Whether artificial or natural, these items were artifacts of commerce, merchandise that circulated in exchange networks between Euro-Americans, Asians, and indigenous traders connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic. The items were “highly gratifying to the curious, who love to trace the operations of nature, and observe the progress of human ingenuity and industry in every part of the world.”2 Trade goods were collected by historical associations, maritime companies, and museums in Boston, which was just beginning to build its own national collections of cabinets of wonder in the decades following the American Revolution. Stripped of proper context and removed from their places of origin, items were rehistoricized as part of an enlightenment narrative that sought to distinguish nature from ingenuity and industry and that measured progress in the crude or artful distances between items of familiar Euro-American manufacture and those made by heathen hands.3
News from the Pacific was as desired a commodity as material objects. Commercial-minded Americans perusing the papers of the day could search through the shipping news to see the names of ship captains who were putting out to the Sandwich Islands, as well as lists of goods arriving in ports and sold in stores. News also circulated between the ships in the China–Northwest Coast–Sandwich Islands trade, and those returning brought back news about the present state of political affairs in the Sandwich Islands. Readers in America were kept up to date on the progress of Hawaiians toward “civilization” under Tamaahmaah (Kamehameha), along with the progress of his war against other ali‘i, in which Euro-American ships and sailors also took sides. Keeping abreast of the political situation in Hawai‘i, in order to keep investors at home informed, was good for the stability of business.
Burgeoning trade routes between New England, Hawai‘i, China, and the Northwest Coast brought both native bodies and the material culture of their homes to American shores. Knowledge of the Sandwich Islands and Sandwich Islanders in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was readily available. Theater and print, exhibition and collection, exploration and merchant shipping—each venue provided different and very particular kinds of knowledge about Hawai‘i that increased people’s curiosity about the Sandwich Islands. They helped to shape specific images about Hawai‘i and the Pacific as a seemingly known, albeit exotic, place.
But why did Hawai‘i and the Pacific exotic become desirable? Was there some kind of fascination with Hawaiians because these were a people who killed Captain Cook, the man responsible for the torrent of print that came out of his many voyages—the maps, words, and meanings made silenced forever? The reasons why Americans were interested in Hawai‘i were multi-faceted, but what is clear is that the United States trade in the Pacific supplied goods, materials, stories, news, and bodies that circulated in the early American republic, feeding a growing desire for more information of this far-off yet increasingly interesting place.
The ships that hunted whales and brought Hawaiian wood to Chinese markets also carried Hawaiian sailors to New England, several of whom intended to stay. Upon their settlement in the States, these sailors, boys and young men, worked for and were supported by American ship captains, schoolmasters, and ministers. In some cases, they were forced by circumstances to make their own way and find employment and eventual passage home.
In 1802, a young Hawaiian boy of four or five years of age was sent to America for an education by his father, Kaumuali‘i, the ali‘i nui (high chief) of Kaua‘i. Some Hawaiians who never left home had their own ideas about what they wanted from the ship captains, crews, and merchants who passed through or settled in their islands. Kaumuali‘i, one of the last ruling ali‘i to survive Kamehameha’s conquest of the archipelago, never surrendered administration or rule of Kaua‘i, his home island. Rather, Kaumuali‘i gave his lands, men, and munitions over to the Hawai‘i Island chief in 1795 in a symbolic cession which would reverberate through the next generation.
Kaumuali‘i’s gesture to Kamehameha meant that he could continue to rule over the island of Kaua‘i and that he continued to manage his own commercial exchanges with visiting ships. In 1802, Kaumuali‘i made an agreement with Captain James Rowan of the Hazard, sailing out of Providence, Rhode Island. In exchange for money and provisions, Rowan agreed to take Kaumuali‘i’s young son to New England to receive an American education. In this way, Kaumuali‘i set in motion his design for a long-term plan to secure his rule over Kaua‘i. Kaumuali‘i’s hope was that his American-educated son would one day return and assist him in making profitable and well-informed transactions with New England merchants and ship captains in the islands. Perhaps such a son could help him keep his island kingdom, or aid in the expansion of his rule beyond Kaua‘i’s shores.
The boy accompanying Rowan moved a lot for the first decade of his residence in America. He lived in Providence, and in Boston and Worcester, where the property for his care ran out and he was placed in the care of Captain Samuel Cotting. With Cotting, he moved from Worcester to Fitchburg, and then back to Boston. Frustrated by his treatment and the impoverished situation of his various patrons, an underage “George Prince Tamoree” enlisted in the US Navy. He shipped out aboard the US sloop of war Wasp, and then was assigned to the brig Enterprize, where he was wounded in the side by a boarding pike when his ship engaged the British ship Boxer during the War of 1812. After the war, Tamoree was drafted aboard the USS Guerrier and traveled to the Mediterranean. On this voyage, he fought in a three-hour sea battle against Turks from Algiers. It was also on this cruise that Tamoree visited Tripoli, Naples, and Gibraltar. Upon his return to America, Tamoree supported himself by working for the purser at the Charlestown Naval Yard in Massachusetts while looking for a passage home.
By 1814, as Tamoree continued his employment in the US Navy, four other Hawaiian sailors who served on merchant vessels—Henry Obookiah (‘Ōpūkaha‘ia), Thomas Hopoo (Hopu), William Tennooe (Kanui), and John Honoree (Honoli‘i)—had found their way to Connecticut, their living expenses and education supported by a circle of ministers, community and church leaders, and their families. But while this support of former Hawaiian sailors turned students sustained the men for a little while, soon enough, a group of Connecticut ministers would see in the presence of these Hawaiian men an opportunity to set their financial maintenance on firmer foundations, and a chance to develop and extend their Christian duties. New England pastors and parishioners thus discovered the power of promoting stories about the lives of these Hawaiian men living in Connecticut as part of a fund-raising push to raise monies for both the school and the broader American foreign mission movement.
A School for Hawaiians, for Heathen Youth in America
Samuel Mills was one of the young men who took part in the now-famed 1806 Haystack Prayer Meeting while he was a student at Williams College. Mills, along with a few of his fellow classmates, believed that an American Foreign Mission Society should be created. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) arose as a direct result of their queries and the debates that followed. The board had been formally incorporated and recognized by the Massachusetts legislature in 1810, thanks to the faith and efforts of these students, but it was not until Mills and a group of ministers and educators from neighboring Connecticut raised the question of educating and supporting several young men from the Sandwich Islands in 1814 that visions for the success of the mission began to coalesce around heathen youth, specifically these Hawaiian men. In meetings and correspondence, the subject of establishing a school for their education was raised.4 Over several years of deliberation about the school and the education of the Hawaiian men, ideas developed about the important role that “heathen” youths would fill in raising the American public’s awareness of foreign missions.5 Heathen youth would be used not only to raise awareness, but also to raise funds for the school and the foreign mission movement. Finally, discussions about the role newly educated heathens would play in the foreign mission field of their homelands engendered discussions about the way in which the foreign missionary movement should be structured both in America and in the field.
Samuel Mills first began writing to the Prudential Committee of the ABCFM in 1814 for assistance in the education of Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, who had been under