Until We Meet Again

died young of typhoid fever. Victoria had been bereft. She remained cloaked in black and shielded from the public life in mourning for decades. But now for her Golden Jubilee, she was re emerging for the first time, a newly minted Empress of India, a global queen, and one who deserved a celebration that exalted her in all of her international imperial glory. Among her foreign royal guests were crowned Princess Lilio Killani of Hawaii, the sister of the King

and next in line for the throne. Lilio Kilani traveled with the King's wife and to their surprise when their ship arrived in Liverpool, they were met with all of the royal pomp and fanfare that England had to offer. Banners flapped happily, streamers danced in the wind rows of soldiers saluted in perfect unison. A military band played God Save the Queen. They were greeted by the Lord Mayor

of Liverpool himself. In Hawaii, royalty enjoyed far less pomp and pageantry, especially since the white owners of the sugar plantations had installed themselves into government. Those men, mostly from the United States, England, and Germany, treated the native Hawaiian

monarchy as something between a nuisance and a threat. But here, arriving to honor Queen Victoria, Lilio Collani and her sister in law were among the guests of honor, treated with splendor and majesty that most European monarchs took for granted. They were brought to London on a steamer train with an escort of one hundred soldiers, and granted use of Queen Victoria's own carriages, horses, and drivers for the duration of their stay. When Lilio Collani commented on the grandness

of their welcome, their minister bowed deeply. They had come such a long way, he said. Her Majesty thought the special honors were the very least she could do. Lilio Collani was seated in the Royal Box at Westminster Abbey for the Jubilee service, and during the prayers for Queen Victoria, Lilio Collani saw a ray of light come through the high windows and fall directly upon Victoria's head. It was

like God himself granting Victoria her blessing. She on. Lilio Klani and her sister in law arrived back at their residence that afternoon, their ears still ringing from the boom of military drums and the shouts of crowd, their heads still buzzing with the excitement of their private audience of Queen Victoria. But they were scarcely in the doorway before they knew something was wrong. Their household staff were staring

at them stony faced. Lolio Collani let her eyes trace around the room, and she noticed that their bags were already packed. They needed to go back to Hawaii immediately. Someone said something had happened. A group of white businessmen had assembled a paramilitary group and forced the King. Lolio Collani's brother to sign away most of his power and

turned the monarch into a powerless figurehead. What's more, the right to vote for the legislature in Hawaii would now include exorbitant property requirements, and explicitly refused that right to the many immigrants who had come to the island from Asia and who had been voting up until that point. The new wealth restrictions meant the vast majority of native

Hawaiians could no longer vote either. The new law of the land was the so called Bayonet Constitution, so called because the king had been forced to sign at the end of Bayonets. The nation to which Lilio Kolani frantically returned was now falling into the grasp of business men. It was a nation on the precipice, and that was the nation the set and imperiled that she inherited when she became queen after her brother's death two years later.

Queen Liliukillani tried to hold the bursting levies at bay for as long as she could, but the waves of imperialism came flooding in, swallowing Hawaii and eventually its last queen. I'm Danish Wartz and this is noble blood even before she was technically queen, Lilio Kalani made it clear that her loyalty would always be to the Hawaiian people and

not to the business interests of white non natives. Back in she had been acting as regent for her brother while he was away on a diplomatic trip when Hawaii faced an outbreak of smallpox imported mainly from Chinese laborers who were brought in by businessmen to work in the sugarcane fields. A quick word about smallpox. It takes about

two weeks for the symptoms of smallpox to show. In that time, a person might look perfectly healthy, all the while they're spreading the deadly disease in person, through the air and through the objects they touch. After that incubation period, the symptoms slowly emerge. It begins with the fever and a lingering, uncomfortable headache. Your limbs will become heavy, your back will ache, you might be vomiting. And then the red spots come Lesions that appear first on your face

and hands, and then all over your body. Little spots that become blisters that fill with pus and then scaped reveal deep pitted scars. Its fatality rate was about one in three. That two week incubation period makes smallpox especially insiduous and contagious, and because native Hawaiians had no inborn immunity, the threat was a deadly serious one. As Queen Regent Lilio Kalani made the decision to shut down all ports and enforce a mandatory quarantine until the outbreak was contained.

Vessels were prohibited from taking passengers between islands. The sugar growers were infuriated that she was putting a frieze on their business, but Lilio Kolani stood her ground. Though three hundred people died from the outbreak, there were zero additional cases outside the city of Honolulu, But Lilio Kolani was faced with perhaps even a greater crisis in eighteen ninety

after she became Queen, the terrif Act. For decades, the United States had provided generous terms for sugar growers in Hawaii in order to encourage American plantation owners to settle there. While the Terriffact of eighteen ninety massively increased the tax on imported manufactured goods, it eliminated all tariffs on sugar, which meant that the American market was now flooded with cheap sugar from all over the world, the Hawaiian economy

was crippled. Over decades, Hawaii's economy had constructed itself up around the of her both terms the US had given, and now the US had pulled that framework out in one single stroke, and the whole thing was threatening to collapse, unless, of course, Hawaii agreed to be annexed by the United States. That was the ultimate goal of a group of white American business owners led by a man named Lauren A. Thurston.

They called themselves the Annexation Club. Annexation would make things a lot more convenient for them, but it would especially help when it came to making a tidy profit from their sugar plantations. So annexation might have been what the American businessmen wanted, but the same couldn't be said for the native population of Hawaii or for Queen Lilio Kolani.

In fact, since her ascension, she had spent nearly all her energy trying to build a new constitution for Hawaii, one that gave the monarchy back its power, and one that once again granted Native Hawaiian's immigrants of color the right to vote. In eighteen ninety two, Queen Lilio Collani traveled throughout the country on horseback, riding from village to

village and talking to her people. She may have lost most of her political power, but she was still the country's queen, and she used her power and influence to listen to the voices of the people who no longer had a voice in government. Thousands of people signed her petition for a new constitution, and finally, on January fourteenth, eighteen ninety three, Lilio Collani presented the draft of the

proposed constitution to the government's ministers. This version of the constitution would increase the number of elected representatives and eliminate the property requirements for voters. Non citizen American and European residents would lose the right to vote. A massive crowd of Native Hawaiians gathered outside in front of Iolani Palace, where the meeting was taking place. They were waiting for the queen to emerge and proclaim that Hawaii had a

new constitution, but the weight was taking longer than they expected. Inside, the queen's ministers all refused to sign the new constitution, believing it would spark unrest. After hours of debate, the queen finally gave in, and so when the queen finally emerged to the crowd waiting outside, their cheers caught in their throats. As soon as they saw her face. Lilio Kalani told her people that they should return peacefully to

their homes. Later, some of the Queen's ministers met with the business men to tell them what had happened in the palace that day. The informants shared what had been in the queen's constitution, how she was building power to take back Hawaii. They spoke of the crowd of supporters that had come to cheer for her. It was time for Lord Thurston and his coterie to strike before they lost or chance. Looking at a photo of Lauren A. Thurston, he doesn't look like he was born in eighteen fifty eight.

Take away the old fashioned style of his suit, the massive Victorian era, and not in the tie, the narrow lapels, and he looks like he could be a stern manager at whatever company you work for today. With his full but neat beard and slight receiving hairline, he might even be considered handsome if it weren't for his black eyes and the unsettling intensity of his gaze. Thurston was born in Honolulu, the grandson of two American missionaries, two of

the very first Christian missionaries to Hawaii. He had been the one who had written the Bayonet Constitution that Liliuokalani's brother had been forced to sign. On January fo Liliuokalani proposed her new constitution to her ministers. That very evening, after hours in a law office in Honolulu, Lauren Thurston gathered twelve elite white businessmen. These thirteen men, all members of the Annexation Club, formed a new group, the Committee

of Safety. Their plan was to gather weapons and raise a militia and, with the support of the American military, overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy altogether. On January six, the Queen's Minister of the Kingdom, Charles Burnett Wilson, received a tip that a coup was imminent. He requested arrest warrants for the thirteen members of the Committee of Safety, all incredibly wealthy, well connected men. Fearing all out warfare, the cabinet denied

the arrest warrants. The next day, when a native Hawaiian policeman tried to inspect crates of weapons that were being gathered by the Committee's paramilitary group. He was shot. The policeman survived, and his was the only bloodshed in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. The queen had watched from the palace as the USS Boston approached the shore with one hundred and sixty two marines on board. The U S S. Boston had orders to protect American business interests.

Chaos is bad for business. They would only get involved if there was fighting, which sounds well and good, except it meant in practice that the queen and her supporters were paralyzed, powerless when it came to defending themselves against the coming insurrection. Almost five hundred men were rallied to protect the queen. The Committee of Safety had fifteen hundred, all white and heavily armed. Under the strict gaze of the ship of American marines in the harbor, Lalio Kolani surrendered.

Lauren Thurston made Sanford B. Dole President of the provisional Government of Hawaii. The Dole had declined to officially be a member of the Committee of Safety that technically overthrew the queen. The United States minister who had approved the marine presence during the coup, wrote the Secretary of State, the Hawaiian pair is now fully ripe, and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it. But unfortunately for the conspirators, something inconvenient was happening in

the United States a presidential election. Though Benjamin Harrison had been eager to annex Hawaii, his successor, Grover Cleveland, was staunchly anti imperialist. Cleveland was in his second of his two nonconsecutive terms, and upon taking office, he immediately with true the treaty for annexation that Benjamin Harrison had sent to the Senate. Cleveland also appointed former Congressman James Blount to investigate what exactly had happened during the overthrow of

the Hawaiian monarchy. The results of that report were crystal clear. Blount determined that the U. S. Minister to Hawaii had landed the U S. S. Boston under false pretenses in order to support the coup, and the coup was carried out against the wishes of the majority of the Hawaiian population. The involvement of the U. S. Military was unauthorized, and

Queen Liliuokolani should be restored to the throne. In an address to Congress, President Cleveland stated that the Hawaiian government had been overthrown by quote, an act of war committed with the participation of a diplomatic representative of the United States and without the authority of Congress. President Cleveland's representative

met with Lilio Kolani and shared the good news. The United States would be willing to help her return to the throne under one condition that you give a full pardon to the group of conspirators who had tried to depose her. Lilio Klani refused. She believed that she would need to consult with her counsel and punish the traders, most likely with banishment and the confiscation of their property.

The American representative was aghast. By the time he made it back to Washington, the story had become twisted and distorted. Propaganda in the papers shifted public opinion until Liliuokalani was seen as a dark skinned barbarian queen who wouldn't be satisfied until she saw the American businessman beheaded in the streets. Lu Kalani wrote about that experience in her memoir about

hearing second hand that she was calling for beheadings. She wrote, there's an old proverb which says that a lie can travel around the world while the truth is putting on its boots. That offensive charge was repeated to my hurt as often as possible, although I immediately sent my protest that I had not used the words attributed to me. Even so, in order to restore the monarchy, that December,

Liliuokalani agreed to Cleveland's original terms a full pardon. But by then the provisional government had consolidated its hold on the islands and Cleveland power when it came to the issue of Hawaii had weakened. Congress, controlled by Cleveland. Republican foes commissioned their own investigation, the Morgan Report, chaired by former Confederate general and Jim Crow proponent John Tyler Morrigan.

That report concluded that America had done nothing wrong in the coup, and so to the American government at least the issue was closed. When counter revolutionaries tempted to overthrow the new white government, Liliukolani was arrested, her home ransacked by soldiers from Garrett to seller. Every drawer wrenched open, their contents spilled onto the floor and swept into bags

for evidence. Though she had not been directly involved in the counter revolution, She was brought in front of a military court and convicted of misprision of treason, meaning she had been aware of potential treason but hadn't reported it. Hundreds of her supporters were arrested, and six were scheduled to be hanged in order to spare their lives. Liliukolani

formally abdicated the throne, or so it appeared. When she was presented with the formal contract, she signed her name as Liliukolani Dominus, her husband's last name, which she had never taken legally. It was the only small act of rebellion left to the queen, who was always willing to sack advice for her people. That might be the end of Queen Lilio Collani's reign, but there's still more in her story. Stick around after a few brief words from

our sponsors to hear about it. If the name Dole sounded familiar, chances are you're familiar with Sandford's cousin, James Dole. James Dole had been about nine years old growing up in Massachusetts with his colonial pedigree family. When the monarchy in Hawaii was overthrown. When James turned twenty two, he decided to move to Hawaii, where his cousin with the governor and began the pineapple growing business that blossomed into the multinational Doll Food Company. But Lilio Colani has a

legacy that survives to the modern day as well. You see, in addition to being a queen, Lilio Kalani was a gifted musician and composer. She sang and played guitar, piano, organ, ukulele, and the zither. While imprisoned, Lilio Collani was denied books and newspapers, but she continued composing music in transcribing music that she had already composed. One of the songs she wrote was called Aloha Ai. You almost certainly know it.

It's been covered by Bing Crosby and Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, But if you're my age, you probably know it for a slightly different reason. The instrumental version of the song has been used in countless episodes of one of America's most popular cultural exports. A certain cartoon character who lives under the sea in a pineapple doll or

otherwise SpongeBob SquarePants. The song aloha Ai was inspired when Lilio Collani saw a and some Hawaiian colonel embracing a young woman after the coup, when Hawaii went from a monarchy to a republic, and then from a territory to a state. For many, the song became a more meaningful ballad mourning for the loss of Hawaii as it had been in English. The title of Lohai translates to farewell to the one fond embrace before I depart until we meet again. Noble Blood is a co production of I

Heart Radio and Aaron Minkey. The show was written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H