3. The Suicide of Kapu
It was probably in 1783, during Kamehameha’s conquest of the Big Island, that he at one stage had repaired to Laupahoehoe, north of Hilo, to regroup. With no major battles imminent, he took one canoe and its crew on a pillaging sortie down the coast. Like those of Vikings in a longboat, such lightning raids could gain supplies and spread terror very effectively among the defenseless coastal kanaka population. Spying two or three fishermen on the shore, Kamehameha had the canoe beached, and they pursued the frightened locals on foot. During this hot chase the king’s foot became wedged fast in a lava crevice. One terrified fisherman, named Kaleleiki, turned and hit the Conqueror over the head with his paddle as hard as he could, shattering it. Kamehameha was knocked unconscious, but rather than finish him off, Kaleleiki fled. Once he came to, Kamehameha found his way back to his warriors; reflecting upon his fortunate escape, he proclaimed thenceforth a kapu against attacking noncombatants. “See to it,” he intoned, “that our aged, our women, and our children, lie down to sleep by the roadside without fear of harm.” In the formality of kapu, he added, “Hewa no, make” (Disobey, and die). It became known as Kanawai Mamalahoe, the Law of the Splintered Paddle, which later became enshrined in the Hawaiian constitution. Kaleleiki, later cast before Kamehameha to face his justice, was pardoned.1 It was the first crack in a social system that, for the kanakas since time immemorial, had been rooted in terror.
Word of the protective kapu spread, but also the knowledge that it was virtually unenforceable. It was ancient to Hawaiian culture that in their ubiquitous warfare, if an enemy force was defeated, they would fall upon their families, hacking and pillaging to the point of gory surfeit, even as warriors in all times and in all cultures, when their blood is up and the killing has started, press an attack without discrimination. Such was the case when Kamehameha’s warriors overran a settlement in the Kau District. A young boy of about twelve named Opukaha‘ia escaped with his parents and baby brother, and the family hid in a cave until thirst drove them to water at a nearby spring. “Here,” Opukaha‘ia recalled, “they were surprised by a party of the enemy while in the act of quenching their thirst.” The man fled, but “the enemy, seeing the affection of the father for his family, put them to the torture in order to decoy him from his retreat.… Unable to bear the piercing cries of his family, he fell into their hands, and with his wife was cut in pieces.”2
Attempting his own escape, the boy swung his three-month-old brother onto his back and fled. The spear flung after them skewered the infant to Opukaha‘ia’s body, killing the baby but only wounding the youth. He was too old to require care and too young to cause trouble, so his life was spared, and he was taken in by the warrior who killed his family. Later it was discovered that Opukaha‘ia was the nephew of a kahuna of Lono. The boy had worked his way into the affections of his new family, and his “keeper,” as he called him, vowed that if he could not keep the boy he would kill him, but he was powerless to defy a priest of Lono. Now perhaps fourteen, he was sent to the god’s Hikiau heiau at Kealakekua Bay to study to become a kahuna as well, learning the precision of the chants and the protocol of sacrifices. In 1809, while visiting his one surviving aunt, he hid in terror as men invaded the dwelling and dragged her away. She was accused of violating a kapu and thrown from a cliff to her death.
“While I was with my uncle,” Opukaha‘ia later wrote, “I began to think about leaving that country.… I did not care where I shall go to. I thought to myself that if I should get away … I may find some comfort.” From Lono’s heiau the youth of now about sixteen swam out to a newly arrived American trading ship, the Triumph, Capt. Caleb Brintnall commanding, out of New Haven, Connecticut. One man aboard spoke enough Hawaiian to relay the boy’s intentions. Unwilling to cause an incident, Brintnall fed him supper and invited him to stay the night, but required the priest’s permission before taking him away. Opukaha‘ia rowed ashore in the morning; his uncle was furious at the development and locked the boy in his room, although since it was a traditional grass house, he was able to work his way through the wall and escape back to the ship. The kahuna was eventually placated at the price of a pig, and the Triumph weighed anchor with Opukaha‘ia on board.3
Also sailing away with Captain Brintnall was another refugee, a few years younger than Opukaha‘ia, named Hopu, called Thomas by the crew, whom he served as cabin boy. Born on Hawai‘i, he narrowly escaped death on the day of his birth. His mother, dispirited by the incessant raiding and terror, opined that it would be better for him had he not been born, and expressed the intent to kill him. Her sister overheard her and stole away with the baby to raise him in her husband’s household. They returned him to his parents when he was four, but when he was eight raiders looted the family of all they possessed; the father relocated to Kealakekua Bay to start over, the mother died the next year, and Hopu availed himself of the Triumph’s presence to search for a better life.4
Hopu and Opukaha‘ia were not unusual in fleeing their homeland; word spread quickly in maritime circles that the Sandwich Islands were a good place to bring depleted crews back up to strength. Once at sea, though, the boys learned that life to these new people was more precious than they were accustomed to. The Triumph, which touched at America for furs and then returned to Hawai‘i before continuing to China, one day was making about nine knots before a stiff wind in a rolling sea. Hopu tending his duties as cabin boy, “stood by the main chains, outside of the ship, drawing up a bucket of water to wash my dishes, I fell overboard.” There was just time to cry for help before the ship was beyond earshot, and then beyond sight. Hopu was a good swimmer and stripped off his clothes so they would not drag him under as he vacillated between despair and determination. Brintnall had been asleep in his cabin but was quickly alerted. “The Captain calls all hands upon the deck, and ordered to have all the sails pulled down in order to let about.… We turned our ship and went back after him, we found him almost dead. He was in the water during the space of two and a half hours.”
Aboard the Triumph Opukaha‘ia was befriended by Russell Hubbard of New Haven, who had been to Yale. “He was very kind to me on our passage, and taught me the letters in English spelling-book.”5 After a lengthy voyage, Brintnall docked in New York, a city that was a shock to the Hawaiian youths, although of all the strange new sights and sounds, nothing caused more consternation than seeing men and women eating together, which was a capital offense in their homeland, a keystone of the entire kapu system. They continued to New Haven, where Opukaha‘ia lived with the Brintnall family, and Hopu with a doctor named Hotchkiss for a time before becoming a sailor. He disappeared for years, more than once shipwrecked, and captured and imprisoned during the War of 1812, before making his way back.
Opukaha‘ia made a start at an education but became frustrated with others’ lack of interest in him. One day “Obookiah,” which was as close as the Americans could come to pronouncing his real name, was found sitting on the steps of one of Yale University’s buildings, weeping. A solicitous student stopped to inquire what was wrong, and Obookiah said, “No one will give me learning.” The young man to whom Obookiah complained happened to be Edwin Dwight, nephew of Timothy Dwight, president of the college. “His appearance was unpromising,” Dwight wrote of the meeting. “He was clothed in a rough sailor’s suit, was of a clumsy form, and his countenance dull and heavy.” Dwight almost passed him by without speaking, “as one whom it would be in vain to notice and attempt to instruct. But when the question was put him, ‘Do you wish to learn?’ his countenance began to brighten and … he served it with great eagerness.”6
After but little religious instruction, Opukaha‘ia’s universe inverted. “Owhyhee gods,” he exclaimed, “they wood! Burn! Me go home, put ’em in a fire, burn ’em up. They no see, no hear, no any thing. We make ’em. Our God”—he looked up in awe—“He make us.”7 Nothing was the same for Opukaha‘ia, or Hawai‘i, ever again.
It would be difficult to imagine drier tinde
r to receive such a spark.
The voyages of Captain Cook had a devoted follower in the person of William Carey, a prominent English Baptist preacher who puzzled over why, amidst the discovery of heathen nations utterly new to Western conscience, no effort was being made to obey the Great Commandment and preach salvation among them. Carey wrote a famous book, formed the Baptist Missionary Society, and then himself sailed to India to spread the gospel for four decades. The movement took root, and soon British missionaries fanned out across the Pacific, except for the one glaring exception of the Sandwich Islands. Carey’s zeal spread to the United States, where one Samuel Mills, Jr., was inspired in 1806 to hold the famous Haystack Prayer Meeting, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, which led the American Congregationalist Church to form the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (universally referred to by its acronym, ABCFM). After taking an affectionate leave of Captain Brintnall, with whom he had lived for some months, Opukaha‘ia lived with the family of Samuel Mills, Sr., while studying religion.8
As a student he won universal affection, as much for his ability to convulse other students with his dead-on mimicry of them and their teachers as for his scholarship. While residing with the Mills family in Torrington, Connecticut, he often paid visits to a friend (discreetly not named in Dwight’s memoir) at Litchfield. That person was then studying for a doctorate in divinity and enjoying his immersion in the abstractions of theology, but Obookiah broached to him a soul sickness and desire that discomfited him greatly. “It was his object to converse with him upon the subject of accompanying him to Owhyhee. He plead [sic] with great earnestness that he would go and preach the Gospel to his poor countrymen. Not receiving so much encouragement as he desired, [Obookiah] suspected that his friend might be influenced by the fear of the consequences of introducing a new religion among the heathens.” Upon which, though Opukaha‘ia was still very new to the language of the scriptures, he demanded, “You ’fraid? You know our Savior say, He that will save his life shall lose it; and he that will lose his life for my sake, same shall find it?”9
Thenceforward it was a subject that would give Opukaha‘ia no rest. His demonstrated zeal for spreading the faith came just at the time that the Second Great Awakening was kindling missionary fever throughout New England. As word spread of his determination to introduce the gospel to his native land, one elderly minister drew him aside to press on him the danger of martyrdom if he did so. “Suppose,” he asked, “your countrymen should tell you that preaching Jesus Christ was blaspheming their gods, and put you to death?” Opukaha‘ia was adamant: “If that be the will of God, I am ready. I am ready.” After being accepted into the church in Torrington, he agitated the question until he was finally taken in by the ABCFM for the purpose—to his unbounded joy—of returning to his home as a missionary.10 In his study of Christianity, Opukaha‘ia discovered to his surprise that one of the easiest subjects for him to learn was Hebrew, because to his mind it bore surprising structural similarities to his own language. He began a massive undertaking: to translate the Bible into Hawaiian, and he began with Genesis, bypassing English to transcribe from Hebrew straight into his native language. “I want to see you about our Grammar,” he wrote a teacher friend. “I want to get through with it. I have been translating a few chapters of the Bible into the Owhyhee language. I found I could do it very correctly.”11
In 1815 Thomas Hopu returned to New Haven, to learn when Brintnall might again sail for the South Seas—he was homesick and wished to return. “My friend Thomas come to me with a sad countenance,” Opukaha‘ia wrote in his diary on March 23, 1816. Hopu was already drawn into the new religion, but he was confused. He “wished that we might pray together in our own language.… We offered up two prayers in our tongue—the first time that we ever prayed in this manner.”12 Hopu threw in with the missionary effort, and then they discovered that there were still more of them in this strange and invigorating world. One was not just a countryman, but an ali‘i of high kapu. Going by the name George Tamoree, he was in fact the son and heir of Kaumuali‘i, the vassal king of Kaua‘i. Entrusted to Americans to get an education, he had instead been used as a common laborer, served on an American frigate, and been wounded in the War of 1812. He was living in company with yet another Hawaiian, John Honoli‘i, one of many kanakas who had shipped out on foreign vessels. And then there was William Kanui, who like Hopu and Opukaha‘ia had had a narrow escape from death; his father was one of the few O‘ahu chiefs to survive the massacre at Nu‘uanu Pali during Kamehameha’s conquest of the island in 1795. He fled to Kaua‘i with his family in tow, where he became a vassal of Kaumuali‘i. With war threatening again, the chief’s two sons signed aboard the brig Elizabeth and joined the Hawaiian diaspora; the brother died in New York before Kanui was taken into the missionary circle.13
The ABCFM could hardly have asked for a more auspicious beginning for the evangelizing of Hawai‘i. All five students had their portraits painted by Samuel F. B. Morse, and electroplate engravings of them were sold to raise money; in 1816 the society published A Narrative of Five Youths from the Sandwich Islands to generate more support. The Hawaiians were enrolled in a religious school at Litchfield until the spring of 1817, when they began studying at the ABCFM’s own new missionary school in Cornwall. And then disaster struck, as Opukaha‘ia took a fever at the start of 1818. Diagnosed with typhus, he lingered for six weeks. “Oh! How I want to see Hawaii,” he said. “But I fear I never shall—God will do right—He knows what is best.” As he neared the end, his much-loved native confederates—Thomas Hopu, John Honoli‘i, Prince George Kaumuali‘i, and William Kanui—all pledged to him that they would continue in the new religion, return to Hawai‘i, and end the horrors of kapu.14
“Go see my uncle,” said Opukaha‘ia. “Tell him I love him. I thank him for his care so long ago. And if my grandmother still lives, tell her I will return to her in my spirit.”15 He died on February 17, 1818. The passing of their star proselyte dismayed but did not dissuade American Congregationalists, for by his serene death in the faith Opukaha‘ia finally galvanized what he had not been able to forge in life: the resolution to actually send missionaries to Owhyhee. His funeral was preached by Lyman Beecher himself, the forty-two-year-old lion of the Second Great Awakening. “We thought,” he lamented, “we saw so plainly the hand of God in bringing him hither; in his instruction, his conversion, talents, and missionary zeal.” His passing, however, must turn Christian eyes toward the Foreign Mission School. “His death … will awaken a tender sympathy for Owhyhee, and give it an interest in the prayers and charities of thousands.… Instead of fainting under the stroke, we are animated by it, to double confidence in God, and double diligence in this work.”16
The churches of New England made good on Beecher’s exhortation; they did not insist on a Congregationalist affiliation for candidates: Presbyterians or any other good Calvinist Protestant would serve as well. The understanding was that once they reached the Sandwich Islands, doctrinal quibbling was to be put aside in the greater effort to convert the heathen. Leadership of the forming expedition was awarded to Rev. Hiram Bingham. He was a Vermonter, a graduate of Middlebury College and Andover Theological Seminary, and newly wedded to Sybil Moseley. Unmarried persons were discouraged from emigrating as missionaries, so like Bingham, the other single men in the company made it their business to find eligible, zealous young women, marry them, and combine missionary effort with honeymoon—to say nothing of getting acquainted. With Bingham would go Rev. Asa Thurston and his wife, Lucy, who was destined to be the last survivor of the company; Samuel Whitney and his wife, Mercy, and Rev. Samuel Ruggles with his wife, Nancy, schoolteachers. Elisha Loomis, a young printer who had to ask for release from his apprenticeship in order to volunteer, was in danger of being left behind until he found Maria Sartwell during his trip home to say farewell to his family; there was also a doctor named Thomas Holman, and the farmer Daniel Chamberlain, taking passage with his five children. Like many of the
more than one hundred missionaries who followed them, they had little expectation of seeing their homes again. Accompanying them, not least, were the four young Hawaiian men: John Honoli‘i, Thomas Hopu, William Kanui, and George Kaumuali‘i, the prince of Kaua‘i.
The brig Thaddeus was chartered and loaded, sailing on October 19, 1819, one week before Bingham’s thirtieth birthday.
* * *
Back in Hawai‘i, changes were afoot. The first and smaller change was that the natives were becoming more vocal in their displeasure at their country being known to the outside world as the Sandwich Islands, which was a foreign designation wholly unknown to them. When the Russian captain Wassily Golovnin had an audience with the aging Kamehameha in 1818, the Conqueror went “so far as to object to the name ‘Sandwich Islands,’ … insisting that each one should be called by its own name, and the group, that of the king of Hawaii.” The islanders themselves referred to the entire archipelago as Hawai‘i nei pae aina, “these Hawaiian islands,” and gradually, informally, the outside world began to use the names interchangeably. On official documents, however, the “Sandwich Islands” survived for another twenty years.17
The larger change was, to the native culture, cataclysmic. Among Polynesian women, fat was beautiful, and Kamehameha’s favorite wife, Ka‘ahumanu, was very beautiful. This imposing woman, estimated to have weighed five hundred pounds,18 was also gracious, hospitable, and funny—important qualities in the wife to whom the king turned first for pleasure. However, she was also forceful and shrewd enough for Kamehameha as he grew old to name her as kuhina nui, or principal adviser and in effect coruler, to steady the coming reign of his son. He knew that the dissolute Liholiho would not be nearly the presence as king that he had been. The sacred royal wife, Keopuolani, had never regarded Ka‘ahumanu’s favored position as any degree of threat. As the mother of the new king, and herself possessing the highest possible rank, her social position was secure. Ka‘ahumanu’s position in retirement was less certain, however, and the favorite consort of the Conqueror had no intention of retiring from public life.
Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii Page 7
