Hawaii (30 page)

As Reverend Thorn led his family aboard he introduced each couple formally to Captain Janders. "The captain has been instructed to look after you on this long and tedious voyage," Thorn explained. "But his first job is to run his ship."

"Thank you, Reverend," Captain Janders growled. "Sometimes folks don't understand that a brig at sea ain't like a farm in Massachusetts." He led the missionaries forward to where a hatch stood open, and deep in the bowels of the brig they could see their boxes and books and barrels. "It's impossible, absolutely and forever impossible for anybody to touch anything that's down in that hold before we get to Hawaii. So don't ask. You live with what you can store in your stateroom."

"Excuse me, Captain," young Whipple interrupted. "You pronounce the name of the islands Hawaii. We've been calling them Owhyhee. What is their accurate name?"

Captain Janders stopped, stared at Whipple and growled, "I like a man who wants to know facts. The name is Hawaii. Huh-va-eee. Accent on second syllable."

"Have you been to Hawaii?" Whipple asked, carefully accenting the name as it should be.

"You leam well, young man," Captain Janders grunted. "I've sure been to Hawaii."

"What's it like?"

The captain thought a long time and said, "It could use a few missionaries. Now this hatchway aft is where you come up and down from your quarters," and he led the twenty-two down a dark, steep and narrow flight of stairs so that each wife thought: "If the boat rolls I'll never be able to manage this."

They were little prepared for what Captain Janders now showed them. It was a gloomy, grimy, 'tween-decks area twenty feet long� less than the length of four grown men�and fifteen feet wide, out of which a substantial portion had been stolen for a rough table

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shaped in the form of a half-circle, through the middle of which rose the brig's mainmast. "Our public living area," Captain Janders explained. "It's a mite dark at present but when a stout storm comes along and rips away our sails, we'll take that extra suit from in front of the portholes, and things'll be a bit lighter."

The missionaries stared numbly at the minute quarters and Jerusha thought: "How can twenty-two people live and eat here for six months?" But the real astonishment came when Captain Janders kicked aside one of the canvas curtains that led from the public quarters into a sleeping area.

"This is one of the staterooms," Janders announced, and the missionaries crowded their heads into the doorway to see a cubicle built for dwarfs. Its floor space was exactly five feet ten inches long by five feet one inch wide. It had no windows and no possible ventilation. The wall facing the canvas was formed by the brig's port side and contained two boxed-in bunks, each twenty-seven inches wide, one atop the other. One of the side walls contained two similar boxed-in bunks.

"Does this mean . . ." Amanda Whipple stammered.

"Mean what, ma'am?" Captain Janders asked.

"That two couples share each stateroom?" Amanda blushed.

"No, ma'am. It means that four couples fit in here. One couple to one bunk."

Abner was stunned, but Jerusha, faced with a problem, moved immediately toward the Whipples, seeking them as stateroom partners only to find that little Amanda was already telling the captain, "The Hales and the Whipples will take this room, plus any other two couples you wish to give us."

"You and you," the captain said, arbitrarily indicating the Hewletts and the Quigleys.

The others moved on to receive their assignments while the first four couples, knocking elbows as they stood, started making decisions which would organize their lives for the next six months. "I don't mind an upper bunk," Jerusha said gallantly. "Do you, Reverend Hale?"

"We'll take an upper," Abner agreed.

Immanuel Quigley, a small, agreeable man, said at once, "Jeptha and I will take an upper."

Practical Amanda suggested: "On the first day of each month those on top come down below. What's more important, the bunks along this wall seem longer than these. John, climb in." And when Whipple tried to stretch out, he found that whereas Amanda was right, and the bunks running along the wall of the ship were nine inches longer than the others, both were too short.

"Those who start with the shortest bunks," Amanda announced, "will switch to the longer ones on the first of each month. Agreed?"

And the eight missionaries formed their first compact, but long after it was forgotten, the one that Abner was about to suggest would mark the missionaries. Looking at the seven distressed faces in the

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little room he said, "Our quarters are not large and there will be many inconveniences, especially since four among us are females, but let us remember that we are indeed a family in Christ. Let us always call each other by true family names. I am Brother Hale and this is my wife, Sister Hale."

"I am Sister Amanda," the saucy little girl from Hartford promptly corrected, "and this is my husband, Brother John."

"Since we are only now met," Abner countered soberly, "I feel the more formal appellation to be the more correct." The Hewletts and Quigleys agreed, so Amanda bowed courteously.

"How's it look?" Captain Janders called, shoving his head through the canvas opening.

"Small," Amanda replied.

"Let me give one bit of advice, young fellow," Janders said, addressing Whipple. "Stow everything you possibly can right in here. Don't worry about having space to stand. Pile it bunk-high, because it's going to take us six months to get out there, and you'll be surprised how grateful you'll be to have things."

"Will we get seasick?" Jerusha asked querulously.

"Ma'am, two hours after we depart Boston we hit a rough sea. Then we hit the Gulf Stream, which is very rough. Then we hit the waters off the coast of Africa, which are rougher still. Finally, we test our brig against Cape Horn, and that's the roughest water in the world. Ma'am, what do you weigh now?"

"About a hundred and fifteen pounds," Jerusha replied nervously.

"Ma'am, you'll be so seasick in your little stateroom that by the time we round Cape Horn, you'll be lucky if you weigh ninety." There was a moment of apprehensive silence, and Abner, feeling a slight rocking of the ship, was afraid that he was going to start sooner than the rest, but the captain slapped him on the back and said reassuringly, "But after we round the Horn we hit the Pacific, and it's like a lake in summer. Then you'll eat and grow fat."

"How long before we get to the Pacific?" Abner asked weakly.

"About a hundred and fifteen days," Janders laughed. Then he added, "I'll send a boy in here with a screwdriver. Cleat your trunks to the deck. You don't want 'em sloshing about in a heavy sea."

When the missionaries saw the boy in their cramped stateroom, they were both amused and delighted, for he was so tall he had to bend over. "It's Keoki Kanakoa!" John Whipple cried. There were hearty greetings as the massive Hawaiian explained, "The American Board is sending me home to help Christianize my islands. I'm working for Captain Janders only because I like ships."

When the tiny cabin was finally packed, no floor was visible; there was no place to sit; there was only one solid layer of luggage upon the other, and four bunks so close together that the toes of one missionary couple were only eighteen inches away from the toes of the next pair.

Early on the morning of Saturday, September 1, in the year 1821,

the mission family assembled on the wharf. Gaunt, God-stricken Reverend Eliphalet Thorn conducted service, crying above the sounds of the port, "Brothers in Christ, I command you not to weep on this joyous day. Let the world see that you go forth in fullness of spirit, joyously to a great and triumphant duty. We who send you upon this mission to far lands do so in joy. You who go must evidence the same exaltation, for you go in the spirit of Jesus Christ. We will sing the mission song." And in a clear voice he started the anthem of those who venture to far islands:

"Go, spread a Saviour's fame:

And tell His matchless grace To the most guilty and depraved Of Adam's numerous race.

"We wish you in His name

The most divine success, Assur'd that He Who sends you forth Will your endeavors bless."

Reverend Thorn then spoke his final word of encouragement: "I have personally helped in the selection of each man in this group, and I am convinced that you will be adornments to the work of Jesus Christ. In storms you will not grow weary, in disappointments you will not question the ultimate triumph of your cause. Through your administration the souls of millions yet unborn will be saved from eternal hellfire. I can think of no better parting hymn than the one which sent me forth on such a mission some years ago:

'Go to many a tropic isle On the bosom of the deep Where the skies forever smile And the blacks forever weep,'

You are to still that weeping."

Another minister issued a long prayer, not much to the point, and the service should have been ended on this high religious plane, with each of the twenty-two missionaries attentive to Reverend Thorn's injunction that they show no sadness, but the elderly wife of one of the supervising ministers, upon looking at the pretty young brides about to depart, and knowing that some would die in childbirth in Hawaii and others would waste away and others would lose their grip on reality because of back-breaking work and insufficient food, could not restrain her motherly emotions, and in a high piping voice she began one of the most truly Christ-like of all church hymns. Its old familiar strains were quickly picked up, and even Reverend Thorn, unable to anticipate what was about to happen, joined lustily in:

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"Blest be the tie that binds Our hearts in Christian love; The fellowship of kindred minds Is like to that above."

All went well in the first verse, and also in the second, but when the singers came to the succeeding thoughts, one after another began to choke, and at the end all the women in the audience were weeping:

"We share our mutual woes; Our mutual burdens bear; And often for each other The sympathizing tear."

flows

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Reverend Thorn, his voice strong and clear to the end, thought ruefully, "Women ought not be permitted to attend leave-takings," for in the general sobbing that now overtook the congregation he witnessed the collapse of his plans for an orderly departure. Instead of triumphant testimony, the morning had become a sentimental shambles, the victory of common human love over black-coated respectability.

Nevertheless, and not by plan, the morning did end on a note of high religious emotion, for Jerusha Hale unexpectedly moved forward and in her fawn-colored coat and lively poke bonnet stood before Reverend Thorn, saying in a clear voice so that all could hear, "I speak to you not as my Uncle Eliphalet, nor as Reverend Thorn of Africa, but as an officer of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. We place our futures in your hands. The eleven men here take no money with them, only those things required for life on a savage island. It would not be proper for me to take worldly wealth, either, and so I turn over to the Board the small inheritance I received from my loving aunt. It was to have been spent on my marriage, but I have married the work of the Lord." And she handed Reverend Thorn a packet containing more than eight hundred dollars.

Penniless, uninformed, ill at ease with their suddenly acquired partners, but strong in the Lord, the missionaries climbed aboard the brig Thetis, and Captain Janders cried, "Break out the sails!" and the tiny ship flung aloft her nine new sails and began moving slowly toward the open sea. Standing on the port side of the vessel, Abner Hale had the distinct premonition that he would never again see America, and he uttered a short prayer which invoked blessing for all those who lived on that bleak, ungenerous little farm in Marlboro, Massachusetts. If he had been asked at that solemn moment what mission he was setting forth upon he would have answered honestly, "To bring to the people of Hawaii the blessings that I enjoyed on that farm." It could never have occurred to him�as indeed it never did�that a better mission might be to bring to Hawaii the blessings

that characterized the solid white home facing the village common in Walpole, New Hampshire, for although he had said nothing about this to anyone, he could not believe that the levity, the profane music, the novels and the deficiency in grace that marked the Bromley home were in any sense blessings. In fact, he rather felt that in bringing Jerusha onto the Thetis he was somehow saving her from herself.

She was now tugging at his arm and saying, "Reverend Hale, I think I'm going to be sick." And he took her below and placed her in one of the short berths, where she was to stay for most of the time during the first four months. Abner, to everyone's surprise, proved a good sailor, for although he constantly looked as if he were about to vomit, he ate ravenously and never did.

It was he, therefore, who led prayers, did the preaching, studied Hawaiian with Keoki Kanakoa, and frequently took care of eighteen or twenty seasick missionaries. Some of them came ungenerously to detest the wiry little man as he moved briskly among their sickbeds, assuring them that soon they would be up like him, eating pork, biscuit, gravy, anything. And yet grudgingly they had to admire his determination, particularly when Captain Janders began to rail against him.

Janders started with his first mate. "Mister Collins, you've got to keep that pipsqueak Hale out of the fo'c's'l."

' Is he bothering the men?"

"He's trying to convert "em."

"Those monsters?"

"He's got his dirty little fangs into Cridland. I found the boy weeping last night and I asked him what was wrong, and he told me that Reverend Hale had convinced him that death and eternal hellfire were the lot of everyone on this ship who did not confess and join the church."

"Maybe he's right," Collins laughed.

"But in the meantime we have to run a ship."