Click on the islands of Kaua‘i, O‘ahu, Maui and Hawai‘i to see key Ali‘i and mission members....
Liholiho, as Kamehameha II, is remembered for dismantling the kapu system and permitting the missionaries to stay in Hawai‘i. He...
On October 23, 1819, the fourteen men and women of the first company to Hawai‘i boarded the brig Thaddeus, anchored in Boston Harbor. They were joined by four Hawaiian men, three as members of the mission and a prince returning home to Kaua‘i.
William Richards arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1823 with the second company of missionaries. At the direction of Keōpūolani, he, his...
From the time of Captain Cook, Hawaiians saw that foreigners used writing to both formalize agreements and communicate ideas. But...
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (ABCFM), founded in 1810, arose from the religious fervor that America experienced during the Second Great Awakening.
From the first arrival of foreigners in Hawai‘i in 1778, Hawaiians perished from introduced diseases at an alarming rate. By...
Faced with declining revenues for its global missions, ABCFM founded the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, in 1816 as a way to proselytize at home and to boost donations.This boarding school aimed to educate non-Christian boys to become missionaries in their homelands.
Captain James Cook was a British naval officer and explorer who commanded three voyages to the Pacific. Privately, he carried orders from the Admiralty to claim any “undiscovered” Pacific islands for Britain, with an eye to assessing the islands’ natural resources.
By the mid-1830s, Hawai‘i had endured a series of escalating foreign conflicts. Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III) was pressured from all sides...
Fragrant sandalwood trees, or ‘iliahi, whose heartwood was used for incense and medicines, had long been abundant in the Hawaiian...
On July 11, 1842, Levi Chamberlain, business agent for the Mission, bundled four of his children and two others into...