Home: The Annexation Of Hawaii: A Collection Of Document
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HAWAIIAN ISLANDS. 23 bility of a grant by the Hawaiian Government of any of the privileges exclusively given the United States by the treaty of 1875 without a violation of that treaty. He said: You will add that, if any other power should deem it proper to employ undue in- fluence upon the Hawaiian Government to persuade or compel action in derogation of this treaty, the Government of the United States will not be unobservant of its rights and interests and will be neither unwilling nor unprepared to support the Hawaiian Government in the faithful discharge of its treaty obligations. (Appendix.) The revival of the subject of coolie immigration from British India and an expression of the views of the British commissioner at Hono- lulu respecting the means by which such immigration should be pro- moted and such immigrants protected and controlled, together with a resuscitation, by Major Wodehouse, of the Lackawanna incident, and the adhesive character of the British claims arising from the reciprocity treaty, were together the moving cause of considerable correspondence designed to instruct the United States minister very fully respecting the established and continued policy of this Government. On December 1, 1881, Mr. Blaine said: It [this Government] firmly believes that the position of the Hawaiian Islands as the key to the dominion of the American Pacific demands their benevolent neutrality, to which end it will earnestly cooperate with the native Government. And if, through any cause, the maintenance of such a position of benevolent neutrality should be found by Hawaii to be impracticable, this Government would then unhesi- tatingly meet the altered situation by seeking an avowedly American solution for the grave issues presented. (Appendix.) In 1883 the Government of the United States was invited to concur in a protest by the Hawaiian Government against the extension of their respective territories by Great Britain and France in Polynesia, by an- nexation of the New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands, and adjacent groups. Mr. Frelinghuysen on December 6, 1883, declined to concur, because, as he wrote, "while we could not * * * view with com- placency any movement tending to the extinction of the national life of the intimately connected commonwealths of the Northern Pacific, the attitude of this Government towards the distant outlying groups of Polynesia is necessarily different;" and he added that the President "does not regard the matter as one calling for the interposition of the United States, either to oppose or support the suggested measure." (Appendix.) In the same year the reciprocity treaty between the United States and Hawaii reached the limit of its duration, subject to twelve months' notice from either power to the other of its desire to terminate the com- pact. Negotiations looking to the extension of this agreement were set on foot by the Hawaiian Government and the project was discussed in Congress and in the diplomatic correspondence with the ultimate result of a convention of renewal, etc., concluded December 6, 1884, at Wash- ington, in three articles, of which Article I renewed the treaty for a period of seven years and Articles II and III provided, respectively: ARTICLE II. His Majesty the King of the Hawaiian Islands grants to the Government of the United States the exclusive right to enter the harbor of Pearl River, in the Island of Oahu, and to establish and maintain there a coaling and repair station for the use of vessels of the United States, and to that end the United States may improve the entrance to said harbor and do all other things needful to the purpose aforesaid. ARTICLE III. The present convention shall be ratified and the ratifications exchanged at Wash- ington as soon as possible.