Far away from the fast-changing sugar fields, Lili‘u matured into a cultured and conscientious young woman. She was a regular churchgoer who took to heart lessons on humility and obedience from her missionary teachers. She joined the king, queen, and other members of the royal court in knocking door to door in Honolulu to raise funds for Queen’s Hospital, the first public hospital to serve Hawaiians. Unlike other young royal women, one of whom caused a scandal by her increasingly open love affair with a married white man, Lili‘u’s public behavior was irreproachable. She occupied the highest rank of any unmarried woman in the land.
In court, Lili‘u became an attendant to the young Queen Emma, and she was present at Emma’s bedside in May of 1858 when she bore a son. The birth was cause for an outpouring of joy in the kingdom, since a succession of stillborn children and infant fatalities had meant that no legitimate heir had survived into adulthood since the reign of Kamehameha I. Feeling strong loyalty to Britain, the royal couple wrote to Queen Victoria, asking her to be their son’s godmother. The monarch agreed, sending an Anglican bishop to the islands to baptize the child, who was named Albert after Queen Victoria’s consort, and establish an official presence of the Anglican Church in Hawai‘i.
The gently civilized nature of Hawaiian court life during the 1860s surprised some foreign visitors, who had half expected Hawaiians to be dark-skinned savages. Instead, they found a society than included ladies’ fancy fairs, moonlight rides on horseback, sea bathing at Waikīkī, balls and parties, an amateur musical society, and two sewing groups, which served as benevolent societies.
“This is no longer a nation of barbarians, any more than of cannibals; though you can hardly be any more prepared that we were to find them as advanced as they really are,” wrote Sophia Cracroft, an unmarried woman from Lincolnshire who accompanied Lady Franklin, widow of a famous British explorer, to the islands for two months in 1861. Her writings reflect the belief in racial superiority on the part of whites that was prevalent at the time. In a series of condescending letters, Cracroft describes her meetings with Queen Emma and King Kamehameha IV, cautioning her readers to “drop all idea of savage life,” for the “King and many of his people are highly educated and accomplished men . . . English in their habits and tastes.”
Relating her first meeting with the king, she wrote that he “came in alone, looking the perfect gentleman, his manner very cordial and unaffected.” He spoke with a British accent and “complete command of the language—and surrounded as he is by Americans, educated also as he has been by them it is truly marvelous that he should have totally avoided their odious intonation.” Miss Cracroft reported in her letters home that the king regularly received a fine assortment of British publications, including the Times, the Edinburgh Review, and Punch; he also wished for his son to be educated at Eton and was an avid cricket fan.
Before he became Kamehameha IV, when he was sixteen years old, Alexander Liholiho had visited London, which was then the capital of the world’s most powerful colonial empire, presided over by Queen Victoria. There he had met Lord Palmerston, the longtime foreign secretary, inspected the royal stables at Windsor Castle, and attended services at Westminster Abbey, forging a lifelong bond to the Anglican Church. The English treated the Hawaiian prince with respect, a welcome contrast to his treatment in the United States.
One of the most striking figures Miss Cracroft encountered in the royal court was Lili‘u’s brother, David Kalākaua, who had been a member of the House of Nobles since 1859. Then serving as the king’s aide-de-camp, Kalākaua was reputed to be the best dancer in the kingdom and “lucky with the ladies.” As Cracroft described him:
He was a pure Hawaiian, excessively stout, but of most gentlemanlike manners and appearance, dressed exactly after the morning fashion of Englishmen in light grey . . . He is very dark brown (not black) with an aquiline nose and thick lips—whiskers and moustache and hair much more woolly in its crisp curliness than is usually seen among this people. Queen Victoria’s Aide-de-Camp could not have acquitted himself better.
She went on to note his excellent English, “with the accent and intonation of a perfect gentleman.”
The dashing David Kalākaua served as Miss Cracroft’s guide on a trek to the Kīlauea volcano, organizing litters, saddle horses, and bulls for the luggage. Joining them was Lady Franklin, who brought an iron bedstead that was set up for her wherever the party settled for the night. Late in the trip, a timing mishap caused them to miss the boat back to Honolulu, and for several days they stayed in grass houses near the shore waiting for canoes—an arrangement that required the ladies to spend time with Kalākaua in close quarters.
Wearing a scarlet woolen shirt over his usual white one, black trousers, and a large, black waterproof hat festooned with a wreath of crimson and yellow Hawaiian flowers, the darkly handsome ali‘i was almost theatrically masculine in his riding attire, with his white buckskin gauntlet gloves and Mexican spurs. His masterful skills as an equestrian, perhaps evocative of matters best left to the bedchamber, seem to have thrilled the maiden traveler.
For a brief period, Lili‘u was engaged to William Lunalilo, a Hawaiian prince. But because of Lunalilo’s increasing intemperance, it was an alliance of which Charles Bishop and his wife, Pauahi, Lili‘u’s hānai sister, almost surely disapproved. Instead, the Bishops favored a match between Lili‘u and her childhood acquaintance John Dominis, since there were strong ties between the Bishop and Dominis families. Charles Bishop’s banking partner was married to John Dominis’s cousin, and the Bishops and many members of the royal circle had come to respect the forceful Mrs. Dominis, who ruled over Washington Place.
Lili‘u’s letters to John during their courtship reveal a young woman pressing to spend time with her new suitor. She beseeched him to join her in Waikīkī (as the Bishops would be away and “I shall feel so lonesome”) signing the letter, “Yours Affectionately, Lydia.” During a trip to Lahaina, she admitted feeling uncertain about her grammar and spelling in English. On more than one occasion, she apologized for her errors: “Now don’t laugh at the mistakes that I make, but correct them, and I expect when I get back to Honolulu you will show them to me.”
Whether the strength of her feelings was reciprocated is unclear, since few of John’s letters survive. But Lili‘u seemed eager to please those around her and in 1860 agreed to marry him. From existing photographs, Dominis seemed to have been a peculiarly unattractive man. But it may be that Lili‘u, with her growing sensitivity to rank, found the prospect of marrying into a prominent family with one of the biggest houses on the islands along with the lack of any other suitors within her circle reasons enough to agree to a match that the Bishops favored.
Lili‘u and John’s engagement lasted a full two years. Even then, a tragedy delayed their wedding. The couple initially chose September 2, 1862, as the date of their wedding ceremony, since it would be Lili‘u’s twenty-fourth birthday. The groom was thirty. But they were forced to push it back because of a death in the royal family: the four-year-old Prince Albert, the only child of King Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma, had died of “brain fever,” now known as meningitis.
Weeks of public mourning ensued. As Lili‘u later recalled in her memoir, the king “completely lost his interest in public life, living in the utmost possible retirement.” In the months following the young prince’s death, his father attempted to console himself by concentrating his efforts, begun before his child’s fatal illness, on translating the Anglican Book of Common Prayer into Hawaiian.
When Lili‘u and John finally did marry—a fortnight later, on September 16, 1862—they exchanged vows at a quiet ceremony in Charles and Pauahi Bishops’ home. A Congregational minister officiated, as the grieving king and queen looked on. The Bishops hosted the couple’s wedding reception, including a center table piled high with “a variety of elegant and costly bridal gifts.”
After the wedding party at the Bishops, Lili‘u and her groom made their way back to Washington Place, the residence that they would share with John’s mother. Her new home was one of the most palatial in Honolulu, a large white mansion with pillars and porticos on all sides, set back far enough from the street to avoid dust and noise and shaded from the noonday heat by monkeypod and mango trees. For Lili‘u, who took special pleasure in arranging fragrant ‘awapuhi or ginger blossoms cut from its gardens, Washington Place seemed like “a choice tropical retreat in the midst of the chief city of the Hawaiian Islands.”
As a bride about to embark on her wedding night, Lili‘u entered what would be her new home filled with aloha, the Hawaiian word for love, affection, and greeting. Little did she imagine how oppressive Washington Place would become.
Lili‘u and John’s wedding trip took them to Hawai‘i Island, where, as part of a royal entourage, the local chiefs welcomed them to their houses and lands with outpourings of hospitality. The mahele, enacted in 1848, had begun sweeping away the system in which the ali‘i provided for the common people and the royal lands were worked collectively. But the customs surrounding the old form of land ownership were still in place as the honeymooners enjoyed weeks of feasting and celebrations.
Had the newlyweds instead traveled to the smaller island of Kaua‘i, they would have seen a whir of activity taking place at Līhu‘e plantation, on the southeastern side of that island. Here had sprung up a sugar industry being replicated across the islands. Passing through a grove of kukui trees, with their silver-gray leaves, and then through a valley, they would have reached sugarcane fields, their stalks as tall as a man and densely clumped together. Fields with enough water would become a leafy, impenetrable jungle of jointed stalks, so dense that a man on horseback couldn’t ride through them.
Eventually, they would come to a clutch of bamboo huts with sugarcane thatching, where the plantation workers slept in wooden bunks. At the edge of the valley stood a mill with a redbrick chimney, which was situated on a small pond. The air carried a faint sweet-and-sour odor of fermentation—the smell of molasses.
After fresh cane had been cut in the fields, workers would pile the stalks high onto carts pulled by oxen. Once the carts reached the mill, the workers would unload the stalks and feed them by hand, a few at a time, into enormous granite rollers—weighing three tons each—powered by pond water. The juice from the crushed cane stalks trickled out into a catch basin to be boiled off in a large vat along with powdered lime and water.
Then came the most delicate part of the process: sugar boiling at the nearby Līhu‘e mill. The work took place in a big, barnlike room where five shallow pots, about six feet in diameter, were bolted together in a long row. A history of the plantation described it as a scene that a Dutch master might have painted.
The pots, diminishing in size, were set in a brick oven. An enormous Hawaiian, naked except for a loincloth, his skin glistening with sweat, threw chunks of wood and cane trash into the fire to keep it going.
The scene was like a painting by Rembrandt. In the late afternoon dusk, the flames threw weird, flickering shadows against the factory walls. The syrupy liquid in the pots bubbled and gurgled in violent agitation throwing up clouds of steam. Muscular Chinese workmen, as naked as the Hawaiian, handled long, oar-like sweeps with which they skimmed off the frothy scum that kept coming to the surface of the boiling juice.
The technology of sugar production was advancing, though. By the 1860s the mill manager at Līhu‘e was using a centrifugal machine, a tub with a round, brass wire cage in the middle that separated the molasses from the sugar grains. It represented an improvement over the slower earlier process of simply letting the molasses run off. As the cage inside the tub began to revolve, powered by steam, the black molasses would stick to the walls of the tub, while the sugar crystals remained inside the wire mesh.
The last step in the process was to pack the granulated sugar for shipping. Workers loaded the wooden kegs onto steamers bound for Honolulu. From there, they’d be handled by sugar factors such as Ladd & Company and later Castle & Cooke, which would act as middlemen for the planters, finding customers in the United States and elsewhere, arranging transportation, and collecting payments.
But the sugar business was fraught with risks. Crops were vulnerable to storms, droughts, trade disputes, and competition from China, the Philippines, and the East Indies. And while the privileged world of the ali‘i that Lili‘u and John knew still existed, the island nation’s economy was becoming increasingly tied to the fortunes of the sugar planters. Indeed, when Lili‘u and John returned from their honeymoon, Honolulu’s newspapers were filled with talk of the benefits of a reciprocity treaty between Hawai‘i and the United States, its biggest market. Under such a treaty, Hawaiian goods would be admitted into California and elsewhere at the same duty rates as California goods were admitted into the islands. Efforts to ratify a treaty between the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and the United States sputtered on for years, as Congress focused on more pressing matters, such as bringing an end to the bloody War Between the States.
Lili‘u’s honeymoon was brief. The newlyweds were relegated to a first-floor bedroom next to that of Mrs. Dominis, who continued to occupy the larger master suite. Mary Dominis had furnished Washington Place as an outpost of America in the tropics, filling the front parlor with dark, ornately carved wooden furniture, with nothing to suggest that this was the new home of a revered island chiefess. In the back parlor was a dark wood settee, imported by Captain Dominis from China. Its arms were carved in the shape of dragons, as if to dare someone to sit down on it comfortably. Every night, Mary made sure to keep a light in the window, in case her missing husband returned home.
Although Lili‘u was living in one of the largest private homes in the kingdom, with a lush garden that flourished under her mother-in-law’s care, it was an unhappy domestic arrangement. Explaining the awkward situation in her memoir, Lili‘u wrote “No man could be more devoted than was General Dominis to his mother. He was really an only child.” And as her mother-in-law “felt that no one should step between her and her child, naturally I, as her son’s wife, was considered an intruder; and I was forced to realize this from the beginning. My husband was extremely kind and considerate to me, yet he would not swerve to one side or to the other in any matter where there was danger of hurting his mother’s feelings.”
After the first year of their marriage, a musical evening was planned at the palace to mark the twentieth anniversary of the recognition by England and France of Hawai‘i’s independence. But the king never arrived, perhaps due to an asthma attack. His absence puzzled his guests, but unbeknownst to them Kamehameha IV lay on his deathbed. He died two days later, on November 30, 1863, at the age of twenty-nine, of poor health and chronic asthma. An old friend of the king wrote afterward, “It cannot be wrong to say that the death of the son hastened the death of the father. God grant that we may never again see so heartbroken a man.”
Since the king left no heir, his brother Lot ascended to the throne as Kamehameha V. The new king was far different from the more polished Anglophile Liholiho, his predecessor. Darker in complexion, large and heavy compared to the late king’s lithe boxer’s physique, Lot also embraced the old Hawaiian ways, including the kāhuna, or priests, and the hula, a native dance tradition that the missionaries had prohibited because they thought it was obscene. Resembling his grandfather Kamehameha I more than any other successor to the Hawaiian throne, Kamehameha V was considered more intelligent than his predecessor and “the last great chief of the olden type.”
Ruling at a time when the kingdom’s economic power was shifting toward sugar planters and the kingdom’s mostly white merchant class, Kamehameha V sought ways to regain more political power for himself, as monarch, and for his Hawaiian subjects. Although he convened a constitutional convention of sixteen nobles, twenty-seven representatives, and himself in 1864, it failed to reach agreement. So Kamehameha V declared a new constitution “on his own authority.” The king believed “‘the influence of the Crown ought to be seen pervading every function of the government,’” and accordingly his constitution greatly expanded executive power while combining the upper and lower chambers of the legislature into a single assembly.
Not surprisingly, expansion of royal prerogative and the curbing of power of Westerners drew strong criticism from the English-language press. But Lili‘u, for one, celebrated it by composing a simple song for Hawaiian schoolchildren. Titled “‘Onipa‘a,” or “Stand Firm,” she wrote it in 1864, shortly after the king proclaimed the new constitution. The anthem fervently urged the students:
Do not abandon Mai noho a ha‘alele
This good work. I kēia hana maika‘i.
Steadfast, stand firm, ‘Onipa‘a, ‘onipa‘a,
For our constitution. Ko kākou kumukānāwai.
Lili‘u took ‘Onipa‘a as her motto. But her attempt, decades later, to return to Kamehameha V’s constitution would invite powerful resistance.
The feeble state of Hawai‘i’s military forces was on the minds of some of the king’s advisers, particularly Lili‘u’s brother Kalākaua, who served on Kamehameha V’s privy council. Writing to the kingdom’s foreign minister during the U.S. Civil War, Kalākaua saw the threat to the monarchy posed by Americans and reflected, presciently, “If in case we are called upon today or say tomorrow to put down and quell an excited and riotous mob, lead on by religious fanatics and the cry for a popular government (as many a secret heart is now most anxious to see this nation in) where? and who are the men to be called upon, to confide the vital trust? I see but a few. ”
The foreign-born minister dismissed Kalākaua’s request for a stronger military on the grounds of tight funds, explaining that “as the next Legislature has to provide for so many extraordinary expenses of the Royal Family debts of the Crown etc. it is indispensable to keep the appropriations for the military as low as possible.” He suggested instead raising a volunteer militia for the next two years. That was one of the first, but not the last, instances of Kalākaua bumping up against financial constraints imposed by haole advisers.
Kalākaua may have been frustrated in his efforts to build a paid military force for the kingdom, but he refused to be thwarted in matters of the heart. He fell in love with the widowed Julia Kapi‘olani, an ali‘i who spoke only Hawaiian all her life. He was determined to marry her and defied custom by doing so before the official mourning period for Kamehameha IV had passed, keeping the secret even from his parents and sisters.
Although Kalākaua faced some criticism for the timing of his secret nuptials, the king himself didn’t seem to mind. But Lili‘u was offended by having been excluded from her brother and new sister-in-law’s secret. She said as much in a letter to her younger sister Likelike, which suggested an early schism between the siblings that would only grow wider through the years, writing, “To say the truth between ourselves, I don’t think he ever cared as much for his own family as does for those who are no connections of his whatever.”
Nonetheless, Lili‘u and her brother remained part of the court’s inner circle, as Kamehameha V chose John Dominis as one of his closest advisers and appointed him governor of O‘ahu. Dominis would rely on the ali‘i he’d first met at the Royal School for government positions throughout his working life. With this job, he could pursue his passion for guns, boats, and horses, earning his reputation as an avid sportsman.
Part of his duties as governor were to make an annual tour of the island, and Lili‘u joined her husband on this trip. But she increasingly found reasons to spend time away from him, as well as from Mrs. Dominis. One day in 1865, Lili‘u made her way to O‘ahu College at the edge of the lush rain forests of the Mānoa Valley, which is today the elite Punahou school that Barack Obama attended. She met with a teacher there named Susan Mills and asked to become a student. Already far better educated than most Hawaiians and many of the missionaries’ children, she soon began studying Greek, Latin, and French.
By the 1860s Lili‘u had become a striking young woman, with a graceful way of moving and an inner light that drew men to her. Lili‘u was as lovely to Westerners as she was to Hawaiians, moving fluidly between both cultures, perhaps with the exception of navigating her own difficult marriage. A young American from Boston, the journalist Julius A. Palmer, observed her in 1867 as a young married woman attending a ball on a French warship moored in Honolulu. Through the racially tinged lens of the time, he wrote:
Of all the fair women who then moved through the dance on the great maindeck of the frigate, she is the one that, from that moment to the present, retains the strongest hold on my memory. Why?
This element is not beauty, but it is grace. As Mrs. Dominis moved through the misty mazes of the waltz there was nothing but grace in every movement, nought but the most bewitching attraction in every smile. She did not dance as the stately court lady: she threw her whole heart into the poetry of her motions; and, whosoever the partner opposite to her, you saw that she was in love with him—yes, at every glance of her flashing black eyes.
Lili‘u may have been lavishing attention on her dance partners in a way that was unusual to an observer used to the more staid manners of Boston society. Or she may have been longing for an approving male gaze, since it does not appear from her letters of the time that she was receiving much of her husband’s attention. Perhaps she had simply harnessed the sensuality that hula dancers knew.
There is no indication Lili‘u was unfaithful to her husband. Indeed, her letters from this period reflect her missionary upbringing, which taught her to be subservient. In one, she advised her sister Likelike, who was then in school, to “Practice humility . . . “Remember then duty before pleasure.” In another letter to her younger sister, who already was starting to show a tendency toward flirtatiousness, Lili‘u urged her to “strive to control your feeling . . . if any harsh word begins to rise you your lips suppress it—do not let it escape and then when you succeed in doing so you will afterwards be happy to think you controled yourself.” Whereas just a generation ago the ali‘i unapologetically celebrated the war exploits and fierceness of their ancestors, the values of humility, meekness, and obedience that Lili‘u absorbed from her missionary teachers undercut the traditional power of the ali‘i.
Meanwhile, her friendship with the king also gave her the perfect excuse to escape from her airless domestic arrangement. Intent on preserving Hawaiian culture, Kamehameha V had asked Abraham Fornander, a Swede who’d arrived in the islands on a whaling ship several decades earlier and had married a Hawaiian chiefess, to undertake an extensive study of Hawaiian history based on gleanings from the oral tradition. Lili‘u set to work assisting Fornander by translating mele and legends for him.
Besides strengthening her awareness of her people’s history, the task deepened Lili‘u’s understanding of Hawaiian poetic expression, with its rich metaphors and secret meanings. It may also have bolstered her confidence as a composer; because she could understand both Hawaiian and Western music, she was able to blend the two in what was then an unusual style that came to be known as hula ku‘i music. In her education and her marriage, Lili‘u was herself a blend of the West and Polynesia and the music she would later become famous for delicately folded in musical elements from both cultures.
On one rainy day when Lili‘u was feeling dejected, the king came to visit her at Washington Place and remarked that he was displeased that Hawai‘i did not have its own national anthem. For state occasions, Hawai‘i used Britain’s “God Save the Queen.” “Each nation,” he told her, “but ours had its expression of patriotism and love of country in its music.” To address this shortfall Kamehameha V asked Lili‘u to compose a Hawaiian national anthem. In a week Lili‘u had written the music and lyrics, in both Hawaiian and English, for a deeply Christian anthem, “He Mele Lahui Hawaii.” As the new leader of the Kawaiaha‘o choir, Lili‘u led the performance of her anthem for the first time in the great stone church.
Beneath the broad balconies and before pews seating hundreds, Lili‘u directed the members of the choir to sing the new national anthem she had composed with a simple but profound prayer embedded in its chorus.
Grant thy Peace thro’out the land Ma kou pono mau
O’er these sunny, sea-girt Isles A ma kou mana nui
Keep the nation’s life, O Lord, E ola, e ola ka mō‘ī
And upon our sovereign smile. E mau ke ea o ka ‘āina
The storm clouds arrived sooner than expected. In December 1872, Kamehameha V lay in his bed. Struggling for many years with obesity and poor health, his doctors told him he was dying. The shock of learning that his condition was fatal wasn’t all the king was struggling with: unmarried and childless, he had yet to name a successor or write a will.
He called John Dominis to his side to put his last wishes into writing. When Dominis urged him to name a successor, the king replied sharply that he needed time to consider such an important matter. He sent Dominis out to get his breakfast, telling him that when he returned they’d “sit down quietly by ourselves and arrange all these matters.”
By the time Dominis returned the king’s bedchamber was full of well-wishers and potential candidates for the throne. Lili‘u and Pauahi stood at the head of the bed, while Kalākaua and others clustered at the foot of the bed and in the doorway. The king turned to a long-serving Hawaiian adviser and asked him to name the new mō‘ī, but he declined, saying they were all his ali‘i. The king then asked Pauahi to be his successor. She said, “No, no, not me; don’t think of me, I do not need it.”
It is unclear why Pauahi, who by then was a leader of Honolulu society, turned down the throne. Perhaps she felt that taking on such a role would strain her marriage, since the needs of the Hawaiian people were increasingly coming into conflict with those of the ascendant business class her husband, the banker Charles Bishop, led. Perhaps she truly believed she could better serve Hawai‘i as a society matron wielding the Victorian values of charity and selflessness rather than political power.
Whatever the reason, the king died moments later without naming a successor. After a tumultuous few weeks, William Lunalilo, the closest relation of the Kamehameha dynasty to the late sovereign and the prince known as “Whiskey Bill,” was overwhelmingly elected as the next king. Yet the Hawaiian royal family was soon struck again by misfortune.
Earning his nickname for his prodigious drinking, Lunalilo’s health began to fail almost as soon as he took the throne. As the rainy season descended, the king took to his bed. Lili‘u was one of the ali‘i who kept a twenty-four-hour vigil over him. Despite Lunalilo’s popularity and his commitment to democratic ideals, the ailing king’s attachment to the bottle made him ineffectual and created a power vacuum in the kingdom. So lingering was the king’s death that the marshals festooned the outer walls of the royal residence with black funeral crepe two days before the passing, mistakenly thinking he had already died.
On February 3, 1874, barely a year after beginning his reign and just after his thirty-ninth birthday, Lunalilo succumbed to tuberculosis and alcoholism. Grief-stricken Hawaiians mourned for weeks following his death. The sound of their wailing raised the hair on the backs of the necks of the white settlers who heard it. With the Kamehamehas dying out and no heir named to the throne, the menace of foreign intervention loomed large.