“I must have been born under an unlucky star, as I seem to have my life planned out for me in such a way that I cannot alter it,” wrote Princess Victoria Ka‘iulani Kalaninuiahilapalapa Kawekiu i Lunalilo Cleghorn in 1897, from a tiny island in the English Channel just 12 miles off the coast of Normandy—as far as can be imagined from Oahu, the Princess’s island of birth.
This week, we celebrate Princess Ka‘iulani’s birthday on October 16. On Maui, festivities include an Upcountry festival (see This Week’s Picks for details). On Oahu, the new film Barbarian Princess will debut, part of the Hawaii International Film Festival.
The film’s title has sparked controversy. It’s a term that was coined by the 19th-century American press, which, under the heavy influence of pro-annexationists, launched a smear campaign against Ka‘iulani as she prepared to plead for the reinstatement of her land’s sovereign rule to the U.S. Senate and then-President Grover Cleveland. (To be fair, journalists and cartoonists of the day could not have easily anticipated the poise and enchantment of Ka‘iulani, and quickly amended their positions.)
Though her life ended in tragedy, Ka‘iulani led an enchanted youth. Wanting for nothing, the royal child had free reign of the lush ‘Ainahau estate. As interesting as she was beautiful, Ka‘iulani garnered the deep friendship of author Robert Louis Stevenson—a fast friend of then-King David Kalakaua, and thusly all the royal family—who in 1889 wrote the following:
Written in April to Ka‘iulani, in the April of her age, and at Waikiki, within easy walk of Ka‘iulani’s Banyan. When she comes to my land and her fathers, and the rain beats upon the window (as I fear it will), let her look at this page—it will be like a weed, gathered and pressed at home, and she will remember her islands and the shadow of the mighty tree, and she will hear the peacock’s screaming in the dusk and the wind blowing in the palms, and she will think of her father sitting there alone.
Though Stevenson’s words eerily foreshadow Ka’iulani’s own end, it was Miriam’s final words to her daughter—as she lay mysteriously ailing, at the very brink of her life—that closed with ominous shadow the only sunny chapter in Ka’iulani’s tragic tale: “You will go far away from your land and your people and be gone a very long time. You will never marry and you will never rule Hawaii.”
These things indeed came to pass, and at 13 the young princess traveled far—sent off for private education at Great Harrowden Hall in Northhamptonshire, England. There, as Ka‘iulani herself eloquently explains in a statement made to the English press before traveling to Washington D.C., to plea before Congress, she was “educated privately and fitted to the position [of queen] which by the constitution of Hawai’i, I was to inherit.”
Yet at the time of her dark musings, Ka‘iulani was merely a citizen of the Republic of Hawaii and four years had passed since the overthrow of her aunt, Constitutional Queen of Hawaii, Lili‘uokalani.
Ka‘iulani, distraught, wrought her own demise. Despite protests from her friends who were along on an outing on the Big Island’s Parker Ranch, she took off on her own, deep into a rainstorm, a rebel on horseback.
Immediately taking ill, she was rushed home to ‘Ainahau, where, on March 6 1899, little more than a year after Hawaii’s annexation to the United States, she died. Her father said, “she died of rheumatism of the heart,” though popular myth holds (as with many of the late monarchs of the day) that her life was ended by a broken heart.
Legends also has it that at the precise moment of her passing, her beloved peacocks, which famously roamed her home estate, erupted into such obstinate peals that Gov. Cleghorn ordered them shot—a final dark note to the melancholy song of Hawaii’s last princess. Anu Yagi, Maui Time Weekly
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