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Posted on: Sunday, July 2, 2006

Walter Murray Gibson

By Will Hoover
Advertiser Staff Writer

Advertiser library photo

Walter Murray Gibson, a silver-tongued 19th-century adventurer, former Caribbean gunrunner and scoundrel of historic note, amassed great stature in the Hawaiian kingdom of the 1880s, rising to the post of premier and minister of foreign affairs in 1882.

By the time of King Kalakaua's reign, the clash between natives of full- or part-Hawaiian blood and non-Hawaiians, especially white or "haole" residents, had boiled over into political as well as racial rivalry.

With a native population previously isolated for centuries, foreign newcomers were able to grow in numbers and influence as Hawaiians were dying by the tens of thousands from diseases to which they had little resistance.

Gibson, a U.S. southerner of English ancestry who arrived in Honolulu in 1861, was able to exploit the tensions of the times to his own benefit — by siding with the royalists.

Three years after his arrival in the Islands, Gibson was excommunicated from the Mormon church for using church funds to take personal possession of half the island of Lana'i.

However, he was able to sidestep that problem and eventually take ownership of the leading newspaper, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser. Ultimately he was able to expand his political clout by clinging to the coattails of King Kalakaua.

Gibson's undoing came when he hatched a plan to form a federation of independent Polynesian island governments over which Kalakaua would be "emperor of the Pacific."

In 1887, after the "calabash empire" scheme fell through, revolutionary leaders deposed Gibson, who fled the Islands in fear of losing his life.

After his death in San Francisco in 1888, Gibson's body was returned to Hawai'i, where the enigmatic leader was afforded a lavish funeral attended by a large crowd of mourners.