CHAPTER XLIX.

Hawaii, and our annexation policy.

Location of the Islands—­Their Population—­Honolulu, the Capital and the Metropolis—­Political History—­The Traditional Policy of the United States—­Former Propositions for Annexation—­ Congressional Discussion—­The Vote in the House of Representatives—­The Hawaiian Commission.

A work of this character would be incomplete without mention of the Hawaiian Islands, and their intimate political and commercial connection with our own country.  For many years prior to the commencement of the war with Spain there had been a growing sentiment in favor of their annexation to the United States, and events in Washington during the first month of that conflict showed conclusively that a large majority of the members of both houses of Congress were strongly in favor of the measure.

The Hawaiians are a group of eight inhabited and four uninhabited islands lying in the North Pacific Ocean, distant from San Francisco about 2,100 miles, from Sidney 4,500 miles, and from Hongkong 4,800 miles.  They are the most important in the Polynesian group, and were discovered by Captain Cook in 1788.  Their combined area is 6,640 square miles, and their population is about 85,000.  The islands are to a great extent mountainous and volcanic, but the soil is highly productive.  Sugar, rice, and tropical fruits grow in abundance, and over ninety per cent of the trade is with the United States.

Fortunes easily made.

The world knows comparatively nothing about the great fortunes that have been amassed in Hawaii in the last thirty years.  The children of the Yankee missionaries who sailed from Boston and Gloucester around the Horn to carry the gospel to the Sandwich islands in the ’30s and ’40s are the richest and most aristocratic people in Honolulu.  For mere songs the sons of missionaries obtained great tracts of marvelously fertile soil for sugar planting in the valleys of the island, and with their natural enterprise and inventive spirit they developed the greatest sugar cane plantations in the world.

When the United States gave a treaty to the Hawaiian kingdom putting Hawaiian raw sugar on the free tariff list, the profits of the sugar planters went up with a bound.  For twenty-five years the dividends of several of the Yankee companies operating sugar plantations and mills on the islands ranged from 18 to 30 per cent a year.  The Hawaiian Commercial Sugar Company paid 25 per cent dividends annually from 1870 to 1882.  The world has never known productiveness so rich as that of the valleys of Maui and Hawaii for sugar cane.  The seed had only to be planted and the rains fell and nature did the rest.  One tract of 12,000 acres of land on Maui was given to a young American, who married a bewitching Kanaka girl, by her father, who was delighted to have a pale-faced son-in-law.  It was worth about $200 at the time.  The tract subsequently became a part of a great sugar plantation.  It was bought by Claus Spreckels for $175,000 and is worth much more than that now.  The Spreckles, Alexander, Bishop, Smith and Akers accumulated millions in one generation of sugar cultivation in the Hawaiian islands.