The Heathen School Read online

  The idol encompassed and sharpened this element, and brought it starkly into view; in Daggett’s words, “distorted … disgusting … and stained black.” (Other comments, on other idols, especially favored the word hideous. And the “stain,” of course, went beyond the matter merely of color.) Moreover, the idol seemed to epitomize deeply held views, throughout the ranks of “the benevolent,” about all of Hawaiian life and culture. These would be summed up, several decades later, by a Connecticut preacher in the course of a “commemorative address.” Hawaiians, he declared—recalling the situation as of around 1820—“are on nearly the lowest level of social and moral condition. They are a nation of lazy, lying thieves and gamblers, reveling in beastliness. Infanticide sweeps away two-thirds of all children born.… The most shocking licentiousness prevails. Woman is a slave. Government is unrestricted tyranny.… A more revolting superstition under the name of religion is hardly to be found. Human sacrifices are not infrequent.” Here, then, was a sinkhole of filth and rottenness. For mission advocates—in terms both metaphorical and more—it stank to high Heaven. And it begged to be cleaned up.80

  Shorn of his idols, King Tamoree (in proper spelling Kaumuali’i) was primed to become a key benefactor—if not a hero—to the missionaries. First, though, he must be reunited with his son, the wandering, mercurial “Prince” George. The story of George’s homecoming would be endlessly told and retold—at Cornwall, in the missionary press, and beyond. Perhaps more than any other “intelligence” received from the islands, it gripped, and enraptured, the hearts of school supporters.

  The moment has been carefully prepared. The ship Thaddeus, the same one that had brought the entire group from New England, carries the “Prince” and a small retinue from Hawaii (today’s Big Island) to Atoi (today’s Kaua’i), his place of birth. His companions include a wife he has “selected” just days before and two of the missionaries. The ship anchors offshore. Its captain orders “a royal salute of twenty-one guns,” which is promptly “returned by the same number from the fort” just opposite. The visitors debark and make their way through a “crowd of natives,” aided by “men appointed to clear a passage … by beating them off with clubs.”

  In due course, they reach the palace of King Kaumuali’i. As young George enters, the king rises from a sofa for a “long embrace…[pressing] his nose to his son’s after the manner of the country.” The two of them weep together, unable to speak. Bystanders, too, are greatly affected; one would later recall that “there were no less than one hundred and fifty eyes flowing with tears, and though the house was so full, it was as still & silent as the grave. Not a word was spoken for the space of one half hour.” Eventually, the king breaks the silence, but only to say that “his heart is so joyful … he could not talk much.”

  Later George will introduce the missionaries. His father showers them “with tears of affection … calling them…‘hicanee’ (friends)…[and] frequently putting his nose to [theirs].” When told of their kindness to his son, the king responds, “ ‘[N]ooe roah aloha America’ (It is very good—very great love to America).” He wishes to be “as much a father [to them]…as the good people of America had been to his much loved Hoomehoome.” (This last is George’s birth name.) An elaborate feast is “soon provided … consisting of … hogs … several fowls and a dog cooked after the style of the island, together with potatoes, taro, bananas, cocoanuts, and watermelons, brandy, gin, wines, &c.” All present partake “most liberally.”

  As the hours pass, the king expresses himself more fully. He uses a native interpreter, who learned some English many years before on a visit to New York. Of his newly returned son, he exclaims, “I love him very much, more than I do my other children.… I thought he was dead. I cry many times.… But he live—he come again—my heart very glad.” He lavishes praise on the missionaries, and says to one, “I make you a chief.” (However, this offer is politely declined.) They, for their part, attempt “to tell him something about God, but [since] the subject was entirely new to him,…he could understand but little.” He bestows on his son “two large chests of clothing,” control of the nearby fort, a “large and fertile valley in which to dwell,” and the position of “second in command” over all the island’s people. George is “much elated with his promotion.” He finds himself “considered by his countrymen almost as a ‘houra’ (white man)”; that, too, he enjoys very much. Both king and prince are eager to “have…[the missionaries] settle there, and to have other missionaries come out from America by the earliest opportunity.”

  This account is quickly relayed back to mission headquarters on Hawaii—and from thence to America. The outlook could hardly have seemed brighter.81

  To be sure, the news from the islands was not entirely positive. Tennooe, his Mission School training notwithstanding, had reverted to “dissipated” ways within weeks of arrival; these included “intemperance and sabbath breaking.” Since then, wrote one of his supposed colleagues, “he shuns our society”; moreover, he had readopted “the native habit [clothing]” and thus become virtually unrecognizable. In due course, the nascent church there voted to excommunicate him. The missionaries greatly lamented his “defection,” and made “earnest and repeated attempts … to reclaim him”—but to no avail. They were led by this to some “salutary reflection” on the danger posed to all their native charges “the moment the restraints of civilized society are removed.” From now on, they would have to be ever vigilant.82

  With others in the native contingent, things went much better. Hopoo, in particular, “was daily and laboriously engaged in the duties of the mission,” while gaining “high favor” with King Liho-liho; indeed, the king “had built for him a house near his own.” Honoree, too, was “very exemplary” in his endeavors. Moreover, the Americans in the group continued to get a largely sympathetic hearing. Obookiah’s personal story held special interest for young islanders, some of whom were heard to remark “me want to be rike-rike (like) Obookiah.”83

  For many at home, these reports were more than enough to justify all the effort previously expended on behalf of missions—and to spur enlarged hopes for the future. At Cornwall, in the closing months of 1821, Mission School authorities planned the dispatch of a second group to the islands. Intended as a reinforcement, it went out the following year with a roster that included three more native scholars. There was even a sense that the little Hawaiian outpost might soon reproduce itself by supplying missionaries “to the neighboring continents and islands”; one supporter plaintively asked, “Are there no more Obookiahs there?” Meanwhile, too, several of Cornwall’s Indian scholars—Cherokees and Choctaws, in particular—were preparing a return to their own tribal homelands; once there, they might easily be attached to missions already at work. And well outside the school’s official orbit, missionary advocates were bent on establishing a new, interdenominational “fund for the education of heathen youth”—in effect, a fellowship program designed to benefit especially worthy individuals. The organizers aimed to place the recipients “at Cornwall, where the necessary buildings and instructors are already provided, and where, we must not neglect to say, the highest advantages are enjoyed for the formation of the character.” In their opinion, “the Foreign Mission School … may yet benefit half of the nations.”84

  These goals, in turn, implied a considerable expansion of the school—something the agents had begun to imagine a year or two before. The Academy building, which the town had bequeathed them, felt “cramped and decayed” to many of its occupants. The second-floor dormitory, divided as it was into “crowded apartments,” lay so close to the roof that “the heat is very oppressive in summer”; for the same reason, it was “too cold in winter for most of our heathen youth, who are from a warmer climate.” It was, in any case, “just sufficient” to hold the current complement of thirty to thirty-five scholars; a larger number would require more space. Thus in the summer of 1822, school leaders proposed the construction of a new building “of two stories [and]
…of sufficient length and width to accommodate, with lodging apartments, forty or fifty persons.” The scholars themselves “might render much assistance in procuring materials.” (The latter would include timber from the school’s woodlot.) To make way for this, the original Academy could be moved to another location and “there converted to useful purposes.” A portion of the requisite funds might be raised locally, but “perhaps $1500” would have to come from the coffers of the American Board. Pending official approval, “considerable might be done by the members of the F. M. School to forward the business, in the fall vacation.”85

  It was a bold idea, and an accurate reflection of the optimistic spirit then prevailing among school supporters. At around the same time, The Religious Intelligencer published an essay by “A Friend to the School,” assessing its achievements to date and prospects for the future. Six years had passed since the formal adoption of its constitution and more than five since the start of actual operations. Within that period, the school had enrolled approximately fifty youths, sixteen of whom had completed some or all of its “course” and returned to their homelands. Of the latter, most were considered “hopefully pious,” or at least “of fair promise”; several had since begun missionary work among their own people. (The outcome was clearest with the returnees to Hawaii, whose every action was observed, and recorded, by the “mission family” there. Their Indian counterparts seemed harder to track, once removed from the vicinity of Cornwall.)86

  The writer’s conclusion was emphatic: “The experiment has been tried, and has proved successful. Heathen youth can be civilized, and instructed, and prepared for extensive usefulness among their countrymen within a limited period and at a comparatively small expense.… No effort in behalf of the heathen world … has … resulted in greater benefit.” To be sure, at the time of its beginning, “no institution similar … in its object and plan, had ever before been known.… It was entirely novel, and original, and by many was considered doubtful as to the issue. But all doubts are removed. The plan is practicable and eligible, and what is more, it meets the approbation of the Great Head of the Church.” Given such clear-cut results, it seemed plausible—indeed necessary—to move toward a much enlarged future: “Now what has been done for a few youths on this plan, may be done for many.” Thus the writer was fully in favor of the proposal to construct a new building sufficient to accommodate “a considerable increase of the present number of scholars.” He urged as well the purchase of more land for the creation of a substantial farm—this in order to strengthen the teaching of “the art of agriculture” while, at the same time, making the school more nearly self-sufficient. (He also recommended the hiring of a special “teacher of divinity,” since Daggett’s declining health no longer permitted him to provide a full measure of “theological education.” Heathen pupils could not be transferred to “our common seminaries”; instead, they needed “peculiar treatment, and instruction in a peculiar manner, which is well understood at the Mission School.”)87

  Similar praise could be heard in many quarters both inside and outside Cornwall. Gifts would arrive with admiring tributes to the school’s part in “evangelizing the world.” Visitors would come away with “no words to express the gratification … afforded me,” or a conviction that “it certainly proposes the best means of diffusing divine and human light where they are most needed.” The annual examinations invariably produced a round of loud hosannas. And then there was the Baron de Campagne’s assurance that “the praying hearts of thousands in our country [Switzerland]…are kindly fixed” on the school.88

  Records internal to the school told a different, more complicated story. Read today, they disclose threads of difficulty dating back almost to the start.

  One involved nothing less than the “academical” program itself. With scholars who spanned such a vast range—in age, cultural background, prior experience and training, not to mention individual mental endowments—it was hard to establish a common pedagogical center. Indeed, the exact opposite seems to have prevailed. As John Prentice, the school’s assistant principal, put it in a letter to the American Board: “There are here, youths brought from each hemisphere and from various climates, regions, and nations, whose languages, habits, and customs are very dissimilar.… To manage them wisely, is no easy service. They cannot be placed in classes as it is with our own children. There must be almost as many classes as scholars.”89

  Mastery of written and spoken English, the necessary foundation of all their learning, presented an especially difficult challenge. Daggett complained very pointedly, with regard to the Pacific Islanders: “They come here where they associate & converse almost exclusively with their countrymen, & obtain only a smattering of very imperfect English.… They go through with their spelling book, & read for months and years in the Testament, with almost no advantage.” Unless they could learn “the structure of the language,” there was little chance “that it can be made the medium of conveying much instruction”; here, then, lay “an insuperable barrier between their minds & the efforts of their teachers.” There were implications, too, for their spiritual development. When, at one point, several came to Daggett to profess their faith, he couldn’t properly examine them because they “understand our language so imperfectly.”90

  Accordingly, the principal recommended that thenceforth individual youths “selected for education” while still “unacquainted with English” should be placed “in respectable Christian families” for up to three years, in order to gain a requisite level of language proficiency before enrolling at the school. Such was, in fact, the strategy tried in a few cases. Still, the problem was never truly surmounted. In the fall of 1822, when three of the Hawaiian scholars were readying to return home with the second mission group, Daggett warned that “friends of the cause will probably be disappointed in finding they have advanced so little in their English education.” Unfortunately, he could “see no prospect that they would improve much more, if they were to stay here another 4 or 5 years.” This comment squared with many others scattered through the school records, in which individuals were described as “dull,” “insensitive,” “indifferent,” “incapable of learning,” and so on. Indeed, as time passed, the frequency of Daggett’s complaints increased and their tone sharpened. Eventually, he concluded that “a considerable portion of the scholars are not such as to intellect, as that we can hope they will ever attain an education to be distinguishingly useful.”91

  “Discontent” and “indiscipline” formed another area of concern. In offering general statements about the school, Daggett preferred to emphasize the positive; for example, “the scholars are, I believe, universally satisfied with their … treatment, respectful to their teachers, attentive to their studies, & give evidence of unusual seriousness.” But when it came to particular “cases,” his comments often went in the opposite direction. One student was “peevish, & fretful & troublesome,” a second “fickle & boyish,” a third “very obscene and indecent,” a fourth “very obstinate & ungovernable,” a fifth “vain, impudent, & extravagant”; a sixth “of very turbulent temper.” (A list like this might be extended almost indefinitely.)92

  Understood from the standpoint of the scholars themselves, these portrayals may well have reflected acute forms of personal distress. A considerable number were said to show “averseness” or, simply, “unhappiness.” A young New Zealander seemed “extremely nervous and almost insane.” One Cherokee youth was “so discontented & homesick that he has made very little progress in his study”; another “manifests a suspicious & gloomy disposition, which renders him unhappy & unpleasant.” (The same scholar sometimes exhibited “a considerable degree of mental derangement.”) An Oneida boy had to be dismissed because he was “subject to a childish disorder (wetting his bed).” And one of the Hawaiians acted the part of “a poor exile, despondent and at times almost heartbroken.”93

  A suggestion, in the opening months of 1823, that the school be moved from its “retired” location i
n Cornwall to “a place of greater public resort,” drew from the agents an unusually candid appraisal. By this account (sent privately to the leaders of the American Board), the scholars had shown such weak character that the proposed change would likely “prove fatal…[to]…their morals” and thus to “the institution” itself. They were, after all, “simple, uninformed, and inexperienced Foreigners … credulous, easily flattered, easily imposed upon, and unable to make much discrimination…[among] those around them.”94

  Weakness of character (if such it was) led, inevitably, to specific acts of misconduct. There was “the sin of drunkenness.” One scholar bought a pint of brandy, “on which he drank through the day.” Another “went away to a black family about three miles distant, and lay all night in a state of intoxication.” Still others had to be expelled for chronic “intemperance.” There were occasional incidents of theft. The worst involved three Cherokee youths whose money was taken “from their trunks and portmanteau … undoubtedly … by some of the students.” After a careful search, some of the stolen dollars were found “under one of the beds,” but the culprit was never identified. There was fraudulent dealing. Debts were incurred and not repaid, books or other property removed under false pretenses. There were bitter arguments between scholars and at least occasional outbursts of physical violence. Tamoree “raged” at a fellow islander, and reduced him to tears. A Malay youth stabbed another with a knife (fortunately without causing serious injury). A Chippewa boy wrote privately to the principal that certain of his Indian classmates were harassing him: “[T]hey kick me sometimes … and very soon I must be kill here if I stay here any longer.” There was rank disobedience and failure of “subordination” to the will of the authorities. Examples included a large number of unauthorized absences, “truancy,” and “keeping improper company.” There were also times when “considerable uneasiness & disturbance was excited among the students” with respect to the school’s internal “regulations.”95