“The Isles Shall Wait For His Law” (February 1960 | Volume: 11, Issue: 2)

“The Isles Shall Wait For His Law”

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Authors: Bradford Smith

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February 1960 | Volume 11, Issue 2

Almost lost in the general rejoicing over the admission of Hawaii as our fiftieth state was a unique fact: unlike any other United States possession, this string of beautiful islands was first turned toward America neither by money nor by force of arms, but by an entirely unselfish impulse.

The story goes back to the morning of March 30, 1820, when the brig Thaddeus, 159 days out of Boston around the Horn, made the landfall of the Islands. Aboard were nineteen Americans, Newland missionaries and their wives, come to enlighten the pagan inhabitants. The question was: did they Avant enlightenment, or would they resist it to the point of violence? The missionaries had no way of knowing.

Men of the Western world had first seen Hawaii in 1778, when Captain James Cook of the British Navy, stumbling upon it by chance, was welcomed as a god—generously showered with gifts, anointed in one of the great stone temples with chewed coconut, and fed with pre-chewed food by reverent attendants. But on a return voyage to the Sandwich Islands, as he called them, he quarreled with the natives over a stolen boat. After he had shot down a Hawaiian, one of the chiefs grabbed him. Cook struggled, slipped, and fell. A groan escaped him.

“He groans—he is not a god!” cried the islanders, and killed him.

Cook’s body, along with those of four of his marines, was carried away and, after Hawaiian custom, the flesh was removed from the bones. Hawaiian tradition says that his heart was placed in a tree where it was found and eaten by someone who mistook it for that of an animal.

The islanders were not cannibals, though mariners feared they might be. Yet not even this fear had prevented other sailors from coming to a paradise where a nail would buy heaps of food, and any cheap trinket the favors of a Hawaiian maiden. American ships had been calling in growing numbers since the end of the Revolution, and the islands had proved a happy place for Yankee ships plying the Pacific with furs bound for China. Ever since 1811 the ships of John Jacob Astor had been stopping there, and more recently a brisk trade in sandalwood had sprung up. Some sailors liked the Islands so well that they jumped ship, found a willing Hawaiian girl, and entered upon a life of indolent beachcombing. Many a New England sea captain had taken a native wife and raised crops of hapahaole (half-white) children whose half sisters and brothers back home never suspected their existence. But it was still hazardous for the passengers now arriving in the Thaddeus to land here, for they were not traders but missionaries, and they had conic not to savor the joys of Hawaii but to challenge its local gods.

By morning the Thaddeus was coasting along the northeast tip of the