by Sarah Vowell
As a minister and educator, David Malo contributed to Hawaii’s Americanization by wielding all three weapons in Hiram Bingham’s arsenal—“the school, the pulpit, and the press.” But as Malo aged, and perhaps because he spent so much time pondering the old traditions in writing Hawaiian Antiquities or wading through Lahaina’s crowds of seamen on leave, he became increasingly exasperated with the rising tide of haoles as the Hawaiians died and kept on dying. In a letter to native friends, he wrote:
If a big wave comes in, large and unfamiliar fishes will come from the dark ocean, and when they see the small fishes of the shallows they will eat them up. The white man’s ships have arrived with clever men from the big countries. They know our people are few in number and our country is small, they will devour us.
Malo died in 1853. He wanted to be buried way up on a mountain above Lahainaluna School, on a slope where he hoped “no white man would ever build a house.”
In 1969, as Hawaiians were beginning to revisit and revive the old traditions Malo wrote about and were learning to speak the Hawaiian language, Lahainaluna students founded a Hawaiiana Club as well as a chorus to study and perform Hawaiian-language songs and hula. Every April since 1970 Lahainaluna has celebrated David Malo Day. The Hawaiiana Club serves a poi supper in his honor, putting on a choral and hula pageant at sunset on the school grounds downhill from David Malo’s lonesome grave. When Amy and Owen and I went, it seemed as though all of Lahaina showed up. Parents, alumni, and David Malo’s descendants sat at long tables, eating poi and lau lau pork.
The students’ performance was joyful and rigorous at the same time. It wasn’t high school cute—it was impressive and intricate. Malo’s translator, N. B. Emerson, also wrote a book about hula called The Unwritten Literature of Hawaii in which he pointed out, “We are wont to think of the old-time Hawaiians as light-hearted children of nature, given to spontaneous outbursts of song and dance as the mood seized them.” On the contrary, Emerson continues, the hula required study and practice, “an organized effort, guarded by the traditions of a somber religion.”
Wearing yellow leis, the Lahainaluna performers were all smiles but well rehearsed, dancing to Hawaiian songs and chants about the beauty of places such as Nuuanu and Hana and Kauai, with discipline and grace.
One of the students recited Malo’s lines about the large and unfamiliar fishes eating up the small fishes, but the grim prophecy of his words wasn’t in keeping with the optimism of the evening. The fish talk that summed up the pageant’s hopeful air was the announcement that a graduating senior who won a David Malo Scholarship planned on majoring in marine biology at U of H in the fall. Slides were projected on a movie screen near the stage, portraits of historical queens like Kaahumanu and Liliuokalani, intermingled with photos of the students themselves. In the middle of a song called “O Kou Aloha,” the students left the stage and searched for their mothers in the audience, bestowing leis upon the women. It was such a graceful, happy gesture that just about everyone teared up, including Owen. He whispered, “If I could marry Hawaii, I would do it immediately.”
THE MISSIONARIES FOUNDED two elite schools in Honolulu in 1839 and 1841—the Chiefs’ Children’s School, where the Hawaii State Capitol now stands, and Punahou, an academy for the children of the missionaries, a couple of miles from the mission complex. The final five Hawaiian monarchs attended the former school, Sanford Dole the latter. Dole, the only president of the Republic of Hawaii, was born on the Punahou campus. His father, Daniel, a missionary from Maine, was the school’s first teacher.
Punahou was built on land Kaahumanu secured for Hiram and Sybil Bingham. The Binghams left for New England in 1840 due to Sybil’s declining health. They never returned, though the night-blooming cereus bushes believed to have been planted by Sybil still grow on the property.
I met Laurel Douglass, an alumna of the Punahou School, Class of ’58, at the Mission Houses Museum archives in Honolulu. A descendant of Amos Starr Cooke and Juliette Montague Cooke, the missionaries who ran the Chiefs’ Children’s School, Laurel was archive hopping that day, having spent the morning at the Bishop Museum. Within about a minute of the librarian from the Hawaiian Historical Society introducing us, she was rifling through a thick folder of papers to show me her morning’s research. She had been reading the diary of Moses, a student at the school who was a grandson of Kamehameha I. She showed me an entry from August 22, 1843, when Moses noted, “When I awoke this morning then Mr. Cooke told that they had a nice baby.” That baby, she said, was her great-something-grandmother Juliette.
At the time, that struck me as garden-variety genealogical homework, just a woman scouring historical records for mention of her ancestors. But that was before I got to know Laurel and learned about her special interest in Moses, an heir to the Hawaiian throne who died as a teenager during a measles epidemic. The way she talks about Moses and his schoolmates speaks to her interest in uncovering the truth about her forebears. Like any genealogical researcher, her blood pressure rises a bit when she sees Amos Cooke’s name in print; in her case it is because she despises Cooke for beating the royal children with a whip.
Hawaiian history is more alive to her than her own past. She lived on the mainland for a few years, dealing blackjack in Reno. “I was the worst blackjack dealer Harrah’s ever turned out,” she told me. “The pit boss told me that.” It takes her a minute to remember what decade she moved to Nevada but when I ask her to walk me through the history of the Chiefs’ Children’s School, she gives me the precise date of Amos and Juliette Cooke’s Connecticut wedding—“November 24, 1836.”
“The two of them, through the ABCFM in Boston, they decided to apply for the Sandwich Islands Mission. They left Boston the very next month after they got married, December 1836, on the Mary Frazier. It was quite a large group of missionaries coming out here to the Sandwich Islands.” She says that the Castles and the Wilcoxes were also on board, “three families that become very prominent over here. One of my brothers of the Cooke family marries one of the Wilcoxes five generations down the line. Everybody’s going to be intermarrying each other, all these original missionaries. I’m the fifth generation here—all of us have been intermarried so many times. So we are all cousins, I guess.
“They arrived here in the islands April 9, 1837. By 1839, Mr. and Mrs. Cooke had been assigned to start a school, a private school in Honolulu, where the children of the chiefs will be taught.” The missionaries reluctantly agreed to grant the king’s request for a school for young aristocrats. Laurel notes, “King Kauikeaouli says, ‘Okay, we’ll take care of you, we’ll respect your authority over the children, we’ll give you some land, and we’ll build a schoolhouse for you.’ ”
In his report to the ABCFM, Amos Cooke describes the meeting among the missionaries about whether or not to grant the king’s request. He wrote, “The Mission voted, by a large majority, that we should relinquish our other labors and undertake it. Some did not vote because they did not like to have anything done to encourage the distinction between the children of Chiefs and common people.” Cooke, speaking also for his wife, continued, “Under these circumstances we consented, unqualified as we were, to engage in this new school.”
Cooke wasn’t being modest. “The Cookes had no qualifications,” Laurel points out. “Amos Cooke did not go to college at all.”
Juliette wrote of her husband, “It has been rather heavy on Mr. Cooke having to teach subjects with which he is imperfectly acquainted, trigonometry, surveying, natural philosophy etc. He has been obliged to study nights in order to keep ahead of his class.”
That the assembled missionaries would pawn off a couple with minimal book learning to teach the future monarchs speaks to their priorities. The mission’s priority—first and last—was saving as many souls as possible. Daniel Dole, the colleague they entrusted with the education of their own children, was chosen to run Punahou because he lacked aptitude in the Hawaiian language and so was useless to teach and minister to Hawaiian
s, a great disappointment to Dole, considering that that’s why he came to Hawaii in the first place.
Punahou became a world-class school and counts President Obama as an alumnus. When I got a tour of its impressive campus from Barb Morgan, a descendant of Hiram and Sybil Bingham, I felt like the president’s grandfather when he took the tour with his grandson in the 1960s. Obama writes in his memoir Dreams from My Father that his grandfather whispered, “ ‘Hell, Bar, this isn’t a school. This is heaven!’ ” I’m used to New York City public schools, where a school called the Secondary School for Journalism doesn’t even have a school paper. When Morgan showed me Punahou’s theater and its vast costume department, I asked her about drama classes. There are plenty of those, along with an entire course just on theater tech. Obama calls the place “an incubator for island elites.” For that reason, it is seen as “the haole rich kid school,” so much so that the coffee table book celebrating the school’s 150th anniversary has an entire chapter titled “The Haole Rich Kids School,” an attempt at confronting that reputation. At its founding, however, it was kind of a dump. The collection of the Mission Houses Archives includes a cranky letter Daniel Dole sent to Levi Chamberlain, complaining that the school’s floors were so lopsided everything in the building rolls downhill.
As for the Chiefs’ Children’s School, Laurel says, “The five future monarchs of the kingdom are in that school as little children: Alexander Liholiho [Kamehameha IV], Lot Kamehameha [Kamehameha V], Lunalilo, David Kalakaua, and little Lydia [Liliuokalani]. The Cookes teach the children English, to write and communicate. The purpose of the school was to have the children submit and change to the American-Christian way, and give up their heathen, native ways. And the children resisted totally.”
In a letter in 1839, Amos Cooke complains of Moses, “He is a very obstinate boy and I shall expect trouble with him.”
“Moses became the troublesome one,” Laurel says. “He was always sneaking out. Mr. Cooke starts going crazy, losing his temper, beating the children, catching them in bed with each other. You normally don’t put boys and girls together in a boarding school with rooms all around each other, at the ages that they are—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. You’re asking for trouble. So Mr. Cooke sends off to Connecticut for a whip. He starts flogging these children. When you read his journal for September 22, 1845, Mr. Cooke hauls in the three Kamehameha brothers, who have been caught sneaking out the previous night, and Mr. Cooke brings one in and then the other and then the other, the three boys. He writes, ‘And I struck Moses on the back, fifteen stripes, with the rawhide. Twenty stripes for Lot, who told such a story I struck him again.’ He tells what he’s done to them.”
“That took place in 1845,” Laurel says. “When I moved home to Maui [from Nevada], it was 1995, a hundred and fifty years later.”
Upon returning home, she says she went into a flower shop in Maui and felt compelled to confess to the native Hawaiian lady working there, “I’m of the Cooke family.”
Laurel remembers, “And she said, ‘Yes, dear.’ ”
“And I said, ‘With the “e” at the end, you know the family?’ ”
“ ‘Yes, dear.’ ”
“ ‘Do you know they taught your royal children?’ ”
“ ‘Yes, dear.’ ”
“ ‘Do you know they also beat your royal children with a rawhide whip?’ ”
“ ‘Yes, dear.’ ”
“ ‘You do?’ I could have fallen.
“And I say, ‘Don’t you think if your people ever put a curse on a family, they would put it on the family of the man who beat your royal children?’ ”
“She looks at me—kind of looks up at me, she’s smaller—and she puts her little hands across the glass counter, holds my two hands in hers, and says, right to my eyes, “ ‘Yes, dear, forever. Hurry, tell the story.’ ”
I don’t believe in curses, but I might if I had been through what Laurel has. When I ask her if there was anything in particular that made her want to start researching her family story, she answered without hesitating, “My son died. That was in Reno. He had just gone out for a bike ride. He was a good athlete, twenty-three years old. A kid ran a stop sign and hit him. So he was in the hospital with a head injury for thirteen days and then we had to turn the air off. I was forty-five when he died. And I just started reading, reading, reading, reading, reading. I had never read a thing about Hawaiian history. One of the books I read was The Betrayal of Liliuokalani. And when I read that, I don’t know exactly how it affected me, but I couldn’t stop.”
Liliuokalani was the last alumna of the royal school to become a monarch before being ousted by alumni from Punahou School. “I was a studious girl,” the queen wrote in her memoir. Regarding the Cookes, she recalls, “Our instructors were especially particular to teach us the proper use of the English language; but when I recall the instances in which we were sent hungry to bed, it seems to me that they failed to remember that we were growing children.” Dinner, she says, was usually a slice of bread with molasses. It turns out the children weren’t just sneaking out in search of fun. The queen writes that sometimes they snuck out to dig in the garden for roots or leaves they would cook on fires they made by rubbing sticks together.
Laurel says, “Amos Cooke said in his diary at the end of the time with the kids there, ‘We have not accomplished our goal. Not one of the children has a changed heart.’ ”
If anything, the Cookes’ harsh discipline and Dickensian mealtimes probably backfired in their goal of turning the royal children into grim New Englanders. David Kalakaua grew up to be the king nicknamed the “Merrie Monarch.” When he toured the world in 1881, he wrote his sister a letter extolling the jollity of Vienna with its theaters, opera, races, and beer gardens. “Can it possibly be that these light hearted happy people are all going to H-ll?” Alluding to the missionaries back home, he continued, “But what a contrast to our miserable bigoted community. All sober and down in the mouth keeping a wrong Sabbath instead of a proper Sunday, the Pure are so pure that the impure should make the Sunday a day of mockery.”
Though the Punahou students such as Sanford Dole and Lorrin A. Thurston (grandson of Asa and Lucy Thurston and Lorrin Andrews) are remembered for overthrowing Liliuokalani, in various ways the missionaries’ children and the royal children all rebelled to some extent against the missionaries’ disdain for worldly pursuits. When Sanford Dole went to Massachusetts to attend Williams College and then to Boston to study law, the letters to and from his parents back home in Hawaii, who hope he will join the ministry, include discussions of his increasingly alarming interests—dancing, card playing, theater, and “nude art.” He writes that not only has he got a Catholic friend but he’s been to a Catholic church to hear music and to a Unitarian church to teach a class. He disappoints his parents by informing them that not only will he not become a minister, he will become an attorney. In a subsequent letter he tries to address their fears that the practice of law is “dangerous to piety.”
Perhaps irritated by scolding parental letters, Sanford writes from Boston in 1868, “I think the reason that the old missionaries have so little influence with the younger and wilder part of the people is because they thunder at them too much from the pulpit, and shun them too much in the affairs of daily life.” Whatever disputes he and his Punahou mates will have with the alumni of the Chiefs’ Children’s School in the coming decades, on that point they would all agree.
IN 1838, KING Kauikeaouli hired the missionary William Richards to tutor him and other high chiefs at Lahaina in political science and act as a translator for the court. At which point Richards’s employment by the ABCFM ended. That is worth remembering. Richards arrived in Hawaii in the second company of missionaries, a group whose instructions stressed that “it especially behooves a missionary to stand aloof from the private and transient interests of chiefs and rulers.” Richards probably believed he was merely continuing his charge to be an all-around good influence on Hawaiians by acting New E
nglandy around them.
Richards was essentially Kauikeaouli’s lackey, albeit a respected and influential one. One of his assignments from the king was to work with his old students at Lahainaluna, including David Malo, but especially a young Hawaiian noble named Boaz Mahune, to prepare briefs about constitutional law for government officials as the king geared up to refashion the absolute monarchy founded by his father, Kamehameha I, into a constitutional monarchy.
When scholar Keanu Sai and I were touring Honolulu’s Judiciary Center, discussing Hawaii’s legal history, he told me, “Kamehameha III [i.e., Kauikeaouli] did it of his own volition. And the chiefs were advising him. They were speaking about it.” Sai brings up the fact that the Lahainaluna student Mahune was himself a chief: “So Boaz Mahune was tasked with drafting articles, presenting them to Kamehameha III and his chiefs, and then revising them. It wasn’t some missionary telling them how to do it. This idea that the missionaries brought in constitutionalism, or forced it on the king, is outrageous.”
The product of this collaboration, the Declaration of Rights of 1839, has been called the Hawaiian Magna Carta, alluding to the medieval English document proclaiming that the king was no longer above the law of the land. The Hawaiian declaration states, “It is by no means proper to enact laws for the protection of the rulers only.” The declaration serves as the preamble to the Hawaiian Constitution issued the following year. It begins: