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CHAPTER 2

Creating an Island Imaginary

Hawai‘i’s American Origins

Long before American westward expansion and the growth of the United States into a global imperial power in the late nineteenth century, America found itself entangled with the Hawaiian Islands in ways that were far less self-assured, far more tentative, and far more curious than an anachronistic focus on colonialism, imperialism, and “nation” might suggest. Hawai‘i became a place more prominent during the Early Republic, an opportune space through which American conceptions of the world and the United States’ new place in it expanded. In looking closely at the entertainments that came to the Atlantic, made from narratives and material objects brought back from the Pacific, we can see the development of an American imaginary of the Hawaiian Islands and kānaka constructed as bountiful, full of alluring women and fierce warriors, ripe and open for the “influence” of great, civilizing European and American men. Americans’ imagined Sandwich Islands were shaped by enterprising entertainment producers and curiosity collectors, who shaped the tastes of Americans eager to consume Hawaiian objects: pieces of information, material curiosities, and stories of paradise.

This chapter focuses on the self-interested efforts of the New England–based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) to raise money for a school in Connecticut and a series of missions to bring Christianity and its church to the Hawaiian Islands by producing narratives of the lives of young Hawaiian men living in New England. It examines the way in which these native men’s stories were the ground in which settler origins were sown, and though these historical narrativizations were keenly opportunistic, when read against the grain, they illuminate a portion of the experience of the Hawaiian men living in New England at the time. American familiarity with an imagined Hawai‘i is profoundly transformed with the advent of the ABCFM’s Sandwich Island Mission in 1820. From that point onward, an avalanche of administrative and official reports and histories produced by the ABCFM reschooled American expectations about the islands. In this new light, Hawai‘i became a field in which an American mission was planted to civilize and save Hawaiian souls.

A central component of the ABCFM mission was the narrative fashioning of native subjects suitable for conversion, the young male escaped from a pagan world of savagery. Before the Sandwich Islands Mission could come to fruition, the figure of the young Hawaiian male, freed from human sacrifice, became an ideal vessel for stirring public sentiment and stimulating financial support of the mission. The funds raised by the individual stories and testimonies of these men would facilitate the planting of an American mission church in Hawaiian soil, free from British and American authorities and the bitterness of church controversies and denominational competition that continued to roil the New England landscape. Reading through the surface to the more complex contradictions of these public productions of Hawaiian types—fierce and deadly warriors, the intensely desirable women whom men are always fighting for, the noble yet not yet civilized chief, and the earnest and skilled Hawaiian convert—we will find the basic bedrock of imaginary fantasies of Hawai‘i that continue to be reproduced today. More immediately, the production of these types for late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Atlantic public consumption set the stage for increasingly intimate connections—both imaginary and material—between the young republic’s people and an emerging Hawaiian nation. The disorderliness of a savage desire for women and things must, in these narratives, give way to the civilized orderliness of restraint and Christianity. And nothing was more likely to stir American desire to consume Hawaiian things than stories of sex, sacrifice, and death.

Ship captains returned home from the Pacific with souvenirs, and news of their contributions to American museums was published in the papers. In 1790, a “donation of curiosities” was deposited at the Museum at Cambridge by Boston-based ship captains James Magee (Astrea) and Joseph Ingraham (Columbia), showcasing materials from places along emergent maritime trade routes connecting New England, China, the Northwest Coast, the Sandwich Islands, and the Southern Pacific with which mariners were familiar. The skin of sea otters from Nootka and a bird of paradise from the Moluccas were “natural curiosities,” while the shoes that bound the feet of Chinese women and mathematical instruments used by merchants were considered “artificial.” From Hawai‘i was collected “a great variety of cloths made of the bark of the mulberry tree, specimens of military weapons, domestic utensils, fishing tackle, musical instruments, dresses, ornaments, and idols.”¹

Whether artificial or natural, these items were artifacts of commerce, merchandise that circulated in exchange networks between Euro-Americans, Asians, and indigenous traders connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic. The items were “highly gratifying to the curious, who love to trace the operations of nature, and observe the progress of human ingenuity and industry in every part of the world.”² Trade goods were collected by historical associations, maritime companies, and museums in Boston, which was just beginning to build its own national collections of cabinets of wonder in the decades following the American Revolution. Stripped of proper context and removed from their places of origin, items were rehistoricized as part of an enlightenment narrative that sought to distinguish nature from ingenuity and industry and that measured progress in the crude or artful distances between items of familiar Euro-American manufacture and those made by heathen hands.³

News from the Pacific was as desired a commodity as material objects. Commercial-minded Americans perusing the papers of the day could search through the shipping news to see the names of ship captains who were putting out to the Sandwich Islands, as well as lists of goods arriving in ports and sold in stores. News also circulated between the ships in the China–Northwest Coast–Sandwich Islands trade, and those returning brought back news about the present state of political affairs in the Sandwich Islands. Readers in America were kept up to date on the progress of Hawaiians toward “civilization” under Tamaahmaah (Kamehameha), along with the progress of his war against other ali‘i, in which Euro-American ships and sailors also took sides. Keeping abreast of the political situation in Hawai‘i, in order to keep investors at home informed, was good for the stability of business.

Burgeoning trade routes between New England, Hawai‘i, China, and the Northwest Coast brought both native bodies and the material culture of their homes to American shores. Knowledge of the Sandwich Islands and Sandwich Islanders in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was readily available. Theater and print, exhibition and collection, exploration and merchant shipping—each venue provided different and very particular kinds of knowledge about Hawai‘i that increased people’s curiosity about the Sandwich Islands. They helped to shape specific images about Hawai‘i and the Pacific as a seemingly known, albeit exotic, place.

But why did Hawai‘i and the Pacific exotic become desirable? Was there some kind of fascination with Hawaiians because these were a people who killed Captain Cook, the man responsible for the torrent of print that came out of his many voyages—the maps, words, and meanings made silenced forever? The reasons why Americans were interested in Hawai‘i were multi-faceted, but what is clear is that the United States trade in the Pacific supplied goods, materials, stories, news, and bodies that circulated in the early American republic, feeding a growing desire for more information of this far-off yet increasingly interesting place.

The ships that hunted whales and brought Hawaiian wood to Chinese markets also carried Hawaiian sailors to New England, several of whom intended to stay. Upon their settlement in the States, these sailors, boys and young men, worked for and were supported by American ship captains, schoolmasters, and ministers. In some cases, they were forced by circumstances to make their own way and find employment and eventual passage home.

In 1802, a young Hawaiian boy of four or five years of age was sent to America for an education by his father, Kaumuali‘i, the ali‘i nui (high chief) of Kaua‘i. Some Hawaiians who never left home had their own ideas about what they wanted from the ship captains, crews, and merchants who passed through or settled in their islands. Kaumuali‘i, one of the last ruling ali‘i to survive Kamehameha’s conquest of the archipelago, never surrendered administration or rule of Kaua‘i, his home island. Rather, Kaumuali‘i gave his lands, men, and munitions over to the Hawai‘i Island chief in 1795 in a symbolic cession which would reverberate through the next generation.

Kaumuali‘i’s gesture to Kamehameha meant that he could continue to rule over the island of Kaua‘i and that he continued to manage his own commercial exchanges with visiting ships. In 1802, Kaumuali‘i made an agreement with Captain James Rowan of the Hazard, sailing out of Providence, Rhode Island. In exchange for money and provisions, Rowan agreed to take Kaumuali‘i’s young son to New England to receive an American education. In this way, Kaumuali‘i set in motion his design for a long-term plan to secure his rule over Kaua‘i. Kaumuali‘i’s hope was that his American-educated son would one day return and assist him in making profitable and well-informed transactions with New England merchants and ship captains in the islands. Perhaps such a son could help him keep his island kingdom, or aid in the expansion of his rule beyond Kaua‘i’s shores.

The boy accompanying Rowan moved a lot for the first decade of his residence in America. He lived in Providence, and in Boston and Worcester, where the property for his care ran out and he was placed in the care of Captain Samuel Cotting. With Cotting, he moved from Worcester to Fitchburg, and then back to Boston. Frustrated by his treatment and the impoverished situation of his various patrons, an underage “George Prince Tamoree” enlisted in the US Navy. He shipped out aboard the US sloop of war Wasp, and then was assigned to the brig Enterprize, where he was wounded in the side by a boarding pike when his ship engaged the British ship Boxer during the War of 1812. After the war, Tamoree was drafted aboard the USS Guerrier and traveled to the Mediterranean. On this voyage, he fought in a three-hour sea battle against Turks from Algiers. It was also on this cruise that Tamoree visited Tripoli, Naples, and Gibraltar. Upon his return to America, Tamoree supported himself by working for the purser at the Charlestown Naval Yard in Massachusetts while looking for a passage home.

By 1814, as Tamoree continued his employment in the US Navy, four other Hawaiian sailors who served on merchant vessels—Henry Obookiah (‘Ōpūkaha‘ia), Thomas Hopoo (Hopu), William Tennooe (Kanui), and John Honoree (Honoli‘i)—had found their way to Connecticut, their living expenses and education supported by a circle of ministers, community and church leaders, and their families. But while this support of former Hawaiian sailors turned students sustained the men for a little while, soon enough, a group of Connecticut ministers would see in the presence of these Hawaiian men an opportunity to set their financial maintenance on firmer foundations, and a chance to develop and extend their Christian duties. New England pastors and parishioners thus discovered the power of promoting stories about the lives of these Hawaiian men living in Connecticut as part of a fund-raising push to raise monies for both the school and the broader American foreign mission movement.

A School for Hawaiians, for Heathen Youth in America

Samuel Mills was one of the young men who took part in the now-famed 1806 Haystack Prayer Meeting while he was a student at Williams College. Mills, along with a few of his fellow classmates, believed that an American Foreign Mission Society should be created. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) arose as a direct result of their queries and the debates that followed. The board had been formally incorporated and recognized by the Massachusetts legislature in 1810, thanks to the faith and efforts of these students, but it was not until Mills and a group of ministers and educators from neighboring Connecticut raised the question of educating and supporting several young men from the Sandwich Islands in 1814 that visions for the success of the mission began to coalesce around heathen youth, specifically these Hawaiian men. In meetings and correspondence, the subject of establishing a school for their education was raised.⁴ Over several years of deliberation about the school and the education of the Hawaiian men, ideas developed about the important role that “heathen” youths would fill in raising the American public’s awareness of foreign missions.⁵ Heathen youth would be used not only to raise awareness, but also to raise funds for the school and the foreign mission movement. Finally, discussions about the role newly educated heathens would play in the foreign mission field of their homelands engendered discussions about the way in which the foreign missionary movement should be structured both in America and in the field.

Samuel Mills first began writing to the Prudential Committee of the ABCFM in 1814 for assistance in the education of Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, who had been under his educational guidance for at least four years. Mills was applying to the committee on behalf of ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia to see if they would consider providing financial support for the young Hawaiian’s education.⁶ Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia was born around 1792 on the island of Hawai‘i and arrived in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1810 along with another Hawaiian man, Thomas Hopu. ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia had been living initially with Captain Brintnall, whose ship he had arrived on, and when the opportunity to obtain an education presented itself, he moved in with the family of Yale president Timothy Dwight, with whom he lived until he met Samuel Mills. ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia went to live with Mills and his family in Torringford, Connecticut. He then moved with Mills in late 1810 to Andover, Massachusetts, when Mills went to undertake his studies at the recently opened Theological Seminary. Henry then went to nearby Branford Academy to pursue his own course of study for a few months. In all, Henry spent two years at Andover with Mills. However, between 1810 and 1816, Henry changed residences frequently, living in Torringford, Andover, Goshen, Litchfield, and Canaan, Connecticut, either following Mills or removing to other situations in order to pursue an erratic course of study with local ministers and deacons, or hiring himself out to work in order to pay for his subsistence.⁷

It seems that nothing formal had been undertaken by the Boston-based board for the financial support of these men through May 1816, as can be seen by ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s frequent movement between households. By this time, however, there were several youths from the Sandwich Islands who were also in Connecticut and whose educations, religious and otherwise, were being supported by the same circle of ministers, educators, and their families who had been helping to provide for ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia. That month, another letter to the board requested “provision for their support,” asking whether or not a school was to be established for these men.⁸ From the necessity of providing financially and spiritually for the five Hawaiians within their community, a larger vision for a Foreign Mission School to train native missionaries was born.

A meeting dedicated to the subject of patronizing the Hawaiian men had been held at New Haven in June of that year, wherein agents and trustees were appointed to “superintend the particular concerns of these young men.”⁹ The next month, the newly elected Board of Trust composed of Rev. Charles Prentice, Rev. Joseph Harvey, and James Morris met in Goshen to deliberate the “best method of conducting the education of these and other heathen youths.” The young men from the Sandwich Islands, noted the trustees in a letter to the board, were sent to them by the hand of Providence in order to “draw the attention of the Christian public to those Islands, as an important missionary field; and also to point out the method of facilitating the introduction of missions to other parts of the heathen world.”¹⁰

Hawaiians, with their frequently remarked-upon amiable dispositions and desire for knowledge, were not only the impetus behind the establishment of a school; their presence in New England spurred discussion and thought about the role “heathens” should play in spreading the gospel in foreign mission fields. Hawaiian men would be invaluable as assistants to missionaries, as “interpreters, schoolmasters, catechists and translators.”¹¹ It was felt that if “properly trained,” the natives would be more successful in discharging the “duties of these subordinate stations” with “much greater success than missionaries from foreign countries.”¹² This developing American missionary theory about the place of natives in foreign mission fields held out the possibility that “natives” would do important work in their homes once educated properly.¹³ Mission letters and pamphlets spoke of the desire of the Hawaiians to “carry the gospel to their perishing country men,”¹⁴ and certainly, over the course of their studies, Hawaiian and other native men cultivated the expectation that they would bear some of the responsibility and pleasure of preaching among and converting their own people.

Discussion about the necessity of building a foreign mission school also engendered thinking about the best system for preparing New England missionaries for foreign mission fields. Missionaries sent to “heathen lands” usually had to spend precious time learning the local language, and once they become relatively accomplished, they would train “assistants,” very often from among the people who taught them the language, to serve as translators and teachers. But the Connecticut trustees proposed that it would be best to establish a school in America, where “youths from different heathen countries may be collected and taught the rudiments of science, the necessary arts of civilized life, and the great principles of Christianity.”¹⁵ They argued for the comparative advantages of this model, since “heathen youths brought to this country and placed in a school, are at once under a regular government, and have their business systematized. They will of course be inured to habits of industry and regularity, they will learn the art of government and subordination.”¹⁶ The school would also benefit American missionaries by affording them the opportunity to study “heathen languages” with their foreign classmates, spending a sufficient enough period that they would be prepared and “furnished with every facility to enter immediately on their work.”¹⁷

Students from around the world had been provided to the mission free of charge, and the Connecticut trustees assured the board that as “commercial relations and enterprise increase, the number of these visitants will also increase.” The trustees clearly had some knowledge of the commercial interests of the nation, since their vision of collecting students followed the Northwest Coast–Hawai‘i–China merchant routes, “We suppose that young men of talents and influence might with little difficulty be obtained from China … from the islands of the sea, from Nootka Sound and the various tribes on the Western Coast of America, from South America.”¹⁸ While builders of missions depended upon merchant shipping to supply students to their schools, they would also find allies in commerce who would carry missionaries to foreign mission fields and facilitate the mission’s progress by carrying letters, journals, and reports back to Boston, where they could be published in newspapers and religious magazines, reaching a large American readership. The trade routes that brought curiosities to American museums would supply students, who would also be placed on display and whose stories circulated through the Christian community. The men would eventually serve as examples of Christian progress—their newly civilized persons made a deeper impression when compared to the already established savage Hawaiian imaginary of print, and the museum.

As a cohort, the Sandwich Islanders embodied a lesson on the spectrum from “savage” to “civilized,” since ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia was by all accounts the furthest along in his education, followed by Thomas Hopu and William Kanui, whereas John Honoli‘i could barely speak any English. The presence of the men in school, at public examinations, in community churches, and on fund-raising tours would, according to the committee, “bring heathen manners, as a living and impressive spectacle. It would afford a constant fund of interesting facts rendered weighty by their proximity, by which we may rouse the attention and call forth the resources of our country in the cause of missions.”¹⁹ While raising awareness, the students would also “call forth” funds for the school and foreign mission cause from the “resources” of the country. The mission school would generate more revenue than “many sermons,” the trustees argued, if annual reports of the progress of the students were made public.²⁰ These observations, they said, came from their own experience with the Hawaiians: “Since the youths from the Sandwich Islands have been under our care, we have found the public greatly interested in their state and concerns. Many generous donations have, unsolicited, poured in upon us, and many have expressed a willingness and even a desire to aid, when their aid is needed.”²¹

In their petitions to the American Board for assistance for the education of these Hawaiian men, the Connecticut group of ministers and community leaders developed ideas about how the mission should be structured both at home and abroad. Instead of focusing on the education of heathen youth in foreign lands, they would concentrate their energies and direct efforts in educating heathen youth in America.

The men from the Sandwich Islands were the impetus behind the establishment of the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut. The Hawaiians were the largest group of pupils hailing from one place in attendance in the school when it unofficially opened on May 1, 1816. By 1817, just one year later, the school housed seven pupils from the Sandwich Islands. As the agents for the school and the General Association of Connecticut were to find, their observations about cultivating the public’s interest in the state, activities, and progress of the Hawaiians to successfully raise funds for the school and the broader cause of foreign missions would pay off handsomely.

The Lives of Men

Before they appeared as signs of Christian providence that inspired calls for the establishment of a school for heathen youth in America, before their names were popularized in newspaper articles or reports and sermons, Henry Obookiah (‘Ōpūkaha‘ia), Thomas Hopoo (Hopu), George Prince Tamoree (Kaumuali‘i), William Tennooe (Kanui), John Honoree (Honoli‘i), and George Sandwich worked as sailors or cabin boys on New England merchant ships. The many different paths which brought these Hawaiian men to the classrooms and dormitories of the Foreign Mission School were obscured by the ways in which the Connecticut Agents of the School and the ABCFM produced and then promoted them as objects of interest for the patronage of the Christian public. As native elites securing alliance and advantage at home, as sailors on ships or marines fighting in the war, as servants or farmers, the lives these men made alongside Americans were barely fleshed out. What was of supreme significance to the mission press was the distance they managed to put between themselves and their heathen pasts through their residence in a civilized nation. What mattered was the promise of what could be done through these educated few once they received instruction paid for by Christian benevolence and once they were returned to their own homelands—within the confines of an American foreign mission.

The concern for Hawaiians in America was connected to the long colonial settler project of regenerating the heathen through Christian education and a process of civilization. This undertaking could claim ancestry in a deeper New England history that reached all the way back to John Eliot’s work with the American Indians in the seventeenth century. However, this project never grew significantly in scope, nor did its nineteenth-century progeny often seem to reflect on the possible pasts of their present endeavor. Instead, news of these Hawaiian men in New England capitalized on the interest in the Sandwich Islands and the islands of the Pacific that had begun gradually with the first sales of the journals and logs from the voyages of Captain Cook, the much-performed pantomime of his death, and the ubiquitous commercial news that related the daily comings and goings of ships from New England to the Pacific. The new American foreign mission movement was progressive, future oriented, and aiming to convert natives in a far-removed field, but first they had to stoke the public’s interest in their enterprise in order to raise the money to train teachers and send them halfway across the globe.

In 1816, the forty-four-page promotional pamphlet “A Narrative of Five Youth from the Sandwich Islands, Now Receiving an Education in This Country” would set the reader back twenty-five cents. For the first time the public could read in extended accounts about the lives and accomplishments of Henry Obookiah, Thomas Hopoo, William Tennooe John Honoree, and George Prince Tamoree.²² Designed by the ABCFM for the consumption of a Christian audience, the narrative’s purpose was to provide a “simple and authentic statement of facts” respecting the men, along with “specimens of their ability and improvement.”²³ The production of the lives of these men made them into both fund-raising tool and product—they were embodied as produced by the mission while also serving as its ultimate outcome and aim. Obookiah was clearly made to appear as the outstanding pupil of the bunch and the star of this pamphlet, as its first twelve pages were devoted to him, his writing, his composition of prayers, and a listing of his phenomenal accomplishments in his educational endeavors.

That same year, the Religious Intelligencer ran an article entitled “Honourable Munificence” that was extensively reprinted in both secular and religious newspapers.²⁴ Those people who were unfamiliar with the progress of the men of Owhyhee were gently chided, since “the Christian public are extensively acquainted with the fact, that several young men, natives of the Owhyhee, are now in Connecticut,” suggesting that the story of these Hawaiian men was widely covered and followed by many Americans. The Christian public would have become familiar with these Hawaiians through pulpit sermons, official published reports, Christian magazines and newspapers, and membership in the many auxiliary missionary societies that had begun to spring up in towns all throughout New England.²⁵

The subject of “Honourable Munificence” was a woman from Savannah, Georgia, who mobilized a circle of her friends to raise funds for the education of the Hawaiian men. Brief information on the Hawaiian students studying at the Cornwall Foreign Mission School was provided, and the accomplishments of one Henry Obookiah, a sometime resident of Torringford and Andover, where he was “instructed by the students of the Theological Seminary,” were especially touted. Obookiah had “not only learned reading, writing, and arithmetic, but grammar and geography.” However, what was of most importance was his familiarity with “the principles and doctrines of Christian Religion.”²⁶

The accomplishments of ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia were set in contrast to the lingering heathen beliefs of his friend Thomas Hopoo (Hopu). Hopu had left Hawai‘i at the age of fourteen and served as a cabin boy aboard the ship that brought ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia to New Haven. In a well-circulated story, Hopu fell overboard and was saved when a fellow sailor tossed a hen coop overboard for him to grasp. Struggling fiercely to catch up to the ship, Hopu promised his akua (gods)²⁷ that if his life were spared he would give them his most prized possession: a pea jacket that the captain had given him. When the ship turned around and he was plucked from the open sea still clutching the hen coop, Hopu had resolved to treat the pea jacket with the utmost care and respect. He never wore it again for the duration of the voyage, or allowed others to touch it, and it was “not until he became fully convinced” that his akua were “no God(s)” that he felt he could release himself from his vow. Even years after he had turned to the Lord, Hopu’s past history of heathen devotion could still be used as a prod to the struggling Christian. “This instance of native conscientiousness in a heathen boy discharging his vow to an imaginary god, ought to raise a blush on the cheek of many a Christian, for his own neglect of paying his vows to the ‘Lord that bought him.’ ”²⁸ The carefully chosen words of this admonishment might also inspire a guilt-ridden Christian to pay out a decent donation. While the article lauded the accomplishments of the older Obookiah, who had “already begun a translation of a part of the New Testament into the language of Owhyhee,”²⁹ Hopu’s story froze him in time as a fourteen-year-old lately arrived in the country. The distance between Obookiah and Hopu was now a pocket example of the progress that a heathen could make if subjected to the correct program of Christianization and civilization.

The woman from Savannah was persuaded by the poignancy of these stories; heathens could be educated, and they could use this education to carry the Christian message to the Sandwich Islands. In the fall of 1815, she visited her friends in New Haven and was transfixed by the story of these men, “particularly as the future missionaries of Owhyhee.” On her return home, she enlisted the assistance of her female friends and collected $335, to be “given for the purpose of educating Henry, Thomas, and William, as missionaries to Owhyhee.”³⁰ The authors of the essay urged readers to consider that “this example of Christian liberality is highly honourable to the citizens of Savannah; and ought to be known, that others may go and do likewise.”³¹

Answering the call, the ladies of Charleston, South Carolina, also “imitated” the example of their female counterparts from Savannah by contributing their own “liberal donation” to the effort of educating these men.³² Whether through word of mouth, the press, or through networks of missionary societies, how the ladies from South Carolina got wind of the charity of the Georgia ladies may never be revealed. However, what is clear is that the mission’s supporters held these men up as examples of their own work, a work that all American citizens should interest themselves in. “Honourable Munificence” connected the capacity of American women to do their Christian duty for young Hawaiian men currently residing in their country in the hopes that by giving monetary support to these prospective missionaries, Americans would both transform their own souls and those of an entire foreign people.³³

For two years, until the death of Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, the activities of the Hawaiians were promoted by the American Board in order to raise the public’s interest and concern for foreign missions. Stories of the educational progress of the men of Owhyhee, their internal struggles, and their speeches, prayers, and letters were produced and reproduced by the ABCFM and its supporters in both the secular and religious press. These stories were generated as a means to create a supportive public interested in the cause of missions. The ability of the men to stand before congregations and discourse on religion, to lead a prayer, and to speak before assemblies in both Hawaiian and English provided substantial, physical proof that heathens could be educated and Christianized. Stories of these men were generated in the hopes that Americans would be moved to donate money and materials to the foreign mission school and the mission to the Sandwich Islands. Americans needed to be converted to the idea through tangible examples and proof.

Christian benevolence paid for the education that hastened their conversions. The mission published stories to convince the public that once the transformation was initiated, through their financial intervention, the Hawaiian men would take it upon themselves to convert the other Hawaiians in their midst. Rev. William S. Vaill, who had taken in at least three Hawaiian students as boarders at his home in 1815, wrote to the editor of the Religious Intelligencer about Thomas Hopu’s visit to John Honoli‘i, his benighted countryman who had arrived in the country in December 1815. Hopu reportedly came sixty miles on foot to visit Honoli‘i, who was at Rev. Vaill’s home in North Guilford, Connecticut. Honoli‘i was joining William Kanui, who was already engaged as Vaill’s pupil. Honoli‘i was “buried in all the senseless ignorance of a devotee to a block of wood,”³⁴ wrote Rev. Vaill. “Whatever ideas the more enlightened of his countrymen may have of God, or of the soul of man,” Honoli‘i “had none.” Honoli‘i’s ignorance was placed in stark contrast to the newly acquired enlightenment of ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia and Hopu. “He could mutter over his unmeaning prayers; and previous to leaving his native place, had sacrificed a hog, as a preparatory step to becoming a priest in their filthy temples.”³⁵ These scenes were constructed to shock the American public, to stoke their curiosity about the Hawaiian men, and to engage their imaginations by allowing individuals to place themselves as witnesses to such dreaded scenes. Relief at finding oneself, after these brief “imagination vacations,” within the safety of the home or church, reinforced the distance between the civilized self and heathen Others. But while the imagination and actual encounter with Hawaiian men reinforced the distance between Owhyhees and Americans, plays like the Pantomime of Captain Cook offered audiences a secure space in which to experience the exotic, extending the viewer’s comfort zone and slowly transforming the unknown exotic into the familiar. Thus imagination labored under a double process: one of confirming distance, while another supplied a comforting sense of superiority and condescension that grew out of the conviction of authentic knowledge of the savage. Cultivating the public’s desire for authentic natives—as the theaters, waxworks, and museums promised—contributed to a cultivated and progressive knowing that inspired a spirit of generous giving that would in turn support the “spirit of missions.”³⁶

The difference between “heathen” beliefs and logic and those of the civilized ministers was exemplified in the discussion between Rev. Vaill and Honoli‘i about where the soul went after death. When asked by Rev. Vaill where he thought his dead mother had gone, Honoli‘i “pointed to the earth, and said, ‘there.’ ” When asked if he thought she had gone to heaven, Honoli‘i shook his head and replied, “No heaven, Owhyhee.”³⁷

Conversion was supposed to be a painful experience for all Christians as the renunciation of one’s past ignorance and sin for new birth. But cross-cultural conversion was painful for other reasons, as it was frequently impeded and by turns spurred on by the conviction of the American missionaries that they were possessed of Christian cultural superiority. Rev. Vaill had never been to the Sandwich Islands, nor was he ever likely to make the long voyage. Instead, he crafted a Hawaiian imaginary out of what he knew to be common characteristics of idolatrous heathens throughout the ages. Honoli‘i was taught a bit about God and came to see, according to Rev. Vaill, “that our religion was better than theirs.” One day, Honoli‘i described Hawaiian “idols” as having hands and feet in a conversation with the minister. “I said, your God has hands, but he no work. He replied, with a smile of contempt, No. Your God has eyes; but he no see. He replied again, shaking his head in disdain, No.”³⁸ “Communication” between Rev. Vaill and Honoli‘i lay in Vaill’s assumptions about what Honoli‘i meant when he gestured, smiled, shook his head—in perhaps Vaill’s broken knowledge of Hawaiian language. To the reading audience, however, who would not pick up on Vaill’s inadequate knowledge of Hawaiian, it was his staged pidgin English that spoke volumes. The responsibility (kuleana) lay upon Kanui, a Hawaiian man better skilled at English, to be the translator and conveyor of meaning between the minister and his new charge. And yet, in all the accounts provided by missionary writers and the mission board themselves, there is no question about the missionaries’ ability to authoritatively interpret the words, meanings, gestures—the hearts of Hawaiians—for a benevolent Christian public.

Hopu’s approach to instruction was shown to be less painful, and yielded more progress: “He [Hopu] labored and prayed in their own tongue, and observed, that if his brethren had taught him in this way, he might have found Christ in one day.”³⁹ The alienation of Hopu’s individual soul from other Christians was made more acute because the words of God could not be expressed to him in a familiar tongue. Hawaiians far from home also found solace in each other’s presence and shared memories from home as they lived a temporary life in the diaspora. Language may have facilitated bouts of homecoming reminiscence. Of those Hawaiians that were in New England, Hopu, ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, and especially Honoli‘i, were noted to have retained their native language.⁴⁰ Rev. Vaill hoped to persuade potential donors that the best thing for the conversion of Hawaiians would be to educate more of them and place them in the mission field. Why wouldn’t this work in the Sandwich Islands? The experiment was already working in North Guilford.

George Prince Tamoree (Kaumuali‘i)

“I have the pleasure seen [sic] the young prince, at Charlestown,” wrote Benjamin Carhoooa (Kalua), a Hawaiian man living in Boston, to Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia on May 30, 1816. As vast as the land occupied by Americans was in 1816, Hawaiian men who arrived in the fledgling nation were possessed of an uncanny ability to find one another. Working and living far from home, Hawaiian men went to great lengths to keep in contact once they had become acquainted. The task of finding other displaced countrymen would have been aided by the newspapers, which carried information regarding the arrival of Hawaiian youth in the country on particular ships arriving at specific ports. Some of these men were passably literate and wrote to one another, sharing news from their area. “The Prince,” Kalua wrote, was working in the purser’s office at the Boston Navy Yard in Charlestown. He had forgotten how to speak Hawaiian, and he said that his father was the king of Attoi (Kaua‘i). When asked his father’s name, the young man’s reply to Kalua was “Tamaahmaah.”⁴¹ Of course, Kamehameha was not the ancestral ruling chief of Kaua‘i; indeed, he had been the opponent of this young Hawaiian man’s father. Kamehameha was certainly not this young man’s father, but since “the Prince” had been in America since he was about six years of age, it was understandable that his memories of home and family were blurred by the years he had spent in America and at sea.

Perhaps it was Kalua’s letter that alerted the ABCFM to the presence of a Hawaiian of “royal” lineage living nearby in Charlestown. Four months later, the ABCFM held their seventh annual meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, where the petition to establish the school for heathen youth was presented, and the subject of educating the Sandwich Islands men, including the newly discovered “son of a king in one of the islands,” was enthusiastically discussed.⁴² Soon all of America would learn about Prince Tamoree (Kaumuali‘i), heir of the king of Atowy (Kaua‘i). The board had taken steps to get Kaumuali‘i discharged from the US Navy so that “he may be placed under advantage similar to those which his four countrymen enjoy.”⁴³

The school which Prince Kaumuali‘i, Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, and the other students would call “home” was settled in the town of Cornwall, Litchfield County, Connecticut. While revivals in religion led to the creation of the ABCFM in Boston, several towns in Litchfield exercised their religious fervor by supporting the Hawaiians and then petitioning the board for the education of heathen youth in America. The Cornwall Foreign Mission School was built on land good for farming. Farmers grew primarily wheat, but also raised oats, rye, and hay. Butter, and especially cheese, was manufactured for export, as well as beef, pork, and wool.

While hardworking, the people of Cornwall were also generous, supplying a forty-by-twenty-foot building for the school. Thirteen acres of woodland were also provided by the town, one part within a half mile of the school, and the rest within a mile’s walking distance. The townspeople gave generously for the cause, subscribing in money and clothing “a considerable sum” of approximately “eleven to thirteen hundred dollars.”⁴⁴

The public’s imagination had been ensnared by stories of the Hawaiian youth, more so than for the mission spirit in general. Hoping to capitalize on their newest charge, the ABCFM’s writers emphasized Kaumuali‘i’s royal connections and his service in the navy on behalf of Americans. With these stories, the ABCFM inaugurated another phase of their promotion of the Hawaiian men for the Foreign Mission School. The mission also solidified their claim upon the Sandwich Islands as an American mission field. The ABCFM began to promote stories about Kaumuali‘i that appeared first in religious newspapers and quickly spread to the secular press. Numerous newspaper notices about the life of Kaumuali‘i were published from September 1816 through April 1817, appearing in newspapers in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia. Two Philadelphia-based German-language newspapers also republished articles that had already appeared previously in English-language newspapers.

From the first, notices about Kaumuali‘i were engineered to persuade the Christian public to be more liberal with their donations by publishing them alongside notices of the names of those who had already donated to the cause. Kaumuali‘i’s letter to a female benefactor, dated October 1, 1816, accomplished both these aims. The letter also revealed much about the lives of the young Hawaiian students in America and gave some glimpse into how the young “prince” related to home. Far from embodying the exemplary kinds of reports the American Board produced about the accomplished ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, George’s letter, published on October 29, 1816, in the Boston Recorder, appeared “not from any particular merit there is in it; but as the first essay of a child in knowledge.”⁴⁵ By placing before the public the written production of their royal pupil, the ABCFM writers challenged readers to “judge for themselves, whether their charities bestowed on these interesting young men, will be lost or not.”⁴⁶

The young Kaumuali‘i thanked his benefactor and related his progress in his studies with Rev. Vaill. Learning also occurred outside the confines of missionary prescribed subjects. For example, George wrote about living with John Honoli‘i, who was teaching him how to speak Hawaiian, while George taught Honoli‘i some English. The younger Kaumuali‘i did not forget that education was the reason his father sent him to America, although it seems strange to think of the young “prince” as just having embarked on an educational path, considering the number of years he had spent in America and in the naval service abroad. Although he left home at a young age, Kaumuali‘i remembered his father’s imperative that he should acquire a good education, though opportunities had since arisen for him to return home. “I think it better for me and for my father to stay here and receive a good education than to go back in the situation I was going in,” he wrote to his patron.⁴⁷ Reflecting on his island home at so far a distance probably made thinking in Christian terms of this life and “the next” readily accessible. The distance from God, as well as from home and family, weighed heavily upon the Hawaiian men, as they considered their own aspirations and kuleana they would bear when they finally returned home as part of the American mission. “I hope I shall be a benefit to my father if I should ever return. I hope it will be provided so that I may return again, but I must seek after God. He will help me through this world. I hope I may be prepared for another.”⁴⁸

No other symbol of the divide between this world, “America,” and another, “Hawai‘i,” was so palpable as that which arose with the question of what Kaumuali‘i should be called, now that he had been “called” to the mission. “Mr. Vaill has put an addition to my name, it is George Prince Kummooree that is my father’s name, so I thought it would be proper enough. Obookiah thought it would be better for me to have the name of my father Kummooree and we thought if ever I should return back again it would be better for me to have my father’s than to have an English name.”⁴⁹ Renaming was a practice that missions frequently engaged in with their native converts. Giving a person a new name stripped them of their past associations and their familial contexts, but it also afforded missionary benefactors power over the newly named soul by dint of a name that was easily pronounced by them—and not necessarily easily pronounced by the one who was so named.⁵⁰ Mr. Vaill, Kaumuali‘i’s teacher, sought to improve on a name that struck New England tongues dumb (“Kummoorree” or “Tamoree”) through the addition of “George” and “Prince.” But while Mr. Vaill made his additions, Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, in conversation with Kaumuali‘i, reminded him about the importance of keeping close ties of identification with one’s ali‘i lineage. Besides learning how to speak Hawaiian from the other men, Kaumuali‘i must have spent many hours listening to them describe Hawai‘i to him and the expectations that would be placed upon him as the returning son of the ali‘i of Kaua‘i.

News of Kaumuali‘i’s father also appeared in the papers at the same time. The Boston Recorder published an account by Captain Edes, who had recently arrived in Boston from a visit to the Pacific. While at “Atooi” (Kaua‘i), Kaumuali‘i asked Captain Edes if he had any news of his son. Unfortunately, the captain had no information to give to the concerned chief. However, Edes was able to relate an “anecdote” about the ali‘i’s treatment of Captain Ebbets that made it into the pages of the Boston Recorder. Ebbets, of the ship Enterprise of New York, was at Kaua‘i in February 1815 and had lost all but one of his anchors in a “violent gale.” The ship had been spared only by the intervention of “King Tamoree,” who sent a boat “at the height of the gale” to supply Ebbets with a large anchor that enabled the ship to withstand the storm.⁵¹

The story might have simply made the circuit between captains and sailors of ships in the China trade (through word of mouth, good news passed between ships about friendly chiefs and safe ports of call), but this story had gotten into the ears of someone at the ABCFM and was then published and mobilized in service of the mission. Occurrences oceans away were relevant to those at home, argued the writer, because “an American ship, and the lives of American seamen have thus been preserved by the humane exertions of King Tamoree. Let every American remember that Tamoree has a son in this country, that for several years past he has been enduring all the hardships attendant upon a life of a common sailor on board our frigates; that he fought in several of our battles during the late war, and was badly wounded.”⁵² Those unfamiliar with the recent developments of the mission were then told that Kaumuali‘i was under the “protection” of the ABCFM. Americans were called upon to do their duty by assisting a patriot, to honor the desire of a noble father, as well as the years lost to the wandering prince, who had been searching for an education in his adopted home in America for years. “We trust that when our countrymen are called upon to contribute for the education of Heathen Youth, these facts will not be forgotten.”⁵³

The mission plan was twofold: persuade the American public of the importance of supporting the school for heathen youth in America, and persuade them that these youth were indispensable to the opening of a mission in the Sandwich Islands. That there were so many men from Hawai‘i being taught at the Connecticut Foreign Mission School was a seeming sign of Providence that an American mission belonged in Hawai‘i. The American mission had successfully produced Kaumuali‘i as an object of desire for public consumption, much like the curiosities and pantomimes displayed and performed on both sides of the Atlantic. This production enabled their quite successful fund-raising efforts to build their school. But Kaumuali‘i, especially, offered the ABCFM an opportunity to light New England imaginary fires with the possibility of funding this young, now-Christian chief’s triumphant return home to Hawai‘i as a bringer of new values and new leadership. The envisioned tableau of reuniting a chiefly son with his chiefly father, the king who had had enough foresight to send his son away for schooling, supplied another strong reason for the ABCFM’s strenuous effort to go to the Hawaiian Islands. “How can we better manifest our gratitude to the father, than by restoring to him under such circumstances his long lost son?” they wrote.⁵⁴ It would be in the ABCFM’s best interest to oversee Kaumuali‘i’s education in order to reap the benefits of returning him home.

In the ensuing months, biographical notices about the prince’s astonishing years adrift at sea and in America would be published, along with speculation that Kaumuali‘i may “at some future day, be King of Atooi, if not all the Sandwich Islands.”⁵⁵ Letters the young man had written to the father he had not seen in over a decade and a half were also published. In these letters, he described to his father (and to a public privy to these letters through publication) what had transpired since Kaumuali‘i’s father had turned him over to the care of Captain James Rowan of the Hazard.

Considering that Kaumuali‘i was “royalty,” the tale that was told about his hard usage at the hands of Captain Rowan and Captain Samuel Cotting was tragic. Rowan, according to the young man, had spent the property Kaumuali‘i’s father had provided for his son’s education. Kaumuali‘i was then given into the care of his preceptor, Captain Samuel Cotting, whose slide into poverty left him unable to care for the youth.⁵⁶ Like some young American males at the time, Kaumuali‘i was forced by poor financial circumstances to move around a lot and had to “shirk for himself.” In his letter to his father dated October 19, 1816, Kaumuali‘i provides a lengthy description of his travels around the world, the battles he fought, and the scars gained in war. “I hope I shall be a benefit to you,” he wrote, echoing the phrase that had appeared in his previous letter to a charitable lady.⁵⁷