The Missionaries and the Making of Modern Hawaii

The brig Thaddeus left Boston harbor in October of eighteen nineteen carrying fourteen people who had been commissioned by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to bring Protestant Christianity to the Hawaiian Islands. They arrived in April eighteen twenty. Among them were Hiram Bingham and Asa Thurston, two ordained ministers, along with teachers, a physician, and several Hawaiian men who had traveled to New England and were returning home. They had no idea that the religious system they had come to displace had been abolished five months before they arrived.

What the missionaries built over the following decades went well beyond churches. They reduced the Hawaiian language to writing, creating an alphabet that is still in use. They printed the first books in Hawaiian, translated scripture, and established schools. By the eighteen fifties, Hawaii had one of the highest literacy rates in the world. The missionaries also pressed against cultural practices they disapproved of, including hula, which was suppressed for a generation before being revived under King David Kalakaua in the eighteen eighties.

The missionary project created a paradox that still defines Hawaiian history. The same families who brought literacy and eventually education to the islands also became the economic and political elite who led the plantation economy, backed the overthrow of the kingdom in eighteen ninety-three, and benefited most from annexation. The children and grandchildren of the men who came to do good, as a Hawaiian saying of the era had it, stayed to do well. Several of the thirteen men of the Committee of Safety that deposed Liliuokalani were the sons or grandsons of missionaries.

The Congregationalist churches those first missionaries founded still stand on every major island. The Hawaiian language they helped preserve, the same language they also helped suppress in schools a generation later, is now being reclaimed by the descendants of both lines.