How the tabus were laid aside, the idols destroyed and the temples burned—all this is a matter of history. But no writer has chronicled how the young husband carried the news from Kailua to the grass house under the cocoanut trees. No one has written of the joy of Oluolu in the life of broader privileges secured by abolishing the tabu system. And no one has described the old woman [[182]]who could not understand the new order of things, but sat in the door of the grass house in the valley and grieved over the shattered doctrines of her forefathers. [[183]]
XIX
FIRST HAWAIIAN PRINTING
Foreigners from all over the world called on the Hawaiians and remained with them forty years before the missionaries came. Their influence was negative. They did not study the people or help them to study. John Young, Don Marin and Isaac Davis were notable exceptions in a few things, but the fact remains that no earnest effort was made by any one to help the natives intellectually until the missionaries came.
Alexander Campbell, who, in 1809, was left in Honolulu by a whaling ship on account of frozen feet, revealed the situation. The king Tamaah-maah (Ka-meha-meha) ordered Boyd, his carpenter, to make a loom for Campbell to use in weaving cloth for sails. Boyd declined, saying, “The natives should be taught nothing that would render them independent of strangers.”
Campbell places on record the feeling among the foreigners. “When a brother of the Queen’s, whose name I do not remember—but who was usually called by the white people John Adams—wished me to teach him to read, Davis would not permit [[184]]me, observing, ‘They will soon know more than ourselves.’ ” It is interesting to note that Gov. Adams, whose native name was Kuakini, did learn to read and write under the missionaries and has left two short letters, in both of which he presents a request for saws.
In one he says, “My wife is going away to Hawaii. If perhaps she can carry, give you to me sahs tools,” signed “Gov. Adams.” In the other letter he says he is building a house and wants a “sah tool” which he will return when the work is done.
The missionaries landed at Kailua on the island Hawaii, April 4, 1820, and there divided their party, the larger number coming to “Hanaroorah, Honolulu, April 19.”
Mr. Bingham says, “They began at once to teach.—The first pupils were the chiefs and their favourite attendants and the wives and children of foreigners.” The first instruction was necessarily in English, but the missionaries used every opportunity to become acquainted with the speech of the people and make it a written language. They wrote down as carefully as they could every new word which came to their ears. This was no small task and was absolutely necessary as the foundation of a written language.