a Polish spy, Anton Hove, to Gujarat, India, to steal cottonseed. He organized the movement of sago and date palms to avert famines in India, of hemp and flax for naval stores, and of spices to break the Dutch monopoly and then helped sponsor prizes for the importation of cinnamon, “cochineal, silk, indigo, fine cotton, cloves, camphor and coffee.”30 And, responding to pressure from British sugar planters in the West Indies who had lost fifteen thousand slaves to hurricanes and drought from 1780 to 1787, he sent Captain Bligh, another veteran of Cook’s first trip, to Tahiti to collect seedlings of the breadfruit trees they had seen there to transplant to Saint Vincent and Jamaica as food for slaves. After the first expedition foundered on mutiny at Tahiti, Banks sent Bligh again—and succeeded, making his ship, the famous Endeavor, into “a floating garden transported in luxuriance from one extremity of the world to another.”31 As an example of the thoroughness of this traffic, the British had successfully imported over two hundred species of plants to New South Wales by 1803.32
Pacific natives were also eager for Euro-American goods and organisms. As the Euro-Americans themselves did, they filtered this trade and traffic through their own economic, political, religious, and class frameworks. When Cook stepped off at Tahiti, Kealakekua Bay, and elsewhere to further the march of the British Empire, he met powerful sets of chiefs, many trying to advance their own designs of Polynesian empire. In Hawai‘i and elsewhere, he and his compatriots stepped into long-running cycles of warfare for consolidation and control of districts, islands, and groups of islands. Kamehameha and other chiefs quickly saw the usefulness of Euro-American arms, ships, and personnel and launched expensive arms races that would completely reshape patterns of life in their islands. Some learned the new rules quicker than others. Kehekili, ruler of Maui, Molokai, and O‘ahu in the 1780s, frequently employed thievery and occasionally violence to procure goods; as a consequence, European and American ships gave him a wide berth and traded instead with Kamehameha, who clearly saw the advantage of courtesy and openness in dealing with the newcomers. Along with his hospitality, Kamehameha’s trading acumen was widely praised. His assertion of kapu, or taboo, control over hogs, the cattle that had expanded from Vancouver’s pair into vast herds, and later, sandalwood, won him strategic advantage over Kehekili and all other rivals as he successfully consolidated his rule over the archipelago. Many defeated chiefs blamed the Europeans for the concentration of all power in Hawai‘i in one hand.33 In Tahiti, the Pomares clan rose to dominance through a similarly shrewd control of the pork trade with New South Wales.34
In time, Kamehameha became a kind of Polynesian Joseph Banks, collecting plants and seeds (including the seeds of apples spit out on the beach by foreigners) and employing a Welsh gardener and Mexican cowboys to train his kanakas (men) to become paniolos (Hawaiian for españoles, or Spaniards). He picked and chose as it suited him: according to Cleveland, he was initially unimpressed with the horses given to him, thinking them too much trouble to feed for the transportation benefit to be had: “He expresses his thanks, but did not seem to comprehend their value.”35 Other Hawaiians, commoners in particular, took more readily to them, and horse riding became a craze. Tobacco became a plague, smoked by “almost every person,” including “children . . . and adults smoking to excess and falling senseless to the ground.”36 Melons, watermelons, “and fruit in general having found the most ready reception next to tobacco” were widely grown.37 Yet, on the whole, Polynesians were uninterested in adopting the European diet. A British officer visiting Kealakekua Bay in July 1796 reported that, of the things left by Vancouver, the ducks had bred, the cattle “had much increased in number,” but “the garden seeds had failed through inattention.”38 In Tahiti, “it was only after three decades of visits that the Tahitians began to nurture some of the alien species or to deplore their introduction such as guavas and goats.” The “shaddock” citrus trees introduced there by Cook and called ooroo no pretany (breadfruit of Britain) had been kept alive only by the attention of one old man. “The natives do not value them,” wrote Bligh.39 Where Bligh had planted Indian corn, a later crew also planted a garden and asked the natives to take care of it. The Tahitians laughed and said that they had everything they needed. Of the horses and cattle left by Cook, they had neglected the cattle and killed the horse but had disliked the meat.40
Many Europeans thought that the prospect of commerce might entice Polynesians to become farmers of European crops, and to a certain extent, it did. Beginning in 1793 the British governor of New South Wales introduced hogs and potato seeds to Maoris in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand; by 1805, Maoris supplied a considerable produce market there.41 In Hawai‘i, lush gardens of vegetables “introduced by foreigners” were tended “chiefly for the white people.” The largest of these were farmed by white people—and one black one.42 A Captain Butler at Lahaina, Maui, maintained an irrigated plantation that prompted wide admiration and comparisons with England. Anthony Allen, an American freedman, had gardens at Pawa‘a, O‘ahu. A Spaniard, Don Francisco de Paula Marin, arrived in Honolulu from California in 1814 and built up a large capacity in herds, extensive gardens, and vineyards both for the shipping trade, which he for some time dominated, and his own “table d’hote.” Travelers could expect to find there beef, pork, goat, duck, goose, turkey, watermelons, onions, coconuts, bananas, cabbages, potatoes, beans, shallots, citrus fruit, pomegranates, figs, pineapples, pumpkins, tamarinds, and wine made from “Isabella” vines from Madeira. One visitor assessed that Marin was “still not adept at the art of making wine,” though others disagreed.43
Along with these intentional imports came other, unintentional, ones: cockroaches, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, fleas (called uku lele, the jumping louse), and innumerable plant species gone wild across the landscape: thorn trees, puncture vines, feral cabbages, and indigo. European diseases, starting with “the clap,” a gift repeatedly given from Cook’s visits forward, spread unchecked. By the second decade of the century, foreigners’ descriptions of common Hawaiians showed that their physical state had deteriorated markedly. According to Stewart, “the majority are more or less disfigured by eruptions and sores, and many are as unsightly as lepers.”44 Langsdorf wrote: “The islanders we had an opportunity to observe were naked, unclean, not well built, of middle stature, and with dark, dirty, brown skin covered with rashes and sores, probably the result of drinking awa or of venereal disease. Most of the men had no front teeth. According to them they had been knocked out by stones in battles. . . . They were good swimmers and tattooed on their arms and bodies with lizards, billy goats, muskets and other rhombus-shaped figures, which in no way embellished their bodies, as on Nukuhiva, but rather distorted them.”45
HAWAI‘I AND THE FUR TRADE
On Cook’s third voyage, between his first and second visits to Hawai‘i, the British ships cruised the northwest coast from Alaska south, trading for sea otter pelts, which his crew subsequently found to bring fabulous prices in the market at Canton. Publicity for the voyage was immediate in Great Britain and the United States, and especially in the best-selling account by the American-born sailor John Ledyard, the details and routes of a new globe-encircling trade were laid out like a map for others to follow.46 Soon, British traders sailed for the northwest coast and as predicted turned spectacular profits at Canton. As per Cook’s example, Hawai‘i became the natural stopover for refreshment of ships and crews. Fleurieu, chronicler of the French expedition led by Etienne Marchand in 1790, dubbed it “the great caravansary” on the Pacific fur route.47 Honolulu quickly became the most cosmopolitan place many Americans and Europeans had ever beheld, as the German poet Chamisso expressed: “In the Sandwich Islands trading brings together the most varied assortment of all the peoples of the earth. Among the servants of upper-class women I saw a young Negro and a Flathead Indian from the northwest coast of America. Here I saw Chinese for the first time.”48 Hawaiians supplied the shipping industry with water, vegetables, meat, salt, firewood, spars, rope, sailors, and women. The historian Ernest Dodge wrote that it was “doubtful” if the fur trade “could have been carried out profitably . . . without the Hawaiian Islands.”49
Beginning with the Northwest-Canton fur trade, a rapid
