“When the first people arrived in Hawai’i by canoe, Sandalwood (‘iliahi) grew abundantly. They found medicinal and other practical uses for the tree, including using the pulverized wood to scent bark cloth used for clothing and bedding.” (Elisabeth C. Miller Library)
“The Hawaiian people were familiar with the pleasant aroma of the iliahi. They called its wood laau ala (or laau aala), meaning “fragrant wood,” and they sprinkled finely powdered heartwood on their kapa or bark doth to perfume it.” (St John)
“For centuries the sandalwood, with its pleasantly fragrant dried heartwood, was much sought for. In the Orient, particularly in China, Burma, and India, the wood was used for the making of idols and sacred utensils for shrines, choice boxes and carvings, fuel for funeral pyres, and joss sticks to be burnt in temples.”
“The distilled oil was used in numerous medicines, perfumes, and cosmetics, and as a body rub. The thick oil pressed from the seed was used as illuminating oil.” (St John)
“The fragrant wood was a principal commodity of the American China traders, prized by the Chinese mainly for incense but also for furniture and craft objects.” (Johnston) “White men also traded along the Northwest Coast for furs and other goods, stopping in Hawaii to replenish their ships before sailing to the market in Canton.” (Kashay)
“The islands’ animals, fruits, and vegetable could only go so far in paying for the silks, satins, china, furniture, and other goods that the chiefs desired.”
“At the same time, American and British businessmen’s need to sell items in order to gain wealth persisted. The discovery of sandalwood at the islands made it possible for both these needs and desires to be met.” (Kashay)
“The early 19th century in the Hawaiian Islands is known as the ‘Sandalwood Era,’ where it is estimated that as many as 90% of Hawaiian sandalwood trees were felled and exchanged for ships and supplies. As a result, most Hawaiian sandalwood taxa are now rare or threatened”. (Harbaugh etal)
“American and British merchants exchanged guns, powder, cloth, glass, and New England rum for Hawaiian sandalwood. In turn, they traded the fragrant wood to the Chinese for silk, china, furniture, and the like.” (Kashay)
While the chiefs “could consume the goods their people produced without remuneration, capitalists required payment. The islands’ animals, fruits, and vegetable could only go so far in paying for the silks, satins, china, furniture, and other goods that the chiefs desired.”
“At the same time, American and British businessmen’s need to sell items in order to gain wealth persisted. The discovery of sandalwood at the islands made it possible for both these needs and desires to be met.” (Kashay)
“From 1790 to 1810 sandalwood may have been exported, but if so, in very small quantity, for little record is found.” (St John) “The sandalwood era started in 1804 and lasted until about 1842.” (Seto Levin)
“Then, in 1809, two brothers, the American ship captains Jonathan Winship of the “Albatross” and Nathan Winship of the “O’Cain,” started on a voyage that established the sandalwood trade.”
“After trading for furs on the coast of Oregon, they sailed in October, 1811, for Honolulu, where they and Captain William Heath Davis of the “Isabella” took on cargoes of sandalwood. The ships sailed to Canton, where the fragrant wood was sold at a large profit.”
“Returning to Honolulu, the three captains persuaded King Kamehameha I to grant them a monopoly of the sandalwood and cotton trade for 10 years. Loading five ships, the three captains sailed to Canton and thus established a highly remunerative traffic.” (St John)
“(W)hen the captains returned to Honolulu they found Kamehameha unfriendly. He canceled their trade monopoly and refused to renew it …. Thereafter, though no longer a trader’s monopoly, the sandalwood trade developed rapidly and throve from 1815 to 1826 … The wood was marketed in China by the picul (133 1/3-pounds) and its value fluctuated from $3.00 to $18.00.” (St John)
“[T]he sandalwood trade reached its peak between 1810-1819. During these years, plenty of good quality wood could be found in the easily accessible lowlands of the islands. This timber fetched a high price in China, somewhere between a $120-$ 150 a ton. “With his monopoly of the trade, Kamehameha I could net as much as $300,000 or more annually.” (Kashay)
“But, by the 1820s, the supply of sandalwood had diminished. Excessive cutting of the timber had reduced the Hawaiians to searching for stands of the fragrant wood in the inaccessible mountains at the center of the islands. Generally, this wood proved inferior to that which had been previously logged.” (Kashay)
“By the 1820s, the whaling industry brought more western men to the islands. They arrived either to replenish their vessels or to sell goods to those who did. In all of these cases, the lure of great wealth led westerners to settle permanently.” (Kashay)
“As the exchange in sandalwood declined in the late 1820s, the resident foreign merchants made up for their lost revenues by increasing their trade in provisions with the new whale fleets that were cruising the Pacific.” (Kashay)
“The successive Hawaiian kings at first followed the example of the shrewd Kamehameha I and kept sandalwood as a royal monopoly, but later they shared it with the higher chiefs.” (St John)
“As with the Native American fur trade, the sandalwood trade allowed the chiefs to buy western goods on credit. (Kashay) In the Islands, “Business seems to have been conducted, to a very considerable extent, by barter.”
“Sandal wood was the chief article, indeed it might almost have been called the standard coin, although Spanish silver more nearly reached that definition. There is constant mention of sticks or piculs of the wood, but none of money.” (Hunnewell)
“As the king bought greater and greater quantities of imported goods, his demands for sandalwood in taxes became greater and more frequent.” (St John)
“All the inhabitants able to go were ordered into the hills in search of the precious wood. The trees were cut down and chopped into logs 6 to 8 feet long; then with adzes the bark and sapwood were chipped off.”
“Men and women tied the logs to their backs with the fibrous leaves of the ti and trudged to the measuring pit or to the shore.” (St John) There were “frequent and unannounced trips by chiefs throughout their lands to observe the local populations, direct their activities (such as sandalwood cutting)”. (Johnston)
“The tax levies increased, becoming more and more exacting, and as all chroniclers agree, they became an intolerable burden on the people. As the easily accessible sandalwood stands had been felled, the people had to climb farther and farther into the wet, cold mountain forests and the quests were no longer like idyllic song fests.”
“The people were driven to the task, and many died of exposure in the mountains. While they were away in the interior, crops and taro patches were neglected, so that famine came to the islands and took its toll of the king’s subjects.” (St John)
“The advent of the sandalwood trade was not without consequence for the whole society. External trade formerly consisted of the exchange of food for iron and this trade did not overburden Hawaii’s subsistence economy.”
“But the collection of sandalwood for trade entailed diverting a large portion of the labour force from subsistence agriculture to the grueling task of cutting trees in the mountain forests and hauling them long distances to the seacoast.”
“A direct consequence of this diversion of labour was that many of the fields were left uncultivated and fishing virtually ceased and that whatever was cultivated was harvested for the ali’i and their konohiki ‘managers’; the makaainana went hungry.”
“Moreover the new use of labour reinforced the breach already existing between the makaainana and the ali’i. The ali’i now viewed the makaainana not as junior kinsmen but as a resource to be exploited.” (Seto Levin)
“The following are the regulations adopted and enforced by the Sandwich Island authorities, in December, 1826, for the purpose of raising revenue to discharge their debts due to citizens of the United States:”
“Every man is required to deliver a half picul of good sandalwood [a picul being 133 lbs.] to the governor of the district to which he belongs, on or before the 1st day of September, 1827; in case of not being able to procure the sandalwood, four Spanish dollars, or any property worth that sum, will be taken in payment.”
“No person, except those who are infirm, or too advanced an age to go to the mountains, will be exempted from this law. Every woman of the age of 13 years or upwards, is to pay a mat, 12 feet long and 6 wide, or tapa of equal value, (to such a mat,) or the sum of one Spanish dollar, on or before the 1st day of September, 1827….”
“Every man who shall proceed to the mountains for sandal-wood shall be at liberty to cut one pecul, and, on delivering half a pecul to the person appointed to receive it, shall be entitled to sell the other half, on his own account, to whomsoever he may think proper.” (Thomas AP Catesby Jones, Feb 4, 1845 Report No. 92)
“On one occasion we saw nearly two thousand persons, laden with fagots [bundles] of sandalwood, coming down from the mountains to deposit their burthens in the royal store houses, and then depart to their homes–wearied with their unpaid labors, yet unmurmuring in their bondage.”
“In fact, the condition of the common people is that of slaves; they hold nothing which may not be taken from them by the strong hand of arbitrary power, whether exercised by the sovereign or a petty chief. (Journal of Tyerman & Bennet, April 18, 1822)
“Even in the time of Kamehameha I the sandalwood had been much depleted, so that this monarch put a kapu (ban) on the cutting of young trees.” (St John)
By 1849, “The Oahu Sandal-wood, the Iliahi, or Laau ala (fragrant wood) of the Hawaiians, is now to be found in only one place, called Kuaohe, where it grows on the slopes of hills, close to the sea.” (Seemann, in Journal of Botany)
“Of the splendid groves, with the produce of which formerly so many ships were laden, but a few isolated bushes, which do not exceed three feet in height and an inch in diameter, remain, and these would probably disappear had they not been protected by the law, and thus escaped being converted into fuel.” (Seemann, in Journal of Botany)
