Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 196

Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "Lost Kingdom: Hawaii's Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Adventure," by Julia Flynn Siler.



To some Westerners, the most beguiling treasure hidden in the Hawaiian Islands was a large estuary about half a day’s carriage ride to the northwest of Honolulu. Ancient Hawaiians believed that the shark goddess Ka‘ahupahau guarded its treacherous entrance, a narrow channel through coral reefs where saltwater mingled with fresh. But the Pearl River basin had lured a succession of British and American naval officers, carrying their magnetic compasses and surveyor’s chains to gauge its suitability as a possible deep water port. 

Oyster beds gave the area its English name and through much of the nineteenth century Hawaiians dove for these prizes in the harbor’s waters. Sheep grazed on the largest island in the estuary. Gradually, starting in the 1870s, planters began transforming the dry plains to the west of it into sugar plantations. But Western surveyors quickly spotted the larger potential of what Hawaiians called Pu‘uloa. 

In 1825 the British government sent a surveyor to chart the estuary. After exploring the area on a launch, one of his colleagues concluded that “it would form a most excellent harbor as inside there is plenty of water to float the largest ship and room enough for the entire Navy of England.” Fifteen years later Commodore Charles Wilkes of the U.S. Exploring Expedition arrived on O‘ahu and mapped the entrance to the Pearl River estuary at the request of Kamehameha III. He reported that “the inlet has somewhat the appearance of a lagoon that has been partly filled up by alluvial deposits” and suggested that, if it were deepened, “it would afford the best and most capacious harbor in the Pacific.” 

The American interest in Pu‘uloa only grew. In 1872, a military commission under secret instructions from the U.S. secretary of war examined various ports in the Hawaiian Islands for possible defensive and commercial purposes. A year later, King William Lunalilo became the first Hawaiian monarch to give serious consideration to offering the Pearl River harbor in exchange for the United States allowing Hawaiian sugar to enter the American market on a duty-free basis. The proposal offered America a defensive toehold in the Pacific in return for favorable terms to Hawaiian planters—the vast majority of whom were haole—selling their sugar into the American market. Trade and defense were becoming inextricably bound, and in neither case were native Hawaiians reaping the potential benefits.