The World полностью

The ideals of the American revolution marked a new epoch – the fruition of both the English civil war and the Enlightenment.

Yet without a game changer, the Americans seemed unlikely to win.

SHOOT OFF YOUR ARROW: KAMEHAMEHA AND COOK

At Valley Forge, Washington was joined by a young French aristocrat, Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, who had fitted out a ship with his own money and, in June 1777, arrived in America to fight for freedom aged only nineteen. The Americans quickly understood Lafayette’s potential influence in Paris, elevating him to major-general. Washington offered to be his ‘friend and father’. His skirmishes with the British, recounted in his excited letters home, were closely followed by Louis and Antoinette.

Many a ruler has dreamed of that ultimate panacea: a short victorious war. Louis XVI was no exception. He knew he could not afford a war, but his new finance minister, the Swiss banker Jacques Necker,^* advised that if he won the war in a single year loans without higher taxes would fund it. Lafayette returned to advocate for America and, after a victory at Saratoga had shown that Americans could beat British–Hessian troops, Louis agreed to intervene, backed by his Spanish cousins. A short victorious war would restore royal fortunes. On 6 February 1778, the octogenarian American envoy Benjamin Franklin negotiated the alliance. Antoinette supported the war, and her first lover would play a role in the American revolution.

Soon after her arrival in Paris, Antoinette had met this special friend at a masque ball, a very eighteenth-century event that allowed incognito monarchs to meet masked strangers – and everyone to meet new lovers. She encountered a flaxen-haired Swedish count, Axel von Fersen, the same age as her, who had talked to her without realizing who she was. Now in 1778 Ferson returned to Paris. ‘Ah, here’s an old acquaintance,’ she said; an equerry noticed that ‘her hand trembled with visible emotion’.

After her disappointing marriage, she fell in love. Fersen thought the heavily pregnant queen ‘the prettiest and most amiable princess’. Asking him to wear his smart Swedish uniform, she welcomed him at her informal villa, Petit Trianon, on the Versailles estate, where ‘The queen couldn’t take her eyes off him … eyes full of tears.’ It was the beginning of a loving liaison that endured for the rest of her life, but they were not yet physical lovers. ‘I love you and will love you madly all my life,’ he wrote later, while she called him ‘the most loved and loving of men’, affirming ‘My heart is all yours.’

In America, Washington was now becalmed for another anxious winter at Middlebrook, New Jersey. Yet, while the Atlantic world focused on the rebellion, a Polynesian potentate – whose island would form another part of America, was encountering his first European.

On 26 January 1779, at Kealakekua Bay, Kaleiopuu, alii-nui (king) of Hawaii island, one of the last lands outside European knowledge, made a visit to the captain of one of two British ships, accompanied by his son Kiwalao. Also among his entourage of young nobles, towering over both of them, was the third man of the kingdom, his nephew Kamehameha, a hefty giant of seven foot, with low brows, penetrating, heavy-lidded eyes and an air of menacing power who would soon unite the Hawaiian islands.

The old alii-nui, wizened from his addiction to the narcotic awa but still an enthusiastic lover of his young boyfriends, arrived wearing a gorgeous scarlet, black and yellow ahuala cloak, made from 400,000 feathers taken from 80,000 birds, and a feathered mahiole helmet. While the regalia was impressive, the Hawaiian leaders were weakened by the ferocity of their political struggles.

Around 1735, an ambitious prince of the ruling clan, Alapai the Great, had overthrown and killed rivals, sacrificing them to gain their spiritual power, mola, uniting several islands into a single kingdom, which he ruled for twenty years.

When his niece, the noblewoman Kekuiapoiwa, became pregnant, she asked for the eyeball of a shark, a signal that the baby would be a king slayer, at which Alapai ordered the baby to be killed. Unsure what to do, the baby boy’s mother placed him on Naha, the sacred stone: if he cried, he would be killed – but he did not. The warrior king sent assassins, but Kekuiapoiwa hid the baby. Finally Alapai, confident in his power, lifted the death sentence and recalled the baby Kamehameha to court. When Alapai died around 1754, his kinsman Kaleiopuu seized power.

Now boarding the European ship with his king, Kamehameha sized up the ships and their cannon along with the European chieftain who combined the scientific pursuits of an Englishman of the Enlightenment with the imperial mission of a British conquistador: James Cook.