The Heathen School

by John Demos

  By now, it must have been at least the summer of 1808, but a considerable journey still lay ahead. Upon arriving in China, the Triumph was seized by a British warship, with the crew confined to quarters and Captain Brintnall jailed in Macao. Released after a few days, crew and captain continued to Canton, sold their cargo of skins, and filled the ship with a quantity of tea, cinnamon, silk, and other goods. Sailing home past the southern tip of Africa, they ran low on provisions; daily rations per man were reduced to “one biscuit and one pint of water…[which] the cook put in our tea.” Just in time, they encountered another ship, outward-bound from Boston and able to supply their needs. There were frightening accidents, too: Hopoo fell overboard and was barely saved “after being several hours in the water.” (Still faithful to Hawaiian religious practice, he cried out from the sea “to his god Akoah,” and afterward consecrated his jacket as a gift of thanks “to the Great Spirit.”) At another point, while rounding the Cape of Good Hope, Obookiah and Hopoo were the targets of an elaborate prank—in effect, a sailor’s initiation rite—in which a crew member impersonated a supposed sea god called “Old Neptune.” These and like adventures would be vividly remembered years later when Obookiah composed a “relation” of his life.13

  Eventually (April 1809), the ship arrived at New York; its cargo was sold, its crew dispersed. Obookiah and Hopoo, however, remained with the captain, saw the sights (including a stage play), met “two gentlemen” who invited them for a home-cooked dinner, were astonished by the crowds (“a great number of people, as I ever saw before”), and pondered how “strange [it was] to see females eat with men.” From there, they traveled to New Haven, still for a while longer in the care of Captain Brintnall. Thence to the steps of Yale College, and to the ministrations of the various students, and, finally, to the household of President Dwight.14

  Dwight’s home was the starting point for a second Obookiah odyssey—an eight-year wander that would take him into three states, eight different towns, and at least a dozen separate families scattered across the New England countryside. The first in this chain of removals came following a visit to Yale by an especially ardent young clergyman-to-be named Samuel J. Mills, Jr. Obookiah encountered Mills “sitting with Mr. D[wight] my instructor” one evening in the fall of 1809. At once, the two began a friendship, and Mills became “deeply interested in this heathen boy.” (The “boy” was now about twenty-two years old.) Some weeks later, Obookiah ended his stay at the president’s house, and was temporarily at loose ends. Mills and Dwight worried that if he remained in New Haven, he might “be exposed to bad company…[or even] be treated as a slave.” (Treated as a slave? In short: This particular person of color must be exempted from the pattern that shackled so many others.) The result was an invitation to visit Mills’s home in the town of Torringford, Connecticut, where his father (Samuel, Sr.) was resident minister. Obookiah lived with this family for much of the following year, and would frequently return later on for visits of varying duration. Indeed, he would come to regard the Mills household “as my own home.” The Millses, for their part, treated him as they would a blood relative. According to a somewhat later account, they made a practice, in church on the Sabbath, of “seating him in their own pew at a time when a strong prejudice existed against any person having a dark colored skin.”15

  While in Torringford, he continued his study of English, and also worked at various “kinds of business that pertain to a farm.” This would become a pattern for his subsequent stays elsewhere: lodging, board, and “learning” received, with labor given in return—a straight‑up exchange. In fact, farmwork was also part of his education, something else to be used and “improved” should he go back one day to his native islands. Rev. Mills noted his unusual aptitude in such matters: “He had never mown a clip until he came to live with me. My son furnished him with a scythe. He stood and looked on to see the use he made of it, and at once followed, to the surprise of those who saw him.… It was afterward observed by a person who was in the field that there were not two reapers there who excelled him.”16

  After several months Mills, Jr. left home to pursue his own studies at Andover [Massachusetts] Theological Seminary, and decided to take his Hawaiian protégé along; thus began another stage in Obookiah’s journey. For the next two years, he was in and out of Andover, spending some periods in a room shared with Mills, others in the home of the seminary steward (a certain “Mr. Abbot”), and still others with local farm families. As before when at Yale, he was much noticed by the students and “taken under their care.” Some gave him lessons, and he “had a right to go to any room … to recite.” (By one later account, “he roamed over the buildings like a common pet.”) Perhaps, however, these arrangements seemed a little too scattered. For Mills concluded that he should “leave Andover and go to some school” where his time might be employed more efficiently. As a result, he enrolled for several months at nearby Bradford Academy. There he lived with yet another “most pious family”; but his own piety suffered from exposure to “unserious company [presumably, academy students] talking many foolish subjects.”17

  Returning to Andover and the home of the steward, he managed to regain his spiritual “concerns.” Meanwhile, too, he sought to extend his knowledge of practical matters. The steward would later recall his “very inquisitive” attitude, which was “peculiarly observable during an eclipse of the sun, concerning which he asked many troublesome questions, and also with regard to many kinds of public business.” There was a particular morning that he devoted to “measuring the College buildings and fences.” When asked the reason for this, “he smiled, and said: ‘So that I shall know how to build when I go back to Owhyhee.’ ”18

  At some point, he left Andover again and moved on to Hollis, New Hampshire, apparently at the urging of a seminary student who came from there. In Hollis, he lived with three more families, including that of the minister, Rev. Daniel Emerson. In Hollis, too, he was “taken sick of a fever” for over a month. This made him the focus of much tender concern—and of anguished prayer sessions with his hosts and interested neighbors “while I was upon my sickbed.” His sense of religious conviction deepened; he declared himself “willing to die and leave this world of sin” if God so willed it.19

  In fact, he recovered—and, in the spring of 1813, returned to the parsonage at Torringford. His friend Mills, Jr. was away on a missionary tour in the western states, but he was able to reconnect with his first teacher, Edwin Dwight, living now in nearby Litchfield. That fall, he received another invitation, from James Morris, Esq. (also of Litchfield), “to spend the winter in his family, and attend the public grammar school, of which for many years he [Morris] has been Preceptor.” This second experience of formal schooling pushed him to make “very considerable progress…[in] the study of English Grammar, Geography, and Arithmetic.”20

  When his teachers and mentors considered the reasons for Obookiah’s success in learning, they stressed his “great inquisitiveness,” his “industry,” and his capacity for imitation. In effect, they were saying that he was an unusually eager pupil, one anxious “to discover whatever was within his reach.” But equally important was his strong motive to connect himself with others. “To families in which he had lived, or to individuals who had been his particular patrons,” wrote Dwight some years later, “he felt an ardent attachment.” His own self-descriptions repeatedly stressed his orphaned condition—something he experienced as an agonizing gap, a void to be filled in his new surroundings. Once, upon seeing a particular “patron” after a period of separation, he pointedly declared: “I want to see you great while. You don’t know how you seem to me: you seem like Father, Mother, Brother, all.” With the Mills family, including “my father” the minister, these feelings were especially strong. Moreover, their force carried over into his religious life. At one point, under questioning about his faith in God, he replied “I have neither a father nor a mother … but He. But O! am I fit to call Him my father?”21

 
In March 1814, the younger Mills wrote on Obookiah’s behalf to leaders of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), the nation’s largest missionary organization, headquartered in Boston. Though focused on overseas missions, the board had already involved itself with nearby “heathen” converts by supporting the education of a singular Indian youth named Eleazer Williams. Born of Mohawk parentage in Canada, Williams had been sent to school in New England, where, as the great-grandson of Eunice Williams, a famously “unredeemed captive” taken a century before from Deerfield, Massachusetts, he had a claim to family connections. Board members would have known this about him, and their actions in his case (1811) prefigured their subsequent sponsorship of Obookiah. About “poor Henry,” Mills offered the following: “I believe his improvement has been as great as could be reasonably expected, with his advantages.… He speaks the [English] language with considerable propriety. He can read different Authors intelligibly.… He likewise writes a very decent hand. He has considerable acquaintance with Agriculture.… His Christian friends have hope of him that he is pious.” This summary of Obookiah’s progress to date must have seemed convincing, for soon thereafter the board approved a plan by a “consociation” of Litchfield County ministers to “superintend his education.” Three men from Newburyport, Massachusetts, volunteered “to put into the hands of Mr. Mills one hundred dollars this year … for the purposes of defraying the necessary expenses of Henry’s education.”22

  Clearly, there was a building tide of public concern with Obookiah and his prospects; from now on, his tutelage would assume a more organized form. A year after the Litchfield group took him in charge, the board offered its direct sponsorship and support. The heart of this sequence—and the chief motive for these gestures of aid—was, of course, Obookiah’s promise as a convert to Christianity. Increasingly, his admirers and patrons “saw … the hand of God in bringing him hither.” His achievements in school, his growing fluency in English, his mastery of farming and related pursuits, his attention to public affairs: All were linked to his remarkable “growth in Christ.”23

  Obookiah’s spiritual progress closely tracked the pattern for Protestants throughout the region. He felt, by turns, “hopeful” and “despairing”; he was “active … in the faith,” then “prayerless and thoughtless.” This stop-and-go pattern was entirely typical; no one would have expected otherwise. And through it all he was repeatedly—often fervently—coached and prodded by his associates. When asked at one point by Dwight, “How does your own heart appear to you?” he replied bleakly, “Oh, black, all black.” Yet on other occasions, in response to similar inquiries, he described his thoughts as being “in Heaven—all [the] time [and] then I very happy.”24

  Finally, he reached a point of culmination, and felt himself ready for baptism and full church membership. He engaged in long and prayerful consultation with his “good friend and father [the elder Mills] concerning my case.” Mills then endorsed his “profession,” and arranged to present him to the congregation at Torringford. On the appointed day, Obookiah arrived, feeling “that I was going home to New Jerusalem—to the welcome gate.” So it was—as he solemnly recorded later on—that he entered “into the Church of Christ … on the ninth day of April, in the year 1815.” Mills used the occasion to preach from an obviously pertinent biblical text: “I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known.” Its meaning must have seemed powerfully important—and visible—to all present.25

  Curiously, the moment was, for Obookiah himself, crossed with disappointment. He had asked Mills beforehand for a chance “to speak a few words to the people,” and the preacher had “readily consented.” But when the time came, he “did not recollect … Henry’s request, and it was neglected.” Afterward Obookiah approached Mills with a “broken heart” and blurted out, “[Y]ou no let me speak, sir—I sorry.” Mills acknowledged his oversight, apologized, and then inquired, “What did you wish to say, Henry?” To which his young convert replied, “I want to ask the people—what they all waiting for?—they live in Gospel land—hear all about salvation—God ready—Christ ready—all ready—why they don’t come to follow Christ?”26

  This last was a mark of Obookiah’s growing confidence in his own religious vocation. From the position of object, he was moving now to that of subject, from proselytized to proselytizer, from recipient to giver. His personal story of rising from “heathen” origins to the status of a “civilized,” Christianized young gentleman was deeply compelling—for himself no less than for others. And he drew on it to issue a challenge to native New Englanders. They lived in a “Gospel land” surrounded by religious influence, in sharp contrast to the situation of his own land and people. (The contrast would be dramatically evident whenever he spoke to them in his still-imperfect English.) Their failure, in many cases, to achieve full conversion was thus doubly culpable: They had all the necessary advantages, with few of the expected results. Obookiah’s admission to the Torringford church was the capstone of his own spiritual (and spatial, and cultural) pilgrimage: how fitting, then, to use this chance “to speak a few words to the people.” Except the minister forgot. (Was there something a bit too jarring, even for Mills, in such blatant turnabout: a dark-skinned, personally exotic, formerly “pagan” youth exhorting—and at the same time upbraiding—a churchful of birthright parishioners?)

  In other cases, Obookiah would act directly on his own. He was tireless in urging his “friends” toward greater and greater religious exertions—sometimes in person, but increasingly, too, by way of long impassioned letters (many of which were subsequently preserved and published). To one, he would implore, “Do not forget to pray for me with our heavenly Father when you are alone.” To another: “We cannot conceive the consequences of one sin.” To still another: “Oh, what a wonderful thing it is that the hand of Divine Providence has brought me here, from that heathenish darkness where the light of divine truth never had been.” He would say, and do, no less in meetings with complete strangers—with “a sick woman lying upon a sick bed,” with an “aged man” encountered in the course of “a walk for exercise,” with an “old grey-headed man [found] next to the road, hoeing corn.” Sometimes such opportunities seemed virtually to seek him out; for example, in visits paid by “two young gentlemen,” or “five pious young men,” or “a pious and good [minister], Rev. Mr. H. of L.”27

  As his confidence rose, Obookiah was gradually forming a plan for the future. The story of his arrival at Yale underscored his misfortune as an uneducated heathen; its key line was his expression of sorrow that “nobody gives me learning.” The flip side of the same theme appeared in his wish to confront the members of the Torringford congregation: Their fortunate circumstances should (but often didn’t) enable them to achieve true godliness. As early as December 1812, he was writing to an unidentified friend in the following terms: “I hope the Lord will send the Gospel to the Heathen land, where the words of the Saviour never yet had been. Poor people, worship the wood and stone and shark, and almost every thing [serves as] their gods; the Bible is not there, and heaven and hell they do not know about it.” A similar preoccupation with relative advantage and disadvantage—with good and bad fortune, with “learning” and ignorance—echoed through much of his subsequent correspondence. The heathen were simply “poor people,” who for unknown reasons had so far been excluded from the outreach of God’s grace. They were not to be condemned for what they could not escape; to the contrary, they must be pitied—and, above all, assisted. In this project, as it specifically embraced his own people, Obookiah might cast himself in a leading role. Thus he would, with increasing frequency, tell auditors (and correspondents) of his aim to return home “to preach the Gospel to my Countrymen.”28

  As part of his plan, he set himself the ambitious task of “reducing to system his own native language.” Since it was “not a written language, but lay in its chaotic state, every thing was to be done.” (The desc
ription is Dwight’s.) By linking the English alphabet with “the different names and different sounds” of Hawaiian, he began to create a spelling book, a grammar, and a dictionary. These, in turn, he could use in translating key biblical texts. Indeed, as part of the same process he undertook to learn also “the Hebrew language, and from its resemblance to his own, acquired it with great facility.”29

  From all this, his reputation spread, both locally and beyond. Ministers, in particular, exchanged ideas and information about him, even as they passed him along from one community to the next. Expressions of interest came from many parts of New England, from New York and Pennsylvania, and (in one case at least) from even farther south. No doubt, too, there was a kind of lore that grew up around him, including striking (sometimes amusing) details of his everyday behavior. Mr. Abbot, the steward who had been his host in Andover, noted his “playfulness,” as evidenced in a trick he liked to try with puppets (presenting the image of “two little gentlemen dancing—shaking their feet and fists”). In Hollis, New Hampshire, “one time having the toothache (the tooth was a good sound one)…he got … a stone and knocked out the tooth.” Also at Hollis, he showed himself to be “fond of the narcotic weed”; thus he “kept a tobbacco [sic] patch back of the barn.” But “the turkeys would visit…[and] he would drive them away [saying] ‘Shew you there get out of my terbacker yard.’ ” (These details were a matter of local remembrance nearly one hundred years after their occurrence.)30