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4.0 out of 5 stars
End of the line,
By
This review is from: Russia's Hawaiian Adventure, 1815-1817 (Materials for the Study of Alaska History) (Paperback)
An alternative title could have been "One German Scoundrel's Hawaiian Adventure." The tale is briefly told -- Richard Pierce does so in 35 pages -- but the implications are enormous.
The remainder of the volume consists of translations of translations of documents from the archives of the Russian American Company. As often happened in what anticolonialists like to call the heyday of European colonialism, the Russian government had less than no interest in colonizing Hawaii, nor did Britain, Spain or the United States, who all had interests in the North Pacific. If any had wanted to colonize Hawaii, it could have done so easily. Hawaii was not then of much value except as a place to stop for supplies and replacement sailors. There was some trade in sandalwood, and the chiefs were all wild to acquire western ships, which meant power. Sea power was the key to Russia's Hawaiian adventure, and Russia, or more precisely, the Russian American Company, did not have it. At the far end of history's longest internal road, in Novo Archangelsk (Sitka), it was short of everything except chutzpah. As far as sea power was concerned, it had a couple of leaky ships and not even captains to command them. It had to hire Americans (Bostonians, as the Russians called them). The German, a physician named Eugene Schaffer, had a commission to retrieve goods from a company ship that had wrecked on Kauai, whose chief, Kaumualii, was deathly afraid of Kamehameha, who he thought -- correctly -- wanted to sacrifice him and take over his islands, as he had done the rest of the archipelago. Kaumualii was willing to offer anybody anything -- specifically his notional claims to Oahu, Maui etc. -- for a ship. The Russians didn't have any ships but were prepared to buy one from Bostonians -- who were bringing in ships of varying quality and selling them as they could -- with payment in sandalwood, which they would have to acquire in exchange for promises of imperial protection to Kaumualii. It was really even more complicated than that, but you get the general picture. Thus Kaumualii was happy to sign -- actually, make his mark since he could not write -- a treaty that he probably thought was an alliance with Russia, but which Schaffer considered annexation. Everybody was playing a duplicitous game, but about eight or 10 Bostonians held all the cards, as they had armed ships. They also were more or less united in purpose, which was to exclude the Russians as much as possible from the Hawaii trade. Had Schaffer been less ambitious, the Bostonians probably would have been less successful, but as it worked out, the Americans achieved a complete victory with little effort. The big losers were a few unfortunate Aleuts who got killed. Schaffer was repudiated by the government in St. Petersburg, several years later when the mail finally arrived, but recovered to become a slave owner in the empire of Brazil. The Hawaiians were far too weak and unsophisticated to play off the European powers permanently, but the eviction of Schaffer gave them another two decades of somewhat mythical sovereignty.
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