rather barns with the thatched roof sloping down steeply to two very low sides, and with gable ends to match. The entrance, placed indifferently in one of the sides or ends, was an oblong hole, so low that one had rather to creep than walk in, and often shut by a board of planks fastened together, which served as a door. No light entered the house but by this opening, for there were no windows. Internally every house consisted of a single room without partitions. In spite of the extreme simplicity of their structure, the houses were kept very clean; the floors were covered with a large quantity of dried grass, over which they spread mats to sit and sleep upon. At one end stood a kind of bench about three feet high, on which were kept the household utensils. These consisted merely of a few wooden bowls and trenchers, together with gourd-shells, serving either as bottles or baskets. The houses varied in size with the wealth or rank of the owners. Those of the poor were mere hovels, which resembled the sties and kennels of pigs and dogs rather than the abodes of men. The houses of the chiefs were generally large and commodious by comparison, some forty to sixty feet long by twenty or thirty feet broad, and eighteen or twenty feet high at the peak of the roof. Chiefs had always a separate eating-house, and even people of the lower ranks had one such house to every six or seven families for the men. The women were forbidden to eat in company with the men and even to enter the eating-house during the meals; they ate in the same houses in which they slept. The houses of the chiefs were enclosed in large yards, and sometimes stood on stone platforms, which rendered them more comfortable.[11]
In the mechanical arts the Hawaiians displayed a considerable degree of ingenuity and skill. While the men built the houses and canoes and fashioned wooden dishes and bowls, the women undertook the manufacture of bark-cloth (kapa) and mats. Bark-cloth was made in the usual way from the bark of the paper-mulberry, which was beaten out with grooved mallets. The cloth was dyed a variety of colours, and patterns at once intricate and elegant were stamped on it and stained in different tints. The mats were woven or braided by hand without the use of any frame or instrument. The materials were rushes or palm-leaves; the mats made of palm-leaves were much the more durable and therefore the more valuable. The coarser and plainer were spread on the floor to sleep on; the finer were of white colour with red stripes, rhombuses, and other figures interwoven on one side. Among the most curious specimens of native carving were the wooden bowls in which the chiefs drank kava. They were perfectly round, beautifully polished, and supported on three or four small human figures in various attitudes. These figures were accurately proportioned and neatly finished; even the anatomy of the muscles strained to support the weight were well expressed. The fishing-hooks made by the men, especially the large hooks made to catch shark, are described by Captain Cook as really astonishing for their strength and neatness; he found them on trial much superior to his own.[12]
The mechanical skill of these people was all the more remarkable because of the extreme rudeness and simplicity of the tools with which they worked. Their chief implement was an adze made of a black or clay-coloured volcanic stone and polished by constant friction with pumice-stone in water. They had also small instruments made each of a single shark's tooth, some of which were fixed to the forepart of a dog's jawbone and others to a thin wooden handle of the same shape. These served as knives, and pieces of coral were used as files. Captain Cook found the natives in possession of two iron tools, one of them a piece of iron hoop, and the other an edge-tool, perhaps the point of a broadsword. These they could only have procured from a European vessel or from a wreck drifted on their coast. No mines of any kind are known to exist in the islands.[13]
Their weapons of war included spears, javelins, daggers, and clubs, all of them made of wood. They also slung stones with deadly effect. But they had no defensive armour; for the war-cloaks and wicker-work helmets, surmounted with lofty crests and decked with the tail feathers of the tropic bird, while they heightened the imposing and martial appearance of the wearers, must have proved rather encumbrances than protections. Captain Cook found the natives in possession of bows and arrows, but from their scarcity and the slenderness of their make he inferred that the Hawaiians, like other Polynesians, never used them in battle.[14]
§ 4. Government, Social Ranks, Taboo
The government of the Hawaiian Islands was an absolute monarchy or despotism; all rights of power and property vested in the king, whose will and power alone were law, though in important matters he was to a certain extent guided by the opinion of the chiefs in council. The rank of the king and the chiefs was hereditary, descending from father to son; but the appointment to all offices of authority and dignity was made by the king alone. Nevertheless posts of honour, influence, and emolument often continued in the same family for many generations. Nor were hereditary rank and authority confined to men; they were inherited also by women. According to tradition, several of the islands had been once or twice under the government of a queen. The king was supported by an annual tribute paid by all the islands at different periods according to his directions. It comprised both the natural produce of the country and manufactured articles. But besides the regular tribute the king was at liberty to levy any additional tax he might please, and even to seize and appropriate any personal possessions of a chief or other subject. Not infrequently the whole crop of a plantation was thus carried off by his retainers without the least apology or compensation.[15] However, the government of the whole Hawaiian archipelago by a single monarch was a comparatively modern innovation. Down to nearly the end of the eighteenth century the different islands were independent of each other and governed by separate kings, who were often at war one with the other; indeed there were sometimes several independent kingdoms within the same island. But towards the close of the eighteenth century an energetic and able king of Hawaii, by name Kamehameha (Tamehameha), succeeded in extending his sway by conquest over the whole archipelago, and at his death in 1819 he bequeathed the undivided monarchy to his successors.[16]
The whole body of chiefs fell into three classes or ranks. The first included the royal family and all who were intimately connected with it. The second included such as held hereditary offices of power or governorships of islands, after the time when the whole archipelago was united in a single kingdom. The third class embraced the rulers of districts, the headmen of villages, and all inferior chiefs. The members of the first two classes were usually called "high chiefs"; they were few in number and closely related both by blood and marriage. The members of the third class were known as "small" or "low" chiefs. They were by far the most numerous body of chiefs in any island, and were generally called haku aina or landowners, though strictly speaking the king was acknowledged in every island as the supreme lord and proprietor of the soil by hereditary right or the law of conquest. When Kamehameha had subdued the greater part of the islands, he distributed them among his favourite chiefs and warriors on condition of their rendering him not only military service, but a certain proportion of the produce of their lands. In this he appears to have followed the ancient practice invariably observed on the conquest of an island.[17] For "from the earliest periods of Hawaiian history, the tenure of lands has been, in most respects, feudal. The origin of the fiefs was the same as in the northern nations of Europe. Any chieftain who could collect a sufficient number of followers to conquer a district, or an island, and had succeeded in his object, proceeded to divide the spoils, or 'cut up the land,' as the natives termed it. The king, or principal chief, made his choice from the best of the lands. Afterwards the remaining part of the conquered territory was distributed among the leaders, and these again subdivided their shares to others, who became vassals, owing fealty to the sovereigns of the fee. The king placed some of his own particular servants on his portion as his agents, to superintend the cultivation. The original occupants who were on the land, usually remained under their new conqueror, and by them the lands were cultivated, and rent or taxes paid."[18]
Below the chiefs or nobles were the commoners, who included small farmers, fishermen, mechanics, such as house-builders and canoe-builders, musicians and dancers, in short, all the labouring classes, whether they worked for a chief or farmer or cultivated patches of land for their own benefit.[19] According to one account, "the common people are generally considered as attached to the soil, and are transferred with the land from one chief to another."[20] But this statement is contradicted by an earlier and perhaps better-informed writer, who spent some thirteen months in Oahu, while the islands were still independent and before the conversion of the people to Christianity. He tells us that commoners were not slaves nor attached to the soil, but at liberty to change masters when they thought proper.[21] On this subject Captain King observes: "How far the property of the lower class is secured against the rapacity and despotism of the great chiefs, I cannot say, but it should seem that it is sufficiently protected against private theft, or mutual depredation; for not only their plantations, which are spread over the whole country, but also their houses, their hogs, and their cloth, were left unguarded, without the smallest apprehensions. I have already remarked, that they not only separate their possessions by walls in the plain country, but that, in the woods likewise, wherever the horse-plantains grow, they make use of small white flags in the same manner, and for the same purpose of discriminating property, as they do bunches of leaves at Otaheite. All which circumstances, if they do not amount to proofs, are strong indications that the power of the chiefs, where property is concerned, is not arbitrary, but at least so far circumscribed and ascertained, as to make it worth the while for the inferior orders to cultivate the soil, and to occupy their possessions distinct from each other."[22] Yet on the other hand we are told by later writers that "in fact, the condition of the common people is that of slaves; they hold nothing which may not be taken from them by the strong hand of arbitrary power, whether exercised by the sovereign or a petty chief." On one occasion the writers saw nearly two thousand persons, laden with faggots of sandal-wood, coming down from the mountains to deposit their burdens in the royal store-houses, and then departing to their homes, weary with their unpaid labours, yet without a murmur at their bondage.[23] When at last, through contact with civilisation, they had learned to utter their grievances, they complained that "the people was crushed by the numerous forced labours and contributions of every sort exacted from them by the chiefs. It was, indeed, very hard to furnish the chiefs, on every requisition, with pigs, food, and all the good things which the folk possessed, and to see the great despoiling the humble. In truth, the people worked for the chiefs incessantly, they performed every kind of painful task, and they paid the chiefs all the taxes which it pleased them to demand."[24]
Certainly commoners were bound to pay great outward marks of deference to their social superiors, the chiefs, or nobles. Indeed, the respect almost amounted to adoration, for they were on no occasion allowed to touch their persons, but prostrated themselves before them, and might not enter their houses without first receiving permission.[25] Above all, the system of taboo or kapu, as it was called in the Hawaiian dialect,[26] oppressed the common people and tended to keep them in a state of abject subjection to the nobles; for the prescriptions of the system were numerous and vexatious, and the penalty for breaches of them was death. If the shadow of a subject fell on a chief, the subject was put to death; if he robed himself in the cloth or assumed the girdle of a chief, he was put to death; if he climbed on the wall of a chief's courtyard, he was put to death; if he stood upright instead of prostrating himself when a vessel of water was brought for the chief to wash with or his garments to wear, he was put to death; if he stepped on the shadow of a chief's house with his head smeared with white clay, or decked with a garland of flowers, or merely wetted with water, he was put to death; if he slept with his wife on a taboo day, he was put to death; if he made a noise during public prayers, he was put to death; if a woman ate pig, or coco-nuts, or bananas, or lobster, or the fish called ulua, she was put to death; if she went in a canoe on a taboo day, she was put to death; if husband and wife ate together, they were both put to death.[27]