Chapter Six
Merrie Monarch, 1883–1886

By dawn on February 12, 1883, the heavy rains that had muddied Honolulu’s streets finally stopped. But because the weather still looked threatening, workmen began attaching a roof of corrugated metal to a temporary amphitheater erected on the palace grounds. A gang of prison laborers spread rush grass along the route to the palace. The king had chosen this day—the ninth anniversary of his accession to the throne—for his royal coronation.

At about 8 a.m. the “morning star” of Venus peeped through the clouds, visible even as the sun shone brightly in the fresh morning air. Two hours later, thousands of islanders, garlanded with flowers, gathered on the palace grounds to witness the crowning. The ceremony was meant to herald the rise of a new ruling dynasty—the House of Kalākaua—and to vanquish any lingering public attachment to the Kamehamehas, as well as demonstrate the kingdom’s embrace of modernity. Many of the events would take place at the just completed ‘Iolani Palace, boasting modern conveniences such as indoor toilets and telephones, which were still unknown in many parts of the world.

Then at the pinnacle of his powers, Kalākaua had the financial resources and power as king to command a fortnight of balls, parties, and performances to celebrate his reign. But the coronation festivities had the unintended consequence of widening the kingdom’s divisions, particularly among those already critical of what they considered Kalākaua’s reckless spending. It was the controversial Gibson who had promoted the idea of a coronation and had convinced Hawai‘i’s legislators to fund a ceremony mixing Polynesian customs with those borrowed from European monarchies.

On that February morning the blow of the conch shell was accompanied by blasts from a trumpet, heralding the arrival of the royal party and Kalākaua’s success as a forward-thinking ruler. Emerging from the palace out onto a walkway, the king and queen saw a grandstand holding several thousand people—the native women standing out in the crowd in their brightly colored holokū, the modest Mother Hubbard–style dresses first introduced by the missionaries

On the grounds of the palace there were thousands more: Hawaiian fishermen from the outer islands, white planters descended from missionaries, Chinese shopkeepers, and foreigners. The harbor was filled with four men-of-war and twenty-two merchant ships, all flying standards and draped with bunting. They were a reminder of the kingdom’s thrall to foreigners and trade.

In turn, the people seated in the amphitheater saw a resplendent royal family that, except for their brown skin and Polynesian features, would not have looked out of place presiding from a European capital. Queen Kapi‘olani wore a gown trimmed in ermine, with its crimson train embroidered in gold. On the chest of his white military uniform, the king wore all of the stars, ribbons, and orders he had been awarded during his trips abroad. In a touch that Twain surely would have enjoyed, a red, white, and blue feather plume topped his helmet.

Seated near her brother and accompanied by her husband, whose dark beard framed his long, angular face, Lili‘u wore a gold and white silk gown imported from Paris. Its richness contrasted with a delicate wreath of white feathers, pearls, and gold leaves she wore in her dark hair. For the evening festivities, she planned to change into another new gown, this one brilliant crimson and also made in Paris. She later wrote that her two splendid dresses for the coronation were “generally considered to have been the most elegant productions of Parisian art ever seen in Hawai‘i.”

The youngest member of the royal family also took part in the ceremony. Ka‘iulani was then just seven years old, and she wore a light blue silk gown with matching blue lace ribbons in her hair. Flowing down her back, her dark locks framed her delicate face, her skin the color of creamy coffee. Holding a small bouquet of flowers, Ka‘iulani was the embodiment of Hawai‘i’s embrace of the West—a child of mixed race born into a royal family that increasingly patterned itself on the courts of Europe.

There were some notable absences, including Queen Emma, the Bishops, and Princess Ruth, who threw her own three-day celebration around the time of the coronation to celebrate completion of her new mansion, which rivaled the new ‘Iolani Palace in elegance and size. Her party included a formal house-warming ceremony, a lū‘au, and a ball where she danced the quadrille while wearing a rich yellow gown with a ten-foot train.

The timing suggests an active rivalry between the Kamehamehas and the ascendant house of Kalākaua. The Advertiser, excerpting a Daily Bulletin article, wryly noted, “We regret to say that the Princess is affected with heart disease, and an occasion of great festive excitement would certainly be unfavorable to the health of the distinguished sufferer,” an excuse belied by Ruth’s own extravagant celebration. But if Ruth noticed the implied criticism in the Advertiser, it is unlikely she cared. Unlike the House of Kalākaua, Ruth did not put much store in Western conventions. During a church service at Kawaiaha‘o, she once walked to the rear of the church, lay on her back, and called a native Hawaiian boy of about eight years old over to her, commanding him to lomilomi her abdomen with his feet. The massage apparently relieved her pain and she ordered the boy to step off. The enormous chiefess then arose and returned to her pew, with no interruption to the church service.

Yet Ruth’s apparent competitiveness did not spoil Kalākaua’s day. Representatives of the great nations were present to witness the coronation: Japan dispatched a special ambassador, while the Americans, British, and French were represented by resident ministers or commissioners.

Traditionally, Hawai‘i’s kings had neither worn crowns nor staged Western-style coronations. But Kalākaua had ordered two crowns made for him and his queen in England. Believing he was creating symbols of power that would be handed down for generations to come, he ordered that the crowns be adorned with golden taro leaves, the sacred plant whose roots, when mashed, make the Hawaiian staple food poi. Encrusted with jewels, the crowns cost $10,000 (nearly $225,000 in ­today’s dollars). Likewise, Kalākaua ordered a sword modeled after one he had seen in England, made of fine Damascus steel and decorated with the Hawaiian coat of arms inlaid in gold.

“Sire, is your majesty willing to reaffirm your previous oath?” the kingdom’s chancellor asked Kalākaua, his formal tone resounding in the soft tropical air.

“I am willing.”

The king rose from his throne, raised his right hand, and swore his oath.

The chancellor then declared Kalākaua’s accession to the throne. Kapi‘olani’s sister handed the chancellor the feathered cloak of Hawai‘i’s ancient kings; he, in turn, placed it on Kalākaua’s shoulders and handed him the scepter.

Finally, the chancellor turned to the king and said, “Receive this Crown of pure gold to adorn the high station wherein thou hast been placed.” Kalākaua took the crown, placing it on his own head. The chancellor then handed the second crown to the king, who attempted to place it on his wife’s head. But because she was already wearing a diadem he had trouble securing it atop her elaborate coiffure.

“The audience watched with intense interest, while hairpins, comb, and veil were being removed,” one Western observer wrote. “In vain! The crown would not fit, and in desperation, and apparently in no very good temper, the King made a final effort, and literally crammed the insignia of royalty down on Her Majesty’s temples.” Recovering their equanimity, the royal couple knelt while the household’s Episcopalian chaplain, who was also the rector at St. Andrew’s, offered a prayer. The king and queen rose, took their seats, and the ceremony concluded with the royal party returning to the palace, accompanied by the Royal Hawaiian Band playing the “Coronation March.”

In their accounts of the event in following days, some of the English-language newspapers took great sport in pointing out that Kalākaua, in Napoleonic fashion, had placed the crown on his own head. The Hawaiian Gazette, a haole newspaper opposed to the monarchy, on February 14, 1883, ran a long article headlined “The Self-Coronation of King Kalākaua,” declaring, “In coronations where the King Crowns himself it is usual for the Monarch to take both hands and in a solemn manner to hold the Crown high in front . . . but by taking hold of the small button or ornament at the top, the effect was rather comical.” Emma, the widowed dowager queen, and Princess Ruth were both highly amused by this account.

The festivities continued with a grand coronation ball where Likelike wore a shimmering dress in a shade described as “moonlight-on-the-­water.” As the guests were swirling to the music, a few drops of rain began pattering gently on the tarpaulin roof over their heads. As the rain became heavier, puddles began forming. Some guests dashed from the tent to the palace. One lady accepted the offer of a seat in a chair, lifted by four gentlemen and carried aloft, above the ground, to avoid muddying her slippers.

The coronation, perhaps more than any other single event in Kalākaua’s reign, became a lightning rod for criticism. The cost of the festivities outraged some of the descendants of the missionaries, particularly after they learned that the actual expenditures were more than three times as much as the $10,000 that the legislature had allocated for the events. And while foreign guests repeatedly enjoyed the Hawaiians’ lavish hospitality at these festivities, some still voiced criticism of their hosts. For Honolulu’s white merchant class, comprised in large part of Americans who leaned toward republican forms of government versus monarchies, the celebration was symbolic of all they believed was wrong with Hawai‘i’s king. It seemed to them to demonstrate his unchecked spending, pleasure seeking, and vainglorious displays of pomp at a time when not only the kingdom but Kalākaua himself was already deeply in debt.

For islanders loyal to their monarch, however, the celebrations showed that their king, who had been embraced by the crown heads of Europe and the Far East, would lead their island kingdom into a more prosperous era. At a time when the Vanderbilts were in the final stages of planning what would be the world’s most expensive party at their new Fifth Avenue mansion in New York—a costume ball for a thousand people—the kingdom’s own celebrations were in the spirit of the age. It seemed a moment to mark Hawai‘i’s ascendancy, not to count pennies.

Writing in her memoirs some fifteen years later, Lili‘u defended her brother’s coronation. Hawaiians who had traveled from the countryside and other islands returned to their homes with a “renewed sense of the dignity and honor involved in their nationality,” she argued. On a more pragmatic level, she also noted that Honolulu’s merchants and traders benefited from the influx of visitors to the capital city, many of whom spent freely. With the benefit of hindsight, Lili‘u saw in the criticisms of the lavishness of her brother’s coronation the shadows of a conspiracy to rob the House of Kalākaua of its right to rule.

Despite a steadily rising drumbeat of criticism over the king’s spending, the new ‘Iolani Palace itself was a source of pride and wonder to many in the kingdom. The old, termite-infested palace had been demolished in the mid-1870s; it had become an embarrassment to the king. “The life of my noble wife (ka‘u ali‘i wahine) and myself is not so pleasant in this place, the houses are filthy and in poor condition, and it is only with great effort to hide the humiliation that we live here,” Kalākaua wrote in 1876. “And it would be well that the citizens feel humiliated (hilahila) also regarding this thing.”

After several years the legislature finally agreed to allocate $50,000 to rebuild it, with construction beginning in earnest during the king’s trip around the world in 1881. At just over 34,000 square feet—tiny compared to Versailles or Buckingham Palace—it was the grandest structure in the islands. Built in an architectural style described as “American Florentine,” with deep verandas and cast-iron columns painted white, it echoed other grand colonial homes built in the tropics.

The rebuilt palace had every modern convenience. The king’s copper-lined bathtub was a full seven feet long and two feet wide, built to accommodate his royal girth. There were an astonishing four bathrooms on the second story, a luxury seen only among the elite or in the finest American hotels in the 1880s. The washbasins were made of Italian marble and, off the dining room, were two water closets, or toilets, for guests, an innovation that few other palaces or residences at the time featured. Two dumbwaiters had been imported from San Francisco, as had crystal door panels, etched with twinned images of dancing maidens. Expenses had ballooned and the palace ended up costing more than six times as much as legislators had appropriated, with close to $350,000, or more than
$7 million in today’s dollars, spent by 1884.

Fascinated by a display of electric lights he had seen in Paris, Kalākaua, upon reaching New York, had made a point of going to the Fifth Avenue mansion that served as the headquarters of the Edison Electric Light Company. There he met with the inventor Thomas Edison who told him how steam power had been transformed into electricity. The king’s eyes lit up at the commercial possibilities.

Upon returning to Honolulu, Kalākaua looked for ways to bring Edison’s inventions to the islands. One of the first, and most spectacular, demonstrations would take place at a ball in 1886, where he hoped to dazzle his guests with the new “electric arc lights.” And he succeeded, in no small measure. “As we stepped into the ballroom we gave a sudden gasp,” wrote Isobel Strong, Robert Louis Stevenson’s stepdaughter, who had come to the islands with her husband, Joe Strong, the man commissioned by John D. Spreckels to paint landscapes of Hawai‘i for his company’s headquarters in San Francisco. “None of us had ever seen it before and the effect after years of kerosene lamps and gas was magical.”

Within the palace, gas chandeliers were hung at a level where servants could easily light them in the evenings. But by 1887 they would be replaced by electric lights—more than four years before the White House in Washington, D.C., installed them. This wasn’t the only way the tiny kingdom moved ahead of the powers to the east. Just two years after Alex­ander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1874, Princess Likelike had ordered one from San Francisco as a gift for her brother. The new palace had a phone that allowed the king to talk to the queen in her separate apartment, across the second-floor hall from his, as well as connected him to the city’s phone system. By the time of the coronation, the Hawaiian Bell Telephone Company of Honolulu was extending service not only to the city but to all of O‘ahu and the neighbor islands, and a rival telephone company would be established later that year to speed progress.

Two weeks of celebrations followed the coronation. Two days after the crowning, on February 14, the statue of Kamehameha I that Walter Murray Gibson had helped bring to Honolulu was officially unveiled in front of the judicial building, across the street from the palace. That night, Kalākaua hosted an elaborate, multicourse state dinner, which started with a choice of four soups, eight kinds of fish, six entrees, roasts, curry, and then dessert, with each course accompanied by a wide assortment of wines. It was a far cry from the traditional Hawaiian feast, which always included the beloved poi, a purplish paste made from pounded taro root, and whole pig, wrapped in leaves and roasted for many hours in an underground oven. But the king had worldly tastes and loved all kinds of food.

The festivities continued with a regatta, horse races at the new Kapi‘olani Park, built in the shadow of Diamond Head, and a grand lū‘au on the palace grounds for some five thousand people. In the afternoon and evening of February 24, native Hawaiians performed an extensive hula recital in a tent erected on the palace grounds, with eighty selections listed in the program. With Kalākaua’s encouragement, it was the most public display of this subtle and expressive art form in many years, and one that flouted a decades-long ban on this dance that the missionaries abhorred for its “unabashed expressions of sexuality,” particularly the performances known as hula ma‘i, which celebrated the genitals and procreative vigor, often explicitly, with lusty movements and references to key organs.

The coronation performances also introduced a new style of hula, called hula ku‘i, which combined elements of the ancient art form with Westernized instrumental music and songs. Men and women dancers partook in the dances, which incorporate languid, curving motions of the hands and arms with fluid hip movement, deep knee bends, and graceful turns. Attended by large crowds of natives and foreigners, these dances were one of the few moments during the coronation festivities where native Hawaiian culture was honored.

Yet the hula that produced such a surge in Hawaiian pride in the tent on that day in 1883 also provoked a legal action. The Hawaiian Gazette reported that the printed program itself had been “characterized by those who profess to understand the Hawaiian language as obscene in the extreme.” Obscenity charges were brought against the printing firm, which, ironically, was run by haole who had not understood the meaning of the words in the manuscript that the palace had sent it to print, and that the king himself had apparently written in his own hand. Critics of the king denounced his encouragement of the once-forbidden hula as “a retrograde step of heathenism and a disgrace to the age.”

Even so, the public embrace of the ancient art form by the king was a crucial moment for native Hawaiians, whose traditions had been frowned upon by the missionaries for decades. By performing mele and hula over the two weeks of the coronation, after decades in which there had been no public ceremonial performances, Kalākaua helped bring his people together and planted the seeds for a rebirth of Hawaiian culture.

The coronation was the high point of Kalākaua’s reign and perhaps the most public demonstration of his rule as the “Merrie Monarch,” as the king soon became known. But while his supporters saw him as genial, generous, and committed to reviving ancient Hawaiian traditions, his critics increasingly portrayed him as an extravagant ruler more concerned with self-aggrandizement than with the efficient workings of
his government. While his ’round-the-world journey was seen by
some as merely an excuse to travel, others saw it was a valid attempt to achieve world prominence for his nation. Rumors of Kalākaua’s dal-
liance with a woman in Vienna had made their way across the sea to
Hawai‘i. The late-night hula performances and card games in the king’s boathouse remained a seemingly ever renewing spring of gossip for the townsfolk.

One of the king’s sharpest critics was Lorrin A. Thurston. Fluent in Hawaiian thanks to his childhood on rural Maui as a grandson of one of the first missionaries, he had returned to the islands to work for a local attorney after earning a law degree at Columbia University in New York. Like Sanford Dole, whose critiques of the government were a regular feature in the pages of the Daily Bulletin and the Hawaiian Gazette, Thurston soon took up strident opposition to what he considered Kalākaua’s excesses.

In his memoirs, written many years later, Thurston describes his own upbringing as one of puritanical thrift. His father died when he was eight and, when Thurston attended Punahou, he worked to pay his own expenses. He was expelled before graduating, however, for a series of minor infractions. He kicked a bucket of water out from another student’s hands and it created a large clatter when it tumbled down the stairs. He also used an ampersand instead of the word “and” in a school composition. Most egregious, he took liberties in quoting Scripture—apparently using the Bible to make an unflattering comment about his female teachers. While describing himself as a bootstrapping American capitalist, he portrayed Kalākaua as a seemingly idle and dissolute king, in a damning summation of the king’s character.

Kalakaua displayed diverse qualities: a personal charm and a kingly demeanor; an unbalanced mentality and a total inability to grasp important subjects intelligently; a fundamental financial dishonesty; personal extravagance, which merged into the control of community finances, to such an extent that community financial collapse loomed; an immoral disposition, or it might be termed “unmoral,” a bent to indulge in political intrigue, a reckless disregard of political honor, which made impossible the continuance of honest government; personal cowardice.

Thurston frowned on Kalākaua’s boathouse as a symbol of the monarch’s hedonistic tendencies, later describing it as a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah set in the shallow shoals near the docks. Constructed of ­single-thickness boards, rowboats were secured in slips at water level. The floor above held a social hall, where hula performances would take place before the king and his guests. “Liquid refreshments were freely on tap,” Thurston wrote many years later. “Poker was the favorite relaxation.” Upstairs were several rooms where, it was whispered, some of the kingdom’s most powerful men privately indulged their fantasies.

It was from his boathouse on the morning of July 31, 1883, five months after the coronation, that Kalākaua first saw a new ship steaming into Honolulu’s port. It was the newest addition to the Spreckels fleet, a steamer named the Mariposa. Word quickly spread that one of the passengers was Spreckels himself. The rhythm of Honolulu’s days had long moved to the ships entering and leaving the harbor, but this was an exceptional arrival because of the boat itself. Townsfolk dropped what they were doing to make their way down to the waterfront and see the first steamer built specifically to carry even more of Hawai‘i’s sugar and rice to the mainland.

From his private clubhouse on the water, Kalākaua waved to the Mariposa as she passed. The town’s leading citizens climbed aboard a smaller steamer, followed by members of the Royal Hawaiian Band. John Dominis, in his capacity as O‘ahu’s governor, was there, as was Archibald Cleghorn. Hoisting themselves up rope ladders and climbing aboard the Mariposa, the welcoming party from Honolulu greeted Claus Spreckels and his wife, Anna, who were joined by a senator from California and his wife. The party made its way to the mahogany-paneled saloon where servants uncorked champagne.

There was cause for celebration: the Mariposa had made a record-breaking passage of just five days, twenty-one hours between San Francisco and Honolulu. As the Mariposa arrived in port, a twelve-gun salute was fired from the shore battery, bringing still more crowds to the dock, which was lined with spectators.

The king sent his carriage to meet Spreckels, who had been authorized by Kalākaua’s cabinet the previous year to mint coins for Hawai‘i bearing the king’s likeness on them. About ten weeks before the Mariposa had reached Honolulu, Spreckels had received his commission from the kingdom in what was yet another dubious transaction. The kingdom could have directly entered into a contract with the San Francisco mint to produce about a million dollars’ worth of coins, which would have produced a profit of 10 to 15 percent from the difference between the face and bullion value of the coins for Hawai‘i’s treasury. But instead Spreckels served as the middle man, reaping a profit estimated at around $150,000 for himself and assuming some of the cash-strapped kingdom’s government bonds in exchange. Not surprisingly, the scheme drew fire. Dole, for one, anonymously penned a satirical pamphlet called Vacuum involving debased silver currency issued by “His Extravagancy Palaver” [Gibson] aided by “Sir Silvergilt” [Spreckels].

Dole and other critics may have described the coinage scheme farcically, but in fact what it meant was that Spreckels would become chief moneylender not only to Kalākaua but to the Hawaiian kingdom itself. He was quietly tightening his grip on Hawai‘i’s finances.

What’s more, Spreckels had positioned himself and his four sons as leaders in the burgeoning trade between the West Coast and Hawai‘i. In San Francisco, he had incorporated a new holding company, the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company. In 1882, it had its initial public offering, with a single share of stock selling for $60, a respectably high price on the San Francisco exchange, especially when compared to depressed utility and banking stocks. Investors, it seems, were tempted by the possibility of heady profits from Spreckels’s fast-growing Hawaiian enterprises.

Perhaps that helps explain why he was greeted so effusively on that day in July, as a second band waited for him on shore. Or the enthusiasm may have had more to do with the enormous success of the Royal Hawaiian Band’s trip to San Francisco, which Spreckels had sponsored, introducing Lili‘u’s tender farewell song “Aloha ‘Oe” to American audiences on the mainland for the first time. Whatever the reasons, as the burly sugar magnate strode onto the wharf the band began playing a rousing rendition of “Hail to the Chief.”

Spreckels’s influence over the kingdom began drawing sharper criticism, particularly as Hawaiian politics entered a tumultuous period of cabinet dismissals and deepening government indebtedness. After one such cabinet reshuffle, a California lawyer named Paul Neumann arrived in Hawai‘i. Before landing in Honolulu, Neumann had made an unsuccessful run as a Republican candidate for Congress from California, during which the San Francisco Chronicle denounced him as a “sugar-coated candidate” and a tool of the Spreckels interests.

In the fall of 1883 Neumann made several visits to the islands and gained admittance to Hawai‘i’s bar. Almost certainly with Spreckels’s help he landed the plum appointment of the kingdom’s attorney general in December. Like his bearded sponsor Spreckels, Neumann quickly befriended the king and became an adviser and companion to Kalākaua at the poker table.

The attacks on Kalākaua and his ex–Mormon premier Gibson intensified in 1884, after the legislature’s finance committee, led by the newly elected legislator Sanford Dole, released a harshly critical report on the kingdom’s precarious financial position. The previous legislature had authorized a $2 million public loan, whose monies were spent on items such as furnishings for the new palace ($47,500), education of Hawaiian ali‘i abroad ($30,000), and the coronation ($10,000)—expenses viewed as frippery by the party that Dole headed, which was alarmed at the 200 percent increase in the national debt since 1882. As a U.S. diplomat wrote to Washington, “With all that can justly be said in defense of the Ministers, it is plain they have been guilty of gross extravagance and irregularity in the administration of the affairs of the Kingdom.” Lorrin Thurston in addition to working as a lawyer edited the opposition-minded Daily Bulletin during the period when this report came out. While most papers focused their criticism on Gibson and the cabinet, Thurston laid the blame instead squarely on the German-American sugar baron. Regarding Spreckels, he wrote: “We recognize him as a man of unusual enterprise, and one who has in various ways encouraged the business and industries of these Islands. . . . But he has manifested a disposition to exercise undue influence in the affairs of the Government; to control the public administration too much for his own benefit.”

The Saturday Press, another English-language opposition paper, was even more blunt in its criticism: “It is a fact, painful to admit, but nevertheless acceded on all sides that this government, for the last two years, has been run in the interest of Mr. Spreckels; and to-day his dictation of the national policy is still submitted to.”

Although the Honolulu newspapers had begun portraying Spreckels as the puppet master controlling Gibson’s and Kalākaua’s strings, it is unlikely that the sugar magnate paid the criticisms much mind. He was grappling with much greater worries back on the mainland. Just two years after taking it public in 1882, his San Francisco-based Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company by 1884 was stumbling badly. Investors had grown alarmed by its heavy debts. Their fears pushed the price of its shares down from more than $60 a share to just twenty-five cents apiece.

To rescue the flailing company, Spreckels personally loaned it a million dollars and the company’s board authorized a bond issue. Both helped push the stock back up. But the dramatic swings in the HCSC’s share price led to articles in the San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere charging that the Spreckels family was manipulating the stock price for its own gain. The Chronicle, in particular, jeeringly referred to the elder Spreckels as “Sir Claus,” which it said was “justified from the fact that Mr. Spreckels Sr. has shown the weakness to accept and the vanity to wear the emblem of an ‘order of nobility’ from the fantastic Kanaka King.” (Kanaka is the Hawaiian word for human being, man, or person, but it was sometimes used scornfully, as a racial epithet.)

The Chronicle published its story referring to “Sir Claus” and made this explosive allegation of stock manipulation on the eve of an HCSC shareholder meeting. That timing so outraged Claus Spreckels’s twenty-seven-year-old son that he decided to take matters into his own hands.

As the second of Claus and Anna’s four sons, Adolph—generally referred to by his initials, A.B.—was a young bachelor about town who enjoyed yachting with his brother or spending time at the family’s ranch in Aptos, California, where the family raised thoroughbreds. Like his father, he had a reputation for hotheadedness. At about 5 p.m. on November 19, 1884, he stormed into the business office of the Chronicle, owned by the city’s prominent de Young family. He was searching for the newspaper’s owner and publisher, Michael de Young.

“De Young!” A.B. called out. The publisher turned and saw the young sugar scion holding a cocked pistol in his hand. Spreckels fired, hitting de Young in his left shoulder. The publisher tried to duck out of range but stumbled as Spreckels fired twice more, one shot striking his left arm near the shoulder and the other lodging in a stack of children’s holiday books, which de Young had been carrying as he entered the office from the street and held up in front of his chest to shield himself from the bullets. A clerk in the office heard the shots and opened a nearby desk drawer, pulling from it a pistol, which he then aimed at Spreckels and fired, grazing his arm. Another employee leaped over the railing of his desk and tackled Spreckels, dragging the would-be assassin to the ground.

Rushed to the hospital, de Young was examined by doctors, who pronounced him in critical condition. The bullets had shattered his left clavicle and come very close to hitting a main artery. The shooting, which involved members of two of the city’s leading families, produced sensational headlines. De Young survived and A.B. was eventually acquitted after pleading insanity and self-defense. Michael de Young’s brother, Charles, the cofounder of the paper, had been fatally shot in the Chronicle offices in 1880 on the exact same spot. History had nearly repeated itself.

The Chronicle did not end its campaign against the Spreckels family after the shooting. Nor did Claus Spreckels slow down his whirl of business activities in the islands. He oversaw the digging of new irrigation ditches, ran his steamship line, and expanded his plantations. (The store he owned at his plantation in Maui, for instance, rang up sales of $50,000 a month in 1884, thanks to a wide variety of goods—from truffles to ship anchors—that rivaled the sales of the large mercantile firms in Honolulu.) But so entwined were the Spreckels family’s business and personal affairs that in the hours before the jury hearing the case against A.B. returned its verdict of “not guilty” in July of 1885, the family ordered the delay of the departure of the steamship Mariposa from San Francisco to Honolulu by several hours. Its goal: to make sure the steamer carried the good news of the Spreckels scion’s acquittal back to Hawai‘i.