Eia Hawai‘i: Exhibit One

Around 1,000 years ago, navigators from the Marquesas Islands launched an unprecedented voyage of discovery across the Pacific Ocean. Steering hand-hewn canoes across 2,000 miles of uncharted seas, guided by stars, ocean swells, birds, and cloud formations, they found one of the most remote archipelagos on Earth – the Hawaiian Islands.

For Hawaiians, the natural environment was imbued with religious significance. Geological features, plants and animals were often revered as kinolau, or manifestations of the many gods.

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.

King Kamehameha I united the Hawaiian Islands at a time when foreign influences were transforming everything around him. He managed the difficult feat of preserving traditional Hawaiian beliefs while exploiting the economic benefits of modern trade.

In 1786, trading ships began making regular stops in Hawai‘i on their way to China and the Pacific Northwest. Pursuing the lucrative fur trade, vessels from Great Britain, Spain and America found Hawai‘i an ideal place to restock provisions and replenish depleted crews with fresh Hawaiian sailors.

From 1790 – 1830, a Protestant revival called the Second Great Awakening swept across America. The movement was a reaction to the loosened social bonds brought on by the nation’s westward expansion and beginning industrialization.

For missionaries, education was essential to both salvation and worldliness. Prominent Congregationalist ministers, such as Timothy Dwight and Edward Dorr Griffin, led schools and churches that stood at the forefront of spiritual revival during the Second Great Awakening.

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.

Henry ʻŌpūkahaʻia played a pivotal role in inspiring the missionary presence in Hawai‘i. His avid embrace of Christianity, told in the best-selling Memoirs of Henry Obookiah, created a compelling vision of what the missionaries could accomplish in these far-off lands.

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.

Kamehameha I died in May 1819, in Kamakahonu, Hawai‘i. Early on, the king had named his son, Liholiho, successor. But two powerful women – Ka‘ahumanu and Keōpūolani, both his widow – would demand new freedoms, igniting a struggle that toppled the ancient religion.

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.