At 7.45am on Wednesday 7 September 1881, the King of Hawaiʻi stepped off a train at St Enoch Station, eight months into a journey round the world to save his kingdom.

King Kalākaua with two of his entourage: Colonel Charles Hastings Judd (Chamberlain), left, and Colonel George Macfarlane (aide-de-camp), right. [Hawaii State Archives]

King David Kalākaua had already visited the great capitals of Europe, and was shortly to cross the Atlantic. His visit to Scotland has a half-impromptu air — he would stay in Glasgow as the guest of a town councillor, and the local Hawaiʻian consul had not been officially informed — but nevertheless it was more than tourism. Kalākaua’s plans were woven from diplomatic and commercial threads; in Scotland, these were Freemasonry and sugar.

Elected to the throne in 1874, Kalākaua ruled a fragile kingdom. Since European contact in 1778, the indigenous Hawaiʻians had been devastated by imported disease: their population was under fifty thousand, in contrast to perhaps eight hundred thousand before contact. Still notionally under indigenous rule, the islands were dominated by settlers from American and Europe, and were perpetually at risk of being drawn into full colonial control.

As king, Kalākaua played an intricate political game for nearly two decades: encouraging the revival of Hawaiʻian culture; signing a treaty with the United States to allow duty-free sugar trade; and holding off challenges from rival noble families and Presbyterian missionaries. His tour’s immediate purpose was to rescue the labour-starved sugar plantations by setting up immigration deals, but it was also intended to make allies, both political and commercial, increasing his country’s prestige abroad and his own at home.

Leaving Honolulu in January, Kalākaua travelled first to San Francisco and then to Japan, China, Siam, Malaysia, India and Egypt, reaching Europe in late June and spending much of July in London before doing the round of European capitals. He returned to London at the start of September and then, apparently, decided to spend a few days in Scotland.

Kalākaua’s route. [Wikimedia Commons]

At St Enoch, the King was met by a deputation led by the Dean of Guild, James Buchanan Mirrlees, along with his business partner Councillor William Renny Watson. He was whisked off to Watson’s house at 16 Woodlands Terrace, where he would stay for the next two nights, and then embarked on a tour of Glasgow attractions: starting with Mirrlees, Tait & Watson’s machinery works on Scotland Street; continuing to Elder’s shipyard at Fairfield; and then dropping in on the Glasgow and West of Scotland Horticultural Show at the City Halls. The evening saw him as the guest of honour at a Corporation banquet, flanked by such local worthies as could be assembled and also by two — presumably bewildered — officers of the Russian ironclad Peter the Great, which was laid up at Elder’s for an engine refit.

The following day, King Kalākaua was taken on the Trossachs excursion that had been mandatory for tourists since the days of Walter Scott. (A keen folklorist, the king may have recognised the romanticised tales of chiefly feuds, now drowned by the rising tide of the modern state.) He took the train to Balloch and cruised up Loch Lomond on the steamer Prince Consort, before crossing to Arrochar and returning by yacht to Greenock, watched eagerly by crowds of day-trippers all the way.

The Prince Consort on Loch Lomond. [McLean Museum and Art Gallery, Greenock]

On the Friday morning, the King made his way to Edinburgh, where again he saw the sights and was taken to dinner in state by the Council. Saturday saw a more unusual ceremony: a special meeting of the Grand Conclave of Scotland of the Order of the Red Cross of Constantine, who with great pomp conferred on Kalākaua the rank of Knight Grand Cross of the Order. He left Scotland by the night train, and took ship on the Tuesday from Liverpool for New York.

It was a short visit, a great deal of which must have been spent listening to whiskered speechifying, but it repays a little exploration.

It’s perhaps not surprising that Kalākaua was curious about Scotland. Scots were common among the settlers; Kalākaua’s sister Likelike had married the Edinburgh-born Archibald Cleghorn, who had come out to the islands as a teenager and flourished in the dry goods trade. If Cleghorn followed the pattern of expat Scots before and since he may well have bent his brother-in-law’s ear on the beauties of his homeland; the enthusiasm for Scotland that the King declared to the Corporation banquet may have been more than a polite nothing.

It seems likely that the visit was arranged through the agency of William Renny Watson. The firm of Mirrlees, Watson & Tait was a major exporter of equipment for the sugar industry, and Watson had met the King previously in Hawaiʻi. Both may have seen the advantages of cultivating a personal connection between government and a crucial industry. (One wonders whether that snubbed Hawaiʻian consul, James Dunn of Virginia Street, was too close to the sugar merchants next door for the King to consider him a disinterested agent.)

Mirrlees, Tait & Watson’s sugar plant. [Engineering, November 6, 1868.]

This royal networking would bear fruit in 1882, when three boys from Hawaiʻi — Henry Kapena, Hugo Kawelo, and John Lovell — arrived in Glasgow as apprentices at the Scotland Street works. They were part of a scheme, reminiscent of Meiji Japan, that sent picked young men to study in industrial centres and bring their skills home. The trio struggled with the Glaswegian smog and smirr, but two stuck it out to the end of their apprenticeships. (Kawelo left a year early, suffering from pleurisy.) Kawelo and Lovell also engaged with another side of Scottish culture, turning out for Rangers’ Shields Eleven and becoming perhaps the club’s first non-European players.

The Masonic conclave in Edinburgh is another incongruous but telling point. Freemasonry had been enthusiastically adopted by Hawaiʻian royals. It supplied opportunities for quasi-religious ceremonial in which some of their traditional mana could be reasserted while including powerful settlers — and providing a bulwark against missionary theocracy. Kalākaua was intermittently a fervent Mason, the master of Lodge Le Progres de l’Oceanie, and had been raised to the 33rd degree of the Scottish Rite, a super-Masonic status reserved for a highly esoteric few.

King Kalakaua in the uniform of the Scottish Rite. [Hawaii State Archives]

Despite its name, the Scottish Rite was not centred in Scotland. Nevertheless, Scotland’s ancient lodges held a high position in world Freemasonry, as they did in public life: few civic events, and no construction projects, were complete without a brandished trowel. During his tour, Kalākaua had been a little remiss in attention to his brothers in the Craft; perhaps the Edinburgh meeting was an attempt to reassert his status and gain some extra mana for his return.

The tone of Kalākaua’s reception is also interesting to consider. Monarchist on principle and racist by default, British society didn’t quite know what to make of a dark-skinned king, dressed in the semi-military uniform of nineteenth-century royalty and hung with decorations like a Christmas tree, travelling with a tiny entourage but with diplomatic entry to the courts of Europe. The formal banqueting seems to have been punctuated with a lot of apologies for absence, and the tone of the newspaper reports ranged from patronising downward:

The Sandwich Island group is the one bright spot which has been redeemed from barbarism and added to the community of civilised countries… the only ones who appear to have been distinctly raised in the scale of civilisation by their contact with Europeans.

— North British Daily Mail, 8 September 1881

In still less polite newspapers the King’s visit was the excuse for tittering sneers about cannibalism, which although long gone (if it was ever practised in Hawaiʻi) still had a pornographic fascination for the British mind.

Kalākaua himself, a shrewd politician, must have been aware of this edge to the niceties, even as he “danced with much energy and composure” at balls and gave carefully bland interviews to selected newspapers. Those three Hawaiʻian apprentices who followed him were rumoured locally to be of royal blood; they presumably knew better than to contradict a story that gave them some protection.

King Kalākaua’s world tour was at best a partial failure. He succeeded in attracting the immigrant labour his country needed, and was received home with great occasion, but his opponents made much of the cost of the venture and of the luxurious palace he subsequently built, apparently on European models.

He held on to his throne, despite the Bayonet Constitution of 1887 which deprived him of much of his power, and he was still king in 1889 when a famous Scottish traveller passed through. Stevenson praised the King as “a gentleman of a courtly order and much tinctured with letters”, but found his hospitality a touch overpowering:

O, Charles! what a crop for the drink! He carries it, too, like a mountain with a sparrow on its shoulders. We calculated five bottles of champagne in three hours and a half (afternoon), and the sovereign quite presentable, although perceptibly more dignified at the end.

— R. L. Stevenson to Charles Baxter, 8 February 1889

One would like to think they had some interesting conversations.

King Kalākaua with Robert Louis Stevenson. [Hawaii State Archives]

Kalākaua died in 1891, the last king of Hawaiʻi. His sister and successor, Queen Liliʻuokalani, reigned until she was overthrown in 1893, in a coup backed by American and European interests. (Sadly, at least two of the coup leaders, Andrew Brown and James King, appear to have been Scottish.) Hawaiʻi passed under American “protection” and then, in 1898, was formally annexed by the United States.

A final thought. The literary-minded King, we’re told, kept a diary of his travels, though it doesn’t seem to have survived. What did he make of his brief sojourn in this remote country, so friendly in some ways and hostile in others, with its strange customs and its tales of savagery sleeping beneath the gorgeous landscapes?

What yarns might a Hawaiʻian Stevenson have told about us?

Main sources

For the background to Kalākaua’s tour I started from Abraham Parrish, Have Crown, Will Travel: The Circumnavigation of King Kalākaua (US Library of Congress, 2024).

For the story of the Hawaiʻian apprentices, see The Sons of the Sandwich Islands (The Founders’ Trail, 2020).

For the politics of Hawaiʻian Freemasonry, I’ve relied on F. J. Karpiel, “Mystic Ties of Brotherhood: Freemasonry, Ritual, and Hawaiian Royalty in the Nineteenth Century”, Pacific Historical Review 69(3): 357-397, 2000.

Dennis Kawaharada, The Killing of the Cannibal King, dissects the skimpy basis for the European myths of Hawaiʻian cannibalism that conditioned Kalākaua’s reception.

For most of the other details, I’ve relied as usual on contemporary newspapers, and on the Post Office Directories and Grace’s Guide for background information. Full details, as ever, on request.

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