On a Mission: Hiram Bingham and the Rhetoric of Urgency

PATRICK MOSER

Hiram Bingham stepped ashore on the island of Hawai'i on Tuesday, April 4, 1820. By his own account he was eager to track down King Kamehameha II and ask for permission to settle in the Islands to spread the Gospel. There were twenty-two people in his company: seven married couples, five children, and three Native Hawaiians who had arrived by various routes at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, and been trained as missionaries. After spending 163 days at sea — a grueling voyage around the tip of South America filled with seasickness, morning sickness (four of the women were pregnant), tight quarters, and stifling heat — Bingham had no idea if the King would even allow the New Englanders to stay.

Bingham certainly had things on his mind that morning other than surfing, but the sport was present from the first moments of his arrival. As he boated in from the Thaddeus, he remarked that "a great number of the natives — men, women and children, from the highest to the lowest rank, including the king and his mother, were amusing themselves in the water," some of them "floating on surf-boards." This is no surprise. He'd come ashore at Kamakahonu on the north end of Kailua Bay, on the west side of the island. This had been the residence of King Kamehameha I, an expert surfer who lived out the last years of his life at this spot. His twenty-two-year-old son, Kamehameha II — also known as Liholiho — may have been one of the surfers that morning. "Amusement" is a word often used to describe surfing during this time period (as when Bingham later presented "sporting on the surf" as "the favorite amusement of all classes"). It is possible, then, that Liholiho — and perhaps his mother, the sacred queen Keopuolani — were catching waves as Bingham prepared to lay at their doorstep an ideology that, in its eagerness to show positive gains for Christian donors back home, falsely trumpeted the decline of surfing in the Hawaiian Islands. Bingham's inflated public rhetoric proliferated a warped view of surf history, influencing later writers and surf historians who accepted his words as historically accurate rather than as religious propaganda. The result has been a narrative, still repeated in academic and popular histories, that surfing nearly died out in nineteenth-century Hawai'i. A careful reconsideration of our primary source for surfing's supposed early demise — Hiram Bingham's writings — calls into question Bingham's reliability and starts the process of recuperating Native Hawaiians' practice of their national pastime. Surfing did not nearly "die out" in nineteenth-century Hawai'i, as so often has been reported. Riding waves continued to be a part of Hawaiian daily life during the missionary era and well after Bingham's departure in 1840.

Bingham was in a hurry that first day. He waited until Liholiho came in from the ocean, then presented his offer to the young king: eternal life and education for his people in exchange for sponsoring the missionaries — providing them with homes, churches, and eventually schools.

The king listened, but was noncommittal. The next day, to boost their cause, the missionaries brought ashore gifts: elegant bibles and a spy glass. The following day they invited the king and his retinue back to the Thaddeus to dine. After dinner, the missionaries sang hymns on the quarterdeck at the king's request, accompanied by a bass viol played by one of the young Hawaiians, George Kaumuali'i, who'd studied at the Foreign Mission School.

On April 7, the missionaries went back ashore for more lobbying, then again on the 8th. They decided to ask the king to split their company: some to remain with him at Kailua on the Big Island, the rest to settle on O'ahu in Honolulu, an up-and-coming port town. Prescient leader Liholiho responded: "White men all prefer Oahu. I think the Americans would like to have that Island."

But the king still did not give them a definitive answer. Instead, he offered them temporary shelter in a thatched hut at Kailua. Captain Andrew Blanchard of the Thaddeus, impatient to get on with his fur-gathering expedition to the North American coast, urged the missionaries to accept. Bingham took a look at the hut — he described it as a barn-like structure — and hesitated: the whole company under one roof, a dirt floor, no ceiling or walls or windows or furniture, and miles away from a fresh water source? He needed something firmer from the king. He stalled, and told Liholiho that it was taboo for them to unload on the Sabbath (April 9); then he stayed aboard and planned a full-court press for the next day.

On Monday, April 10, from morning until late afternoon — "hearts burning with the desire to be advantageously and speedily settled down in our work" (my emphasis) — the whole company lobbied the king and local chiefs for permission to stay. This urgency on Bingham's part, manifest in his writing through the repeated use of words like "speedily" and "eagerly," was not merely a quirk of character or a clash of two cultures with fundamentally different concepts of time. Rather, it was a sign of religious anxiety: the missionaries believed they had a duty to save Hawaiians...