Missionaries and foodways in early 19th-century Hawai'i

Food and Foodways

Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 159-180

  Kashay, Jennifer Fish ^a  

^a Veterinary Dentistry and Oral Surgery   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 70349611094     PISSN: 07409710     EISSN: 15423484     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/07409710903149769     Document Type: Article

References (128)

1. Lucy M. Long, Nourishing the Academic Imagination: The Use of Food in Teaching Concepts of Culture, Food and Foodways, 9, 3-4, 235.
2. My understanding of the links between food, foodways, and identity has been informed by numerous scholarly writings. The foremost are: Long, Nourishing the Academic Imagination Linda
3. Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, Introduction, Ethnical and Regional Foodways in the United States, the Performance of Group Identity (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984)
4. Roger Abrahams, Equal Opportunity Eating: A Structural Excursus on Things of the Mouth, ibid
5. Susan Kalcik, Ethic Foodways in America: Symbol and the Performance of Identity, ibid
6. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).
7. This paper is a product of a summer research trip at the Hawaiian Mission Children Society Library in Honolulu, Hawai'i that focused on material culture of the ABCFM evangelists who lived there in the early 19th century. While there, I randomly examined the journals and letters of both male and female missionaries. Moreover, I tried to make sure to read primary sources from the early and middle years of the mission. Additionally, I read as many published primary accounts of mission life, as available through interlibrary loan, written either by the missionaries themselves or their children and grandchildren.
8. Missionary women continued to write to one another about food, but usually in the form of a request for butter, fresh vegetables, or some other item needed for their families.
9. Over the past two decades I have read not only the private letters and journals of the evangelists, but mission station reports, church records, official reports to the ABCFM, and articles, letters, and copies of their journals intended for publication in the Missionary Herald. Generally, the latter were written by the men of the mission.
10. David Mackay argues that science and the empirical method were but one lens that British explorers and sailors viewed the Pacific. This worldview existed along with older utopian notions about unknown and exotic locations.
11. David Mackay, Myth, Science, and Experience in the British Construction of the Pacific, in Alex Calder, Jonathan Lamb, Bridget Orr, eds., Islands and Beaches: Pacific Encounters, 1769-1840 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 100-113.
12. Ralph S. Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1778-1854: Foundation and Transformation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1938), 84-85.
13. Richard A Wisniewski, Hawaiian Monarchs and Their Palaces (Honolulu: Pacific Basin Enterprises, 1987),6-8.
14. While it is difficult to determine the exact number of Americans and Europeans living in the Sandwich Islands during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in 1831 the missionary Hiram Bingham estimated that between 250 and 300 foreigners lived on the island of Oahu, which was the main port of trade. The numbers, no doubt, were much smaller prior to the arrival of American Protestant mission in 1820, the sandalwood boom of the 1810s and 1820s, and the whale trade of the 1820s and 1830s.
15. Gavan Daws estimates that several dozen resided in Honolulu by 1810.
16. Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968), 46.
17. A large percentage of these foreigners included traders and missionaries from New England and the Mid-Atlantic States. British traders made up a much smaller percentage of this number, while a handful of French, Spanish, and other Europeans also lived at the islands.
18. Rafia Zafar, The Proof of the Pudding: Of Haggis, Hasty Pudding, and Transatlantic Influence, Early American Literature, 31, 1996.
19. Char Miller, Selected Writings of Hiram Bingham, 1814-1869 (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), 132-133.
20. Lucia Ruggles Holman, Journal of Lucia Ruggles Holman, Special Publication 17 (Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1931), 17-18.
21. Emma Lyons Doyle, Makua Laiana: The Story of Lorenzo Lyons (Honolulu: Star Bulletin, 1952), 19.
22. Robert Launay, Tasting the World: Food in Early European Travel Narratives, Food & Foodways, 1, 2003, 30.
23. Doyle, Makua Laiana, 19
24. Abner Wilcox, Apr. 15, 1837, in Ethel M. Damon, ed., Letters of Abner and Lucy Wilcox (Honolulu: Privately Printed, 1950), 68
25. Cochran Forbes, May 17, 1832, The Journals of Cochran Forbes: Missionary to Hawaii 1831-1864 (Honolulu: Hawaiian Mission Children's Society, 1984), 30.
26. Holman, Journal, 32.
27. Holman, Journal, 32.
28. Heidi Oberholtzer Lee, 'The Hungry Soul': Sacramental Appetite and the Transformation of Taste in Early American Travel Writing, Early American Studies, Spring 2005, 71.
29. Doyle, Makua Laiana, 19.
30. Doyle, Makua Laiana, 125.
31. Henry Lyman, Hawaiian Yesterdays (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1906), 8.
32. Sarah Joiner Lyman, The Lymans of Hilo: A Fascinating Account of Life in 19th Century Hawaii (Hilo, HI: Lyman House Memorial Museum, 1979), 33.
33. S. Lyman, The Lymans of Hilo, 60.
34. John D. Paris, Fragments of Real Missionary Life (Honolulu: The Friend, 1920), 14-15.
35. S. Lyman, The Lymans of Hilo, 63.
36. Orramel Hinckley Gulick, Pilgrims of Hawaii: Their Own Story (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1918), 116.
37. Laura Fish Judd, Honolulu, Sketches of Life Social, Political, and Religious in the Hawaiian Islands From 1828-1861 (Honolulu: Star Bulletin, 1928), 5.
38. Kalcik, Ethic Foodways in America, in Brown and Mussell, eds., Ethnic and Regional Food- ways, 50. Miriam E. Lowenberg, et al., Food and Man, 2nd edition (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974), 118.
39. Frederik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 13-14.
40. Nupur Chaudhuri, Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain, in Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, ID: Indiana University Press, 1992), 232.
41. Erica J. Peters, National Preferences and Colonial Cuisine: Seeking the Familiar in French Vietnam, Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Western Society for French History, 27, 1999, 150-159.
42. Roger Abrahams, Equal Opportunity Eating: A Structural Excursus on Things of the Mouth, in Brown and Mussel, eds., Ethnic and Regional Foodways, 23.
43. Gulick, Pilgrims, 116.
44. Lucy Goodale Thurston, Life and Times of Lucy G. Thurston (Ann Arbor: S.C. Andrews, 1882),
45. Mary Dillingham Frear, Lowell and Abigail: A Realistic Idyll (New Haven: Privately Printed, 1934), 215.
46. According to Vanessa Smith, since they first tasted it in 1686, British travelers in the Pacific have conceived of the breadfruit as a substitute for one kind of food or another.
47. Vanessa Smith, Give Us Our Daily Breadfruit: Bread Substitution in the Pacific in the Eighteenth Century, Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture, 35, 2006, 53.
48. S. Lyman, The Lymans of Hilo, 59.
49. Cochran Forbes, Journals, 42.
50. Titus Coan, Life in Hawaii: An Autobiographical Sketch of Mission Life and Labors (New York: A.D.F. Randolph & Co., 1882), 91-92.
51. Doyle, Makua Laiana, 156.
52. In Smith, Give Us Our Daily Breadfruit, 61-62
53. The author explores the syncretic nature and conscious symbolism of the use of breadfruit as the host by missionaries in Tahiti. Since William Ellis, one of the missionaries described by Smith, became a member of the American Mission to Hawaii in 1823, Smith's insights seem even more pertinent.
54. Doyle, Makua Laiana, 129.
55. S. Lyman, The Lymans of Hilo, 82.
56. Juliette Montague Cooke, July 29, 1839, in Richards, ed., Amos Starr Cooke and Juliette Montague Cooke, 178.
57. William Richards, Oct. 30, 1823, in Samuel Williston, William Richards (Cambridge, MA: privately printed, 1938), 17.
58. For the difficulties in growing corn and other familiar American agricultural produce, see extracts from the journal of Elisha Loomis, Jan. 8, 1821, in Gulick, Pilgrims of Hawaii, 86. Ostensibly, the missionary assistant Daniel Chamberlain, his wife, and growing brood of children were sent back to America because of the difficulty of cultivating crops such as corn and wheat in Hawai'i. However, others attribute their return home to the growing sense of fear among the missionaries that their children were being exposed to the sexual activities of Native Hawaiians.
59. Williston, William Richards, 16-17.
60. Coan, Life in Hawaii, 111.
61. Sereno E. Bishop, Reminiscences of Old Hawaii (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Co., Ltd., 1916), 16
62. Launay, Tasting the World, 38-39.
63. Peters, National Preferences and Colonial Cuisine, 150.
64. Launay, Tasting the World, 29, 36.
65. Peters, National Preferences and Colonial Cuisine, 151.
66. Forbes, March 20, 1832, Journals, 20.
67. Forbes, Sept. 10, 1832, Journals, 40.
68. S. Lyman, February 5, 1852, The Lymans of Hilo, 131.
69. Frear, Lowell and Abigail, 97.
70. S. Lyman, Oct. 5, 1833, The Lymans of Hilo, 58.
71. S. Lyman, Aug. 9, 1841, The Lymans of Hilo, 111-112.
72. Henry Kinney, April 3, 1845, in Charlotte Morris Thompson, ed., Kinney Journals: Boston to the Sandwich Islands, 1847-1848 (Lafayette, CA: privately printed, 1978), 62.
73. Doyle, Makua Laiana, 156.
74. Coan, Life in Hawaii, 91-92.
75. Coan, Life in Hawaii, 91-92.
76. Coan, Life in Hawaii, 91-92.
77. Mary Charlotte Alexander, William Patterson Alexander in Kentucky the Marquesas Hawaii (Honolulu: privately printed, 1934), 192.
78. Alexander, William Patterson, 192.
79. See, Daniel Sack, Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture (New York: St. Martins Press, 2000.) ch. 1.
80. Robert C. Fuller, Religion and Wine: A Cultural History of Wine Drinking in the United States (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1996), ch. 3.
81. I want to thank the members of the Yale Edinburgh Group who so generously offered me their advice and citations for readings on the theology of the sacrament of Holy Communion and the controversies surrounding it. I would also like to thank the Reverend Hal Chorpenning of Plymouth Congregational Church in Fort Collins, Colorado and my colleague Diane Margolf at Colorado State University for discussing this subject with me.
82. Similarly, Smith does not interpret the use of breadfruit for the sacrament by the missionaries of the London Missionary Society in late 18th-century Tahiti as a sacrifice. Instead, she describes the act as a syncretic gesture in which a substitute (breadfruit) is used as a substitute (bread) for the blood and body of Christ. She goes to on to analyze the ways in which this was easier for English Protestants who believed in commemoration than it was for Catholics who believed in transubstantiation.
83. Smith, Give Us Our Daily Breadfruit, 62, 61-64.
84. Launay, Tasting the World, 32.
85. Launay, Tasting the World, 32.
86. Launay, Tasting the World, 43.
87. S. Lyman, The Lymans of Hilo, 75.
88. Thurston, Life and Times, 45. Italics mine.
89. Thurston, Life and Times, 40.
90. Thurston, Life and Times, 40.
91. Thurston, Life and Times, 40.
92. Trudy Eden, Food, Assimilation, and the Malleability of the Human Body in Early Virginia, in Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tartar, eds., A Centre of the Wonders, The Body in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 29-42.
93. See also, Lee, The Hungry Soul, 67-68.
94. Thurston, July 25, 1839, Life and Times, 143.
95. Norbert Elias, Edmund Jephcott, trans., The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 84-108.
96. James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: Archaeology of Early American Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), ch. 6.
97. Barbara Carson, Ambitious Appetites: Dining, Behavior, and Patterns of Consumption in Federal Washington (New York: The American Institute of Architects Press, 1990).
98. John F. Kasson, Rituals of Dining: Table Manners in Victorian America, in Kathryn Grover, ed., Dining in America, 1850-1950 (Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 114-141.
99. Kasson calls this the democratization of gentility. Ibid., 123.
100. Similarly, Jean and John Comaroff identify the Congregationalist missionaries of the London Missionary Society as coming from the middling sorts, although the class system was much differ- ent in England than in America. Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 44.
101. Patricia Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 7, 19.
102. For two examples, see Samuel Williston, William Richards, 67-68.
103. Frear, Lowell and Abigail, 281.
104. Holman, June 1, 1820, Journal, 27.
105. Thurston, 1820, Life and Times, 56.
106. See also, Carson, Ambitious Appetites, 38, 46-47.
107. Holman, April 7, 1820, Journal, 19.
108. Holman, September 18, 1820, Journal, 34.
109. Carson, Ambitious Appetites, 59.
110. Holman, April 7, 1820, Journal, 19.
111. Holman, April 7, 1820, Journal, 20.
112. Thurston, 1823, Life and Times, 74.
113. Abigail Smith, 1833, in Frear, Lowell and Abigail, 72.
114. Thurston, Life and Times, 112-113.
115. Forbes, Journals, 30.
116. Forbes, Journals, 40.
117. Lowell Smith, Jan. 6, 1834, in Frear, Lowell and Abigail, 91.
118. Lowell Smith, Jan. 6, 1834, in Frear, Lowell and Abigail, 89-90.
119. Miller, Selected Writings, 132-133.
120. Launay, Tasting the World.
121. Launay, Tasting the World, 28.
122. Launay, Tasting the World, 30-31.
123. Launay, Tasting the World, 39.
124. Peters, National Preferences and Colonial Cuisine, 151.
125. Launay, Tasting the World, 34, 37-38.
126. Peters, National Preferences and Colonial Cuisine, 150-151.
127. Chaudhuri, Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain, 232.
128. See Geoffrey A. Oddie, 'Orientalism' and British Protestant Missionary Constructions of India in the Nineteenth Century, South Asia, 17, 1994, 29.