The Sinclairs, it turned out, were more than just the owners of an islandthey were also the rulers of the Hawaiians who lived on Niihauat least those who chose to stay on the island after it changed hands.Heres the story of how that came to be, and what life on the island is like today.There she hoped to buy a ranch large enough to support the dozen family members who were traveling with her, but after arriving in Canada, she decided the country was too rough for a ranch to be successful.
Someone suggested she try her luck in the kingdom of Hawaii, 2,400 miles west of North America in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On September 17, 1863, she and her family sailed into Honolulu harbor, and quickly became friends with King Kamehameha IV. They turned down an opportunity to buy much of what is now downtown Honolulu and Waikiki beach, and they passed on a chance to buy much of the land in and around Pearl Harbor. ![]() When King Kamehameha heard of this he told us that if we would stay in Hawaii he would sell us a whole island. Annes brothers, Francis and James Sinclair, had a look and liked what they saw. They offered King Kamehameha 6,000 in gold; the King countered with 10,000 (about 1.5 million in todays money). Sold Kamehameha IV died before the sale could be completed, but his successor, King Kamehameha V, honored the deal. When the Sinclair brothers first laid eyes on Niihau, the island was lush and green, seemingly the perfect place to set up a ranch. What Kamehameha apparently did not tell them was that the island was coming off of two years of unusually wet weather. Niihau sits in the rain shadow of Kauai and receives just 25 inches of rain a year, compared to more than 450 inches on the wettest parts of Kauai. Droughts on Niihau are so severe that it was common for the Niihauans to abandon their island for years on end until the rains returned. After the Great Mahele (division) of 1848, when the monarchy made land available for purchase by native Hawaiians for the first time, the Niihauans had tried to buy the island themselves. Theyd hoped to pay for it with crops and animals raised on the island, but the land wasnt productive enough for them to do it, not even when the price of the land was just a few pennies an acre. They ended up having to lease the island from the King instead, at an even lower price. By the time the Sinclairs sailed into Honolulu harbor in September 1863, the Niihauans had fallen so far behind on even these meager payments that Kamehameha IV was ready to sell the island to someone else. But the dry weather returned, and it became evident that the operation might never be successful. Luckily, Eliza Sinclair still had plenty of gold left, and in the 1870s she bought 21,000 acres of land on Kauai that the family developed into a sugarcane plantation. It, too, remains in the family to this day. In 1902 Elizas grandson bought the island of Lanai at a property auction, making the family sole owners of two of the eight inhabited Hawaiian Islandsbut only for a time. They sold Lanai to the Hawaiian Pineapple Companynow part of Dolein 1922.). But the day may come when Hawaiians are not as strong in Hawaii as they are now.
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