The pioneers who arrive in 1820,
By Patricia Grimshaw
many strangers to each other,
face the unknown
Special to the Star-BulletinIN 1820, a party of Protestant-American missionaries, men and women from the Congregational churches of New England, set foot for the first time in the exotic Hawaiian Islands. Their sole and solemn mission: Bring Christian teaching to the native Hawaiians.
Since Britisher James Cook discovered Hawaii in 1778, numerous travelers had brought news of the island people and their "pagan" religious beliefs.
The English had sent missions to the other Polynesian peoples; Hawaii, however, would be a fitting field for Americans. These missionary "pioneers" from Boston, plus dozens of others who were to follow through 1850, would become prominent in Hawaii's history.
Sybil and Hiram Bingham were in their number, as were Emily and Daniel Dole, Charlotte and Dwight Baldwin, Lucy and Asa Thurston, Mary and Samuel Castle, and Laura and Gerrit Judd.
The missionaries were talented young people, typically ministers and teachers in their 20s or early 30s, healthy and energetic. They had been raised in rural communities, educated in male theological or ladies' seminaries, and had formed missionary ambitions during the excitement of the religious revivals.
At Boston Harbor, they farewelled beloved relatives and friends, expecting to meet again not on Earth but in Heaven. There would be no retreat with honor, they knew, from the mission field.
The voyage by sailing ship -- around Cape Horn then across the treacherous Pacific -- was not only tedious, but also dangerous.
While these pioneers did not fear being killed by wild natives nor succumb to dreaded diseases, they faced an isolated life among Hawaiians whose culture they knew little of -- and understood even less.
Their closest companions would be spouses they usually had met only weeks before the departure day: The men, once assigned to Hawaii, anxiously sought and won mission-minded young women who would see the marriage offer as God's call to a personal dedication to "uplifting" non-Christian people.
These couples were driven by the powerful conviction shared by their evangelicals everywhere that non-Christians faced an eternity in Hell unless brave Christian pilgrims relinquished the comforts of home to spread Christ's word. If they could pluck just one soul from the burning flames, the mission wives proclaimed, their sacrifice would not be in vain.
"The die is cast," Laura Fish Judd, 23, wrote in her diary, shortly after her marriage proposal and a mere month before leaving Massachusetts in 1827. "I have in the strength of the Lord, consented Rebecca-like, I WILL GO, yes, I will leave friends, native land, everything for Jesus."
If some missionaries and their descendants later profited from native Hawaiians, this was initially remote from their minds. Yet, perversely, the mission's strenuous efforts to impose American values and practices on Hawaiian converts undermined indigenous peoples' capacity to resist U.S. domination of their economy and eventually, their government.
First came Western education and knowledge systems along with Christian rituals and morals. Western clothes, houses, furniture, food: all seemed essential accompaniments to Christianity.
Finally came the divisions of communal lands into farms under individual family ownership, ceded from chiefs who were urged to relinquish their supreme authority. Americans snapped up alienated land and pressed chiefs for constitutional reforms.
Many missionaries by the late 1800s came to embrace wealth, but some reflected sadly on the cost to the Hawaiians, who were either dying from diseases, displaced off lands, or replaced by migrant laborers.
"The country is being drained to fill up a few seaports," wrote evangelist Titus Coan, who had come in 1830, "and to work a few plantations where the mower and the reaper gather in the harvest of death."
Patricia Grimshaw is Max Crawford Professor of History
and Chair of the History Department at the University of Melbourne,
where she teaches American and Australian history and Women's Studies.
Her publications include "Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives
in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii (1989)," "Women's Suffrage in New Zealand
(rev ed, 1987)," and "Creating a Nation "(1994).
The Honolulu Star-Bulletin is counting down to year 2000 with this special series. Each month through December, we'll chronicle important eras in Hawaii's history, featuring a timeline of that particular period. Next month's installment: July 12. About this Series
Series Archive
Project Editor: Lucy Young-Oda
Chief Photographer: Dean Sensui
