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4.0 out of 5 stars
Trapped ashore amidst "damned scoundrels", November 11, 2009
Sandra Wagner-Wright, who teaches history at the University of Hawaii-Hilo, discovered Charles Hammatt's journal in the back pages of a Bryant & Sturgis account book at Harvard. She calls it "an exciting addition" to materials on a crucial period in Hawaii, and "a welcome change from (the views of) ubiquitous missionaries . . . laconic traders . . . or ship's officers who did not remain in Hawaii for any length of time."
That overstates the case a little, but Hammatt, a young New Englander about whom little is known, did keep an interesting diary.
Bryant & Sturgis was one of the leading firms in the sandalwood trade. These Bostonians were happy to sell beads and cloth, both in Hawaii and along the west coast of North America, but after Kamehameha I's death the chiefs wanted western ships more than anything else. Bryant & Sturgis had several sloops and brigs it was hopeful of disposing of, plus accounts due for the king's purchase of the famous Cleopatra's Barge, the first millionaire's yacht built in America.
Hammatt, an experienced supercargo who had spent time in India for his employers, was sent out to sell ships and collect sandalwood to pay for them. It was, as Wagner-Wright says, a crucial time in Hawaii.
The chiefs still completely controlled the small haole business community, promising wood but seldom delivering, but tensions were building.
Though Hammatt's notes offer character judgments of the other white traders and officers, unusually, he was not inclined either to praise or to censure the Hawaiians. He arrived when Liholiho was drinking himself to death, and noted the fact, but did not moralize. Nor, unlike the hot-tempered merchant Stephen Reynolds, did he express strong feelings about the missionaries.
He seems, in fact, to have looked about him with wide, fresh eyes. He did not come to conquer Hawaii, or to change it. He accepted its ways without demur, even hiring a "cruise wife."
If there is anything new to history in this slender volume, it is his amused account of how one of the other traders fell in love with one of the famous hapa-haole Holmes sisters and nearly ruined himself trying to persuade her to follow him to sea. This is the most direct account I know of this form of concubinage or prostitution (from the western point of view), which despite the missionaries and the chiefs persisted far in the whaling era.
Hammatt wanted only wood. He realized very soon after arriving that he wasn't going to get it.
Shortly after he left, an American warship arrived to force the chiefs to acknowledge and arranged to pay their debts. That, says Wagner-Wright, was the beginning of the end of Hawaiian sovereignty.
That is one way of looking at it, but her very short analysis is unpersuasive. Following the unreliable PC anthropologist Greg Dening, she argues that the chiefs did not pay wood because they were on a different kind of time from the Americans.
Even if true, that does not explain why the great Kamehameha paid his debts punctiliously. A far more likely explanation of Hammatt's trouble is that the chiefs felt no responsibility to pay, because no one could tell them to do anything.
The complete lack of business ethics on the part of the chiefs resulted in a beggar-thy-neighbor attitude among both chiefs and traders, with the commoners paying most of the penalty, dying in the uplands chopping down the sandalwood.
Hammatt was slow to anger, but after only a few months in Honolulu he was disgusted with the "damned scoundrels here, who are held by no contract & who regard no promises."
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