Wildlife and Sovereignty Conservation on Hawaii’s Desert Islands,...

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Wildlife and Sovereignty Conservation on Hawaii’s Desert Islands, 1898-1911

Paul Kreitman

Columbia University

Shortly after Annexation, American ornithologists, naval officers and administrators

began a campaign to repel Japanese "bird pirates" from Hawaii's desert islands. The

campaign was waged at a number of levels: through the law courts, diplomatic

channels between Washington and Tokyo, and direct interdiction of bird hunters by

the U.S. naval and customs vessels. The campaigners were motivated by a number of

things: concern for the welfare of the birds themselves, but also racial angst about

Japanese trans-Pacific migration, as well as the desire to defend American sovereignty

over islands that might have value as telegraph cable landing stations. The campaign

culminated with President Theodore Roosevelt's executive order establishing the

Hawaiian Islands Reservation, after which American naturalists set about

transforming Hawaii's desert islands from sites of commodity extraction to

uninhabited (but still sovereign) wilderness. Today these islands form the nucleus of

the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, which with an area of 583,000

square miles constitutes the world's third largest nature reserve.

Dear Georgetown International History Seminar participants,

Firstly, my apologies for inflicting such a lengthy piece of prose on you all. The chapter

I present for discussion forms part of my monograph manuscript, which is provisionally titled

Japan’s Desert Islands: the political ecology of sovereignty. In a mostly Japan-centric book

this chapter is something of a geographic outlier, focusing as it does on islands that are now

part of the US state of Hawaii. Structurally, it forms the beginning of the second half of the

book. Whereas the first three chapters explored how people have tried to assert sovereignty

over desert islands by colonizing them, the remaining three develop the idea of nature

conservation as a way of producing/reproducing sovereignty through the ‘non-colonial’

means of nature conservation. I thank you in advance for your time and attention, and look

forward to your comments.


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Let us return to the North Pacific in the summer of 1902, where a gang of American guano

prospectors confronted marines of the Imperial Japanese Navy on the tiny island of Marcus/

Minami Torishima. (See Fig. 4.1) Numbered among the American landing party were two

scientists. There was the chemist, Sedgwick, whose job was to translate the island’s birdshit

into commercially promising guano reserves.1 And there was an ornithologist affiliated with

Honolulu’s Bishop Museum of Natural History, who regarded the Japanese slaughter of

Marcus’s albatrosses with unvarnished horror:

The story of the Marcus Island colony of goonies is one of death and extermination…. The long wing feathers of all the birds were pulled out [by the Japanese hunters] and carefully preserved to be shipped to America and Europe and sold as “eagle feathers”, which were in great demand for trimming on ladies’ hats. The feathers from the breast were plucked off and sold by the pound. A profitable business was thus developed, with the deplorable result that within six years the entire colony of these splendid birds has been exterminated.2

The ornithologist was named William Allison Bryan, and he could not quite believe that

Marcus Island, once American territory, had been lost to the Empire of Japan. Later he would

recall how, during the week he spent on the island along with Sedgwick they had noticed that “a

single great “Northwest” log had gone ashore and been driven a considerable distance inland…

We regarded this bit of silent evidence as indicating the natural relation existing between the

American continent and this all but lost island, and looked upon it as a fore-runner of the ultimate

annexation of Marcus by the United States.” Even if half in jest, it is a bizarre claim to make. In

part, surely, Bryan was using the log as a metaphor for his own long journey across the Pacific:

from the mainland U.S.A. to Hawaii, and from there to godforsaken Marcus Island. To the two

Americans stumping around the island, the one prospecting for guano he suspected he would

never get the chance to mine, the other forlornly cataloguing “splendid birds” that were being

wiped out before his eyes, the tree might also have offered a morsel of comfort. The metaphor of

the destiny-driven log helped Bryan and his compatriot to compensate for their own sense of

frustration, and allowed them to seek solace in the fact that, whatever setbacks the Americans

faced, Nature was on their side after all. 1 “Minami Torishima jiken no kaiketsu” Asahi Shimbun, 6 September 1902.2 William Alanson Bryan, “A Monograph of Marcus Island: An Account of Its Physical Features and Geology, With Descriptions of the Fauna and Flora,” Occasional Papers of the Bernice Pauhi Bishop Museum II, no. 1 (1904), 106.


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Bryan was wrong about Marcus Island, which to this day remains Japanese sovereign

territory. But as if to compensate for this, in the following decade he would become a key

figure in a campaign to repel Japanese bird hunters from the many uninhabited islands dotted

across the North Pacific that were, as he understood it, sovereign territory of the United

States. This chapter is in large part his story.

Race, Nature & Sovereignty in the post-1898 Pacific

A devout Quaker sired in the nation's heartland, William Alanson Bryan trained in zoology at

Iowa State College before arriving in Honolulu in 1900 to take up an appointment as resident

taxidermist at the Bishop Museum of Natural History, as well as “Special Inspector, Birds and

Animals” - deputized by Roosevelt himself no less.3.4 Immediately upon arrival, he threw

himself into the public life of America’s new colony. At the Bishop Museum, he used the latest

taxidermic methods, “the same used with such capital success in South Kensington, New York

and other great museums,” to stage elaborate dioramas of native Hawaiian birds mounted against

“their natural surroundings.”5 He also worked with the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association to

introduce pest-eating bird species to plantations, and established a Pacific Science Institution,

under whose auspices he would hopscotch the Pacific, even travelling as far as Easter Island to

investigate its potential as a sheep ranch.6 In 1914 he even ran for the Hawaiian governorship.7

Bryan belonged to the wave of Americans who descended on Hawaii in the wake of Annexation

in 1898. Along with the administrators, and the naval officers who began work on a new base at

3 NARA-II MD, Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations: Interior Secretary to Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1 December 1904. The Bishop Museum had been established by the banker Charles Bishop in 1889 in memory of his late wife Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the last legal heir of the Kamehameha Dynasty. The museum's founding mandate was "to preserve and exhibit to all who care to look relics of her people and the kindred races of the Pacific Ocean".4 pearson, national life and character5 . William T. Brigham, Director’s Report for 1902 (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1903), 7.6 . UHM William Alanson Bryan Collection, Bryan misc correspondence: Brigham to Bryan, 25 January 1909; Bryan misc correspondence: HSPA Assistant Secretary to Bryan, 9 December 1914; NARA-II MD, Territories Office, Hawaii, Education: “Pacific Science Institution”.7 . UHM William Alanson Bryan Collection, Bryan scrapbook 1912-: “Professor Bryan Home: Confident of Chances for Governorship”; “Pinkham Next Governor of Hawaii: Nomination Made by President Wilson Receives the Approval of the Senate”.


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Pearl Harbor, came a host of taxonomical baggers: ethnographers and naturalists who sought both

to catalogue to steward the natural riches of the new U..S. Territory.

The new arrivals brought with them to Hawaii a stew of late nineteenth century

preconceptions about racial and civilizational conflict on the world stage. Take Theodore

Roosevelt, who probably did more than any other American of his generation to shape U.S.

foreign policy. Roosevelt was, like many American geopoliticians at the time, acutely aware that

American power in the Pacific was acutely over-extended. During the Spanish American War of

1898 the United States had seized Guam and the Philippines (as well as annexing Hawaii). But

now its army was bogged down fighting a a counter-insurgency against Filipino nationalists, and

delays in the construction of the Panama Canal meant that its navy was hampered in its access to

the Pacific. And Roosevelt was preoccupied by the thought that white settler societies risked

being overwhelmed by migration from the populous Asiatic nations.

Japan in particular was a particular object of concern, for it appeared to have growing

military as well as demographic clout. In 1895 the country had surprised international observers

by defeating neighbouring, far larger Qing China in a naval war, and in 1905 it would pull off the

even more shocking feat of beating Tsarist Russia too. In 1898 had Roosevelt argued for

Hawaiian Annexation by emphasising the strategic threat posed by Japanese migration to the

islands After he helped to broker Japan’s peace with Russia, he would worry privately that it

“might get the 'big head' and enter into a general career of insolence and aggression." Moreover,

Japanese immigration to the continental U.S., much of it routed through Hawaii, led to a

nativist backlash that in turn morphed into a major diplomatic crisis for Roosevelt. When the

San Francisco Board of Education attempted to segregate the city’s schools, Roosevelt found

himself caught between anti-immigrant sentiment on the West Coast and a Japanese government

determined that its citizens not be targeted for exclusion as the same way that Chinese

immigrants had been in 1881. The dispute was eventually defused in 1907 via the face-saving

Gentleman’s Agreement, whereby Japan took upon itself the task of restricting emigration to the

mainland U.S. rather than submit to the indignity of an explicit immigration ban. But at one point

Roosevelt felt relations to be so tense that he instructed the Navy to begin wargaming a possible

conflict, and despatched the U.S. fleet on a round-the-world voyage via the Pacific, hoping to

display American military might for the benefit of Japan audiences.

At the same time as worrying about a brewing racial clash in the Pacific, Roosevelt was a


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quintessential Progressive in his burgeoning concern for issues of sustainability and nature

conservation: in 1905 he appointed Gifford Pinchot as the first chief of the Forest Service, and in

1908 he organised the first ever Governors' Conference on the Conservation of Natural

Resources.8.9 Both Roosevelt and Bryan conceived of nature not just as a material resource (for

instance timber or farmland) but also as an aesthetic, indeed spiritual one. The cult of wilderness

was reaching its zenith in the United States at the time. Turner’s Frontier Thesis had famously

argued that the dialectic between (white) civilization and wilderness was the vital source of the

American democratic spirit.10 As Karl Jacoby writes, “American [national] parks...in the closing

decades of the nineteenth century underwent an abrupt transformation from obscure locales to

popular tourist destinations”.11

The strength of yearning to capture wilderness varied in almost direct proportion to the

vividness with which wilderness was perceived to be vanishing. Thus did the millionaire William

Hornaday pour considerable resources into preserving the last remaining wild American bison .12

Alongside with the bison, the plight of the passenger pigeon, whose population plummeted from

an estimated two billion in the 1870s to extinction by the 1900s, galvanised bird conservationists

in particular.13 At the same time, Audubon societies sprung up across the nation, whose members

pledged not only to “refrain from wearing the feathers of any birds not killed for purposes of

food” - but also to discourage their friends and also servants from doing likewise.14

Understandably, conservationists were keen to communicate their message to the wider public in

order to galvanise support for their efforts. The Audubon Society successfully campaigned for a

new “Bird Day” to be integrated into the school curricula of several states.15 And Hornaday

sought to exhibit his bison either in his newly established Bronx Zoo or, failing that, by

taxidermising them for display in museums.16

8 . Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature. Kindle location 214, 4272, 4285; HSA Frear President: Presidential Secretary to Frear, 6 February 1908.9 . Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Worster, Nature’s Economy. Kindle location 4286 .10 turner ref also cronon11 Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature, Kindle location 115.12 Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts. Kindle location 2504.13 . Joel Greenberg, A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction (Bloomsbury USA, 2014)14 . Ibid., 31, 96-97; Jennifer Price, Flight Maps CH.2 REF15 Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation, 31-32.16 Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts. Kindle location 2504.


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Attitudes towards nature conservation and race, empire and geopolitics were in fact

deeply intermingled. A great deal of this intense interest in wilderness felt by wealthy white men

stemmed from sublimated socio-economic anxieties, not least about immigration.17 As William

Cronon has shown, to render something as wilderness has often in practice involved designating

it for aesthetic or scientific consumption - in practice, usually by affluent white men such as

Roosevelt or Bryan.18 Indeed wilderness almost by definition was conceived of as a pristine

landscape empty of all people. As such the cult of wilderness legitimated expelling people from

land in the name of nature conservation. Immigrant groups were the especial targets of nature

conservation campaigns.19 Across the continental United States bird conservationists waged

campaigns to criminalise Hispanics and Italian immigrants for engaging in their customary

hunting behavior.20 Even indigenous groups were not safe. Native Americans were frequently

evicted from newly-created national parkland for failing to adhere to the requisite tropes of noble

savagery.21 Wilderness was the preserve of whiteness.

Armed with such attitudes, the American colonizers arrived in Hawaii to encounter a

multi-racial society unlike anything they would have known back home. According to the census

of 1900, whites comprised about twenty per cent of the population, roughly equal in number to

native Hawaiians. The colonisers regarded “aboriginal society” with a mix of curiosity and

condescension, assuming them destined for either extinction of assimilation “when brought into

contact with an advanced social order.”22 (One of Bryan's early tasks at the Bishop Museum was

to compose a diorama from a series of casts taken of natives, “to illustrate the most important

or characteristic employments of old Hawaiians.”23) Far more threatening were the Japanese

17 Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness.”; Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936,” Social Text 11 (1984); Gray Brechin, “Conserving the Race: Natural Aristocracies, Eugenics, and the U.S. Conservation Movement,” Antipode 28(1996)18 barrow, passion for birds, cronon, trouble with wilderness, haraway, teddy bear patriarchy19 Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness.”; Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936,” Social Text 11 (1984); Gray Brechin, “Conserving the Race: Natural Aristocracies, Eugenics, and the U.S. Conservation Movement,” Antipode 28(1996)20 Louis S. Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (Yale University Press, 1994)21 Jacoby REF CHECK THIS22 Coman, The History of Contract Labor in the Hawaiian Islands, 1-2 For the myth of the fatal impact see Howe, Nature, Culture, and History, 43-44.23 William T. Brigham, Director’s Report for 1902 (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1903)


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plantation laborers who had since the 1880s been recruited en masse to work in Hawaii’s

booming sugar industry, and who by 1900 constituted a plurality (forty per cent) of the total

population.24 And it wasn’t just the demographic strength of the Japanese that was alarming. U.S.

Annexation had profoundly destabilised the political economy of labor in the Hawaiian

archipelago. Until 1898, the Hawaiian legal code’s support for indentured labor (shirkers could

and were punished in the courts) had kept Japanese immigrants confined to the plantations.25 But

the 1900 Organic Act that established the Territory of the Hawaii had abolished indenture and

guaranteed workers the right to unionise. With their indentures invalidated, Japanese workers

could now leave their plantations and take up alternative work elsewhere, soon making inroads

into areas of the economy formerly dominated by whites and native Hawaiians, such as

construction, stevedoring and fishing.26 Some also worked as domestic servants: Bryan and his

wife employed a Japanese maid in their own household.27 The Organic Act also unleashed a wave

of strike activity on sugar plantations across Hawaii. On 14 June, the day the Act passed,

Japanese laborers marched through downtown Honolulu, chanting “We are free people!”28

Throughout the summer of 1900, Japanese cane cutters staged strikes and work stoppages at

plantations across Hawaii, calling for shorter working hours, increased wages, and more Japanese

promoted to positions as overseers.29 A decade of industrial unrest ensued, culminating in a

6-7. "The care and skill Mr. Bryan has shown in this work will give pleasure to many visitors in future years, and without the important accessories he has furnished, the admirable casts would be almost useless for the purpose intended - to illustrate the most important or characteristic employments of old Hawaiians."24 . US Census 1900; Ibid., 52.25 takaki pau hana. For the unusually close working relationship between the Japanese consulate and the Hawaiian Board of Immigration, see Morgan REF26 . Moriyama, Imingaisha, 137; Manko Ogawa, Sea of Opportunity, Ch.227 REF Bryan collection photo album28 . Takaki, Pau Hana, 148-149.29 . An American economist surveying the Hawaiian labor market noted that “Of the 22 strikes recorded by the United States labor commissioner for 1900, 20 were undertaken by plantation laborers, all of them Japanese. The causes given throw a good deal of light on the aspirations of the inscrutable Jap: 'for discharge of overseer'; 'for increase of wages, increase of water-supply at dwellings, payment of damages for injuries received by an employee, and against retention of part of wages withheld in accordance with original contracts'; 'against being compelled to work regular hours'; 'for increase of wages from $17.50 to $26' per month'; 'for reinstatement of discharged employee'; 'for employment of Japanese instead of white overseer'; 'against the task system'; 'against being compelled to work on holidays'. This sudden advent of full-blown trade unionism took the planters by surprise." Katharine Coman, The History of Contract Labor in the Hawaiian Islands (Macmillan, 1903), 47-8.


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general strike of Japanese cane-cutters that managed to shut down every sugar plantation on

Oahu.30.31

All this helped give rise to a pervasive sense of unease that America’s new colony was in

danger of being over-run by Oriental hordes.32 Journalists seized on the fact that some strikers

were using phrases like “Yamato spirit” as rallying calls as evidence of a racial conspiracy. One

Honolulu-based solicitor wrote to the State Department warning that “things are not very steady

here owing to the labor situation, Japanese trouble and other minor things… Since the [Russo-

Japanese] war they have gotten the swell head and are literally trying to run things out here.”33

Some theories verged on the conspiratorial. The head of the USDA’s Hawaiian agricultural

station wrote to Roosevelt claiming that “the unrest among these people in Hawaii was caused

and is being fomented and encouraged by official representatives of the Japanese Government

who have been sent to Hawaii for that purpose…34”

The Hawaiian authorities reacted to the newly assertive Japanese presence in Hawaii in a

number of ways. Honolulu municipality forbade contractors from employing “Asiatic labor” on

road repair crews, and in 1902 the Territorial Government announced that “aliens must pay duty

of one cent per pound on fish caught in sea waters off Hawaii;”35 a raft of other laws targeted

Japanese fishermen at the local level.36 The Territorial Government also made a game attempt to

transform Hawaii from a society of large plantations reliant on oriental labor to one populated by

(white) Jeffersonian homesteaders. Hoping “to offset the large percentage of Japanese laborers

now within the Territory by a desirable class of Europeans eligible for citizenship,” the Board

of Immigration despatched agents to scoured the more impoverished corners of the Old World,

enticing emigrants with subsidized passage and land grants on arrival.37 For their part, sugar

planters fought back against the militancy of the cane-cutters’ unions by recruiting workers from

Korea and the Philippines, trying (with mixed success) to undermine worker solidarity through

30 REF takaki31 . Takaki, Pau Hana, 150-151.32 . Hawaiian Star, “Trouble Threatened on Maui”, 1905.33 . NARA-II MD, State Dept 1906-10, Japanese Immigration Crisis: H.R. Castle to W.S. Rossiter, 5th December 1906.34 . NARA-II MD, Territories Office, Hawaii, Labor, Jared G. Smith to Wilson, 29 January 1909.35 . Moriyama, Imingaisha, 145. See also Ogawa, Sea of Opportunity, 56-5736 . Ogawa Manako, “Hawai ni okeru Nihonjin no gyosangyō kaitakushi: 1900-nen kara 1920-nendai made o chūshin ni,” Ritsumeikan gogen bunka kenkyū 21, no. 4.37 . HSA Governor Frear, Territorial - Immigration 1907-1909: “Immigration”.


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racial diversification.38

Bryan, too, could not help but be aware of the Japanese presence in Hawaii. In 1902 the

director of the Bishop Museum noted with alarm the uptick in Japanese plantation workers

visiting the museum.39 Concerned that "the lawless element of the community is increasing", the

museum began placing exhibits in glass cases for protection, including Bryan’s elaborate

dioramas of stuffed birds.40 Bryan, who employed a Japanese maidservant in his own household,

was anxious enough about the Japanese presence in Hawaii to write a lecture on the “world

crisis” engendered by “the collision of races…evenly matched” in the Pacific.41 Integration

offered no solution, for as a keen eugenicist Bryan believed that miscegenation between whites

and Japanese would result in offspring “apt to be physically inferior to the average of either

parent stock”. Indeed, “the preventing of contact of this character is only practicable when

measures are taken to prevent the people of one race entering the territory of the other for

economic reasons.”42

From Marcus to Midway: Strategy and Sovereignty

It was against this backdrop, of mounting anxiety of a Japanese racial threat in the Pacific,

that Bryan joined Captain Rosehill’s expedition to Marcus Island. The trip had a profound

impact on him. As well as his visceral horror at the destruction of the island’s bird-life, the whole

expedition was suffused with the frisson of colonial rivalry. He would later describe the landing

on Marcus as “the most exciting experience of my life”, and recounted his disappointment that

“when our little company of ocean-tossed explorers reached the island we had always called our

own, it was to find the Japanese flag boldly flying over the tree tops from a pole a hundred feet

high… and a band of half-dressed coolies scurried about like crabs on the beach. It was obvious

that we were both anticipated and expected.”43

38 Takaki, Pau Hana, 161-163. As Takaki describes, this strategy was only temporarily effective. Within just over a decade Japanese and Filipino labor organizers succeeded in coordinating an inter-ethnic strike among cane-cutters.39 . William T. Brigham, Director’s Report for 1901 (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1902), 9-10.40 . Brigham, Director’s Report for 1902, 10.41 UH Manoa William Alanson Bryan Collection, “Race Contact” [m.s.] 19 May 191142 . Ibid.43 . BM William Alanson Bryan collection: William Alanson Bryan, “America’s Lost Possessions” [m.s.]


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Despite the initial failure of Rosehill’s attempt to reclaim Marcus, Bryan was initially

confident that the island would eventually be restored to American sovereignty.44 After returning

to Honolulu, Bryan lent his support to Rosehill’s campaign to have the U.S. government

intercede with Tokyo on his behalf, for instance petitioning Governor Dole to raise the issue with

Washington.45 But as the suit ground on, Bryan’s confidence in a favorable outcome waned. In

late 1903, when the State Department rejected Rosehill’s claim decisively, Marcus Island now

morphed into a symbol of crumbling American sovereignty in the Pacific.46 In an essay on

“America’s Lost Possessions” Bryan wrote that “what happened at Marcus Island is part of the

same story told of [guano islands such as] Palmyra and Jarvis and Baker. All of them were

American possessions once.”47

In this new, more pessimistic mood, Bryan’s attention shifted to America’s other

deserted islands in the Pacific - islands that, he fretted, were also in danger of being lost to

Japanese encroachment. Of particular concern were the outlying Northwest Hawaiian Islands,

an archipelago some six days sail from Honolulu, two weeks from Marcus Island, and

another three days further from mainland Japan. None of the islands have ever had any

history of prolonged human habitation. Nihoa, the closest to the main Hawaiian group, had

once been inhabited, but had been abandoned before the arrival of Captain Cook.

Neighboring Necker, suggests Cleghorn, “was not permanently inhabited but visited for short

term stays related to religious ritual linked to the harvesting of birds and bird eggs on the

island.”48 (Just as the belles of the belle époque sallied into the salons of Paris adorned with

“eagle feathers”, Hawaiian kings went into battle wearing “magnificent cloaks, woven of a

mass of bright but tiny feathers into something like a variegated velvet…”49 In the early 19th

44 . Ibid., 82.45 . BM William Alanson Bryan collection: Dole to Bryan, 19 September [n.d.]; WANT CABLE AT MARCUS ISLAND REF46 MOFA 3.5.8.2 ‘Middouee’-jima kaichō hokaku kinshi: “Consul Saito Disputes Marcus Island Story”. CHECK REF47 . BM William Alanson Bryan collection: William Alanson Bryan, “America’s Lost Possessions” [m.s.]48 Paul L. Cleghorn, “The Settlement and Abandonment of Two Hawaiian Outposts: Nihoa and Necker Islands,” Occasional Papers of the Bernice Pauhi Bishop Museum (1988), 47.49 Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire, 74-76. Thomas describes how feathers “were highly valued across the Pacific. Never more than mere decorations, in much of Polynesia they were closely connected with divinity, sacredness and divine genealogies...In Hawaii, featherwork of all sorts was elaborated to a greater extent than


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century the Northwest Hawaiian Islands’ abundant colonies of birds and turtles began to make

them attractive as resupply points for the whalers and trading vessels that began to criss-cross the

North Pacific.50 In 1857 King Kamehameha IV of Hawaii had annexed all of the islands,

hoping to cash in on the ongoing global guano rush discussed in Chapter Two. But few

subsequent attempts were made to mine the islands, even as other, less remote islands such as

Baker and Palmyra were worked between the 1850s and 1870s.51 At the time of Annexation the

islands were, with one notable exception, entirely uninhabited.

The first hint that Japanese bird hunters were operating on these islands dates to August

1900, when the Japanese consul in Honolulu wrote to Governor Sanford Dole enquiring whether

his government might lease them from the Territory of Hawaii so as “to secure permission or

right of fishing and bird-catching by the Japanese subjects.”52 Dole declined the request, citing

both “sentimental” and “commercial” reasons why the birds should be protected. By

“commercial”, Dole meant that the birds played an important role in replenishing guano deposits

on the island - a view that placed him outside the prevailing consensus at the time as most

geologists believed that bird faeces accumulated so slowly as to render guano effectively a non-

renewable resource. In fact, Dole was concerned less about the hunting of the birds per se than

about whom they were to be hunted by. As he argued to the US Secretary of the Interior, “If this

business of collecting bird skins is allowed should it not be limited to American citizens or at any

rate to the residents of the Hawaiian Islands?”53

anywhere else. Most strikingly, when kings went into battle, and on other occasions of ritual risk, they wore magnificent cloaks, woven of a mass of bright but tiny feathers into something like a variegated velvet...What is most telling about these cloaks is the sheer labour behind their production….Nowhere in Oceania, apart from here in Hawaii, could chiefly men and women, even of the very highest status, mobilize the labour of common people and appropriate their products to anything like this extent…. the cloaks suggest a system of corvee labour, on something nearer a Mayan or Egyptian scale.” REF See also SF museum exhibition on royal hawaiian leatherwork https://chaari.wordpress.com/2016/05/27/royal-hawaiian-featherwork-na-hulu-ali%CA%BBi/50 . Alexander G. Findlay, A Directory for the Navigation of the North Pacific Ocean With Descriptions of Its Coasts, Islands, Etc., From Panama to Behring Strait and Japan: Its Winds, Currents and Passages (London: R.H. Laurie, 1886), 1113.51 . Duffy Burnett, “The Edges of Empire and the Limits of Sovereignty: American Guano Islands.”; Gregory Rosenthal, “Life and Labor in a Seabird Colony: Hawaiian Guano Workers, 1857-70,” Environmental History 17(2012)52 . NARA-II MD, Territories Office, Hawaii, Dole to Interior Secretary 6 July 1903.53 NARA-II MD, Territories Office, Hawaii, Dole to Interior Secretary 6 July 1903. See Cushman REF on views of guano accumulation rates

https://chaari.wordpress.com/2016/05/27/royal-hawaiian-featherwork-na-hulu-ali%CA%BBi/

https://chaari.wordpress.com/2016/05/27/royal-hawaiian-featherwork-na-hulu-ali%CA%BBi/


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It so happened that around this time the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, along with the

islands of the North Pacific more generally, began attracting interest from other quarters as well.

Hawaiian Annexation had finally cleared the way for the attainment of one of Washington D.C.s

long-held strategic goals: the laying of a trans-Pacific telegraph cable. The prospect of a cable in

turn dramatically increased the strategic value of remote islands in the North Pacific (something

that Bryan made sure to to emphasize during his public campaign in support of Rosehill).54 A year

after Hawaiian Annexation, the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Equipment singled out Marcus Island in

particular as a potentially promising landing station. In 1900 Secretary of State Hay

commissioned a survey of U.S. insular possessions in the Pacific (most of them guano islands

which had either been abandoned or never even excavated) to see which could be used as landing

stations. This brought the activities of Japanese bird hunters into new focus. In 1901, the year

before Rosehill’s expedition, Mizutani’s got into an altercation with a visiting U.S. troop

transport, even attempting (unsuccessfully) to order its commanding officer off the island.

Another dispute broke out over Wake Island, roughly equidistant between Guam and Tokyo.

Wake had been claimed as U.S. territory in 1899, shortly after the invasion of the Philippines,

with the explicit aim of using the island as a cable landing station. In the summer of 1902 two

American ships noticed that a Japanese settlement had been established on the island, ostensibly

for the purposes of “gathering guano and drying fish”. This prompted a diplomatic exchange

between Washington and Tokyo in which the Japanese foreign minister insisted that his

government had “No claim whatever to make on the sovereignty of the island, but that if any

subjects are found on the island the Imperial Government expects that they should be properly

protected as long as they are engaged in peaceful occupations.”

While this statement certainly settled the question of which government exercised

territorial sovereignty over Wake, it was at the same time a fairly unambiguous assertion of

Japanese citizens’ right to inhabit the islands as long as they were engaged in “peaceable

occupations”. This was perfectly in line with Tokyo’s insistence, in the era before the

Gentleman’s Agreement, that Japanese nationals be permitted to migrate freely to Hawaii and to

the continental United States. The State Department did not object, and in any event Wake was

not selected as a cable station, so that was pretty much the end of the matter. Japanese hunters

continued to work on Wake: in January 1903 a Navy warship stopped at the island to find fifteen

54 REF


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men “engaged in the killing of birds for their feathers and sharks for their fins.”55

Matters played out differently on Midway Island, however. Midway lies near the western

extremity of the Northwest Hawaiian island group. Famously, it would later lend its name to one

of the pivotal naval battles of the Pacific War. But in 1903 it was known - if known at all - simply

as “the loneliest place on earth.”56 In 1859 the island had been annexed as an unincorporated

territory of the United States as part of a disastrous attempt to establish a mid-Pacific coaling

station.57 But since that failure, no attempt had been made to settle the island.58 Indeed the pre-

Annexation Hawaiian government seems to have been either unaware of or indifferent to the

American claim on Midway, and to have regarded the island as its own territory since 1857.59 In

1903 the Commercial Pacific Cable Company, with government backing, finally began laying the

telegraph cable between San Francisco and Manila, and selected Midway as a landing station.60 In

January 1903 President Roosevelt issued an executive order placing Midway Island under the

administration of the U.S. Navy in order to (as one newspaper put it) “guard against the invasion

of Japanese sailors”.61 When the cable landing party arrived at the island they discovered that,

55 . MOFA 3.5.2.8: Rear Admiral Evans to U.S. Ambassador, Tokyo, 6 January 1903. According to the captain, the men had been on the island for four months out of a total seven-month stint, and had amassed “about three thousand bird skins”. They claimed to be well supplied with food and tobacco, which would last them until they were due to be collected in a ship sent by their employer. One of the men was, however, suffering from beri-beri.56 . “Off To Midway” The Hawaiian Star, 23 April 1903.57 The Pacific Mail Company “intended forming a depot here for their Trans-Pacific steamers, in preference to Honolulu, which was thought to be under foreign influence, establishing here a coaling and refreshment station.”. But this project was abandoned in 1867, after a debacle in which a reef-breaking ship was itself shipwrecked and its crew had to be rescued. See Findlay, Navigation of the North Pacific, 1117; Jan Tenbruggencate, “Historic Hawai’i wreck found” Honolulu Advertiser, 18 October 2003. Last accessed 1 July 201558 . NARA-II MD Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations, Alexander to Dole, 28 August 1900.59 As evidenced by the fact that in 1894 it leased the island to the Pacific Guano Fertilizer Company. HSA M-476 Pacific Chemical Fertilizer Co., 43; NARA-II MD Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations, lease signed between J.A. King and the North Pacific Phosphate and Fertilizer Company, 24 February 1894.60 . Jonathan Reed Winkler, By Jonathan Reed Winkler - Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I: 1st (First) Edition (Harvard University Press, 2009), 146-147. “Pacific Ocean Cable: Hearing Before the House Committee on Commerce” Evening Star, 11 January 1902.; “Proposed Pacific Cable: Hearing Before the Senate Naval Affairs Committee” Evening Star, 14 January 1902.61 Daily public ledger., March 14, 1903. See also T.R. EO 199A. Such public lands as may exist on the Midway Islands, Hawaiian group, between the parallels of 28° 05′ and 28° 25′

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_Atoll


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sure enough, it was not quite so lonely after all. A crew of Japanese bird hunters had already been

established on the island for months, and “had practically denuded” the island of its albatrosses

and terns.62 For two months the bird hunters and the cable company staff resided together on the

island uneasily, but when Captain Rodman of the U.S.S Iroquois stopped at Midway two months

later, he promptly ordered the Japanese off the island, citing the risk that the birds’ decaying

bodies might contaminate the island’s water supply.63 The following year the U.S. Navy billeted

an attachment of twenty-five naval marines to Midway, to protect the cable company staff but

also to guard against poachers.64

The Lisianski Incident

It was encounters like these that began to stir awareness in Honolulu that Japanese bird hunters

were operating on the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. For instance, only a week after he had

evicted the Japanese bird hunters from Midway, Rodman discovered the same crew back at work

on neighboring Lisianski Island. He once again ordered the bird hunters to leave, and on his

return to Hawaii warned the Naval Department that “for the past several years, the Japanese have

been in the habit of visiting the various islands and slaughtering the bids in countless thousands.”

He also provided a particularly harrowing description of the suffering that the Japanese hunters

inflicted on the birds, one that would become a staple of future accounts. According to Rodman

the Japanese did not just butcher the birds, but did so in the most cruel ways, cutting off their

wings while they were still alive, or leaving them crippled to starve to death.65 Significantly,

Rodman then went on to advocate expelling Japanese bird hunters from all the islands of the

Northwest Hawaiian group. But Midway aside, the challenge of evicting Japanese hunters from

the rest of the islands was a daunting prospect. The islands stretched over thousands of square

miles, after all, and were otherwise almost entirely deserted.

North latitude and between the meridians of 177° 10′ and 177° 30′ West longitude, are hereby placed under the jurisdiction and control of the Navy Department. January 20, 1903. REF - check TR archival docs62 . “Exterminated Midway Island” The Hawaiian Star, 30 June 1903.63 . National Magazine Vol. XXI No.4 (January 1905) published by The Bostonian Publishing Co, Boston. Dr. Martin Cook, “Our Cable Station in Mid-Pacific” (385-97), 388-389.64 . “Iroquois Ordered to Midway: To Reach the Island About Middle of May” The Hawaiian Gazette, 20 March 1903.65 . NARA-II MD Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations: Rodman to Assistant Secretary of Navy, 1st July 1903.


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Rodman, however, found a willing ally in William Alanson Bryan, whose experience on

Marcus Island two years earlier must have still been fresh in his memory. Bryan wrote to the

State Department in support of Rodman’s campaign for bird protection.66 He also enlisted the

support of the American Ornithologists’ Union, whose chairman wrote to the Naval Secretary

begging him to “establish rules and regulations as will prevent the killing and taking of resident

birds [on Midway] for commercial purposes, and also to prevent the taking of the eggs of the

same birds during the breeding season.”67 These combined missives precipitated a flurry of

administrative activity, as different branches of government consulted each other as to what could

be done to prevent the Japanese “depredations”. The Navy ordered its “commanding officers in

Hawaiian waters...to give all the aid within their power with a view to suppress the destruction of

the birds”. Governor Dole petitioned the State Department to issue a “proclamation forbidding

depredations upon the birds frequenting the islands in question, and the limiting of the collection

of bird skins from these islands to American citizens, or residents of Hawaii.”68 The State

Department in turn consulted the Attorney General, repeating Dole’s warning that “unless

something is done to prevent such ravages, the fowl will in a few years be destroyed and a source

of valuable guano deposits destroyed.”69 It also suggested that Dole use his own power as

governor to introduce legislation prohibiting bird hunting on the islands.70 But Dole was reluctant

to do this - perhaps because he knew how much it would cost to enforce such a law. Instead,

attention focussed on whether the bird hunters could be found to be in violation of existing laws.

Rodman had suggested that the Japanese bird hunters were in violation of U.S. law, either

immigration or customs, or perhaps quarantine law.71 Dole made the same argument to the State

66 . HSA Carter bird depredations: Acting Secretary of Interior Department to Governor of Hawaii, 4 November 1904.67 . NARA-II MD Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations: William Dutcher to Naval Secretary, 2 July 1903.68 . NARA-II MD Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations: Acting Secretary of Interior to Secretary of State, 23 July 1903.69 . NARA-II MD Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations: Acting Secretary of State to Attorney General, 28 July 1903.70 . NARA-II MD Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations: Acting Secretary of State to Interior Secretary, 15 August 1903.71 NARA-II MD Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations: Rodman to Assistant Secretary of Navy, 1st July 1903.


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Department.”72 Eventually the Treasury agreed to appoint Rodman as “Inspector of Customs for

Midway and the outlying islands, with authority to enforce the customs, quarantine and

immigration laws.”73

Finally, there were diplomatic avenues to pursue. After the incident on Midway, the

American ambassador to Tokyo argued that bird hunting did not fall within the definition of

“peaceable occupations” as had been claimed after the incident on Wake Island. He explained

that the destruction of birds by Japanese “marauders” was resulting in “unsanitary conditions”

that were endangering the new cable station at Midway.74 The ambassador’s memorandum

combined two separate arguments, an explicit hygienic one and an implicit conservationist one.

The hygienic argument was somewhat specious, in that it may have justified evicting Japanese

hunters from Midway, where the cable station was in operation, but hardly made sense when

applied to otherwise uninhabited islands. The conservationist argument was hinted at only

obliquely, through terms such as “depredation” and “marauder” which, like the adjective

“wanton” (another term often deployed by wild bird protectionists) convey moral disapproval of

the killing of birds without pointing to any specific legal infraction. The ambassador was likely

aware that there were no specific regulations prohibiting the killing of wild birds on Hawaiian

islands. Foreign Minister Komura, for his part, responded to the memorandum noncommittally,

merely stating that “the subject has been referred to the Authorities concerned”.75

In the months after the Midway Incident, reports continued to circulate of Japanese bird

hunters active in the Hawaiian islands. In November 1903, a Japanese schooner of about one

hundred tons was sighted off the French Frigate Shoals. Though the ship’s captain claimed to be

hunting sharks, the Navy believed this to be "a mere pretext, and that the real object of this

vessel’s presence is the destruction of birds on these islands for their feathers.”76 Dole’s successor

as Governor of Hawaii wrote to the captain warning him (inaccurately) that “the Departments at

Washington, including the State, Interior and Navy Departments, have taken the attitude that the

72 . NARA-II MD Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations: Acting Secretary of Interior to Secretary of State, 23 July 1903.73 . NARA-II MD Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations: Rear Admiral Silas Terry to Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 18 November 1904.74 . MOFA 3.5.8.2 ‘Middouee’-jima kaichō hokaku kinshi ‘Middouee’-jima oyobi sono hoka no Hawai guntō ni okeru honpōjin no kaichō hokaku kinshi ikken: Griscom to Komura, [n.d.] 1903.75 . MOFA 3.5.8.2 ‘Middouee’-jima kaichō hokaku kinshi: Komura to Griscom, [n.d.] 1903.76 . HSA Carter bird depredations: Terry to Carter, 12 December 1903.


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destruction of birds is in violation of our laws”.77

Matters came to a head when, in April 1904 the U.S.S Iroquois returned to Lisianski to

find: “a colony of 77 Japanese engaged in the slaughter of birds. Not having room on board the

tug no arrests were made, but they were notified to desist.” Yet when the Revenue Cutter Thetis

returned to Lisianski in June, the cull was still in full swing.78 This time, the hunters were brought

aboard and taken to Honolulu, but under ambiguous circumstances: had they been arrested or

rescued? According to the captain of the Thetis, the Japanese on Lisianski were on the verge of

starvation, their ship having been wrecked on a reef five months earlier, and “were very glad to

leave the Island, as they had only 600 lbs. of rice and few beans left.”79 But one newspaper cast

doubt on this account, claiming that the hunters were not marooned but had been in contact with

another ship, which had already arrived to collect a portion of the bird skins they had processed.80

The Naval Department in its later correspondence would insist that the poachers had been

arrested, not rescued. The problem was that there was no obvious charge to levy at the hunters,

nor any legal basis for deporting them. Without determining by what (if any) contract they had

been employed to hunt birds, they could not be shown to have violated immigration law. Indeed

the hunters soon signalled that they wanted to stay in Hawaii, and on being examined by the chief

inspector of the immigration bureau, all but three were allowed to stay.81

Complicating things further was the matter of 200,000 processed bird skins, that had not

been brought back by the Thetis but left behind on Lisianski. The revenue cutter’s captain had left

a letter on the island, authorizing the captain of the Japanese schooner that was scheduled to

collect the hunters to “take all their catch from the Island and carry it to Japan, with the

77 . HSA Carter bird depredations: Carter to the Master of the Schooner “Ada”, 14 December 1903.78 REF79 . MOFA 3.5.8.2 ‘Middouee’-jima kaichō hokaku kinshi: Hamlet to Saitō, 23rd June 1904.80 . “Thetis Visited Many Lone Islands” Evening Bulletin, 23 June 1904. In the same article the officers of the Thetis also furnished a rather sympathetic account of the Japanese bird-hunting operation, being “of the opinion that the killing was carried on in a more humane manner. They found only one maimed bird. This bird had only one wing, the other having been cut off. This had evidently been done by one of the men in direct disobedience to the manager’s orders. Only a very small percentage of birds were allowed to escape in wounded condition.” This description contrasts sharply with Rodman’s account of bird hunting on Midway the previous year.81 . MOFA 3.5.8.2 ‘Middouee’-jima kaichō hokaku kinshi: Bechtel to Saitō, 24 June 1904. Three of the hunters were diagnosed as suffering from trachoma, however, and therefore found to be in breach of quarantine law.


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understanding that no further bird killing should be done on any of the islands by Japanese

hereafter.”82 The question of who actually owned these bird skins quickly became a topic of hot

discussion in the Hawaiian press. “From a commercial standpoint,” insisted the Hawaiian Star

slyly, “the skins belong to any free lance that may choose to go after them”.83 As the skins were

extremely valuable, various enterprising souls quickly set about planning voyages to collect them.

The controversy quickly ensnared the Japanese consul to Honolulu . Consul Saitō Miki

had an pivotal, but unenviable, diplomatic role in the Territory of Hawaii: charged with defending

the rights of Japanese nationals to live and work in Hawaii, but also with policing the behavior of

said nationals so as to avoid causing international embarrassment to the Japanese government.

After the Midway Incident he had written to the Japanese Foreign Ministry, warning of the

“unusually furious” coverage that Hawaiian newspapers were devoting to the “cruel behavior” of

Japanese hunters, and suggesting that the ministry take anticipatory measures to regulate the

hunters and forestall future incidents.84 During the Lisianski Incident he was approached by

Shugeyo Tsunetato, the foreman of the rescued/arrested bird hunters, who asked for help in

protecting the cargo of bird skins that had been left behind on the island.85 Saitō duly lodged a

request on Shugeyo’s behalf that the U.S. government “protect the catch from the interference of

outsiders.”86 (In the event, it later emerged that another Japanese vessel had indeed returned to

Lisianski to collect the skins as scheduled87.) On its part, Hawaii’s Inspector of Customs was keen

that the Japanese consulate provide compensation for the expense of “transporting” (the term was

deliberately ambiguous) the rescued/arrested Japanese hunters from Lisianski to Honolulu. He

requested that the Japanese government pay the two dollar-per-head tax for the hunters who had

chosen to stay in Hawaii, and also bear the cost of repatriating the three men whose immigration

petitions had been rejected.88 Saitō refused pay this cost directly. But he did promise to

82 . MOFA 3.5.8.2 ‘Middouee’-jima kaichō hokaku kinshi: Hamlet to Consul Saitō, 23 June 1904.83 . “Who Owns Those Rich Bird Skins On Lisianski?” The Hawaiian Star, 24 June 1904.84 . MOFA 3.5.8.2 ‘Middouee’-jima kaichō hokaku kinshi: Consul Saitō to Foreign Minister Komura, 30 June 1903.85 . “Thetis Visited Many Lone Islands.”86 . HSA Carter bird depredations, Terry to Asst. Navy Secretary, 18th November 1904; MOFA 3.5.8.2 ‘Middouee’-jima kaichō hokaku kinshi: Stackable to Saitō, 20 July 190487 . “Iroquois Gets Back” The Hawaiian Star, 29 September 1905.88 . MOFA 3.5.8.2 ‘Middouee’-jima kaichō hokaku kinshi: Customs Inspector Bechtel to Saitō, 24 June 1904.


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‘“endeavor to arrange for their passage at their own expense.”89

As far the United States government was concerned, this settled the matter.90

Significantly, the Lisianski dispute was resolved without any direct accusations of poaching being

leveled. But over the course of the next year, the U.S. government’s attitude hardened, and it

became determined that the Lisianski Incident should serve as a line in the sand. Much of the

credit for this shift in policy can be laid at the door of William Alanson Bryan. In the wake of the

Lisianski Incident, Bryan wrote to President Roosevelt personally, “suggesting that a revenue

cutter be regularly stationed in Hawaiian waters, with instructions to take trips, biennially, to

outlying islands and enforce the Customs Laws, as well as prevent the destruction of bird life on

the islands in Hawaiian waters.91” Bryan’s memorandum had an immediate effect. The Treasury

promised to arrange for dispatch of another revenue cutter to patrol the waters of the Northwest

Hawaiians, at least intermittently..92 Copies of Bryan’s report were also sent to the Attorney

General, the Naval Secretary, to the Interior Secretary, the Agriculture Secretary (who was

responsible for management of wild game stocks), and the State Department.

This prompted the latter department to take up the issue of bird depredations with the

Japanese Foreign Ministry once again, now by unambiguously framing the hunters as poachers.

Choosing to interpret the Lisianski incident as a precedent, the Acting Secretary of State observed

that “so far as appears, no exception was taken to the deportation of the Lisianski poachers last

year, and the action of the Japanese Consul at Honolulu seems to have had the approval of his

Government.93” This was technically a mis-statement of the events that had transpired: only three

bird hunters had been deported, and for violation of quarantine law rather than for poaching.

There was still no law on the books that prohibited bird hunting, either at the Hawaiian or at the

federal level. But whether through strategic misrepresentation or an honest misunderstanding, the

State Department now began explicitly asking the Japanese government to help enforce a hunting

ban on Midway and the other Northwest Hawaiian Islands. The U.S. legation in Tokyo even

supplied a list of firms known to have been engaged in poaching activities, which the Japanese

89 . MOFA 3.5.8.2 ‘Middouee’-jima kaichō hokaku kinshi: Saitō to Bechtel, 27 June 1904.90 . MOFA 3.5.8.2 ‘Middouee’-jima kaichō hokaku kinshi: Acting Inspector of Customs Cullen to Saitō, 6 October 1904.91 . HSA Carter bird depredations: Acting Treasury Secretary to Interior Secretary, 2 November 1904.92 . HSA Carter bird depredations: Taylor to Interior Secretary, 2 November 1904.93 . HSA Carter bird depredations: Acting Secretary of State to Interior Secretary, 3 November 1904.


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Foreign Ministry in turn passed onto the Home Ministry. The legation scored a diplomatic victory

when it received assurances from the Japanese government that it would instruct police forces in

Tokyo, Yokohama and Taiwan to “take strict measures to prevent any persons within their

respective jurisdictions from infringing the regulations prohibiting such expeditions.”94 In other

words, after 1905 a new diplomatic consensus was established between the two nations, that

Japanese bird-hunting on the islands did not constitute a legitimate form of “peaceable

occupation”.

Nature and Labor on Laysan Island, 1890-1900

For the next few years there was a lull, as reports of Japanese bird “poaching” in the Northwest

Hawaiian Islands died down. Perhaps this was because the diplomatic initiative, in combination

with the semi-regular dispatch of revenue cutters to patrol the islands, succeeded in deterring

future bird hunting expeditions. Or perhaps it is simply that after 1905 bird populations on islands

like Lisianski and Wake were already so depleted that plumage companies no longer thought it

commercially worthwhile to harvest them. But either way, at the end of the decade the issue

flared up again dramatically, culminating in President Roosevelt’s 1909 executive order

establishing the Hawaiian Islands Reserve.

This time the dispute swirled around a single island, the island of Laysan, the only one of

the Northwest Hawaiian group that had been inhabited Hawaiian annexation. We have a good

description of Laysan written by schooner captain John Paty, who landed on the island in 1857

and claimed it for King Kamehameha IV. Paty described Laysan as a “low sand island, 25 to 30

feet high”, its surfaces “covered with beach grass” and “literally covered” with birds, “evidently

unaccustomed to the sight of man, as they scarcely move at our approach, and the birds are so

tame and plentiful, that it was difficult to walk about the island without stepping upon them…”95

Paty also mentioned the island’s most unusual feature for a North Pacific atoll, its central lagoon

with an “abundance of tolerable good fresh water”. Because of this it was home not only

seabirds, but also to various species of freshwater birds, whose rarity and evolutionary

distinctiveness would bring ornithologists flocking to the island when it was first brought to the

attention of the wider world. (I will say more of on these ornithologists later)

In 1890, an Englishman named Freeth rented Laysan it from the Hawaiian government

94 . HSA Carter bird depredations: Komura to Griscom, 21 February 1905.95 Paty, “Account of the Manuokawai - Interesting Account of Her Explorations.”


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five dollars per year, and went on to open a guano mine on the island. This mine on Laysan owed

its existence to the remarkable sugar boom that had transformed Hawaii over the previous

decades. The newly formed Pacific Guano & Fertilizer Company96, which ran it, received

majority financing from Hackfeld & Co, a German planters’ firm based in Kauai, and Hackfeld

would use the guano it produced to fertilize the cane-fields on its plantations.97 Like the sugar

plantations, the Laysan mine relied for its operation on indentured Japanese laborers (an early

attempt to recruited Micronesians from the Gilbert Islands having turned sour).98 And like the

sugar plantations, the mine experienced an outbreak of industrial unrest immediately after U.S.

Annexation and the abolition of indentured labor in Hawaii - one that ended with two Japanese

laborers shot dead and their white overseer arraigned in the Honolulu District Court on charges of

manslaughter.

“LAYSAN ISLAND’S STORY OF BLOOD,” as The Hawaiian Gazette luridly dubbed

it, crystallized white anxieties about race and labor relations in post-Annexation Hawaii, with the

tiny island operating as a synecdoche for the whole archipelago in the fraught summer of 1900

following the passage of the Organic Act.99 Unsurprisingly, accounts differ as to what chain of

events led to the shootings. At the arraignment, two Japanese testified that the dispute began

when they had asked for an altered work schedule (or failing that, higher wages) to accommodate

the fact that “the guano dust, blown by the fresh sea breeze, got into the eyes of the laborers and

greatly bothered them.” When this was refused the miners downed tools in protest, in response to

which the overseer, a septuagenarian known as Captain Spencer, refused to sell rice to the miners

unless they resumed work.100 Based on the Japanese testimony the sheriff - though “expressing

regret that it had been necessary to bring the charge" - sought manslaughter on the basis that

Spencer had “attempted to starve the men into submission... it would have been inhuman to cut

off food, even if they did refuse to work, being on a barren island as they were.”

96 . The company was initially named the North Pacific Phosphate and Fertilizer Company, and was renamed in 1895. See HSA M-476 Pacific Chemical Fertilizer Co.97 . The company was initially named the North Pacific Phosphate and Fertilizer Company, and was renamed in 1895. See HSA M-476 Pacific Chemical Fertilizer Co.98 . HSA M-476 Pacific Chemical Fertilizer Co.; Tom Unger, Max Schlemmer, Hawaii’s King of Laysan Island (iUniverse, Inc., 2004-02-08) Ch.4 The Japanese responded that this was all simply customary behavior to celebrate the Festival of the Dead, which fell on that day. “White Men All Fired, Say Laysan Island Japs.”99 . “Laysan Island’s Story of Blood.”100 “White Men All Fired, Say Laysan Island Japs” Hawaiian Star, 14 September 1900.


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The defense counsel, however, claimed that the Japanese had engaged in threatening

behavior, such as wrestling on the beach, banging drums and raising a the national flag of Japan

above their house.101 Matters culminated when the miners surrounded Spencer’s house “armed

with knives, clubs stones and cutlasses made of hoop-iron sharpened” (the Japanese denied

carrying any weapons), “cursing the aging captain and his friends and shouting something to the

effect that they were American citizens [a misinterpretation of the Organic Act] and wouldn’t

work any more on the Island but would behave thereafter as best suited themselves.102” Spencer

and his assistant drew their firearms in warning, but when the miners rushed them (so the defense

argued) they had no choice but to fire, for “when a man goes up against a loaded revolver he is

out for blood.”103 Or as the Gazette put it, “War has been declared, waged and ended on Laysan

Island…The forty Japanese rose in a body, determined to annihilate all the white people on the

Island and run things to suit themselves…They threatened the white men’s lives….[But] though

they moved quickly, Captain Spencer’s trigger fingers moved quicker. ”

After only an hour of argument, the the magistrate decided that “it would be be

impossible to find a jury that would convict the captain of any crime,” and dismissed the case.104

The United States vs The King of Laysan

After this debacle, the Pacific Guano & Fertilizer Company decided to look for new management

to run the mine on Laysan. They found their man in one Max Schlemmer. Schlemmer was a

classic beachcomber, one of those Conradian characters who were to be found drifting round the

global nineteenth-century Pacific, eking a living on the shorelines of state sovereignty. Spiritually,

he was a distant cousin of Nathaniel Savory and the Bonin Islanders described in Chapter One.

Often taken for a German, Schlemmer was in fact born in French-administered Alsace. In 1871,

the year that Prussia invaded and annexed his home province, he left home bound for the United

States, aged fifteen. Within a few months of arriving in America he had found work on a whaler

out of New England, and spent the greater part of the next two decades working as a crewman

aboard various whaling vessels criss-crossing the Pacific, before eventually washing up on Kauai

101 . “White Men All Fired, Say Laysan Island Japs.”102 . “Laysan Island’s Story of Blood” The Hawaiian Gazette, 11 September 1900.103 . “Captain Spencer is Promptly Dismissed: Laysan Island Case Thrown Out of Court” Honolulu Republican, 22 September 1900.104 . “Shooting Was Justified” The Hawaiian Star, 22 September 1900.


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in Hawaii to become a fixture of the island’s small German community.105

In 1890, when the Pacific Guano & Fertilizer Co. announced its plan to begin mining

guano on Laysan, Schlemmer approached the firm’s board of directors claiming to have lived on

the island for a stint five years previously. On the basis of this claim to squatters rights, he

succeeded in negotiating a royalty from the mine’s guano sales that amounted to, on average,

about $1,600 per year.106 (Much later it would emerge that Schlemmer, though he had seen much

of the watery part of the world, had never actually set foot on Laysan before that point.107) In 1893

Schlemmer agreed to take a job as foreman at the Laysan mine, and spent the next six years

supervising the Japanese laborers under the authority of overseer Spencer. In 1899 he had

quarreled with Spencer and decided to return to Honolulu. So when Spencer’s tenure as overseer

ended in disaster the following year, Schlemmer made for an obvious candidate to replace him.

The Hawaiian press were fascinated by Schlemmer. There was the fact that he lived a

Swiss Family Robinson-like existence, accompanied on Laysan by his wife and eleven children.

And he was known as a genial host, accommodating visiting naval and scientific expeditions,

including both Rodman and Bryan, and furnishing them with his extensive knowledge of the

island’s flora and fauna - its bird-life in particular.108 Newspapers took to referring him as the

“King of Laysan”.109 Of course it was meant half in jest. Surely, by the turn of the 20th century,

every right-thinking citizen of the United States knew that kingship had been consigned to the

dustbin of history? The white community in Hawaii were particularly sure of this - had not the

Kingdom of Hawaii, just a few years earlier, been absorbed peacefully by the civilizing power of

the Republic?

Then again, the name was only partly a joke. The inhabitants of the scattered Hawaiian

archipelago also understood better than most that remoteness confers a high degree of autonomy.

The precedent of the 1900 shootings also suggested the use of force on Laysan Island would

likely go unpunished. The Hawaiian Star described Schlemmer as “the supreme being of his little

kingdom. His Japanese workmen must obey his command, lest they be deported or, under rarer

105 . Unger, Max Schlemmer, Ch.1 Unger was Schlemmer’s grandson.106 . HSA M-476 Pacific Chemical Fertilizer Co.107 . Star Bulletin Printing House, Sales Builder (Honolulu, January 1939) cited in Unger, Max Schlemmer, Ch.2108 “Princess of Laysan and Olson’s Disaster”; “Exterminated Midway Island.”109 . “The King of Laysan: His Majesty here for a short stay”; The Hawaiian Star, 29 July 1901. In fact had already conferred this title on his predecessor, Captain Spencer, before his ill-fated reign was cut short.


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circumstances, shot to death, which in the latter event is looked upon as a justifiable act, although

the Laysan monarch is under the indirect control of the United States.”110 Schlemmer for his part

relished his royal status, but also made every effort to accentuate his American-ness. In the last

turbulent days of the Kingdom of Hawaii, he had enlisted in the Honolulu police force to fight

against the pro-Annexation faction in Hawaiian politics.111 But after 1898 he moved quickly to

adopt U.S. citizenship, and took care to fly the Stars and Stripes on Laysan whenever ships sailed

past, and to generally emphasise his credentials as “an American citizen who has always been a

friend to Navy and Army people and also to scientific people all over the Globe…112”

In April 1904 Hackfeld and Co. decided to divest from the guano mine in favor of the

emerging sector of chemical fertilizers.113 So when Schlemmer expressed interested in buying the

remaining six years of the Laysan leasehold, the PGFC’s board was only to happy to sell it to

him.114 It seems likely that, from the outset, he planned to supplement the income to be gleaned

from guano mining by expanding into the plumage trade. In June 1903 he petitioned the

Governor of Hawaii to extend his leasehold for Laysan and Lisianski to ninety-nine years:

Schlemmer would undertake to protect the birds on the islands, but also be licensed to harvest a

certain number (he judged 21,800 per season to be sustainable) which he would turn over to the

Territorial Government to sell. The governor was unenthusiastic. He agreed to forward the

leasehold request to Washington DC, but rejected outright the suggestion that the administration

itself get involved in the plumage trade.115 Schlemmer also wrote to Prince Kalanianaole,

Hawaii’s delegate to Congress, asking for help securing an appointment as police warden of the

Northwestern Isles, and expressing his frustration that the U.S. government had been so lenient

with Japanese bird hunters in the past, “making them a present with all the birds they had stolen

to the amount of $65,000, at Lisianski, which island was leased to me at the time…116” (On this

point Schlemmer was correct, for Lisianski had indeed been included on the 1890 Laysan Island

110 . “Princess of Laysan and Olson’s Disaster.”111 REF112 . NARA-II MD, Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations: Schlemmer to Kalanianaole, [undated]113 . HSA M-476 Pacific Chemical Fertilizer Co. In the years 1896-1899, the company extracted on average 2,565 lbs of guano for every dollar spent on labor. For the period 1901-1903 this figure dropped to 1,671 lbs.114 . MOFA 3.5.8.2 ‘Middouee’-jima kaichō hokaku kinshi, 361.115 . HSA: Carter to Schlemmer, 23 December 1904.116 . NARA-II MD, Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations: Schlemmer to Kalanianaole, [undated]


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lease, although neither the PGFC or Schlemmer had done much with the island since then.)

Schlemmer was not the only Honolulu-based entrepreneur hoping to get into the plumage

business during this period, especially after the exploits of Japanese bird hunters hit the

headlines. After Lisianski Incident in the summer of 1904, former Acting Governor Atkinson

openly held talks with foreman of the arrested Japanese hunters, arguing that “there is no reason

why the territory should not lease the bird killing privileges to such persons as have the enterprise

to go there. The birds would of course be protected from extermination and that at present seems

to be the only fate in store for them.117” At one point Atkinson even tried to recruit Schlemmer

into a consortium that hoped to exploit Laysan’s bird population with government backing.

Schlemmer was initially enthusiastic about the scheme, before realising that he was essentially

only being invited to participate in a managerial capacity. For the King of Laysan, the prospect of

being demoted to his former role as foreman of a Japanese labor gang was not appetising, and he

parted with the consortium on bitter terms. Later, he would accuse them of conspiring with

Japanese bird poachers, including a number of his own guano miners, in a far-fetched scheme to

poison his entire family so as to pillage Laysan’s birds.118

Schlemmer’s attempts to leverage his dwindling became ever more audacious. In May

1907, with only three years until the lease expired, he finally received his coveted commission as

police constable “within the district of Honolulu and the western [island] group”. The position

was without pay, and explicitly stated that the authority granted to him was primarily for the

protection of birds. Undaunted, Schlemmer announced the following April that he was to

construct a tannery on Laysan, ostensibly for the purpose of processing the skins of rabbits that he

had released to breed on the island.119 Then, in December 1908, he made his boldest play yet. He

travelled to Tokyo, where he licensed one Yamanouchi Genkichi, owner of a deep-sea fishing

company, “as my agent to conduct the Guano Business etc. etc., for me at Laysan Island and

Lisianski Island,,” and also granting Yamanouchi “the privilege of securing phosphate guano,

and any products of whatever nature in and from the Islands.”120 Schlemmer also undertook to use

his police constable’s commission for the purpose of “overseeing any other people who would

come to the said Islands and impinge [Yamanouchi’s] privilege” - a flexible interpretation of his

117 . Hawaiian Star, “To Lease Lisiansky”, 29th June 1904.118 . HSA Frear bird depredations: Schlemmer testimony, 8 July 1908 .119 . Evening Bulletin, 23 April 1908 cited in Unger, Max Schlemmer, Ch.11.120 .MOFA 3.5.8.2 ‘Middouee’-jima kaichō hokaku kinshi: Max Schlemmer, “License”, 22 December 1908.


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original mandate, to put it mildly. In return, Yamanouchi would pay Schlemmer one hundred and

fifty dollars per month.121

How on earth did Schlemmer think he could pull off this gambit? He seems to have still

hoped that the Hawaiian Territorial Government might grant him his cherished leasehold

extension, for his contract with Yamanouchi was to be valid for fifteen years. Perhaps he was

hoping that nobody would notice the deal he’d struck? Or perhaps he did not reckon with the

backlash he would provoke by appearing to get into bed with the loathed Japanese bird pirates. If

so he reckoned wrong. News of Schlemmer’s trip to Japan soon circulated, triggering outrage in

first the Hawaiian and then the mainland American media, making the pages of both the San

Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, from whence it garnered the attention of William

Dutcher, then president of the National Union of Audubon Societies. Dutcher promptly sent the

Times clipping to his old colleague William Alanson Bryan, who happened to be in Washington

D.C. at the time. Bryan in turn forwarded Dutcher’s letter to the State Department, hand

delivering it to Foggy Bottom himself.122 This set off a panic within the Federal Government,

compounded by uncertainty as to whether Schlemmer’s contract had any legal basis and, if so,

what steps could be taken to overrule it. On 3 February 1909, Theodore Roosevelt’s last day in

office, the Interior Secretary submitted a memorandum suggesting that to the president use his

executive power to declare the Hawaiian islands a refuge for “native birds...reserving them for

public use” Roosevelt signed Executive Order 1019 into law the same day, creating the Hawaiian

Islands Reservation.123 (See Figure 4.2)

Over the following year, newspapers began reporting that Japanese vessels had resumed

their visits to the Hawaiian Islands. Yamanouchi, it turned out, had decided to subcontract the

rights granted him by Schlemmer to yet another person, Hatoyama Kan’ichi, owner of a firm

called the Japan Fishing Co.124 Shortly after this, the winter season of 1908-9 seems to have

121 . MOFA 3.5.8.2 ‘Middouee’-jima kaichō hokaku kinshi: Schlemmer to Yamanouchi, 22 December 1908.122 . HSA Frear bird depredations, State Department Chief Clerk to Bryan, 13 January 1909.123 . NARA-II MD Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations: Dennett to Interior Secretary, 3rd February 1909; Executive Order 1019.124 . Japanese: Nihon Gyogyō Kabushiki Gaisha. See FOMA Middoueei: Hatoyama to Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce Marine Products Department, 28 February 1910; Governor of Kanagawa to Foreign Minister Komura, 17 March 1910.


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devolved into something of a free-for-all.125 One Tokyo newspaper reported that at least seven

different ships belonging to a variety of different operators had visited Laysan during the winter

bird hunting season of October 1908 to January 1909: “coolies are crowded on this small island

as thickly as spectators at a fire...it is feared that business rivalry may bring them to quarreling,”126

Reports of bird depredations reached the American authorities as well. In March 1909 the

cable station superintendent reported that a Japanese schooner stopped at Midway for general

repairs: “Think intends to take guano Laysan, fish Johnson, and other islands.”127 In October that

same year a Japanese sampan was spotted anchored five miles off the coast of Bird Island,

purpose unknown.128 And in December The Hawaiian Gazette reported that “Japanese poachers

[were] stripping the small islands between here and the Midway, of birds”.129 A Captain F.D.

Walker, who claimed to be familiar with the western Hawaiian Isles, wrote in to the Honolulu

Sunday Advertiser condemning:

what I see to be a disgrace to a civilized power, in allowing Japanese year after year to destroy the ocean sea birds… It is all very well issuing a proclamation that the islands above mentioned are the sole property of Uncle Sam and no one must kill any birds, etc etc. Bah! ….Just imagine for a moment Kaiser William or Edward the Seventh permitting such atrocities to be continued year after year on their domains - but don’t imagine, it is too absurd for imagination!130

The apoplectic sea captain had put his finger on an uncomfortable truth: the resources of the U.S.

government were stretched too thin to respond effectively to this renewed influx of bird hunters

across such an expansive and sparsely populated area. For the meantime the State Department

resumed its diplomatic initiative, hoping to pressure the Japanese government to take action to

rein in the bird hunters. The U.S. ambassador to Tokyo informed MOFA of the establishment of

125 . An alternative possibility is that Yamanouchi was rightly doubtful that his contract with Schlemmer would prove enforceable in the long-term, and so came to an arrangement with other bird hunting companies to jointly harvest Laysan’s bird population as swiftly as possible.126 . Chūgai Shimpō “Expedition of Japanese Sailing Vessels to Secure Feathers”, 29 March 1909 cited in NARA-II MD Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations: Poaching of Japanese on bird islands of Hawaiian group, 3 April 1909.127 . G.V. Meyer to unknown, 31 March 1909.128 . HSA Frear bird depredations: Stackable to Frear, 7 October 1909.129 . Hawaiian Gazette, “Jap Poachers on Islands to Windward”, 1 December 1909130 . The Honolulu Sunday Advertiser, “Slaughtering the Sea Birds”, 24 October 1909.


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the Hawaiian Islands Reservation131, and MOFA arranged to have announcements to this effect

placed in Japanese newspapers, including the Honolulu-based Hawai Shimpō.132 The Japanese

Home Ministry also instructed coastal authorities to warn Japanese ships of a heightened risk of

arrest for poaching in Hawaiian territory, with apparently limited effect.133 But the revenue cutter

Thetis was at the time deployed in Alaskan waters, and could not be requisitioned for duty in

Hawaii until the following year.134

Finally, in January 1910 the Thetis stopped at Laysan Island to discover twenty-three

Japanese engaged in a systematic bird slaughtering and skinning operation. The captain arrested

the hunters for poaching, and transported them to Honolulu along with over a quarter of a million

bird wings, valued at $112,000 in total.135 It also confiscated the Schlemmer-Yamanouchi

contract, presented by the hunters’ foreman as proof that they were operating on the island

legitimately. This damming piece of evidence made it clear who the real villain was. As The

Hawaiian Star intoned darkly that the captured Japanese were merely the pawns of nefarious

commercial interests: “It may go hard with them for what they’ve done, but it appears that they

were but the tools of a great company, whose headquarters is in Japan and which has agents in

Hawaii.” The real culprit, though, was Schlemmer: “A Honolulu man, a white man, is supposed

to know all about their business and he will have much to explain if not to answer for.”136

The United States government was also determined to make an example of the King of

Laysan. A federal grand jury arraigned him on two counts of poaching from a federal reservation

and bringing aliens into the country unlawfully. Twelve of the captured Japanese were used as

witnesses against him. But the prosecution soon found itself bogged down in a legal morass. It

emerged that Roosevelt’s order authorizing the creation of the Hawaiian Islands Reservation

rested on dubious constitutional grounds, with a government memo admitting that “Congress has

since attacked the proposition that the President has the power to reserve public lands for such

131 . MOFA Middouee: MOFA Commerce Dept to Assistant Foreign Minister, 27 January 1910.132 . MOFA Middouee: MOFA to U.S. Ambassador, 26 January 1910; Hawai Shimpō, “Dōhō gyogyōsha e chūi”, 26 October 1909.133 . MOFA Middouee: “Hawai guntō ni okeru kaitō micchō ni kan suru ken,” 467134 . NARA-II MD, Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations: Acting Treasury Secretary to Interior Secretary, 23 July 1909.135 . “Poachers Brought by Thetis: Max Schlemmer Thought To Be In Poaching Deal” Hawaiian Star, 2 February 1910.136 . Ibid.


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purposes”.137 Neither could Schlemmer be prosecuted under the laws of the Territory of Hawaii,

as there was no specific anti-poaching law on the books that covered the Northwest Hawaiian

Islands.

Schlemmer for his part was utterly unrepentant. He admitted the government’s charge

that the Japanese were his employees but insisted that they “were not poachers….They were

there after guano and killed a few birds on the side.” The government’s persecution of him, he

alleged, was punishment for his decision to sell on his rights to Laysan and Lisianski to a

Japanese national.138 This claim has the ring of truth to it. After all, ever since the first reports of

bird culls on otherwise uninhabited Hawaiian islands, the U.S. government had been exercised by

the fact the “depredations” occurred specifically at the hands of Japanese nationals. The panic

about Japanese “bird pirates”139 also occurred against a background of widespread white anxiety

about Japanese migration into American territory and encroachment into economic activities that

were properly felt to be the preserve of American citizens, anxiety that had crystallised so vividly

in William Alanson Bryan’s experience on Marcus Island in the summer of 1902. In this sense,

the crackdown on Japanese bird-hunting was part of a broader effort to exclude Japanese from the

political and economic life of the Territory of Hawaii.140

Eventually, the prosecution failed to convict Schlemmer either on the charge of poaching

or on illegal employment of foreign labor. Interestingly, the Hawaii district court judge accepted

the defense’s argument that the Hawaiian Islands Reservation, even if constitutional, only

provided protection for “native birds”; whereas the prosecution had failed to provide any

evidence as to whether the birds killed on Laysan were native or not. Formally at least,

Schlemmer was exonerated. But it was a pyrrhic victory. The trial had exhausted his finances, and

the Territory of Hawaii was able to cite Roosevelt’s executive order as grounds for annulling the

lease extension it had granted him. One newspaper wryly noted the contrast with the murder trial

137 . NARA-II MD, Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Reservations: “Hawaiian Islands Reservation - Memorandum” (n.d.)138 . “Schlemmer Says Fear Cause of Trouble” Honolulu Evening Bulletin, 3 February 1910.139 REF140 To this should be added the fact of Schlemmer’s German-ness, which may not have rendered him as irredeemably alien in the same way as the Japanese, but nevertheless marked him as foreign in the new American colony. During World War I he would even be briefly detained on suspicion of spying on American shipping. There was some irony in this accusation, as few people had demonstrated their distaste for German militarism more manifestly than Max Schlemmer, who had left his homeland of Alsace at the very moment it was invaded by Prussia. Unger, Max Schlemmer, Ch.14.


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nine years earlier: “There has been no revolt among the subjects of King Max. His rule has been

mild and beneficent and his people have always been well-satisfied. It is only a case of a stronger

power stepping in and taking away his land. The U.S. government is the power that has deposed

the King of Laysan and annexed his country.141”

Max ended his days as a janitor working in the Honolulu office of Hackfeld & Co.142

Coda: Producing Pacific Nature

Visitors to the Museum of Natural History at the University of Iowa, about as far from the ocean

as you can get in the United States, can nevertheless feast their eyes on Laysan Island circa.

1911.143 (See Figure 2.16) They can do this by ducking there heads and immersing themselves

into the darkness of the museum’s prized cyclorama, a type of diorama that envelopes the viewer

from three hundred and sixty degrees. It is a masterpiece of its kind, constructed with the support

of Carl Akeley, architect of the dioramas in New York’s Museum of Natural History, and the

product of a number of trips made to Laysan by Bryan and his former graduate advisor,

Professor Charles Nutting.144 Like Akeley’s habitat dioramas, it aimed “to create an immaculate

vision of nature uncontaminated by human presence...Dioramas tantalized visitors with the

possibility of communion with nature, the possibility of experiencing nature's truth. Despite the

fact that the animals were all hunted down for the purpose, despite the skinning, the theatrical

postures, and the artificial surroundings, dioramas were meant to suggest unhindered access to

raw nature.”145 A foreground composed of stuffed albatrosses nesting on the sand merges artfully

with a painted backdrop depicting flocks of birds wheeling above the island and the ocean to

produce for the American museum-going public a vision of Layman as a pristine, untrammelled

State of Nature.146

Conspicuously missing is any evidence of Laysan’s former history as a site of human

141 . “King Max of Laysan is Deposed” Honolulu Advertiser, 11 November 1909.142 . Ibid., Ch.16.143 . At the time of writing the cyclorama is still on display at the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, and indeed was recently refurbished for its centenary. See http://www.uiowa.edu/mnh/laysan/laysan/laysan-main.htm Last accessed 27 January 2015.144 . Ibid.145 . Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo : Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 104.146 . Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo : Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 104.

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labor, whether of guano miners or bird hunters, to say nothing of the viewers themselves. As

Bryan well knew, the production of pristine nature necessitated that all traces of the human be

occluded from the tableau. Not just the naturalists and the evidence of his own taxidermic

fabrications. But also the abandoned guano mine, the packing sheds and, immediately to the

south of them, the graves of the two murdered Japanese. Yet it was the guano mine, and the

Japanese laborers who worked it, that made the whole tableau possible in the first place. Indeed it

was only after the Pacific Guano & Fertiliser Co. Began operations on Laysan that ornithologists

were even able to travel to the island to begin classifying its unique biodiversity. Soon after the

mine opened, the island became ammunition in a taxonomical arms race between two British

naturalists, the renowned Cambridge professor Alfred Newton and his wayward pupil Walter

Rothschild, a scion of the eponymous banking dynasty. Bitter rivals among Britain’s rarified

community of gentleman ornithologists, both despatched proxies to Hawaii simultaneously, each

hoping to pip the other to the post in cataloguing the islands’ bird life. Rothschild’s man made it

to Laysan first, allowing his master to claim discovery of several previously uncategorized

species of birds, including the now-extinct Laysan rail and Diomedea immutabilis Rothshild,

1893.147

Rothschild’s discovery put Laysan on the ornithological map, attracting more naturalists

who began gamely trying to romanticise the island as a pristine Rousseauian State of Nature -

notwithstanding the fact that many found Laysan a thoroughly unpleasant place to live. Consider

Hugo von Schauinsland, who insisted that he and his wife felt that on Laysan “we are back in our

true home”, yet elsewhere described it as a “godforsaken island” infested with sandflies,

cockroaches, and a particularly horrific sort of carpet beetle that enjoyed “an unending food

supply here in form of bird carcasses… truly, it is a hard beauty, that surrounds us here!”148

Compare, also, a poem composed by U.S. Marines stationed on neighbouring Midway with the

specific intention of skewering romanticised portrayals of desert island life: “Oh the Island it is

147 Storrs L. Orson, “On the History and Importance of Rothschild’s Avifauna of Laysan.” accessed 28 October 2014, http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/nhrarebooks/rothschild/essays/storrs_rothschild.htm Last accessed 28 October 2014; Charles A. Ely and Roger B. Clapp, “The Natural History of Laysan Island, Northwest Hawaiian Islands,” Atoll Research Bulletin 171(1973), 254; Scott Barchard Wilson, “On a New Finch From Midway Island, North Pacific,” Ibis 32, no. 3 (1890), 339-341; Lionel Walter Rothschild Rothschild, The Avifauna of Laysan and the Neighbouring Islands: With a Complete History to Date of the Birds of the Hawaiian Possessions (R.H. Porter, 1893)148 Schauinsland and (trans.), “Three Months on a Coral Island (Laysan),” 8, 29, 30-32.

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sandy / And 'tis not a rural scene / But they give you emerald glasses / Just to make you think it's

green…”149 It is also possible that many of those who resided on Laysan fell victim to a malady

spread by avian ticks and later known as “Laysan fever”.150

Schauinsland omitted virtually all mention of the guano mine, preferring to portray

himself and his wife as living a Crusoe-like existence in “solitude” amidst Laysan’s State of

Nature. He admitted that “the sole connection with that island is through the Guano

Company. we considered ourselves the company’s guests during the whole time., for which

we are forever very obliged.151 But he mentioned the mine’s laborers only insofar as they

illuminated the behavior of the island’s bird population, such as when a frigate bird “making

a quick sweep through the air, stole a cap from the head of a Japanese worker, carrying it

high into the sky before dropping it… On another occasion a Japanese, rushing home from

egg collecting with two full baskets in his hands and daydreaming about his forthcoming

feast, was struck from out of the blue in the neck with such force, by a low flying albatross,

that he fell forward into the basket of eggs.”152

This, then, was the social space within which the first ornithologists conducted their

fieldwork on Laysan. Japanese laborers mined the island for its guano, which was then

shipped to Honolulu for sale to German or American planters, who hired yet more Japanese

laborers to plough it into the soil of Kauai or Oahu, to grow sugarcane for export to global

markets. Labor relations on the island, and in Hawaii more generally, were not only fractious

but were tightly interlinked with the global economic and diplomatic shifts that roiled

Hawaiian politics in the 1890s. Bryan knew this very well indeed. Like Rothschild’s agent and

Schauinsland before him, he had first visited Laysan by hitching a ride aboard the Hackfeld &

Co. ship that ferried guano to the plantations on Kaui, accompanied by "flock of forty-five or

more Japs on board [who] eat and sleep and jabber away like monkeys”. And he knew the history

of the island’s contentious labor relations, noting in his field diary the graves of “two Japanese

were shot during a riot”.153 Like previous naturalists, Bryan and Nutting had availed themselves

149 “Soldiers on Midway Take to Rhyming” The Hawaiian Star, 4 June 1907.150 Cedric Yoshimoto, also https://archive.org/stream/Bulletin20PaciA/Bulletin20PaciA_djvu.txt REF151 . Ibid. pp.4-5152 . Ibid. pp.18-19. As part of his analysis of Laysan’s geology, Schauinsland also mentions in passing that “the guano pits” extend to depths “way below sea level”. p.13153 Bryan, Laysan Diary, 1903

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of the Schlemmer family’s hospitality: Schlemmer had provided them with board and lodging,

and also directed them towards particular nesting sites, informed them of the laying and hatching

times of various species, and otherwise furnished them with his observations of bird life on the

island. The ornithologists admitted that "it would have been very hard to accomplish the amount

of work performed without such aid as he rendered".154 And Schlemmer, needless to say, would

not have been there but for the guano mine.

In this sense, we can perhaps invert Marx’s famous dictum, and say that humans in fact

produce First Nature (wilderness) by applying labor to Second Nature (capital). Nature is the

output of labor rather than the input. Of course, Laysan and its birds existed long before the first

humans began to visit. If a bird defecates on an island and no one is around to see it, the shit still

hits the ground. Indeed it was centuries of shitting that shaped the ecology of Laysan Island and

its surrounding seas. Sedimented bird excrement helped form the soil of the island itself, and the

runoff attracted shoals of plankton which supported the marine ecosystems which in turn fed the

birds themselves. Similarly, Laysan’s distinctive freshwater lagoon allowed for species of bird to

evolve that are found nowhere else on earth. But none of this was evident to humans before the

opening of the guano mine in 1890. To render Laysan and its birds legible to human eyes, to

transform it into nature, something to be studied, admired and protected, took labor. Not just the

labor of scientists - the fieldwork, the collecting and shipping and stuffing and displaying of bird

specimens for the benefit of a viewing public far beyond the island’s shores. Also the manual

labor of shovelling the birds’ excrement, which allowed the Laysan guano mine to operate and in

doing so rendered it accessible to those scientists in the first place.

It was this human labor that bird conservationists sought to occlude, not just by

constructing artfully naturalistic dioramas for display in museums, but by transforming the

islands themselves into sites of uninhabited wilderness. This involved not only evicting and

sometimes arresting Japanese who hunted on the islands, but also working to deter them through

diplomatic channels (which also served to affirm American sovereignty over the islands

themselves). It also involved a range of efforts to protect the pristine nature of Laysan from other

invasives, such as the rabbits that Max Schlemmer had introduced during his tenure on the island,

and which now threatened to devour its native flora and fauna.

In the aftermath of the Schlemmer trial, William Alanson Bryan participated in a

154 . Fisher, “Birds of Laysan and the Leeward Islands, Hawaiian Group,” 789, 776; Thomas to Commissioner, 5 June 1902 in Records Concerning the Steamer Albatross


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Department of Agriculture expedition to the Northwest Hawaiian Islands - “Uncle Sam’s

great ocean bird reserve”, as one newspaper put it. The expedition aimed first of all to survey

the islands’ wildlife, partly as to determine which of its fauna could be classified as “native”.

Given the fiasco of the Schlemmer trial, this was a matter of pressing legal importance if

future poachers were to be successfully prosecuted. Secondly, the USDA expedition tried to

help the island’s ecology recover from the impact of Japanese hunting, but also of human

occupation more generally. In his earlier work Bryan had deployed his skills in fieldwork,

taxidermy and diorama to produce miniature replicas of Laysan as uninhabited wilderness

space. At the same time he had mobilised political allies, including the President himself, no

less, in order to make sure the island itself was uninhabited. Now he deployed his scientific

expertise to return Laysan to what he judged to be a true State of Nature.

Once again, Schlemmer was cast as the villain. Aside from the large-scale bird culls

that had taken place with or without his connivance, during his time on the island the King of

Laysan had undertaken various initiatives to modify his domain for human habitation. These

included planting coconut palms (which had actually been stipulated as a condition of his

leasehold), and also releasing pigs and rabbits to breed on the island as a food source.155 The

USDA expedition viewed these latter introductions as a menace to the “native” bird

population, and so a new cull commenced on Laysan, this time of the island’s “invasive”

species. (The practice of wildlife conservation invariably prioritizes conserving the wild over

conserving life as such.) Unfortunately the expedition exhausted its supplies of shotgun

ammunition before it was able to wipe out the last remaining rabbits, so the cull was

essentially fruitless.156 It was not until twelve years later, in 1923, that a second expedition

finally succeeded in eliminating rabbits from Laysan.157

Since then, various government agencies have sporadically intervened to fulfil the

American mandate of nature conservation on the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. And over the

same stretch of time bird populations have slowly recovered, although it is hard to infer

causation from correlation. The apparent decline in the number of visits by Japanese bird

155 . NARA-II MD Territories Office, Hawaii, Bird Depredations: “Memorandum for the Chief Clerk”, 27 October 1909; Unger, Max Schlemmer. Ch.11156 . UHM William Alanson Bryan collection, Laysan field diary 1911; Ibid. Ch.13157 . Storrs L. Olson, “History and Ornithological Journals of the Tanager Expedition of 1923 to the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, Johnston and Wake Islands,” Atoll Research Bulletin 433(1996) pp.29-30, p.48, p.55


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hunters to the islands cannot necessarily be attributed to American deterrence. After the

outbreak of World War I, plumed apparel went out of fashion, and the global plumage

markets collapsed. The commercial incentive to mount expeditions to remote bird islands

therefore dwindled correspondingly. Secondly, the albatross population on the island of

Midway provides a useful control study against which to gauge the impact of bird

conservation efforts. As an operational cable station and U.S. military base, Midway was not

included within the newly established Hawaiian Islands Reservation. During the Pacific War

it was transformed into a major naval airbase, and “almost the entire surface of the island was

either smoothed for roads, paved for runway, excavated for bunkers, or covered by buildings

and dumps.”158 The Navy, concerned about the risk of plane crashes caused by bird strike,

embarked on a systematic attempt to eradicate Midway’s albatross population. The attempt

failed. “Marines and construction men armed with two-by-fours clubbed thousands to death -

with almost no effect upon the population”.159 By the end of the Pacific War there were still

some 163,000 albatrosses nesting on the island. Albatross populations are sometimes capable

of remarkable resilience.160

Still, whatever its effect on the birds themselves, Bryan’s campaign to inscribe the

Northwest Hawaiian Islands as a site of wilderness has proved remarkably successful. In

2006, almost hundred years after Roosevelt first proclaimed the reserve, the oceanographer-

adventurer Jean-Michel Cousteau shot a documentary on the islands. In a rather meta twist,

the concluding scene portrayed the film crew transporting a lame albatross called Lanai back

to a wildlife park in Honololu to serve as “an ambassador for the species” - a twenty-first

equivalent of the taxidermised specimens that Bryan sent around the world. Sure enough,

when President George W. Bush sat down to watch the documentary he was so moved that he

decided to expand the existing reserve into the Papahānaumokuākea National Marine

National Monument, within which “fishing, mining, oil exploration or other commercial

activity” would be limited so as to protect a “unique habitat to hundreds of rare species of

158 . W. Lance N. Tickell, Albatrosses (Mountfield: Pica Press, 2000), 206-207.159 . Harvey I. Fisher, “Populations of Birds on Midway and the Man-Made Factors Affecting Them,” Pacific Science 3(April 1949), 105.160 . Ibid., 109. This resilience is likely due to the species’ long life-cycle. Albatrosses can live for over sixty years and live most of their lives far out at sea. They do not return to their birthplace to nest until the age of seven or eight. Any culling operation would have to be maintained continuously over a decade or so in order successfully extirpate a breeding colony. See Grzimek vol. 7 (1975) 145 REF


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birds and fish”.161 A decade later, in 2016, President Barack Obama issued another yet

executive order expanding the Papahānaumokuākea monument up to the limit of the islands’

exclusive economic zone, banning all commercial fishing and making it, at 1,508,870 square

kilometers, America’s largest (and also most inaccessible) nature reserve.162 (See Figure 4.3)

Though the focus of conservation at Papahānaumokuākea has now widened to include

marine life, the birds of the Northwest Hawaiian islands, and albatrosses in particular,

continue to serve as proxies for the overall environmental health of the Pacific Ocean. Today,

ecologists and conservationists view the albatross as an apex predator whose population

fluctuations can be monitored as a proxy for the overall health of a given ecosystem163. But

the species has an older appeal, inhabiting as it does probably the most distinguished niche

within the pantheon of threatened megafauna. Incarnated in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s

famous poem, the albatross was the original avatar of the wilderness: a creature whose ill-

treatment provoked the wrath of that “tutelary spirit… who bideth by himself / In the land of

mist and snow”, and so brought judgement raining down on man.164 Coleridge’s Rime was so

popular throughout the nineteenth century, particularly in the final decade when bird

protection campaigns began to gather pace, that it seeped into the very idiom of the English

language (round one’s neck, etc…) In this sense its credentials as a canary in the coal-mine

of the anthropocene are venerable indeed. One sequence in the documentary that so moved

George W. Bush portrayed the film crew transporting a lame albatross called Lanai back to a

wildlife park in Honololu to serve as “an ambassador for the species,” much like the

taxidermised specimens that Bryan sent around the world. Another described how albatrosses

feed their chicks with plastic flotsam scavenged from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -

precisely the kind of mobile, transboundary pollutant that territorially demarcated nature

reserves cannot hope to combat. Finally, in 2009, one particular image caught global

attention: an albatross corpse on Midway, rotted away to reveal its belly packed with plastic

161 . John M. Broder, “Bush to Protect Vast New Pacific Tracts” New York Times, 5 January 1909.; Alison Rieser, “The Papahānaumokuākea Precedent: Ecosystem-Scale Marine Protected Areas in the Eez,” Asian-Pacific Law & Policy Journal 13:2(2012)162 https://www.papahanaumokuakea.gov/new-about/ Accessed 8 March 2018163 B. A. Block, et al., “Tracking Apex Marine Predator Movements in a Dynamic Ocean,” Nature 475, no. 7354 (2011/07/07/print)164 Coleridge, Rime

https://www.papahanaumokuakea.gov/new-about/


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debris.165 (See Figure 4.4) As for the ancients, the entrails of dead birds augur the fate of the

world.

165 Chris Jordan, “Midway: Message from the Gyre” Source: CNN.com, “Plight of the albatrosses: choking on plastic waste” (4 November 2009)

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/11/03/midway.atoll.albatross/index.html?iref=24hours



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Figure 4.1: The North Pacific in 1902

Figure 4.2: The Hawaiian Islands Reservation, established by President Theodore

Roosevelt’s Executive Order 1019, 3 February 1909


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Figure 4.3: The Papahānaumokuākea National Marine National Monument, established

by executive order of President George W. Bush in 2006. The current borders of the

monument were delineated by executive order of President Barack Obama in 2016.

Figure 4.4: Chris Jordan, “Midway: Message from the Gyre”

CNN.com, “Plight of the albatrosses: choking on plastic waste” (4 November 2009)


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