In 1895 Robert William Kalanihi‘apo Wilcox led a rebellion aimed at restoring Lili’uokalani to the throne. With only two hundred men facing nearly a thousand assembled by the provisional government, Wilcox had little chance of success. Captured, tried for treason, and sentenced to death, he had his sentence commuted to imprisonment and hard labor. Lili’uokalani was charged with conspiring to commit treason and was sentenced to five years of hard labor and a substantial fine. Later reduced to a year of house arrest, the initial sentence handed down to the fifty-six-year-old queen did not need to be fulfilled to serve as a statement of humiliating colonial supremacy. During her confinement Lili’uokalani wrote “Aloha ‘Oe” to her Hawai‘i Nei, “Farewell to Thee Beloved Hawai‘i,” perhaps Hawai‘i’s best-known song.
Meanwhile, the U.S. federal government launched an inquiry into the circumstances of the coup. The findings of the investigation led President Grover Cleveland to demand that Dole reinstate the monarchy, an order he refused. On July 7, 1898, the U.S. Congress annexed the Territory of Hawaii. The archipelago would now function not only as an agricultural colony but also as a strategic military outpost, as well as a vacation destination for a developing leisure class. Leisure travelers, few as they were, fell into the arms of tourism boosters like George Macfarlane and Lorrin A. Thurston, one of Dole’s collaborators in deposing the monarchy and founder of the first entity for tourism promotion in Hawai‘i, the Hawaiian Bureau of Information.
After the coup came the grand hotels. The Moana, built three years after annexation and seven years after Lili’uokalani’s imprisonment, was the first. Sited on productive agricultural land, the new Moana Hotel and the Waikīkī district were then merely flecked with tourists. On December 6, 1924, the estate of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, a philanthropist and member of the Hawaiian royal family, released a prospectus for leasing nearly four acres with approximately 370 feet of beach frontage, part of the “world-famous beach of Waikiki.” Requiring a minimum annual payment of $11,000 for its first decade and $13,000 for the lease’s remaining forty years, the lease auction demanded an investment of not less than $100,000 (nearly $1.75 million today) to construct a “suitable modern hotel building.” This land was Helumoa, seat of ruling chiefs of O’ahu since 1640, now recast as the new future of territorial Hawai‘i.
Matson Navigation Company of San Francisco won the auction. Matson Lines’ passenger ships would benefit from more frequent sailing schedules on the routes between Honolulu and San Francisco and Los Angeles, bringing tourists to occupy a new four-hundred-room hotel. In alliance with local sugar giant Castle & Cooke and the Territorial Hotel Company, Matson built the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Waikiki’s “Pink Palace,” on the newly leased parcel. The hotel opened on February 1, 1927, and quickly filled with Matson passengers fresh from a mere five days at sea, down from seven, barring storms.