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Who took Enoch Hatch’s gold dust?

What became of the two Colt revolvers Edwin Rowe had in his possession when he died?

How did the U.S. consul get possession of the estate of the German sailor H. Behre, who wasn’t even American? And was his well-worn wallet indeed completely empty at his death?

Civil Beat’s review of packets containing the last possessions of more than 160 Americans who died in the Hawaii before it became a U.S. territory raised questions about what had happened to valuable items the deceased owned at the time of their deaths. Did assets get into the official inventory at all, or instead end up in the pockets of people who happened to be onsite or nearby when the person died?

In fact, as Civil Beat reporting has found, the State Department offices in Hawaii were rife with corruption at the time. A series of U.S. consuls — political appointees from the United States who got their jobs based on their pull and connections — shook down ship captains, stole from the hospitals where sailors received their care and from the sailors themselves, and also, in at least one notorious case, took money directly from the estates of dead people.

One government official detailed his investigation into years of corruption within the consuls’ office, sending the results of his probe to the U.S. Secretary of State. A much more thorough and damning investigation, which would likely have led to prosecutions of the culprits, stalled when the sailing ship carrying the investigators home sank in a hurricane in 1860. More than 150 people died in the accident.

The federally funded Lahaina Seamen’s Hospital, where sick and ailing sailors turned for care, was often the site of dishonest dealings, investigators found. The doctors who were running it had been padding their pockets, and archival records show that the consular officials bickered and bargained over maximizing their own cuts of the take.

At times the federal officials talked about the scams openly, as when Milo Calkin, U.S. Vice Commercial Agent in Lahaina, wrote to William Hooper, Honolulu’s acting U.S. commercial agent, to complain about the big windfall that physician Dr. Charles Winslow was amassing at the Lahaina hospital, according to historian Dorothy Riconda Pyle.

“I don’t like to shovel dollars into another man’s bag so much faster than I can shovel into my own — and then get few thanks for it and no pay for the use of my shovel,” Calkin wrote to Hooper in 1845, Pyle recounted.

It is difficult to determine how much money may have been stolen from the assets of the dead. For one thing, many estate records seem to be missing. About 160 consular reports on deceased Americans in Hawaii were sent back to the State Department and later shuttled to the National Archives.

But many more Americans than that died in Hawaii between 1820 and 1900, when Hawaii was annexed to the United States. In 1859 alone, for example, Rev. Samuel C. Damon recorded 75 American deaths, many of them involving transients passing through the islands.

U.S. consuls played an essential role in Hawaii starting in 1820, when John Coffin Jones Jr., an American merchant sent to the islands by his employer, was named commercial agent, with power to represent the United States in a limited way in Hawaii.

, who were the lowest ranks of the U.S. foreign service. Later, as Hawaii developed as a nation, with its own set of international treaties and reciprocal trading relationships, the State Department recognized that the stakes were rising. A series of U.S. commissioners, which is closer to the status of an ambassador, played a bigger role in diplomatic policy in Hawaii, but a line of U.S. consuls continued operating independently in the islands at the same time.

This amateur diplomatic corps, many of whom were political appointees who got the posts by party patronage or by backing a winning candidate in Washington, were often unpaid, with their compensation coming from whatever fees or commissions they were allowed to charge.

But they also held real power over commercial disputes, representing American interests and Americans who had gotten into trouble with Hawaiian officials. They also had the power to grant or deny requests allowing sailors to be discharged from ships.

“Opportunities for misappropriation of funds were legion” -Historians B. Jean Martin and Frances Jackson

This meant consuls were in a unique position to take financial advantage of their positions. Some 3,000 to 5,000 sailors were discharged in Honolulu in the 1850s, many of them remaining from one to six weeks.

When they left a ship, either because of ill health, or they wanted to escape shipboard life or because the captain wanted to hire a cheaper workforce, U.S. law entitled them to receive three months’ wages, first $12 a month and later raised to $20 a month.

This sum — $36 or $50 — was held by the consul, who could deduct their expenses from the total. If they were sick and kept under hospital care, the entire amount could be held by the consul for payment of bills. Meanwhile, the consul received a 5% commission on the transactions, .

“Opportunities for misappropriation of funds were legion,” Martin and Jackson wrote.

Some sailors, including people who had lost everything in shipwrecks, arrived desperately poor. If a sailor needed more money, the consul could dip into a “relief” fund financed by the U.S. government to cover any deficit.

Lahaina consuls padded their bills with particular gusto. Charles Bunker charged the federal government $20,566 to care for 187 sailors for three months in 1852, compared to $11,913 the consul in Honolulu charged to care for 191, according to State Department historian Charles Stuart Kennedy, who wrote a book about the history of the consular service.

Pocketing his earnings, Bunker then shipped himself home.

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Enoch L. Hatch

A tan-colored log book in the National Archives contained lists of people who died and what happened to their assets. In many cases where heirs were not easily at hand, the money was sent to the U.S. Treasury.

Photo: Kirstin Downey/Civil Beat/2024

The explosive growth of the whaling industry in the Pacific multiplied the opportunities for profit because there were more American ships and more American sailors coming into port in Hawaii. Many of the sailors were sick, some dying in grog shops, a problem that became embarrassing for the United States as the country got richer and its merchant fleet grew.

So the United States opened hospitals, also known as seamen’s hospitals or marine hospitals, in Lahaina, Honolulu and Hilo. They sometimes housed as many as 100 sailors at a time.

The consuls oversaw the hospitals, controlling which physicians were employed there and which companies provided them with food and supplies.

The best known of these establishments was the Seaman’s Hospital in Lahaina, located on Front Street, which opened in summer 1844. The structure, which is now a national historic landmark even though it was badly damaged in the Lahaina wildfire in August, was on a site owned by a Mexican vaquero who was close to King Kamehameha III. The Mexican, Joaquin Armas, left a British whaling ship and went into the cattle business with the king.

Dr. Charles Winslow was the first physician at the hospital. He stayed just a few years before retiring with a tidy profit of some $20,000 in his pocket, amid criticism in the pages of the Sandwich Island News about the exorbitant fees he had charged, .

The situation was similar in Honolulu. Sailors’ care in Hawaii became shockingly expensive, up to $150,000 a year, making the islands the most expensive consular relief station in the world. Consular officials in Hawaii blamed it on the high cost of living in the islands.

But by the late 1840s, officials in Washington were becoming more insistent in asking why costs were so high in Hawaii.

State Department officials ordered David L. Gregg, the newly appointed U.S. commissioner to Hawaii, to begin a quiet investigation into what was going wrong at the American hospitals.

He found the system laden with abuses. At both Honolulu and Lahaina, consuls had been taking a percentage from the fees paid to hospital doctors and purveyors. He described this diplomatically in a letter to Secretary of State William Learned Marcy:

“For a long time past it has been the practice of the Consuls to share in the profits of the hospital,” Gregg wrote on June 18, 1855, in a letter preserved in the National Archives. “Formerly the consideration paid to them was twelve percent, but it was nominally a gift, and no bribe for appointment.”

Physicians who did not cooperate were removed, he learned.

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Enoch L. Hatch

U.S. Commissioner David L. Gregg told Secretary of State William Learned Marcy that he had considered pursuing the graft inquiry in Lahaina but decided it would make it harder to get truthful information there than by asking the same questions in Honolulu. He defended the current occupant of the job in Lahaina but said that he believed that the earlier consuls had made the hospital give them a cut of what sailors paid for their care.

Photo: Kirstin Downey/Civil Beat/2024

Gregg found it very difficult to push the investigation further because many officials and local businessmen seemed to maintain a code of silence.

“The investigation I have been called upon to make has been full of difficulty and embarrassment,” he wrote. “Many parties who possess knowledge were unwilling to communicate it otherwise than verbally, and guarded their statements by an injunction of secrecy.”

He said he had intended to go to Lahaina to pursue the investigation there more closely but decided that officials on Maui were so reticent to speak honestly that it was hardly worth the time to visit at all.

“I became convinced not only that it would probably result in learning less information than I could acquire by availing myself of opportunities of enquiry here,” he wrote.

“For a long time past it has been the practice of the Consuls to share in the profits of the hospital” -David L. Gregg, U.S. commissioner

In his private diary, Gregg identified Honolulu consul Benjamin F. Angel, a lawyer from New York, as particularly unpopular for his way of doing business in Hawaii. Many whaling captains and merchants had protested Angel’s operations in the islands, causing Angel to lose his position. Gregg said that Angel offered Gregg a $5,000 bribe to use his influence to help him stay in the post, which suggested that Angel found it lucrative to remain as consul.

Gregg soon left the consular service and went to work for the Hawaiian government. But the problems continued to fester.

, a former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, arrived as a new U.S. consul in 1857. Although he held the job only briefly, he left with enough money to build himself a monumental $20,000 home in Michigan said to be modeled on the royal palace of King Kamehameha IV, with its interior walls painted with scenes from the Hawaiian islands.

After Pratt left, claiming ill health, that he had carried away some $4,327 in estate funds that were supposed to be deposited in the U.S. Treasury but that never made it there. In at least three specific cases, involving sailors James Huntley (or Huntress), Robert Ammon and Archibald Macklin, totalling about $500, Pratt had acquired the money in this way.

In 1859, officials in Washington decided that they needed to send experienced investigators to Hawaii to look into the corruption allegations more deeply, according to historian Peter von Buol.

Navy Commander William E. Hunt was dispatched to lead the probe and he was teamed up with the new commissioner for Hawaii, James W. Borden. The investigation visited three islands, lasted four months and uncovered many problems.

Sailors in Hawaii told officials they had been compelled to sign their names to blank receipts that officials filled in with bogus expenses. They said that the consuls deducted fees and charges from the sailors’ three-month discharge wages, leaving them with little to show for their efforts when they could finally ship back home.

Investigators put the finishing touches on what had become a damning report, and set off aboard the Levant, a Naval ship, to carry it back to Washington. The ship and its 150-member crew were never seen again. The Levant was believed to have sunk in a violent hurricane that struck the North Pacific in September 1860. The official report was lost with the ship.

Meanwhile, the Civil War was breaking out in the United States, which put problems in Hawaii on the back burner. No one was ever prosecuted for consular corruption.

But the truth came out nonetheless. One copy of the report made it quietly to the State Department. And Commander Hunt had slipped a copy of the investigation’s conclusions to a reporter in Boston, who in turn shared it with a reporter for the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, which published its account on Feb. 28, 1861.

“One of the most high-handed schemes by which the U.S. Consuls at the Sandwich Islands have for a long time enriched themselves at the expense of government has lately been brought to light,” the newspaper reported, saying that a “foul nest of wrong and corruption” had been exposed, citing the kickbacks and fraudulent billing.

What had been done to sailors was particularly heinous: “Every means is resorted to impoverish the sailor by stripping him of his just dues.”

Ship captains had similarly been subjected to shakedowns where they were compelled to pay fees to get federal government approval they needed for business transactions, according to the investigative report.

The report noted that officials of all kinds had gone to great lengths to thwart the investigation. The truth appeared to be that many people had profited off the corruption, not just the American consuls.

“One of the most high-handed schemes by which the U.S. Consuls at the Sandwich Islands have for a long time enriched themselves at the expense of government has lately been brought to light.” -The Pacific Commercial Advertiser

The hospital in Lahaina shut down in the 1860s, partially because the falloff in the whaling trade meant there were no longer enough sick Americans coming to Maui to justify the expense.

In Honolulu, meanwhile, a number of people had quietly decided enough was enough. Gregg, the former commissioner, Damon, the seaman’s chaplain, and other community leaders joined with officials of the Hawaiian kingdom to organize support for a community hospital that would serve both foreigners and Hawaii residents.

The cornerstone for The Queen’s Hospital was laid on July 17, 1860. Gregg, as Hawaii’s new finance minister, participated in the planning. In the pages of The Friend, Rev. Samuel C. Damon urged that Americans be sent to Queen’s and not to the American hospitals anymore.

The hospital was needed by everyone and was being advanced as a shared charitable organization, said Alexander Liholiho, ruling as King Kamehameha IV, in a speech he made as he laid the cornerstone, complete with a Masonic Order ceremony. The Hawaiian royal family, including Liholiho and his wife Emma, became important hospital patrons.

“Society makes distinctions broad enough, but strip us of our artificial robes, and we are all one and equally naked and equally exposed to the keen blasts of want and torments of disease,” Liholiho said.