A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

without divinity to sustain them, haunted at every turn by ghosts from the past and
omens of alienation. 296
The (unanswerable) question here is: would they have done so if there had been no
contact? Cook’s crew had violated kapu times for work, and obviously none of them was
struck down by the gods for it; this alone could have served as food for radical thought. It
is questionable whether the resulting changes were for the better. The unification of the
Hawaiian Islands under Kamehameha I (who reigned as King Kamehameha the Great
from 1795 to 1819) is to be viewed with the same ambiguity: before the arrival of whites,
no similar conquest for autocracy had taken place. Probably, the foreigners’ insinuations
and superior weapons had their share in convincing the aspiring chief that he should aim
higher. These assumptions are mere indicators of the difficulty of assessing historical
developments.
White residents, mostly the Yankee missionaries, urged for fee simple land tenure,
among other things. In 1848, the ruling chief, Kamehameha III, agreed to a land division,
the ‘Great Mahele.’ 297 The beneficiaries were white people, now able to lease or buy large
tracts of land. Sugar plantations, whose owners were mostly related to the missionary
group, emerged. Their growing size together with the decimation of natives through
epidemics called for foreign labor, which was recruited successively from China, Japan,
the Philippines, and Korea. White influence increased, in the government as well as in
every other realm. In 1887, the convivial monarch Kalakaua was forced to sign the
“bayonet constitution,” agreeing to “reign, not rule.” The way to 1893’s overthrow of the
monarchy was paved. The strategic position of the islands was one of the incentives of
American annexation in 1898. For the next forty years, the islands were virtually in the
hands of the sugar barons. Only the war, starting for Hawaiians and Americans alike in
December 1941 with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, would change that in the long
run. Statehood for Hawai’i was finally ‘granted’ in 1959 after offering a yes/no ballot that
“precluded discussion of Hawaiian sovereignty.” 298
296 Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands, Toronto 1968: 34.
297 Mahele = portion, division.
298 Lyons 1997: 54. Gima notes: “The Territory achieved statehood in 1959 partly on the basis of its military
significance, despite doubts expressed by various politicians in D.C. as to the appropriateness of admitting
the ‘melting pot of the Pacific,’ and its mostly non-white population, to the Union” (Gima 1997: 66).
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