Before the United Irishmen: Wolfe Tone’s Plan for a British Military Colony in Hawaii
Three years before helping to establish the Society of United Irishmen, Theobald Wolfe Tone approached the British government with an unlikely proposal. The future Irish revolutionary wanted Prime Minister William Pitt’s support for the establishment of a British military colony in the Sandwich Islands, now Hawaii.
Written in August 1788, when Tone was twenty-five and studying law in London, the letters proposed settling several hundred British soldiers on the islands, rewarding them with land and creating what he described as a “small but impenetrable Nation of Soldiers”.
From this strategically placed colony, Britain could protect its growing trade between the north-western coast of America and China, while threatening Spain’s commerce and possessions across the Pacific.
The original correspondence survives among William Pitt’s papers at the UK National Archives, while digitised manuscript images can be viewed online through the Australian Joint Copying Project at the National Library of Australia. Although the 1788 proposal was included in the modern scholarly edition of Tone’s writings, I could find no complete transcription of these letters freely accessible online. I therefore prepared and published a transcription directly from the manuscript images.
These letters are valuable not merely as an obscure episode from Tone’s youth. They appear to be among his earliest substantial political writings and offer an unusual view of his developing ideas about property, citizenship, military service and national allegiance. Read alongside his pamphlet, Spanish War, and his renewed colonial proposal of 1790, they reveal that Tone’s movement towards Irish separatism was rapid, but neither simple nor entirely consistent.
The Sandwich Islands scheme has already been discussed by Tone’s biographers, including Frank MacDermot, Marianne Elliott and Thomas Bartlett. The full texts illuminate its provisions for recruitment, landholding and military service, the subordinate roles assigned to Hawaiians and its expansion in 1790 into a project for Spanish-American liberation intended to benefit British commerce. They show how Tone combined military ambition, colonial assumptions and the language of liberty within an evolving scheme. Publishing the proposals as freely accessible standalone texts also makes it easier for readers to compare them and follow their development through Tone’s own words.
A Military Colony in the Sandwich Islands
Tone’s proposal emerged at a time when his ambitions were still unsettled. Having graduated from Trinity College Dublin, he entered the Middle Temple in London to study law, but showed considerably more enthusiasm for adventure and political advancement than for the legal profession. Accounts of recent voyages in the Pacific offered an imaginative escape from this uncertain position.
The proposal was probably influenced by the published voyages of Captain James Cook and Woodes Rogers. Tone recognised that the Sandwich Islands occupied a potentially valuable position between Britain’s developing fur trade on the north-western coast of America and the Chinese market at Canton. A British base there, he argued, could protect this trade while threatening Spain’s commerce and possessions in the Pacific. He imagined that the settlement might become “the Terror of Spain, and the Pride of England”.
His plan was strikingly specific. The government would select five hundred men under the age of thirty from the marching regiments and settle them on the islands. Officers would receive land immediately according to rank, while soldiers who remained after seven years and re-entered the service would receive grants of their own, giving the settlers a material stake in the colony and something to defend. Tone also requested surplus arms from British stores and proposed that the settlers’ children should receive regular military training.
“I know not that the experiment of a Military Colony has been tried since the days of Ancient Rome,” he wrote. The comparison was revealing. Tone envisaged a disciplined, property-owning population in which military service, civic duty and material independence reinforced one another. He was not proposing independence for the islands: this was explicitly a British imperial project, addressed to Pitt and intended to strengthen British power.
Although he conceded that the project might be “the reverie of a heated imagination”, Tone offered to direct it himself and to stake his future upon its success. Tone was equally candid about how the colony would be employed. Its forces would conduct “a predatory and incursive war”, spreading “alarm and devastation” along the Spanish-American coast and enriching the settlement “by plunder”.
The colonial assumptions of the scheme are equally unmistakable. Tone assumed that Hawaiian land could be purchased and redistributed to British officers and soldiers under a new colonial authority. He proposed to “temper the savage ferocity of the Natives” through European culture and Christianity, while training Hawaiian men as auxiliary troops.
Only “a few European Women” might be sent out; most soldiers would “provide themselves with Wives on the spot”, with land grants and other rewards used to encourage population growth. Hawaiians were therefore to be incorporated into the colony on terms determined by its British founders: men as soldiers and women as wives. The community whose liberty and property principally concerned Tone was the incoming military settlement.
Katherine Lucas, whose research examines the development of Tone’s political thought, interprets the proposal as an early exercise in the classical Republican tradition. Its citizen-soldiers, landed independence and emphasis upon civic virtue anticipate themes that would become important in Tone’s later politics. This does not make the Tone of 1788 an Irish Republican or an opponent of empire. Rather, the letters reveal some of the political materials from which his later ideas would develop, initially placed at the service of Britain.
The Spanish War and the Problem of 1790
Less than two years later, the commercial setting of Tone’s proposal became the subject of an international crisis. In 1789, Spanish forces seized British trading vessels at Nootka Sound, on the north-western coast of America. British merchants were attempting to obtain furs there for sale in China, the same trade that Tone had argued a colony in Hawaii could protect. Pitt’s government began preparing for a possible war with Spain.
Tone responded in 1790 with Spanish War! An Enquiry How Far Ireland is Bound, of Right, to Embark in the Impending Contest on the Side of Great Britain. Rather than supporting British expansion in the Pacific, he now asked why Ireland should bear the cost of defending commercial interests from which it received little benefit.
His argument rested upon the supposed legislative independence achieved by the Irish Parliament in 1782. Although the king could declare war, Tone argued, Parliament alone could provide the money and forces required to wage it. The Irish Parliament was therefore entitled to refuse its support. Otherwise, its claimed independence was merely “waste paper”.
More fundamentally, Tone maintained that the dispute had arisen from British, rather than Irish, interests. “The quarrel and the profit are merely and purely English,” he wrote. Ireland would make an “immense sacrifice of blood, treasure, and trade” to secure commercial rights in which the Irish people would not be permitted to participate.
The contrast with the letters of 1788 is striking. Tone had previously presented British expansion into this same commercial world as an opportunity. He had proposed a military colony intended to defend the fur trade, challenge Spanish power and strengthen the British Empire. In Spanish War, he instead portrayed the possible conflict as an example of Ireland being compelled to serve British interests at its own expense.
The change was not, however, as complete as it might initially appear. Between September and December 1790, only months after publishing Spanish War, Tone revived and expanded his Sandwich Islands proposal. Working with his friend Thomas Russell and later drawing upon information supplied by the American Thomas Attwood Digges, he again attempted to interest senior British ministers in the project, placing still greater emphasis upon challenging Spain’s commercial position in the Pacific and Spanish America.
Tone could therefore argue in the same year that Ireland should remain outside Britain’s imperial conflict while personally promoting a scheme designed to advance British power within it. As historian Ultán Gillen observes, Tone’s political thought developed rapidly under the pressure of events, but retained significant contradictions. Personal ambition, practical opportunity and political principle did not always point in the same direction.
The episode cautions against presenting Tone’s development as a straightforward conversion from British imperialist to Irish separatist. What had clearly emerged by 1790 was his conviction that Ireland’s interests were distinct from Britain’s and that Ireland should possess the authority to decide when, and for whose benefit, its people and resources would be used.
The Making of Wolfe Tone
Within a year of his final attempt to interest British ministers in the Sandwich Islands scheme, Tone’s attention had turned decisively towards Ireland. In 1791, he published An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland and played a central role in the formation of the Society of United Irishmen in Belfast and Dublin.
The young man who had recently sought advancement through a British imperial project was now working to unite Catholics, Protestants and Dissenters against English influence over Irish government.
Yet the ideas found in the letters of 1788 did not entirely disappear. Tone continued to emphasise civic duty, military organisation and the importance of giving people a material and political stake in the society they were expected to defend.
Most significantly, Tone imagined the settler community as bound together principally by shared allegiance, property and military obligations rather than common ancestry. In a very different setting, that principle anticipated the United Irish project first conceived by William Drennan and later memorably expressed by Tone as the replacement of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter with “the common name of Irishman”.
This does not make the Sandwich Islands proposal an early United Irish manifesto. Tone’s imagined community was militaristic, colonial and firmly attached to British imperial power. It subordinated the Hawaiian population to the ambitions of the proposed settlement and reflected the aspirations of a young man seeking a career as much as the convictions of a developed political thinker.
Nor did Tone later entirely repudiate the original scheme. Recalling it in his 1796 autobiography, he wrote that he still considered it “a good one for England”. Yet he also remembered Pitt’s failure to acknowledge his first proposal with considerable bitterness. “In my anger,” he wrote, he had made “something like a vow” to “make Mr Pitt sorry”. After the renewed scheme was declined in 1790, he claimed to have “renewed the vow”, with Russell concurring. Tone’s retrospective account therefore suggests that disappointed personal ambition contributed to his growing hostility towards the British administration, even though it cannot by itself explain his political transformation.
His fascination with the Pacific also survived his political transformation. Writing to his wife Matilda in 1797, while serving the cause of an independent Irish republic, Tone again imagined settling upon one of the islands discovered by Cook. This time, however, he contemplated founding a small republic which, although neither rich nor powerful, “might be very happy”. He confessed that this remained his favourite plan.
The letters therefore offer neither a prophetic first statement of Irish Republicanism nor an embarrassing aberration to be completely disregarded. Their value lies precisely in the distance between the Tone of 1788 and the revolutionary of the later 1790s, as well as in the ideas and ambitions that connected them.
More broadly, Tone’s recollections offer a recognisably human reminder that political allegiances may not always change through abstract principle alone, but through the interaction of conviction, ambition, opportunity and personal disappointment.
