Note 278 — Chapter II · GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF SLAVERY.

Of Hawaii Ellis says: “The wives and children of those whom they had defeated were frequently made slaves, and attached to the soil for its cultivation, and, together with the captives, treated with great cruelty.” Captives were sometimes spared, “though perhaps spared only to be slaves, or to be sacrificed when the priests should require human victims. The persons of the captives were the property of the victors, and their lives entirely at their disposal.” But in enumerating the social classes he makes no mention of slaves. “In the fourth [lowest] rank may be included the small farmers, who rent from ten to twenty or thirty acres of land; the mechanics … indeed, all the labouring classes, those who attach themselves to some chief or farmer, and labour on his land for their food and clothing, as well as those who cultivate small portions of land for their own advantage”278. In the accounts of the other writers, who knew the ancient institutions of Hawaii by observation or personal information, we do not find anything tending to prove that slavery existed. Wilkes, in his very detailed account of government and land tenure, does not speak of slaves. “The authority” he says “descended in the scale of rank, rising from the lowest class of servants to tenants, agents, landholders, land-owners, petty chiefs, high chiefs, and the king”279. Chamisso expressly states that slavery was absent. The common people were entirely subjected to the chiefs, but there were no slaves or serfs. Peasants and servants were allowed to remove to any place they liked. The people were free; they could be killed, but not sold or retained280. Remy tells us that the common people were heavily oppressed by the chiefs. Slaves are not mentioned by him. Prisoners were sacrificed281. All this renders the existence of slavery in ancient Hawaii very improbable and so we think we are justified, notwithstanding the second-hand information, furnished by Meinicke, that there were a few slaves282, and Marcuse’s short remark, that “to allure the sharks, they occasionally made human sacrifices, especially among the slaves”283, in concluding that slavery did not exist.