Unfamiliar Fishes

by Sarah Vowell

  Edwin introduced Obookiah to his cousin, Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, who invited Henry to live in his home. Timothy Dwight was Jonathan Edwards’s grandson. If Edwards, author of the 1741 slasher sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” had been the idol of the Great Awakening, Timothy Dwight was the biggest star of its sequel, the so-called Second Great Awakening.

  “Pope Timothy,” as he was nicknamed, assumed the presidency of the college in 1795. Yale was founded by finicky Protestants who worried that the Puritans at Harvard weren’t puritanical enough. But the Revolutionary War brought the Age of Reason to New Haven, and Dwight inherited a student body full of deist beatniks on the Enlightenment highway to hell, which is to say, France. This generation did not just read Voltaire; they literally addressed each other as “Voltaire” the way kids today call one another dude. Like, “Voltaire, I’m so high right now.”

  Dwight had already published, anonymously, an epic poem narrated by the Devil. Satan dedicated the book to “Mons. de Voltaire” to thank him for teaching “that the chief end of man was to slander his god and abuse him forever.”

  As Yale’s president, professor, and minister, Dwight spent the next few years in the classroom and the pulpit ranting against the European empirical thought that had been “vomited upon us,” lecturing on such topics as “The Nature and Danger of Infidel Philosophy.” As an author, he was no Grandpa Edwards, but he was eloquent and stubborn and sufficiently terrifying; all that burning-in-hell-forever stuff pretty much writes itself. Eventually the students abandoned France, that “suburb to the world of perdition,” returning their hearts home to New England, their ancestral city on a hill.

  In 1802, the school trembled with revival. “Yale College is a little temple,” a student wrote his mother.

  “It was like a mighty rushing wind,” a graduate recalled of the year the revival hit. “The whole college was shaken. It seemed for a time as if the whole mass of the students would press into the kingdom.”

  As Timothy Dwight’s sermons are whipping up yet another revival in 1808, Henry Obookiah is sailing from his uncle’s temple at Kealakekua Bay toward the little temple of Yale. Let’s pause a moment while Obookiah is still unloading crates of sealskins in the Pacific because I have a thing or two I want to unload myself.

  One counterintuitive result of pondering the legacy of New England missionaries in Hawaii is being reminded of how much I used to enjoy studying eighteenth-century France. On one of my trips to Maui, I went to La Perouse Bay, a rocky bit of shoreline at the end of the road on the south coast. Though Captain Cook had sailed past Maui, he had not set foot on it. The first recorded European to do that was Frenchman Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, in 1786. Poking around spiky lava fields that had dribbled down from the last eruption of the Haleakala volcano, I asked a park ranger who happened by if he could tell me anything about Admiral La Pérouse.

  “Yes,” he said. “He was French.”

  Wanting a pinch more detail, I went home and started reading up on the expedition, how Louis XVI had commissioned La Pérouse to sail to the Pacific, fine-tune Captain Cook’s maps, scope out new trade routes, and bring along an astronomer, a geologist, a botanist, and illustrators to collect specimens and record scientific data. I was especially entranced by the name of one of the frigates under the admiral’s command, the Astrolabe. Its namesake is a scientific instrument used to calculate the position of stars—very early Captain Cook.

  Britain’s Royal Society had dispatched Cook, La Pérouse’s predecessor and idol, on his first Pacific expedition in time to make it to Tahiti by June 3, 1769, so as to observe the transit of Venus across the sun. That’s why they sent him there: to sail for eight months just to catch a glimpse of another planet’s orbit, an event that, incidentally, lasted all of six hours. The expedition’s calculations were to be used to measure the universe, but since such calculations would not really be accurate until the invention of photography, Cook completed his task yet still sort of failed.

  On the bright side, on the way home Cook stumbled onto New Zealand. Setting forth to learn one thing, he and his shipmates gained extra understanding, and not just that Tahiti might be more beautiful than a speck of another planet loping through the sky. The crew spent weeks there, setting up to observe the transit. In that time, they hung around natives, picked up some of the language, and just generally soaked up a little of the island’s way of life. When they arrived in Aotearoa, aka New Zealand, the Tahitian chief who came along for the ride could communicate with the Maori because of the similarities in the two Polynesian languages. Cook returned to Tahiti on his second and third voyages to the Pacific. So when he first sailed into the harbor at Waimea, on Kauai, in 1778 he and his men could communicate on a rudimentary level with the Hawaiians because the language, one of the expedition’s surgeons wrote, was “much the same as that of [Tahiti].” This led to one of Cook’s most intriguing insights, the identification of what is now called the Polynesian Triangle, that immense stretch of ocean between New Zealand, Easter Island, and Hawaii—including Samoa, Tonga, and Tahiti—with related dialects and customs.

  For instance, the New Zealand natives call themselves Maori, while native Hawaiians’ name for themselves is Kanaka Maoli. “Same language, same people, same culture,” the Hawaiian activist Kekuni Blaisdell told me.

  Cook asked, “How shall we account for this Nation spreading itself so far over this Vast ocean?” Answer: the ancient Polynesians were some of the most skilled and talented natural-born navigators the world has ever known. Which is how the natives of Tahiti and the Marquesas settled the Hawaiian Islands at least a millennium ago—eyeballing stars from their double-hulled canoes for 2,600 miles. The missionary Hiram Bingham dismissed the Polynesians’ sailing expertise, writing off the migration to Hawaii as dumb luck, supposing that they arrived “without much knowledge of navigation” just as “trees from foreign countries repeatedly land on their shores.” The Polynesian Voyaging Society proved him wrong in 1976, when Hawaiians sailed a replica of an ancient voyaging canoe to Tahiti in thirty-three days without using navigational instruments.

  Anyway, La Pérouse. I was reading about his landing in Mowee, Cummins Speakman’s history of the island. The inhabitants of Maui charmed the admiral, who found them “so mild and attentive.” At the same time, the expedition’s physician examined the natives for the not so mild symptoms of venereal disease, debating in his report whether or not this was the legacy of earlier encounters between islanders and Captain Cook’s sailors. Typical—the only thing more European than spreading VD is documenting it.

  In describing the expedition’s scientists’ careful record-keeping Speakman notes, “They had been brought up in the encyclopedic atmosphere of the French Enlightenment and their orders contained instructions to observe, measure, and describe everything of interest which they might find in their travels.”

  I have an undergraduate degree in French language and literature. Affection for the French Enlightenment kind of comes with the diploma, along with a map of the Paris subway and a foolproof recipe for Proust’s madeleines. One of my first homework assignments at college was to read Voltaire’s Candide. I loved the book, but I especially loved discussing the book in class. I had spent my high school years trying to hide just how pretentious I was. So imagine my teenage glee at sitting in a fluorescent-lit room arguing about what Voltaire meant by “we must cultivate our garden.” It occurs to me now that the novel is actually about an optimistic young person’s disillusionment, but that irony was lost on me.

  In another course on French history I fell in love with the Encyclopédie Speakman alluded to when he said La Pérouse and his shipmates had come of age in an “encyclopedic atmosphere.” Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and others published their exhaustive compendium of knowledge between 1751 and ’72. In more than 70,000 articles, the best French minds explained and classified information on everything from adultery, wild mint, typesetting,
and friendship to opera, purgatory, hydraulics, and raccoons. Also, werewolves. (Imagine all the entries on Wikipedia being written by Steve Jobs, Doris Lessing, Garry Wills, Jay-Z, and what’s-his-name, that string-theory guy.)

  The entire laborious enterprise of the Encyclopédie was illumined by curiosity. Thinking about it again was a sort of homecoming for me, a return to my freshman goose bumps over Candide. I tracked down Denis Diderot’s mission statement for the encyclopedia and wrote it on a purple index card I tacked up next to my desk as a talisman: “All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings.”

  Hawaiians, I discovered, take a different approach to collecting, discussing, and presenting information. One afternoon I was sitting at my desk in New York, noodling around the Internet, trying to nail down the meaning of the Hawaiian word kupuna. I was reading a message board in which Hawaiians debated whether it simply means any ancestor, starting with one’s grandparents, or if it’s more specific, for example, a forebear with wisdom or skills to pass on. One quibbler noted, “a kupuna needs to be brought up in the tradition.” Someone named Hoopii chimed in that a kupuna doesn’t have to be a blood relative, that the word also has the connotation “to take a person as a grandparent . . . because of affection.”

  That was an interesting enough notion on its own, but I was intrigued by Hoopii’s preface to his opinion. He wrote, “As I read the comments posted by each individual about this specific forum, I do so in respect to each and every single person’s beliefs. I sense the passion in each of your concerns and I hope that I do not offend in any way.”

  Hawaii really is a foreign country, I thought, turning my head away from the kindly expression of the aloha spirit on my computer screen to look at that Diderot quote tacked to the wall about how entries in the French encyclopedia would be published “without regard for anyone’s feelings.”

  By “anyone” Diderot was taking a jab at the Catholic Church. Incidentally, the Church did have feelings about the Encyclopédie, the sort of feelings that got Diderot locked up under house arrest. But Diderot’s “anyone” extended beyond the pope to all men of faith, men like Pope Timothy of Yale.

  It is worth pointing out that disregard for the feelings of others who disagree is the one thing shared by New England theologians and French philosophers (along with New Bedford whalers, Hawaii-born queen-usurpers, President McKinley, and New York writers finding inspiration in quotations about how it’s fine to be a jackass as long as you’re trying to tell the truth). In America, on the ordinate plane of faith versus reason, the x axis of faith intersects with the y axis of reason at the zero point of “I don’t give a damn what you think.”

  “Haole” is a handy little word. And some Hawaiians believe it is a sort of antonym of “aloha,” the most Hawaiian word of all.

  “Haole” is an old word predating Western contact and can be used to describe nonnative plants and animals as well as people. Still, there’s a popular myth that the derivation of the term comes from the phrase for “without breath,” ha being the word for breath. (As in “aloha,” which can be used as a greeting or a farewell or to indicate love but literally means “the presence of breath” or “the breath of life.”) This “without breath” interpretation of the word “haole” was supposedly applied to Western visitors because they refused to engage in the traditional Polynesian greeting in which two people touch noses and embrace while breathing each other in.

  This blunt assessment suggests that white people are too uptight and alienated from the element of air—from life itself—to perform this fundamental ritual of love and respect. In my case, this judgment is not entirely unwarranted. When Hawaiian hospitality has cornered me into one of these awkward nosetouching, acquaintance-sniffing situations, I have two moves: head-butt the other person, and then wheeze inward as though I were about to dive into a river to pull a baby out of a car that went off a bridge.

  NOT LONG AFTER Henry Obookiah arrived in New Haven in 1809, Timothy Dwight invited him to live in his home so cousin Edwin could tutor the Hawaiian in English and Christianity. Learning the errors of polytheism and its graven images, Obookiah resolved to return to Hawaii someday and take down the wooden idols of his uncle’s profession and “put ’em in a fire, burn ’em up.”

  At Yale, Henry also met Samuel John Mills, Jr. Mills had been one of the Williams College students in on the “Haystack Meeting” in Massachusetts three years earlier. What happened was, one afternoon in 1806 Mills and his college buddies were out for a walk. Getting caught in a storm, they sought shelter under (or maybe next to) a stack of hay. During this impromptu huddle they got to talking about what red-blooded American boys always discuss while shooting the breeze on a rainy day—how missionaries should be sent to Asia. This brainstorm inspired the formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the group that would eventually sponsor the missionaries to the Sandwich Islands.

  Mills brought Obookiah to his father’s Connecticut farm and then took him along to Andover Theological Seminary outside of Boston, an institution of such pious gloom townspeople called it “Brimstone Hill.”

  According to Rufus Anderson of the ABCFM, Mills had designs on Henry from the get-go, writing a letter after they met at Yale “proposing that Obookiah be sent back to reclaim his own countrymen, and that a Christian mission accompany him.”

  Mills, Dwight, and the other men of faith who founded the ABCFM would use the empirical data and maps of European explorers like Cook and La Pérouse to fan out evangelists across the Pacific to spread the fear of God as far and wide as Cook’s men had spread the clap.

  At one of the ABCFM’s meetings in Boston in 1813, Dwight began his sermon to the group by quoting Jesus according to John 10:16: “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold. Them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice, and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.”

  Meanwhile, New England’s commercial ships began returning from China with more boys of Obookiah’s ilk they’d picked up along the way. In 1816, godly high-rollers in the ABCFM, including Timothy Dwight and his protégé, the Reverend Lyman Beecher, met at New Haven to plan a school for “heathen youths” to be built in Cornwall, Connecticut, a tiny hamlet in the rural Litchfield Hills.

  Rufus Anderson of the ABCFM recalled that the founders chose this nowheresville, rather than a city like Boston or New Haven, so as to hinder the foreign students from “acquiring the tastes and habits of city life.” Cornwall was not then, nor is it now, known for its theaters. I passed through it a couple of centuries after the school was built, and from what I could tell the closest thing to entertainment was the town blood drive.

  The Foreign Mission School opened in 1817, with Edwin Dwight as principal. Its stated task:

  The education, in our own country, of heathen youths, in such manner as . . . will qualify them to become useful missionaries, physicians, surgeons, schoolmasters, or interpreters; and to communicate to the heathen nations such knowledge in agriculture and the arts as may prove the means of promoting Christianity and civilization.

  Of the twelve students in the school’s first class, seven were from the Sandwich Islands, including Obookiah, Thomas Hopu (Henry’s shipmate from the voyage to New York), and a young Hawaiian veteran of the War of 1812 who turned out to be the long-lost son of the high chief of Kauai. The latter was known by various names, including George Sandwich, George Prince, and George Tamoree. Other pupils included an American Indian and two students from the Indian subcontinent.

  A report to the ABCFM about the school boasts that the Hawaiians “have renounced their heathenism . . . and testify a deep concern for their idolatrous parents, and brethren, and people.” Thankful that “the hand of God” has brought “these lately pagan youths to our shores,” the author of this testimony concludes that molding them to return home with the Gospel “may lead to very important events.”

  Obookiah was the star pupil from th
e start. By the time he arrived at the school, he had already spent eight years among the seminarians and their families. He had enough English and theology under his belt to start sermonizing to random farmers he bumped into in the woods. In his diary he recounts a walk through the Connecticut countryside when he “found an old grey-headed man, next to the road, hoeing corn . . . and I thought it was my duty to converse with him.” To Obookiah, conversing meant informing the man point-blank, “No doubt your days will soon be over.” I wonder if the apostle Paul took this approach with the retirees of Corinth. Henry hounded the elderly farmer around his cornfield, haranguing him that anyone that decrepit should repent his sins at once. The codger must not have wanted to waste his dwindling moments on earth being hassled by some prim Polynesian because he ignored Obookiah and “kept hoeing his corn.” It’s indicative of just how deeply Henry had drunk the Jesus juice that his quintessentially Christian response to this evangelical flop was to offer “thanks to the Almighty God for the opportunity” to pester a geezer with a hoe.

  At the Foreign Mission School, Henry studied Euclid, Latin, and Hebrew. He reportedly figured out how to translate Genesis into the Hawaiian tongue years before anyone solved the logistics of Hawaiian spelling and grammar. Working toward becoming “a missionary to my poor countrymen,” he paid particular attention to the preaching he heard, finding some of the sermons in Connecticut needlessly baffling to the congregations because of the learned ministers’ esoteric vocabulary. After all, “people can’t carry [a] dictionary to meeting,” he said.

  Henry’s line of reasoning echoes what Jonathan Edwards meant when he nailed the New England clergy’s weakness for the didactic: “Our people do not so much need to have their heads stored as to have their hearts touched.” Edwards did so by conjuring images of hearts being shot with God’s arrows drunk on sinners’ blood. Henry simply decided that when he became a missionary, he would “preach so that all can understand.”