Hawaii (69 page)

"Yes," Eliphalet Thorn said coldly. "Noelani told me ... in Honolulu. She now has four lovely Christian children."

Abner shook his head, trying to keep all things in focus, but for a moment he could not exactly place where he had known Eliphalet Thorn before, and then it became clear to him, and he recalled the manner in which the grave, gaunt man had gone from college to college in the year 1821. "What you must do, Reverend Thorn," Abner explained eagerly, "is go back to Yale and enlist many more missionaries. We could use a dozen more here at least."

"We have never intended sending an unlimited supply of white men to rule these islands," Thorn replied severely, and his accidental use of the word rule reminded him of his major responsibility in visiting Hawaii, but the subject was difficult to broach, and he hesitated.

Then he coughed and said bluntly, "Brother Abner, the Board in Boston is considerably displeased over two aspects of the Hawaiian mission. First, you have set up a system of bishoprics with central control in Honolulu, and you must know that this is repugnant to Congregationalism. Second, you have refused to train up Hawaiians to take over their churches when you depart. These are serious defects, and the Board instructed me to rebuke those responsible for these errors."

Abner stared coldly at his inquisitor and thought: "Who can know Hawaii who has not lived here? Reverend Thorn can throw down rebukes, but can he justify them?"

Thorn, having met the same kind of stubborn resistance in Honolulu, thought: "He is accusing me of intemperate judgment on the grounds that I know nothing of local conditions, but every error begins with a special condition."

Eliphalet Thorn was not at ease in delivering rebukes, and having warned Abner, he turned to happier topics, saying, "In Boston the tides of God seem always to run high, and I wish you could have witnessed the phenomenal changes in our church during the past few years. Our leaders have brought to the fore God's love and have tended to diminish John Calvin's bitter rectitude. We live in a new world of the spirit, Brother Abner, and although it is not easy for

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us older men to accommodate ourselves to change, there is no greater exaltation than to submit to the will of God. Oh, I'm convinced that this is the way He intends us to go." Suddenly, the inspired minister stopped, for Abner was looking at him strangely, and Thorn thought: "He is a difficult, custom-ridden man and cannot possibly understand the changes that have swept Boston."

But Abner was thinking: "Jerusha instituted such changes, and greater, in Lahaina seven years ago. Without the aid of theologians or Harvard professors she found God's love. Why is this tall man so arrogant?" A single conciliatory word from Thorn would have encouraged Abner to share with him the profound changes Jerusha had initiated in his theology, but the word was not spoken, for Thorn, noticing Abner's aloofness, thought: "I remember when I interviewed him at Yale. He was excitable and opinionated then. He's no better now. Why are the missions cursed with such men?"

Then, driven by that perverse luck which often frustrates full communion, Thorn stumbled upon a vital subject, and the manner in which it developed confirmed his suspicion that in Abner Hale the Church had acquired one of those limited, stubborn men lacking in capacity for growth who are such impediments to practical religion. "Brother Abner," the questioning began, "I have come here to join you in ordaining any Hawaiians who are ready for the ministry. Will you assemble your candidates?"

"I have none," Abner confessed.

Thorn, already satisfied that he had identified Abner's character, did not raise his voice. "I'm not sure I understand, Brother Abner. When young Keoki betrayed the church, didn't you immediately recruit eight or ten better prospects?"

"What I thought was," Abner began, but his head felt out of balance, and he jogged himself from the right hip. With compassion Reverend Thorn waited, and Abner continued: "I felt that since the church had suffered such a terrible disgrace, it would be better if . . ." Then he caught a vision of Keoki standing before the altar of Kane, with the maile leaves about his shoulders and the whale's tooth. "Well," he concluded, "I thought the most important thing was to protect the church from another such debacle."

"So you conscripted no potential ministers?" Thorn asked quietly.

"Oh, no! You see, Reverend Thorn, unless you live with the Hawaiians you can't really understand . . ."

"Brother Abner," the visitor interrupted. "I have brought with me two fine young men from Honolulu."

"Missionaries?" Abner cried excitedly. "From Boston?"

"No," Thorn explained patiently, "they're Hawaiians. I'm going to ordain them in your church, and I would be particularly happy if you could nominate some young man of Lahaina who seems destined for the church . . ."

"The Hawaiians in Lahaina, Reverend Thorn . . . Well, I don't even allow my children to associate with the Hawaiians in Lahaina. There's this man Pupali, and he had four daughters, and his young—

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est, Iliki . . ." He stopped and his mind became brutally clear and he thought: "He would not understand about Iliki."

The ordination ceremonies impressed Lahaina more deeply than any previous church activity, for when the congregation saw two of their own people promoted to full responsibility for Christianizing the islands, they felt at last that Hawaiians had become part of the church, and when Reverend Thorn promised that within a year some young man from Lahaina itself would be ordained, there was little discussed in the next days except one question: "Do you suppose they might choose our son?" But on the next Sunday came even more welcome news, for Thorn announced that the missionary board in Honolulu had decided that one of the two ordained Hawaiians, Reverend Jonah Keeaumoku Piimalo, should remain in Lahaina to preach in the big church and assist Reverend Hale.

When Thorn sensed the joy that this announcement occasioned, he happened to be looking at John Whipple, who turned sideways to his little wife, Amanda, and shook her hand warmly as if the family had long discussed this move, and Thorn thought: "Isn't it perverse? I like Whipple, who left the church, much better than Hale, who stayed. With his doctoring the poor and building a good business, Whipple is much closer to my idea of God than the poor little fellow sitting here beside me."

On the next morning Reverend Thorn sailed back to Honolulu, en route to Boston, taking with him the four Hale children, and when they left their father at the pier Abner said solemnly to each, "When you have learned the civilized manners of New England be sure to come back, for Lahaina is your home," but to his brilliant son Micah he added, "I shall be waiting for you, and when you return a minister I shall turn my church over to you." Thorn, overhearing these words, winced and thought: "He will forever regard it as his church . . . not God's . . . and surely not the Hawaiians'."

It now came time for Thorn to bid good-bye to the missionary whom he had inducted into the service nineteen years before, and he looked compassionately at the halting little man and thought: "What a profound tragedy. Brother Hale has never even dimly perceived the true spirit of the Lord. If the score were tallied, I suspect he has done far more harm than good."

Abner, his mind now beautifully clear, looked at his imperious inquisitor and saw him once more as the black-frocked judge he had been on that visit to Yale in 1821. He thought: "Brother Eliphalet moves about the world dispensing advice and thinks that by coming to Lahaina for a few days he can detect where we have gone astray. What does he know of cannon? Has he ever faced a rioting mob of whalers?" And with a sense of deep sorrow Abner discovered: "He will never know." Then, his mind still competent, he developed an equally haunting thought: "I doubt that anyone will ever know . . . except Jerusha and Makma. They knew."

"Farewell, Brother Abner," Eliphalet Thorn called.

"Farewell, sir," Abner replied, and the packet stood out to sea.

IN THE YEARS that followed, Abner became one of the human signposts of the old capital, an increasingly befuddled man, limping about the city, stopping to adjust his brains and clicking his head sideways to relieve passing darts of pain. He no longer lived in the mission house, for others came to assume the major responsibilities of the church, but he frequently preached in flowing Hawaiian, and whenever it was known that he would occupy the pulpit, the church was crowded.

For all official duties he continued to wear the shiny old clawhammer coat he had bought in New Haven and the black beaver hat. His shoes and other apparel he got as best he could from the charity barrels, and in time his life settled into a perfected routine, marked by three recurring highlights. Whenever a new ship anchored in the roads, he would hurry down to the pier and ask its people whether, in their travels, they had come upon the Hawaiian girl Iliki. "She was sold from here to an English captain and I thought that perhaps you might have intelligence of her." No one had.

His second calendar-marking moments came when, from the rude desk in the grass house in which he now lived, he released for printing another of his metrical renderings of the Psalms in Hawaiian, and when the printed sheets appeared, he would distribute the Psalms to his parishioners, and at the next church service would lead them in singing their praises.

The final triumph, of course, came whenever he received mail from his children in America. His sister Esther, now married to a minister in western New York, cared for the two girls, while the boys were the responsibility of the Bromleys. Each of the children's portraits had been drawn in black pencil at a studio in Boston, and they now looked down gravely from the grass wall: handsome, sensitive, alert faces.

Micah, having graduated with top honors from Yale, was already a minister, preaching in Connecticut, but the most exciting news was that Lucy had met young Abner Hewlett, studying at Yale, and had married him. It was Abner's intention to send his old friend Abraham Hewlett a brotherly letter of congratulation upon the joining of the two mission families, but he could not forget the fact that Abraham was married to a Hawaiian, nor could he forgive; and the subsidiary fact that the Hewletts were prospering exceedingly with their lands, and were now wealthy, did not alleviate Abner's distrust of anyone who would consort with the heathen.

One of the saddest aspects of these years was the fact that all who witnessed the visible impairment of Abner's faculties could at the same time observe John Whipple's cultivation of his. Always a handsome young man, he now flowered into an enviable maturity: he was tall, lean, sharp-eyed, and bronzed from surfing. His jaw was prominent, and the fact that he had a heavy beard, which he shaved twice each day, gave him a dark, manly look, which he accentuated by wearing dark suits very closely fitted with six-button waistcoats. His black hair, at forty-four, was untouched by gray, whereas Abner's was

T

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actually whitened, so that to see the two men of equal age side by side was shocking, and this was partly the reason why islanders always referred to Abner as the old man.

Whipple also prospered in trade, for whalers now jammed the roads�325 in 1844; 429 in 1845�and they had to buy from } & W. Following Captain Janders' driving precept, "Own nothing, control everything," John had become a master in manipulating the lands and wealth of others, and if an upstart attempted to open a major industry in Lahaina, it was usually Whipple who discovered the tactic whereby the man could be either bought out or squeezed out. When Valparaiso begged for more hides, it was Dr. Whipple who recalled seeing huge herds of goats on neighboring Molokai, and it was he who organized the expeditions to the windward cliffs. As honest as he was clever, he paid any man he employed a fair wage, but when his most skilled huntsman was tempted to organize a goat-shooting team of his own, selling the hides and tallow directly to an American brigantine for extra profit, the man suddenly found he could hire no boats to transport his hides, and after three months' labor had rotted away on Molokai, the venture was abandoned and he returned to work for J & W. Abner never understood how John Whip-pie could have learned so much about business.

Once, on a trading mission to Valparaiso, Whipple's schooner was laid over for two weeks in Tahiti, and John, as was his custom, improved the wasting hours by studying something of Tahitian ways and words, and it was out of this casual experience that he wrote the essay which dominated Polynesian research for some decades: "The Theory of Kapu," in which he made this provocative suggestion. "In our concern over why the Tahitian says tabu and the Hawaiian Icapu we are apt to digress into theories which, while entrancing, are probably irrelevant. What we must remember is that a group of learned English scientists transliterated the Tahitian language and set it into western ways, while a body of not so well-trained American missionaries did the same job for Hawaiian. In each case we must suspect that the visitors crystallized what was not really there. Would it not be wiser to believe that when the English spelled their word tabu, what they actually heard was something different�somewhere between tabu and Jcapu, but slightly inclining toward the former� whereas when the Americans wrote their word Icapu, what they heard was also something quite different�somewhere between tabu and Icapu, but inclining slightly toward the latter? Much of the difference that we now observe between written Tahitian and written Hawaiian must be accountable for not by the actual differences between the languages but by the differences in the ears of the men who transliterated them.

"Thus we have many words for house: whare, fale, fare, hale, but they are all one word, and we should like to know how many of these differences can be attributed to the defective ear of the white man, whose system of spelling did much to crystallize error. I recall

an educated Hawaiian who said to me one day in his native tongue, 'I am going to see Mr. Kown.' I replied, 'Kimo, you know his name is Mr. Town," and he agreed, pointing out, 'But in Hawaiian we have no letter T, so we can't stay Town.' And he pronounced the name perfectly. We had imposed limits on his speech that did not exist before we arrived on the scene.