Portrait of Henry Obookiah. by Adelle Summerfield, n.d. (Courtesy of Author).
The anticipated skeleton would, hopefully, be the remains of ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, the first Christianized Native Hawaiian—the young man whose untimely death in 1818 inspired missionaries to venture off to the Sandwich Islands, charged with converting the “heathen” who up to that time possessed no knowledge of Christ; whose intelligence had created a phonetic Hawaiian alphabet which he applied to translate the book of Genesis from Hebrew; whose personality and cogent arguments for allowing Native men to save Native souls led to the development of the Foreign Mission School; and whose life and death story would be told in Sunday Schools to this day. His New England Calvinist patrons gave him the Christian forename of “Henry” while spelling and pronouncing his Hawaiian birth name “Obookiah.” As Connecticut state archaeologist, I was given the responsibility to conduct the professional and respectful disinterment of his physical remains per the request of his genealogical relatives for repatriation home to Hawai‘i. After almost two centuries in New England soil, the best we could hope to recover would be a decomposing skeleton.
Our archaeological field crew had already removed the heavy marble tombstone engraved with the epitaph of “Henry Obookiah” off a granite table marking the burial. The stone monument had also been systematically disassembled, as were three layers of supportive foundation, which extended well below the frost line. Thinly slicing through mixed-mottled sandy soils with the sharp edge of a mason trowel, I encountered the first evidence of the top of the coffin at fifty-two inches below ground surface when rusted metal hardware appeared. The horizontal pattern of nails revealed a hexagonal-shaped box laid in a classic Christian mortuary practice where the deceased was reposed supine with head oriented west, facing east, which means that as one reads the epitaph on a historic New England tombstone, the deceased is not in front of the stone, as most people suspect, but behind it with their feet moving away. Accordingly, on the Day of Resurrection, the dead would be able to witness the rising Christ coming up with the sun and awaken to join Him in everlasting life.
Further evidence of the wooden coffin became visible when a thin, dark, linear stain appeared, a decomposing shadow of the sideboards. Though all that remained of the wood was soil discoloration, it provided a clear outline to the coffin. Excavating within, a pattern of brass tacks with preserved wood adhering materialized along adjacent sides about the chest area. My initial impression was that the tacks secured a draped cloth or decorative linen lining the interior of the coffin. But as I carefully continued deeper into the side margins, the tack pattern changed, descending downward as we dug toward the pelvic area. A second row of brass tacks underneath the discovered row on the right side of the coffin also became visible, forming a semi-circular pattern like a half moon; on the left side, the second row tack configuration emerged but took on a dissimilar shape, horizontal.
As more of the arrangement was revealed, it became apparent that the wood and tacks were not associated with the sides of the coffin, but were actually part of the lid. When the overburdened soil collapsed into the decaying coffin interior due to weight pressure from the foundation tiers and monument above, it split the decomposing top board down the middle, filling the coffin housing with sand and compressing the lid along the sides like swinging a downward, horizontal gate. Brushing the edges revealed that the brass tacks patterned an “H” on the left side and an “O” on the right. “Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia!” I thought to myself, smiling.
Our mandate was to remove for repatriation the remains of “Obookiah,” and his remains only, so we had to be unconditionally certain that this was his grave and not that of another individual. Though we had yet to encounter skeletal remains, the brass tack pattern of initials was an optimistic first indication. We were confident now that this was his coffin, but would there be any associated remains? Acidic soils are the bane to organic preservation in New England. So we tested the sandy ground for its pH content, which fortunately yielded a relatively neutral reading (6.8), suggesting less acidity than we normally find in Connecticut’s mixed-deciduous and high precipitous environment. We remained hopeful.
Then, moving my trowel gently over the soil leveling the head region of the coffin, I heard a dulled tone. Immediately thinking I had encountered a small stone or another metal coffin nail, I put my trowel aside and grasped a small, fine-hair paintbrush among the various hand tools gathered under me. The material encountered felt hard, too hard for bone that had been in the ground for 175 years, I thought, but as my brush swept the granular soil aside, uncovering a one-inch diameter circle, I recognized the rounded structure of the forehead. My God, he is here, I realized, and his skeletal remains were firm, unusually well preserved for a grave of this time period.
An array of anxious people had aligned above me, peering down into the excavation unit, attempting to see over my shoulders, but from their perspective they could only distinguish a small, unidentifiable brownish speck where I had been excavating. I could hear the responding buzz of excitement and anticipation from the onlookers, but before resuming the process of exposing more of the cranium, I allowed myself a moment to appreciate that I would soon be the first person since his death and burial on this sandy knoll in 1818 to look upon the facial structure of Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia. From the scant part already exposed, I realized that we would recover his intact skeleton, bequeathing his repatriation to his awaiting Hawaiian family. I remember thinking to myself, “Henry will return home.” Also aware that the attending crowd stood clueless as to what had been discovered, I turned my head over my right shoulder, looked up and gave identification to the emerging speck: “He’s here!”
The Hawai‘i ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia longed to see once more rose from the depths of the Pacific Ocean thirty million years ago when vents on the ocean’s floor developed a crack or hot spot through which poured molten lava from the earth’s mantle. For tens of millions of years, subterranean liquid rock slowly seeped and spurted, gradually accumulating layer upon layer, until eventually emerging from the sea. Beginning from the northwest end of the rupture, small islands, beginning with Kure, reached the surface of the ocean. This continuous volcanic process created the five largest islands: Kaua‘i, O‘ahu, Moloka‘i, Maui, and Hawai‘i (The Big Island) to the far southeast. The outgrowth is a series of 122 forming islands along a chain spreading out for almost 2,000 miles.6 That is the western scientific explanation. Contrarily, Native Hawaiian tradition relates that the islands were born like humans, conceived by their parents Papahānaumoku, who gave birth to the archipelago with her partner, Wākea, the sky father.7 Together, they genealogically connect the Hawaiian people to their beautiful islands, perceived as relatives, giving rise to the powerful Hawaiian love of their land (aloha āina).8
These nascent islands with their barren topography would welcome hundreds of species of plants and animals that somehow found their way through wind and water. Lichen and moss grew as factors of wind and rain pulverized the lava into bits of soil. Birds came feeding on fish, depositing their digestive waste containing seeds, which germinated and grew. Insects, blown by jet streams, found the cooled lava their home. Coral and mollusk larvae as well as seaweed surfed the bounding waves from other Pacific islands reaching Hawai‘i and setting their roots along shallow inlets. Storm swept seeds, drifting logs, and branches of wood found their way.9 Within this emergent island ecology, life adapted and developed untouched by human hands until the first Polynesians ventured forth.10
Hawai‘i’s founding Polynesians sailed in large, double-hulled canoes, some seventy to eighty feet in length, lashed together affording a platform that carried sixty or more people, as well as water, household goods, animals including pigs, dogs, and chickens, and vegetables and fruits such as bananas, taro, and coconut.11 Their seafaring crafts were floating communes, probably the swiftest ships in the world 1,000 years ago. So intrepid and