Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii by Susanna Moore

Author:Susanna Moore
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: State & Local, Oceania, CO, West (AK, UT, CA, General, United States, MT, HI, NV, ID, WY), History
ISBN: 9781429944960
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2015-09-01T20:35:47+00:00

Missionaries preaching in a grove of kukui trees. Engraving from Charles Wilkes’s Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, 1845

Some Hawaiians approved of the mission, confessing that they had lived in evil times, but now required learning and salvation. Others had heard rumors that on those islands in the Pacific where foreigners had married natives, the indigenous population had begun to disappear. They worried that it might happen in their own islands, and that they, too, would cease to exist as a people. Hiram Bingham was discouraged by the initial resistance of the Hawaiians to what he considered the only path to redemption:

How often have the chiefs and people of the Sandwich Islands been represented as easily influenced and moulded to one’s will! Their ready compliance was doubtless in reference to that which they had not physical strength to resist. But in respect to the course the Bible marks out, the case was different. The missionaries found that the conflict between the light of Christianity and the darkness of heathenism was no momentary struggle. Even those who were desirous to be instructed, clung with great tenacity to their heathen customs, and their heathen pleasures. Multitudes passed away quickly to the grave before such impression could be made on them, and others resisted for years all the endeavors of missionaries to reclaim them.

The missionary William Ellis described a conversation that he had with several Hawaiians about their former beliefs:

The natives were very desirous to shew us the place where the image of Tairi the war-god stood, and told us that frequently in the evening he used to be seen flying about in the neighbourhood, in the form of a luminous substance like a flame, or like the tail of a comet. We told them that the luminous appearance which they saw was an occurrence common to other countries, and produced by natural causes: that the natives of the Sandwich Islands … whenever they observed such a phenomenon, supposed it to be Tane [Kāne], one of their gods, taking his flight from one marae to another, or passing through the district seeking whom he might destroy, and were consequently filled with terror; but now, they wondered how they could ever have given way to such fears … We asked them if they did not see the same appearances now, though the god had been destroyed and his worship discontinued? They said, “No; it has not been seen since the abolition of idolatry.”

It is hardly surprising that there were misunderstandings. The missionaries were not temperamentally given to allusion or irony, while the Hawaiians were known for their playful use of language, which was replete with double-meaning (kaona), sexual references, and jokes, particularly in chants and songs. The missionaries were confused, for one example, when elders scolded young women who sat with their legs apart with the admonition “Keke!” which means “The teeth are exposed!” Martha Beckwith complained that the subtlety of Hawaiian informants often impeded her field work. She wrote in The Kumulipo,

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