HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

In the 1820s, waves of Christian missionaries were dispatched from Boston, believing they might never return. They didn’t know much about the land they were going to settle in or the people they were trying to convert, but what little they had heard was frightening. The missionaries came from a church that was directly descended from the harsh Christianity of the Puritans, and they were on their way to a land where the people worshipped a pantheon of many gods. From a society where both men and women were basically always covered from neck to ankles, they were going to a land where the people wore tattoos and very little else. They had heard rumors of graven idols and human sacrifice, and believed they were on their way to do battle with the devil himself. Many of them believed that they were being sent into the gates of hell, but they were on their way to heaven on earth itself… the Kingdom of Hawaii.

Puritans in Paradise Keawala’i Palapala Ho’omau Huialoha Huialoha Huialoha Huialoha Nahiku Nahiku Lahuiokalani Ka’ānapali Kahakuloa Lanakila Ihiihi O Iehowa Ona Kava in Keanae Lanakila Ihiihi O Iehowa Ona Kava in Keanae Keolahou Waiola in Lahaina Royal burial plot at Waiola Royal burial plot at Waiola Wananalua in Hana

• Morrison, S. E. “Boston Traders in Hawaiian Islands, 1789-1823.” The Washington Historical Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 3, 1921
• History of the Sandwich Islands Mission, Rufus Anderson, 1870
• A Narrative of Five Youth from the Sandwich Islands, 1816
• A Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands, Hiram Bingham, 1848
• Tate, Merze. “The Sandwich Islands Missionaries Create a Literature.” Church History, vol. 31, no. 2, 1962
• Portraits of American Protestant missionaries to Hawaii
• The Hawaiian Kingdom, Volume I, Ralph S Kuykendall, 1938
• Island Queens and Mission Wives, How Gender and Empire Remade Hawaii’s Pacific World, Jennifer Thigpen, 2014
• Background on Opukaha’ia from an independent researcher
• Empire of the Young: Missionary Children in Hawai‘i and the Birth of U.S. Colonialism in the Pacific, 1820-1898, dissertation by Joy Schulz, 2011
• The congregation at Keawala’i refuses to deed their church and land to the missionary society in Boston
• The 1848 panorama of a whaling voyage around the world that our header image is taken from
• A travelog of the bicentennial trip to Boston
• Rediscovering the royal complex at Moku’ula