The Heathen School

by John Demos

  Eight years had passed since the moment of Obookiah’s appearance at Yale College and the start of his connection to Dwight. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, among “the benevolent” had seen the opportunity—and the challenge—presented here. Now they were poised on the threshold of a new project, whose aim was nothing less than to save the world.

  • INTERLUDE •

  Hawaii

  For people in New England, Henry Obookiah’s home (also that of his fellow Hawaiian “scholars”) was a mystery. If they carried any image at all in their minds, it might have come from a much-celebrated book by Rev. Jedediah Morse, published in several editions, starting in 1812, and carrying the grandiloquent title The American Universal Geography, or, A View of the Present State of All the Kingdoms, States, and Colonies in the Known World.

  A brief section near the end described the Sandwich Isles (as Morse called them). “The climate appears to be temperate…[with] rain inland, while there is sunshine on the shore.” The wildlife was rather sparse: “The kinds of birds are not numerous…[principally] large white pigeons, plovers, owls, and a kind of raven”; moreover, “the quadrupeds … are few, only hogs, dogs, and rats being discovered.” He had a bit more to say about the people. “The natives are of a darker complexion … but the features are pleasing.” They dress in “narrow” garments made of “coarse cloth,” and “tattoo their bodies.” They are “a mild and affectionate people…[who] have even made some progress in agriculture and manufactures; yet they still sacrifice human victims, but do not eat them like the people of New Zealand.” Their food “consists chiefly of fish, to which are added yams, plantains, and sugar canes.” They are ruled by “a supreme chief called Eree Taboo”; below him stand “inferior chiefs … a second class of proprietors, and a third of laborers, all of these ranks seeming to be hereditary.”

  In conclusion, Morse noted that “a number of very promising youths from these islands … are now in Cornwall, in Connecticut, at a school established there by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, for the education of heathen youth from different parts of the world.… They have good natural talents, are easily taught and governed, and of amiable disposition.” He had, in fact, been directly involved in the school’s founding; about that, he could speak from direct experience.

  About Hawaii as a whole, however, The American Universal Geography was a disappointment. After all, Morse had never been there; what little he knew came from the scattered writings of travelers. Today, of course, Hawaii is a widely favored destination—for tourists, long-term visitors, retirees, or even for a wandering historian.

  It is a long journey from my home in the New England countryside. By jetliner, over the broad middle of the continent and halfway across the Pacific, through the busy airport at Honolulu; then, in another, smaller plane, to the Big Island of Hawaii and the handsome seaside town of Hilo.

  At Hilo, I pause. I will spend the coming week on the trail of Opukaha’ia. (This, I have only recently learned, is the proper phonetic spelling of his name; “Obookiah,” its rough Anglicized equivalent, dates from around the time of his arrival in New England.) I hope to see the place where he was born and passed through childhood—in effect, to walk in his tracks. I have the name of his village, Ninole, which no longer appears on any map. I ask around, in Hilo, and presently locate three Opukaha’ah descendants. (Theirs must be a collateral line, for he had no children.) One of these, a local hotel manager, knows the entire family history. She knows, too, about the vanished village, and the route to get there. Soon I am on my way again, this time by car, along winding roads, through a bleak lava-strewn landscape, then down toward the shore, to arrive finally at a place now called Punalu’u, in Ka’u district. Two centuries ago, this was the site of Ninole.1

  I park and walk a few yards to a narrow, black-sand beach, on the inner edge of a U-shaped cove. Along its sides are rocky points of land reaching out several hundred yards into the water—fingers at the end of a long armlike volcanic rift. Between these points, the sea churns fiercely, fueled by spring-fed rip currents from below; here and there, thick green seaweed breaks the dominant gray of the surface. Ragged clouds spit raindrops in occasional bursts; a salty wind rises in the east. The air itself seems to sag under the weight of a sodden heat. Two large hawksbill turtles, their marbled shells glistening, nap at water’s edge; gulls swoop and dive overhead. Otherwise, I am alone.

  I turn and face inland. Immediately to the rear stands an irregular line of coconut palms, mixed with patchy scrub growth. On one side, near a cluster of low dunes, lies a small pond, in which a few ducks are languidly swimming. Farther back, the land rises gradually for perhaps a mile—through a tangle of jagged lava flows—to reach the base of several dome-shaped bluffs. Above the bluffs, merging at the top with the sky, looms the enormous mass of the ancient (but still active) volcano, Mauna Loa.

  I roam the beach and its immediate surroundings but find only the bare foundation lines of a large heiau (temple) where local people once worshiped. The rest is gone, swept away long ago in one or another of several historic tsunamis. From here on, I must imagine.

  Fortunately, there are aids to start this process. In 1823 (some two decades after Opukaha’ia left for good), a missionary named William Ellis toured the region and wrote about it in his journal. Ninole was at that point a thriving place, “celebrated on account of a short pebbly beach … the stones of which were reported to possess very singular properties, amongst others that of propagating their species.”2

  To hear Rev. Ellis tell it, Ninole was all about the stones. Some were used in “making small adzes and hatchets.” Others would be separated into black and white piles, to serve as “pieces … in playing at konane,” a native board game. Still others held special importance in times of war, “as the best stones used in their slings were procured here.” But “most particularly,” it was from such stones that “the gods were made, who presided over most of the games of Hawaii.” These last involved elaborate religious ceremonies in the heiau, leading to a remarkable feat of lithic reproduction. Stones were arranged in pairs to represent “one of each sex…[and] wrapped very carefully together in a piece of native cloth.” In due course, “a small stone would be found with them”; this, in turn, “when grown to the size of its parents, was taken to the heiau or temple, and afterward made to preside at the games.” (Ellis, of course, was appalled by such “nonsense”—and tried both “argument and ridicule … to make them believe it could not possibly be so.” They, however, clung to their “opinion … with tenacity.”)3

  Stones, stones, stones. As I stand on the same beach, two hundred years later, I see nothing extraordinary under my feet. But surely, as a young and impressionable boy, Opukaha’ia was pulled into this part of the local culture—with its convergent links to spiritual belief, heiau ceremonies, and the island’s public “games.” I think I can picture him, together with other village youths, darting about, eyes on the ground, stooping to grasp an especially “singular” stone.

  What else? In fact, archaeologists and historians have succeeded in re-creating a surprisingly detailed view of Ninole and its environs during the period of Opukaha’ia’s childhood (the last years of the eighteenth century). The village served as a “royal center” for Ka’u district, the seat of a regional high chief named Keowa. A hundred or more home sites were strung around the cove and nearby pond. The usual building pattern, found throughout Hawaii, was a rectangular shell, set with upright poles, beneath a steeply pitched, heavily thatched roof. In addition to residential housing, there were canoe barns, cabins for religious worship and burial rites, storage huts, and other ad hoc construction. The heiau just to the south covered an expanse of at least three acres and was bordered by rock walls up to nine feet thick and nearly as high; its interior was paved with the famous beach pebbles. The buildings, the heiau, the beach, the sea, the great volcano at the rear: All this would have been the prospect on which the young Opukaha’ia looked out eve
ry day.4

  But the shoreline community was just one part of it. The land immediately around the cove was rocky and infertile, the annual rainfall quite low. As a result, Ninole’s people depended for food on agricultural fields well inland and higher up. There the soil was relatively deep, and rain was reliable; in addition, streams with year-round flow could be tapped for irrigation.

  The whole territory was divided into several extremely long rectangular units (called ahupua’a), extending from near the shoreline to far up on the mountainside. Each one would encompass a variety of environmental conditions—forest, grassland, exposed rock; wetter and drier; warmer and cooler. In the topmost sections, taro was the preferred crop; a bit lower down, sweet potato; lower still, breadfruit and banana. Along its borders, each would be marked with walls of piled‑up rock and sometimes a line of cultivated sugarcane. Internally, there might be additional walls and, wherever the grade was steep, a stepped arrangement of small plots supported by stone terracing. Every ahupua’a was controlled by a single chief (ali’i) and worked by as many as a dozen households. Typically, there were small dwellings within or alongside the fields to supplement those found down at the shore. Well-established trails ran the length of the entire system.5

  Meat played only a minor part in the island diet. Pigs, dogs, and fowl might be consumed on festive occasions (mostly by the chiefs and their families), but not otherwise. However, the sea and the life within it supplied a wide range of important staples: fish, mollusks, crustaceans, seaweed. Men were regularly out in their canoes, setting nets and traps, casting long spears with sharp stone points, and dropping lines fastened to delicately fashioned hooks. (Fishhooks are to Hawaiian archaeology what ceramics are to archaeological study in other parts of the world; fine details of their style mark key points of historical change. Hawaii has no ceramic tradition of its own.)6

  If I proceed with my imagining of Opukaha’ia’s early life, I may place him in the fields, learning to cultivate taro and other essential foods, or on the water, mastering marine skills such as spear fishing. Perhaps, at the same time, he was being tutored in one or another of the more specialized crafts: building canoes from the wood of koa trees, fashioning twine and rope from forest vines, forging hand tools from hard chunks of basalt (rock), or shaping the ubiquitous fishhooks out of animal bone.

  Always, too, there was the enveloping presence of Hawaiian spirituality, Hawaiian religion. Opukaha’ia, like every child, would have learned at an early age about the four “major gods,” or “high heads”: Ku, god of war; Lono, god of fertility and health; Kane, god of agriculture; and Kanaloa, god of death. (To be sure, these designations oversimplify the actual, highly complex set of meanings attached to each one.) In addition, there were numerous lesser deities, linked to specific aspects of everyday life—fishing, craft work, landscape features, and the like. For example: Pele, goddess of volcanoes, was a particular focus of dread and veneration; the period of Opukaha’ia’s childhood brought at least one major eruption of nearby Mauna Loa. (In fact, the stones venerated at Ninole—as described by the visiting missionary—were considered to have come from Pele; hence their sacred character.) Finally, individual households would commemorate the spirits of key ancestors. All members of this pantheon, from lowest to highest, required regular acts of propitiation, especially sacrifice. For the major gods, kahunas (priests) would conduct dramatic public ceremonies in the heiau, with offerings of animal and, at least occasionally, human victims.7

  Religious belief and practice expressed a vast array of prohibitions (kapu, the source of our own word taboo); these, in turn, were interwoven with an elaborate hierarchy of social rank. Hawaiian society was rigidly graded: king and high chiefs at the top; the various ali’i a level or two below; maka’ainana, “commoners,” or, literally, “dwellers on the land,” far beneath. (According to some estimates, this latter group comprised approximately 95 percent of the total populace.) The chiefs were thought to have descended from the gods, and thus to possess special mana (spiritual power). Great emphasis was placed on proving these specific connections; hence genealogy acquired deep cultural significance. Encounters across category lines were scrupulously regulated. For instance, a commoner must avoid throwing his shadow on the person of a high chief; punishment of infractions could extend to death. The king should not even be seen by others, except on special ceremonial occasions.8

  The commoners, too, enforced deep differences within their own ranks—most conspicuously around gender. Men dined separately from women, to whom certain foods were entirely forbidden (pork, coconuts, bananas). Moreover, with foods permitted to both sexes, men would perform a ritual separation—reserving “sacred” portions for themselves, while consigning the remainders to women. They also maintained “men’s houses,” for their use only; the equivalent spaces for women were identified by the “pollution” of a menstrual kapu. The underlying principle, throughout this system, was purity (or the obverse, contamination), and the point of its specific parts was to separate the sacred from the profane, the elevated from the lowly, the noble from the common.9

  All this Opukaha’ia would have begun to absorb while passing through his earliest years. Those same years were, however, shadowed by something else: the mounting series of island wars. Their beginnings preceded the time of his birth; their end would open a new chapter in his young life (and in Hawaiian history as a whole). How he experienced this progression of events, we have no way of knowing—except for its final sequence. His family’s belated flight to the mountains, in retreat from invading armies led by Kamehameha, fits well with other, firmly established facts. The residents of villages like Ninole did indeed make that sort of escape. And the exotic, volcano-scourged hinterland high above the coast offered many forms of refuge: caves, lava tubes, dense forest. (Today some of these are tourist attractions.)

  The eventual violent death of his parents was personally catastrophic; it could hardly have been otherwise for a ten- or eleven-year-old boy. His subsequent placement—first with his captor, the man who had killed his father and mother, then with his uncle, “a pagan priest”—offered little consolation. In fact, the uncle’s residence—not in Ka’u district, but, rather, in Kona, seat of power for the newly victorious King Kamehameha—implies a link with the enemy side.

  Kona, too, must be part of my search; there, Opukaha’ia spent most, perhaps all, of his later childhood. (On his arrival, to join his uncle, he seems to have been around twelve years old; when he left on Captain Brintnall’s ship, he was approaching twenty.) Exiting Punalu’u, the route takes me along and above the shore, skirting the southwest flank of Mauna Loa, passing numerous little inlets and a host of rather unprepossessing villages. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, this was a region of vast plantations raising sugar and pineapples for the export trade. More recently, the emphasis has shifted to coffee growing; indeed, Kona coffee has become famous worldwide. But most of the activity is higher up; views from the roadway are of very bare, very brown rock fields.

  After somewhat more than an hour’s drive, I approach my goal, the great coastal amphitheater of Kealakekua Bay. In centuries past, this was considered to be a sacred place; its name means “pathway of the gods.” A short detour leads to the water’s edge and the site called Napo’opo’o. At once, stunning views open up—huge in scale, and full of sharply contrasting contours. The land surface is a mix of brown rock fields and many-shaded green forest, the sea a liquid turquoise. Tall cliffs loom overhead; from these, the god Lono was believed to have descended to earth. Higher still, the verdant slopes of another volcano, Huala¯lai, stretch toward a cloudless sky. Directly to the north, a long, sharply angled ridge projects far out into the bay. On its lower edge, clearly seen from my viewing point nearly a mile away, stands a thin white obelisk commemorating the death of Captain James Cook. It was Cook who famously “discovered” these islands for the rest of the world in 1778. And it was here at Kealakekua, a year later, that he fell victim to a
native warrior’s spear. (Greeted at first as the embodiment of Lono, he was soon recast as a dangerous intruder.)10

  My main interest in coming to Napo’opo’o is its ancient heiau, named Hikai’u and dedicated to the god Lono. Located just yards up from the shore, it presents today an immense, though somewhat degraded, stone platform, over 100 feet wide by 160 long, and raised eight to twelve feet above ground level. On its interior surface lie the remains of various additional structures—what might once have been worship huts, altars, benches, scaffolds. Fortunately, there is a vivid period description from the hand of Captain Cook himself. “The top,” he wrote after a personal visit with some of his crew, “was flat and well paved, and surrounded by a wooden rail, on which were fixed the skulls of the captives sacrificed on the death of their chiefs.” At the center stood “a ruinous old building of wood, connected with … a stone wall which divided the whole space into two parts.” On one side, facing inland, “five poles upward of twenty feet high” supported an “irregular kind of scaffold”; on the other, fronting the sea, stood “two small houses” linked by a covered passageway. Near the entrance, Cook and his men “saw two large wooden images, with features violently distorted,” their base “wrapped round with a red cloth.” Beneath the scaffold, twelve more images were “ranged in a semicircular form,” in the midst of which, on “a high stand or table … lay a putrid hog, and under it pieces of sugar-cane, cocoa-nuts, bread-fruit, plantains, and sweet potatoes.” The visitors inferred that a sacrifice was about to begin but did not stay for the actual performance.11