About The Polynesian

The Polynesian

The Polynesian was a four-to-eight-page weekly newspaper published in Honolulu, in English with some Hawaiian, in two distinct periods: from June 6, 1840, to December 11, 1841, and from May 18, 1844, to February 6, 1864. From 1845 to 1861 it was the official publication of the government of the Hawaiian Kingdom, publishing enacted legislation and the policies of Kings Kamehameha III and Kamehameha IV. It was the leading newspaper on Oahu in the mid-1800s and one of the earliest English-language newspapers in the Hawaiian Islands.

The paper was founded by James Jackson Jarves, a Boston-born editor who later became famous as an art collector in Florence, Italy. Jarves ran the Polynesian in both of its incarnations' early phases, first as a private venture supported by missionary funds, advertising, and subscriptions, and then, after the Hawaiian government bought the paper and its press in 1845, as the Kingdom's official journal. After Jarves left Hawai'i in 1848, the paper passed to his printer Charles Gordon Hopkins and then to Abraham Fornander, a Swedish-born journalist who had once run an opposition paper against the Polynesian before editing it, buying it in 1861, and issuing its last edition in 1864.

Because it spoke for the Hawaiian Kingdom during the decades when the Kingdom was writing constitutions, dividing land in the Great Mahele, and negotiating with expanding foreign powers, the Polynesian is a primary record of nineteenth-century Hawai'i. Its pages mixed the official and the everyday: copies of enacted legislation alongside local and international news, business and shipping intelligence, police reports, editorials, and fiction, with its length in any week depending on how much news there was to print.

James Jackson Jarves and the first Polynesian, 1840–1841

James Jackson Jarves (August 20, 1818 – June 28, 1888) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Deming Jarves, an inventor and glass manufacturer. After attending Chauncy Hall School in Boston, Jarves was disabled at age 15 by a strange disease; though he recovered, he sought warmer climates, traveling to South America and Hawai'i in 1837. In Hawai'i he tried journalism and silkworm husbandry. He married Elizabeth Russell Swain in Boston in 1838 and returned to Hawai'i in 1839, again attempting a commercial silkworm venture.

On June 6, 1840, Jarves printed the first issue of The Polynesian, one of the first Hawaiian newspapers in English. He ran it with funds from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, advertisements, and subscriptions. Written for Honolulu's foreign residents, it was among the first Hawaiian newspapers to feature puff pieces that were barely disguised advertising. The venture was not profitable, and Jarves closed it after the issue of December 11, 1841. During a return to the United States he published his History of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands in 1843, embracing the islands' antiquities, mythology, legends, and civil, religious, and political history, together with Scenes and Scenery in the Sandwich Islands, drawn from his notebooks of 1837 to 1842.

Relaunch and purchase by the Hawaiian Kingdom

Jarves restarted The Polynesian on May 18, 1844, positioning it as impartial, and was appointed Director of the Government Press. In 1845 the Hawaiian Government bought a printing press and The Polynesian itself. King Kamehameha III commissioned the paper as the Official Journal of the Hawaiian Government, a status it held until 1861. As such, it published copies of enacted legislation as well as the policies of Kamehameha III and his successor, Kamehameha IV, while continuing to feature local and international news, business and shipping news, police reports, editorials, and fiction.

Despite being the mouthpiece of the Hawaiian government, Jarves had a pro-American editorial bias. Land ownership was a pressing concern for him: he believed that private land rights were needed to bring capital investment to Hawai'i, and stressed, with others, that private property rights were a hallmark of civilized nations. He promoted Christianity and Western culture as superior, backed the Great Mahele—the division of Hawaiian lands enacted in 1848—and endorsed English as the language of instruction in schools. The Polynesian thus documented, and helped to advance, the westernization of the Kingdom whose laws it printed.

Jarves's wider career

Jarves's service to the Kingdom extended beyond the press. As an agent for the Hawaiian Government in 1846, he placed an order for 100,000 keneta, a copper coin equivalent to the United States large cent. The coins were a spectacular failure, no more were minted, and the coin was ultimately removed from legal tender status in 1884. He was also sued unsuccessfully for libel by P. A. Brinsmade, the United States Consul to the Sandwich Islands and a principal of Ladd & Co. Jarves was made an honorary Hawaiian citizen and was awarded the Order of Kamehameha I for his diplomatic services to Hawaii while empires fought to control it.

In 1848 Jarves left his government position and Hawai'i, moving to California to engage in land speculation and to negotiate treaties for the island kingdom. His land ventures failed, and after reuniting with his family in Boston he moved briefly to Paris and then, in 1851, to Florence, Italy, where he served as United States vice-consul and began collecting medieval Italian art with the aid of his father's fortune. In 1871 Yale University purchased 119 of his early Italian paintings, spanning the tenth to seventeenth centuries, for about $22,000 after Jarves defaulted on a loan for which the collection was collateral—a transaction that made the Jarves collection a foundation of Yale's art gallery. The King of Italy appointed him Cavaliere della Corona d'Italia for his contribution to Italian art. Jarves died of jaundice in 1888 and is buried in the English Cemetery in Rome; Edith Wharton later drew upon his well-known misfortunes in her novella False Dawn.

Charles Gordon Hopkins and the middle years

When Jarves left Hawai'i in 1848, his printer Charles Gordon Hopkins became editor of The Polynesian, editing it from 1848 to 1849 and again from 1855 to 1860. Edwin Oscar Hall also served as editor-in-chief during the paper's government years. The University of Hawai'i at Manoa's account for the Library of Congress describes a paper that remained, throughout these changes, the Kingdom's official printer of laws and notices—dated 1844 to 1860 in that account, and 1845 to 1861 in the paper's standard bibliographic summary.

The Polynesian also figured in the training of Hawai'i's next generation of publishers. Henry Martyn Whitney, who would found the Pacific Commercial Advertiser in 1856 and Ka Nupepa Kuokoa in 1861, served as business manager of The Polynesian after working as head printer at the government printing plant. The government paper that Jarves had built thus stood at the center of Honolulu journalism even as independent competitors multiplied around it: The Friend, begun by the Reverend Samuel Chenery Damon in 1843, and the Honolulu Times (1849–1851) of Henry L. Sheldon, which opposed the influence of American Protestants.

Abraham Fornander: opponent turned owner

Abraham Fornander (November 4, 1812 – November 1, 1887) was a Swedish-born emigrant who became an important journalist, judge, and ethnologist in Hawai'i. Educated under his father, a clergyman, and at gymnasium in Kalmar, he studied theology at Uppsala and Lund before family hardship ended his studies. After going to sea as a whaler, he deserted ship in Hawai'i in 1844 and spent the remainder of his life in the islands, apart from a brief time in the California gold fields. The English physician Thomas Charles Byde Rooke hired him as a coffee planter in Nu'uanu, Oahu, and in 1847 as his land surveyor. On January 19, 1847, Fornander became a citizen of the Kingdom of Hawaii, taking an oath of allegiance to Kamehameha III, and that year married Pinao Alanakapu, a Hawaiian chiefess of Molokai.

Beginning in 1849, as Hawai'i considered constitutional change, Fornander wrote for an upstart paper, the Weekly Argus, which he eventually took over, publishing it from 1851 to 1853 and, as the New Era and Weekly Argus, from 1853 to 1855. His objective in the Argus was to provide a voice against the government's Polynesian, advocating responsible government, improvements to public education, and reform. When the paper failed in 1855, he launched the Sandwich Islands Monthly, which survived less than a year. Fornander then went to work for his former rival, editing The Polynesian—he is listed as its editor from 1850 to 1855 in overlapping accounts and as its editor until its demise after buying it in 1861. A recurring theme in his writing was concern for the status and condition of Native Hawaiians, a sympathy that set him apart from the missionary establishment: as editor of The Polynesian he observed, in the debate over Hawaiian-language publishing, that Native Hawaiians repudiated a foreign publisher's proposed journal because they feared it would not be a true reflection of their own opinions and thoughts.

Final years and closure in 1864

Fornander bought The Polynesian in 1861, the year its status as the government's official publication ended. The venture proved not to be profitable, and the paper published its last edition on February 6, 1864. Its closure ended a publication history that, with the 1841–1844 interruption, spanned nearly 24 years and the reigns of Kamehameha III, Kamehameha IV, and the first months of Kamehameha V.

Fornander's own career continued upward. In late 1863 the new king, Kamehameha V, appointed him to the nation's privy council; in May 1864 he was made a judge, and in March 1865 Inspector General of Schools for the entire kingdom, pursuing a non-sectarian school system, improved education for girls, and improved teaching of English before missionary opposition forced his replacement in 1870. He later returned to the circuit court and devoted himself to the Hawaiian history and folklore for which he is now best known, including An Account of the Polynesian Race and the Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folklore published by the Bishop Museum.

Honolulu's early English-language press

The Polynesian did not appear in isolation. The Sandwich Island Gazette and Journal of Commerce (1836–1839), aimed at the foreigners living in Hawai'i, was the first newspaper in the islands to contain advertising; it championed freedom of the press, discussed the declining Native Hawaiian population, and supported freedom of religion for Roman Catholics. The Sandwich Island Mirror and Commercial Gazette (1839–1841) was supported by American businessmen. These early English-language papers were commercial ventures, published by businessmen to promote their economic and political ideas, in contrast to the Hawaiian-language missionary papers produced at Lahainaluna.

Within that small world, the Polynesian occupied the government position. Some English-language papers supported Protestant Christianity, while others, notably the Honolulu Times, opposed the influence of American Protestants, as did the earlier business-community papers. The Polynesian's official status from the mid-1840s gave it a stability its commercial rivals lacked, even as its editors quarreled with the missionary establishment over land, language, and the direction of the Kingdom.

Legacy and archives

The Polynesian is documented for researchers by the University of Hawaii at Manoa through the Library of Congress Chronicling America program, which holds its issues as part of the national record of historic American newspapers. Students of Hawaiian history encounter it as the official voice of the Kingdom in its formative constitutional decades: the paper that printed the laws of the Mahele era, argued for private property and English schooling, and carried Honolulu's shipping, police, and commercial news to the foreign residents who were reshaping the islands.

Its editors' afterlives measure its importance. Jarves carried the habits of a Honolulu editor into a second career that reshaped American art collecting. Fornander carried the Polynesian's printing office experience into the judiciary, the schools inspectorate, and the ethnological work that preserved Hawaiian tradition. Between them, the government weekly they successively ran remains one of the essential printed sources for the Hawaiian Kingdom between 1840 and 1864.