Hawai‘i: Another United Kingdom

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Hawai‘i: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans, British Museum, London, 15 January–25 May 2026

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Hawai‘i has become widely symbolic, both as an iconic paradise and, equally, as a ‘fallen’ paradise, spoiled by tourism and the cultural incursions of the USA. Even the experiences of those who visit the islands are largely determined by such images; having been sold one narrative, many will either remain under that enchantment or, frustrated, lurch to the other in disillusionment. In the hinterlands of Europe’s historical colonial powers (and the USA), the idea of the idyllic, unspoiled island merges with that of the touchable, enjoyable resort. Balmy weather, fertile abundance and a blithe, easy-going sensuality: perhaps not so much Eden as the classical fantasy of the Golden Age, which has a strong appeal from the depths of the infantile. It is gratifying but remote.

The exhibition at the British Museum has little to do with aloha-laden sentimentality or anything much resembling a Gauguinesque vision of Polynesia. It shows a warlike, canny and culturally refined people, the people among whom Captain Cook and his men found themselves in 1778 when Hawai‘i was still a system of territories under several chiefs, and who in the following decades saw the rapid modernisation of their home. The high chief Kamehameha, through conquest and diplomacy, gradually formed the chain into a single kingdom, gathering up the final islands by 1810. The first room of the exhibition gives a picture of those decades, mainly through objects collected by, and often presented to, early European visitors. It is dominated by a large case full of chiefly garments in brilliant red-and-yellow featherwork: arresting, imposing, intimidating, as well as very intricately beautiful and staggeringly sumptuous (the hundreds of thousands of yellow feathers, for example, come from a black bird, the ʻōʻō, with only small patches of yellow plumage). The display is meant to suggest a ‘gathering of chiefs’, and one can imagine the daunting magnificence of such a scene, both to European eyes and those of the lower-ranking Hawaiians. But it is, after all, the story of Hawai‘i told through the aliʻi, the chiefly classes, that the exhibition and its prized artefacts recount; one has to remind oneself that the ordinary people of those times are vastly underrepresented in material remains.

Moving through the gallery, we see more and more of what is, for me, the most ambivalent and moving aspect of Hawaiian cultural history: its mixedness. We are not in the prelapsarian world before ‘contact’ that I suppose all of us who sympathise with Hawaiian Hawai‘i and its many injuries must sometimes tend to idealise, but in the house Kamehameha built in the decades after Cook. This was the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, lasting through most of the nineteenth century, when the pre-existing culture combined and recombined with so many non-Polynesian influences. In the first place, there were the European and American explorers, whalers, missionaries and traders (sandalwood was the chain’s first major export commodity), and these are much more in evidence at the exhibition. Later, however, through the immigration of contract workers and other agricultural labour for the swelling sugarcane industry, large populations of Chinese and Japanese people, as well as Portuguese from Madeira and the Azores, added their cultural infusions. It is tempting to see all of this simply as adulteration, a tragic process of decline, as if it were always bound to end in the same way, or as if some purity of indigenous culture could have been sustained forever. But to forget that the conclusion was not always fixed is to accept as inevitable so many regrettable acts and choices along the way. A review in the Guardian praises the exhibition for offering a picture of ‘a surprisingly complex if doomed encounter between different cultures’. It depends what you mean by ‘doomed’.

The artefacts on display, meanwhile, help to show the imaginative liveliness of the cultural intercourse, and recapture some of the excitement of the exotic from the Hawaiian point of view: we see basketwork fans in which prized foreign threads, in colours the Hawaiians could not imitate, were carefully woven with local materials and ancestral hair, connecting the owner both with their own heritage and the faraway outer world; and we see a kapa cloth – the traditional Hawaiian cloth, made from mulberry-bark beaten into supple sheets – into which a red-dyed foreign fabric has been incorporated by shredding it up and pounding it in. Likewise, we are shown depictions of Hawaiian monarchs of the early nineteenth century looking magnificent in traditional dress and also elegant in English tailoring.

Mixedness may be what modern, multicultural Hawai‘i is most obviously defined by. It is there in the food, in the music, in the polylingual idioms and slang. For many of us who have lived there and loved the place, it is impossible, despite all the losses entailed (which are always palpable), wholly to regret this essential characteristic. The exhibition shows both the early history and some contemporary aspects (mainly focused on traditional handicrafts) of one of the things I find myself most wanting to explain to people about the experience of life in Hawai‘i: the survival, diffusion and renewal, in the general culture, of religious and mythological elements from the islands’ earlier history.

In traditional Hawaiian culture, ‘religious and mythological’ covers a lot of ground. An inclination towards legend and ‘superstition’ constitutes an important element in the popular consciousness of long-term residents of all backgrounds, altering in kind according to each person’s position. Guilt and defiance, belonging and alienation, are registered in superstition, reverence and ghostliness, or in their denial. The Hawai‘i that tourists rarely see is rich with eerie or sacred presences. People talk about the experience of ‘chicken skin’ (goosebumps). I have felt it around the ruins of old temples. As a child, I knew to be afraid of the ‘night marchers’, the ghosts of ancient Hawaiian warriors who would travel in phalanxes down to the sea each night, to their war canoes, and would unceremoniously kill at sight any person they met who did not have Hawaiian blood. Many tensions in Hawaiian history find expression in such hauntings.

The curators tread a delicate line, and for good reason. To what extent are these items sacred, still sacred?

Something of this mysterious charge is evoked by what is on display in the exhibition, and this mingled unease and reverence comes out in the somewhat ostentatious but necessary curatorial delicacy. It is not only a matter of being cautious and sometimes regretful about the provenance of items. There is an overt carefulness over the proper treatment of certain objects. The curators explain how chiefly cloaks are, under ‘sacred laws’, not allowed to touch the ground, and offer an apology for their making an exception to this rule for the glorious featherwork cloak sent by Kamehameha I (the great unifier of the islands) to George III, on the grounds that (i) it was a gift to a foreign monarch, and (ii) it is so large that it would have to trail on the floor if worn by anyone under seven foot four. ‘Sacred laws’ like these ultimately pertain to the kapu (taboo) system of culture and religion, which structured Hawaiian society until, in 1819, during the reign of the young King Kamehameha II and under the influence of his step-mother and regent, Ka‘ahumanu, a rapid official dismantling of these strictures took place, opening up a space filled by the Christian missionaries who were then invited to settle. Unofficially the habits of mind did not, of course, vanish, and the remnants of kapu are clearly in evidence in modern Hawai‘i, both in serious matters and trivial ones. Another thing I was taught by other children was that I must placate the volcanic goddess Pele before picking certain flowers.

Kamehameha I, the first monarch of the new kingdom he had yoked together, maintained, throughout a reign marked by European influences, the traditional Hawaiian religious order and its elaborate systems of kapu, according to which a person could pay with their life for even unwitting infractions: allowing oneself, for example, to be touched by smoke from a sacred fire, or dropping the royal spittoon. But soon after Kamehameha passed away in 1819, during the first year of the reign of his son Liholiho (as Kamehameha II), came the crisis. Ka‘ahumanu, the late king’s favoured wife, is recorded as having effected the change by sitting down to eat with the young king at a public gathering, in defiance of a kapu of gender segregation. A brief period of turmoil followed, both iconoclasm and revolt. The British Museum show makes relatively little of this, although Liholiho – who, during an ill-fated visit to England only five years later, died in London of measles along with his queen, Kamāmalu – is probably its major protagonist. (There is an attempt to approximate a bicentennial anniversary of the state visit, which took place in 1824.) But the implications for the exhibition itself are complex and important.

The curators tread a delicate line, and for good reason. To what extent are these items sacred, still sacred? And (a different question) how fully or extensively must ‘sacred laws’ – e.g. about cloaks touching the floor – be observed? Moreover, what was the status of religious artefacts given away, or taken away, in the years following the overthrow of kapu? When Liholiho on his British visit made a gift, as it is thought, of a large wooden temple statue to George IV – the image standing at the entrance to the exhibition, with its sumptuously lava-like jaws (all crinkly, ridgy and elastic), and the heavily, stretchily elongating eyes, and the vegetable nubbliness of the hair – in what degree was it still regarded by him with reverence, and of what kind? Could he so soon have come to think of such things as relics of his cultural history, or precious works of art, curiosities for a foreign king? Might he perhaps have had to think in such a way, after the convulsions of the culture he had just witnessed, which had happened under his authority? The extent of the iconoclasm is hard to judge, as is its congruity with such a gesture as this. What were the meanings of this gift?

Questions over the sacredness of religious images and objects become particularly vexed in regard to several exhibits which were collected, or stolen, by the crew of the HMS Blonde, the ship tasked by the British crown with returning the Royal Hawaiian delegation – and the bodies of Kamehameha II and Queen Kamāmalu – back to Hawai‘i. The captain was George Anson Byron, the poet’s cousin. He and some of his men removed various artefacts from the Pu‘uhonua o Hōnaunau, a sacred complex on the Island of Hawai‘i where the Royal Mausoleum was then located. Particularly they took images from the hale poki or deification house. The exhibition text calls it desecration, though avoiding clear adjudication on the question of whether permission was given, and by whom.

The book that accompanies the exhibition provides a more detailed and nuanced account of these matters by Akoni Nelsen, ancestrally connected to the site at Hōnaunau, who takes up the question of the status of the old religious practices at that ‘confused’ time. ‘The kapu system was diminished but did not end, in my opinion’; ‘by the time the Blonde arrived, practices had shifted—we are still grappling with how much had changed.’ When it comes to the matter of the spoliation of the hale poki, the precise meaning becomes slightly blurred. ‘I think there was a bit of hesitation by people on the Blonde in relation to taking some of our things … but they ended up taking a whole bunch of things.’ Then in the next sentence: ‘I feel that they knew what was happening and they were trying to be progressive.’ Does this last sentence refer again to the crew of the Blonde, or rather to the Hawaiian custodians of the site, who may have made what Nelsen calls ‘bad decisions’ in the context of a period of modernisation and Christianisation? I am uncertain, but imagine the ambiguity speaks of conflict. It is significant that Nelsen’s account explicitly mentions the present-day restoration of ‘hale poki practices’ at the site. Kapu is not ancient history.

The three Hōnaunau images on display are intensely powerful; they constitute, for me, the exhibition’s most frightening case of material. The ‘chicken skin’ sensation I felt in front of them is hard not to fancy as a very distant echo of the sacred fear that old sources teach us was an important part of Hawaiian experience. But the unease is also more specifically related to the murky histories and fortunes of these ki‘i (images). A dark, gauzy fabric screen encloses them, which the information placards explain in terms of the provision of an intimate space for the ki‘i. What more could be said about this unusual manner of display? It seems to mark both colonial shame and a concession to religious reverence of kapu: both, I think, because other religious images in the exhibition do not receive similar treatment.

Britain never tried to colonise Hawai‘i. The statement requires some qualification.

One of these ki‘i in particular sticks in the imagination. It is a human figure in dark, polished wood, a ‘deified ancestor with female qualities’, on all fours with a very alertly upturned head. It is the size, though not the shape, of a small child. The large eyes are, like many of the most haunting Hawaiian ki‘i, made of undotted pearlshell: moony expanses without pupils to focus their gaze, they stare enigmatically, with a kind of inwardness. Both the nacreous eyes and the smoothed, gently faceted surfaces catch the light. One imagines them glimmering in dark places by torch and candle, before electric light, or at night under the generous starlight and moonlight of Pacific skies. The mouth gapes ambiguously, studded with ‘ancestral teeth’, while on the back of the head uneven tufts of ‘ancestral hair’ remain – relics of human life, signs of continuity, which remind us that in many cases the pieces on display, from carved deities to hand-fans and bodily adornments, have ancestral sanctity even apart from the question of formal religious usage. This figure’s horizontal back is flattened in a way suggesting utility ‘as a seat or surface for certain rituals’. Sculpturally it is fantastically arresting; it looks up with an expression flickering between submission and defiance, even threat, or between fear and enquiry.

‘Fearsome’ is a word I heard almost as soon as I stepped into the gallery: a woman next to me was describing two temple statues in the first room. And perhaps this is a good corrective to the soft, all-giving image of Hawai‘i as the paradisal realm of flower-garlanded aloha. There isn’t a hula girl anywhere in sight here. There is, however, a marionette-style ki‘i that the curators suppose was used in a variety of hula. (Earlier sources are less certain.) It has a light, hollow wooden body and articulated arms which could be manipulated by cords pulled through the torso. It is male, with a helmet (mahiole) similar in form to the several on display elsewhere in the gallery. And it is tremendously intimidating. Nothing could be further from the hula dancers Elvis Presley might befriend. His eyes are again of mother-of-pearl, without pupils, and his teeth are bared: the upper ones are of animal tooth or bone, while the lower comprise a length of sharp, serrated fish jaw. On each of his hands are six long dog teeth, more clawlike than fingerlike. In his present state there is something of the mummy about him. But even in the deathliness, even when motionless behind glass, there is an engrossing vitality.

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It is Hawai‘i’s important historical relationship to Britain that gives the exhibition its major thematic framework. This perspective makes a refreshing change from the more usual focus, for obvious reasons, on the role of the USA in Hawaiian history, a preoccupation especially pronounced in the work of ‘mainland’ American writers and those of white American descent.

Britain never tried to colonise Hawai‘i. The statement requires some qualification. Cook had named the chain ‘the Sandwich Islands’ in honour of the Earl of Sandwich, but laid no claim to territory. Captain Vancouver, however, sent after Cook’s death to continue surveying the islands, negotiated a treaty with Kamehameha I in 1794 which apparently placed the Island of Hawai‘i (not the whole chain, which had not yet been unified, but what is now called the Big Island) under British protection, an arrangement which involved the ‘cession’ of the island to Great Britain. It is hard to be clear how this agreement was conceived on either side at the time, but the relationship was regarded subsequently by Kamehameha as an alliance with a protective maritime power rather than a matter of colonial possession, and in fact the treaty was never ratified by the British Parliament. When Liholiho travelled to London in 1824, some clarification or consolidation of the alliance with Britain must have been in his mind; and when, following his death from measles, his delegation finally met with George IV, the British King told them he would offer protection from the evils that came from outside, but not from the evils that came from inside, the Hawaiian kingdom. One further caveat or addendum: for five months in 1843 a British Navy captain, Lord George Paulet, went rogue and occupied the islands. This was rectified, however, after news reached London, and one result of the ‘Paulet affair’ was the Anglo-French proclamation (on display in the exhibition) signed in November of the same year ‘to engage reciprocally to consider the Sandwich Islands as an independent state’.

From Captain Cook’s ‘discovery’ of the islands in 1778 to American annexation one hundred and twenty years later, Britain had a complex cultural position in Hawaiian eyes, while Hawai‘i provided an object of curiosity and fascination for Britain. The Hawaiian monarchs looked to their British counterparts for both material and moral support, forging close, or apparently close, bonds. Kamehameha I made his conquests thanks, in part, to British guns; he flew the Union Jack, given to him by Vancouver (it was later incorporated into the Hawaiian flag); and he wrote to George III as a fellow king and asked for the gift of a modern warship: ‘Captain Vancouver informed me you would send me a small vessel am sorry to say I have not yet receiv’d one.’ The letter is on display beside the huge featherwork cloak he sent to King George, also via Vancouver, saying it was the most precious thing on the whole island. Although the letter is not subservient, and speaks as from one king to another, its relative meekness (‘being very poor at these islands any thing which you may think useful to me I beg you will send me’, etc.) is in marked contrast with the spectacular cloak, which speaks so much more strongly than the interpreter’s words could ever do.

The central gallery is devoted to Kamehameha II’s fatal state visit in 1824. Alongside the brilliant gifts from the Hawaiian royals to the British ones and vice versa (but the Hawaiian featherwork outclasses the English silverware), we see, more movingly, scraps of the traditional kapa clothes worn by the delegation while in London, including a very beautiful fragment worn by the chiefess Kuini Liliha in a portrait (displayed nearby) commissioned during their stay. There is a marked emphasis on the ‘dignified’ character of the royal visit and the delegation’s decorous reception, with a recognition also of the opposite, evidenced by some very unpleasant caricatures by Isaac Robert Cruikshank. It is valuable to be shown both extremes; the trouble, quite apparent to those who have read and seen more of the contemporaneous responses to the visit, is that so very much lay in between.

The exhibition’s narrative dons seven-league boots at this point; the next seventy years or so hardly figure at all. But the British connection continued to be important. In the 1860s an Anglican Church of Hawai‘i was established under Kamehameha IV, who translated the Book of Common Prayer into Hawaiian, and his queen consort, Emma, who would oversee the construction of a cathedral in Honolulu. Their son, significantly named Albert, was godson to Queen Victoria, who hosted Queen Emma on a tour of England in 1865 – another important royal visit to British shores, when both queens were in mourning for their royal husbands. A crucial part in the founding of the Hawaiian Reformed Catholic Church (as it was then known) was played by Manley Hopkins – no, not the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, but his father (1818–97), the head of a firm of average adjusters for marine shipping insurance and Consul General of the Hawaiian Kingdom in Britain from 1856 until the last years of the Kingdom in the 1890s. Two of his brothers (the poet’s uncles) had travelled to Hawai‘i in the 1840s, and the younger of these, Charles Gordon Hopkins, had risen to become an important politician in the island kingdom, serving in various official capacities under three successive monarchs, ending as private aide to Queen Emma. He accompanied her on the English trip and rubbed almost everyone up the wrong way, proving to be, in the opinion of some, a bit of a bounder with the wrong kind of friends. Largely unperturbed, Queen Emma enjoyed a busy tour, raising funds for the cathedral back home, satisfying her longing to experience fog, and staying at the Isle of Wight home of the Tennysons – who had a throne chair made of their own ilex wood in advance of her visit, and were delighted with her sweet nature and musical voice.

As landowners of foreign descent, primarily American, became increasingly powerful and demanding in the Hawaiian Kingdom, seeking to strengthen ties to the USA and limit royal power, the monarchs looked more and more toward Britain, a model of monarchy and a powerful if distant ally. Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma were not only distinctly pro-British but perhaps no less distinctly anti-American. An emblematic anecdote tells how, as a young man, the future Kamehameha IV was ejected from a train compartment during an American visit, having been taken for a black servant. ‘In England an African can pay his fare and sit alongside Queen Victoria’, he wrote in his diary. Queen Emma’s Anglophilia had also to do with her own mixed heritage. Her adoptive father was an English physician who had married Emma’s maternal aunt, a high chiefess. But Emma’s maternal grandfather was John Young, a Lancashire-born boatswain who in 1790 had been left behind by a British trading ship on the Island of Hawai‘i, where he had in fact been detained by Kamehameha I – after which inauspicious beginning he rose, improbably, to become one of the king’s principal military advisors, governor of Hawai‘i Island, and eventually Kamehameha’s nephew-in-law and a central royal progenitor. Young is buried in the Royal Mausoleum in Nu‘uanu, now part of Honolulu, not far from the site of the Battle of Nu‘uanu which, at the head of the cannons from overseas, he helped Kamehameha to win, completing the conquest of the whole chain: the defending army, some seven- or eight-hundred men, leapt to their deaths from the cliffs to avoid capture.

Anglophilia continued in fluctuating degrees through subsequent reigns. King Kalākaua, for instance, known as the ‘Merrie Monarch’ – an appellation summoning the most unabashed associations of British royalism and cultural revivalism – bolstered royal Hawaiian splendour in expensively European style during the 1870s and 1880s. At the same time, he encouraged a resurgence of traditional Hawaiian arts and crafts, including those, such as hula, which had been suppressed as heathenism under his predecessors. His absence from the present exhibition is therefore of particular note; the more so, as he too visited Britain, as did his sister, the future Queen Lili‘uokalani. But the narrowed focus is understandable: the Hawaiian collection at the British Museum most impressively comprises material dating to earlier decades.

The predominantly white landowners who increasingly permeated Hawaiian government were subjects of the Hawaiian crown, citizens of the Kingdom. Many were descendants of missionaries or other early visitors who had stayed. Hawai‘i does not fit most people’s idea of a colonial history. Its story presents a version of ‘settler colonialism’; it was colonised from within by Hawaiian subjects of foreign, mainly American descent, with a distaste for monarchy, substantial business interests and allegiances elsewhere. In the 1880s King Kalākaua was persuaded to offer exclusive use of Pearl Harbor to the US Navy in return for the continuation of preferential rates in the trade of Hawaiian sugar; in 1887, in the interval between that agreement and its ratification, he was forced in the presence of armed riflemen to sign the ‘Bayonet Constitution’. Among reforms that post-Cromwellian Britons might well approve, limiting absolute monarchical power, this enforced constitution also effectively denied suffrage to the majority of the Hawaiian population and explicitly withdrew it from Asian immigrants. And the direction of travel was becoming unmistakable. Kalākaua’s successor, Queen Lili‘uokalani, who evokes associations more with the Martyr Charles I than with ‘merrie’ Charles II, was ultimately placed under house arrest in a coup which allowed the pro-American element to form first a Provisional Government, then a Republic, moving for annexation by the USA – in which endeavour they were at first rebuffed on grounds of evident illegality, but eventually succeeded. In 1898 Hawai‘i became an overseas US territory.

The later and better-known fortunes of Pearl Harbor – the more famous chapter of the same history – was symbolically and materially important in making Hawai‘i into a sufficiently central part of American identity to become the fiftieth state in 1959. One can see all the kitsch Americana-Hawaiiana of that period, with its military themes and slightly desperate insistence on the fantasy of ‘aloha’, as part of the same process. It continues. But none of this, thankfully, important as it is, forms any part of the British Museum’s exhibition. With Britain as a point of reference and connection, in this case it is the Kingdom of Hawai‘i we are invited to envision, another united kingdom in its century of sovereignty – its cultural mixedness, breakneck development, losses, continuities and revivals; the idea of it.

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Cover image details: Display of Akua hulu manu (feathered gods) © The Trustees of the British Museum, Photo by MKH

Alex Wong is a poet and literary critic based in London, where he was born, although he lived for substantial portions of his childhood in Hawai‘i. His two collections of poetry are Poems Without Irony (2016) and Shadow and Refrain (2021). As a critic he has also edited and introduced the work of several Victorian writers for Carcanet Classics, most recently Alice Meynell. 

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