It has been said that when Captain James Cook stepped ashore at Hawaii's Kealakekua Bay in December, 1778, greeted by hundreds of Hawaiian chiefs, warriors and priests, it was not simply another collision between the stone age and modern, industrializing Europe, but an encounter, from a certain point of view, between two remarkably similar societies. The ships of the Royal Navy, each miniature models of the British class system, strict rank hierarchies buttressed by caste and run with autocratic discipline, found their counterparts in the Hawaiian chiefdom, as baroquely stratified and authoritarian as any in the Pacific. "At Kealakekua," the anthropologist Patrick Kirch has written, "one chiefdom met another, recognizing in the other the essential structures of hierarchy and power."¹ The participants may also have recognized another point of similarity, that theirs was an encounter between two of the greatest seaborne colonizing societies in history.

          After about 1500 BC, ² from their cultural cradle in the region of Tonga, Polynesians explored and successfully settled a larger area of the earth's surface than anyone before them: stretching from Tonga, east to Rapa Nui (Easter Is), north to Hawaii, and South to Aotearoa (New Zealand), an area spanning two hemispheres. Thousands of years before the Europeans would, Polynesians mastered the technical and material challenges of extended seafaring: by combining the lateen sail, the double-hulled canoe and a supple science of celestial navigation³ ã and by becoming experts at managing what Alfred Crosby called a "portmanteau biota"⁴ and what ethnobotanist Edgar Anderson called "man's transported landscapes." For the Polynesian settlers of Hawaii, this meant 28 species of crop plants for food and fiber, including bananas, coconuts, yams, taro, ti, wauke (paper mulberry), breadfruit, pandanus. noni, olona, and the psychoactive kava, as well as dogs, pigs, chickens and rats, all helping to project and sustain a common language, culture and livelihood to a vast, interlinked realm of archipelagos and islands.⁵

          As Crosby and others have shown, Europe's "portmanteau biota" was equally critical to its expansion. Cattle, white clover, wheat, weeds and diseases underwrote the efforts of the British and others to colonize most of the world, and, in temperate climes, to create "neo-Europes," full-dress biological recreations of the home landscapes. Whereas, in the Atlantic in previous centuries ecological imperialism had been a subordinate part of the project of implanting European colonists or garrisons, ⁶ in the Pacific from the late 18^th to the mid-19^th centuries, imperialism's strategy aimed primarily at implanting not populations, but preferential, advantageous relations and trade flows between mobile agents of the European metropole and native groups in situ.⁷ Biological traffic was both means and end to this effort, and the transferal of organisms was quickly organized and systematized to provide fuel for an intricate globalization machine.

          Cook has been called the "avatar" of the "Second" British Empire: an imperialism reconfigured after the loss of the American colonies and the atrophying of the mercantile system, no longer interested in territorial jurisdiction or conquering native peoples, but in spreading a newly articulated, more humane form of control, whether by direct or indirect sovereignty, manifested through trade and diplomatic relations.⁸ "We prefer trade to dominion," asserted one British official in 1782. The British-French wars of 1790-1815 left the imperial project tired, spent, and distracted; its limited resources available outside the North Atlantic theater were deployed to search for "footholds" and way stations, a supply archipelago to support the Royal Navy, advancing trade and scientific exploration. On his Pacific cruise to attack Spanish shipping from 1740-44, George Anson attempted to establish a South American base ã a "halfway house" like the Dutch had at the Cape of Good Hope. ⁹ The voyages of Byron in 1764-66, Wallis in 1766-68 and Cook's three voyages from 1768-1779 marked in addition a renewed search for the Northwest passage, a British dream dating from the Tudor era, and the supposed terra australis or southern continent. In all of these efforts the figure of the scientist-naval officer was central, commanding small expeditions with explicit instructions to cultivate ties and trade relations with the natives, and to pursue biological exchange: to seed and stock the (is)lands found along the way and to bring back potentially useful seeds to the empire. ¹⁰

          Cook's orders on the first trip had been to observe the transit of Venus in Tahiti, and to catalog what he saw along the way. On the third voyage, he had, in addition, secret instructions to find "a North East, or North West Passage, from the Pacific Ocean into the Atlantic Ocean," and "carefully to observe the nature of the Soil & the Produce thereof; the Animals & Fowls that inhabit or frequent it" and "to bring home Specimens ofÄthe Seeds of such Trees, Shrubs, Plants, Fruits, and Grains, peculiar to those Places, as you may be able to collect." No secret was his duty to leave specimens from his own country behind: when the Resolution left London in June, 1776, it "was a floating barnyard" loaded with "Cattle, horses, sheep, goats, hogs, and poultry for New Zealand, Tahiti, and Tonga," and a Tahitian named Omai, returning with Cook from a celebrated sojourn in England after the second voyage. At Huahine, Cook had a garden planted for Omai; he had previously planted a garden in Tahiti in 1769, as Wallis had planted citrus trees there in 1767. At Ni'ihau in 1777, Cook contributed to the Hawaiian biota English pigs, goats, and mellon, pumpkin and onion seeds.¹¹

          The historian David Mackay has remarked that "planting a garden in Tahiti was the botanical equivalent of taking coals to Newcastle." Others, such as Gannanath Obeyesekere, have interpreted it as an expression of the European imperialist "improvement narrative" wherein Cook the Civilizer introduces order into the untended wilderness "to domesticate a savage land," rendering his imperialist mission "morally persuasive."¹² It may simply have been pragmatic. In the late 18^th to mid-19^th centuries, few transoceanic voyages left port without a menagerie on deck ã supplies with which to stock passing shores as an investment in future voyages. The French explorer La Perouse landed goats on Rapa Nui and planted seeds on his march into its interior ã and commented accurately in his journal that the natives had "foolishly cut down" the island's trees "ages ago," causing desertification.¹³ Even American traders did it, at their own expense, considering it a wise investment in the success of future voyages and good baksheesh to grease trade with native rulers. John Meares wrote of a voyage from Canton in 1788: "A certain number of cattle and other useful animals were purchased, for the purpose of being put on shore in those places where they might add to the comfort of the inhabitants or promise to supply the future navigators of our own, or any other country, with the necessary refreshments."¹⁴ In 1803, William Shaler and Richard Cleveland brought four horses from California to Hawaii as presents for Kamehameha (the king bought their ship, the Lelia Byrd, as the flagship of an armada to invade Kauai). American whaler captains, generally unconcerned with moral persuasion, left livestock on even the smallest rocks, such as the Bonins south of Japan.¹⁵

          By the 1780s, Sir Joseph Banks, veteran of Cook's first voyage and director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, had launched a global scheme for rebuilding the mercantile system with an "unabashedly economic" program of "plant transfer" to bring production of raw materials inside the British empire. "Botany and great power rivalry became curiously intertwined, as nations endeavoured to guard their precious colonial treasures while seeking to filch those of their competitors," in Mackay's words. Banks sent a Polish spy, Anton Hove, to Gujarat, India to steal cotton seeds. He organized the movement of sago and date palms to avert famines in India, of hemp and flax for naval stores, of spices to break the Dutch monopoly, and helped sponsor prizes for the importation of cinnamon, "cochineal, silk, indigo, fine cotton, cloves, camphor and coffee."¹⁶ And, responding to pressure from British sugar planters in the West Indies who had lost 15,000 slaves to hurricanes and drought from 1780-87, he sent Captain Bligh, another veteran of Cook's first trip, to Tahiti to collect seedlings of the breadfruit trees they had seen there to transplant to St. Vincent and Jamaica as food for slaves. After the first expedition foundered on mutiny at Tahiti, Banks sent Bligh again ã and succeeded, making his ship, the famous Endeavor, into "a floating garden transported in luxuriance from one extremity of the world to another."¹⁷ As an example of the thoroughness of this traffic, the British had successfully imported over 200 species of plants to New South Wales by 1803.¹⁸

          Pacific natives were also eager for Euro-American goods and organisms. As the Euro-Americans themselves did, they filtered this trade and traffic through their own economic, political, religious and class frameworks. When Cook stepped off at Tahiti, Kealakekua Bay, and elsewhere to further the march of the British empire, he met powerful sets of chiefs, many trying to advance their own designs of Polynesian empire. In Hawaii and elsewhere, he and his compatriots stepped into long-running cycles of warfare for consolidation and control of districts, islands, and groups of islands. Kamehameha and other chiefs quickly saw the usefulness of Euro-American arms, ships and personnel, and launched expensive arms races that would completely reshape patterns of life in their islands. Some learned the new rules quicker than others. Kehekili, ruler of Maui, Molokai, and Oahu in the 1780s, frequently employed thievery and occasionally violence to procure goods; "lacking that noblesse oblige with which Kamehameha was careful to greet his European guests,"¹⁹ he was shunned in favor of the latter by officers and traders. Along with his hospitality, Kamehameha's trading acumen was widely praised. His assertion of kapu or taboo control over hogs, cattle (from a pair given him by Captain George Vancouver in 1790, which soon grew into vast herds) and later, sandalwood, won him strategic advantage over Kehekili and all other rivals as he successfully consolidated his rule over the archipelago (many defeated chiefs blamed the Europeans for the concentration of all power in Hawaii in one hand).²⁰ In Tahiti, the Pomares clan rose to dominance through a similarly shrewd control of the pork trade with New South Wales.²¹

          In time, Kamehameha became a kind of Polynesian Joseph Banks, collecting plants and seeds (including the seeds of apples spat out on beach by foreigners) and employing a Welsh gardener and Mexican cowboys to train his kanakas [men] to become "paniolos" [Hawaiian for "espa¿oles"]. He picked and chose as it suited him: according to Cleveland, he was initially unimpressed with the horses given to him, thinking them too much trouble to feed for the transportation benefit to be had: "he expresses his thanks, but did not seem to comprehend their value."²² Other Hawaiians, commoners in particular, took more readily to them, and horse riding became a craze. Tobacco became a plague, with "almost every person" carrying his own pipe.²³ Melons, watermelons, "and fruit in general having found the most ready reception next to tobacco," were widely grown.²⁴ Yet, on the whole, Polynesians were uninterested in adopting the European diet. A British officer visiting Kealakekua Bay in July, 1796 reported that, of the things left by Vancouver, the ducks had bred, the cattle "had much increased in number," but the "seeds had failed through inattention."²⁵ In Tahiti, "it was only after three decades of visits that the Tahitians began to nurture some of the alien species or to deplore their introduction such as guavas and goats." The "shaddock" citrus trees introduced there by Cook from Tonga, and called ooroo no pretany, breadfruit of Britain, had been kept alive only by the attention of one old man. "The natives do not value them," wrote Bligh.²⁶ Where Bligh had planted Indian corn, a later crew also planted a garden and asked the natives to take care of it. The Tahitians laughed, and said that they had everything they needed. Of the horses and cattle left by Cook, they had neglected the cattle, and killed a horse, but had disliked the meat.²⁷

          Many Europeans thought that the prospect of commerce might entice Polynesians to become farmers of European crops, and to a certain extent, it did. Beginning in 1793 the British governor of New South Wales introduced hogs and potato seeds to Maoris in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand; by 1805, Maoris supplied a considerable produce market there.²⁸ In Hawaii, lush gardens of vegetables "introduced by foreigners" were tended, "chiefly for the white people." The largest of these were farmed by white people ã and one black one.²⁹ A Captain Butler at Lahaina, Maui maintained an irrigated plantation that prompted wide admiration and comparisons with England. Anthony Allen, an American freedman, had gardens at Pawa'a. A Spaniard, Don Francisco de Paula Marin, arrived from California in 1814, cultivated extensive gardens and vineyards for trade and his own "table d'hote." Travelers could expect to find there beef, pork, goat, duck, goose, turkey, watermelons, onions, coconuts, bananas, cabbage, potatoes, beans, shallots, citrus fruit, pomegranates, figs, pineapples, pumpkins, tamarinds, and wine made from "Isabella" vines from Madeira. One visitor assessed that Marin was "still not adept at the art of making wine," though others disagreed.³⁰

          Along with these intentional imports came other, unintentional ones: cockroaches, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, fleas (called uku lele, jumping louse), and innumerable plant species gone wild across the landscape: thorn trees, puncture vines, feral cabbages and indigo. European diseases, starting with "the clap," a gift repeatedly given from Cook's visits forward, spread unchecked.

          On Cook's third voyage, between his first and second visits to Hawaii, the British ships cruised the Northwest coast from Alaska south, trading for sea otter pelts, which his crew subsequently found to bring fabulous prices in the market at Canton. Publicity for the voyage was immediate in the UK and the US, and especially in the best-selling account by the American-born sailor John Ledyard, the details and routes of a new, globe-encircling trade were laid out like a map for others to follow.³¹ Soon, British traders sailed for the Northwest coast, and as predicted turned spectacular profits at Canton. As per Cook's example, Hawaii became the natural stopover for refreshment of ships and crews. Fleurieu, chronicler of the French Marchand expedition in 1790, dubbed it "the great caravansary" of the Pacific.³² Hawaiians supplied the shipping with water, vegetables, meat, salt, firewood, spars, rope, sailors, and women. The historian Ernest Dodge wrote that it was "doubtful" if the fur trade "could have been carried out profitablyÄwithout the Hawaiian Islands."³³

          Beginning with the Northwest-Canton fur trade, a rapid ramification of trade webs in the Pacific occurred, with Hawaii at their center. What is most remarkable about this growth was that it lay almost entirely outside the plans and dictates of mercantilist, imperial planners in Europe. The British trade illustrates the tensions and ambivalences of the new Pacific world. On one hand, Great Britain had been for decades attempting to break the maritime monopoly claimed by the Spanish for its American possessions. British whalers had been forced off the South American coast in the 1780s, and, in 1789, Spanish warships seized two UK vessels at Nootka Sound, leading to the "Nootka Crisis" of 1790 and the brink of war.³⁴ On the other hand, at Canton, the British East India Company strictly enforced its monopoly on the China trade, requiring all UK-flagged ships to sell to it at listed prices. In addition, it imposed a punitive tax on the sale of any UK vessel to foreigners to avoid the restrictions. Samuel Shaw, supercargo on the first American ship to Canton, the Empress of China, in 1784, and later US consul there, noted that these rules "strongly favor the suspicion" that the UK aimed for a monopoly on tea exports to Europe. Instead, what it built was a situation tailor-made for smuggling. British tea consumption in 1784 was 14 million pounds, yet the Company's receipts "did not exceed six." The remainder was shipped by rival countries, or by UK ships flying flags of convenience ã "Renegado Englishmen," Shaw sniffed. The upside for monopoly-breakers was too good to ignore. "Since the year 1784, the trade here has been constantly tending to the disadvantage of the Europeans. The imports, collectively taken, hardly defray the first cost, and the exports have increased in a ratio beyond all possible conjectureÄ.Such is the demand for this article, that the Chinese hardly know how much to ask for it; and, should the rage for purchasing continue only another year, it is not improbable that its price may be doubled."³⁵

          Shaw recognized an opportunity for American traders. The United States, its economy devastated by the revolutionary war, British blockades, and a crushing specie crisis, desperately needed markets. Shaw suggested that, "If it is necessary that the Americans should drink tea," they pay for it with "the produce of her mountains and forest" as the Empress of China had, with ginseng. Ships left New York with ginseng, but many more sailed to the Northwest coast with trinkets and arms to trade to the Indians for sea otter furs. Within a few years, New Englanders had taken over the trade. By 1800, 100 US ships anchored at Canton.³⁶

          Their own success drove them to look beyond the fur trade: "and this in consequence of the animal's being almost annihilated."³⁷ Economical sources of domestic ginseng, too, were soon tapped out. US traders searched out new commodities and diversified markets, but their customers adapted nearly as fast as they did. The Chinese, famously, would look at little besides top-quality furs or silver; Northwest Indians kept careful control over their own sources of furs and salmon, demanding ever-increasing prices;³⁸ and Spanish officials punished smuggling stiffly, if unevenly. From 1812 onward, Americans found that good quality Hawaiian sandalwood fetched good prices in Canton, and a new dimension was added to the circuit. Hawaiian chiefs, allowed progressively by Kamehameha to trade on their own accounts, became prodigious consumers of foreign goods, as conspicuous consumption became an arena of furious social competition between factions of the chiefly class. US captains might leave Boston or New York with cargoes of guns and ammunition for South American rebels and silk dresses, pianos, and bone china for Hawaiian nobles; pick up furs, salmon, or lumber on the Northwest Coast; dried beef, hides and tallow in California; copper in Peru; sandalwood at Honolulu; and sail for home full of tea from China. As the markets matured, enterprising "gather" merchants combed the Pacific for goods: "beche-de-mer, tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl, shark fins, edible birds nests, grain, fish, salt, coal, sandalwood and other exotic woods, and crude construction lumber for Asiatic and Australian markets. Copra, copper, cowhides and tallow, arrowroot, vanilla, spices, and guano they delivered to American and European markets."³⁹ On the horizon the whaling fishery loomed, slowly building from the 1820s, towards its golden age from the 1830s to 1850s.

          Kamehameha himself underwent a gradual evolution from warrior to trader, then governor, that is representative of the dynamics of the period. For decades, from Cook's landfall until the belated capitulation of Kauai in 1810, Kamehameha's control of trade was aimed at acquiring arms, ships and naval supplies for his conquests.⁴⁰ At first he proceeded by direct purchase, but quickly got the point of European behavior and instituted a native mercantilism of sorts ã asking or demanding that ships leave behind expert European and American carpenters, armorers, and shipwrights to build a fleet of European-style vessels in Hawaii. His shipyards bustled with activity, and the skill of Hawaiian workmen trained by foreigners was frequently remarked upon.⁴¹ By 1806 Kamehameha had 15 vessels, including three-masters, brigs, and cutters; by 1808 he counted more than 30 ships, most under 40 tons, built in Hawaii, plus the 200-ton Lelia Bird.⁴² At the height of the buildup, he was said also to have had a fleet of "peleleu" war canoes up to 800 strong.⁴³ After the capitulation of Kauai, the king turned his attention to other things. An 1812 invoice of goods he purchased includes "chairs, lamps, tables, fireworks, velvets, satins, silks, fifty paper parasols, fifty silk hats, 135 pounds of large glass beads, and the like."⁴⁴ The same year he participated as stakeholder in sending a cargo of sandalwood to Canton; while the voyage was not a financial success, the port charges levied by Chinese authorities at Canton inspired him to impose an $80 per ship harbor duty at Honolulu plus a $12 piloting fee.⁴⁵

          From the first European landfall in the 18^th century Pacific, control of trade, not turf, was the name of the game. Cook strictly regulated which members of his crews were allowed to carry on trade. By the third voyage, he could write: "Knowing from experience, that if every body was allowed to traffick with the natives according to their own caprice, perpetual quarrels would ensue, to prevent this I ordered that particular person(s) should manage the traffick both on board and ashore, and prohibited the trade to all others." On approaching Tahiti, Bligh wrote in his log: "2:00 PM. The Surgeon examined the Ships Company to discover those that were tainted with the Venereal disease. 5:00 PM. Took an Account of every Man's Cloaths to prevent them trafficking them away."⁴⁶ If one were not vigilant, capricious trade would break out, just like venereal disease, and was equally unhealthy for the body of the mercantilist empire.

          Where and when they were enforceable, controls were profitable to the controllers: Spanish governors; the East India Company; chiefs like Kamehameha, the Pomares, and among the Northwest Indians; the Chinese authorities at Canton. But anti-monopolist forces were always in motion, siphoning off and redirecting flows of goods and organisms, and planting seeds of uncharted, future trade wherever they went: US captains were just the most effective of free traders from many nations (John Jacob Astor's plans to monopolize the Northwest fur trade were defeated as handily as the East India Company). The full panoply and energy of Pacific trade in the period was in great part the result of unregulated competition keeping the monopolist powers sidelined. This in turn was due to a combination of the size of the Pacific and its distance from the Atlantic world, making exclusions difficult to enforce, the disinclination of home governments to do the enforcing, and the number and resourcefulness of independent competitors, including natives. The Pacific world in this period provides an example of the "borderland" condition described by Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, a kind of "middle ground" characterized by "the extended cohabitation between natives and newcomers that prevailed in the perimeters of European colonial empires," and by multiple-sided rivalries between national claimants that allowed natives significant agency and produced extreme fluidity of alliances and trade relations between groups.⁴⁷ European and native governments alike were, in a sense, paralyzed by their own factionalisms and ideological ambivalences regarding nationalism and free trade.⁴⁸ From his consulate at Canton, Samuel Shaw asked: "The experience of nearly a century has convinced the Europeans of the utility of managing their commerce with this country by national companies and with large ships. How far it may be proper for America to imitate their exampleÄmust ultimately be determined by her own experience."⁴⁹ Experience proved that the speed and flexibility of independent market actors outperformed the mercantilist assumptions that supply and demand were essentially static and that "savages" could not be important customers.

          Perhaps the most interesting case of the dynamics of trade and the multiplication of participants is provided by that of Hawaiian commoners, or kama'ainana, especially women. From the first European landfalls, both captains and chiefs found it nearly impossible to control the "all hands trading" activity of native commoners and Euro-American crews. Nearly every expedition report contains scenes of Polynesian men and women swarming over ships, eager to engage in person-to-person exchanges. Many observers noted that "traffic" was encouraged by the ahupua'a system of land division, wherein upland dwellers traded with coastal residents, farmers with fishermen, etc.⁵⁰ In any event, Hawaiians did not have to be prodded to enter the market aggressively. Women's trade was especially important, both in making Hawaii attractive to Euro-American crews, and in bringing income, trade items and the possibility of upward caste mobility to Hawaiian commoners.⁵¹ It also greatly spurred the urbanization and racial mixing that characterized 19^th century Hawaii,⁵² and the attendant erosion of feudal duties and class hierarchies. Beyond women's trade, commoners were afforded limited access to the market, as chiefs took much of the produce of kama'ainana initiative ã variously reported as anywhere from 1/10 to 2/3 ã and demanded often onerous corvþe labor.⁵³ One American resident explained that he, "as others had doneÄwas afraid of making any improvements and putting more land into cultivation, lest his property should excite the cupidity of the Chief, who would not hesitate, if he chose it, to appropriate the whole to himself."⁵⁴ Even the Spaniard Marin had his Honolulu lands taken by a jealous chief.⁵⁵ In sum, the Hawaiian class structure made for severe disincentives to business. The solution, for many women, was to abandon the countryside for the towns and the aloha trade; for many men, as many as 1000 per year, it was to ship out as seamen on foreign vessels. Hawaiian kanakas were present worldwide in the period, wherever ships sailed: in China, in the Northwest, tanning and tallowing at San Diego, and later, in large numbers in the whale fisheries and in the West Coast gold rush encampments. Many never returned.⁵⁶

          In this first, globalized Pacific world, the seeds from which its openness and energy sprouted, when matured, also contained its demise. The resources that sustained it were exhausted by turn: sea otter and seal furs, sandalwood; later guano, gold, and whales. Arrell Morgan Gibson compared the commercial exploitation of the Pacific to the extractive frontiers of the United States: strip mining the sandalwood; shooting out the otters and whales like the buffalo.⁵⁷ The impacts on local social, political, economic, and environmental equilibria were huge. Fernand Braudel wrote that, in the development of the world economy, foreign demands impose "an intrusive monoculture, destructive of local balance."⁵⁸ With each wave of foreign demands in the Pacific, cultural turmoil deepened. As Gavan Daws pointed out, the overthrow of the taboos in Hawaii was "an incomplete revolution," as the chiefs plunged headlong into capitalism without relinquishing their feudal prerogatives over the kama'ainana.⁵⁹ Between wars prosecuted by the chiefs, corvþe labor in the sandalwood forests and the fields, Western diseases, and an assault on agricultural production by feral cattle, goats, and invasive weeds and crop blights, the Hawaiian countryside withered in the grip of a sustainability crisis for decade after decade. It was a "time of dark hearts."⁶⁰ In 1778 there were perhaps 300,000 to half a million Hawaiians; in 1840, they numbered about 100,000,; in 1876, 54,000.

          After Kamehameha's death in 1819, the chiefly class began "running amok in the marketplace" in a frenzied competition of conspicuous consumption, running up huge debts for Western luxury goods mostly purchased on promises of sandalwood.⁶¹ As the sandalwood forests gave out and the debts mounted, the foreign trading community at Honolulu began to agitate for privatization of property, until then controlled by the king, and for foreign naval pressure to compel the chiefs to pay. By the mid-1820s, harbingers of the end of the era appeared on the horizon. In 1825, Commander Lord Byron of the HMS Blonde, attending the accession of King Kamehameha the 3^rd, advocated the vesting of an hereditary, landed aristocracy in Hawaii along British lines; the chiefs' council enacted it. The next year saw the visits to Honolulu of two US warships, the USS Dolphin, followed by the USS Peacock, sent to press the chiefs on their debts; two days after Christmas, the chiefs signed a document acknowledging debts of up to $160,000 worth of sandalwood.⁶² The British visit saw a bill of sale signed; the American visits saw a lien piled on top, payable by the kama'ainana. From the 1830s onward, a new mood of imperialist competition gripped the Great Powers, and the independent islands of the Pacific were annexed, one by one, before the end of the century. Hawaii's government was overthrown by American interests in 1898.