The US Civil War and Hawai'i

[whtviper1]

I'll give it a shot. The Civil War which ended over 148 years ago isnt applicable to Hawaii today. Although rebel battle flags on trucks at the military bases are still pretty common.

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by Jonah K

I was going to write something about how surplus weapons from the U.S. Civil War helped to change the outcome of Boshin War in Japan, which contributed towards Japanese emigration to Hawaiʻi, the United States, and Brazil. I guess that it can wait until the level of discourse improves.

Thanks, Jonah. I welcome your intelligent contributions to the topic under discussion. What I am finding particularly fascinating in looking newly at the history of the islands in the 1800s is the way seemingly unrelated events and trends worked together to produce seismic shifts in the culture, economics, and government of a small, remote island kingdom that are still reverberating in today's Hawai'i.

In the early 1820s the fact that Japan was closed to trade with the outside world lead to the rapid buildup of the Hawaiian Islands as a center for whalers in the Pacific to provision and repair their ships. If Japan had been open for business back then, that alone probably would have had a huge impact on what was to follow because Japan had many advantages over Hawai'i for hosting the fleet. I think it might make for an interesting piece of speculative fiction to surmise an alternative world in which Honolulu harbor never filled up with all those whalers, carrying all those diseases the natives had no resistance against. And what if all that money hadn't flowed so copiously, when it did, and what if the land had never been divided up and sold off as a result?

I just found some interesting reading about a ship called the Brig Owyhee in 1830, but I'll save that for another round.

Mahalo for your interest.

[OpenD]

While I was looking into the use of the old English spelling for Hawai'i, one of the references I checked took me on a voyage of discovery along another winding tributary in history, when I ran across a casual mention of an anchor from the Brig Owyhee being displayed in a museum near Portland, Oregon. What?

After some digging I found that a certain Captain John Dominis had sailed a Brig, a two masted sailing ship, up the Columbia and Willamette Rivers to the Clackamas, where he and his crew engaged for two summers in fishing for salmon, which were salted down in barrels for sale in Boston. But through some misadventure the ship's anchor was lost there in 1830, and the Owhyhee sailed away without it. Much later the anchor was recovered, and put on display at the Portland Yacht Club, and it stayed there until 2008. Then it was moved to the Museum of the Oregon Territory in Oregon City, where it is displayed today.

Years after losing his anchor, in the early 1840s Captain Dominis built a house in Honolulu where he lived with his family until 1846, when the ship he was traveling on disappeared on a voyage to China to buy furniture for his big house. His wife Mary stayed on in the house with their teenage son by renting out rooms. One of her tenants was the American representative to the Hawaiian Kingdom, on account of which King Kamehameha III named the House Washington Place, which it is still known as today.

Captain Dominis's house had been the center of several legal disputes while it was being constructed, and it became pivotal in a key bit of Hawaiian history. One unhappy Englishman, who had paid $100 for the land Dominis was building on, but which King Kamehameha III had then given to Dominis, appealed to Captain George Paulet, an officer of the British Navy for relief. Paulet responded by using his military force to seize control of the nation, and then installed himself as Governor. Five months later Paulet's Supervising Officer ordered him to stand down, the British invasion ended, and construction on the house continued.

In 1862 the Captain's son, John Owen Dominis married Lydia Liliʻu Loloku Walania Wewehi Kamakaʻeha. She assumed the legal name Lydia K. Dominis, and they took up residence with John's mother Mary at Washington Place. She was a Princess in the royal family, although distant in line to the throne, and her husband assumed the title of Prince Consort upon their marriage. He was a cad who had many affairs, and at least one illegitimate child, while she was unable to bear children, so their marriage was an unhappy one. But Washington Place stayed central to their lives, and to the social whirl of the day.

In 1874 Lili'u, as she was known, was made Crown Princess by her brother Kalākaua, who by a series of unfortunate deaths in the family had just become King. He also gave her the new name Liliʻuokalani. Liliʻuokalani inherited the throne from her brother Kalākaua on January 29, 1891 and served as the last monarch of Hawai'i until she was arrested at Washington Place and deposed from the throne in 1893. She died there in 1917.

Later Washington Place became the official residence of the Governor, and was made a National Historic Landmark in 2007, just before the current Governor's Residence was built behind it.

So now you know how an old anchor in Oregon is connected to the final home of the last monarch of Hawai'i, and former Hawai'i Governor's residence, and current historic landmark.