2
Playing with Fire
White Childhood and Environmental Legacies in Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i
Come with a whoop, come with a call, come with a good will or not at all. Up the ladder and down the wall, a half-penny roll will serve us all.
English nursery rhyme1
In our country, children play “keep house”; and in the same high-sounding but miniature way the grown folk here, with the poor little material of slender territory and meager population, play “empire.”
Mark Twain in the Hawaiian Islands (1866)2
Missionary children born in the Hawaiian Islands were, like all children, influenced by their environment. But more than just shape the space upon which they played, the Hawaiian Islands formed the missionary children’s understanding of natural space. The white children became adults who believed their childhoods had afforded them intimate knowledge of the islands, as well as the authority to enact their environmental agenda on the islands. Their activities had become what Mark Twain called “play[ing] ‘empire.’” This chapter explores the relationship between children and the environment in the context of nineteenth-century American missionary involvement in the Hawaiian Islands, including how early connections to the land influenced adult interactions with the environment. By the twentieth century, missionary children had secured their environmental legacy of colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands.3
Kāma‘āina (Land Child)
As scholars of childhood have noted, the material objects a child possesses for play are not as significant as where and with whom the child plays.4 For white children in the Hawaiian Islands, isolation from peers and even family members nurtured early and strong attachments to nature. From their earliest memories, missionary children recorded loneliness. Their childhoods of intense separation from social interaction were born out of parental fears as well as geographic realities. Outside of Honolulu on Oahu, where the largest population of ABCFM missionaries resided, missionary families were divided across five islands and seventeen stations. As one missionary son noted, most missionary families “occupied the lonely outstations, where from one year’s end to another no white people except themselves . . . were ever seen.”5
While parents had little control over where they were stationed, missionary fathers and mothers did exert enormous efforts to keep their children from interacting with the indigenous population. The two things that missionary parents most feared were the sexual freedom of indigenous practice and the explicitness of Hawaiian history. The Hawaiian creation story itself began with incest, as sky-father Wākea instituted a religious kapu (taboo) that separated him from his wife and half-sister, the earth-mother Papa, in order to have sexual relations with his daughter Ho‘ohōkūkalani. Their father-daughter union brought forth the kalo plant (the Hawaiian name for the taro plant) and the first Hawaiian high chief, ancestor of the Hawaiian people.6
Hawaiians orally recorded and celebrated this genealogical heritage with meles (chants) and rituals that allowed married men and women free sexual expression. As Christian convert Samuel Kamakau explained, “The taking of many women as wives was a cause of trouble in old days. Women too took many husbands.”7 Hawaiian children followed suit. As one stunned missionary mother exclaimed, “In all social acts, [children] were taught to be alike skilled with those of adult years.”8
American missionary families also entered a well-established environmental system based on early Polynesian settlement patterns that favored the clearing of lowland forests in order to cultivate taro, sweet potatoes, yams, and sugarcane. Farmers communally relied upon the natural flow of waters from the heavily forested mountain regions. Volcanic soils abounded in nutrients, and early Polynesian settlers learned to maintain the viability of the soil through terracing. Large mammals, potentially detrimental to maintaining sloping island soil composition, were nonexistent, as was the widespread use of money.9
Put off by a social system containing such casual views of sex and industriousness, missionary parents created their own elaborate systems to segregate their children from the Hawaiians, including forbidding their children to learn the language that the missionaries themselves were laboring to transcribe. The parents of Persis and Lucy Thurston, for example, required their children to leave the room whenever a Hawaiian visitor entered the house. “My memory of the house at Waialua is of adobe walls,” George Wilcox (1839–1933) wrote, “being shut in by walls that seemed fifteen feet high, but I suppose they were about five feet really.”10 Similarly unable to participate in village life at Kailua, Sereno Bishop grew to dread the “dismal resonance of the tapa-mallets all around the village,” an indigenous practice he was forbidden to watch, despite the fact, as native historian David Malo recorded, “tapa was a thing of value,” and the women who beat the bark into clothing and rugs “were held to be well off, and were praised for their skill.”11
Indigenous Hawaiians were familiar with such restrictions. Religious kapu, such as men and women eating in separate quarters and abstaining from certain foods retained for the ali‘i, had dominated the lives of the maka‘āinana (people) until the death of King Kamehameha I in 1819. Kamehameha’s favorite wife Ka‘ahumanu and his son and successor Liholiho allowed the restrictions to expire, and U.S. missionaries worked to replace the traditional Hawaiian kapu with biblical commandments, as well as New England prescriptions regarding time management, literacy, and agricultural development, such as planting corn and herding goats for milk.12
Like their British counterparts in India, U.S. missionaries in the Hawaiian Islands taught their children to denigrate unclean dwellings and unclad natives who slept on mats next to their animals.13 They also invented new taboos for their own children for fear Hawaiian cultural habits could influence young minds. With numerous native servants and visitors entering missionary homes each day, the pressures upon both parents and children to maintain such restrictions was, according to missionary daughter Ann Eliza Clark (1833–1938), “simply immense if not crushing.” Missionary children saw the great lengths their parents undertook to separate them from the indigenous Hawaiians and, in their isolation, grew to despise the natives and their culture.14
Part of the missionary children’s disdain for indigenous culture stemmed from their frustration over the amount of time their parents spent with Hawaiians. Elizabeth Judd wrote in her journal that her parents’ Honolulu kitchen and parlor “always seemed filled with natives.”15 Sophia and Elizabeth Bingham’s mother taught two to three hundred native children in a school the Bingham girls were forbidden to attend.16 Missionary children learned from an early age that their own mothers were not like Hawaiian mothers, who carried their children to work with them and, in the words of David Malo, “nursed their children with the milk of their own breasts.”17 Fathers, too, were noticeably absent. Often traveling around the islands to preach, missionary men left their sons behind. One missionary son pointed out, “It is glorious to die for one’s country, but what becomes of the solemn obligation to cherish the wife and educate the children?”18
The irony of the missionary kapu against their children’s interactions with natives is that the missionaries themselves could not maintain them. As in other nineteenth-century colonial contexts, almost all missionary families employed native domestic help. The Thurston family, for example, utilized one man to cultivate kalo, their primary food source, and another man to do the washing and bring fresh water from ten miles away. They also used a native cook and female natives for sewing and infant care. Some missionary families also relied on native wet nurses.19
6. Mothers and daughters at a Luau-Native Feast, ca. 1900–1910. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-69814.
Missionaries in Hawai‘i argued that native labor freed their own time to educate the natives. It was the same argument missionary parents used for eventually sending their children away to attend schools in New England or Punahou boarding school in Honolulu after it opened in 1841. “The missionary mother who is qualified to give her own offspring a thorough education on missionary ground, without calling in the aid of others,” missionary Hiram Bingham wrote, “is, or ought to be, qualified to teach a multitude of those whose mothers cannot teach them well at all.”20 The message was clear from the beginning: the most important roles for missionary parents were ones that did not include their children. In response to such “abnormal” childhoods, as one son put it, missionary children turned to the environment, exploring the land and cultivating their fascination with adventure, danger, self-reliance, and independence.21
Playing Empire
For American children born in the Hawaiian Islands, their early tropical environment became, in the words of historian Elliott West, the “original measure for the rest of their lives.” In his study of nineteenth-century children growing up on the American frontier, West notes that the environment often divided families as it shaped “ideas of what was possible” among children differently than their parents’ own reality.22
Nowhere was this more obvious than in parent-child interactions regarding the ocean. Stationed at Hilo, Henry Lyman considered the beach his “principal playground.”23 Although missionary parents generally did not know how to swim and feared the water, missionary children’s earliest memories included watching through the groves of coconut trees “the active gambols of the crowd of natives sliding on the great rollers of the surf.”24 Missionary children dove off sixty-foot cliffs into the sea, descended into rat holes to find pools of water thirty-feet deep, and taught themselves to swim by tying gourds around their arms as flotation devices.25 Part of parental anxieties included the belief that ocean sports encouraged licentious behavior, as Hawaiians tended to swim naked, but some parents adapted to their children’s reality. “[Father] could not swim himself, but was very eager to have us learn,” George Wilcox remembered.26
Missionary daughters, too, fell in love with water. Lucy Thurston and her siblings often traveled half a mile to the seashore to bathe “in the waters of the ocean, with a high sea, and a spring tide.”27 In Honolulu, “few days went by” when Kapena pool “was not visited by at least one member of the family,” Elizabeth Judd wrote. “Hidden in the midst of trees . . . we bathed and picnicked to our hearts’ content.”28
Horseback riding also exemplified the independence, rebellion, and blurred gender lines of white children living in the Hawaiian Islands during the nineteenth century. Horses were initially the provenance of Hawaiian royalty, brought aboard successive waves of foreign ships after Captain Cook’s arrival to the islands in 1778. Initially designed as gifts to facilitate trade, large mammals altered Hawaiian landscapes. Along with imported cattle, these ungulates scavenged unfenced lands and destroyed crops. By the 1820s, herds of wild cattle had become, in the words of one observer, “immense,” and horses became necessary for ranching and herding. These large mammals eventually contributed to island soil erosion and deforestation, as delicate native vegetation in Hawaiian uplands gave way to sturdier, nonnative grasses, and naked soils washed away.29
For island children, however, horseback riding became one of the most popular island activities. Henry Whitney (1824–1904) loved Saturday afternoons in Honolulu when everything would shut down early so that as many as a thousand “reckless riders” took free reign of the streets.30 The seven Gulick brothers, whose father raised colts, “all became expert horsemen.”31 Girls rode alone across the pali to visit friends, and those living in Honolulu rode three miles on horseback to attend Punahou. Twice Elizabeth Judd caught her horse in quicksand. “Ah! What is there to compare to our horseback excursions,” she exclaimed, “when a party would dash along the road, the very horses dancing in the joy of their existence, while the sun glowed and ocean sparkled, and the mountains in the distance raised their blue heights against the bluer sky!”32 At Punahou, girls and boys would sneak out together at night to take “tropical moonlight” horseback rides, “galloping eight or ten abreast” through the coconut grove at Waikiki and around Diamond Head, as many as forty students riding together.33 In this regard, white children in the islands differed from their peers in the United States, who tended to self-segregate their play according to gender upon reaching school age.34
Given such excessive independence, missionary sons and daughters in the islands—not unlike other nineteenth-century American children—utilized play as “simple disobedience of society’s rules and prescriptions.” Whether shedding shoes whenever possible, to the chagrin of their white elders, or simply getting wet and dirty in their outdoor exploits, missionary children knew they were choosing something different than what their parents desired. Within this process of informal play, children “began to realize that theirs was a different world that only they appreciated.”35 White children in the islands increasingly believed that the natural world around them belonged to them in a way their parents would never understand nor possess. In attempting to explain their feelings to their parents, the children often failed. When John Gulick (1832–1923) begged his father to allow him to become a naturalist, arguing that his love for nature was “undoubtedly implanted by the Creator,” Peter Gulick refused, telling his son that all professions were “subordinate” to preaching the gospel.36
7. Hawaiian women surfing (late 1860s woodcut). Fear of their children seeing naked Hawaiian swimmers kept many missionary parents away from the water, despite their children’s fascination with the native sport. Mission Houses Museum Library.
Instead, missionary children thwarted their parents, who were busy with the natives, in the words of one child, “from daylight to dark,” by fully enjoying their years of childhood.37 Gulick collected thousands of land shells, categorizing 185 different species and writing letters to Charles Darwin about his evolutionary findings. Missionary children living near the ocean fished, carved sailboats, and searched for seashells. In the hills they explored caves and hunted with rifles and lassoes for wild goats, pigs, and cattle. In Hawaiian jungles with trees over one hundred feet tall, they used swords to hack their way or walked on the tops of tightly woven branches, their feet not even touching the ground.38
8. Hanapepe Falls, Kauai, ca. 1906–16. Almost all missionary children learned to swim and dive at a young age. Image by R. J. Baker, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-107033.
The children also engaged in cruelty. Unbeknownst to parents, missionary children climbed trees to drop fruits and nuts on Hawaiian heads and even turned to more violent pastimes, beating dogs and torturing cats. Missionary boys hunted for stray cats to kill, writing about their exploits in the school newspaper, the Punahou Gazette. “These animals are uncommonly tenacious of life,” one Punahou student wrote. “It was hard work I tell you. . . . [I]t seemed as though it would never die.”39 The islands, missionary son Oliver Emerson wrote, were to us “‘the call of the wild.’”40
Aggressiveness was not unusual in nineteenth-century play. American naturalist John Muir recalled dropping a cat from a roof and visiting the slaughterhouses as a boy. In such independent play, Howard Chudacoff notes, “the feelings of guilt that pervaded transgressions of earlier eras were more absent.”41 In their writings, white children in Hawai‘i displayed notions that the islands required aggressive containment. The children also revealed possessiveness for their birth land. Parents and teachers often allowed aggressive jealousies to remain unfettered in isolated island environments, and childish play frequently centered around conquest of land, animals, and natives.
Of all the exploits missionary children undertook, one surpassed them all. Every missionary child wanted to descend into Hawai‘i’s Kilauea to see the “huge lake, full of bubbling, boiling red lava.”42 Dedicated to Pele, goddess of the volcano, Kilauea held spiritual significance for indigenous Hawaiians, as well for the missionaries. Attributed both with creative and destructive powers, Pele and her volcano had been shrouded in mystery until 1824 when the Hawaiian chiefess Kapi‘olani “dramatically and publicly” defied Pele at Kilauea. Declaring her newfound faith in the missionaries’ Christian god, Kapi‘olani refused to participate in customary Hawaiian prayers and ate the sacred berries growing near the volcano’s molten lava, breaking a longstanding religious kapu.43
Missionary children were aware of Kilauea’s significance, and their obsession with it signified a desire to confront their Hawaiian environment, as well as the cultural history of the Hawaiian people. Their desire to visit Kilauea also may have signified a self-reliant craving to create a space between themselves and their parents’ religion. Just one year before Punahou School opened, the volcano erupted. Lava flowed five miles wide and two hundred feet deep. At night the light from its fire was visible one hundred miles away. Upon visiting the islands in 1866, Mark Twain named Vesuvius “a child’s volcano” compared to Kilauea, whose crater was nine miles in circumference and fifteen hundred feet deep.44 Henry Lyman visited the active volcano at least twelve times as a boy. George Wilcox descended the crater without shoes at age five.45 Sixteen-year-old Lucy Thurston (1823–41) called Kilauea “awful” yet slept one night just two feet from its active crater.46 Samuel Chapman Armstrong (1839–93) wrote that Hawaiian volcanoes made “all the art galleries in the world seem trifling.”47
9. Haleakala Crater, Island of Maui, ca. 1930s. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-46889.
Missionary children grew to love the diversity and grandeur of their natural surroundings, as well as the difficulty of their conquest. In the midst of conflicting social restrictions and geographic isolation, what Elizabeth Judd called “the contrast of the dark tropical night and the adventuresome times,” missionary children found identity in the land of their childhood.48 “Children of Hawaii,” Ellen Armstrong (1844–1924) called herself and her white peers.49
We Are the Anglo-Hawaiians
Punahou School’s opening in 1841 coincided with other important changes occurring in the islands. The decline of the Hawaiian sandalwood (Santalum) trade by the 1830s—the result of its over extraction and virtual extinction in the islands—meant the kingdom needed new export crops to continue its trade relationships with the United States and Europe, as well as to demonstrate its viable status as an independent nation. Increasing numbers of whaling ships were stopping in the islands, eager to purchase supplies from the kingdom. With the discovery of gold in California in the late 1840s, Hawai‘i became California’s nearest trading partner and principal supplier of agricultural and manufactured goods. Under the advisement of former missionaries and other foreigners, Kauikeaouli (King Kamehameha III) determined that selling private property to foreign investors and encouraging agricultural development among the Hawaiian people were vital to maintaining an independent economy.50 “The prosperity of the Islands and their altered position relatively to Oregon and California, require a greatly increased cultivation of the soil, which will not be possible without the aid of foreign capital and labor,” the king told the legislature in 1850.51 “It is proper to sell small farms to natives and also to foreign subjects, and let them cultivate alike, that the skilful may instruct the ignorant in the work,” the legislature decreed.52
With the constant influx of foreigners arriving to take advantage of these changes, many white children believed the Hawaiian people to be outmatched. They saw the devastation that imported smallpox, measles, and whooping cough had caused the indigenous population.53 Native Hawaiians referred to such illnesses as becoming “shippy,” in reference to the importation of diseases.54 One Punahou student noted, “As civilization increases, civilized custom and habits are introduced, and with these blessings, sickness and disease.”55 Historian David Igler has argued that infectious diseases in the islands were exceptionally damaging because they occurred in “wave after wave,” the result of increasing commercial trade.56
Missionary children believed that as “Anglo-Hawaiians” they could work together for the betterment of their nation.57 By midcentury school-age missionary children were discussing in Punahou essays and student newspapers the material and political benefits of remaining in the islands. “The Hawaiians as a nation are doomed,” missionary son Samuel Alexander (1836–1904) declared.58 “Whatever may be the destiny of the native race,” Hiram Bingham Jr. (1831–1908) argued, “the very strength of this nation, mental, moral and physical, shall, for many ages, lie in the descendants of the American Protestant Missionaries.”59 By their teenage years, missionary descendants clearly had formed what sociologists have termed a “mini society.” Their status as white, Hawaiian-born minorities defined their membership in a Hawaiian subculture in which the “boundaries of play territory” were the entire Hawaiian Islands.60
Nā Hānai (The Foster Children)
We are “Hawaiians,” Samuel Alexander stated in 1864, after living nearly thirty years in the islands.61 Yet the aloofness with which missionary children judged humanity can be seen in their relentless drive for control.62 By the time they reached adulthood, this ambition had merged with great opportunity. Nowhere was this more evident than in the burgeoning sugar industry. Although the sugar boom temporarily subsided after the Civil War, and some plantations even failed, Hawaiian sugar planters secured their sugar market through trade reciprocity with the United States in 1876 and brought vast new lands under cultivation through the development of sophisticated irrigation systems. Between 1867 and 1920, Hawaiian lands under sugar cultivation increased from 10,000 acres to 236,000 acres.63
Former missionaries Samuel Castle and Amos Cooke financed the most successful sugar ventures. Samuel Alexander and Henry Baldwin learned how to plant sugar with their missionary fathers, and together organized the Haleakala Sugar Company in 1860.64 With financing from Castle & Cooke, Alexander and Baldwin started additional sugar plantations and engineered the first irrigation ditch to move water from wet to dry lands. With a government license the Hamakua Ditch took water from six streams on government lands to Alexander and Baldwin’s private plantation.65 One hundred years later their descendants remained among the largest landowners in the islands. Charles Cooke joined his father’s investment firm and acquired the Bank of Hawaii, large shares in numerous plantations, and Moloka‘ī Ranch. Organizing Charles M. Cooke, Ltd. in 1899, Cooke hoped to keep these assets together after his death. As late as the mid-twentieth century, family members continued to represent the only shareholders in the holding company.66
Missionary sons also explored economic opportunities on nearby guano islands, as the Hawaiian sugar boom coincided with the expansion of nitrate fertilizers. Charles Judd and his father were the earliest to get involved in the nitrate trade, advising the American Guano Company on guano deposits in the central Pacific Ocean. The Judds organized Hawaiian labor gangs to work on Baker and Jarvis Islands, and Judd recruited peers Levi Chamberlain, George Wilcox, and members of the Alexander and Emerson families to manage native labor. Hawaiian laborers plotted to murder George Wilcox for his abusive management, but Wilcox survived to later organize the Pacific Guano and Fertilizer Company.67
Most importantly, missionary descendants utilized their extensive peer network to wrest control from the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and pursue U.S. annexation. Determined to maintain the gains they and their parents had made in the islands since the 1820s, missionary children reacted swiftly to Queen Lili‘uokalani’s efforts to dilute their political influence by issuing a new constitution. In overthrowing the queen and turning to the United States, missionary descendants rooted their arguments for annexation in the environment.
As American men began to fear their loss of masculinity amid developed, urban landscapes and to turn to bodybuilding and football as mechanisms to revitalize their manhood, missionary descendants in the islands bolstered their pro-annexation arguments by arguing they represented evolution at its best.68 “As a rule, European colonies in the tropics have hitherto been failures in this vital point of maintaining manhood and virtue,” Sereno Bishop stated in 1872. “So far as I know, [our] group presents the only exception to this rule among all white communities in the tropics.” Hawaiian-born whites believed their island childhoods fitted them for leadership both within the islands and American society.69
10. A sugar cane plantation, Oahu, ca. 1906–16. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-98701.
With the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and establishment of a constitutional republic, descendants of the ABCFM pointed to their own successes in the islands as testament to the continued vitality of Anglo-Saxon civilization, as well as to the ease with which the islands might be absorbed by the United States. The Darwinian struggle in the Hawaiian Islands had been won, the missionary descendants argued, by the Anglo-Hawaiian community. In the midst of the “splendid” 1898 Spanish-American War—as American emotions flew high—the U.S. Congress finally agreed.70
John Thomas Gulick (1832–1923)
John Thomas Gulick exemplified the sense of exploration, adventure, and fearlessness that characterized the childhoods of white missionary children in Hawai‘i. Gulick was born on the island of Hawai‘i, and his first memory was of his fascination with the sea creatures washing on shore outside his home. Gulick’s freedom to explore the beaches did not last long. From age three to five, Gulick remained isolated from nearly all physical contact, kept in a dark room during daylight by his parents in their attempt to cure him of his constant eye infections.71
Gulick suffered his entire life from poor eyesight and endured numerous bouts of near blindness that required long periods of rest. Much later Gulick would be diagnosed with kidney problems. When Peter and Fanny Gulick finally released their son from his prison, Gulick was “nearly blind from the growth of a white film over each eye.” He would later write that he saw the world as if for the first time: “The trees, the birds, the insects, were all strange interests for me.”72 Gulick’s tendency toward solitude and his love for nature remained constants the rest of his life.
Gulick’s missionary parents forbade their eight children any communication with native Hawaiians until the siblings were forced to ride an interisland schooner with Hawaiians in 1841. Gulick and his brothers were returning home from Punahou. “They went with none but native company, a thing which we never before permitted, and may never repeat,” Fanny Gulick wrote, “but there seemed no alternative.”73
Gulick sporadically attended Punahou School due to his poor health. Punahou students shared with Gulick an attraction to the outdoors, but Gulick infused an intellectual component into their understanding of the natural world. Gulick devoured Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and researched natural philosophy, a topic his brother introduced to him after returning home from college in the United States. “A vast field of thought and study has within a few days been rapidly opening to my view,” John wrote in his journal in 1852. “It is the study of God’s character, as displayed in his stupendous works . . . and in connection with this, the study of the relations that I sustain to my fellow creatures on earth.”74
Gulick’s health did not deter him from seeking adventure. In May 1848, during one absence from school, Gulick convinced his parents to allow him to travel to Oregon to visit the Congregationalist mission, still recovering from the deaths of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman the previous winter. Hearing rumors of gold, Gulick soon made his way from Oregon to California, becoming a “forty-niner.” Gulick struck gold. When he finally returned to the islands, Gulick gave the money he had saved to his father, who promptly invested it in ranchland. The investment helped pay college tuition for John and several brothers. Years later Gulick discovered his father had put the ranch in the younger Gulick’s name. John Gulick immediately rented the land for sugar production and retired.75
As a child Gulick had long been fascinated with the indigenous land snails—Achatinellae—that covered the Hawaiian trees and hills. After returning from California Gulick traveled the islands collecting shells. “I asked myself whether I was not acting foolishly in letting shells and other natural objects defer my researches,” Gulick wrote. Fellow Punahou students helped Gulick, roaming Oahu and bringing him thousands of shells.76
Soon after graduating from Williams College in 1859, Gulick read Darwin’s Origin of Species. “Many good people of that day were startled and dumbfounded at his ideas of the growth of the living world, but my mind was ripe for his illuminating interpretation of nature,” Gulick recalled.77 Unfortunately, Peter Gulick did not share his son’s respect for science. Throughout his stay in the United States, Gulick attempted to obtain his father’s blessing in pursuing a scientific career. His father would not give it. All professions were “subordinate” to preaching and publishing the gospel. At his father’s insistence, Gulick attended a seminary and decided to pursue missionary activity in Japan.78
Gulick had been amazed at Japanese ambassador Shimmi Masaoki’s parade up Broadway in 1860 to sign a treaty opening the island nation to U.S. trade. Gulick was one of a half million New York spectators who turned out to watch the ambassador’s entourage. Only several years before, in 1854, Commodore Perry had forced the Tokugawa regime to acknowledge the realities of nineteenth-century U.S. power. Japan had been closed to most outside influences for centuries. Gulick was fascinated by the thought of “opening communication with that interesting people.” He decided to wait in California for the opportunity to visit the island nation. Because few ships yet traveled to Japan, Gulick waited six months. Eventually he heard that the newly appointed U.S. minister to Japan, Robert Pruyn, had chartered a ship. Gulick secured passage with the minister’s party and arrived in Japan in 1862.79
The Japan Gulick met was engulfed in forced transformation and violent reaction. Only a handful of Christian missionaries lived in Japan, and they were strictly forbidden to proselytize. Instead they subverted the nation’s customs and laws by introducing secular, Western-style education and infusing it with Christian symbols and meanings. Gulick recorded that the Japanese people were receptive to the new learning. However, the strong, negative reaction of the daimyos (provincial rulers) and samurai (warriors) to the Tokugawa shogun’s (military ruler) weakness toward foreigners had caused internal upheaval.80
Gulick lived in Japan during much of the violence, recording the cultural abuses and racial prejudices of fellow Westerners. On September 14, 1862, one high-level daimyo and his samurai traveling from Edo (Tokyo) to Kagoshima met with an English riding party coming in the opposite direction. “These English people probably did not know that they were expected either to go off on some branch road, or to dismount and uncover their heads when the prince passed,” Gulick wrote. “They remained on their horses riding on one side of the road.” Samurai immediately killed one man and wounded two others. They knocked the hat off a woman in the party, trying to decapitate her with their swords. Gulick recorded: “The English government demanded $500,000 indemnity which was not granted, until in August 1863 Kagoshima was bombarded and destroyed by British warships. The daimyo and other leaders . . . from that day became advocates of the policy of studying the European methods of war, and of organizing the defense of Japan on that line.”81
Despite the periodic attacks on American and British legations, Gulick stayed. He also took photographs, including some of the earliest pictures ever taken in Japan’s capital city, Edo. Gulick photographed streets and temples and several officials, including a yakunin (two-sword samurai). Entrance into Edo was by Japanese invitation only, and Gulick’s photographs translated Japanese culture for Western foreigners, just as his parents had translated the Hawaiian language for American missionaries. By the 1860s the ABCFM did not have the financial resources to begin a mission in Japan. The Civil War had ravaged its ability to unite donors in an international cause. Without the board’s permission to stay in Japan, Gulick headed to China instead.82
In China Gulick followed his parents’ missionary example. With ABCFM support Gulick learned Mandarin and traveled to Kalgan, 140 miles northwest of Beijing. For ten years Gulick and his English wife, Emily De La Cour, whom he had met in Hong Kong, visited Mongolian villages and taught children to read Chinese. “It will be of no use to send out men who shrink from a rough and somewhat lonely life,” Gulick wrote the ABCFM board.83 When Emily Gulick and their baby died in childbirth while seeking medical care in Japan, John Gulick decided to remain in the island nation for the next twenty-four years. By then the ABCFM had established a presence in Japan. Gulick married fellow Congregationalist missionary Frances Stevens and taught biology in a Congregationalist missionary school.84
Throughout his missionary endeavors Gulick retained his deep, personal interest in natural science, publishing articles on Hawaiian land shells and evolution. An article he published in Nature in 1872 allowed Gulick an introduction to Charles Darwin during a trip to London. “I read your article with the greatest possible interest and admiration,” Darwin wrote Gulick.85
Gulick’s solitary and intellectual nature perhaps influenced his seeming distance from the native populations with whom he worked. Despite writing of Chinese and Japanese friends in his handwritten memoir, he mentions none by name. Instead, Gulick related to people through teaching and writing about biology. Gulick spent much of his adult life attempting to reconcile the evolutionary science he observed in the Hawaiian Islands and the Christian faith he accepted as a child. Gulick believed that the Hawaiian land snails he had studied as a young man demonstrated the principle of evolution by isolation. Although he used the term species somewhat loosely, Gulick believed he had categorized over 180 different species of snails, some incapable of interbreeding. Gulick noted that under the same environmental conditions in the Hawaiian Islands, the evolution of snails proved that “there is more happening in evolution than the factors discovered by Darwin can account for.”86 Gulick believed this diversity was “due to release from the standardizing effect of the strenuous competition on continents, and to the increased opportunities to take up new ways of life.”87
Gulick termed his discoveries habitudinal evolution and spent the rest of his life trying to discern the social implications of human isolation and diversity. He also attempted to reconcile his parents’ infiltration of Hawaiian culture and his own forceful entry into Japanese and Chinese civilizations. “In biological evolution a new type has influence only as its offspring multiply to the exclusion of other types,” Gulick wrote, “but in rational evolution a new character may propagate itself by transforming other types into more or less conformity to its own standards without any infusion of new blood. This is the method of Christ’s influence on the world.”88 Choice, even among the lowest snail, suggested that “some future day mankind will execute intelligent plans for influencing its own evolution.” Genetics, Gulick wrote in 1907, hid the “secrets of biology.”89
Gulick spent his last two decades back in the Hawaiian Islands, deconstructing the concept of nationalism using the theory of evolution. For Gulick, who was raised in Hawai‘i and lived in Japan, China, and the United States, the question was personal. Gulick believed citizenship was global and international socialism inevitable. Gulick demanded an international response to exploitation, overproduction, waste, and artistic and scientific ignorance. “The socialists are the only political party seeking to attain any of these ends,” he wrote. In 1907 Gulick founded the Hawaiian branch of the American Socialist Party.90
Gulick’s desire to use his Hawaiian and American educations—as well as racial privilege—to influence political, economic, and social conditions throughout the world was no different from the efforts of other missionary children born in the Hawaiian Islands. In Gulick one sees the influence of the islands as an inescapable environmental force propelling him forward and back again.
11. John T. Gulick, 1858. Mission Houses Museum Library.
All the World’s a Playground
White missionary children presided over some of the most dramatic environmental changes occurring in the Hawaiian Islands during the nineteenth century. Gone were the ahupua‘a of traditional Hawaiian society, land grants protecting communal use and water rights from the uplands to the sea. Like the early Hawaiian forests, where ranches and plantations now stood, they had eroded away under decades of legislative and judicial decisions. Industry and international commerce supplanted them.91 Whereas on square mile of taro could feed over fifteen thousand Hawaiians, one hundred acres of sugar cane required one million gallons a day of irrigated water.92 As anthropologist Carol MacLennan notes, “Cane sugar production was probably the first true industry of the modern era.” Cut cane required immediate milling, and plantations became efficient by bringing field and mill together into one enterprise, which ultimately incorporated transportation, roads, harbors, and shipping for sale overseas.93
Yet missionary descendants believed the islands—their topography and geography—had made them who they were. In the absence of a material and social culture, missionary children in the Hawaiian Islands turned to the environment for a sense of identity and fulfillment. “The senses claim Hawaii,” explained missionary son Joseph Cooke (1838–79).94 In nature, John Gulick believed, one obtained “life, pleasure and instruction.”95 Under the stars, another missionary child noted, “he felt himself no longer entirely alone.”96
As psychologist Alison Gopnik notes, childhood play is both meaningful to children and significant to society: “When we become adults we put all that we’ve learned and imagined to use.”97 For the white children born to American parents in nineteenth-century Hawai‘i, nature became their parent, but they became its master. “Nature is full of antagonistic forces,” Andrews argued, “and these are always paired off, and ready to join battle at any provocation.”98 In the end, the missionary children’s desire to control the ‘āina (land), which culminated in political revolution, grew out of the children’s disproportionate sense of self-reliance, born from a dearth of personal engagements with others, as well as a sense of rebellion toward the culture and people who, the children believed, had forced their isolation.99
12. Taro patch, Hawaiian Islands, ca. 1908. By the early nineteenth century, native Hawaiians had learned to cultivate over three hundred varieties of taro on ahupua‘a, the triangle-like wedges that spread from the mountains to the sea. The penalty for wasting water in one’s ahupua‘a was death. See Levine, “Lessons from the Taro Patch.” Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-113415.
Nineteenth-century missionary children in Hawai‘i encountered amazing ecological experiences, which few other white children at the time ever would. Yet those missionary children who remained in the Hawaiian Islands—with few exceptions—had little faith in the Hawaiian people or culture.100 The missionary children had been taught to distrust racial difference and fear acculturation into nonwhite populations. Perhaps the children also desired to prove to themselves that they represented a worthy race. As missionary son William Smith (1848–1929) noted in 1882, missionary parents had made the “sacrifice of family life” and chose the indigenous people instead.101 This sense of abandonment allowed missionary children to explore places few Americans or Europeans had ever seen. Yet the same independence and insecurities that propelled missionary children toward environmental exploration also inflicted them. Many simply incorporated the tension into the way they understood the world. Their views, as indigenous populations would increasingly discover, coexisted easily with the growing number of nineteenth-century voices who advocated a “white man’s burden” of economic exploitation, colonial administration, and suppression of native dissent.