During the reign of King Kamehameha IV, the young monarch supposedly hatched a scheme to ship the entire population of Pitcairn Island to Hawai'i to join the labor force.
Although the plan to move descendants of infamous HMS Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian never came to pass, it highlighted a growing concern about Hawai'i's inadequate number of field workers at a time when demand for sugar was on the rise.
Even before Hawai'i's sugar plantation era got fully under way in the mid-1850s, it became obvious there was an Island labor shortage.
For one thing, many able-bodied Hawaiians were unmotivated by long hours and rigid Western working schedules that seemed alien to ancient laid-back customs in which inhabitants raised subsistence crops for no monetary reward on communal lands belonging to ali'i.
A more pressing problem was Hawai'i's rapidly declining native population, vulnerable to Western infections such as measles, venereal diseases and Hansen's disease.
By the time sugar had replaced whaling in the Islands in the 1850s, the Hawaiian population was less than 100,000 and falling fast. To pick up the slack, the plantation owners brought in workers from Asia, Europe, the West Indies and North America.
Although workers from China had come in tiny numbers as far back as 1794, a shipload arriving in 1852 marked the beginnings of an immigration process that would alter Hawai'i's society forever.
In time, Hawaiian and Chinese contract workers were joined in the fields and plantation villages by Portuguese, Japanese, Puerto Rican, Korean and Filipino workers.
While so many cultures thrown together on plantations presented new social problems for Hawai'i, they also began a merging of traditions that would ultimately influence food, language, music, dress and holiday customs. They transformed the social fabric of the Islands.
