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Sandalwood Mountains

DIAMOND HEAD, 1870S (Courtesy of Hawaii State Archives)

The loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean.

—Mark Twain

A BOY NAMED Ah Pung was born sometime around 1871 in a thatched hut by a muddy creek in Waipio, a tiny village tucked away in the rolling sugarcane fields to the east of Honolulu. His father, Chang Jong Tong, was a Chinese coolie laborer from southern China, and his mother, Chun Shee, had been born in Hawaii of Chinese parents.¹ Ah Pung was their second son. The proud father took the day off from fieldwork and started dyeing eggs, according to Chinese custom. Later he would go around the small, tight-knit plantation community carrying not only a basket of boiled red eggs but also the good tidings of his newborn. An illiterate man from a humble peasant family, Chang had no idea that the baby snuggling comfortably next to his mother inside their shabby hut would one day turn out to be a legend.

As with other Hawaiian coolie families of the nineteenth century, crucial records of Ah Pung’s birth are murky and unreliable. The Delayed Birth Records issued in 1909 by the Department of Health lists December 26, 1871, as his birth date, as does his official employment record at the Honolulu Police Department. But the 1930 census lists his age as sixty-one, which means he must have been born around 1869, a date confirmed by the obituaries published upon his death in 1933, as well as by his death certificate. Gilbert Martines, who did pioneering research on Apana for his thesis at the University of Hawaii in the late 1980s, believes that Apana was in fact born December 26, 1864.² But Apana’s gravestone, which still stands in the verdant Upper Manoa Valley, states “1870,” in Chinese characters, as his year of birth.

“Tombstones,” says Charlie Chan, “often engraved with words of wisdom.” But in this case, words at Apana’s resting place are not at all reliable, as his tombstone also records 1934 as the year of his death—in this case, a factual error.

At the time of Ah Pung’s birth, Honolulu was a bustling seaport town of about 15,000 souls. Isabella Lucy Bird, a British traveler who spent six months in the islands in 1873, described Honolulu as a place that “looks like a large village, or rather like an aggregate of villages.”³ With shadowy huts and houses made of straw, wood, adobe, or coral that perched on streets as straight as a line or as crooked as a corkscrew, the town was a distant cry from what it is today.⁴ Waikiki, nowadays a jungle of high-rises inundated with two million tourists each year, was then only a stretch of white sand running from Diamond Head to the harbor. Here and there, a few grass shacks straggled along swamps and ponds. A stream ran from Manoa Valley down to the sea.⁵ Under the ten-year reign (1863–72) of King Kamehameha V—a benevolent monarch who dressed plainly and enjoyed poking around town on his old horse—tourism as an industry had just begun to grow. The first hotel in town, reincarnated in 1927 as the palatial pink Royal Hawaiian, did not even have its cornerstone laid until 1871, just around the time of Ah Pung’s birth.

To better know this man’s true story, we need to take a detour and look at some snapshots of early Hawaiian history, at the events that would impact directly—or at times more obliquely—the life of our future Charlie Chan. As the honorable detective says, compared to the grandeur of history a man is merely “one minute grain of sand on seashore of eternity.”

The Hawaiian Islands, also known as the Sandwich Islands, only emerged as an economic center a hundred years after Captain James Cook’s arrival in 1778. After Cook’s death at Kealakekua Bay, where his body was butchered and devoured by the natives on the beach, the missionaries soon came in waves—British, American, French—bringing the Word of God and trying to convert the “cannibals” who had barely finished digesting the roasted flesh of the man once regarded as their god Lono. And after the missionaries inevitably came the businessmen, fortune-seekers, and scavengers of the Pacific, bringing, in the parlance of the Kanakas (natives), the word of Rum.

Koolau the Leper, a colorful character in one of Jack London’s infamous leprosy stories, summarizes the early colonial history of Hawaii in a few poetic sentences full of pain and resentment:

They came like lambs, speaking softly. Well might they speak softly, for we were many and strong, and all the islands were ours. As I say, they spoke softly. They were of two kinds. The one kind asked our permission, our gracious permission, to preach to us the word of God. The other kind asked our permission, our gracious permission, to trade with us. That was the beginning. Today all the islands are theirs, all the land, all the cattle—everything is theirs.⁶

For the United States, the islands possessed a lure far beyond their natural beauty or their strategic location for maritime travel. In some ways, the islands, indeed the whole Pacific basin, perpetuated the notion of Manifest Destiny, holding the key to the future of the young republic as it grappled for international respect.

On February 22, 1784, shortly after the Revolutionary War, the merchant ship Empress of China, used as a privateer during the war and still fitted with guns, sailed from New York for China with a super-cargo of ginseng, furs, raw cotton, and lead. The transpacific trade was in large measure an attempt to rescue the battered economy of a nation suffocating under a war debt of more than $50 million. To make matters worse, markets accustomed to American raw products were now limited or closed. Refusing to open its home ports on an equal basis to American shipping, Great Britain also closed its West Indies colonies to Yankee suppliers. France also restricted American trade with its West Indies colonies, and Spain continued its exclusionary mercantilist policies toward the United States. As a result, Americans had to turn to the Pacific in order to overcome their nation’s economic setback, and in Hawaii they were in luck.

The Empress, the first American ship to dock at a Far East port, returned from Canton in 1785, making a 20 percent profit on invested capital. In the following years, China trade expanded rapidly. By 1800, the number of American ships that cleared Canton in one year had swelled to one hundred. In trade volume, America now ranked second only to Great Britain.

The boom in trading, however, was buttressed more by the natural products that merchants collected from the Pacific, especially in the Hawaiian isles, than by the native products of the American continent. Although the Empress voyage was a success, the Chinese soon discovered that the ginseng they bought from the Americans was not the same as the Korean herb that had been used for centuries in traditional Chinese medicine. Consequently, it became increasingly difficult for American traders to sell products brought from their native land. They had to look for alternatives, soon finding that the Pacific abounded with natural products that would cater to the demands of East Asian as well as American markets. Fortune-seekers moved into the Pacific to scavenge for furs, whales, bêche-de-mer (sea cucumbers), tortoiseshell, pearls, shark fins, birds’ nests, grain, fish, salt, coal, sandalwood, lumber, copra, cowhide, tallow, arrow-root, vanilla, spices, guano, human heads, and even human beings. These commodities gave currency to the nineteenth-century term curio, famously adopted by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick (1851): The New England innkeeper, Peter Coffin, told Ishmael that the Pacific savage Queequeg had “a lot of ’balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know).” The Oxford English Dictionary, in fact, cites Melville’s sentence as the earliest recorded use of the word.⁷

Among the Pacific curios, two were uniquely abundant in Hawaii: sandalwood and sugar. Called ’iliahi in Hawaiian, sandalwood is a parasite that attaches itself to the root of another tree. As it grows, it becomes a hard, fragrant wood. Hawaiians used sandalwood sticks to make bows for their traditional musical instrument, the ukeke. They also ground the wood into a powder and sprinkled it on kappa (bark cloth) garments as a perfume.⁸ For centuries, China, Japan, and other Asian countries had also been using sandalwood for “incense, fuel for funeral rites, temple carvings, handmade boxes, medicine, and as a basic ingredient in perfume.”⁹ Ornate cabinets and chests made of sandalwood were considered rarities, gracing houses much as antique vases and authentic artworks do today.

The beginning of the Hawaiian sandalwood trade, as historian Michael Dougherty tells us, can be traced to John Kendrick, the captain of the American clipper Lady Washington. Born about 1740 in Harwich, Massachusetts, Kendrick came from a long line of seamen. A true patriot, he participated in the Boston Tea Party and fought bravely in the Revolutionary War, where he was captured by the British navy and later released on a prisoner swap. After the war, he became commander of the first American ships of discovery, setting out to explore the Pacific Northwest.¹⁰

Sponsored by a Boston merchant, Kendrick’s expedition set sail on October 1, 1787. After clearing the Falkland Islands and Cape Horn, Kendrick sailed up the coast of Vancouver Island in June of 1788. He traded for furs with the Haida and other tribes and then sailed for Macao to unload the cargo. His ship stopped by the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands to restock food, water, and firewood. While stir-frying his popular chop suey for the Western sailors, the Chinese cook on board realized to his amazement that the logs and sticks burning under his sizzling wok gave out a distinctive fragrance.¹¹

Up to this point, China had been importing white sandalwood from India and the East Indies, but the supply had become insufficient to meet market demand. The cook’s discovery of red sandalwood, though of a quality inferior to the white species, made Kendrick recognize a potential new trade item for the Canton market. He immediately sent men ashore with instructions to collect the wood. Kendrick, however, did not live long enough to reap the full benefits of their fragrant discovery, for he was accidentally killed by a cannon shot from a British warship saluting his return to Honolulu Harbor in December 1794.¹² Still, the era of the sandalwood trade had begun. The islands emerged as a major source for the wood supply to China, and the archipelago soon became known in China as Tan Heung Shan, Sandalwood Mountains.

The transpacific trade had profound and tragic effects on the natural environment of the islands. Kamehameha I (also known as Kamehameha the Great), perhaps the most powerful monarch in the history of Hawaii, who by 1810 had unified all the main islands, maintained a monopoly over the export of sandalwood. In 1812, three shrewd Bostonians, Jonathan and Nathan Winship and William Davis, persuaded Kamehameha to sign a ten-year agreement for the sale of sandalwood. According to the agreement, the king would “have the sandalwood gathered and waiting” for the American merchants; the latter would “sail it to Chinese ports, sell it, and, upon return, give Kamehameha one quarter of the net profits.”¹³

Greed quickly took hold of the king and local chiefs, who would command thousands of commoners to trudge up the steep slopes of valleys to harvest and transport the prized logs. The work was dangerous and gruesome. Historians have given sobering accounts of the misery that the wood trade inflicted on the native people:

Slavery replaced freedom to the people. Natives were treated like cattle. Up and down the treacherous mountain trails they toiled, logs and sandalwood strapped to their sweating shoulders. Men and women actually became deformed due to the tremendous weight of the logs on their backs. The forced laborers in the sandalwood forests had no time to farm—food grew scarce and famine came.¹⁴

By 1819, intensive harvesting had stripped almost all of the Hawaiian sandalwood forests. It also caused market oversaturation and led to a precipitous price decline from the highest average of $13 per picul (133 1/3 pounds) to merely $1.50 per picul.¹⁵

Within just three decades, the dramatic rise and fall of the sandalwood trade left the Hawaiian economy in shambles. For years, the island kings and chiefs “had been buying all sorts of luxury goods and contracting to pay in sandalwood.” Now, the wood was disappearing but the debts remained. In 1826, when the first two American warships, USS Dolphin and USS Peacock, arrived in Honolulu, the king and the chiefs were forced to acknowledge debts to American traders in an amount close to $160,000.¹⁶

But fortune smiled on the islands once again. Following the demise of the sandalwood trade, sugar miraculously emerged as the one product that would restore the economy. From the Hawaiian perspective, however, new contacts with the outside world brought new hazards, be they germs, viruses, or vices—the so-called gifts of civilization.

A type of giant perennial grass, sugarcane had originated in India but was brought to Hawaii by the Polynesians as they migrated outward from the South Pacific sometime during the first millennium. The plant was growing plentifully in the islands at the time of European discovery. In his travelogue, Captain Cook noted the abundance of sugarcane in the islands. On his third and last voyage, Cook wrote, “Having procured a quantity of sugarcane and finding a strong decoction of it produced a very palatable beer, I ordered some more to be brewed for our general use.”¹⁷ The natives, however, had made no use of it beyond that of food until its commercial value was recognized in the nineteenth century. It was again a Chinese who was credited with the first attempt to manufacture sugar from the native Hawaiian canes in 1802.

Chinese had begun to settle in Hawaii soon after Cook arrived. Most of them were skilled workers hired as carpenters and cooks on European and American vessels. In 1788, some forty-five Chinese carpenters, under the direction of Captain John Meares of the Felice, were taken to Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island to build a forty-ton schooner, the North West America. Upon the completion of the project, and on the Chinese team’s homebound journey via Hawaii the next year, Kamehameha I asked for some of the workmen to stay and build him a ship just like North West America. But the request was denied by Captain Meares, though one Chinese carpenter did build “a small platform for a swivel gun on one of Kamehameha’s canoes.” There has been speculation that some of these Chinese might have “jumped ship and remained in Hawaii.”¹⁸ But the more probable first Chinese settlement was in 1789, when an American trader, Captain Simon Metcalf, sailed from Macao for the northwestern United States on the Eleanora and made a stop in Hawaii—the first of the American vessels in the China trade to stop over in the islands—to give the crew of forty-five Chinese and ten Americans some rest. It is likely that one or more Chinese remained in the islands, as the Chinese community celebrated the 150th anniversary of the first Chinese arrival in Hawaii in 1939.

The first recorded sighting of a Chinese living in Hawaii was documented by Edward Bell, who in 1794 wrote that the foreigners seen standing with Kamehameha I at Kealakekua Bay when the ships arrived were “John Young, Isaac Davis, Mr. Boid, 1 Chinaman, and 7 other whites.”¹⁹ In the absence of reliable historical documents, it is impossible for us to ascertain who that “1 Chinaman” was, and what business he had standing there with the most powerful king in Hawaii’s history. It is said that Kamehameha relished, perhaps more than anything else, haggling with ships’ captains over supplies and cargoes. “Wherever he was,” writes historian Gavan Daws,

Kamehameha immersed himself in trading, and with great gusto. A visiting ship would anchor and wait for clearance from the king’s harbor masters. For merchant vessels and naval ships alike the royal guards fired their cannon in salute, and then Kamehameha came out on his platformed canoe, sometimes wearing only a loin cloth and alone except for an interpreter and a few attendants, sometimes dressed in European magnificence, seated on a gun chest with his hand on a silver sword, and surrounded by feather-cloaked chiefs and courtiers, but always with his tooth-edged calabash spittoon beside him.²⁰

In either setting, whether in a team of white compradors such as John Young and Isaac Davis or among the Hawaiian chiefs and courtiers, a long-queued Chinese would certainly stand out to an observant Western explorer. Most likely the Chinese seen by Bell was a merchant participating in the king’s haggling on the dock.

The man credited with the first attempt at making sugar out of Hawaiian canes was Wong Tze-chun. Not much is known about this Chinese man except that he arrived in Hawaii on a sandalwood trading ship in 1802. He was obviously a tong see (sugar master) in South China, where for centuries sugarcane had been cultivated and manufactured into sugar. In rural areas in southern China, as Bob Dye describes in his book Merchant Prince of the Sandalwood Mountains,

itinerant tong see went by boat to the creek villages with their pots, rollers, and drying mats. Villagers brought them freshly cut cane that they fed between two huge stones, kept in motion by men or beasts, which ground and crushed the cane to express the crude juice. This liquid was boiled in kettles and then boiled again while being furiously whisked. The hot syrup was then spread in thin layers on mats to cool. Later the brittle sheets were cut into small squares, which were stored in jars.²¹

We do not know if this was Master Wong’s first overseas adventure, but he had at least come into contact with other Chinese who had visited Hawaii and recognized the sugar plant. Like thousands of Chinese who jumped aboard the minute they heard about gold in America, Master Wong must have had a “sweet” dream when he heard of the abundance of cane lying wasted in the Sandalwood Mountains. On this trip, Wong carried with him a vertical stone mill, boilers, and other tools of his trade. Upon arrival, he set up his apparatus on the small island of Lanai, ground off a small crop, and started making sugar. But Lanai was the least hospitable island for growing sugarcane, and Master Wong, true to the spirit of itinerancy, folded his mat and returned to China the next year.²²

In 1811, other Chinese began making small quantities of sugar and molasses at a mill owned by the king. Next came John Wilkinson, an Englishman who, having had experience with sugarcane in the West Indies, established a plantation in Manoa Valley. But Wilkinson’s establishment was abandoned after his death in 1827, and the South China sugar manufacturers soon filled the gap with the founding of the Hungtai Sugar Works at Wailuku, Maui, in 1828. Induced by the decline of the sandalwood trade, William French, an American China trader, undertook sugar cultivation and production in Waimea, Kauai, in 1835. French hired Chinese workmen and recruited four tong see from China. The latter brought with them “a mill, a simple apparatus—granite cylinders turned by wooden cogs and operated by human muscle power.” Later that year, French advertised that he had ten tons of sugar and a thousand gallons of “Sandwich Island Molasses” for sale.²³ Clearly, the great era of the Hawaiian sugar industry was underway. It was an industry that fundamentally changed the course of Hawaiian history and reshaped the destiny of millions in the Pacific Rim, including little Ah Pung, born in the cane fields of Waipio.

Though no record has been found to verify the date of arrival of Ah Pung’s father, Chang Jong Tong, we know that he was among the early waves of Chinese coolies brought to Hawaii to work in the sugarcane plantations, so we can speculate on the basis of the few facts we do have about him.

Unlike on the U.S. mainland, where the clamor of “The Chinese must go!” was a clarion call for almost all parties in the mid-nineteenth century (more on this point later), the general sentiment in Hawaii was “The Chinese must come!” Economy, as they say, is the king, and several economic factors joined forces to create increasing demands for labor in Hawaii; among them were whaling, the nascent sugar industry, and the ripple effects of the California gold rush.

Nearly three decades before the discovery of gold at John Sutter’s mill, whaling ships were docking at Hawaiian ports. More than a hundred whaling ships stopped at these ports in 1824, and more than 170 in 1829. During the next twenty years, Pacific whaling expanded rapidly, with the fleet doubling in size and then nearly doubling again. As the industry moved northward from the equatorial hunting grounds to the Sea of Japan—a geographical shift noted in Melville’s Moby-Dick—and finally to the Arctic, the Hawaiian Islands became a vital entrepôt of a booming trade. For eight years—before the 1859 discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania sounded the death knell for the whaling industry—the annual ship arrivals at Hawaiian ports totaled more than five hundred. In the record year of 1846, almost six hundred ships crowded the islands. These vessels spent much time in island waters and took on vast supplies of fresh provisions. As Daws puts it, sailors on shore leave meant business for everyone—not just for Hawaiian women.²⁴

The California gold rush, started in 1848, also created a new market for Hawaiian produce. The whaling season of 1847–48 was particularly dismal, and many stores on the islands were badly overstocked. But with gold fever hitting thousands of men, including hundreds of natives, the stores were soon “stripped of everything that might be useful in the goldfields, from pickaxes, shovels, and lamps to Bibles and playing cards.” In San Francisco, prices of food and durables skyrocketed: a 500 percent rise in the price of beef and a fourfold increase in the price of flour; a single droplet of laudanum (an opium tincture used as an analgesic) would go for as much as $40.²⁵ All this created an unparalleled opportunity for Hawaii, where potatoes, corn, wheat, coffee, squash, turnips, and other vegetables could grow plentifully because of the islands’ superior climate and fertile soil. Potato patches on Maui even acquired an epithet, “Nu Kaleponi” (New California), because potatoes, “snapped up by the shipload and sent to San Francisco,” were as good as the gold being dug out of the ground.²⁶ Once again, plantation owners were crying out for workers as the native population dwindled precipitously, as a result of either epidemics or emigration to California’s goldfields.²⁷

The gold rush and the subsequent trade opportunities for Hawaii did not, however, last long. By the end of 1851, as Daws tells us, “surface gold in California was mined out. The West Coast market collapsed…and Hawaii found itself in the midst of depression.”²⁸ The quick boom-and-bust of whaling and the gold rush taught local businessmen a lesson: they needed to rely on the soil and not the sea. Sugar emerged as the obvious choice to be the staple of the islands’ economy. With the subsequent rising export of sugar and molasses, the white plantation owners yearned for cheap and reliable labor. They looked and found the Chinese.

On January 3, 1852, 175 Chinese field laborers and twenty-three houseboys arrived in Honolulu Harbor after a rough fifty-five-day voyage, with a loss of five men, on Captain John Cass’s Thetis. The laborers had agreed to work for five years, at $3 per month as field hands or $2 per month as houseboys, in addition to receiving passage money, clothing, room and board.²⁹ Thus began the Chinese contract-labor migration, the infamous “pig trade.” Visiting the islands in 1866, a fledgling American writer—who had adopted the pseudonym “Mark Twain” shortly before the trip—provided colorful descriptions of the labor-recruitment system, for which he would become an avid advocate:

The sugar product is rapidly augmenting every year, and day by day the Kanaka race is passing away. Cheap labor had to be procured by some means or other, and so the Government [of Hawaii] sends to China for coolies and farms them out to the planters at $5 a month each for five years, the planter to feed them and furnish them with clothing. The Hawaiian agent fell into the hands of Chinese sharpers, who showed him some superb coolie samples and then loaded his ships with the scurviest lot of pirates that ever went unhung. Some of them were cripples, some were lunatics, some afflicted with incurable diseases, and nearly all were intractable, full of fight, and animated by the spirit of the very devil. However, the planters managed to tone them down and now they like them very well. Their former trade of cutting throats on the China seas has made them uncommonly handy at cutting cane. They are steady, industrious workers when properly watched.³⁰

Mark Twain was commissioned that year by the Sacramento Union, a leading newspaper in the West that was often called “the Miners’ Bible,” to spend a month in the islands as a traveling correspondent. With the newly inaugurated steamer Ajax running between San Francisco and Hawaii, the paper saw an opportunity to serve readers who might soon visit the islands. The publisher hired Twain, who had only recently lost his newspaper job in Nevada due to his sympathy for Chinese miners, to assess the lay of the land in Hawaii.

The twenty-five picturesque letters Twain would write from the islands in the next six months served the paper’s purpose quite well. He documented in great detail the islands’ scenery and climate, politics, social conditions, history, and legends, but he conveniently forgot to mention the prevalence of leprosy, for fear that it might frighten off the businessmen who would be reading his letters with an eye toward possible trade opportunities.

What particularly impressed Twain, besides the flamboyant tales of Captain Cook’s demise and the indigenous cannibalism, was the sugar-industry boom supported by shrewd local planters’ use of Chinese coolie labor. The master ironist did a little math: with more than 250 sugar plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi, the aggregate yield was only twenty-five million pounds in 1866. By contrast, Hawaii’s mere twenty-nine small plantations yielded a total of twenty-seven million pounds that year. The secret, Twain concluded, lay not just in the fertile soil or advantageous weather but also “in their cheap Chinese labor.” When one company paid only $5 a month for labor that another company had to hire for $80 and $100, there was no question which business would fare better.³¹

Twain’s testimony to its benefits partly explains the continuation of the Chinese coolie trade until 1898, when Hawaii was annexed by the United States, which by then had effectively stopped Chinese immigration with 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act. What Twain considered to be the secret to Hawaii’s success, “cheap Chinese labor,” was regarded as a disaster for the white labor force on the mainland. Only four years after Twain penned these letters, his close friend and collaborator, Bret Harte, would publish “The Heathen Chinee,” one of the most popular poems about Chinese to rear its racist head in the nineteenth century. In the poem, white miners lamented, “We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor.” But for decades, before becoming a U.S. territory, Hawaii hugely benefited from the steady supply of cheap Chinese labor. From 1852 to 1898, an estimated 46,500 Chinese laborers flowed into the islands.³²

Many of these indentured laborers, realizing that a coolie’s life was certainly not what they had bargained for, chose to return to China upon the expiration of their five-year contract. Others moved to expanding towns such as Honolulu and looked for other forms of livelihood. Ah Pung’s parents, with two children and a third on the way, homesick for their native land, decided to move the growing family back to China. Thus, at the age of three, Ah Pung took his first and only journey to his ancestral hometown in southern China. His stay would form an indelible impression on the young boy, but it would not prove permanent.