Hawaii - James Michener [212]
"I thought the same thing," Abner said frankly, "and I was astonished at myself."
"You're growing up," Whipple said sharply and left.
ONE UNEXPECTED BENEFIT came from the whistling wind that leveled much of Lahaina in 1829. When the damage was cleared away, Kelolo for the third time helped Abner rebuild his church, but this time the kahunas refused even to argue where the door should be. They put it where it should have been in the first place, where the local gods ordained, and the famous stone church they built that year stood for more than a century.
Now Lahaina, most beautiful of all Hawaiian towns, prospered as the national capital. The business center of the kingdom was Honolulu, to be sure, for foreigners preferred living near their consulates, but the alii had never liked Honolulu, finding it hot, cheerless and commonplace, so that even though it was true that the boy king and his regents had to spend more and more time there, he returned whenever possible to his true capital, Lahaina, and his women often remained in the cool grass houses under the kou trees even when he was called to the larger city.
Whaling vessels, their crews now better behaved, came to Lahaina in increasing numbers--78 would come in 1831, 82 in 1833--and because each stayed for about four weeks in the spring and four in the autumn, there were sometimes many tall-masted ships in the roads; and since the famous whistling wind of Lahaina blew only about twice a century, they rested in security within the charmed pocket of islands. The important thing to Janders & Whipple was that every whaler who came into the roads paid them a fee for something or other. Did the ship need firewood? J & W had it. Salt pork? Dr. Whipple found out how to salt down island hogs. Salt itself? J & W had a monopoly on the fine salt evaporated from the sea in flat lava-rock beds. Did a ship's captain insist upon fresh pork at sea? J & W could provide healthy live pigs and bundles of ti leaves for fodder on long trips. Sweet potatoes, oranges that had been introduced by Captain Cook, and fish dried by Dr. Whipple . . . J & W had them all. And if a ship required balls of olona twine, strongest in the world, or even cables woven of it, J & W controlled that monopoly, too.
It was John Whipple, however, who devised one of the simplest moneymaking schemes for the firm. When a whaler put in with an unwieldy amount of whale oil, not enough barrels to warrant sailing all the way home, but so many that there seemed no purpose in returning to the Off-Japan Banks, Whipple arranged for the captain to leave his entire cargo at Lahaina, under the care of J & W, who, when they had assembled half a dozen such cargoes, would argue some New England captain into running the entire lot back to New Bedford. In this way J & W made a profit on storing the barrels of oil, on shipping them, and on chartering the ship that did the work. It therefore seemed to Whipple that the next logical step ought to be for his firm to buy the odd lots of oil outright and to hold them on speculation.
Accordingly, he proposed that J & W acquire its own ships and take over the whale-oil business, but cautious Captain Janders, tugging at his red beard, was adamant. "Only one way to make money in this world," he judged. "My motto: 'Own nothing, control everything.' Own a batch of oil outright? Never! Because then you worry about the market. Let someone else own it. We'll handle it, and we'll make the better profit. But to own a ship. That is real madness. I've watched the tribulations of shipowners. They have to trust a rascally captain, a worse mate and a depraved crew. They've got to feed the lot, insure the vessel, live in anguish when there's a storm, and then share whatever profits there are with the crew."
"You bought the