Growing up in Honolulu, my schoolmates and I painted faux tapa cloth of unbleached muslin and helped thatch a hut with pili grass. We studied different kinds of lava in earth sciences and wrote reports on each of the Hawaiian kings and queens. There were field trips to Queen Emma’s summer palace and to Kawaiaha’o church. “This church was built of love,” the docent told us. “No!” our teacher whispered. “Missionaries built this church in 1842 out of coral harvested from the reef.” My school, Punahou, had been founded by those missionaries to educate their children, and the exquisite grounds had been the gift of the royal family, which in turn married into missionary families. My education mixed Hawaiian history with weekly required chapel, Hawaiian myths with Christian ethics: seafaring Polynesia and Congregationalist Christianity.
When did New England and Hawaiian cultures mix? What happened when Western imperialism met tribal feudalism? How did missionaries set about winning the minds and hearts and lands of the Hawaiian kings? Sarah Vowell’s breezy history, “Unfamiliar Fishes,” attempts to answer these questions and to shed some light on the cultural complexities of Hawaii today. In many ways this project follows naturally from Vowell’s previous bestseller, “The Wordy Shipmates.” That book dealt with New England Puritans’ arrival in the New World. “Unfamiliar Fishes” describes the starchy descendants of these Protestant divines and their own journey to spread the gospel by converting idol worshippers in the Pacific.
(Allegra Goodman/Book World) - \"Unfamiliar Fishes\" by Sarah Vowell (Riverhead. 238 pp. $25.95)
Brief but discursive, “Unfamiliar Fishes” takes the reader on a guided tour of cultural encounters: Captain Cook’s unfortunate end; Henry Opukaha’ia’s journey from Hawaii to Connecticut to train as a missionary; the voyage of the Thurstons, the Bishops, the Binghams and other missionaries to Hawaii. Vowell tells of the missionary wives’ sewing circle as they stitched a cambric gown to cover Queen Ka’ahumanu, the translation and publication of the Bible in Hawaiian, the breaking of ancient taboos, the abandonment of royal polygamy. Vowell writes of the ecological disaster of the sandalwood trade, the annexation of the islands by the U.S. government, the establishment of sugar plantations and the importation of Chinese laborers to work on them. She tells of growing dependence on Western luxuries by the Hawaiian ruling class, and of the islands’ increasing strategic importance to controlling the Pacific. Vowell touches on many lives and multiple events.
Throughout her narrative, she speaks of her own journey as a researcher. She discusses her own mixed heritage as a descendant of displaced Cherokees. She writes of the discoveries that disturb her, including Hawaiian practices of incest. “I think it’s a little bad,” she admits to a friend. She critiques missionaries at their sanctimonious and self-serving worst. Missionary wife Sybil Bingham’s memoir is “insufferable.” Vowell praises missionaries’ “astonishing aptitude for kinship and public-spirited love.” Her prose is conversational but clever, her anecdotes quirky yet highly crafted: “When the Iolani Palace tour guide mentioned the day the Hawaiian flag on the palace grounds was lowered and the American flag went up, she looked like she was going to cry.” It’s the kind of writing performed so well on National Public Radio, journalism as human interest, history as found poetry, monologue casting a spell of public intimacy.
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