When Jerusha spoke thus, Abner was not listening, for he had erected for himself, out of rough ends of timber gathered here and there—for nothing in Lahaina was more precious than wood—a small table upon which papers were spread in seven or eight neat piles, each with a sea shell placed on it to preserve order. For he had begun, in co-operation with the other missionaries throughout the islands, the work which would be his most lasting contribution to Hawaii. He was translating the Bible into Hawaiian and sending his pages as they were finished to the printer in Honolulu, where they were being published a little at a time.
Nothing that Abner applied himself to in these years gave him greater pleasure, for he kept before him his Greek and Hebrew texts, Cornelius Schrevelius’ Greek–Latin Lexicon, plus those versions of the Bible he had studied at Yale. He was happy, like a plowman who turns furrows in a field without stones, or a fisherman who sets his nets for known returns. Usually he worked with Keoki, laboring over every passage with the most minute attention, and as the years passed he reached those two books of the Bible which he cherished most. The first was Proverbs, which seemed to him a distillation of all the knowledge man could hope to know. It was especially appropriate for Hawaii, since its crystallizations were in simple language, easily understood and long remembered, and when he came to the glorious closing pages in which King Lemuel describes the ideal woman, his pen truly flew along the ruled pages, for it seemed to him that Lemuel spoke specifically of Jerusha Bromley: “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.… She is like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar.… She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.… Strength and honor are her clothing; … Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.”
When he finished translating Proverbs he left the last pages exposed, so that Jerusha might read them, and he was disappointed that she did not take notice of them, for she had learned not to interfere with his Biblical studies; so at last he was forced to hand her the pages of King Lemuel’s conclusions, and she read them quietly, saying only, “A woman would do well to mark those pages.” He was constrained to cry, “They were written about you, Jerusha!” but he said nothing, and put them along with the rest and forwarded them to Honolulu.
In the decades that were to follow, more than six committees would have occasion to polish this first translation of the Bible into Hawaiian, and in the portions contributed from the big island of Hawaii, or from Kauai, or Honolulu, the scholars frequently found understandable errors in translation or emphasis. But in the portions for which Abner Hale had been responsible, they rarely found an error. One expert, with degrees from both Yale and Harvard, said, “It was as if he had been in turn a Hebrew and a Greek and a Hawaiian.” Abner did not hear this praise, for it came long after he was dead, but he reaped his full enjoyment from his great task when it came time to translate Ezekiel, for there was something about this strange book—a contrapuntal melody of the most banal observations and the most exalted personal revelations—that spoke directly to him and epitomized his life.
He loved the recurring passages in which Ezekiel, who must have been a rather boring man most of the time, laboriously set down the specific dates on which God spoke to him: “Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day … that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.… The word of the Lord came expressly unto Ezekiel.” The assurance with which Ezekiel spoke on all matters, and his confidence that the Lord personally directed him, gave Abner great consolation, and whenever he copied out Ezekiel’s blunt statements of his correspondence with God, he felt that he, too, was participating in it: “In the sixth year, in the sixth month, in the fifth day …, as I sat in mine house, and the elders of Judah sat before me,… the hand of the Lord God fell there upon me.” It was, to Abner Hale, clarity itself that the prophet Ezekiel, sitting in counsel with the elders of Judah, was markedly similar to the prophet Abner, sitting in counsel with the alii of Maui, and if the latter prophet sometimes spoke with an authority that the Hawaiians had difficulty in accepting, Abner felt that the elders of Judah must have had the same difficulty with the preachments of Ezekiel. Yet there it was in imperishable writing: “Again the word of the Lord came expressly unto me.” A man required no greater authority than that.
IN 1825, Jerusha had a second baby, the saucy little girl Lucy, who was in later years to marry Abner Hewlett, whom her father had also delivered. As Kelolo’s big church neared completion, a serious problem confronted Abner, for he was determined above all things that when it was dedicated the Hawaiians who entered it must be dressed as proper Christians. “There will be no nakedness in this church,” he announced. “There will be no wreaths of maile branches, with their distracting fragrance. Women will wear dresses. Men will wear pants.”
But even as he promulgated the law, he wondered where enough cloth would be found to convert these heathens into Christians. The alii, with access to cargoes from China, were well taken care of. They had worn proper clothing from the first, and in recent months many visiting naval captains had been astonished by the gigantic and solemn noblemen who greeted them at the small stone pier. “They would do credit to the city of London,” one Englishman reported to his superiors. “The men were dressed in black coats, proper trousers and yellow capes. The women wore strange but becoming dresses with a yoke at the neck, and an unbroken fall of expensive material from the tops of their bosoms to their ankles. When they moved, men and women alike seemed like gods, so straight and arrogant were they. They confided to me privately that a missionary from Boston had told them how to greet incoming ships properly, and if he has done as well with their souls as with their deportment he is to be commended, but this latter I doubt, for I have rarely seen so much open debauchery in any principal port as at Lahaina.”
It was cloth for the poor people that worried Abner, and then from the coasts of China appeared his salvation. The hermaphrodite brig Thetis returned from its sandalwood expedition loaded with wares for sale in local markets. Captain Retire Janders, already committed to selling his ship to Kelolo, had determined to enter the trading business with a flourish and had gambled every farthing of his sandalwood sale in Canton on things he thought the Hawaiians might like. It was therefore an exciting moment when he opened his store next to Murphy’s grog shop and started unloading the bales from China.
For men there were sturdy gabardine, shimmering silk shirts, knee-length black pants such as had been popular in France thirty years earlier, silk-ribbed stockings and shoes with fancy buckles. There were cigars from Manila, brandies from Paris, and one entire box filled with ready-made suits of which Captain Janders had told the Canton tailors, “Make each one big enough to hold three Chinese. These are for Hawaiians.”
For the women the captain’s lures were irresistible: bolts of fine brocades, lengths of satin, whole dresses made of velvet, yard upon yard of green and purple cloth, with boxes of lace edging. There were glittering beads, and bracelets and rings; fans for hot nights, and perfumes from the Spice Islands.
What the alii particularly prized, however, were the full-length mirrors, transshipped from France, and the massive mahogany furniture constructed in Canton from English patterns. Each noble family felt that it had to have a secretary, with two round rests for lamps and numerous pigeon holes for filing papers. The delicate china ware was also appreciated, especially that in blue and white, but more treasured than tableware were the gleaming white chamber pots, decorated with raised roses, etched in pink and blue and green.
And for the common people there were hundreds of bolts of turkey-red cloth, with some brown and white samples intermixed. It was this commodity that attracted Reverend Hale and led him to propose the strategy that laid the foundation for the Janders fortune.
“You have many bolts of good cloth here, Captain,” Ab
ner pointed out. “I have long dreamed of having my congregation properly clothed when the church opens. But the people have no money. Will you extend them credit?”
Captain Janders tugged at the rim of beard that still fringed his face and said, “Reverend Hale, long ago you taught me to revere the Bible. I have got to stand on Proverbs 22, verse 26: ‘Be not thou one of them … that are sureties for debts.’ Thus saith the Lord, and it’s good enough for me. Cash! Cash! The rule of this establishment.”
“I know that cash is a good rule,” Abner began.
“The Lord’s rule,” Janders repeated.
Abner said: “But it doesn’t have to be money cash, does it, Captain?”
Janders said: “Well … if something could be converted …”
Abner said: “A lot of whalers come into these roads, Captain. What do they need that my natives could supply?”
Janders countered: “Why are they your natives?”
Abner replied: “They belong to the church. What could they bring you?”
Janders mused: “Well, the whalers are always demanding tapa cloth for calking. And I could use a lot of olona twine.”
Abner proposed: “If I could supply you with regular amounts of tapa and olona? Would you trade the cloth?”
So Janders sealed the deal which became one of the principal foundations of his fortune, for the explosion of whalers into Lahaina Roads was about to occur—42 in 1825; 31 in 1826—and when they arrived, Captain Retire Janders cannily waited to service them with products supplied by Reverend Hale’s natives: tapa, olona, pigs, wild beef. At one point Kelolo protested: “Makua Hale, you used to fight with me when I took my men into the mountains for sandalwood. For me they worked only three weeks at a time. For you they work all the weeks.” But Abner explained to the simple-minded man: “They do not work for me, Kelolo. They work for God.” Nevertheless Kelolo insisted: “They still work all the time.”
In one sense Abner did profit: he got each of his parishioners properly dressed for the opening of church, and on the Sunday when the sprawling edifice was consecrated, curious processions from miles around marched through the dust in their unaccustomed finery from Captain Janders’ store. The alii, of course, made a respectable showing, the men in frock coats and black hats, the women in handsomely gored dresses made from rich, thick stuffs from Canton. But the common people, even though they had watched the alii shift from tapa breechclouts to London jackets, had not quite caught the niceties of western dress. Women seemed to have found the easier solution: prim high collars on tight-fitting yokes which encased the bosom and from which hung copious folds of cloth; long sleeves hiding the offensive nakedness of the wrists; this costume was the essence of practicality and ugliness, and that beautiful women should have submitted to it was incomprehensible. It was completed by a broad-brimmed hat of woven sugar-cane leaves, decorated with imitation flowers, for real ones were not allowed in church lest they exhibit vanity and distract the congregation.
Men faced more confusing problems, for each felt honor-bound to wear some one article from the Janders store, so that the first who entered the church after the alii wore a pair of shoes, a Bombay hat and nothing more. The second wore a man’s shirt with his legs pushed through the sleeves and the collar tied around his waist with a strand of olona twine. When Abner saw these ridiculous worshipers he was inspired to send them back home, but they were so eager to enter the new church that he allowed them to do so.
The next pair were brothers to whom Janders had sold a complete Canton suit; one wore the coat and nothing else; his brother wore the pants and white gloves. Now a man came wearing a woman’s dress, complete with a wreath of maile leaves about his head, and this time Abner was stern. “No flowers or pagan-smelling leaves in church,” he commanded, tearing away the wreath and throwing it to the ground, whence the fragrance penetrated to the church. Some men wore only shirts with tails flapping over enormous brown buttocks, and some wore grass breechclouts and silk neckties, but in deference to the white man’s God, who refused to share his mysteries with the naked, all wore something.
The interior of the church was impressive: a perfect rectangle with handsomely matted grass walls, an imposing stone pulpit, and not a shred of other furniture except one wooden bench for Jerusha and Captain Janders. The multitude, more than three thousand of them, spread individual pandanus mats on the pebbled floor and sat tailor fashion, elbow to elbow. Had Abner studied the climate for even a moment, he would have built his grass walls only a few feet high, leaving open space between them and the room so that air could circulate, but churches in New England were built foursquare, and so they were in Hawaii, with no air stirring and the congregation sweltering in the natural heat, plus the radiation of three thousand closely packed bodies.
The singing was magnificent: spontaneous, joyous, instinct with worship. The reading of the Scriptures by Keoki was impressive, and when Abner rose to deliver his two-hour sermon, the audience was thrilled to hear him speak in acceptable Hawaiian. He chose for his topic, Zephaniah 2, verse 11: “The Lord will be terrible unto them: for he will famish all the gods of the earth; and men shall worship him, every one from his place, even all the isles of the heathen.”
It was a sermon almost ideally suited for the occasion. Phrase by phrase Abner interpreted Zephaniah’s words. He defined the Lord and his powers, spending fifteen lyrical minutes in identifying the new god of the islands. It was a god of mercy and compassion that he expounded.
Then he described the terribleness of Jehovah when His anger was aroused, and he lingered over floods, pestilences, thunder and lightning, famines and the tortures of hell. To his surprise the Hawaiians nodded understandingly, and he heard Kelolo whispering to Malama, “The new god’s just like Kane. Very difficult when he’s mad.”
Abner next turned to the specific gods of Lahaina whom the new God was determined to destroy. He specified Kane and Ku, Lono and Kanaloa, Pele and her attendants. “They shall perish,” Abner shouted in Hawaiian, “both from Lahaina and from your hearts. If you try to hide these evil gods in your hearts, you will be destroyed, and you will burn in hell forever and ever.”
After this he analyzed what the word worship meant, and here for the first time before the general public he expounded his view of the good society. “A man worships God,” Abner said, “when he protects his women, when he does not kill girl babies, when he obeys the law.” At one point he cried, “A man who grows better taro to share with his neighbors praises God.” At another he came close to expounding pure New England doctrine when he suggested, “Look about you. Does this man have good land? God loves him. Does that man’s canoe catch more fish? God loves that man. Work, work, work, and you will find that God loves you.” Finally, with considerable courage, he stared directly at the alii and expostulated his concept of the good ruler, and the entire congregation, all but thirty of them commoners, heard a bold new concept of government. The sermon ended with one of the dramatic touches that Abner, like St. Paul before him, loved. He cried, “In the kingdom of God there is no higher and lower, there is no alii and slave. The lowliest man stands bright in the sweet gaze of God.” And he summoned from the doorway, for the man would not otherwise have dared enter the edifice, a slave and he brought this slave to the pulpit area and put his arms about the man and cried, “You have previously called this man a foul corpse, one of the living dead. God calls him an immortal soul. I call him my brother. He is no longer a slave. He is your brother.” And inspired by the awfulness of this iconoclastic moment, Abner leaned up and kissed the man on the cheek and made him sit on the ground, not far from Malama, the Alii Nui.
But the highlight of the dedication services came after a series of hymns led by Keoki, for Abner rose and announced, during the third hour of worship: “Entrance into the kingdom of God is not easy. Entrance into His church here on earth is not easy, either. But today we are going to allow two of your people to start their six months’ trial period. If they prove good Christia
ns, they will be admitted to the church.” There was much excitement in the audience and open speculation as to who the chosen pair should be, but Abner stilled it by raising his hand and pointing to Keoki, tall, wiry and handsome.
“In Massachusetts your much loved alii, Keoki, was made a member of the church. He is the first Hawaiian to join. My dear good wife, whom you know as teacher, is also a member. So am I. So is Captain Janders. We four have met and have decided to test two others for membership. Mrs. Hale, will you rise and bring forth the first?”
Jerusha rose from her mat on the side, walked forward to the alii area, reached down and grasped the hand of the slave. In slow, careful Hawaiian she said, “This kanaka Kupa is known in all Lahaina as a saintly man. He shares his goods with others. He cares for children that have no parents.” By her forceful enumeration of the man’s extraordinary virtues, which were acknowledged by all, Jerusha made the consecration of the slave logical to the congregation. “In your hearts, people of Lahaina, you know that Kupa is a Christian man, and because you know him to be such, we are going to accept him into the church of God.”
Abner took Kupa’s hand and cried, “Kupa, are you prepared to love Jehovah?” The slave was so terrified by the experiences the missionaries were forcing upon him that he could only mumble, and Abner announced: “In six months you will no longer be Kupa the Foul Corpse. You will be Kamekona.” And he gave the slave this treasured name, Solomon.
The audience was stunned, but before there could be any murmuring against the radical move, Abner said in his powerful and persuasive voice, “Keoki Kanakoa, rise and bring forth the second member of the church.”
And it was with the greatest excitement and joy that Keoki rose, went to the alii area and reached down for his sister Noelani, the Mists of Heaven. That morning she was dressed in white, with a yellow feather lei about her head and white gloves on her capable hands. Her dark eyes were ablaze with sanctity and she moved as if God and not her brother had reached down to touch her. From a distance she heard the joyous acceptance of her nomination as the Hawaiians whispered, and then she was aware that Abner was addressing her: “You have been faithful to the Lord’s ways. You have studied and learned to sew, for all women, alii and commoner alike, should know how to sew, for does not the Bible say of the virtuous woman, ‘She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.’ But more than this, Noelani, you have been an inspiration to this island. In six months you will become a member of the church.”