The Americans were touched by the reception, but they were scandalized by a hula that praised the genitalia of Hawaii’s royalty.
When the first missionaries landed, Hawaiians paddled out to greet them with tropical fruits. Vancouver, one of Cook’s midshipmen, returned later. Captain James Cook first landed on the island of Hawaii (the “Big Island”), where he would be killed. Then she takes us to the European beginnings of Hawaiian history. The Americans wanted “a cozy little global empire with a few islands here and there to park their fleet of battleships.” annexation of Hawaii in 1898, Vowell writes, came after the “four-month orgy of imperialism” of the Spanish-American War that included the acquisition of the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam. “That’s how stuck-up the British were - whole archipelagos were handed to them and they were too busy ruining continents to notice.” “There is no record that the British government ever acknowledged receipt of the gift of Hawaii,” she adds. Her point is that “the Cherokees were Christianized and educated by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,” the same bunch that descended on Hawaii.Ī quarter-century before the missionaries landed there, the first ruler of the whole archipelago, Kamehameha I, had pledged that his people “unanimously acknowledged themselves subject to the British crown,” according to Vowell’s quote from the sea-faring journals of Captain George Vancouver. From this flit through Hawaii’s history, we learn several things: that murder occurred throughout 19 th-century Hawaii that marriage between caste-ridden Polynesians (whose royals practiced incest) and democratic neo-Puritans ended as a disaster for the Hawaiians and that diseases, carried by missionaries, merchants and sailors, caused another kind of mass murder.īefore she gets to the actual history, Vowell makes a point of telling us that she was born part Cherokee and that her ancestors were marched at gunpoint along the Trail of Tears from North Carolina to “Indian Territory” in her native Oklahoma. She flits from 1820, when the first New England missionaries invaded the islands and made it possible for their descendants to take over, to 1898, when Hawaii was annexed by the United States.
But Sarah Vowell has reduced learning to a side-effect.
Students of history will learn something from this attempt to tell how Hawaii lost its constitutional monarchy and became a political component of the United States.
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