by Sarah Vowell
Like so many Hawaiian locations with bloody pasts, Pu‘ukohola is absurdly picturesque. The temple is one man’s tribute to his violent god, built out of a craven lust for spiritual and political domination and christened with his kinsman’s blood. Still, a swell place to spend an afternoon.
Hiram Bingham found Kamehameha’s temple “a monument of folly, superstition and madness, which the idolatrous conqueror and his murderous priests had consecrated with human blood to the senseless deities of Pagan Hawaii.” He hoped that “soon temples to the living God would take the place of these altars of heathen abomination.” To that end, Kalanimoku and the other chiefs sailed south with the missionaries toward the king’s court in Kailua.
On board the Thaddeus, Bingham preached his first Sunday sermon in Hawaii on “the design of the Messiah to establish his universal reign, and to bring the isles to submit to him.” Before this makeshift congregation of natives and New Englanders, Bingham cited Isaiah’s prophecy of his god’s ambition: “He shall not fail nor be discouraged till he have set judgment in the earth: and the isles shall wait for his law.”
A missionary preaching the first sermon in an archipelago pretty much has to quote that verse. Otherwise, it would be like a Bon Jovi concert without “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Still, I wonder if this sermon was the smartest teaser, Bingham announcing to the locals that he and his friends had come all that way just to introduce harsh new rules and regulations. Why not start with something comforting and poetic, such as the Psalms or more impressive, like one of Jesus’ magic tricks—hook them with Christ’s ability to raise the dead and walk on water, maybe get around to the fine print about Judgment Day later? Not that Bingham had the natives’ undivided attention.
“How unlike to those peaceful Sabbaths I have enjoyed in America, have been the scenes of this day,” Nancy Ruggles wrote of that first service. She complained of being “thronged with these degraded natives, whose continual chattering has become wearisome to me.” Still, she wasn’t bored, admitting, “I think this has been the most interesting Sabbath of my life.”
The next day, according to Lucy Thurston, “The first sewing circle was formed, that the sun ever looked down upon in the Hawaiian realm” to make a frock for one of the queens. Or, according to Bingham, the women “fitted out the rude giantess with a white cambric dress.” The New Englanders were more than happy to stitch coverings to hide this queen’s ample flesh. Looking back on that day, Lucy would brag, “The length of the skirt accorded with Brigham Young’s rule to his Mormon damsels,—have it come down to the tops of the shoes. But in the queen’s case, where the shoes were wanting, the bare feet cropped out very prominently.”
After passing Mount Hualalai, an extinct volcano, the ship arrived in Kailua. This court was where Kamehameha died and where his son broke the kapu by eating with women. Nowadays, what had been the royal compound is King Kamehameha’s Kona Beach Hotel. In 1820, when the Thaddeus anchored there, hundreds of natives, including King Liholiho and his mother, frolicked half-naked in or near the water. Spying them surf, sunbathe, and dance on the beach, Bingham carped that they “exhibit the appalling darkness of the land, which we had come to enlighten.”
Bingham, Thurston, and Thomas Hopu went ashore to meet King Liholiho in his thatched house. According to Lucy Thurston, “They found him eating dinner with his five wives”—and she adds that “two of his wives were his sisters, and one the former wife of his father.”
The ministers read the king letters from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions explaining their intentions in his kingdom. “We made him the offer of the Gospel of eternal life,” wrote Bingham, “and proposed to teach him and his people the written life-giving Word of the God of Heaven . . . and asked permission to settle in his country, for the purpose of teaching the nation Christianity, literature and the arts.”
The king, Bingham griped, “was slow to consent.” Liholiho promised to think about it. The missionaries spent the next few days waiting around, pestering him for permission to settle. The only thing worse than a missionary coming to your house is a whole troupe of missionaries coming to your house day after day, begging to move next door. One day they brought the king an extravagant Bible they had intended to give his father. Then they invited him to dinner on the Thaddeus and sang him hymns. Another time he made the excuse that he couldn’t give them an answer until he consulted Queen Kaahumanu, who was away on a fishing trip. One morning the white men and women paid a visit to the king’s house and were scandalized to learn he was still in bed at eleven o’clock. Sybil Bingham wondered if he kept them waiting because of the Hawaiians’ “great indolence and total disregard of time.”
Another reason the missionaries worried Liholiho was procrastinating about making a decision on whether or not to let them stay was their belief in monogamy. According to Lucy, Thomas Hopu had revealed to the king “that our religion allowed neither polygamy nor incest. So when Kamamalu, his sister and marked favorite out of five queens, urged the king to receive the Mission, he replied: ‘If I do they will allow me but one wife, and that will not be you.’ ” True enough, though if the king read the first half of that Bible of theirs, he could have found a counterargument or two, what with Moses’ mother also being his aunt, or Lot being his grandchildren’s father (though, technically, his daughters did get him drunk and rape him).
During one of the missionaries’ pleas to start their work, they proposed to Liholiho that some of them could stay in Kailua at his court while others would set up shop in Honolulu, already frequented and prized by Western sailors for its impressive harbor. Bingham recalled, “To this proposition the king replied, ‘White men all prefer Oahu. I think the Americans would like to have that island.’ ” This offhand remark is so prophetic it is taking all my writerly restraint not to italicize it.
Finally, after two weeks of thumb twiddling, Liholiho granted the missionaries permission to start a mission, but only on a trial basis for one year. Bingham wrote that they promised the king “that we should send for no more missionaries, till our experiment had been made and approved.”
There was a reason Liholiho kept putting off authorizing the mission and it had little to do with him being a late sleeper. Nor did the king who had summarily given the ax to all the priests of Hawaii worry that a couple of pencil-necked seminary grads from New England would prevent him from sleeping with any relative he damn well pleased. No, Liholiho’s problem was that he was afraid that allowing American settlers in his realm would offend the king of England.
According to the journal of Captain George Vancouver of the Royal Navy, in 1794, Liholiho’s father, Kamehameha, made “the most solemn cession possible of the Island of Owhyhee to his Britannic Majesty.” Kamehameha and his chiefs, Vancouver wrote, “unanimously acknowledged themselves subject to the British crown.” For this the captain gave the king a Union Jack. There is no record that the British government ever acknowledged receipt of the gift of Hawaii. That’s how stuck up the British were—whole archipelagoes were handed to them and they were too busy ruining continents to notice. But the Hawaiians didn’t know that. Kamehameha I and Kamehameha II believed they ruled a British protectorate. This is the reason that the Hawaiian flag features a Union Jack.
On my stroll through the Judiciary History Center with Keanu Sai, we were discussing how King Liholiho kept the missionaries waiting for days on end to give them an answer about whether or not they had permission to settle in Hawaii. Sai points out that this procrastination goes back to Liholiho’s father. “Kamehameha,” he said, “was British.”
Sai continues, “In 1810, Kamehameha I was sending letters to King George III, advising him of the consolidation of the Sandwich Islands under one rule, that [George] is now king of the Sandwich Islands.” Kamehameha reassured the king that “he was his obedient servant.”
“It was after that,” Sai says, that Kamehameha “began to implement British governance. That’s when you start to see the words ‘prime m
inister’ being used. And that prime minister was Kalanimoku.”
Kalanimoku is the aforementioned gentleman who made such a good first impression on the missionaries for his courtly manner and wearing of pants. “His nickname,” Sai says, “was Billy Pitt.” William “Billy” Pitt was then the prime minister of Great Britain, whom Sai describes as Kalanimoku’s “counterpart.”
When Kamehameha ceded the islands to George Vancouver, he also granted the Englishman permission to send missionaries—British missionaries. “So when the [American] missionaries showed up in 1820,” Keanu Sai said, “the chiefs knew missionaries were coming. The problem they had was they weren’t British. That’s why they made them sit there off the coast and said, ‘You’re going to sit there until we find out what we’re going to do with you,’ because that could affect their allegiance to Great Britain. So John Young”—an Englishman who was a trusted advisor to the Kamehamehas—“was told to go on the ship, find out who they are, why they are here. And then he came back and he said, ‘Same religion, different nationality.’ ”
Regarding the missionaries’ temporary permission to evangelize, Sai maintains, “The chiefs were watching them, saying, ‘We’re going to see how you folks operate.’ ” The missionaries’ one-year probation was renewed four times. It wasn’t until four years after the New Englanders’ arrival that the government allowed them to settle permanently, a ruling made, according to Sai, “after Liholiho traveled to London to meet with King George.” He adds, “Now, that tells me who’s in control.”
Lucy Thurston wrote, “After various consultations, fourteen days after reaching the Island, April 12th, permission simply for one year, was obtained from the king for all the missionaries to land upon his shores.” Lucy and Asa Thurston planned to stay in Kailua, along with Dr. Holman and his wife. (“God will be our physician,” groaned Sybil Bingham, who was moving on to Honolulu.) The Kailua settlers were joined by two of the Hawaiians from the Cornwall school, William Kanui and Thomas Hopu. Hopu, Henry Obookiah’s old shipmate, was Reverend Thurston’s interpreter, translating the missionary’s sermons until Thurston could learn the Hawaiian language.
“Such an early separation was unexpected and painful,” said Lucy about saying goodbye to her friends from the Thaddeus. “At evening twilight we sundered ourselves from close family ties, from the dear old brig, and from civilization.”
Before he sailed on to Honolulu, Hiram Bingham escorted the Thurstons and the Holmans to their new home. “A small thatched hut was by the king’s order appropriated for their accommodation,” he wrote, “if such a frail hut . . . without flooring, ceiling, windows, or furniture, infested with vermin, in the midst of a noisy, filthy, heathen village can be said to be for the accommodation of two families just exiled from one of the happiest countries in the world.”
Describing their new abode, Lucy wrote, “There was a secret enemy whose name was legion lying in ambush.” Satan? “It was the flea.”
“For three weeks after going ashore,” wrote Lucy, “our house was constantly surrounded, and our doors and windows filled with natives. From sunrise to dark there would be thirty or forty at least, sometimes eighty or a hundred.” The white women, she noted, were “objects of curiosity.” Hawaiians had seen a steady stream of white men since the arrival of Captain Cook forty-two years earlier, but staring at Lucy and the doctor’s wife became something of a fad. The Hawaiians followed the ladies around like paparazzi. One day, fed up with being ogled, Lucy left the house to go sit under a tree for a little privacy. “In five minutes I counted seventy companions.”
The Thurstons’ only chairs were overturned buckets. Not that they had much time for sitting. Living at Liholiho’s court, Lucy observed that to the king and the chiefs the “highest point of etiquette . . . was, not to move,” but the life of “an American lady, the active wife of a missionary, could not be measured by such a yard-stick.” Three or four times a day, Liholiho’s wives would drop by for lessons or to socialize. Referring to a pair of biblical sisters who befriended Jesus—Mary, who according to the Book of Luke “sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying,” and Martha, the busybody homemaker “distracted by her many tasks”—Lucy wrote, “When the queens were at our house, we sisters were Marys; when they were away, we were Marthas.”
One aspect of life at Kailua complicating their many Marthalike chores was the beachfront settlement’s distance from inland fresh water sources. Then, as now, the west coast of the Big Island is prized for its beaches and sunny days (as opposed to the east coast around Hilo, which locals call the “rainy side”). Kamehameha I and II would not have been surprised the haoles would someday build their five-star resorts along this stretch of shore between the Pu‘ukohola temple and the Kailua court. It is an excellent location for water sports and getting a suntan. Lucy mentions “hundreds of natives, all ages, of both sexes, and every rank, bathing, swimming, floating on surf boards.” It is, however, a lame location for doing oodles of laundry by hand. Hawaiians were used to hauling drinking water to the shore. But the cleanliness required by godliness meant that the missionaries required way more water resources than the natives. As Lucy points out, “Every quart of water was brought to us from two to five miles in large gourd shells, on the shoulders of men.” The scarcity of water and all-around regret would send the Holmans scurrying back to the mainland after three months.
Hiram Bingham recalled that King Liholiho, “when he learned with what promptness we could teach reading and writing, objected to our teaching the common people these arts before he himself should have acquired them.” Bingham finds this attitude “encouraging, for we wished him to take the lead” but also “embarrassing, for we wished to bring the multitude under instruction, without reference to the distinctions of birth or rank.”
Within three months, Hiram Bingham reported, the Thurstons, with help from Thomas Hopu, had taught the king to read a little of the New Testament. But according to Lucy, soon thereafter “the pleasures of the cup caused his books to be quite neglected.” However, Liholiho’s little brother, Kauikeaouli (the boy their mother had defied the kapu laws to eat with), “attended to his lessons regularly.” Bingham praised the boy, a “promising pupil” who could “spell English words of four syllables.”
“Watchfulness, on our part,” Bingham writes, “was demanded not to provoke needless hostility or to wound unduly the self esteem of the grandees, and at the same time not to omit to do good to them and their needy people according to the explicit commands of the Bible.”
“Under such a despotic government,” Lucy asserted, “it was all important that those in authority be taught and Christianized. It was forging a key that would unlock privileges to a nation.” This was both an astute tactic as well as the missionaries’ only choice, given the king’s initial denial of literacy to commoners. For instance, tutoring the king’s younger brother was a wise investment of Lucy Thurston’s limited time. The child would eventually succeed his sibling and become King Kamehameha III, the longest-reigning monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Lucy must have swelled with pride a few years later when her former student ascended the throne and outlawed adultery. (That word, by the way, did not exist in the Hawaiian vocabulary and so, technically, the government of Kamehameha III outlawed the delightful crime of “mischievous mating.”)
One day, Lucy was in her house, tutoring the prince, when one of the unemployed priests burst in. He was drunk. Before she knew it, her student and his entourage had vanished, leaving her alone in the house with the invader, who “threw himself upon the bed and seemed to enjoy the luxury of rolling from side to side upon its white covering.” He then chased her around the house and out into the yard, where Lucy bashed him with a stick and ran away. She sprinted to fetch her husband and they returned home, where she collapsed into “trembling and tears.” Soon the house was filled with concerned chiefs. “The queens were very sympathizing,” she recalled. “With tears they often tenderly embraced me, joined noses a
nd said: ‘Very great is our love to you.’ ”
Lucy and Asa’s grandson, Lorrin A. Thurston, would go on to be one of the leaders of the coup d’état against the Hawaiian queen in 1893. In his memoirs, he wrote of his grandmother, “She was as much a missionary as her husband.” Her work as a teacher, he pointed out, was “not only as a literary teacher, but as a teacher of housekeeping, sewing, cooking, and care of children.” For this, he marveled, she “received no salary whatsoever.” And not only that, she managed her household on the miserly stipend the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions paid her husband. Lorrin Thurston writes that his grandmother once told him a story “illustrating the economical character of the American Board”:
The family was without a dictionary; she proposed to the children that, if they would go without butter made from the milk of the family cow, she would sell the butter and buy a dictionary with the proceeds. The children agreed, and the book was bought, but afterward, the authorities of the American Board having discovered how she obtained it, the cost was deducted from her husband’s salary.
Lucy delivered one of those children on a schooner headed toward a missionary meeting on Oahu. Giving birth, from what I’ve seen on sitcoms, looks painful enough on dry land. Lucy had her baby in the throes of seasickness. Then, later on, after a Honolulu doctor diagnosed her with breast cancer, he deemed chloroform too risky for her mastectomy and so she was wide awake for an hour and a half, sitting up straight in a wooden chair while the doctor sliced off her breast, her blood spattering his eyes.
Her take on the operation was that it “inspired me with freedom.” Afterward, she proclaimed, “I am willing to suffer. I am willing to die. I am not afraid of death. I am not afraid of hell.”
When the time came to ask the missionary board for new blood, reinforcements to aid the pioneer company in their work, Asa Thurston sent headquarters a description of the qualities to look for in an applicant. His ideal missionary bears a striking resemblance to his wife, the good sport:
