Chapter One
Born in Paradise, 1820–1843

On April 4, 1820, a small merchant vessel, the Thaddeus, carrying a group of Christian missionaries, arrived off the coast of the Hawaiian archipelago’s biggest island, Hawai‘i. The New Englanders’ unwavering belief in the righteousness of their mission gave them the courage to undertake a dangerous, 164-day voyage from Boston.

The brig made its way through the treacherous Atlantic during the winter storm season, navigated the southernmost tip of South America, and then fought winds and high seas to make its way back up into the north Pacific. Fourteen members of missionary families were onboard, including the Reverend Hiram Bingham and Reverend Asa Thurston, as well as four Hawaiian youths.

Before setting off on this 18,000 mile journey, the missionaries gathered at the Park Street Church in Boston to receive their public instructions. Warned by one of the leaders of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions that they were headed to a pagan “land of darkness as darkness itself,” their orders were clear. “You are to aim at nothing short of covering those Islands with fruitful fields, pleasant dwellings, schools, and churches.”

The Americans hoped to bring what they considered progress to the islands while reaping the souls of the Sandwich Islanders. When they arrived, they were horrified by what they saw.

“The appearance of destitution, degradation, and barbarism among the chattering, almost naked savages, whose heads and feet and much of their sunburnt swarthy skin were bare, was appalling,” wrote the Rev. Bingham. “Some of our numbers, with gushing tears, turned away from the spectacle. Others with firmer nerves continued their gaze, but were ready to exclaim: ‘Can these be human beings?’” They soon overcame their disgust and sought and received permission from the chiefs to move into thatched houses, living alongside the natives.

Just a few months before their arrival, two powerful chiefesses had overthrown the kapu, the system of rules regulating Hawaiian life, by overtly disregarding the ancient law against women eating with men. At a feast in November, 1819, Alexander Liholiho, the young king who had assumed the throne as Kamehameha II after the death of his father, Kamehameha I, broke the ancient law against women eating with men by sitting down at their table. “The guests, astonished at this act, clapped their hands and cried out, ‘Ai noa,—the eating tabu is broken.’”

That was just the first of the radical changes that Kamehameha II made. After the meal was over, he ordered the heiau, the places for worshipping the many gods of the old Hawaiian religion, destroyed. It seemed sudden, but this revolution within Hawaiian society had fomented long before that fateful meal. Cook’s arrival had ended the islands’ long isolation and, inevitably, Hawaiians began to see themselves differently. They had watched as foreigners disregarded the kapu with no ill effects. And they had observed that Pele did not unleash her fury on Hawaiians who dared to break the rules surreptitiously.

Thus, the Reverand Thurston and the other missionaries arrived just in time to fill a void in the Hawaiians’ belief system. As Congregationalists who practiced an austere, Calvinist form of Christianity, they quickly spread out, settling in almost all parts of the island. They also brought heluhelu (reading and writing) to the islands for the first time.

Within a year and nine months of arriving, they’d given the Hawaiian language a twelve-letter alphabet (all the vowels—a e i o u—and a handful of consonants—h k l m n p w), introducing writing to an oral culture. Compared to the visiting whale men, who first arrived a year before the missionaries, in 1819, and only wanted pleasure from the Hawaiians after months at sea, the missionaries opened a wider world to them through education. By 1839 they had published the first complete Hawaiian-language Bible.

The first company of missionaries was soon joined by many more, including such passionate evangelists as Titus Coan, who began preaching in Hawaiian in the Hilo district on the island of Hawai‘i, reducing hundreds of natives to crying, shouting and weeping at his descriptions of hellfire and promises of redemption. In short order, missionaries had established more than a dozen churches in the islands and won thousands of converts; even Kamehameha II himself became a Christian.

Was there ever a stranger match than that between the New England missionaries, dressed in tightly buttoned black, and the barely clad Polynesians? Did the missionaries fully grasp the fierce history of the Hawaiians or did they lump them in with the African slaves they encountered on the streets of Boston because of the dark color of their skin? Did they realize that the king was a descendant of people who had conquered the seas in canoes, and that his father was the great warrior who had unified the far-flung Hawaiian archipelago?

One missionary who grew close to the chiefs was Asa Thurston, who was assigned to head the mission at Kailua on Hawai‘i Island, near the site of Captain Cook’s death. There, he instructed the king and his brother on Christianity until the itinerant court moved on to Lahaina on the island of Maui and then to Honolulu on O‘ahu. Like the other missionaries, Thurston and his family lived a life far removed from the relative comforts of New England, struggling to make ends meet. The family, for instance, went without butter so they could afford to buy a dictionary. Their plan backfired, though, for when the authorities of the missions discovered how they’d obtained the dictionary, they deducted its cost from Thurston’s salary.

The missionaries may not have understood much about the ­Hawaiians when they first arrived, but they saw an opportunity for spiritual harvest. Sometime in late 1820 or early 1821, Thurston wrote to the mainland urging other missionaries to join the cause if they possessed a single-minded devotion to God: “We want men and women who have souls . . . who have their eyes and their hearts fixed on the glory of God in the salvation of the heathen—who will be willing to sacrifice every interest but Christ’s.”

Such purity of purpose wouldn’t last long in Hawai‘i, however, especially among Thurston’s own descendants.

Looming over Honolulu lies a geological oddity known as the Punchbowl, an extinct volcanic crater whose brilliant red soil stands out from the green skirts of the mountains. New England sailors gave the crater this nickname because its rounded shape reminded them of punch bowls they remembered from home. But to Hawaiians it was a sacred site known as Pūowaina, “the hill of human sacrifices.”

In a compound of grass houses at the base of the Punchbowl, where some of Hawai‘i’s ali‘i, or high chiefs, lived, a baby was born on September 2, 1838. As the mother labored inside the windowless home, lying on mats braided from the bladelike leaves of the pandanus tree, men and women waited outside, reciting chants, oli, which traced the family’s genealogy and described their ancestors’ feats.

The infant emerged and began to cry. A midwife wrapped her in a soft blanket made from tree bark. The hut was filled with sweet and musky fragrances, including the coconut oil and turmeric that were often sprinkled on such cloth to give it a soft golden color.

The baby was a girl, later named Lili‘u. Soon after the cries of the child were heard, gasps of a different sort were made. A few drops of rain had fallen from an otherwise cloudless sky and a rainbow had spanned the horizon. “Ali‘i! Ali‘i! That is the sign of our Ali‘i!” the men cried out. Nature was signaling a propitious birth.

She was born during the time of year some islanders called Māhoe Hope, meaning “the time when the plumes of the sugarcane begin to unfurl from their sheaths.” It was a significant coincidence, since Lili‘u’s life would be inextricably bound to the fortunes of Hawai‘i’s sugar trade.

Although Lili‘u was born a high chiefess, with lineage that reached back to the high chiefs under Kamehameha the Great, at the time of her birth it would never have seemed possible she would someday become queen. And despite the appearance of a rainbow shortly after she was born, the full name she acquired foretold not a blessed life but one filled with pain. As was the tradition, she was named by the highest chiefess who, unfortunately, was suffering at the time from an eye infection. Marking the birth with her own complaint, the chiefess named her Lili‘u (smarting) Loloku (tearful) Walania (a burning pain) Kamaka‘eha (the sore eye.)

Bloodlines were crucial to Hawaiian society and elders scrutinized genealogy closely before a marriage to make sure that a partner of high rank was marrying an equal. Lili‘u’s social position rose soon after her birth, when she was adopted by chiefs of a higher rank than her own: Konia, a granddaughter of Kamehameha I, became her foster mother and Pākī, a high chief and adviser to Kamehameha III, became her foster father. The couple’s only daughter, Bernice Pauahi, became Lili‘u’s foster sister.

Lili‘u was welcomed by Pākī and Konia as part of a Hawaiian custom known as hānai. To strengthen family ties, newborns were sometimes given to close friends and relatives for adoption. The birth parents could not reclaim their child, except in the event of a death or serious illness on the part of the adoptive, or hānai, parents. They could, however, maintain a connection with the child by visiting and conferring with the adoptive parents over the child’s welfare.

Lili‘u adored her foster parents, particularly Pākī. An imposing man at six foot four and three hundred pounds, Pākī was a gentle giant, with a light complexion and reddish hair. At some point, a photographer captured an image of the enormous chief, looking somewhat uncomfortable in a dark, Western-style suit. Perhaps to display his wealth, a watch chain is looped from his vest and he holds out in front of him a walking stick topped with an ornamental knobbed handle.

Lili‘u’s feelings toward her adoptive father were much warmer than those for her biological parents. She recalled climbing on Pākī’s knees and putting her small arms around his neck, kissing and hugging him. He returned her affections and “caressed me as a father would his child,” she later wrote. Yet when she met her biological parents, “it was with perhaps more interest, yet always with the demeanor I would have shown to any strangers who noticed me.”

The practice of hānai was abhorrent to the New England missionaries, who discouraged it. But it continued anyway, reflecting not only a communal attitude toward child rearing but also a practical response to the rising incidence of infertility on the part of native Hawaiians.

It was a time when old Hawaiian customs were being swept away and new ones emerging to replace them. One sign of the changes was a flurry of activity on Punchbowl Street, not far from where Lili‘u was born. Rising above the few square blocks of storefronts, taverns, and grog shops that then made up downtown Honolulu, an extraordinary structure, Kawaiaha‘o church, arose out of blocks of buff-colored coral rock, weighing 200 to 1,200 pounds each. Native divers had quarried them from an offshore reef and then dragged them from the sea to the site of an ancient freshwater spring. Soaring above the palace and every other building in town was the first large Christian church to be built on O‘ahu.

The child Lili‘u was swept up in the Christian fervor. She was baptized at two and given the Christian name Lydia. She spent her earliest years with Konia and Pākī in Lahaina on the island of Maui, the Hawaiian capital until the court moved permanently to Honolulu in 1845. Looked after by a Hawaiian nursemaid there, Lili‘u as a toddler wandered one afternoon out of her hut, where she was supposed to be napping, and climbed onto a morning glory vine to swing. Losing her grip, she fell off, and her howls of pain sent her nursemaid running. Lili‘u lay on the ground, writhing. She had broken a leg, which left her with a mild limp all her life.

Perhaps believing Lili‘u needed closer supervision, she was sent by her parents to a boarding school on the neighboring island of O‘ahu just before her fourth birthday. At the school, near the palace and the stone church at the eastern edge of Honolulu, American missionaries educated ali‘i children, with the support of Kamehameha III and the chiefs.

Known as the Chiefs’ Children’s School, later renamed the Royal School, it was founded by Amos Starr Cooke and his wife, Juliette, in 1839. The modest mud-brick building, its rooms ringed a central courtyard. As the unlit streets of Honolulu grew dark in the evenings, the Cookes kept a lamp burning in the courtyard, setting out a beacon of light against what they saw as the sins and temptations of the rollicking port town.

The Cookes sought to protect their royal charges from bad influences by keeping them away from the rougher elements of Honolulu, as well as from their own people, whom they were allowed to visit for only short periods in the spring and fall. Honolulu, along with the port of Lahaina on the island of Maui, had become the Pacific base for the hundreds of ships that made up the American whaling fleet. As the kingdom’s exports to China trailed off, trade with whalers took its place.

The first thing the land-sick sailors would hear after their ship entered Honolulu harbor was the eerie blow of the conch shell announcing their arrival. At the height of the whaling season, up to five hundred ships would anchor in the harbor at any one time and ships so crowded the port that it was possible to cross the harbor by jumping from one ship’s deck to the next. A Hawaiian composed a song describing Honolulu’s harbor crowded with masts, calling it “Ka Ulu La au o Kai,” or “Forest Trees of the Sea.”

As the ships disgorged hundreds of sailors onto the streets of the town, the languid port would roar to life with merchants hawking their wares and large groups of horseback riders kicking up dust. Merchants’ tills clattered with English guineas, French double Louis, American eagles, Spanish doubloons, and even Russian ducats. The sailors’ appetites drew them not only to taverns and shops but also to a special red-light district near the harbor, named Cape Horn.

But prostitution was not the only way lusty sailors found pleasure. Some were happily surprised to find that native women offered themselves up freely. The islanders even had a lighthearted word for this practice: moekolohe, or “mischievous sleeping.” The result was a growing number of half Hawaiian, half white children, known as hapa haole. In Honolulu’s schools, the skin colors of the students were often not just dark or light but somewhere in between.

Missionaries such as the Cookes and the Thurstons sought to counter the sexual exuberance of native Hawaiians by instilling modesty. Lucy Thurston joined with Hawai‘i’s dowager queen to start a sewing circle, stitching modest calico dresses for native women to wear. That and other efforts led to the adoption of the holokū, the form-concealing dresses (patterned on the Mother Hubbard gowns worn by the missionaries) that native women began to wear in the 1820s. That replaced tapa cloth wrapped around the hips and gathered at the waist, which left the breasts uncovered—a shocking state of undress, at least to some foreigners.

The aesthetics of the West also reached the draftsman’s table. Honolulu and Hawai‘i’s other ports absorbed the West’s culture and architectural styles, as tidy wood frame houses with white clapboard fronts rose alongside the Hawaiians’ grass houses. Even the Chiefs’ Children’s School, where the missionaries were educating the next generation of chiefs, became a blend of the two cultures. The Cookes filled their parlor with furniture and knickknacks from New England, along with goods imported from China, within whitewashed adobe brick walls and beneath a thatched roof.

Literacy flowered in the kingdom. As the ali‘i children learned from the Cookes, thousands of Hawaiian adults and children attended other schools, learning to read and write in Hawaiian and sometimes also in English. Lahainaluna, a high school on the island of Maui, produced the first generation of native Hawaiian journalists and historians working in the written word. This thirst for learning began with the king and the chiefs. Within two decades of the missionaries’ arrival, Hawai‘i had achieved one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

The routine of Lili‘u’s school days followed the pattern set by schools in New England. She and the other Hawaiian students started their day at
5 a.m. with morning devotions, receiving their instruction in English and attending Kawaiaha‘o church every Sunday, sitting in a straight-backed pew near the king’s. All of the students were required to take a temperance pledge, which the older boys, in particular, had difficulty keeping as drinking alcohol was pervasive among Hawaiians and haole alike. As well as studying from English textbooks, the students had more than sixty books that the missionaries had translated into Hawaiian, most of which had moral or practical lessons to impart, such as Pilgrim’s Progress, Animals of the Earth, Geometry for Children, and tracts on marriage and intemperance.

Some of the girls, including Lili‘u’s hānai sister Pauahi, played the ­pianoforte, and the boys rode horses. Every evening the children would write in the journals they were required to keep. The parents who enrolled their children in the school hoped that they would bond as a group and become better rulers resisting the urge to fight among themselves, an admirable but elusive goal. Their Congregationalist teachers seemed more focused on saving what they considered their heathen souls than in grooming the kingdom’s next generation of rulers.

Attending the Chiefs’ Children’s School was a miserable experience for Lili‘u, who’d arrived kicking and screaming. But it was there that she first came to know her biological brother David Kalākaua, who had been adopted by a different family. The first time she was brought from her home to the school’s entrance, she clung tearfully to the family attendant who delivered her. Food rations were meager, especially compared with the generous portions ali‘i children enjoyed at home. “I recall the instances in which we were sent hungry to bed, it seems to me that they failed to remember that we were growing children,” she wrote in her memoir, years later. “A thick slice of bread covered with molasses was usually the sole article of our supper.”

Lili‘u’s childhood was Dickensian in another sense. Illness was a frequent visitor, as the young royals were routinely threatened by chicken pox, smallpox, fevers, typhoid, influenza, measles, and other ailments of modern Western civilization, brought to the islands by travelers. Carts covered with yellowish cloth regularly rattled through the streets of the town, hauling away the dead.

The strict discipline from their headmaster was a far cry from the indulgence they received at home. In their own homes, it was traditionally kapu, forbidden, to discipline a young noble. But not at the Cookes’. Lili‘u’s brother David endured beatings from the stern taskmaster Amos Cooke for bad behavior. Cooke once even slapped him in the face for talking during a church service.

Young Kalākaua also witnessed firsthand the kingdom’s sometimes harsh justice when he saw his own grandfather’s hanging. Not five years old at the time, and a rebellious student who loved to sing and fight, Kalākaua received word that his paternal grandfather by blood, Kamanawa, a former high chief, wanted him to visit while he was bound in irons and awaiting execution. He had been found guilty of murdering his wife with poisoned ‘awa, a medicinal tonic used by native Hawaiians to induce drowsiness.

Six days later, a crowd gathered as the convicted man was marched up the scaffold at the old fort, near the harbor, to face his punishment. Some of the royal children witnessed the execution, including Kalākaua himself, who was said to have saved a piece of the hangman’s rope to remind him of that dreadful experience. In later years, perhaps remembering the day of his grandfather’s hanging, Kalākaua grew embittered and cynical toward those who preached Christian mercy.

As the sixteen ali‘i children sat in the schoolroom, learning to read, write, and do their sums, they were living in a time that would later be viewed as the golden age of the Hawaiian kingdom. The nation’s longest-ruling monarch, Kamehameha III, had introduced a declaration of rights in 1839, followed by a written constitution in 1840. He gave, for the first time, some measure of political power to the common people through the creation of a house of representatives. He also established a supreme court.

With a constitutional monarchy firmly in place, the king sent a pair of emissaries to Washington, D.C., London, and Paris, seeking formal recognition of his island nation’s sovereignty. The United States recognized Hawai‘i’s independence in writing in late 1842. Great Britain followed on April 1, 1843. France expressed a verbal assurance soon after.

But as the Hawaiian emissaries were crossing the English Channel in an effort to convince the French to commit to writing what they had pledged in words, news of an astonishing coup in the islands reached Europe. In what would come to be known as the Paulet Affair, a triumvirate of Englishmen living in Honolulu staged a takeover of the islands, ­turning Hawai‘i, at least temporarily, into a British protectorate. This odd but important episode gave the young Lili‘u her first glimpse of how attractive and vulnerable Hawai‘i was to foreign powers.

In 1843 Kamehameha III was entering the final decade of his thirty-year reign. Five years earlier, wracked with grief over the death of the sister who was also his bride, Nāhi‘ena‘ena, he had moved his court to Lahaina, on the island of Maui, subsuming his sorrows with alcohol.

The king’s private struggles allowed ambitious Westerners to accumulate power in the newly formed government, and several became royal advisers—most notably an American medical missionary named Gerrit P. Judd, who held a succession of posts over two decades, including minister of foreign affairs.

Other Americans and Europeans also made their way into court, drawn by its brilliant pageants and lavish lū‘au, or feasts. Herman Melville arrived in Honolulu aboard a whaling ship in 1843 and worked for a time as a clerk and a pin setter in a bowling alley. Unimpressed with the quality of the Westerners who became courtiers, he described the royal entourage as “a junta of ignorant and designing Methodist elders in the council of a half civilized king ruling with absolute sway over a nation just poised between barbarism and civilization.” Surely Melville was indulging in hyperbole, but his description of “designing” Westerners would prove all too accurate.

The roots of the Paulet Affair lay less in court intrigue than in the intricate courtship dance being performed by three rivals for Hawai‘i—­Britain, France, and the United States. In the years prior to Kamehameha III’s rule there were strong ties between the British empire and the islands. But by the 1840s British power in the islands had begun to wane as trading with American whaling ships accelerated.

A scheming Englishman named Alexander Simpson, who had come to the islands in 1839 as superintendent of operations for the Hudson Bay Company, hoped to change that. Very quickly, he concluded that Hawai‘i should become a British possession. It wasn’t long before he convinced Lord George Paulet, the commander of the British frigate Carysfort, to demand that the Hawaiian king address a long list of British grievances, backed up by the force of the Carysfort’s guns. Compounding matters, a French ship had recently entered Honolulu harbor, leading to talk that the islands would soon be claimed by a foreign power—­perhaps by Catholic France, at that.

Rumors began swirling that the British frigate moored in Honolulu harbor would bombard the town, sending the townsfolk into a panic. Facing this threat, the king decided to yield to the British demands “under protest,” knowing that his emissaries, at that very moment, were in Europe and, when they heard the news, would be able to personally press his case. Instead of turning for aid to either France or the United States, he “decided to throw himself into the arms of England, trusting in the just of his cause, and hoping still for independence.” After all, many islanders already considered themselves under Britain’s protection, often referring to themselves as kanaka no Beritane, or “men of Britain.”

Nonetheless, the scene the children from the Chiefs’ Children’s School witnessed a few days later, on February 25, 1843, was a mournful one. Standing in the fort near the harbor, addressing a group of both Hawaiians and white foreigners in English, King Kamehameha III said, “Hear ye! I make known to you that I am in perplexity by reason of difficulties into which I have been brought without cause; therefore, I have given away the life of our land, hear ye! But my rule over you, my people, and your privileges, will continue, for I have hope that the life of the land will be restored when my conduct is justified.”

The Hawaiian flag was lowered and the Union Jack hoisted in its place. Introduced by Kamehameha I in the opening years of the century, the island nation’s flag reflected the swirl of national influences: the top-left quarter contained a Union Jack, while the rest of the flag consisted of eight horizontal stripes, repeating in a pattern of white, red, and blue, one for each of the major islands. The design and color scheme called to mind not only the British flag but those of France and the United States, too, whose flag displayed twenty-six stars at the time.

As the Union Jack took its place, troops from the fort and the Carysfort fired twenty-one-gun salutes. It was a moment that reflected a painful truth for the island kingdom: it was merely an afterthought in the grand plans of that century’s superpowers, as easily snatched up without much thought as put back down again and permitted—for the moment at least—its independence.

The ali‘i children watched sorrowfully as the Hawaiian flag was lowered and the last notes of the ship’s band died away. It was a brutal, public humbling of their once all-powerful king. As Amos Cooke wrote in a letter a few days afterward, “Our children feel very bad & many of the foreigners have expressed much sympathy for them. They feel as if their glory had departed. On Sabbath morning they all [the boys] took their gold bands off from their caps saying they were no longer Chiefs.”

One of Lili‘u’s fellow students wrote later that the children held many “indignation meetings” at the school, “laying plans for revenge on Great Britain.” Lili‘u and the other children from the Chiefs’ Children’s School glared at the occupying soldiers “with scorn whenever we met [them] on the street.” They also took delight in calling the red-­uniformed British officers “lobster backs.”

While the event must have shocked and saddened the schoolchildren, some Hawaiians had already foreseen the demise of their tiny kingdom at the hands of a great Western power. Writing in 1837, more than two decades before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the native historian David Malo had warned of “the small” being gobbled up by “the large” and made a prediction:

The ships of the whitemen have come, and smart people have arrived from the Great Countries which you have never seen before, they know our people are few in number and living in a small country; they will eat us up, such has always been the case with large countries, the small ones have been gobbled up.

Just as the scheming Englishmen Paulet and Simpson rushed to send their version of events to London on the first boat they could commandeer, so did the king’s advisers prepare their own plea for justice.

To prevent the British from discovering their plan, the dispatches and documents were composed in top secrecy by Judd within the darkness of the royal tomb, using the coffin of the late widow of Kamehameha I as a writing desk. Kamehameha III, who had again retreated to Lahaina after the cession ceremony, was spirited back to Honolulu by “express” canoe at night so he could sign the protest documents without Paulet’s knowledge.

The intrigue didn’t stop with the secret signing ceremony. The ship that the British commandeered belonged to an American concern, Ladd & Company, which insisted that one of its own agents travel with the British. Nicknamed the “Pious Traders” because one of its founding partners was educated at Yale’s School of Divinity, Ladd & Co. supported the Hawaiian king. Its agent became his emissary, carrying the documents with him. The king hastily appointed Ladd & Co.’s agent as his “envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary”—a title as grand as the Hawaiian kingdom was small—and dispatched him to plead Hawai‘i’s case in London and Washington.

After months at sea, both sets of documents reached London, where the Hawaiian kingdom’s plea prevailed—coming as it did at a time when England was preoccupied with far more important matters, having just extended its empire beyond India to Hong Kong and South Africa as well. Lord Richard Thomas, admiral of Great Britain’s Pacific fleet, concluded that the coup was an embarrassing diplomatic blunder. So he left Valparaiso, where he was stationed, and sailed to Honolulu. With the simple stroke of a pen, he then restored power to the Hawaiian monarchy.

The last day of July in 1843 dawned clear and cloudless. The children from the Chiefs’ Children’s School, along with most of Honolulu’s resi­dents, made their way to a plain east of town. At ten that morning the children witnessed the formidable sight of several hundred English marines marching toward the plain carrying flags and banners, while Admiral Thomas and the Hawaiian king rode together in a royal carriage.

The dignitaries arrived at the site of the ceremony and standard-­bearers unfurled over the king’s head a broad Hawaiian banner decorated with a crown and an olive branch. The royal children and the large crowd of onlookers cheered as soldiers hoisted the Hawaiian flag.

A thanksgiving service followed in Kawaiaha‘o and the king spoke the words that were later to become the motto of Hawai‘i: Ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono, “the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.” He then proclaimed a ten-day Restoration Day cele­bration. Tables laid for a celebratory feast were decorated with miniature flags of Hawai‘i, along with the flags of its trading partners America, France, and England. Overall, the British had ruled Hawai‘i for just five months.

With the end of the short-lived takeover of the islands, the small kingdom seemed secure. But ships from the larger nations prowled its seas. While economists and philosophers in Europe would soon debate Darwinism, with its suggestion—at least to some—that only the fittest would survive, the vulnerable Kingdom of Hawai‘i was facing an economic Darwinism that would prove swift and brutal.