Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory

Chapter 25. The Fourth of July, 1907: Jack and Charmian London Visit Kalaupapa

297 25 The Fourth of July, 1907 Jack and Charmian London Visit Kalaupapa on july 1, 1907, Elizabeth Thielemann posed for the standard photograph at Kalihi Hospital, with her arms crossed over her chest to show the condition of her hands. Later that day she would board the interisland steamer that would take her to Kalaupapa. At 5 o’clock in the afternoon that same day, Jack and Charmian London boarded the Noeau, which then sailed to a separate wharf to pick up twelve-year-old Elizabeth and twentytwo other men, women, and children who were being sent to Kalaupapa. They included fifty-two-year-old Elemakule Pa and fifteen-year-old Emilio Brito, who would both play an important role in Kalaupapa’s history in the next two years. Others who were separated­ from their families as they boarded the Noeau that day were eight-year-old Hannah Kaiholua , twelve-year-old Kauhi, and twenty-year-old Mrs. Emaline Malamae Voris. The experiences of that day and the following week made a deep impact on the Londons, as is revealed in Charmian’s detailed account of their trip in her diary: What we have been seeing in the past two hours, would wring emotion from a stone. . . . Why must such things be! . . . We saw the whole thing—the parting and the embarkations; and if I live a thousand years, the sound of the wailing will never be forgotten. . . . Poor souls, they came stumbling aboard, stumbling for the tears that were in their eyes. . . . Relatives and friends left behind on the dock set up their wailing. . . . Elizabeth Thielemann, age twelve, in a photograph taken on July 1, 1907, the day she was sent to Kalaupapa. Courtesy of Hawai‘i State Archives. The Fourth of July, 1907    299 One young German girl, about ten years old, particularly tolled on our own feelings—she seemed so lonely, so very fair of skin and hair. . . . The others had dear ones to wail for them, and for whom to wail. She had no one. She stood quite alone, with grave eyes, old before their time, watching another race express its woe in ways she did not know. Whose baby is she—to whom is she dear—where is the mother who bore her?1 Her mother, we learned, was in the Settlement. . . . She and her mother­ were both looking forward with gladness to the circumstance that would bring them together. But we did not know all this, that night; and we looked upon the little waif, sitting next to a half-white, pretty girl of twenty­or so with despair in her face, and pitied the German girl above the others,­somehow. This kinship with our own kind—we cannot­help it, we are made that way; but we have to be very careful that it does not lead us into injustice.2 The wharf in Honolulu on July 1, 1907, as seen by the Londons from on board the Noeau. Photos by Jack London, courtesy of The Huntington Library. 300   chapter twenty-five As they tried to fall asleep on their “first class mattresses” placed on the deck of the Noeau, the Londons heard the sound of ukuleles and guitars that the people bound for Kalaupapa had brought with them. While they were kept awake by a drunken sailor and the voices of Mr. McVeigh and the crew, Charmian observed that “the white child is asleep, with her flaxen head in the lap of a hapa-haole girl of great loveliness.”3 At 4:00 the next morning, they reached their destination. As the twenty-three new residents of Kalaupapa were put into small boats and taken ashore, Charmian noted that some were greeted by old acquaintances. Then, in the flickering lantern light, she saw a white face press forward and “two white hands stretch out to the little German girl.”4 Tina Thielemann, who had been forced to leave four young children and a four-month-old baby at home some seven years earlier, was now thirty-two and being reunited with her daughter Elizabeth, who had been only five when her mother was taken from her. The next year they would be joined by Elizabeth ’s brother, Hans Carl, who was only a year old when his mother had to leave. Tina’s husband, Conrad Thielemann, a carpenter from Germany, would ultimately be left with only two children at...