The Many (De)colonial Lives of Kāpena George Gilley

George Gilley was born some forty years before his race off Honolulu, not in Hawai‘i, but in the Bonin Islands, a European colony in the Asian Pacific that both supported and relied upon Kanaka families and lifeways. England claimed the small island group, located six hundred miles south of Tokyo, in 1827. Three years later, a British ship captained by Samuel Dowsett carried about twenty Kānaka Maoli from Hawai‘i to the uninhabited archipelago and left them to settle on Peel Island (modern Chichijima).²¹ Accompanying them were an Enata (Marquesan) boy and five white men to whom the Hawaiians were either married or indentured as laborers.²² Most nineteenth-century accounts of the islands’ history emphasize the hardscrabble lives of the white settlers, especially that of Nathaniel Savory, an American. Due to the number of Kānaka Maoli these men sought to exploit, Peel Island was British on paper, yet largely a Hawaiian colony in practice. By 1833, the colonists’ grass-hut settlement attracted at least six more wāhine (Hawaiian women), and several other white men, including English whaler William Penn Gilley of the shipwrecked Amelia Wilson.²³ Generally, as historian David Chapman notes, “information on the very first Hawaiian islander settlers, especially the women, has not emerged in any records,” yet one late nineteenth-century visitor identified Fanny Gilley as the “Hawaiian wife of W.P. Gilley.”²⁴ Like the other Bonin wāhine, who were described by shipwrecked Japanese sailors in 1840, Fanny probably wore a flowing, hand-made holokū-style dress and tortoiseshell comb in her top bun.²⁵ Not yet a teenager on arrival, Fanny soon had at least two sons with William Gilley—William Jr. in 1833 and George in about 1837 (most sources round to 1840).²⁶ The boys survived regular typhoons, earthquakes, and the arrivals of violent seamen, “who had little fear of punitive recourse for their actions.”²⁷ Many others were lost to such forces and sickness. British captain R.C. Collinson reported in 1851 that twelve of the twenty-six children born on the island by that point had died—a nearly 50 percent child mortality rate.²⁸

George Gilley was molded by a blend of Kanaka and Euro-American cultures. Although he inherited his father’s English surname, that had little bearing on his Indigeneity. As Lisa Kahaleole Hall explains, “a Hawaiian plus a non-Hawaiian produces a Hawaiian child.”²⁹ Chapman infers that “William Gilley [Sr.] left sometime between 1837 and 1851,” possibly for California mining, although he may have repeatedly left and returned, as seamen do.³⁰ Fanny most likely took the parental lead, raising Kanaka Maoli children on islands which must have felt something like Hawai‘i in terms of climate, built structures, and agriculture. The Kanaka colonists, who were “free agents” by 1837 according to visiting British Captain Michael Quin, remade the island that they called “Aina” in their own image.³¹ Their first modifications included planting kalo, the roots of which are mashed into poi. This vital dish connects Kānaka to their Native ‘āina (land, lit. that which feeds), their common ancestral brother Hāloa, and ultimately to the progenitor gods Papahānaumoku and Wākea.³² In addition to eating this dynamically fortifying poi, it is highly probable that the young Gilley thrived on other Hawaiian staples that the colonists procured: fresh fish, wild pig, sweet potatoes, and sugarcane.³³ The Gilley family sustained both Hawaiian and Euro-American agriculture on their family farm.³⁴ Like this hybrid diet, the colonists created new language forms. Linguist Daniel Long has traced New England accents among twentieth-century islanders to Massachusetts-born Nathaniel Savory’s influence, although English was long spoken by Kānaka in pidginized forms.³⁵ Originally, ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i may have enjoyed some lingual dominance; the residents taught the Japanese sailors at least thirty-five Hawaiian-language words and only about twenty English words during their two months together in 1840.³⁶

We can imagine that, like Kānaka Maoli far to the east, Gilley’s boyhood was defined by the sea, which provided Native and foreign bounties and connected him to hybrid ancestral traditions. At first, Gilley likely hunted sea turtles—another mainstay in the colonists’ diet since first arrival.³⁷ He may have learned to hunt these from outrigger canoes, also used for interisland travel. Hanae Kramer and Scott Kramer have found that while the “islanders largely dispensed with ceremonial aspects of canoe making…a small population with limited needs resulted in…single-hulled dugouts supported upright by one lateral float held in place by two booms,” which can still be found in the islands today.³⁸ With guidance from his kūpuna, elders with connections to mo‘okū‘auhau ‘ike (genealogies of knowledge), Gilley may have developed an early understanding of seagoing vessels, from their construction to their handling at sea during shark hunts. Not unlike the “voyaging nursery” that Near Oceania’s archipelagoes provided ancestral Pacific Islanders, the Bonin Islands would have allowed a safe educational space for the voyager-in-training.³⁹ In time, Gilley might also have learned how to take advantage of imperial networks to procure goods and capital. As roving whalers increasingly sailed into Port Lloyd, seeking “supplies of water and wood,” the burgeoning planters sold them “Indian corn, yams, sweet potatoes, melons, plantains, onions, beans, salad, and pumpkins…at very moderate prices,” according to an early visitor.⁴⁰ These visiting ships likely contained many Kānaka continuing ancestral voyaging traditions by way of the whaling industry. As Chang writes, from the moment Captain James Cook inadvertently introduced a new class of open-ocean vessels to their islands in 1778, Kānaka Maoli, “in keeping with their own heritage of exploration and curiosity…went out into the ocean to seek knowledge of the strangers and the world.”⁴¹ In the decades following the arrival of the first foreign whaleship in Hawai‘i in 1819, thousands of Kānaka embarked on whaling voyages all across Oceania and well into the frigid north.⁴²

In his late teens, George apparently signed onto a ship bound for O‘ahu, and through this first action as a trans-Pacific voyager increased ties to his lāhui (nation, people), and generated our earliest known record of his actual life. In 1855, a Gilley family friend in Honolulu wrote to the Bonin Islands’ de facto leader, Nathaniel Savory, “George has been here 2 or 3 times but I could not persuade him to go home and see his mother,” noting further that “[h]e seems to like this place so much.”⁴³ As the message makes clear, Gilley’s move from the Bonin Islands signaled a break from his makuahine (mother). Gilley would treat O‘ahu as home base for the next two and a half decades. Unlike the many Yankee whalers provisioning their ships at Honolulu and Lahaina, Gilley was a Native subject since King Kamehameha III had decreed that “persons born abroad of a parent native of this kingdom, and afterwards coming to reside in this, shall be deemed to owe native allegiance to His Majesty.”⁴⁴

Throughout his career, Gilley made occasional appearances in newspapers, which help us exhume his story, even as they introduce some confusion. The San Francisco Chronicle claimed that Gilley was the heroic first mate on the Hawaiian-registered Kohola in 1864, when its captain, Herman Brummerhoff, was killed by Siberian Chukchi traders.⁴⁵ That actually occurred in 1862, when Bernard Cogan was first mate; it was he who, unable to find the captain’s body, retrieved his clothing and steered the ship to safety.⁴⁶ Yet because the Chronicle’s reporter claimed to have interviewed Gilley, it is possible that Gilley was aboard the Kohola in 1862. If so, that season may have included Gilley’s first “wintering over” in the Bering Strait, at eastern Siberia’s St. Lawrence Bay. It also may have been his first of many experiences witnessing another Indigenous community’s cultural practices, as the Chukchi had killed Brummerhoff “according to their custom of man for man” when one of their kin, Capatchou, died under the captain’s watch. When the Kohola resumed its harvest in the spring—hauling six hundred barrels of whale oil—five Kānaka died of scurvy, followed by three more from a “disease of the breast.”⁴⁷ Such were the harsh realities of whaling that Gilley must have quickly grown accustomed to “aia i ‘Ālika (there in the Arctic),” where the captain’s wheel turns, “e niniu i ka makani (spinning in the wind),” as a popular maritime song of the time reflected.⁴⁸ Even if Gilley’s association with the Kohola is clouded by his interviewer’s apparent sloppiness, it arises from something he must have said, orally.

Because the scattered sources on Gilley’s life soon prove fallible and contradictory, his story is well served by the mo‘olelo form, which makes room for divergent threads in a single storyline. One such divergence was initiated in the late 1850s, when his brother William apparently decided to name his own son George B. Gilley. Born to William Jr. and a “Kanaka woman” called Tineree, George B. Gilley was recorded as present on Peel Island in 1875 and 1898.⁴⁹ While the roughly ten-year age difference between the Georges helps to separate them, their shared name, distinguished only by the younger’s occasionally used middle initial, may confuse their overlapping lives. The narrative bifurcation begins as early as 1870, when a woman living in Pohnpei named Lizzie Brown wrote to Nathaniel Savory in the Bonin Islands, asking him to “please tell my brother that I am quite well and coming back.” Commenting on that letter in 1915, the Bonin Islands S.P.G. missionary Lionel Cholmondeley claimed Brown’s brother “would be George Gilley, son of William Penn Gilley, one of the earliest settlers.”⁵⁰ This suggests that George Gilley returned to his family by 1870, perhaps soon after one “William Gilley” (his father or brother) was killed on Peel Island in 1863.⁵¹ It is also possible, however, that Lizzie Brown was referring to George B. Gilley—and that, like him, she was a child of William Gilley Jr., brother of the George Gilley in Hawai‘i. Indeed, just two years later, in February 1872, the Hawaiian Gazette listed a sailor named “Gillie” on the Honolulu yacht Henrietta who was “counted among the most expert whalemen that belong here.”⁵² Yet the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, reporting ten days later that “the crew of the Henrietta have struck three whales since leaving here,” confusingly attributed this success to an “R. Gillie.”⁵³ Even though misprints were common in the papers, this instance challenges the assumption that George Gilley never returned to the Bonin Islands.

In 1875, George Gilley became the captain of the Hawaiian-registered brig Onward, making him the only Kanaka Maoli known to have led whaling expeditions.⁵⁴ The Onward happened to be owned by Honolulu businessman James Dowsett, son of the Captain Dowsett who ferried the first settlers to the Bonin Islands (before famously disappearing at sea in 1834). While Dowsett was part of a small pool of local financiers fitting out whaleships, it is possible that George Gilley forged his professional opportunity through some lasting personal ties to the man whose father once traveled three thousand miles with his mother, Fanny Gilley. Notably, the earliest record of her full name, “Mrs. Fanny Gilley,” dates to 1875, when she and other heads of household “signed an oath to honor the rules and regulations” of the nascent Empire of Japan as it assumed control of the Bonin Islands.⁵⁵ While this retroactively added Japan to her son’s web of national ties, at the time he was busy fulfilling his new duties in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, which included filing obligatory shipment reports.⁵⁶ These reports offer us a clearer sense of his role in Hawai‘i’s mercantile economy. His spring debut as a captain at Honolulu Harbor included overseeing flour, salt pork, sweet potatoes, and other commodities loaded into the Onward ahead of its six-month sojourn in the North Pacific.⁵⁷

Clearer, too, from this year on, are the links between the Kingdom of Hawai‘i’s stature and Gilley’s ‘oihana—his skilled profession—as each whale that his learned hand harpooned brought “success to home enterprise.”⁵⁸ In November, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser logged the Onward sailing back into port with all her casks full, thanks to Captain Gilley’s winning gamble on a whaling ground off Kodiak Island that was once, but no longer, popular with the massive American whaling fleet.⁵⁹ Records of Captain Gilley’s auspicious start therefore illustrate his thorough maritime training before 1875 and convey the broader aptitude of his lāhui (nation, people) in the global economy, countering notions that it merely fell prey to American capitalism in the late nineteenth century.

Because Gilley achieved captaincy amid an exceptionally perilous decade for North Pacific whaling, his name not only entered commercial reports at higher frequency but also emerged in accounts left by the Kanaka seamen who recorded their own tribulations. Gilley was well aware of the immense dangers that Arctic whalers faced each season. There is a chance that he was present for the disaster of 1871, when rogue ice floes claimed more than thirty ships, including the Kohola and three other Hawaiian-registered vessels.⁶⁰ The 1876 summer season, likewise, witnessed the ice trap at least twelve ships, including the Honolulu barks Arctic and Desmond, off Nuvuk, or Point Barrow, the northernmost point of all U.S.-claimed territory.⁶¹ That year Dowsett hired Gilley to captain the William H. Allen, but it seems that delays in fitting out the ship spared him the hardship faced by the three hundred seamen who became stranded on the ice. Gilley ended up taking the brig for a short winter hunt along the equator—a late-season trip possibly intended to recoup some of the year’s Arctic losses.⁶²

Thus, it was not until 1877 that Gilley, again at the helm of the William H. Allen, would see for himself what remained of the trapped fleet. He departed in April and by early August reached Tangent Point, on Alaska’s north slope, where he was surely surprised to see a Kanaka whaler, Charles Edward Kealoha, clambering toward him over the coastal ice dunes. Kealoha and a Mā'ohi (Native Tahitian) whaler named Kenela, both of the wrecked Desmond, were the last survivors of at least fifty men who stayed behind when others took their chances on a few crowded ships that managed to escape the ice.⁶³ Later that year, Kealoha would publish a firsthand account of their harrowing winter and departure with Gilley in the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Lahui Hawaii. As Kealoha related to his people, he was initially rescued by local Iñupiat, whose diet of fatty fish and orca meat was at once repulsive and lifesaving. Yet, despite these challenging lifeways, Kealoha declared, “he lahui keia i ano like ka ili me ko kakou” (this is a people whose skin type is like ours), adding that theirs is paler, “i ka noho paha iloko o na lua” (probably because they live in caves). In contrast to the coarse and unexpected kinship forged in those caves, Kealoha delighted in the warm reception offered by “Kapena George Gilley,” who was “he keiki Hawaii Ponoi” (one of Hawai‘i’s own children), and whose “moku” (ship) provided a feeling of being “i ka aina hanau” (in the birth land).⁶⁴ Gilley signed Kealoha and Kenela onto his crew on August 9, 1877. In her analysis of Kealoha’s article, archaeologist Susan Lebo suggests that the new hire likely spent many hours in the forecastle trading mo‘olelo (stories) with fellow writerly Kanaka seaman J. Polapola. The latter, a member of Gilley’s Honolulu-based crew, would go on to publish his own account of the 1877 season, including the violent event, later known as the “Gilley Affair,” that occurred on the decks above them two months before.⁶⁵ Like Kealoha, Polapola inscribed Gilley’s name in his article, as a result of the captain’s decisive actions.

The label “Gilley Affair” reflects the muddled, racially contingent discourse around the events that transpired off Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska, on June 5, 1877. The “affair” involved the slaughter of at least a dozen Kingikmiut (Iñupiaq) traders, one of whom had fatally stabbed a member of Gilley’s Kanaka crew when bartering went awry.⁶⁶ The event’s affiliation with “Gilley,” the ship’s captain, diverges from naming massacres after their location and, occasionally, after white victims.⁶⁷ Yet few massacres involve a survivor and lead perpetrator possessing Gilley’s perceived racial ambiguity. Indeed, the captain’s Indigeneity, and that of his crew, was variously erased or amplified within English-language renditions of the massacre, a trend that again affirms my use of the mo‘olelo narrative form. As Native Hawaiian scholar ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui explains, “multiple versions and variants” in mo‘olelo “are not just acceptable, but perhaps preferable, as it allows for an array of possibilities through the analysis of several perspectives and sources of knowledge in the telling and recording of story.”⁶⁸ In a mo‘olelo of the “Gilley Affair,” we may also see how Gilley mobilized his own sense of self-identity to emerge relatively unscathed from racist discourses, and even learned how “to make race work to one’s advantage.”⁶⁹

From the outset, Gilley portrayed himself as a victim of circumstance, starting with his brief 1877 season report to the Advertiser:

It is noteworthy that Gilley left out killing the Kingikmiut, the unidentified “them,” though perhaps not surprising given that he was reporting for the commercial column—which logged his successful haul of two hundred barrels of oil, five thousand pounds of baleen, and three tons of ivory. In the same column, Captain Leander Owen of the Three Brothers offered “a heartfelt thanks to Capt Gilley for his generous hospitality,” as Gilley had helped to rescue Owen’s ice-bound crew near Nuvuk three months after the “row” at Cape Prince of Wales. Together, these reports appear focused on assuring the public of Hawai‘i’s national economic stability amid the waning of the disaster-prone whaling industry. Yet Gilley’s pragmatic report, printed in late October, was actually preceded by one that had aligned his victimhood with his relative whiteness. In the very first record of the William H. Allen’s incident, received by the missionary newspaper The Friend on September 1, Captain Benjamin Whitney of the Giovanni Apiani conveyed that when “natives came on board and kicked up a row, the officers and crew with handspikes and heavers killed some 10 or 12, and drove the remainder overboard.”⁷¹ The term “natives” here is notably reserved for the Kingikmiut, while Gilley and his crew of Kanaka, white, and Native Siberian whalers were uniformly deracialized.⁷²

Stateside papers would quickly sensationalize these reports, while further whitening Gilley and promoting his innocence via racial tropes common to the settling of the American West. Within a month of the William H. Allen’s return to port a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle printed “A Whaleship’s Escape: Indian Pirates in the Arctic Sea,” claiming to dispel the “wildest rumors” by presenting facts gained through an interview with the captain. Yet the writer went on to describe how “the vessel was overpowered” by “seventy five warriors,” led by a 6-foot-6-inch tall chief who seized Gilley by the throat and signaled his determination “to take charge of the vessel, run her ashore, and murder the officers and crew.” With dramatic flair, the article flipped this fate, one “lazy,” dead “redskin” at a time, as the writer described the Kingikmiut. The Chronicle’s version was soon reprinted in New York and Chicago, feeding American readers’ images of a melee at sea. Throughout the rendition Gilley was implicitly, and heroically, cast among the ship’s “four white men, the remainder being Sandwich-Islanders.” With his first mate-cum-sidekick W.H. Murphy fighting for “life or death,” “the Captain escaped unhurt,” having only struck the towering chief “with the butt-end of his revolver” before the chief fell overboard, though “in what manner nobody knows.”⁷³

In time, captains for the U.S. Revenue-Marine, predecessor to the U.S. Coast Guard, produced accounts that varied in their treatments of Captain Gilley as they prioritized America’s national interests. In his 1880 “Report Upon Alaska and Its People,” addressed to U.S. Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman, Captain George W. Bailey mentioned “Gillie [sic], master, from the Sandwich Islands” in a discussion of “ships from the Sandwich Islands, under the Hawaiian flag” illegally trading contraband liquor “on our side” of the Bering Strait. Bailey blamed Gilley, whose crew “shot and killed…fourteen men and one woman,” for the likelihood that “these natives will probably retaliate some day, by taking advantage of some vessel.”⁷⁴ By contrast, Captain C. L. Hooper of the Revenue-Marine steamer Corwin proclaimed in his 1881 report that the Iñupiat of Kiŋigin, “the worst on the coast…were taught a severe lesson about two years ago by the Hawaiian brig, ‘Wm. H. Allen,’ commanded by a Kanaka half-breed named Gilly [sic].” Here, the mate apparently “shot the Indian dead” who “attempted to stab the captain,” while the rest were killed by “enraged Kanakas.”⁷⁵ In spite of their differences, both emissaries of America’s rule in Alaska passively condemned the presence of the Hawaiian-registered William H. Allen, either through associating its parent nation with illicit behavior or its “half-breed” captain with an inability to restrain his savage crew.

In 1887, George Gilley was ostensibly able to set the public record straight, by way of a firsthand telling to itinerant journalist Herbert L. Aldrich. In the latter’s book Arctic Alaska and Siberia (1889), Gilley is presented—or presents himself—across four pages as level-headed and even-handed, each action as a measured reaction. For example, when the Kingikmiut “resorted to big knives and stabbed one sailor in the back,” Gilley stated, “I stood ready, and whenever I saw a native raise his knife I shot him.” Further, he attempted to “take survivors prisoner…for they had been punished enough,” and yet when they persisted Gilley “posted men above them, and when a native showed his head, he was clubbed and thrown overboard.” He justifies this saying, “these same men had looted Captain Jacobson’s schooner a week before, and tried to take Captain Raven’s brig. They had also endeavored to take possession of two other ships…No attempt to take a vessel has been made since.” In this arguably self-serving rationale, we may notice that Gilley shifts from calling the Kingikmiut “natives” and refers to them simply as “men.” Although Gilley no doubt carried his own learned prejudices, he still implied that all present were men, even men with a shared interest in autonomous trade—the entire exchange having begun with a friendly request for ammunition, and the big chief taking practice shots at “cakes of ice” before his men clamored for rum and turned violent, as Gilley/Aldrich explained.⁷⁶

In 1890, the U.S. Bureau of Education’s first English-Eskimo and Eskimo-English Vocabularies included a biased rendition by ethnographer John W. Kelly, who described the Kingikmiut as “a band of hypocrites and shylocks…led by what they believed to be invincible unutkoots (seers).”⁷⁷ Kelly claimed that these “Kinegans” had as their leader in 1877 “an unutkoot, whom the natives considered invulnerable, [when] they seized and boarded a Hawaiian brig, commanded by George Gilly [sic], a Bouin Islander [sic].” Kelly continued that Gilley “broke the power of the Kinegans” by proving “the unutkoots…to be but ordinary men.” Like Hooper, Kelly saw Gilley as a partially civilized enforcer of white hegemony. For Kelly, this equated to Gilley “striking the chief over the head” before “he shot him dead.”⁷⁸ The pinnacle of Gilley’s racial manipulation came later still, in famed Arctic resident Charles Brower’s 1942 memoir Fifty Years Below Zero. Notably, Brower and Kelly were the very same Americans who first commodified Iñupiaq labor, respectively establishing commercial shore whaling stations at Utqiagvik in 1888 and Point Belcher in 1891.⁷⁹ Coining the phrase “Gilley Affair” in his memoir, Brower placed first blood on the hands of the “hothead” Irish first mate, re-named Finnigan—beginning a racist trend. When provoked, Gilley’s “crew of Kanakas…went crazy…grabbed axes and spades and lit into the damned Eskimos,” wrote Brower, ostensibly quoting words Gilley told him in an 1886 encounter. Brower went so far as to state that Gilley “wasn’t the only white man to avoid Cape Prince of Wales in those days,” and quoted him saying, “No, sir, they don’t like whites much around Cape Prince of Wales.”⁸⁰ In some eyes, this sentiment was corroborated by the seemingly retributory 1893 murder at Kiŋigin of an American missionary, Harrison R. Thornton, who himself suspected that some “Gilly [sic] conflict” survivors and kin might have “vowed vengeance on all white men.”⁸¹

It is worth exploring the possibility that Gilley deliberately passed, or primarily identified himself, as a white man. One of the first visitors to the Bonin Islands colony described the results of local “miscegenation” stating, “In the male children the white parentage is very distinct: light olive complexion, dark eyes and clear cut features.”⁸² Such white perceptions of Kānaka Maoli fit within Maile Arvin’s study of “the deep history of attributing (always approximate and partial) whiteness to the Polynesian race in Western scientific literature, popular culture, and law,” which engendered “a logic of possession through whiteness” among settlers.⁸³ Born to a white father in the diverse Bonin Islands colony, Gilley may have been at least passively aware of such settler perspectives; indeed, he seems to have gained power from that knowledge. In the ruffian writings of Charles Brower, Gilley appears to contradict the discourse in which “Polynesians became the feminized, exotic, possessions of whiteness, gaining no secure power to possess whiteness or identify as white themselves.”⁸⁴ Rather, Gilley may have exploited blind spots in white visions of the racial hybrids—hapa haole, ‘afakasi, half-breed, half-caste—that settlers socially constructed and legally enshrined throughout Oceania. As such, Gilley fits a different historical trend, outlined by Damon Salesa, in which Oceania’s “half-castes” challenged “assumptions that European society in the colonies was an obvious and discrete social and biological whole…and forced the boundary to be actively and visibly policed, so that the inequalities of colonialism might be maintained.”⁸⁵

Floating, or passing, above that policing, Gilley “had the capacity to traverse categories, or be cast from one to another.”⁸⁶ Much like the “half-caste” Aboriginal whaler Tommy Chaseland studied by Lynette Russell, Gilley’s skill and rank “gradually got him out of the category of nonwhite. Although he never fully becomes white he certainly is seen as not merely colored.”⁸⁷ In a specifically Hawaiian context, Gilley echoed the “Hawaiian elites,” discussed by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “who benefitted from the social positions of their white fathers [and] identified as hapa haole, which implied a degree of privilege and status, regardless of (or in addition to) their mothers’ genealogical status.”⁸⁸ As Kanaka seaman Charles Kealoha made clear, Gilley cultivated a feeling of shared Hawaiian Indigeneity aboard his own moku. Conversely, in Brower’s company, Gilley appears to have allowed racist assumptions to stand unchecked. Through the resulting solidarity, the trusting Brower quoted Gilley in his popular book, from which we can infer many of Gilley’s movements as mate aboard the American steamship Grampus in 1886. Again, Gilley’s mobility and ‘ike (inherited and self-honed knowledge) allowed him to become the agent of his memory.

Unlike all the English-speaking reporters, J. Polapola was actually present on the deck when the Kingikmiut chief took Gilley by the throat, and therefore hoped to spread his firsthand version throughout the lāhui (nation, people), “from Hawaii to Niihau.” The moment Gilley was threatened, Polapola recalled, he hurled a heavy handspike at the chief’s brother, striking him in the neck. “Ke kaikaina alii a haule make aku la iluna o ka oneki,” Polapola wrote—the chief’s younger brother dropped dead onto the deck.⁸⁹ But rather than calling the first mate to action, as the Chronicle averred, Gilley shouted just one thing in Polapola’s account: “Don’t kill him yet.” As echoed in Aldrich’s text, it seems Gilley had tried to cut short the violence by sparing the chief. And when Kanaka seaman Honuailealea was stabbed in retribution, it doesn’t appear that all the “Kanakas went crazy,” as Brower reported. At least two Kānaka, named Paia and Kahele, abstained from violence. But others in the fight, including Gilley, knew that Hawai‘i’s whaling fleet was down to just three ships and that theirs contained about $36,000 worth of cargo, according to Polapola.⁹⁰ Losing it was unthinkable. Only after laying out this rationale did Polapola state, “The captain seized the chief by the neck, gave him a bullet in the face and threw him into the sea.”⁹¹

The vast majority of sources that we do have on Gilley limit their coverage of his life to his 1877 “affair.” The event has increasingly functioned as a ready-made anecdote in discussions of historical friction on the northern fringe of America’s empire, rather than in the center of the Kingikmiut world. Two recent histories—John Taliaferro’s In a Far Country (2006) and John R. Bockstoce’s Furs and Frontiers in the Far North (2009)—synthesize the aforementioned reports by white men to produce anecdotal renditions in which Gilley is implicitly different from his Kanaka crew.⁹² Even such recent and innovative scholarship as G. Samantha Rosenthal’s Beyond Hawai‘i (2018), which does include Polapola’s voice, merely mentions Gilley’s presence as captain amid its treatment of Kealoha’s agency as a laborer on his ship.⁹³ No recent chroniclers have pursued anthropologist Dorothy Jean Ray’s 1975 assertion that “Eskimos in the 1960s had their own versions of what had happened almost a century before” on the ship of the “half-blood Hawaiian.”⁹⁴ Taliaferro and Bockstoce do draw from several nineteenth-century accounts from the Iñupiaq side; yet Bockstoce, who deems Brower’s the best general record, adds that “it is regrettable that no contemporary account by an Eskimo has survived.”⁹⁵ This lament is surprising, as a 2012 development plan by the town of Wales (Kiŋigin), Alaska, notes, “There are many versions of the [‘Gilley Affair’] that do not coincide with the local knowledge.”⁹⁶

This observation, finally, directs us to a central tenet of Indigenous Studies: that all knowledge is both variable and local. In this light, the events that transpired within the locale of Gilley’s moku (ship) in 1877, among actors who variously embodied Kanaka, Iñupiaq, Euro-American, and Native Siberian epistemologies, would seem to preclude efforts toward an authoritative account, let alone one written down and in English. According to Iñupiaq anthropologist Aġiyġaq Herbert Anungazuk, in twenty-first-century Kiŋigin, “what remains from this incident is signed in the traditional manner…by placing bowhead whale mandibles upright on the tundra.” Where such bones usually signal a grave, here they “mark no remains of our losses on the William H. Allen, only the belongings of those who were lost,” Anungazuk explains. He knows this, he states, because it is what “we are told,” referencing the Iñupiaq oral tradition which, “however faint, differs from what has been told in print.”⁹⁷ Meanwhile, the ongoing proliferation of English-language accounts remains largely tethered to a Euro-American worldview favoring static printed sources and racial certainties. As a result, Captain Gilley predominantly appears as a white or mostly white agent of settler colonialism, rather than the more elusive figure I have drawn out, a hesitantly violent and broadly opportunistic actor serving his own interests and those of his Native lāhui (nation, people).⁹⁸

Although George Gilley and his crew inflicted much harm at Cape Prince of Wales in 1877, the whaler’s subsequent moves suggest a determination to maintain positive relations with Alaska’s Indigenous communities. Just seven months after returning to Honolulu, Gilley again steered the William H. Allen across the North Pacific, through the Bering Strait, and over to Alaska’s north coast where it, and the whaleship Florence, met their ends.⁹⁹ As the leading Hawaiian-language weekly Ka Nupepa Kuokoa reported, “The pair [of ships] were stuck in the ice, and surrounded by it. The pair’s whales were procured, and if they are not troubled, then the child [keiki] Gilly [sic] shall return with all the goods of his ship.”¹⁰⁰ The paper’s projection—echoing Charles Kealoha’s description of Gilley—was borne out, as the captain safely returned to Honolulu on the familiar Onward in November.¹⁰¹ Hawai‘i’s whaling fleet had dropped to two ships, including Gilley’s next charge, the Giovanni Apiani.¹⁰² But the Arctic he encountered in 1879 had changed. He reported to the Advertiser that he found no whales, but a population “starving for want of blubber,” such that he “killed two schooner loads of walruses and carried them along the settlements and gave to the natives.”¹⁰³ As Gilley’s actions made plain, contrary to stateside “Gilley Affair” spin, he had no interest in exterminating the trading partners that sustained him and provided his lāhui (nation, people) a foothold in the whaling industry. He gave away his entire haul. On October 27, he returned to Honolulu with just twelve hundred pounds of tobacco, five barrels of rum, and other trade goods.¹⁰⁴

Following the sale of the Giovanni Apiani in 1880, which led to Gilley helming Hawai‘i’s last Arctic-bound whaler, the Julia A. Long, the seasoned captain transitioned into American maritime positions never before occupied by Kānaka Maoli.¹⁰⁵ But before moving beyond the Kingdom’s economy, he demonstrated his mastery of whaling technology to his lāhui. In the 1880 season, Gilley cruised the reliably stormy waters around the central Bering Sea’s St. Lawrence Island, caught half a dozen bowheads, and performed a routine rescue when Captain Benjamin Dexter ran aground in the Loleta.¹⁰⁶ Gilley even had an encounter with ichthyologist Tarleton H. Bean, curator of fishes for the U.S. National Museum, and impressed him with his knowledge of walrus-hunting hotspots.¹⁰⁷ In spite of the strong haul, Hawai‘i’s local whaling industry folded after Gilley returned to port on October 10, 1880. Listed at that time in the local directory as a “master mariner” living at Pauoa, O‘ahu, Kāpena Gilley was a well-known figure when King Kalākaua’s birthday yacht race took place that November; yet popularity and one-off race prizes could not sustain him.¹⁰⁸ From 1882 to 1885, he was listed (ultimately in records as distant as Massachusetts) as captain of the American whaling bark Eliza, which was based in San Francisco but often visited Honolulu.¹⁰⁹ In 1883, Gilley became a naturalized U.S. citizen, a necessary legal process to maintain his status as captain. As of 1864, the United States required “that officers of vessels of the United States shall in all cases be citizens of the United States.”¹¹⁰ Gilley’s naturalization form listed his “country of birth or allegiance” not as Hawai‘i, but Japan—a reflection of his mother’s migration to, and participation in signing over, the Bonin Islands.¹¹¹ In 1886, George Gilley accepted a downgraded station to become first mate on the modern steam-powered San Francisco-based whaler Grampus.¹¹² That season, in which he met Charles Brower, marked the start of his employment with the Pacific Steam Whaling Company (PSWC). In 1887, he had his Arctic encounter with Herbert Aldrich, who also photographed him, standing on the decks of what could be the Grampus, foregrounding two other men, possibly Iñupiaq or Siberian Yupik (fig. 1).¹¹³

This record of Gilley’s movements in the 1880s is misleadingly straightforward. It does not align with Gilley family documents, which suggest that Gilley returned to the Bonin/Ogasawara Islands around this time, and married Esther Thurlow Washington (1862∼1925), a daughter of Nathaniel Savory and CHamoru (Native people of Guåhan/Guam) woman Maria de los Santos y Castro. According to this mo‘olelo, Esther entered a union with George Gilley around 1882, shortly after her husband George Augustine Washington died. Gilley then became stepfather to Esther’s three sons—Rufus (1877–1964), Henry (1879–1903), and Charles (1881–1972) Washington—before fathering two sons of his own, Grover (1885–1957) and Norman Gilley (1886–1945).¹¹⁴ At least three Gilley family trees produced in the twentieth century, including one by Grover Gilley himself, corroborate this genealogy, connecting British seaman William Penn Gilley to George Gilley and then to Grover and Norman Gilley.¹¹⁵ Further supporting this lineage is a photograph, possessed at present by Grover’s granddaughter, of a man identified by family as George Gilley standing beside Esther and a young Grover, whose height indicates a date around 1895 (fig. 2).

As with the early phases of Gilley’s mo‘olelo, sources on his later years produce a narrative of mobility that transcends the linear timeline constructed by whaling’s colonial archives. Although it is possible that Captain Gilley traversed the Pacific in the Eliza, stopped over at the Ogasawaras to create this family, and later posed for this photograph, it is also possible that Norman and Grover were actually the sons of the captain’s little-known nephew, George B. Gilley. In a 1971 interview with anthropologist Mary Shepardson, Norman and Grover’s stepbrother Charles Washington differentiated his stepfather “George Gilley”—a man who hunted seals off the coasts of Japan and Korea before drowning (with Henry Washington) in a 1903 storm—from an “Old Man Gilley” whom he had heard about while whaling in the North Pacific. “Of course, he was the captain of a whale ship,” Charles stated of the latter, adding that at one point, “Eskimos…were going to take the ship. See? So he shot all what he could with his gun.”¹¹⁶ As for the family photograph, the mustached man beside young Grover, though clearly a Gilley, does not outwardly appear to be two decades older than Esther, as Captain Gilley would have been. While we might deduce from these details that repeated names, similar careers, island departures, and early deaths likely produced some genealogical foreshortening, Kanaka epistemology does not require that we do so. No one version must be “true,” in the Euro-American empirical sense, when engaging the practices of mo‘olelo or mo‘okū‘auhau (genealogy).¹¹⁷ When read within these expansive Kanaka Maoli ways of knowing, Grover Gilleys’s signed 1950 statement that his mo‘okū‘auhau “is a true testimony” warrants at least as much credence as Charles Washington’s spoken claims that, “It was like this,” and “That’s the way it happened.”¹¹⁸

Newspapers from early 1890s contain brief mentions of Captain Gilley that, in addition to introducing an entirely different marriage scenario and further traces of racial discrimination, indicate his continued determination to work—and specifically to work with other Native Hawaiians. Following a summer hunt off Alaska, during which he met the reindeer-herding missionary W.T. Lopp, Gilley, then first mate of the PSWC steam-whaler Thrasher, developed scales on his legs, and was “taken into custody…on suspicion of being a leper.”¹¹⁹ According to Gilley’s San Francisco-based crew, “his wife, who was formerly a resident of this city, but who now lives at Yokohama, is also a leper.”¹²⁰ Although a California health officer soon dismissed Gilley with “a severe case of eczema,” one has to wonder whether his ethnicity and associations with Asia and Hawai‘i, famous for its leprosy colony, played into the false assumption that he was “also a leper.”¹²¹ Despite potentially racialized stigmas, Gilley continued to visit Hawai‘i, with the hope of luring other Kānaka Maoli to continue whaling. As an article in the Hawaiian-language paper Ka Leo o Ka Lahui reported on March 23, 1891, “Here within Honolulu is Captain George Gilley [Kapena Keoki Kele] with his whaling ship, to procure some kanaka Hawaii, it will likely not be approved, that is what we have heard.¹²² It is not clear on what ship, or in what capacity, Gilley made this visit, but the record reveals that he retained clout as captain even as he continued to fill lower ranks in the PSWC and possibly faced discrimination in the United States.

At the end of the nineteenth century, George Gilley was recognized for his career’s remarkable longevity, which attested to his unprecedented mobility among diverse racial and national communities. In November 1897, the San Francisco Call ran a feature story on Gilley, then boatsteerer for the Thrasher, complete with an illustrated portrait of him, smartly groomed in a three-piece suit, indicative of his financial success (fig. 3).¹²³ The headline was familiar: “Captain George Gilly: Forty Years an Arctic Whale-Hunter, Who Has Killed a Few Esquimaux.” Besides a rehashed telling of the 1877 incident, the article claimed that Gilley “has gone to the Arctic Ocean every year for forty years past.”¹²⁴ If true, that placed him in the Arctic even before Brummerhoff’s fatal mishap in 1862. Those years apparently gave Gilley deep insights into, and perhaps feelings of kinship among, the Bering Sea’s Indigenous communities. As the article noted, “He speaks and understands their language,” probably in reference to an Indigenous language of Siberia, where Gilley hired seasonal crewmembers.

In 1898, Gilley left the PSWC and joined the Andrew Hicks, becoming first mate to Captain William T. “Black Ahab” Shorey, the only Black whaling captain in the Pacific.¹²⁵ That spring, the two sailed for the Japanese whaling grounds from San Francisco, stopping for provisions in the Republic of Hawai‘i, the short-lived nation led by anti-monarchy insurgents who were preparing to hand the islands to the United States. While in Hawaiian waters, any chance or need for Gilley to pass as white vanished; the same went for Captain Shorey’s ship. The Pacific Commercial Advertiser, then owned by lead annexationist Lorrin Thurston, hailed the return of “Geo. Gillie [sic], a half-caste of this Island,” along with the crew’s other Hawaiians, who were deemed “very much in demand in the whaling business.” As that business confronted increasing competition and scarcity, Shorey needed reliable Kanaka labor. “Hawaiians are fearless on the water,” he told a reporter during the visit. He continued that “[t]hey will chase a whale when they know they are in the greatest danger and think it is the greatest fun…I do not know of any people who are better suited for our business” since “[t]hey are absolutely fearless.”¹²⁶ Perhaps whaling was “the greatest fun” for Gilley; or perhaps he relished having sovereign power over his moku (ship), and with it his race-transcending status, autonomous mobility, and economic stability. For even after finding such comradery with Shorey, and returning to the soon-to-be “American” city of Honolulu, he sought the Bering Sea one last time.

In 1900, just before Gilley left San Francisco, a U.S. census taker attempted to record his biographical details. The mariner was subsequently listed as a naturalized, literate, married (in 1875), English-speaking “sailor (captain)” born in 1840, with an unlikely immigration date of 1860, and a white racial identity.¹²⁷ While Gilley himself may not have known exact dates, and may have self-identified as white, in the latter case he had little choice. For “color or race,” canvassers were instructed only to “write ‘W’ for white; ‘B’ for black (negro or of negro descent); ‘Ch’ for Chinese; ‘Jp’ for Japanese, and ‘In’ for Indian, as the case may be,” with no mixed racial option available.¹²⁸ Gilley’s place of birth and the names of his parents were recorded as “Unknown.”

Despite the many unknowns about his life, it is clear that Gilley leveraged his knowledge and experiences, his mo‘olelo, to maintain personal sovereignty through the end of his days. Voyaging northward to Nome via the bark Alaska in the spring of 1900, as a goldrush was transforming the coastal town, Gilley quickly secured a position as a ship captain and started trading around the Bering Sea.¹²⁹ In early August, he sailed the schooner Edith over to the Siberian coast and anchored near the shore. A week of trading there went peacefully, until one night, when mysterious gunshots rang out from the beach. Moments later first mate F. Scott Morrison cried from his cabin, “I’ve been shot.” Gilley immediately heaved anchor and sailed through the night for Alaska as Morrison, bleeding out from his groin, brought death upon the ship. The next morning—August 18, 1900—as the schooner approached Sledge Island, about 20 miles offshore, Gilley sat on the ship’s rail and took in a final view of the rocky coast. When the wind suddenly shifted, swinging the boom, Gilley was knocked into the Bering Sea. His remaining crew, Edward Foregren and “an Indian named Sam,” raced astern as the ship cruised onward, only to watch Gilley drown. Evidently loyal and respectful to their captain, the men toiled like whalers to hoist Gilley’s body from the water and then took him on to Nome.¹³⁰

A few days after Gilley drowned, a small newspaper in Oregon recorded the loss of a 60-year-old “native of the Island of Borneo,” “whose good or bad fortune it was to have killed five Northern Indians some years ago.”¹³¹ Later in the same article, that number is raised to ten. A few papers in western states ran similarly misleading accounts. The Salt Lake Herald printed the headline, “Siberian Natives Kill an American Aboard a Ship,” in reference to the Chicago-born first mate Morrison, and only mentioned in passing the death of the other American, Gilley, whom it called “a noted Alaskan explorer.”¹³² Gilley’s death was not evidently reported in Hawai‘i. In 1975, Dorothy Jean Ray made the only latter-day mention of Gilley’s drowning, in a footnote.¹³³

In light of the intimate Kanaka ‘Ōiwi tradition of caring for ancestors’ iwi (bones), it is fitting that our only indication of Gilley’s final resting place comes through family sources, which also convey the continuation of mo‘okū‘auhau ‘ike (genealogies of knowledge).¹³⁴ Recalling his own whaling experiences, Charles Washington reported hearing a captain at Unalaska (Dutch Harbor) state, “Captain Gilley is here. They brought him from Cape Nome, and brought him up here and buried him. His tombstone is here.” In Washington’s version, Gilley’s fate intertwined with Morrison’s and the Kiŋigin Iñupiat killed in 1877. “He fooled around again and he went there and some of the old descendants was laying for him,” Washington told Shepardson in 1971 adding, “from the shore they shot him and he fell overboard, see?”¹³⁵ As should be clear by now, many diverging and converging truths texture the long wake leading to the Gilley name today, which still roves—as “Gilley” and “Gērē,” and within the Nozawa, Minami, and other related families—in the Ogasawaras, Guåhan, and across Turtle Island.¹³⁶ In recent years, one Gilley descendant on Chichijima, named George Minami (1960–2020), operated a fishing and whale-watching boat, the Little George.¹³⁷ Through such shared ‘oihana (skilled professions), mo‘okū‘auhau ‘ike (genealogies of knowledge) have continued to connect these Pacific Islanders across the depths of Oceanic space and time.

Unlike Kānaka whose revolutionary lives and writings are readily reassembled from the pages of Hawaiian-language newspapers, Gilley’s rough career largely comes through a few English sources that painted an often incorrect, biased, or confusing portrait of the captain. I have implicitly vouched for these varied reports, and other problematic sources, in telling this mo‘olelo. To ignore them would render Gilley’s life virtually erased. Speaking to this common dilemma for Pacific historians, David Hanlon recently characterized “the colonial archive as at once indispensable but also inadequate to the study of subjugated or subaltern people,” as they tell but “partial colonial histories.”¹³⁸ This prompts the questions: was Gilley subaltern, and if so, can he speak through these “inadequate” sources?

As shown in this article, Gilley can and does speak volumes. His actions gave meaning to his life at work in a colonial industry and allowed his mo‘olelo to infiltrate lasting settler documents. This takeaway emerges by viewing Gilley’s maritime prowess as the natural manifestation of his mo‘okū‘auhau ‘ike in Pacific voyaging, and his mobility as an exploitation of settler colonialism’s contingencies. To that end, I have argued that Gilley and by extension other historic Kānaka Maoli—literate or not—warrant biographical recognition for their daily, active deployment of inherited ‘ike (knowledge) within and against settler structures. Indeed, my rendition of Gilley’s life-in-work builds on historian Fred Cooper’s critique of studies that play into notions of an all-oppressing colonial modernity by reducing “the conflicting strategies of colonization to a modernity perhaps never experienced by those being colonized” and ignoring the way people like Gilley were able to “build lives in the crevices of colonial power.”¹³⁹

Effectively a (de)colonial hybrid, Gilley participated in the expansion of American power through his commercial maritime actions yet simultaneously undermined the empire’s racial order as an immutably Native Hawaiian whaler shifting in and out of his relatively contingent whiteness. His unprecedented rise through whaling’s hierarchies to novel forms of sovereignty and success would seem to render those floating diasporas closer, at times, to mobile Native Hawaiian colonies. Presiding over these “crevices” of Indigenous hegemony, he assumed control of the capitalist base of each foreign-built moku he captained. This process further transcended Euro-American national structures as these moku repeatedly delivered Gilley to the comfortably porous “borderlands” of imperial and Indigenous power, which he himself embodied. Ultimately, following Gilley’s mo‘olelo requires a steady mental mobilization away from contingent settler structures, from text to race to nation, that constitute the archives in which his many lives take shape.