The World полностью

The settler nation now extended from ocean to ocean, even though the central section was, writes Pekka Hämäläinen, ‘a seemingly disordered, uncontainable world of grasslands, deserts, buffalos, and Indians’. Thousands rode in wagons, prey to the elements and Native Americans. In February 1847, a party of eighty-seven members of the Donner family tried a new route from Missouri but, getting lost in mountains and desert, were decimated by hunger and reduced to cannibalism. Only forty-eight survived. Two years later, the discovery of gold in California launched the first gold fever: the village of San Francisco grew from 1,000 souls to 30,000; altogether 300,000 settlers rushed to California. For almost a century, few settlers had arrived in America – in 1820, just 8,000 came – but now, thanks to steamships, crises in Europe, land rushes and gold rushes, immigration tripled: 1.6 million Irish, escaping a famine at home, immigrated,^* the start of a rush of settlers that transformed America, creating new cities and bringing more Europeans into contact with Native Americans, who still controlled much of the interior.

In California, militias of gold miners and other settlers attacked and slaughtered Native Americans, collecting ears and scalps to earn bounties. The Indian Protection Act, meanwhile, forced Native Americans and their children into servitude. Survivors were driven into reservations, but these masters of the interior were able to defy the Euro-American settlers: the Lakota still ruled the northern plains, the Comanche the Texan–Mexican borderlands of Comancheria. The Native Americans, armed with guns and horses, had intensified their hunting of bison. The Comanche alone had annually killed 280,000 of the animals, but now settlers were wiping out the herds. Among the Comanche lived the chief Peta Nocona and his wife Naduah (once known as Cynthia Ann Parker, the girl kidnapped from Fort Parker) with their son, Quanah. Quanah had no idea that his mother was white; he had been trained as a Comanche fighter by his father, whom he regularly accompanied on raids.^*

AMERICA TURNS WEST: THE KING OF HAWAII, QUEEN EMMA AND COMMODORE VANDERBILT

As thousands of Americans settled in California, the nation was drawn towards the Pacific, trading in China, infiltrating Hawaii and keen to open Japan, closed for centuries under the Tokugawa dynasty of shoguns. In July 1853 the US president Franklin Pierce dispatched a commodore, Matthew Perry, veteran of the Mexican war, to Japan to force open the closed nation. Perry sailed into Edo Bay with four heavily armed steam cruisers to demand a trade treaty with Japan at the end of a gun barrel.

In Hawaii, the reign of Kamehameha III, son of the Conqueror who had united the islands, had been dominated by the struggle between his desperate love for his sister and the influence of American missionaries.^* Hawaiian kings had often married their siblings, but the Conqueror’s widowed queens had banned sacrifices and then, in a radical reform, abolished the traditional kapu system of idolatry and converted to Christianity. They also welcomed American missionaries, who started to marry into Hawaiian families, buy estates and interfere with local sexual customs.

The young king initially devoted himself to sexual adventures with Kaomi, an ex-Christian, half-Tahitian male lover, the traditional aikane. Kamehameha appointed him co-ruler until pressure forced his removal. His real agony, however, was not his affair with Kaomi, but the great love of his life: his full sister Na¯hiʻenaʻena – luminous in her scarlet feather cloak in a portrait by the painter Robert Dampier – who was also in love with him. In Hawaiian tradition, their marriage could only strengthen the dynasty, but the missionaries managed to ban it. Married to another aristocrat, she and the king became lovers anyway and when she gave birth to a son in 1836, Kamehameha declared the child his heir.

Yet, like the Habsburgs, the family was being genetically destroyed by incestuous marriage: the child died within hours. The king was heartbroken. Na¯hiʻenaʻena died soon afterwards, aged twenty-two. When he finally married another relative, Kamala, both their children died in infancy.

The kings had always employed half-Hawaiian or European ministers. The family of John Young, the Conqueror’s gunner, played a special role. Young’s son John Young II, brought up with the king, served as his premier. But then in 1839 the premier was caught ‘fastening his pantaloons’ in the bedroom of Queen Kamala. He was sentenced to death, a penalty only commuted at the plea of the queen dowager. Amazingly John Young II remained interior minister. Kamehameha III maintained Hawaiian independence, but Americans and Europeans were increasingly interested.