Unfamiliar Fishes

by Sarah Vowell

  We want men and women who have souls, who are crucified to the world and the world to them, who have their eyes and their hearts fixed on the glory of God in the salvation of the heathen, who will be willing to sacrifice every interest but Christ’s, who will cheerfully and constantly labor to promote his cause. . . . The request which we heard while standing on the American shores, from these islands, we reiterate with increasing emphasis: “Brethren, come over and help us.”

  If I had to pick one Bible verse that students of American history should know, it is Acts 16:9: “And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia and help us.” In the middle of his second missionary journey, the apostle Paul had a dream or a hallucination in which a Macedonian stranger pleaded for his preaching. Paul dropped what he was doing in Asia Minor and “immediately” sailed across the Aegean.

  Theologians refer to this as the “Macedonian call.” For example, in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr., writes: “Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.”

  For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses—an all-purpose ingredient we’ll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of this missionary zeal, contributing to our overbearing (yet not entirely unwarranted) sense of our country as an inherently helpful force in the world. And, as with the apostle Paul, the notion that strangers want our help is sometimes a delusion.

  The forerunners of the New England missionaries, the Massachusetts Bay colonists, invented American exceptionalism, scrawling Acts 16:9 across their colony’s official seal, in which an Indian literally says, “Come over and help us.” (The natives of Massachusetts didn’t have an official slogan but the few who had not been struck dead by smallpox spread by foreigners would have been better served by a more specific slogan along the lines of “Please don’t burn our wigwams while our babies sleep inside.”)

  When Yale’s Timothy Dwight delivered the founding sermon at Asa Thurston and Hiram Bingham’s alma mater, Andover Theological Seminary, Dwight praised the doctrines carried to the New World “by those eminently good men, who converted New-England from a desert into a garden.” Hoping to inspire the Puritans’ godly descendants to keep on gardening, Dwight preached that “ ‘Come over to Macedonia, and help us,’ is audibly resounded from the four ends of the earth. . . . The nations of the East, and the islands of the sea, already wait for his law.”

  Acts 16:9 is the meddler’s motto, simultaneously selfless and self-serving, generous but stuck-up. Into every generation of Americans is born a new crop of buttinskys sniffing out the latest Macedonia that may or may not want their help.

  For the Thurstons and their brethren, it was Hawaii. Asa and Lucy spent forty years in Kailua. In 1837 their congregation built a church out of lava rocks from old Hawaiian temples. It is still standing, and still a church. A model of the Thaddeus is on display in the sanctuary.

  As the Thurstons were settling in on the Big Island, Hiram Bingham and the rest of the pioneers on the Thaddeus sailed northwest, past Maui, Lanai, and Molokai, toward Oahu. Nearing Honolulu on April 14, 1820, Maria Loomis, the printer’s wife, wrote, “The first object that attracted our attention was a lofty craggy point called Diamond hill.”

  Even now, spotting Diamond Head from the window of a plane about to land at Honolulu International is still one of Hawaii’s most consistent little thrills. The iconic volcanic crater’s Hawaiian name, Leahi, means “brow of the tuna” and it does look more animal than mineral. There might be taller or prettier mountains in the islands but I’m hard pressed to think of one that’s more magnetic. Like a television, if it’s in my field of vision, I cannot pay attention to anything else.

  As the brig began to curve around the coast, Maria Loomis continued, “Our eyes were feasted with the verdant hills & fertile vallies.” She described groves of coconut palms lining the beaches.

  The Thaddeus waited in the harbor with the company while Hiram Bingham and a small party rowed ashore to look for the island’s high chief. They trudged through the then-dusty plain of Honolulu and climbed Punchbowl Hill, another volcanic crater presiding over what is now downtown. Bingham wrote, “We had a beautiful view of the village and valley of Honolulu, the harbor and ocean, and of the principal mountains of the island.”

  From there they looked across at Diamond Head and Waikiki, to the fort by the harbor, and at the soupy taro patches in the inland valleys. Bingham, in an uncharacteristic fit of poetry, praised the sight of the staple crop “with its large green leaves, beautifully embossed on the silvery water in which it flourishes.”

  Bingham compared himself to Moses gazing at the Promised Land. Noticing the cliffs of Nuuanu, the site of “the last victory of Kamehameha,” he predicts the landscape “was now to be the scene of a bloodless conquest for Christ.”

  The Christian soldiers’ weaponry, he said, would be “the school, the pulpit, and the press.”

  REMEMBER THE OPENING credits of Hawaii Five-O, when Jack Lord stands on a roof, surveying the panorama of then-mod Honolulu? I’m on a balcony—around here it’s called a “lanai”—on the twentieth floor of the very same building, the Ilikai. While I command the same view as Jack and his jawline, this morning it’s yet another voggy day. Vog, the volcanic fog blowing over here from Kilauea, is the most exotic air pollution my landlubber’s lungs have ever coughed up.

  Wish I could say I was taking the Ilikai’s elevator down to street level so as to get cracking on a day of thwarting PCP smugglers or rescuing the diabetic scientist kidnapped by my Red Chinese archenemy, like Jack used to do every week. I chose to stay in this building because it’s walking distance to the Mission Houses Museum’s library and archives in downtown Honolulu, where the closest thing to a felony is taking notes with an ink pen instead of a pencil. Perusing the letters and diaries the New England missionaries left behind is detective work of a sort, albeit an investigation whose only theme song is the faint rhythm of a gloved hand paging through the brittle correspondence of the dead.

  When I was browsing through a box of papers belonging to Abner Wilcox, a Connecticut-born proselytizer on the island of Kauai, I found a memo he received in 1838 from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions asking its missionaries scattered around the globe to send back to Boston items for a cabinet of curiosities they were assembling at headquarters, including “warlike weapons” because “these convey a vivid idea of the savageness of heathenism, and impress the beholder with the reality of the dark places of the earth, which are full of the habitations of cruelty.”

  Speaking of the habitations of cruelty, the Ilikai was designed by one of the architects of Seattle’s Space Needle. It was the very first luxury high-rise hotel in the state. Elvis used to stay here. Its developer, Chinn Ho, was a self-made millionaire who rose from peddling can openers to become the first Asian to run the Honolulu Stock Exchange. Detective Chin Ho Kelly on Hawaii Five-O was named after him. Which is a nice change of pace, since most things around here are named for long-dead Hawaiian monarchs. Like, I wonder if Chin Ho Kelly or Chinn Ho himself got their cavities filled at the King Kalakaua Dental Center.

  I liked the symmetry of waking up in the islands’ first residential high-rise and walking to work at the islands’ first wood-frame house. The Mission Houses Museum complex contains the buildings in which Hiram Bingham and his colleagues lived and worked, including a wooden prefab shipped from Massachusetts.

  I took a guided tour led by Mike Smola, the museum’s affable tour coordinator. After hitting the highlights about the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and discussing Henry Obookiah, he says, “During the forty-three years the mission station operated, between 1820 and 1863, they established seventeen stations on five major islands. Twelve separate companies, or groups of missionaries, arrived, all
totaling about one hundred and seventy-eight people. But the station here in Honolulu, which was situated on the land you’re standing on presently, was the headquarters, or main mission station for the entire endeavor.”

  A portrait of Hiram and Sybil Bingham hangs on the wall. Smola points out that it was “painted before they left Boston in 1819 by an old buddy of Reverend Bingham’s, Samuel F. B. Morse, as in the Morse code and the telegraph.”

  I love Morse’s stirring portrait of the Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette hanging in New York’s City Hall. Morse was in Washington painting it when he received the news his wife was ailing back home in Connecticut. He raced toward her but by the time he arrived, she had died. And so he started monkeying around with a machine to speed up communication, an achievement that would eclipse the reputation of his art.

  Morse was born into a venerable family of New England Protestants. His minister father, Jedidiah, had founded a newspaper with Timothy Dwight and others to guard “morals, religion and the state of Society in New England.” Not only was Jedidiah Morse on the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, he had been one of the clergymen who lobbied for the founding of the seminary at Andover that Hiram Bingham and Asa Thurston attended.

  Hence, the younger Morse’s acquaintance with, and portrait of, Bingham, as well as his images of Thomas Hopu and the other three Hawaiian men who would soon sail on the Thaddeus. Morse lit the Binghams with a liturgical glow. Hiram smolders with his dark eyes and peacock’s plume of hair. Sybil looks clean.

  Smola points to a model of the neighborhood as it looked in 1821, the year after the arrival of the missionaries, or “mikanele,” as the Hawaiians called them. Nowadays, grassy lawns and fine old trees beautify this area of downtown. The same land in the model is all dirt brown. “The first thing I’d like to point out is how dry this area is,” Smola says. “It’s practically a desert.” Water had to be hauled in from the Nuuanu Stream a couple of miles inland.

  Smola indicates four little huts built out of pili grass, the “tufted grass that was the preferred building material of the Hawaiian people.” In his memoir Hiram Bingham wrote, “A house thus thatched assumes the appearance of a long hay stack.” Fitting that a pious expedition first envisioned at the Haystack Meeting in Massachusetts would find New England missionaries holed up in thatched homes in Polynesia—much to Hiram Bingham’s dismay. “Such houses,” he grumbled, “are ill adapted to promote health of body, vigor of intellect, neatness of person, food, clothing or lodging, and much less, longevity. They cannot be washed, scoured, polished, or painted.” They are no place, he continued, “for the security of valuable writings, books, or treasures.” He would be relieved to learn that some day the mission’s descendants would build a climate-controlled library next door to care for (and lock up) his and his fellows’ writings.

  Smola says the missionaries lived in the huts “until the completion of this building here, which is a New England-style wooden frame house. It was something of a prefabricated building. The lumber was cut in New England and then shipped here for the mikanele to assemble, which they had done by the end of 1821. Today it is the oldest still-standing wood-frame structure in all of the Hawaiian Islands.”

  The house, Smola points out, features “small windows, short ceilings, and no good breezeways. In short, it’s built to keep the New England winter out. Of course those are difficult to find here in the tropics.”

  Eventually, the missionaries learned to position their windows so as to circulate breezes from the trade winds. Still, the buildings they and their progeny constructed in the decades to come replicated this first one. There’s barely a back road or highway in Hawaii that doesn’t have at least one wee whitewashed house of worship. It can be unsettling to take a thirteen-hour flight from the East Coast to Maui only to turn a corner and stumble upon a scene straight out of Old Saybrook.

  On her tour of the islands in 1873, Englishwoman Isabella Bird analyzed the haoles’ dwellings. “Some look as if they had been transported from the old-fashioned villages of the Connecticut Valley, with their clap-board fronts painted white.” And yet, she noticed, “The New England severity and angularity are toned down and draped out of sight by these festoons of large-leaved, bright-blossomed, tropical climbing plants.”

  To me, the most evocative example of prim American architecture imposed on the exotic landscape is in Hanalei, on the island of Kauai. This was the town where the 1958 musical South Pacific was filmed, its mountains the backdrop for “Bali Hai.” Sunsets there are downright lurid.

  William Patterson Alexander, a missionary who sailed with the ABCFM’s fifth company to Hawaii, erected the Waioli mission house there in 1837. White and wooden, the building is nestled at the foot of Hanalei’s undulating peaks, its right angles softened by palm trees in the lush front yard. It’s as if Gauguin had plopped one of the French farm maids from his early paintings—wholesome girls in starched caps who look like they make their own cheese—into the vivid sensual scenery of his later Tahitian canvases.

  Mike Smola leads the way through the Honolulu mission house’s cramped chambers—the communal dining room with its Chinese dishes, the kitchen with its beehive oven. He says, “Mrs. Bingham writes in her journal about baking as many as thirty loaves of bread a day in this oven. Which brings up something of an interesting point about the mikanele diet. They originally came here expecting to keep their New England diet, their beef, dairy, wheat, and potatoes. No way. Even today, living out here like that is an incredibly expensive proposition. So they very quickly adapted to a native diet. They ate fish, poi, local fruits and vegetables, and chickens. Now, they did get food supplies from the ABCFM back in Boston, most notably barrels of wheat flour. But they were lucky if they could use half of any given barrel of wheat that was shipped out here. Either it would be infested with weevils, or it would become wet and would be packed so hard as to be a rock. Levi Chamberlain writes in his journal about taking hammer and chisel to flour to try to get something usable out of it.”

  Chamberlain, who came with the second company of missionaries in 1823, was the agent in charge of doling out supplies to the mission stations on this and the other islands. He and his neighbor Sybil Bingham are two of the best sources for insights into the mission folks’ daily ordeals.

  When Smola leads the way to the Binghams’ bedroom, I look at the little four-poster taking up most of the room and remember reading about a frazzled Sybil seeking refuge in it. She sniffed, “I have felt at home only by drawing my curtains around my bed. But missionary life could not be a secluded one.”

  Smola notes, “If you’re one of the other sixteen mission stations that needed something, you had to write to Mr. Chamberlain that you needed it.”

  The Chamberlain files in the mission archives are full of such requests for everything from axes to tea. Smola mentions that if Chamberlain had a mission station’s requested item on hand, “he’d send it on the next ship available. If not, he’d have to write back to Boston for it, which of course meant six months for his letter to get there, and six months after that for hopefully what you asked for to return here to the islands.”

  Dealing with the inventory (or lack thereof) and fielding the various missionaries’ often cranky requests for provisions prompted Chamberlain to confide in his diary after a typical long day, “To wear out in the service of Christ is the summit of my ambition.”

  Chamberlain’s job was so detail-oriented and so physically taxing that Hawaii gave him a newfound appreciation for Sundays, a day of rest and abstract thought. “I now perceive more than ever that the Sabbath is a blessing,” he wrote. “I did not so much realize it when I was in my native country, a land of privileges; but now . . . it is a comfort to lay aside the ordinary employments and cares of the week to . . . look into eternity.”

  Chamberlain’s descriptions of the sermons he enjoyed capture how the evangelists focused on Bible stories that spoke to their project of not only changing Hawaiian
s’ lives but trying to keep the reformed natives from returning to their old pagan ways—drinking, gambling, dancing, fornicating, etc. He recounts one sermon on Lot’s wife delivered by William Ellis, a visiting English missionary. “To explain his text,” Chamberlain wrote, Ellis “alluded to the account in Genesis of the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah.” The refugees “are to forsake their old ways . . . [and] not desire to return to their former customs and habits.”

  Especially disappointing to the missionaries were the relapses of two of the Hawaiian alumni of the Cornwall school. The son of the high chief of Kauai was so successful in inspiring his father, Kaumualii, to take in the missionaries and heed the call to Christ that within four months of the arrival of the Thaddeus, Kaumualii was writing the ABCFM a thank-you note, proclaiming, “I worship your god.” But that did not stop his son from feeling, as Bingham put it, “the strong downward tendencies of a heathen community.” At Kailua, William Kanui “violated his vows by excess in drinking.” After Asa Thurston had him “excluded from Christian fellowship,” Kanui “became a wanderer for many years.”

  Outside on the Mission Houses Museum grounds, Mike Smola lingers over a slab of the coral rock that was used to construct two of the mission’s buildings and the gothic-style Kawaiaha‘o Church across the street. “Rocks like these were quarried by hand out of the living reef out in the harbor. They were cut by hand by divers with stone and iron tools. Then the blocks were canoed to shore and used as building materials.”

  “Now, why coral?” Smola asks. Good question. Ever since I saw an IMAX documentary narrated by Liam Neeson at the Polynesian Cultural Center about endangered coral habitats, I can’t look at the stately gray edifice of the church without hearing Neeson’s Irish accent delivering apocalyptic warnings about the fate of the sea.