Hawaii

  “What I thought was,” Abner began, but his head felt out of balance, and he jogged himself from the right hip. With compassion Reverend Thorn waited, and Abner continued: “I felt that since the church had suffered such a terrible disgrace, it would be better if …” Then he caught a vision of Keoki standing before the altar of Kane, with the maile leaves about his shoulders and the whale’s tooth. “Well,” he concluded, “I thought the most important thing was to protect the church from another such debacle.”

  “So you conscripted no potential ministers?” Thorn asked quietly.

  “Oh, no! You see, Reverend Thorn, unless you live with the Hawaiians you can’t really understand …”

  “Brother Abner,” the visitor interrupted. “I have brought with me two fine young men from Honolulu.”

  “Missionaries?” Abner cried excitedly. “From Boston?”

  “No,” Thorn explained patiently, “they’re Hawaiians. I’m going to ordain them in your church, and I would be particularly happy if you could nominate some young man of Lahaina who seems destined for the church …”

  “The Hawaiians in Lahaina, Reverend Thorn … Well, I don’t even allow my children to associate with the Hawaiians in Lahaina. There’s this man Pupali, and he had four daughters, and his youngest, Iliki …” He stopped and his mind became brutally clear and he thought: “He would not understand about Iliki.”

  The ordination ceremonies impressed Lahaina more deeply than any previous church activity, for when the congregation saw two of their own people promoted to full responsibility for Christianizing the islands, they felt at last that Hawaiians had become part of the church, and when Reverend Thorn promised that within a year some young man from Lahaina itself would be ordained, there was little discussed in the next days except one question: “Do you suppose they might choose our son?” But on the next Sunday came even more welcome news, for Thorn announced that the missionary board in Honolulu had decided that one of the two ordained Hawaiians, Reverend Jonah Keeaumoku Piimalo, should remain in Lahaina to preach in the big church and assist Reverend Hale.

  When Thorn sensed the joy that this announcement occasioned, he happened to be looking at John Whipple, who turned sideways to his little wife, Amanda, and shook her hand warmly as if the family had long discussed this move, and Thorn thought: “Isn’t it perverse? I like Whipple, who left the church, much better than Hale, who stayed. With his doctoring the poor and building a good business, Whipple is much closer to my idea of God than the poor little fellow sitting here beside me.”

  On the next morning Reverend Thorn sailed back to Honolulu, en route to Boston, taking with him the four Hale children, and when they left their father at the pier Abner said solemnly to each, “When you have learned the civilized manners of New England be sure to come back, for Lahaina is your home,” but to his brilliant son Micah he added, “I shall be waiting for you, and when you return a minister I shall turn my church over to you.” Thorn, overhearing these words, winced and thought: “He will forever regard it as his church … not God’s … and surely not the Hawaiians’.”

  It now came time for Thorn to bid good-bye to the missionary whom he had inducted into the service nineteen years before, and he looked compassionately at the halting little man and thought: “What a profound tragedy. Brother Hale has never even dimly perceived the true spirit of the Lord. If the score were tallied, I suspect he has done far more harm than good.”

  Abner, his mind now beautifully clear, looked at his imperious inquisitor and saw him once more as the black-frocked judge he had been on that visit to Yale in 1821. He thought: “Brother Eliphalet moves about the world dispensing advice and thinks that by coming to Lahaina for a few days he can detect where we have gone astray. What does he know of cannon? Has he ever faced a rioting mob of whalers?” And with a sense of deep sorrow Abner discovered: “He will never know.” Then, his mind still competent, he developed an equally haunting thought: “I doubt that anyone will ever know … except Jerusha and Malama. They knew.”

  “Farewell, Brother Abner,” Eliphalet Thorn called.

  “Farewell, sir,” Abner replied, and the packet stood out to sea.

  IN THE YEARS that followed, Abner became one of the human signposts of the old capital, an increasingly befuddled man, limping about the city, stopping to adjust his brains and clicking his head sideways to relieve passing darts of pain. He no longer lived in the mission house, for others came to assume the major responsibilities of the church, but he frequently preached in flowing Hawaiian, and whenever it was known that he would occupy the pulpit, the church was crowded.

  For all official duties he continued to wear the shiny old claw-hammer coat he had bought in New Haven and the black beaver hat. His shoes and other apparel he got as best he could from the charity barrels, and in time his life settled into a perfected routine, marked by three recurring highlights. Whenever a new ship anchored in the roads, he would hurry down to the pier and ask its people whether, in their travels, they had come upon the Hawaiian girl Iliki. “She was sold from here to an English captain and I thought that perhaps you might have intelligence of her.” No one had.

  His second calendar-marking moments came when, from the rude desk in the grass house in which he now lived, he released for printing another of his metrical renderings of the Psalms in Hawaiian, and when the printed sheets appeared, he would distribute the Psalms to his parishioners, and at the next church service would lead them in singing their praises.

  The final triumph, of course, came whenever he received mail from his children in America. His sister Esther, now married to a minister in western New York, cared for the two girls, while the boys were the responsibility of the Bromleys. Each of the children’s portraits had been drawn in black pencil at a studio in Boston, and they now looked down gravely from the grass wall: handsome, sensitive, alert faces.

  Micah, having graduated with top honors from Yale, was already a minister, preaching in Connecticut, but the most exciting news was that Lucy had met young Abner Hewlett, studying at Yale, and had married him. It was Abner’s intention to send his old friend Abraham Hewlett a brotherly letter of congratulation upon the joining of the two mission families, but he could not forget the fact that Abraham was married to a Hawaiian, nor could he forgive; and the subsidiary fact that the Hewletts were prospering exceedingly with their lands, and were now wealthy, did not alleviate Abner’s distrust of anyone who would consort with the heathen.

  One of the saddest aspects of these years was the fact that all who witnessed the visible impairment of Abner’s faculties could at the same time observe John Whipple’s cultivation of his. Always a handsome young man, he now flowered into an enviable maturity: he was tall, lean, sharp-eyed, and bronzed from surfing. His jaw was prominent, and the fact that he had a heavy beard, which he shaved twice each day, gave him a dark, manly look, which he accentuated by wearing dark suits very closely fitted with six-button waistcoats. His black hair, at forty-four, was untouched by gray, whereas Abner’s was actually whitened, so that to see the two men of equal age side by side was shocking, and this was partly the reason why islanders always referred to Abner as the old man.

  Whipple also prospered in trade, for whalers now jammed the roads—325 in 1844; 429 in 1845—and they had to buy from J & W. Following Captain Janders’ driving precept, “Own nothing, control everything,” John had become a master in manipulating the lands and wealth of others, and if an upstart attempted to open a major industry in Lahaina, it was usually Whipple who discovered the tactic whereby the man could be either bought out or squeezed out. When Valparaiso begged for more hides, it was Dr. Whipple who recalled seeing huge herds of goats on neighboring Molokai, and it was he who organized the expeditions to the windward cliffs. As honest as he was clever, he paid any man he employed a fair wage, but when his most skilled huntsman was tempted to organize a goat-shooting team of his own, selling the hides and tallow directly to an American brigantine for extra profit, the man sudden
ly found he could hire no boats to transport his hides, and after three months’ labor had rotted away on Molokai, the venture was abandoned and he returned to work for J & W. Abner never understood how John Whipple could have learned so much about business.

  Once, on a trading mission to Valparaiso, Whipple’s schooner was laid over for two weeks in Tahiti, and John, as was his custom, improved the wasting hours by studying something of Tahitian ways and words, and it was out of this casual experience that he wrote the essay which dominated Polynesian research for some decades: “The Theory of Kapu,” in which he made this provocative suggestion. “In our concern over why the Tahitian says tabu and the Hawaiian kapu we are apt to digress into theories which, while entrancing, are probably irrelevant. What we must remember is that a group of learned English scientists transliterated the Tahitian language and set it into western ways, while a body of not so well-trained American missionaries did the same job for Hawaiian. In each case we must suspect that the visitors crystallized what was not really there. Would it not be wiser to believe that when the English spelled their word tabu, what they actually heard was something quite different—somewhere between tabu and kapu, but slightly inclining toward the former—whereas when the Americans wrote their word kapu, what they heard was also something quite different—somewhere between tabu and kapu, but inclining slightly toward the latter? Much of the difference that we now observe between written Tahitian and written Hawaiian must be accountable for not by the actual differences between the languages but by the differences in the ears of the men who transliterated them.

  “Thus we have many words for house: whare, fale, fare, hale, but they are all one word, and we should like to know how many of these differences can be attributed to the defective ear of the white man, whose system of spelling did much to crystallize error. I recall an educated Hawaiian who said to me one day in his native tongue, ‘I am going to see Mr. Kown.’ I replied, ‘Kimo, you know his name is Mr. Town,’ and he agreed, pointing out, ‘But in Hawaiian we have no letter T, so we can’t say Town.’ And he pronounced the name perfectly. We had imposed limits on his speech that did not exist before we arrived on the scene.

  “At the same time, however, the visitor from Hawaii to Tahiti is visibly struck by the changes that occurred when Polynesians from the latter islands journeyed north. In Hawaii their stature increased. Their skin became lighter. Their speech became sharper. Their tools underwent obvious changes, and of course their gods were transmuted. Most spectacular was the transformation of the bold, angular and oftentimes lascivious Tahitian hula into the languorous, poetic dance of Hawaii. Change occurred in all things: religion changed from wild vitality to stately formalism; government became stable and self-perpetuating; and what in Tahiti was merely ornamental featherwork became in Hawaii a subtle art of rare beauty. Thus the development of Tahiti’s god of the sea, Ta’aroa, into Hawaii’s god of hell, Kanaloa, becomes a change in both orthography and theology, but the latter is the greater.

  “In our studies of Polynesia we should start from this premise: Nothing that came to Hawaii remained unchanged; flowers, processes, words and men there found new life and new directions. But we must not be deceived by outward appearances, and especially not by word forms, into estimating the differences to be greater than they actually are. Scratch a Hawaiian, and you find a Tahitian.”

  Abner’s avocation was the Seamen’s Chapel, where he would often sit for hours with Chaplain Cridland, the sailor whom he himself had brought to God, and he thought: “Of all things I have accomplished, that accidental conversion of Cridland has borne the most fruit.” He felt that no life was more difficult or more fraught with temptation than that of sailors, and he was happy that he had been instrumental in erasing Lahaina’s brothels and grog shops.

  He existed on a pittance sent by the mission board, for he was no longer a full-fledged missionary, but Dr. Whipple kept close watch upon him, and if he required pocket money, either Janders or Whipple saw to it that he got a little. Once, a visitor, seeing the lonely grass shack, adorned only with the portraits of his children, asked compassionately, “Have you no friends?” And Abner replied, “I have known God, and Jerusha Bromley, and Malama Kanakoa, and beyond that a man requires no friends.”

  Then, in 1849, exhilarating news reached Lahaina and transformed Abner Hale into a spry, excited father, for Reverend Micah Hale wrote from Connecticut that he had decided to leave New England—it was too cold for his taste—and to live permanently in Hawaii, “for I must see once more the palm trees of my youth and the whales playing in Lahaina Roads.” Many mission children, after their years at Yale, wrote the heartening news that they were coming home, for the islands generated a persuasive charm that could exert itself across thousands of miles, but what qualified Micah’s letter as unusual was the fact that he was determined to cross overland to California, for he wanted to see America, and he predicted that sometime near the end of 1849, he would be boarding a ship out of San Francisco.

  Consequently, Abner found a map of North America and hung it on the grass wall, marking it each day with his son’s imaginary progress across the vast continent, and from deductions that were remarkably accurate, he announced one day to the crowd in the J & W store in late November of 1849, “My son, the Reverend Micah Hale, is probably arriving in San Francisco right now.”

  When Micah climbed down out of the Sierra Nevadas and started along the Sacramento to the booming San Francisco of the gold rush, he was a handsome, tall young man of twenty-seven, with dark eyes and brown hair like his mother and the quick intelligence of his father. The sallowness and delicate stature of his youth had been transmuted into an attractive bronze, and his chest had filled out from his long hike in the company of gold-seekers crossing the continent. He stepped forward eagerly, as if anticipating excitement at the next tree, and he had won the respect of his fellow travelers by preaching a simple Christianity characterized by God’s abiding love for his children, and the respect of the muleteers by nipping straight whiskey when the nights were cold.

  In wild and vigorous San Francisco he made acquaintance with many adventurers who had come from Hawaii to the gold fields and was asked to preach in one of the local churches, where after a brief reading of the Bible he captivated his audience by predicting that one day “America will sweep in a chain of settled towns from Boston to San Francisco, and will then move on to Hawaii, to which the American democracy must inevitably be extended. Then San Francisco and Honolulu will be bound together by bonds of love and self-interest, each advancing the work of the Lord.”

  “Do you consider the Americanization of Hawaii assured?” a San Francisco businessman probed, after the sermon.

  “Absolutely inevitable,” Micah Hale replied, reflecting his father’s love of prophecy. Then, grasping the man’s hands in his own, he said forcefully, “My friend, that a Christian America should extend its interests and protection to those heavenly islands is ordained by our destiny. We cannot escape it, even if we would.”

  “When you use the word we,” the businessman asked, “are you speaking as a citizen of Hawaii or as an American?”

  “I’m an American!” Micah replied in astonishment. “What else could I be?”

  “Reverend,” the Californian said impulsively, “you’re alone in the town and I’d esteem it a signal honor if you’d have dinner with me. I have a businessman from Honolulu visiting me, and he used to be an American. Now he’s a citizen of the islands.”

  “I’d like to meet him,” Micah agreed, and he drove with his new friend through the excitement of the city to a point overlooking the bay. There they left their team and climbed a steep hill on foot until they reached a prominence which commanded a scene of far-stretching beauty.

  “My empire,” the man said expansively. “It’s like looking out on creation!” He led the young minister inside and introduced him to a tall, powerfully built man with eyes set wide apart and a wealth of black hair that grew long at the ears. “This is
Captain Rafer Hoxworth,” the Californian said.

  Micah, who had never before seen his father’s enemy, drew back in loathing. Hoxworth saw this and was challenged by the fact that the young man might insult him by refusing to shake hands. Accordingly, he activated his considerable charm, stepped forward and extended his huge hand, smiling compassionately as he did so. “Aren’t you Reverend Hale’s son?” he asked in an extra deep, friendly voice.

  “I am,” Micah said guardedly.

  “You look very much like your mother,” Hoxworth reflected, as he held onto the minister’s hand. “She was a beautiful woman.”

  Repelled by the sea captain of whom he had heard so many ugly reports, yet fascinated by the man’s calculated vitality, Micah asked, “Where did you know my mother?”

  “In Walpole, New Hampshire,” Hoxworth replied, releasing Micah’s hand, but holding him at attention with his dynamic eyes. “Have you ever been to Walpole?” And he launched into a rhapsody on that fairest of villages, and as he spoke he could see that he was whittling away at Micah Hale’s resolve, and then with a sense of animal delight he saw that the young man was not listening to him but was looking over his shoulder at someone who had entered the room, and instinctively he wanted the young man to become fascinated, involved, hurt.

  In fact, Micah was staring at two people who stood inside the doorway. The first was Noelani Kanakoa Hoxworth, whom he had last seen in his father’s church at Lahaina, and if she had been beautiful in those days, she was now radiant, in a dress of jet-black velvet, her hair piled high and as shimmering as a polished kukui nut, and wearing about her slim brown neck a single gold chain from which dangled a glistening whale’s-tooth hook. Micah hurried over, grasped her hand and said, “Noelani, Alii Nui, I am so pleased to see you.” The tall woman, who now knew Hong Kong and Singapore as well she had once known Lahaina, bowed graciously.