by Sarah Vowell
Bingham does speak lovingly of certain American and English ships’ captains, calling them “neighbors” from whom the missionaries “received repeated tokens of kindness, which alleviated the trials of our early exile.” And the missionaries’ diaries do record the visits of the occasional whaleman dropping by one of the mission houses in search of a Bible. Yet Bingham’s fond feelings for some of the more upright sailors did not extend to their livelier shipmates, whose behavior was not necessarily “favorable to the peace, reputation or success of the missionaries, or their native helpers.”
Bingham complains that the missionaries’ early English lessons involved un-teaching the natives the “language of Pandemonium” they had picked up from “the frequent intercourse with an ungodly class of profane abusers of our noble English,” i.e., sailors.
Remember that breakthrough night when the Binghams attended Kaahumanu’s sickbed and Sybil Bingham described the “pleasant sound” of the queen asking Hiram to pray? In the same journal entry Sybil mentions that later that evening they returned home to a horrid racket, “the shameless conduct of intoxicated white men.” Honolulu, she said, reminded her of “the guilty streets of Sodom.”
Once the Cook expedition returned home to England in 1780, news of Hawaii spread fast, attracting steady ship traffic, mostly commercial vessels in the China trade like the one that scooped up Henry Obookiah.
Then Nantucket whale hunters discovered plentiful sperm whale fisheries off the coasts of Peru in 1818 and Japan in 1820. Located smack dab between two of the most lucrative fishing holes ever found, Hawaii in general, and Honolulu and Lahaina in particular, became the whalers’ favorite stopping place, especially since Japan was closed to foreigners until 1853. The whalers visited Hawaii to refuel, pick up fresh food, water, and other supplies, air out ornery crews, and hire on new sailors, many of them native Hawaiians, to replace deserters.
In response to this influx, Hawaiian farmers started to grow more of the crops favored by sailors, such as potatoes, as well as raise more cattle, originally introduced on the islands as a gift from George Vancouver to Kamehameha I. Businesses such as stores, hotels, bars, bowling alleys, and shipping suppliers sprang up along the waterfronts. The previous barter economy, in which Hawaiians traded foodstuffs and sandalwood to sailors for Western and Asian goods, turned increasingly to cash—mostly, but not exclusively, American. “Money is beginning to be an important article,” Levi Chamberlain wrote the secretary of the ABCFM in 1825. When a Nantucket whaler stopped at Lahaina in 1852, the captain’s wife, Eliza Brock, wrote in her journal about shopping at a store selling “every thing beautiful of China goods, but everything is very dear here, too dear to buy much.”
In 1848, the first American ship to hunt polar whales in the Arctic pulled into Honolulu Harbor. I doubt the coral-block church Hiram Bingham designed was the first place those whalemen went to brag about their feat. The subsequent fashionable if miserable business of arctic whaling soon made Hawaii’s subtropical ports all the more alluring to the frostbitten crews.
Until the first petroleum well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, whale oil was oil. In Leviathan, a fine history of whaling, Eric Jay Dolin enumerates whale oil’s manifold applications: “It was used in the production of soap, textiles, leather, paints, and varnishes, and it lubricated the tools and machines that drove the Industrial Revolution.” In fact, its use as a lubricant impervious to extremes in temperature persisted well into the space age—NASA lubed its moon landers and other remotely operated vehicles with sperm whale oil until the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling in 1986.
“To the whalemen,” Dolin asserts, “whales were swimming profit centers to be taken advantage of, not preserved.” He talks up ambergris, “a byproduct of irritation in a sperm whale’s bowel” as the ingredient that “gave perfumes great staying power and was worth its weight in gold.” A lady who dabbed floral-scented whale bowel irritant behind her ears also cinched whalebone around her waist. “The baleen cut from the mouths of whales,” Dolin points out, “shaped the course of feminine fashion by putting the hoop in hooped skirts and giving form to stomach-tightening and chest-crushing corsets.” Baleen was also used in umbrellas. A text panel at the Whalers Village Museum in Lahaina calls it “the true forerunner to plastic.”
In the nineteenth century, Dolin boasts, “American whale oil lit the world.” He notes, “Spermaceti, the waxy substance from the heads of sperm whales, produced the brightest- and cleanestburning candles the world has ever known.”
Imagine a Bostonian in 1851 sitting by the fire in his Beacon Hill parlor, trying to make sense of a strange new novel called Moby-Dick. He comes to the passage in which the sailor narrating the book brags about “us whale hunters” how “almost all tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!” This reader must have glanced sideways at the table next to his chair and stared at the whale-oil lamp or the whale-oil candle illuminating the page he was on. How many times must he have looked upon his reading light in wonder, or horror, as he progressed through Melville’s weird yarns of whale butchery? Especially after perusing the homoerotic paragraph in chapter 94 when Ishmael, along with his swarthy shipmates, was elbow deep in a vat of spermaceti trying to squeeze the hardened sludge back into liquid form (because it cools and hardens postmortem). Ishmael swoons over this orgy of greasy squeezing, sometimes clasping and stroking his coworkers’ hands beneath the slime: “Let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.” Could a genteel reader ever light his spermaceti candles again without blushing?
Melville, himself a former hand on the whale ship Acushnet, captured whaling’s glories and horrors—the tyranny of its captains, the racial variety and bravery of its crews, the excitement of harpooning and the hellish fires heating the try-pots, those colossal iron cauldrons of boiling oil, their noxious fires fueled by hacked-up whale bits used as kindling. As a display at the Whalers Village Museum puts it, “The whale was literally cooking itself on the flames of its own blubber.”
Considering that it is located within a Lahaina mall with a store called Island Cutie, a shopper who wanders into the Whalers Village Museum can learn a thing or two: processing a whale takes a couple of days and “could yield up to 2,000 gallons of oil”; the ship Sarah sailed home to Nantucket with “almost 3,500 barrels of sperm oil on one voyage worth $89,000”; “a single try-pot could render two hundred gallons of oil per hour.” Also, “injured sailors faced the horror of surgery performed by ship masters using carpentry and sail making tools.”
The museum displays a replica of a forecastle, the dark, dirty sleeping quarters below deck. There men were shoehorned into grim little bunk beds infested with fleas and lice. As a sufferer of claustrophobia and seasickness, I can barely look at the creepy forecastle exhibit without dry-heaving.
Most whaling ships were based out of New England, and most of those from New Bedford, Massachusetts, where, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “they hug an oil-cask like a brother.”
I stopped by New Bedford on one of those perfect New England October days, when the sky is blue and the leaves are gilded and the air has that bracing autumnal bite so that all you want to do is bob for apples or hang a witch or something.
I came to visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum, but really the whole town is a whaling museum. At the National Park Service’s visitor center I chatted with the volunteer manning the information booth. I asked her if she had ever attended the town’s annual Moby-Dick marathon, in which the novel is read aloud straight through, all night long. Kind of a dream of mine to witness that. She winced, blurting, “No! I’ve never read Moby-Dick all the way through. I don’t care for it. It’s not my taste.” I found this hilarious and egged her on, said I guess we wouldn’t be discussing our favorite chapters, mine being the one about the sermon delivered in the chapel a couple of blocks away. She pointed out t
he window at passersby and griped, “People around here rhapsodize about it day after day!” Then she asked me if I needed any help and I told her I came in to get a map I had heard about and she asked me which one and I said, “Herman Melville’s New Bedford.” She handed it to me, shaking her head.
I popped in the Seaman’s Bethel, the aforementioned chapel where Melville had an old sea captain turned minister give his whopper of a sermon to whalemen about to ship out. I sat in the pew where the young Melville once sat. It’s a nice little church, its walls lined with tributes to men lost at sea. But the place is marred by the phony, cartoonish ship-shaped pulpit the town put there after the John Huston movie of Moby-Dick came out in 1956 and tourists showed up expecting to see the stupid movie prop Orson Welles stood behind to deliver the sermon. I know sixteen-year-olds who have never heard of Bill Murray, much less John Huston; I think it’s safe to say visitors’ Huston-movie expectations have dwindled to the point where the real pulpit can be once again restored. Then maybe they could haul the boaty lectern to the visitor center. The only thing funnier than a New Bedford tourism ambassador who hates Moby-Dick would be a New Bedford tourism ambassador denouncing Moby-Dick from the pulpit of Moby-Dick the movie.
Moving along, past the house where Frederick Douglass lived for a spell after his escape from slavery, I ambled up to the Greek Revival mansion the whaling merchant William Rotch, Jr., built in 1834. Admiring its shuttered windows, columned porch, polished antiques, and sumptuous carpets, I thought of the grimy sailors whose sweat paid for such finery and how they drank and whored through Lahaina, or tried to. Of the splendid homes like Rotch’s, Melville noted that “all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.”
The captains in the employ of Rotch and his fellow merchants passed through the Doric columns of the Customs House on their way in and out of town. Built in 1836, and designed by the architect of the Washington Monument, it’s still the oldest operating customs house in the country. A plaque points out, “Here ship captains walked up the granite steps to register their crews and declare their cargoes before they were granted clearance to leave or enter the port.” Because it is still a federal building, a portrait of the president of the United States hangs in the hallway inside. I can’t help but wonder what those old captains would think if they saw the picture and learned that the president was born in Honolulu, now a state capital.
When those captains walked out of the Customs House toward the waterfront, they did so with the knowledge that they wouldn’t be declaring any cargo for three or four years, the average length of a whaling voyage.
By the time the captains and their crews were given their first leave in Polynesia they had usually been at sea for a year or more. The sailors came ashore malnourished, flea-bitten, and flogged, ships’ captains maintaining discipline with the crack of the whip. For some of them, jumping ship in subtropical islands proved too tantalizing to resist. This included Herman Melville, who, despite his epic mash notes to the whaleman’s life, ditched his ship, Acushnet, in the Marquesas Islands, hiding in the hinterlands until the ship finally left without him. He made his way to Honolulu, where he worked in one of the bowling alleys where his fellow miscreant sailors amused themselves. Then he went home and wrote, among other books, Moby-Dick. It flopped and he worked as a customs inspector in New York until he died.
Because of this persistent parade of deadbeats washing ashore, going AWOL in Hawaii was illegal. Not that that stopped sailors from sticking around. I’ve been to the old prison in Lahaina. It has a sunny courtyard shaded by palms. Even lockup in Hawaii was preferable to the floating jails the men had forsaken.
After months if not years of monotony on board a whale ship, long stretches of boredom in between the occasional panicky whale hunt followed by the stench of burning blubber—after being cooped up with filthy, farting, masturbating shipmates, enduring the captain’s beatings, the sickening food, the rancid water—it goes without saying that a whaleman pulling into Lahaina or Honolulu was going to want to blow off some steam. Perhaps grab a drink with one hand and a girl with the other.
The last thing a sailor wanted to see on shore was “a tall, dark-looking man, with a commanding eye, thin lips and a clean shaven face,” as William Thomes described the missionary who came to rescue him from fun. Thomes, a deserter, had been hiding out in a happy little native enclave on Oahu. He had settled into the contented village rhythms of fishing and eating fruit. The missionary, informing Thomes he was breaking the law by abandoning his ship without government consent, nagged, “You are living here in idleness and sin, I suppose.”
In the four decades the Sandwich Islands Mission lasted, which happened to coincide with whaling’s golden age, the ABCFM dispatched twelve boatloads of ministers from New England harbors. Hawaiian ports hosted six hundred whaleships in 1846 alone.
This influx was especially apparent in Lahaina, a small, charming city a few streets deep nestled between an excellent harbor and the West Maui Mountains. Nowadays, cruise ships pull in there instead of whalers but the effect is similar in terms of head count, if not physical appearance. I happened to be downtown one day when a Princess cruise ship let loose scores of elderly looky-loos. These retirees were certainly cleaner than the whalemen of yore, and most of them were excited about historic walking tours instead of booze or trysts, but it was still a flash flood of haoles pouring down the narrow streets.
Wildly outnumbered by seamen, the missionaries nevertheless had the ear of the government, whom they persuaded to limit liquor sales and outlaw not just prostitution but fornication in general.
One of the earliest publications of the printing press at the Honolulu mission house was a handbill decreed by the king (under missionary advice) on March 8, 1822. To wit:
Whereas disturbances have arisen of late on shore, the peace broken and the inhabitants annoyed, by the crews of different vessels having liberty granted them on shore, it is hereby ordered by His Majesty the King, that in future, should any seamen of whatever vessel, be found riotous or disturbing the peace in any manner, he or they shall be immediately secured in the Fort, where he or they shall be detained until thirty dollars is paid for the release of each offender.
As the missionaries gained more and more influence over Queen Kaahumanu, the other high chiefs, and, eventually, the king, the prohibitions against sailors’ bad behavior multiplied and got more amusingly specific. Arrest statistics posted at the old prison in Lahaina for convictions on Maui, Molokai, and Lanai in 1855 include 335 cases of drunkenness, 111 counts of adultery and fornication, 49 for breaking the Sabbath, 21 for profanity, 14 for “disturbing the quiet of the night,” and, my personal favorite, 89 cases of “furious riding,” which is to say, speeding on horseback.
At the New Bedford Whaling Museum, I watched a film whose narrator noted that the whalers “find themselves taking America to where it had never been before.” That statement is even truer in Hawaii, where the sailors as well as the missionaries, most of them born within 150 miles of Boston Harbor, established a new front of America’s time-honored culture war halfway around the world. “Evidently the Pacific was a Boston suburb,” Earl Derr Biggers wrote in 1925.
The conflict between Saturday night and Sunday morning is older than New England. English immigrants to that region during the Great Migration from 1620 to 1640 were divided into “saints and strangers,” the Pilgrims and Puritans who exiled themselves to farm and worship God versus their secular fellow travelers, many of them fishermen, whose taverns soon outnumbered the churches. One of the godly condemned his saltier fisherfolk neighbors as “beastly, barbarous, belching drunkards.”
To pious New Englanders agriculture was culture. The word the English used to describe their colonies was “plantation.” When Samuel J. Mills, Jr., brought Henry Obookiah home to his minister father’s Connecticut farm, Mills Sr. swooned over how
handy Obookiah was with a sickle, speedy reaping apparently indicating good moral character. One reason the ABCFM approved the layman Daniel Chamberlain’s appointment in the pioneer missionary company was his background as a farmer. The board believed he would lead the charge in achieving the mission’s goal of “covering those islands with fruitful fields.” Of course, the islands were already covered in fruitful fields of actual fruit, as well as taro and sweet potatoes, the Hawaiians being expert horticulturists already. The natives had even mastered growing taro, a wetland crop, in the islands’ dry plains.
Chamberlain, his skills superfluous, took ill, along with his wife. When they decided to move with their five children back to the United States in 1823, their voyage home ended with a lawsuit, Chamberlain v. Chandler. But it might as well have been called Saint v. Stranger, considering how perfectly it symbolized the cultural divide between New England’s fishers and fishers of men.
According to an account in the periodical The Missionary Herald , the Chamberlains’ skipper, one Captain Chandler, “cherished a most malignant hatred of missionaries. . . . During nearly the whole voyage, he was guilty of gross abuse towards Mr. Chamberlain, his wife and children. This abuse was principally confined to language.” In short, the Chamberlains spent the entire trip being cussed at. They sued, winning $400 in damages for mental suffering.
The years 1826 and ’27 marked the nadir of missionaryseaman relations. The Sandwich Islands section of the ABCFM’s annual report in 1827 tiptoes up to its chronicle of disturbing anecdotes. The mortified report states that in Hawaii, “a series of events took place, which, for the honor of our country and of Christendom, the Committee would gladly pass over in silence.”
In January of 1826 the demure chronicle contends that the Dolphin, a United States military ship, arrived in Honolulu. “Her commander expressed his regret at the existence of a law, prohibiting females from visiting ships on an infamous errand.” Learning of Hiram Bingham’s influence, and determined to procure female companionship for himself and his shipmates, the captain informed the high chiefs “that unless the law against prostitution were repealed, he would come and tear down the houses of the missionaries.”
