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| Waimea Foreign Church. KHS archive photo. |
Missionary Era
Missionaries sailed out of New England to convert the Hawaiians to Christianity, the first boatload of them arriving in 1820 in the Hawaiian Islands. They endured their own survival journeys—188 days sailing around Cape Horn and South America.
The first missionaries to arrive in the Hawaiian islands included Mr. Samuel Whitney and his wife, Mercy Partridge Whitney, who with Mr. Samuel Ruggles and his wife, Nancy Wells Ruggles, established the mission station at Waimea, Kaua‘i in 1820. Waimea was the capital city, located at the mouth of the Waimea River. Later companies of missionaries established missions in 1834 in Koloa on the South Shore and Wai‘oli on the North Shore.
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| Portraits of Samuel and Mercy Partridge Whitney, 1819, by Samuel F.B. Morse, N.Y., inventor of the telegraph and Morse code. Samuel Whitney was a teacher and mechanic educated at Yale College, Connecticut. He and his wife, Mercy Partridge Whitney, sailed in the first company of missionaries to Hawai‘i. From original portraits hung in Kaua‘i Museum. |
As a rule, missionaries brought strict changes, enforcing kapu, or restrictions. No more nudity. Women must wear Mother Hubbards, long, loose-fitting gowns that evolved to the mu‘umu‘u chosen as daily wear by many women in Hawai‘i until this day. No more hula—a dance with sacred roots that also entertained.
Paradoxically, while they set about deconstructing a culture, missionaries were also the ones to begin to record it, creating a written language from an oral tradition. This they used to translate the Bible into Hawaiian.
Children of the missionaries, the new kama‘aina, or children of the land, set about establishing themselves in differing professions. Many became land and sugar plantation owners.
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