by Sarah Vowell
Reverend Humphrey said, “How large a part of the land of promise remains yet to be possessed.” Not that there wasn’t still plenty of subduing to do here in North America. “Even within our own limits, the savage still lights his death fires, to appease the wrath of an idol,” he points out. What’s worse, to the “north, there is an immense region of palpable darkness.” (Hi, Canada!)
Thurston and Bingham should have been chastened by this subtext. If New England Protestants could not even talk Catholic Montreal out of siding with the Antichrist (which is how they see the pope), what makes them think they can douse Hawaii’s “death fires” lit for Lono and Ku? After all, Humphrey pointed out, “Satan will not yield the empire of the Sandwich Islands without a struggle.”
Lest they forget, the first man who left home to talk up the importance of Jesus—that would be Jesus himself—faced a bit of an uphill climb, an uphill climb in which his executioners forced him to carry the cross they planned to nail him to. “How was the Gospel first propagated, even in an age of miracles?” Humphrey asked. “By toil, by perseverance, by encountering a thousand dangers.” As send-offs go, Humphrey’s unsettling pep talk reminds me of how my nephew Owen says goodbye on the phone: “I love you! Don’t die!”
The missionaries to the Sandwich Islands received the following official instructions from their keepers at the ABCFM: They were supposed to learn to speak Hawaiian and make the natives “acquainted with letters; to give them the Bible with skill to read it.” In order to do that, they would need to teach the natives to read, as well as to translate the Bible into Hawaiian. Since it wasn’t a written language, they would need to invent a spelling and grammar for it. One person could spend an entire career attempting any one of those things but the board had more job requirements: “You are to aim at nothing short of covering those islands with fruitful fields and pleasant dwellings, and schools and churches; of raising up the whole people to an elevated state of Christian civilization.” Is that all?
No. As if the missionaries don’t have enough to worry about, the board gives them the seemingly contradictory instruction to not make waves:
You will withhold yourselves entirely from all interference, and intermeddling with the political affairs and party concerns of the nation or people among whom you reside: paying proper respect to the powers that be, and rendering . . . tribute where tribute is due . . . and showing unto all men a bright and impressive example of a meek and quiet spirit.
In summary, the missionaries’ brief was to remake Hawaiian society without aggravating the keepers of the status quo—to butter up the Hawaiian king while teaching his people that the only true authority is the king of kings. What could possibly go wrong? Still, what comes off as a contradiction might be good old-fashioned, New England-style separation of church and state. Just as in the 1600s the Massachusetts Bay colonists would have rioted if ministers had been made magistrates, the same colonists thought it was appropriate for magistrates to consult the ministers and follow the ministers’ advice. Church and state were separate but cozy.
Also, the allusion to rendering to the Caesars of the Pacific the proper deference makes sense in light of the evangelists’ conviction that the body politic is literally worldly, a distraction from the goal of shepherding as many people into the body of Christ as possible. The ABCFM’s instructions to a later company of missionaries to Hawaii spell out this belief: “You are to abstain from all interference with the local and political interests of the people. The kingdom of Christ is not of this world and it especially behooves a missionary to stand aloof from the private and transient interests of chiefs and rulers.”
If there is one thing to understand about the New England missionaries, remember that as their defining belief. . . the kingdom of Christ is not of this world. A Christian, as the chaplain in Moby-Dick put it, “is only a patriot to heaven.” The people they are sailing toward? Polar opposite. As Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau would assess the missionaries’ reception, “Some people helped with the missionary work, and other people belonged to the perpetuation-of-the-earth side.”
When I interviewed the Hawaiian independence activist Kekuni Blaisdell, I asked a question about the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani in 1893. Believe me, he has plenty of things to say about the subject. Both of his grandmothers lived and worked in the queen’s household. He was one of the aforementioned protesters marching on the fiftieth anniversary of statehood, carrying “We Are Not Americans” signs. But he didn’t get around to discussing the overthrow for a couple of hours, because he answered my opening 1893 question by recounting the history of Hawaii from the beginning of time—literally.
He told me about the earth mother mating with the sky father. They have a daughter, then the sky father mates with the daughter. “The product of conception is stillborn and buried,” Blaisdell says. “Up sprouts the first taro plant.”
It is an understatement to call the root vegetable, taro, and its mashed form, poi, the staple of Hawaiian food. It’s not simply a local favorite, the equivalent of, say, cheese to the French, or cheesesteaks to Philadelphians. As the nineteenth-century English travel writer Isabella Bird noted after a trip to the islands, “A Hawaiian could not exist without his calabash of poi. The root is an object of the tenderest solicitude, from the day it is planted until the hour it is eaten.”
One reason for such reverence is that taro is not simply a plant. To ancient Hawaiians, it was a brother. Blaisdell told me that after the taro plant grew from the stillborn’s burial, “the next child is the first kanaka.” “Kanaka” means human being. Thus, the taro plant is the “number-one sibling.” It is a first sibling’s responsibility to take care of its younger brothers and sisters. Blaisdell points out that the root of the word for land, ‘aina, is the word for eat. “We eat the land,” he says.
The word for Hawaii’s commoner class—the people responsible for growing taro and other food—can be translated as “eyes of the land.” Meaning, they are the stewards, keeping watch in a reciprocal family arrangement. The land takes care of them and they take care of the land. I tell Blaisdell I have been to Maui, to the remote, old-fashioned taro farm of one of his fellow activists. When I mentioned that on the day I visited the taro patch the farmer was barefoot in the mud, caring for his plants, Blaisdell’s eyes lit up and he cooed, “He’s a good man!”
Compare that Hawaiian creation myth to the Judeo-Christian one. The first chapter of Genesis claims, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Humans are not caretakers; they are overseers, dominators of their dominion. This conceit comes with some pretty obvious ecological consequences. Plus, in this beginning, the fruit of the land doesn’t always nourish the people. In fact, the fruit of knowledge poisons them with fancy ideas and so they are cast out of a garden bearing a striking resemblance to the island of Kauai. (Though having been to the pleasantly sleepy Kauai, I can see how after a few days of lollygagging amidst the foliage, a woman would bite into just about anything to scare up something to read.)
When Blaisdell was telling me how the Hawaiian people are so rooted in their homeland that they love a root vegetable as a brother, I remembered the little green leather-bound New Testament I was given as a little girl after I learned how to read. It was no bigger than my tiny hands.
Blaisdell and I were sitting outside in Honolulu. I pointed at the cliffs of Nuuanu, supposing that for his people’s culture to exist it requires an entire archipelago of mountains and valleys, beaches and farms, whereas the missionaries’ entire world was so portable it could fit in a child’s pocket. You have to admit, I told him, missionary culture travels light.
THE “LITTLE BAND of pilgrims,” as Lucy Thurston dubbed the first company of missionaries, assembled at Boston Harbor on October 23, 1819. After hymns and tears, they board
ed the brig Thaddeus, a vessel so crappy it made the Mayflower look like the QE2.
On board: the ordained ministers Bingham and Thurston and their wives; a doctor, Thomas Holman, and his wife; the “assistant” teaching missionaries Samuel Ruggles and Samuel Whitney, and their wives; Elisha Loomis, a printer, and his wife; the farmer Daniel Chamberlain and his wife and five children. Also four native Hawaiians who had attended the Foreign Mission School with Obookiah. Three of them were going to help the missionaries: Henry’s old shipmate Thomas Hopu, William Kanui, and John Honolii. George Tamoree/Sandwich/Prince/ Kaumualii, the son of the high chief of Kauai, was hitching a ride home after his adventures abroad.
The trip took five months. Lucy Thurston compared the cramped quarters of the Thaddeus to a “dungeon.” They were all so sick for so long Daniel Chamberlain described the ship as a “hospital,” though vomitorium would have been more precise. On the bright side, the cramped quarters offered the newlyweds no small amount of quantity time. By journey’s end the brides were much better acquainted with their grooms and more or less pleased with the matches. Sybil Bingham wrote in her diary, thanking God for answering her prayer for filling “the void” with a husband like Hiram, a “treasure rich and undeserved.” Having read his insufferable memoir, A Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands, all I can say to that is: I’m happy for her?
Just as each marriage had deepened, after five months of throwing up and tripping over one another, five months of huddling together with only Bingham’s sermons for entertainment, these people who never expected to see their own relatives again began to think of—and describe—themselves as a family. “Few in our native land can look around on a more interesting and happy family,” wrote Mercy Whitney.
Mercy wrote those words in her journal in February, after the brig rounded Cape Horn. Assessing her new mission kin, she noted, “We feel the cords of love binding our hearts together, and uniting them as the heart of one man.”
One hundred and eighty-nine years before these Protestants left Boston, the Protestant founders of Boston were sailing toward it. Before they arrived in 1630, John Winthrop, their governor, preached his famous lay sermon hoping New England would become “as a city upon a hill.” He declared to the men and women before him, “All true Christians are of one body in Christ.” He cited the apostle Paul’s address to the church of Corinth: “ ‘Ye are the body of Christ and members of its parts.’ ” Winthrop claimed, “The ligaments of this body which knit together are love.” Knowing of the hardships he and his fellow colonists would face in Massachusetts, knowing that half the Plymouth pilgrims that preceded them perished in their settlement’s first year, Winthrop proclaims that the only way they will survive in the New World is if they stick together and share every burden and every blessing, as “members of the same body.” He pleads, “We must be knit together, in this work, as one man.”
Mercy Whitney’s echo of Winthrop’s sentiment, which was an echo of Paul’s belief, is a crucial reminder of one of the finest principles of Christianity in general and New England’s Congregational brand of Protestantism in particular. Scrape off every irritating trait that mars Mercy and her shipmates—xenophobia, condescension, spiritual imperialism, and self-righteous disdain—and they have an astonishing aptitude for kinship and publicspirited love.
This community-minded devotion is one of New England’s lovelier bequests. I can hear it, for instance, in John Adams’s inaugural address, when the Puritan descendant rises above his authoritarian streak to marvel that “there can be no spectacle presented by any nation more pleasing, more noble, majestic, or august” than a government comprised of “citizens selected at regular periods by their neighbors to make and execute laws for the general good.” Can any noun have more radical sweetness than the word “neighbors” escaping a frumpy New Englander’s lips?
Granted, the considerable downside of that region’s neighborly disposition is an ill-mannered contempt for anyone who deviates from New England’s austere aesthetic and narrow moral code. But that does not make their capacity for community any less beautiful. Knowing how loving they can be to one another just makes their fear of strangers seem all the more pathetic and small.
On March 30, Thomas Hopu spotted the snowy peak of the Big Island’s tallest mountain, Mauna Kea. Bingham marveled at the image of “northern winter” peeking up from the “perpetual summer” of Hawaii. Nowadays, that strange contrast is still a wonder, especially from the windows of a helicopter. A few minutes after flying by that chilly summit you can look straight down at the Kilauea volcano, its oozing red maws resembling the mouths of hell the missionaries came there to warn against.
The Thaddeus rounded the lush cliffs of the Big Island’s northern shore, and as it veered south along the west coast, Maui came into view in the distance. The captain dispatched a crew member in a boat with a couple of the Hawaiians to ask permission to land.
Three hours later the little party returned with big news from shore: Kamehameha the Great was dead. His son Liholiho was the new king. The kapu system was kaput. The idols of the gods had been burned. The temples had been abandoned. The priests were unemployed.
Before the missionaries left New England, one of the board members of the ABCFM gave them their instructions, proclaiming Hawaii’s need to be “renovated.” It’s a concept dear to New England, calling back to the observation of Jonathan Edwards that America was discovered just before the Protestant Reformation, which was “the first thing that God did towards the glorious renovation of the world.” Turns out that as the carpenters on the Thaddeus navigated the high seas, the Hawaiians were already taking care of some of the demolition.
This upheaval was shocking but it wasn’t exactly a surprise. The end of the old system was a natural side effect of the coming of the foreigners whose ships followed those of Captain Cook. In his history of Hawaii, missionary son William DeWitt Alexander asserted that the tradition’s collapse was the effect of “deep-seated and widespread causes which had been at work for more than a quarter of a century.” Natives witnessed haole sailors breaking rules willy-nilly. Male and female chiefs dined together without incident on board the strangers’ ships. Female chiefs secretly wolfed down pork and bananas when the priests weren’t looking, and the earth continued to revolve around the sun.
Two of Kamehameha’s widows deserve the credit for nudging his son toward reform. The queen mother, Keopuolani, was the highest-ranking noble in all the land. Far fancier than her deceased husband, she was born to the uppermost caste of chiefs. Her parents had been siblings, and brother-sister marriages were prized for concentrating a clan’s spiritual mana, or power. Children of such unions were especially revered. Native historian David Malo described the intricacies of this phenomenon:
A suitable partner for a chief of the highest rank was his own sister, begotten by the same father and mother as himself. Such a pairing was called pi’o (a bow, a loop, a thing bent on itself); and if the union bore fruit, the child would be a chief of the highest rank . . . so sacred that all who came into his presence must prostrate themselves. He was called divine, akua.
So as the product of incest among the upper echelon, Keopuolani was doubly blessed. In fact, her body was kapu: anyone greeting her was supposed to prostrate himself before her, including her husband, the nearly seven-foot-tall conqueror. Any commoner who stepped on her shadow was supposed to be put to death, though the queen always politely pardoned offenders. Kamehameha had many wives and other children, but because of her unsurpassed rank, Keopuolani’s sons were the undisputed heirs to the throne.
If Keopuolani was Kamehameha’s spouse with the most social standing, Kaahumanu was nevertheless his favorite wife. She had unparalleled political clout. Hiram Bingham described Kaahumanu as “magisterial,” remarking on “her suavity and skill for managing the minds of others.” An English artist who tried to paint her portrait observed, “It must be known that this Old Dame is the most proud, unbending Lady in the who
le island. As the widow of [Kamehameha], she possesses unbounded authority and respect, not any of which she is inclined to lay aside on any occasion whatever.” Her husband named her his government’s kuhina-nui, the second-highest office in the land after that of the king—a sort of prime minister, advisor, vice president, and chief of staff all rolled into one.
Kaahumanu hardly relinquished her power when her stepson took the throne. When the chiefs gathered to acknowledge their new king, Kaahumanu informed Liholiho (now also called Kamehameha II), “Hear me, O Divine one, for I make known to you the will of your father. Behold these chiefs and the men of your father, and these your guns, and this your land, but you and I shall share this realm together.”
One of Kaahumanu’s first items of business was to get her stepson to do away with the eating kapus. In his early twenties, Liholiho had inherited a recently united Hawaiian kingdom just vacated by the fiercest warrior in memory. His father was Kamehameha the Great, and he was merely Kamehameha II. He must have been skittish about ordering a revolution on the first day of his new job, and so he tabled the idea. It was his aristocratic mother who made the first move.
Keopuolani summoned her younger son, Kauikeaouli, and, in full view of the king, she and the little boy ate together. This was a bold gesture that went against everything Liholiho’s father had brought him up to protect—literally. When Kamehameha named him heir to the throne, he put Liholiho in charge of protecting the kapus and the temples. That his own sacred mother committed this sacrilege made it easier for him to follow her lead.
I spent an afternoon moseying around the Judiciary History Center in Honolulu with Keanu Sai, a Hawaiian historian, discussing the islands’ legal and political developments. I was telling him how my research into Hawaiian culture had made me more aware of my own biases and prejudices than any project I’d ever worked on. I mentioned how my democratic tendencies make me prone to sneer at aristocracy, and yet because of my feminist tendencies I have a soft spot for the domineering Kaahumanu.
