Unfamiliar Fishes

by Sarah Vowell

  Smola contends, “The first reason is that the termites here are voracious, so if you want a very permanent structure, you have to find something that the termites won’t eat. The other reason is that, cut into about two-foot-wide slabs like this, they made for very good insulation, keeping things cool in summer and warm in winter. By the way, some of the blocks used to build the church weigh over a thousand pounds, and it took over fourteen thousand blocks.”

  I have a Frommer’s guidebook to Honolulu whose point-blank entry on the church claims the divers who harvested the coral “raped the reefs.” By today’s ecological standards, the Kawaiaha‘o Church is a veritable Nanking of marine biology. Still, even if Bingham, its architect, clued in to the fact that coral reefs are colonies of living creatures sustaining underwater ecosystems, the Book of Genesis had rubber-stamped his dominion over the fish of the sea. (The church happened to be dedicated in 1842, a couple of months after Charles Darwin published Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, his first volume of findings from the voyage of the Beagle.)

  Smola points at the Chamberlain house, mentioning it was “built in 1831 completely out of coral rock, just like the church. Now this,” he says of the building’s white surface, “is actually a fake brick façade here. What they did is, they made a form of lime plaster by burning coral, turning it into a paste, stuccoing over the coral, and then basically stamping the brick pattern into it.”

  Even if the idea of coral brick is now distasteful, it’s nevertheless an aesthetically pleasing material with a bumpy, biological texture. Kawaiaha‘o is actually one of the prettiest buildings in Honolulu. That the missionaries spackled over and painted the rough surface of the coral rock on the Chamberlain house and then incised perpendicular lines in the plaster to ape the look of a New England house is somehow baffling and understandable at the same time. Plastering over the natural rock is the perfect symbol of what they hoped to do to the Hawaiians’ earthy way of life.

  Smola points out, “The major reason for this was that in accordance with their own beliefs they’re not just mikanele for God, but also mikanele for Western ways of living. Which of course in New England means brick homes. This is a way for them to model that without actually having to make brick, which would have been fairly difficult here in the islands.”

  “The missionaries set up schools at every single mission station,” Smola says of the cellar room where Sybil Bingham conducted hers. He continues, “Many times they had satellite schools taught by older students.” That was one of the ABCFM’s shrewd moves worldwide, to increase literacy exponentially by dispatching ace pupils to a country’s more remote regions.

  The missionaries, Smola remarks, “focused on literacy very hard in their schools. This is mostly religiously motivated. Being good Protestants, they believed you had to be able to read the Bible for yourself in order to convert and to believe.” He is referring to the Protestant Reformation’s gift to the world—denying the power of priests to stand between believers and God. The Protestant mandate that each Christian, no matter how lowly, must read the Bible for him- or herself, was both a religious revolution and, more important, an educational one.

  “Now, it is worth noting,” Smola says, “that the mikanele did teach their schools in Hawaiian. They preached in their churches in Hawaiian, and even wrote hymns in Hawaiian, in addition to doing translation work.” In fact, since Asa Thurston preached his sermons in Hawaiian, after their children were born, Lucy lobbied to keep the youngsters home on Sundays so she could offer them Sabbath teachings in English, one of her many unpaid chores.

  Bingham writes in his memoir about how, in the pulpit and in the schools, the missionaries drew on the ABCFM’s earlier stateside success stories as teaching tools, particularly the biographies of Henry Obookiah and a Cherokee girl named Catherine Brown. Brown converted to Christianity when she studied at the ABCFM’s first mission school in the Cherokee Nation. Following the ABCFM pattern of sending its best students farther into the hinterland to teach their countrymen, Brown signed up to teach at another Cherokee school the board established in Alabama. When Brown died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-three, the ABCFM capitalized on her passing the same way they did Obookiah’s, publishing a memoir of her conversion and subsequent piety in which she is quoted as saying, “My heart bleeds for my people” and “I cannot . . . express how much I love the missionaries with whom I live.”

  Bingham writes that the Hawaiian pupils found Brown’s life story “encouraging . . . partly because she had been in circumstances similar to their own.”

  Obookiah’s biography, of course, was the perfect parable. “One of the exercises from Sabbath to Sabbath,” Bingham writes of the mission’s early years, “was the reading and interpreting of successive portions of the memoir of Henry Opukahaia. . . . Our pupils, who had listened to the narrative with increasing interest, many of them tenderly wept.”

  In April of 1821, a year after the Binghams’ arrival, Liholiho and Kaahumanu moved their court to Honolulu. That fall, the royal retinue voyaged to Kauai, and when they returned to Oahu, Kaahumanu brought back two new husbands—Kaumualii, the high chief of Kauai, and one of his sons (though not George from the Cornwall school). This was sort of a bad news/good news development for the missionaries, who frowned upon the fatherson husband situation. Kaumualii was nevertheless one of their most promising pupils of Christianity and so they welcomed his influence on his daunting new wife, whom Bingham had described as “either heedless in regard to Christianity, or scornfully averse to our instructions.” Kaumualii assured Bingham, “I have told her some things about God.”

  In December, Kaahumanu took so ill she was, according to Bingham, at “the borders of the grave.” Sybil describes in her journal paying a visit with her husband to Kaahumanu’s “sick couch.” Each Bingham held a hand of the queen’s and “she seemed not only willing, but desirous to hear something from the servants of the living God.” Hiram was all too happy to comply, assuring the queen, “that the blessed Savior who died for sinners could preserve her body and her soul; that he could restore her to health.”

  The Binghams returned the next day and Sybil took to “rubbing her with spirits of camphor.” When the queen asked Hiram to pray, Sybil writes, “I need not say this was a pleasant sound in our ears.”

  Describing his wife’s soothing bedside manner, Hiram is so admiring I almost like him a little. “With unfeigned sympathy,” he wrote, Sybil “bound a silken cord around [Kaahumanu’s] heart, from which I think she never broke loose while she lived.”

  Kaahumanu’s sister queen, Keopuolani, suffered a similar sickbed change of heart in 1822 and invited missionaries to preach to her in her home in Waikiki. She was a quick study, applying herself to reading and writing lessons, dismissing her second husband so that she could practice proper Christian monogamy, and turning down an old drinking buddy’s offering of rum, explaining, “I am afraid of the everlasting fire.”

  Keopuolani’s health improved by the time the second company of missionaries arrived in 1823, and she purloined a few to take with her to Lahaina, a port town on Maui, the island where she was born. She built them a church and a school there. She was dead within the year, but not before issuing firm instructions to her family and the other high chiefs. She requested a proper Christian burial (instead of burning the flesh off her bones per ancient Hawaiian ritual). According to missionary William Richards, she asked, “Let my body be put in a coffin.” She urged her husband to see that her son Kauikeaouli (with whom she broke the eating kapu four years earlier) and her daughter Nahi‘ena‘ena “should be instructed in Christianity.” Her daughter, especially, the queen hoped, “may learn to love God and Jesus Christ.” Richards reported that she advised her son King Liholiho, “Protect the missionaries.”

  Protection they would need, but Liholiho wasn’t around to follow through. After his mother died, he and his favorite queen, Kamamalu, sailed to Great Britain, intent on meeting the English king. This summit
never took place. Liholiho and his wife both died of measles in London.

  His eleven-year-old brother, Kauikeaouli, took the name Kamehameha III. His stepmother, Queen Kaahumanu, ruled as his regent until her death in 1832.

  After the Binghams personally taught Kaahumanu to read—seated on the floor of her thatched house, according to Hiram—she became an official member of the church in 1825. “Of what amazing consequence was it that Kaahumanu should be a believer and advocate of Christianity!” Hiram exclaimed.

  Bingham noted that her approval of the missionary endeavor sparked “the need of a great increase of native teachers” as well as printed matter. “Many are the people,” Kaahumanu said. “Few are the books.” Though not for long, as the missionaries’ printing presses started cranking out Bibles, spelling books, and the first newspaper printed west of the Rockies.

  One of the rooms in the wood home at the Mission Houses Museum was Kaahumanu’s guest room. She became, Mike Smola says, “a very frequent visitor to the mission station here, so much that she referred to this room as her apartment.” One of the queen’s high-necked cotton dresses is laid out on the little rope bed, ready to welcome her. It’s the same sort of outfit worn by the present-day Kaahumanu Society, an organization of ladies who are easy to pick out of a crowd at celebrations and parades because they wear identical black frocks in the style of the one displayed in the mission museum.

  In the chronology of Hawaii’s Americanization, that stuffy little room with Kaahumanu’s frumpy dress is one of the landmarks, emblematic of the replacement of airy grass dwellings and airier flimsy skirts with wooden houses and long-sleeved outfits.

  Five or ten years before Captain Cook arrived in Hawaii, Kaahumanu was born in a cave. The contrast between her mission house “apartment” and her rocky birthplace above Maui’s Hana Bay provides a perfect education in the changes visited upon her country. Within a ten-minute walk from the mission house in Honolulu, a visitor can see the Victorian-style palace erected by later monarchs, skyscrapers of the business district, and the concrete, Nixon-era state capitol. Getting to her birthplace involves a dodgy hike up what my guidebook optimistically called a “trail.” On the climb, my family and I had to cling to the branches of ironwood trees to avoid falling into the churning water below. Her birth cave, a womblike divot in the rock face, reeked of some decomposing animal. (“Don’t go in there,” Owen advised. “It smells like roadkill.”) The bay was visible through the trees and Hawaiian men were rowing out to sea in an outrigger canoe just as they’ve been doing since long before baby Kaahumanu was born.

  IN HIS TOUR of the mission house Mike Smola says, “Now, of course the mikanele were here to spread their message of Christianity. In order to do that, you need Bibles. They very quickly determined they would like a Hawaiian-language Bible. There was an issue with this in 1820. There was no such thing as a form of written Hawaiian here in the islands. And I do emphasize here in the islands.” He notes that back in Connecticut, Obookiah had invented an eccentric “grammar structure that used numbers to represent certain sounds.”

  Smola emphasizes, “The Hawaiians who lived here had a very deep, rich, and long oral tradition. Everything from memory: songs, chants, and stories detailing their history, their genealogy, their cultural stories, their religion. They also had the hula, which tells stories through dance movements, and petroglyphs, or rock carvings, rock pictures. But they didn’t have an alphabet as such.”

  The missionaries, Smola points out, employed “the Roman alphabet we use in English. Now, the initial form of written Hawaiian in 1822 consisted of seventeen of twenty-six English characters. Five vowels, twelve consonants. By 1826 there was an effort to standardize the written form of the language. They thought they were better served by a smaller alphabet. What they found was that several letters served the same purpose. For example B and D functioned the same as P; K the same as T; L the same as R; and B the same as W. If you look up an 1825 map of Oahu, you’ll see a little tiny town on the south shore marked ‘Honoruru,’ as opposed to Honolulu. You also see references to ‘Tamehameha,’ as opposed to Kamehameha. So basically what happened was by 1826 a committee of mikanele and native Hawaiians got together and voted B, D, R, T, and V out of the alphabet, leaving us a modern Hawaiian alphabet of twelve letters. A, E, I, O, U, H, P, L, K, M, N, W.

  “It took the missionaries seventeen years to translate the Bible into Hawaiian,” Smola says. Partly, this is because they had so many other things to do. In Levi Chamberlain’s diary, he composes entries about meetings to discuss how to go about inventing a Hawaiian grammar that are followed by entries about wrestling a 120-gallon barrel of oil into the basement. Another reason it took so long is that they were persnickety well-educated New Englanders who wanted to get it right. As Smola points out, “They did not translate it from English. They went back to the original Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament and translated that directly into Hawaiian, giving us this book, Ke Kauoha Hou, the Holy Scriptures. A book of 2,331 pages, it is, by the way, about twice as long as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And, even more amazingly, they went on to print about ten thousand copies of it.”

  Translating directly from Hebrew and Greek to Hawaiian speaks to the influence of the original New England clerics. The desire to train ministers capable of studying the Bible in Hebrew and Greek is the foundation of higher education in New England, and thus the United States. The Massachusetts Bay colonists, whose early ministers were mostly Cambridge-trained theologians from the old country, clamored to build a college on the outskirts of Boston to train a new generation of clergymen in those ancient tongues. And so, only six years after their arrival in the New World, they founded Harvard College in 1636. Harvard did not drop compulsory Hebrew for all students until 1755, the year John Adams graduated. Those finicky standards speak to the reason Hiram Bingham and Asa Thurston were the only members of the first company of missionaries to be called missionaries. The other men on the Thaddeus were deemed “assistants.” Bingham and Thurston were properly ordained graduates of the new seminary at Andover. Thurston had attended Timothy Dwight’s Yale before that. This preoccupation, more than racism, explains why later on the New Englanders will deny the indispensible Thomas Hopu’s request to become a full-fledged minister instead of merely the missionaries’ helper—not so much because he was Hawaiian but because he wasn’t a seminarian.

  Smola shows off the museum’s replica of the Ramage printing press the missionaries brought with them on the Thaddeus. Besides the Bible, he says, “They also printed newspapers, hymnals, schoolbooks, government laws and proclamations, broadsides, and flyers. It’s estimated that in twenty years, between 1822 and 1842, the mission presses put out over 113 million sheets of printed paper, virtually all of it in Hawaiian.”

  Smola says that from the first page printed in the Hawaiian islands in 1822 to the end of missionary operations in 1863, “The Hawaiian people accomplished an absolutely incredible educational feat. They went from having no written language here on the islands to seventy-five percent of all Hawaiians learning to read and write in their native language. By the way, if you factor in the slave population in the South of the United States in 1863, the literacy rate was roughly forty percent. Western Europe had a literacy rate of about sixty-five percent, which means in about forty-one years Hawaii became one of the most literate nations on the planet as a percentage of its total population. And that is perhaps the greatest accomplishment of these mikanele.”

  After the arrival of the second company of ABCFM missionaries, in 1823, the king and the chiefs lifted the ban on teaching commoners to read. Charles Stewart, one of the new arrivals, wrote in his journal in 1824 that the chiefs “expressly declared their intentions to have all their subjects enlightened by the palapala [the Hawaiian word for books and learning] and have accordingly made applications for books to distribute among them.”

  The printer Elisha Loomis wrote to the secretary of the ABCFM in 1825
, “The demand for books has been so great. . . . A vast number of people have become able to read, and a vast number of others will be able to read by the time one of the gospels can be put into their hands.”

  In 1825, Kaahumanu and the high chiefs gathered in Honolulu and, according to Levi Chamberlain’s journal, they “agreed to patronize instruction, and engaged to use their influence in extending it throughout the islands.” They also agreed to “suppress vice, such as drunkenness, debauchery, theft and the violation of the Sabbath.”

  Thus within five years of their arrival the New Englanders had won over key players in the ruling class. The same cannot be said about the missionaries’ peskiest opponents—their fellow Americans, the sailors.

  I’M HARD-PRESSED TO find a more momentous season in the history of Hawaii than the autumn of 1819. Kealakekua Bay—the already significant Big Island cove where Captain Cook died and Henry Obookiah lit out for America—welcomed the first two New England whaling ships on September 29. Three weeks later, the first missionaries departed Boston on the Thaddeus. Two weeks after that the eating kapus came to an abrupt end.

  Thus within five weeks during the presidency of James Monroe, Hawaii’s stormy course toward becoming the fiftieth state was charted. The Hawaiian people, with their ancient balance between spiritual beliefs and earthly pleasure, were suddenly freed of or in need of an official religion, depending on one’s point of view, and about to entertain swarms of haole gate-crashers representing opposing sides of America’s schizophrenic divide—Bible-thumping prudes and sailors on leave. Imagine if the Hawaii Convention Center in Waikiki hosted the Values Voter Summit and the Adult Entertainment Expo simultaneously—for forty years. As Hiram Bingham put it dryly, “It has been said that the interests of the mission, and the interests of commerce, were so diverse, or opposite, that they could not flourish together.”