Bostonians on the Pacific (episode 280)

Transcript

Music

Jake:
[0:04] Welcome to Hub History where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the Hub of the Universe.
This is episode 2 80 Bostonians on the Pacific.
Hi, I’m Jake.
I’ve been researching a new episode about one particular Bostonian’s adventures on the South Pacific that took place 80 years ago this week.
This however is not that episode between my vacation to see my mom last week and my annual camping trip to Peddocks Island.
This coming up this weekend, I haven’t had a chance to finish it.
Instead, I’m gonna bring you three classic stories about other Bostonians who had other adventures on the Pacific Ocean.
These three stories all took place a little bit closer to home than my unfinished episode, but they all took place longer ago than just 80 years first up.
We’ll hear about the voyages of the ship Columbia to the Pacific Northwest, starting in 17 87.
Then we’ll move on to the congregational missionaries who descended on Hawaii starting in 18 20.
And finally, we’ll talk about the Boston Whaler who brought the industrial revolution to Spanish California while I introduce these three classic stories.
See if you can work out what new episode I’m working on.
That would involve a Brookline native on a small boat in the Solomon Islands in August 1943.

[1:32] But before we talk about Bostonians on the Pacific, I just want to pause and say a big thank you to everyone who supports hub history on Patreon.
As you could probably guess. I listen to a lot of podcasts ever since I got my first real smartphone in 2009, I’ve been a heavy podcast listener.
First. It was tech news and then I started listening to some of my favorite N PR shows.
And then comedy, finally, I discovered history podcasts and it was all over by about 2014 or so.
I was listening to a ton of history shows and I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t one specific to Boston.
There were local history shows for New York L A and lots of smaller cities, but not for Boston.
So, co-host Emerita Nikki and I decided to start the show we wanted to listen to as a listener.
One of the greatest things about podcasts is that they’re free so I can listen constantly while I’m driving, while I’m out for a run and while I do chores around the house and it doesn’t cost me a dime.

[2:40] As a podcast creator though. It’s not quite that simple.
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[3:29] And now it’s time for this week’s three classic stories. First up is the story of the ship Columbia owned by a group of prominent Boston investors.
The crew of the Colombia was charged with opening up trade between Boston and China.
Almost by accident. The Colombia became the first American ship to visit the west coast of North America.
The first American ship to land in the Hawaiian Islands and the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe, starting in 17 87 and stretching out over the course of five whole years, the crew completed two circumnavigations, brought the first native Hawaiian to visit Boston and navigated up the Columbia River, European and American explorers had started to think that the mighty river of the West was a myth but navigating up this river established us land claims in what would eventually become seven states.
The Oregon country was contested between Russia, Spain and Britain, but the Colombia’s expedition opened it to Boston merchants and pretty soon all American traders on the West coast were known as the Boston men.
This story originally aired as episode 2 33 in October 2021.

[4:45] The gazette of the United States records the arrival of the ship Columbia in Boston Harbor on August 9th, 17 90.
After a voyage of almost three years, it is with real pleasure.
We announced the safe arrival in this port on Monday.
Last of the ship Columbia, captain Gray from a voyage of adventure to the northwest coast of America.
This ship and company with the sloop Washington sailed on the 30th of September 17 87 and the year following reached their place of destination.
From whence the Columbia sailed with furs which she disposed of in China on her return home.
The Columbia and Washington are the first American vessels who have circumnavigated the globe.
And the Washington which is only of 90 tons burden is the first sloop of any nation ever sent on so great a voyage on the Colombia arriving opposite the castle.
She saluted the flag of the United States with 13 guns which was immediately returned there from, and on coming to her moorings in the harbor fired a federal salute which a great concourse of citizens assembled on the several wharves returned with three Hazar and a hearty welcome, the story of Colombia’s two circumnavigations of the globe.
Its opening of trade between Boston, the west coast and China and its discovery of the mighty Colombia river.
Once thought to be pure, legend starts with Charles Bullfinch.

[6:10] Within just a few years, Bullen had become known as one of the premier architects of the new United States.
He designed the finest federal style homes on Beacon Hill University Hall at Harvard and the Bullfinch building at Mass General, as well as the statehouses of Massachusetts, Maine and Connecticut.
He renovated Faneuil Hall to its current appearance, created a replacement steeple for Old North after the snow hurricane and redesigned the US Capitol for James Monroe after the British burned it during the war of 18 12.

[6:44] Before any of that. Though Charles Bullfinch was a recent Harvard graduate in need of a job and he found one through a friend of his father, for whom he would eventually design a grand mansion in Charlestown called Pleasant Hill.
In a paper read at the April 1960 meeting of the colonial society.
Dean A fails describes how a young Bullfinch first encountered the idea of a voyage to the northwest coast of North America.

[7:11] In 17 81 Joseph Barrel took into his counting house for five years.
A young family friend, Charles Bullfinch, a graduate of Boston Latin school.
This was the start of a long friendship culminating finally in Bullins designing Pleasant Hill after his European tour in the eighties.
While Bullfinch was working for barrel journals of Captain Cook’s voyages to the northwest reached Boston.

[7:36] Captain James Cook was a British naval officer who made three famous voyages around the world in 17 68 17 72 and 17 76 vastly expanding British and by extension, American understanding of the Pacific Ocean.
His first two voyages focused mostly on Australia, New Zealand and the islands of the South Pacific.
But his third went much much further north.
This time, he made the first European contact with the Hawaiian islands, traveled to the west coast of North America which he followed from the Spanish settlements in Alta California all the way up to Alaska through the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean.
And then he returned to Hawaii where he pissed off the wrong Hawaiian by attempting to kidnap the king and got killed in February 17 79.
His surviving crew completed the journey returning to Britain.
In 17 81 Captain Cook’s journals were published in 17 84.
And it was these that Charles Bullfinch in his circle of friends devoured as Bullfinch’s daughter.
Put it in a biography of her famous father in his father thomas’ house.

[8:45] It was at Doctor Thomas Bullfinch’s mansion and by his fireside that those plans were discussed among a little circle of friends which resulted in the purchase and outfit of the ship Columbia whose voyages during the next five or six years have become a matter of history.

[9:02] Charles Bullfinch became fixated on Cook’s account of buying sea Otter fur on the west coast of North America and then selling them in China.
Demand for Chinese goods like tea and porcelain was through the roof in Boston.
But there was little demand in China for any goods produced in Boston.
Historian Samuel Elliott Morrison’s book, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 17 83 to 18 60 points out.
Although America was outstripping every other nation in China trade save Britain, she could not long compete with Britain without a suitable medium.
The Canton market accepted little but spicy and Eastern products.
British merchants could import the spoils of India and the Malus opium and mummy and sharks fins and edible birds nests.
Yet Britain paid for the major part of her teas and silks and silver.
Massachusetts on the Morrow of Xi’s rebellion could not afford to do this.
Ginseng could be procured and sold in only limited quantities to find something saleable in kin was the riddle of the China trade.
Boston solved it.

[10:11] Charles Bullfinch knew instantly the cook had solved the problem and he convinced his extremely rich friend Barrel to take the lead in underwriting a voyage from Boston to try to open up an American Sea Otter trade with China.
In an 18 38 statement to Congress Bull finch said, in the year 17 87 Joseph Barrel esquire, a distinguished merchant of Boston projected a voyage of commerce and discovery to the northwest coast of America, and associated with him, Samuel Brown, Charles Bullfinch, John Derby, Cole Hatch and John M Pinard, as the richest guy in the room.
Barrel was the majority shareholder, buying a 2/7 share in the ship.
Each of the other five purchased a 1/7 share together, they put up over $21,000 to purchase two ships and hire crews for each of them.
The Columbia was a full rigged ship of 213 tons capacity with three masts and square sails.
She carried 10 cannons and a compliment of swivel guns on deck and she would have been crewed by about 25 men together with the Lady Washington.
The total compliment of sailors and officers on the expedition was about 40.
The Washington was an even smaller ship sloop rigged with two masts at 67 ft long.
She could ship about 90 tons of cargo.

[11:39] On the 17 87 expedition, the Columbia was to be captained by John Kendrick and the Lady Washington by Robert Gray, at the time, Captain Kendrick was 47 years old, a veteran of the seven years war and the American revolution.
After growing up on the outer cape in today’s Orleans, he served in the militia on a campaign against the French in Western New York.
In 17 62 sailed on a whale ship and eventually moved to Boston in the 17 sixties, during the revolutionary War.
He commanded a series of privateers and captured several British prizes.

[12:17] Little is known about the early life of Robert Gray who was 32 years old and missing one eye when he took command of the Washington.
Most of the officers on both ships hailed from Boston and New England and our best descriptions of the Columbia, the Washington and their voyage to the northwest coast comes from one of them according to a mass historical society profile.
Robert Haswell was born in 17 68 the eldest son of William and Rachel Woodward Haswell.
Roberts, father was an officer in the Royal Navy who was a customs official.
In Massachusetts, we know little of Robert’s early life.
And that only because his stepsister, Susannah Haswell Rosson became a famous actress, author and educator, Robert Haswell next appears in 17 87 when at age 18, he was made third maid of the Columbia on its first voyage.

[13:13] Haswell log of the voyage commences a few days before the journey itself did.
He records that the Columbia was moved from the wharf to anchor in the inner harbor where it was loaded with trade goods, provisions and other stores.
Then the ship was moved out into the channel near Castle Island two days before their scheduled departure.
The Lady Washington was anchored nearby one day before the second mate, Ingraham came aboard and the crew was busy cleaning the ship from top to bottom, stowing supplies and making the vessel ready for sea, on Sunday, September 30th 17 87 the day was at hand and Haswell wrote, we were thronged with friends of almost all our people.
And about noon, Captain Kendrick and Lieutenant Howe as clerk, Mr Roberts, our surgeon and Mr Nutting, the astronomer came on board with the pilot accompanied by a great number of merchants, gentlemen and others of Boston.

[14:10] The departure that afternoon was a bit anti-climactic as the two ships were forced to anchor again.
A nant tat road near hull due to a lack of wind that gave them the chance for one last hurrah described by Haswell the evening was spent in mirth and glee, the highest flow of spirits, animating the whole company, great songs and animating sentiments pass.
The last evening we spent on that side of the continent.
They finally got underway for real on October 1st. Early on Monday morning, we weighed and came to sail and by sunrise we’re out of the harbor.

[14:49] By the fourth, they had cleared Cape Cod and the journey was fairly uneventful until they arrived at the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa on November 9th, there, they stayed for over a month making minor repairs to both ships, taking on water and buying goats and cattle.
During their protracted stay, Captain Kendrick and second mate Simeon Woodruff argued constantly until Woodruff finally quit the expedition and caught a ride home on a Spanish ship.
Woodruff had been a gunner’s mate on Captain Cook’s third circumnavigation.
So he was the only member of the expedition who had already been to the West Coast Hawaii. And China.
Kendrick would later face criticism for letting the most experienced member of his crew get away as well as for the sheer amount of time he dallied in Cape Verde.

[15:39] Once they finally got underway again, they crossed the equator and were sailing past the Brazilian Island, Fernando de Noona by January 6th at the Falkland Islands near the southern tip of South America.
The ships paused again for another period of weeks.
Hall’s log at this point is full of details about his personal conflicts with Captain Kendrick and when the ships left the Falklands, Haswell had moved over to the Lady Washington with Captain Gray on February 28th with Haswell.
Now in the smaller sloop, the two ships set out from the Falklands to make their attempt to round Cape Horn into the Pacific Haswell log reports that they were lucky that they didn’t encounter the legendary storms of the region.
Instead just dealing with more typical weather like a wind violent from the southeast, accompanied with frost and so high a sea that our vessel was almost continually underwater.
Well, that sounds fun.

[16:38] It was difficult for a full rigged ship like the Columbia to navigate the wind, heavy seas, treacherous shoals and occasional icebergs of the southern ocean.
And it was completely unheard of for a tiny sloop like the Washington to even attempt it after fighting the elements.
For over three weeks, the Washington finally rounded the horn on April 1st, but then it got separated from the Columbia in a violent storm that caused damage on both ships.
Haswell noted in his log on April 14th began to experience that beautiful serenity that this ocean is celebrated for this.
Having been 40 days from the Falkland Islands until we were to the northward of the Straits of Magellan.
The bounds that have been stipulated by most navigators to this extensive cape.
We viewed the remainder of our passage to the coast of America with indifference.
The worst part now being over, they were safe.
They’d made it into the Pacific Ocean and now they just had to find the Columbia again and make their way north to the North American coast.
They basically island hopped up the coast of Chile to the Juan Fernandez Islands where they arrived on May 5th from the Chilean coast north.
They tried to avoid land as much as possible because the officers worried that the sloop alone could be taken advantage of in Spanish ports without the support of the Colombia.

[17:59] Finally, Haswell diary notes on August 2nd at 10 a.m.
To our inexpressible joy. We saw the coast of New Albion distance about seven leagues.
New Albion was the term in English for the stretch of North American coast that lay to the north of Spanish claims in Mexico.
The name was given by Sir Francis Drake, but the British had never attempted to start a colony on this far away coast.
If Haswell calculation of latitude was accurate. They cited the coast of today’s northern California, roughly between Redwood National Park and Klamath in rural Del Norte County.
About 30 miles from the Oregon State Line.
Two days after sighting land, the Lady Washington explored the shore and made its first contact with the indigenous people of the West coast.
This first interaction seemed innocuous with a giant oceangoing dugout canoe carrying about 10 men approaching the ship when it was a bit less than two miles offshore and making gestures that the Americans interpreted as signs of friendship.

[19:03] After that first encounter, the American expedition enjoyed mixed relations with the Tillamook people who lived along the coast of Oregon.
As the ship made its way slowly north. It explored many inlets, rivers and bays in hopes of finding a sheltered harbor where it could anchor and start trading for furs, which was the whole point of the voyage.
Instead, they kept finding treacherous currents, sandbars and hostile locals.
After one of these attempts, somewhere south of today’s Newport, Oregon, Haswell log recorded that the attempt to locate a harbor had found nothing remarkable except vast numbers of the natives that appeared to be a very hostile and warlike people.
They ran along shore waving white skins. These are the skins of moose, three or four thicknesses, completely tanned and not penetrable by arrows.
These are their war armor.

[19:59] The Washington moved slowly up the coast at every likely looking inlet and bay, lowering a long boat and taking soundings to find a safe harbor.
And every time being disappointed at several of these stops, the crew traded mirrors, combs and buttons for fresh berries that helped cure their advancing scurvy.
And the officers traded iron knives and ads for sea otters skins.
Haswell notes that in every encounter, whether in canoes or on shore, the indigenous residents always came armed with bows and spears and they wouldn’t approach the Americans unless their knives were unsheathed and in their hands as though they expected the crew to attack at any moment.

[20:40] Haswell concludes that the distrust meant that the natives had never encountered Europeans before, but it makes me think that perhaps they had and it didn’t go well.
On August 16th, 17 88 the Washington ran aground on a hidden rock possibly near today’s Cape Mears lighthouse near the entrance to Tillamook Bay in Oregon.
While they are waiting for high tide to lift the sloop back off the rock.
A party including Robert Haswell went ashore near a village to gather firewood and grass for their livestock, having traded for several days with this village and their neighbors, Haswell notes that they were more lightly armed than usual as they cut grass.
The party had two muskets, three or four Cutlasses and each of the two officers carried a sword and pistol.
Eventually, a sailor named Marcus Lopez carefully stuck his cutlass in the sand so he could use both hands to haul a huge bundle of grass down to the long bone.
Haswell notes that Lopez was a black man who had joined the voyage at Cape Verde as Captain Gray’s servant.
The voyage had started in the midst of the freedom suits that gradually ended slavery in Massachusetts. And the language used in Hall’s log is wishy washy.
So I honestly can’t tell if Gray enslaved Lopez or if he was a free black sailor.

[22:00] Either way while Lopez was busy with his bundle of grass, one of the tile grabbed his cut and ran off with it.
Lopez ran after him shouting and one of the other sailors took aim with the musket but didn’t shoot because they’d been ordered to only fire as a last resort to protect life.

[22:18] Most of the landing party ran toward the village where Marcus Lopez had disappeared in pursuit of his cutlass while a few followed parallel to the shore and the long boat eventually they caught up to Lopez who’d caught the thief.
He stood holding the man by the shoulder, surrounded by a large group of heavily armed Tillamook men and shouting for the rest of the party to help him recover the cut as they rushed forward to help him.
Haswell wrote, when we were observed by the main body of the natives to hastily approach them, they instantly drenched their knives and spears in the body of the unfortunate youth.
He quitted his hold and stumbled but rose again and staggered toward us but having a flight of arrows thrown into his back, he fell within 15 yards of me and instantly expired while they mangled his lifeless corpse.

[23:05] The rest of the party dashed for the boat, taking a few shots as they ran and dodged arrows.
Haswell and another officer were wounded in hand to hand combat in the surf as they tried to reach the boat.
And another man was stabbed deeply enough that he nearly died of blood loss.
But the survivors made it back to the Washington which fired a few shots from its cannons and swivel guns to keep the pursuing canoes from catching them.
The crew named this Bay Murderers Harbor and from Hawes Diary, it appears they thought that they had found the legendary Western river Murderers Harbor is I suppose the entrance of the river of the West.
It is by no means a safe place for any but a very small vessel to enter the shoal of its entrance.

[23:49] Little. Did he know that the Great River still lay ahead?

[23:53] For the rest of August. The Washington traded its way up the coast, buying sea otter skins for iron tools whenever they could.

[24:02] The further north they went, the more contact the native Tillamook had had with European traders.
These hunters insisted on trading for copper coins or muskets which weren’t among the trade goods available in the Washington.
Their difficulty in trading meant that the crew of the lady Washington was approaching their goal and they finally arrived in NCA Sound on September 17th, 17 88, New Sound was a large sheltered harbor on the seaward side of Vancouver Island about 200 miles northwest of today’s Seattle.
After Captain Cook claimed the area for Britain. In 17 78 the British established a base for trading in the area in 17 86.
At this point, our story turns from adventure on the high seas to a diplomatic thriller.
As the Washington arrived at Nua Sound on the eve of a crisis between the great powers of the Pacific first, though came a happy reunion.
Six days after Captain Gray in the Washington anchored in Newa Sound, the crew was busy making repairs and laying in wood water and provisions to get ready to sail again.
Some of the officers on shore has well wrote, saw a sail in the open which by our glasses, we soon knew to be the Columbia and about five o’clock in the afternoon, she anchored within 40 yards of us.

[25:24] It was the first time the two ships had been within sight of each other since getting separated in a storm after rounding the cape almost six months before.

[25:33] After the Colombia was damaged by a series of storms.
They landed in the Juan Fernandez Islands. Arriving about three weeks after the Washington departed, they stayed there for 17 days making repairs and falling even further behind the Washington.
By the time that Columbia finally caught up with the smaller sloop, most of the crew had advanced cases of scurvy which had killed two sailors as they recuperated.
The crews of both vessels celebrated the anniversary of their departure from Boston on October 1st with a 13 gun salute from both vessels.
This was returned by the three British ships in the harbor and then came a feast for the officers on board the Columbia and booze and Games for the crew.

[26:19] In the last week of October, the three British trading vessels left Nuka Sound having announced a plan to win her over in the sandwich islands today’s Hawaii before continuing on to China to sell their valuable store of sea otter skins, with the British gone.
Captain Kendrick announced that the Americans would be staying at Nua for the winter.
And since the ships were reunited, he was in command again of the combined expedition, under his direction, the crew of the Columbia began fortifying one of the islands in NCA Sound to use his winter quarters while the Washington sailed south to continue trading for skins.
Now that the British with their richer trade goods were mostly out of the picture.
Captain Gray and the Lady Washington arrived back at Kendrick’s outpost now dubbed Fort Washington in the first week of May 17, 89.
Between the two captains, they had amassed a huge cargo of furs and they began planning to leave the coast.
Then a British ship commanded by a captain Douglas sailed into New Casso, followed by a small Spanish fleet on May 5th.

[27:27] The Spanish had laid claim to the entire west coast since the early 16 hundreds, but they’d only recently tried to project real power north of their traditional base in Mexico.
In the 17 seventies, they founded a series of missions up the California coast, reaching the Yerba Buena Peninsula and founding the mission Dolores that we now know as San Francisco in 17 76.
In the meantime, the Russian Empire colonized Alaska and begun pressing south along the coast.
And the British Hudson Bay company was coming west across Canada and landing at Nuka Bay by sea while the Americans were now building a fort in a strategic harbor right at the intersection of British Spanish.
And Russian claims the two ships under Esteban, Jose Martinez immediately moved against the British with the last entry in Robert Hall’s account of the Columbia first voyage, stating, Don Martinez now demanded captain Douglas’s papers and from what pretense, I know not said they were false and made the vessel his prize.
The officer and seamen were kept prisoners for several days.
At that point. Haswell notes the Spanish commander discharged the crew and sent the ship packing as spring turned into summer.
Martinez seized further English vessels when they attempted to anchor a new sound which almost sparked an open war between the two great European powers.
When word got back to their respective capitals.

[28:55] In the midst of the tensions, Martinez also managed to alienate the local Newa North nation after he or one of his men killed an important sub chief in a misunderstanding.

[29:06] Somehow throughout all this drama, the Americans of Fort Washington managed to stay on Martinez’s good side.
Although his orders said that he was to make a prize of any foreign ships in New Sound.
The Columbia and the Washington were quietly allowed to keep exploring the coasts and trading for furs.
This was partly because Spain and the US were or at least had recently been formal allies.
And in part, it was because Captain Kendrick had backed the Spanish and capturing at least one British ship which both curried favor with the Spanish and helped to eliminate competition in the fur business.

[29:42] Nevertheless, with the situation at NCA seemingly deteriorating, the Americans decided it was time to get while the getting was good.
Kendrick asked Martinez for permission to return to Nua the following year.
And the Spaniard granted it in return for the Americans delivering some trade goods and English prisoners to Macau across the Pearl River from Hong Kong.
Martinez also agreed to forward letters from the Americans. And after they were received on the US East Coast, the gazette of the United States carried this brief notice on March 17th, 17 90.
The concerned in the ship Columbia and sloop Washington have received letters from captain Kendrick dated at Nuka in July.
Last he informs them that he passed the winter proceeding on the northwest coast of America that he was then bound on a voyage further northward.
And from thence intended to proceed to Canton.
The letters were forwarded to Mexico by a Spanish fleet that had been at NCA.
And from thence to the Spanish charge, the affairs at New York, they were covered to the president of the United States of America.

[30:49] The American ships left Nuka Sound on July 15th, 17 89 but not without a bit of a shake up.
The captains had decided that Gray should take command of the larger Colombia with its old stuff full of sea otter pelts and sail for China to sell them.
Meanwhile, Kendrick would take over the smaller Washington and use it to keep trading on the West Coast, eventually returning to NCA and meeting back up with the Columbia on a future voyage.

[31:17] The crew was redistributed between the ships ensuring a complete compliment of experienced seamen on both vessels and moving Haswell, whose hatred for Kendrick had hardly abated onto the Columbia along with Captain Gray, following the pattern that had been established by Captain Cook and followed by several British expeditions.
In the ensuing decade, the Columbia would first stop in the island chain that was known then as the sandwich islands.
Unfortunately, I’m not aware of an officer’s log of this part of the journey, so we’ll have to go light on detail.
However, in a 1921 article about early Boston contact with Hawaii historian Samuel Elliott Morrison wrote probably the first American vessel to touch at Hawaii was the famous Columbia of Boston.
Captain Robert Gray on August 24th, 17 89.
In the course of her first voyage around the world, she remained 24 days at the island salted down five punches of pork and sailed with 150 live hogs on deck.
A young native called a two shipped there as an ordinary seaman.

[32:24] If you’re interested in learning more about the early influence of Bostonians on the Kingdom of Hawaii during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Check out episode 2 20 arriving in China in early 17 90 Robert Gray disposed of his cargo the best he could carrying out the orders he had gotten from Joseph Barrel to get Bo he and he and tea blue and white china plates and dishes and tea and coffee cups and saucers or any other article which you think will answer better in this country.
This he did setting out for Boston as soon as possible, crossing the Indian Ocean, rounding the cape of good hope at the southern tip of Africa and crossing his own path from 17 87 somewhere north of Cape Verde.
Finally on August 9th, 17 90 the Columbia sailed into Boston Harbor just six weeks short of three years after departing.

[33:18] In a letter to his mother dated August 14th, future President John Quincy Adams who is about to turn 23 years old, described the wonders that Columbia brought with it.
The principal topic of conversation this week has been the arrival of the Colombia from an expedition which has carried her around the world.
The people of this vessel have brought home a number of curiosities similar to those which you have seen at Sir Ashton Levers Museum.
They have likewise brought a native of the Sandwich Islands who bound himself as a servant to one of the passengers.
He was paraded up and down our streets yesterday in the dress of his country.
And as he speaks, our language has been conversed with by many gentlemen in this town, one of the passengers it said has kept a very accurate journal, the voyage and proposes to extract from it a relation for publication.

[34:10] In his 1960 paper, Dean fails relates how the investors in the expedition created costly keepsakes to commemorate the triumph of the expedition.
Boston papers hailed the voyage of the first two American ships that went completely around the world as a great triumph medals of the expedition were made of silver and copper.
A silver medal was sent by Barrel to Jefferson on May 2nd 17 89 the Goldsmith Paul Revere recorded in this ledger the making of six silver medals and repairing the edges of 10 copper meals for Joseph Barrel.
A silver medal at the Massachusetts Historical Society is one that barrel gave to the society in 17 91.

[34:53] However, triumphant the investors were publicly, they were not as happy behind closed doors, sending two ships to an unknown coast and then sailing all the way around the world wasn’t cheap and the trade goods captain Gray purchased in China fell short of expectations as Charles Bullfinch revealed in an 18 38 statement read into the congressional record.

[35:14] The result of the voyage disappointed the expectations of its projectors and the proceeds of the Ts not being sufficient to cover the cost of outfit and the unforeseen expenses in Canton and elsewhere.
Messer Derby and Pinard would not pursue the enterprise further but sold their shares in the vessels to Messer Barrel and Brown.
The remaining owners determined to send Captain Gray and commanded the Columbia to the coast for the furs which it was supposed.
Captain Kendrick had been collecting as bullfinch was quick to point out the project had not been profitable.
But its success lay in uncovering the potential for massive future profits in his book about the maritime history of Massachusetts, Samuel Elliott Morrison notes.
But Columbia had logged 41,899 miles since her departure from Boston on September 30th 17 87 her voyage was not remarkable as a feat of navigation, Magellan and Drake had done the trick centuries before.
Under far more hazardous conditions.
It was the practical results that counted. The Columbia’s first voyage began the Northwest Fur Trade which enabled the merchant adventurers of Boston to tap the vast reservoir of wealth in China.

[36:27] In his letter to Abigail John Quincy Adams focuses more on the immediate pecuniary rewards or the lack thereof.

[36:36] The adventurers after having their expectations raised to the highest pitch, were utterly disappointed and instead of the immense profits upon which they had calculated will scarcely have their outsets refunded to them.
This failure has given universal astonishment and is wholly attributed to the captain whose reputation now remains suspended between the qualifications of egregious nay and of un pardonable stupidity.
Mr Barrel, I am informed, is not discouraged but intends to make the experiment once more.
And if he should not meet with anybody disposed to second him, they say he will undertake it at his single risk and expense.

[37:17] So it was to tap into this potential for future profits that the Columbia was quickly repaired, refitted and made ready for sea.
The certificate of Colombia’s cargo tells us how the ship was outfitted.
These certify all whom it may concern that Robert Gray master and commander of the ship Columbia burden 212 tons or thereabouts navigated with 30 men mounted with 10 guns.
Has permission to depart from this port. With the following articles, 2000 bricks, six Sharon’s of sea coal, 135 barrels, beef, 60 barrels, pork, three hogsheads, New England.
Rum, two hugs heads West Indies rum.
Five hogsheads molasses five barrels, sugar, 10 boxes, chocolate £228 coffee, £72 bo tea, six casks of rice. 20 barrels of flour.
£27,000 of ship bread, six fins butter, £500 cheese, 30 barrels of tar 13 barrels of pitch, 30 packages of merchandise, six tons bar iron, 20 100 bar lead, £1500 gunpowder, £300 small shot.

[38:27] Their difficulty in trying to buy valuable sea otter skins from sophisticated traders of the tribes of the northwest coast with trinkets had taught the owners of the Columbia a valuable lesson.
Samuel Elliott Morrison points out the changes in their trade goods.
Between 17 87 and 17 90 the Indians evidently had more discrimination than generally acknowledged for her first voyage.
The Columbia carried large numbers of snuff bottles, rat traps, juice, harps and pocket mirrors which except for the last item were a dead loss.
Her second cargo in 17 90 is typical of the Northwest Fur trade.
As long as it lasted from Herman Bremmer, we bought 143 sheets of copper.
Many pieces of blue, red and green duffel and scarlet coating.

[39:15] Solomon cotton sold the Columbia’s owners 4261 quarter pound chisels, Asa Hammond 100 and 50 pairs of shoes at 75 cents.
Benjamin green junior blue duffel trousers at 92 cents.
P jackets, flushing great coats, watch coats and fear knots.
Samuel Parkman sold six gross of gimlets and 12 gross buttons.
Baker and Brewer striped duffel blanketing. Samuel fails 14,020 penny nails.
And the United States government, 100 old muskets and blunder buses.
Very few of these articles were manufactured in Massachusetts and sometimes a North West man would make up a cargo in England before starting for the coast.
New England. Rum. That ancient medium for savage. Barter is curiously absent from the Northwest fur trade.
Molasses and ship biscuit were used instead of liquor to treat the natives.

[40:11] Barely six weeks after surviving a three year journey around the world.
Captain Robert Gray found himself at the helm of the Columbia as it again slipped past Boston Light through the outer harbor and out to sea on a voyage that would take him back to the Northwest and around the world.
Again, this time, we have a partial log by Robert Haswell and a very detailed blog recorded by John Boyd, the grandson of the fifth mate, Robert Athor.
Boy described him in a 1916 profile at the age of 16.
He started his first circumnavigating voyage as fifth officer aboard the ship Colombia bound for the Northwest coast in China.
His brother-in-law Carwell hatch ship owner and merchant of Boston was one of the chief owners of the ship Columbia.
John Boy kept complete journals of this voyage and these discoveries are interesting and minutely described by him.

[41:09] Boy’s log begins as the ship sails out of Boston Harbor.
September 28th, 17 90 latitude of Boston left Boston September 28 17 90 with the wind from the Western board and the next day past Cape Cod, like in 17 87 the initial departure was a bit an climactic as Boys continues, on the 30th, the wind having changed to the east and blowing heavy obliged us to bear away.
We anchored the same evening in Herring Cove on the west side of Cape Cod in 15 fathoms of muddy bottom but not liking our situation.
We got underway the following morning and anchored the same evening in sket roads in seven fathoms.

[41:55] Like on the previous voyage, they spent the night before their actual departure and the channel near hull knownn as Nant Tat Roads this time, one day short of three years after the first, on October 2nd, Bola describes how they finally got under way for real, win at the Southwest Waden.
Came to sail, stood to sea on the third, passed Cape Cod at three leagues distance, generally blowing hard with squalls of rain.

[42:27] On November 1st. He noted that they passed Cape Verde off the African coast.
A long passage from Boston of 29.5 days from there.
They turned southward crossing the equator 54.5 days after leaving Boston, in mid January, the crew got a break and they anchored in the Falkland Islands for 11 days, giving the ship a complete overhaul, taking on fresh water and spending time exploring and shooting hundreds of ducks and Spanish hogs.
By mid February, they had rounded Cape Horn and started north up the west coast of South America, on April 23rd, 17 91 boy’s journal recorded the demise of the captain’s mascot, between the hours of three and 4 p.m.
Departed this life. Our dear friend, Nancy, the goat, having been the captain’s companion on a former voyage around the globe.
But her spirited disposition for adventure led her to undertake a second voyage of circumnavigation.
But the various changes of climate and sudden transition from the polar colds to the tropical heats of the torrid zone proved too much for a constitution naturally delicate.
At 5 p.m. Committed her body to the deep, she was lamented by those who got a share of her milk.

[43:43] On this second voyage, the Columbia anchored near Nua Sound by the end of May 17 91 having made the journey four months faster than it had on the first expedition, with their improved trade goods.
The crew of the Colombia soon began amassing a large cargo of furs despite increased competition from a growing number of American ships along the coast.
On August 12th, 2 officers and a sailor went on shore to fish man.
They didn’t return to the ship when it signaled its departure.
Their dead bodies were soon found robbed and stripped naked.
They were the first fatalities on the second voyage.
Two weeks later, the Columbia caught up with Captain Kendrick and the Lady Washington.
The reunion was less happy this time than it had been three years before.
With point noting the brig, Lady Washington was asleep when she left Boston, but captain Kendrick had altered her rig in Canton the year before, I was sorry to find that Kendrick had made no remittances to the owners since he had parted with the Columbia on the first voyage.
Although since that period, he had made two successful trips from this coast to Canton as the vessel still belonged to the same owners.
He was under some mistrust that Captain Gray was empowered to seize the brick and kept himself always ready against attack.

[45:03] In fact, Kendrick would never again remit any portion of his profits to barrel Bullen or the rest of the owners of the Lady Washington.

[45:12] A month after reuniting with his former subordinates on the Colombia.
Kendrick left again taking his own cargo of skins to Hawaii and then on to China, Gray and the crew of the Columbia built a new fort in another bay a few miles down the coast from Duca Sound.
They called this one fort defiance and they settled in for the winter when the spring of 17 92 came.
Cray thought that the New Nolf was planning to attack his group.
So he decided to engage in a bit of preemptive retaliation, destroying a nearby village and permanently spoiling his relationship with local indigenous groups.
It was time to leave but Columbia headed south down the coast of what’s now Washington State trading where they could and mapping the coastline as best they could.
On April 29th, the Columbia spotted the British ship.
HMS Discovery and Captain Gray spent a nice evening dining and trading stories with Captain George Vancouver, Gray told the British captain about a large river he had cited in 17 88 without finding a navigable channel that Vancouver dismissed the account as another gullible sucker falling for the myth of the great river of the West.
The two captains took their leave of one another. And a week later, Captain Gray found himself staring the mythical river in the face.

[46:36] The dates immediately surrounding the discovery of the Great River are the only entries from Captain Gray’s own log of the voyage that still survive having been transcribed in 18 16 by Charles Bullfinch.
From the surviving log that had been left to Gray’s widow’s brother on May 7th.
Gray’s log recorded being within six miles of the land saw an entrance in the same which had a very good appearance of a harbor, lowered away the jolly boat and went in search of an anchoring place.
The ship standing to and fro with a very strong weather current.
At 1 p.m. the boat returned having found no place where the ship could anchor with safety made sail on the ship stood in for the shore.
We soon saw from our mast head, a passage in between the sandbars at half past three bore away and ran in northeast by east having from 4 to 8 fathoms of sandy bottom.
And as we drew in nearer between the bars, I had from 10 to 13 fathoms having a very strong tide of ebb to the stem.
Many canoes came alongside at 5 p.m.
Came two in five fathoms water sandy bottom and a safe harbor well sheltered from the sea by long sandbars and spits.

[47:53] Captain Gray would name this harbor after Charles Bullfinch.
But upon visiting it later, George Vancouver named it Grays Harbor.
Over the next few days, the Colombia interacted with indigenous nations that spoke languages.
They hadn’t yet encountered, they traded with some groups and clashed with others, killing as many as several dozen with grape shot when their canoes approached in the middle of the night.

[48:18] After they spent four days taking soundings and looking for a passage across the danger sandbar into the river.
Gray’s log recorded how they hoisted the sails on May 11th.
At half past seven, we were out clear of the bars and directed our course to the southward along the shore, set up the main top gallant yard and set all sale at 4 a.m.
Saw the entrance of our desired port bearing east southeast at a distance of six leagues in steering sails and haul our wind and shore at 8 a.m.
Being a little to Winward at the entrance of the harbor, bore away and run in east northeast between the breakers having from 5 to 7 fathoms of water.
When we were over the bar, we found this to be a large river of fresh water up which we steered John Boyt gives us a sense of the vast scope of the river they had sailed into truly myth worthy.

[49:14] The river extended to the northeast as far as the eye could reach and water fit to drink as far down as the bars at the entrance, we directed our course up this noble river in search of a village, the beach was lined with natives who ran along the shore following the ship.
Soon after above 20 canoes came off and brought a good lot of furs and salmon, which last they sold two for a board nail, the furs, We likewise bought cheap for copper and cloth.
We lay in this place till the 20th of May. During which time we put the ship in good order and filled up all the water casks alongside it being very good.
These natives talk the same language as those further south, but we could not learn it.

[50:01] Captain Gray named the river Columbia after the ship.
Later exploration by the Lewis and Clark expedition and others would reveal that this mighty river drained a vast portion of the western continent, including parts of today’s Alberta and British Columbia, most of Washington and Oregon.
Basically all of Idaho and parts of Nevada, Utah, Montana and Wyoming, including some of Yellowstone in the coming decades.
Russian and Spanish claims to the territory were relinquished in separate treaties, and in another 18 18 treaty, Britain and the US agreed that the region would be occupied by citizens of both nations but governed by neither.
It was the 10 day exploration of the river Colombia by the ship Colombia that gave the USA strong enough claim to the region to eventually claim everything south of the 49th parallel as the Oregon territory.
In 18 43 as Samuel Elliott Morrison wrote on her first voyage, the Columbia had solved the riddle of the China trade on her second empire followed in the wake.

[51:06] After a summer spent meddling in international politics in Nua Bay, turning the Spanish and English against one another.
Again, it was time to once more sail around the world.
Luckily, we have John Boy to give us the details on this portion of the journey which was missing from Haswell log of the first voyage on October 3rd, 17 92.
Boyt reflected weighed anchor for the last time on the northwest coast and left poverty cove bound for Canon in China via the Sandwich islands.
Our feelings on this occasion are easier felt than described our friends at home and every endearing idea rushed so full upon us and made us so happy that it was impossible for a while to get the ship in readiness for bad weather.
And full allowance of grog being served on the occasion, made our worthy tars join in general Murph.
And so we go.

[52:00] Before the month was over. They started the Hawaiian Islands on October 29th and landed on the big island on the 31st with boat riding.
Thus many canoes sailing in company with us. The shore made a delightful appearance and appeared in the highest state of cultivation.
Many canoes alongside containing beautiful women, plenty of hogs and fowls together with most of the tropical fruits in abundance, great quantities of water and muskmelons, sugar cane, bread, fruit and salt was brought for sale.
The price of a large hog was from 5 to 10 spikes, smaller ones in proportion, six dunhill fowls for an iron chisel and fruit cheaper still, on November 2nd, the diary records a two who had enlisted as a cabin boy on the Columbia first voyage and paraded through the streets of Boston became the first native Hawaiian to circumnavigate the globe.
Coming into the harbor at the outlying island of Niihau.
Pola records that the ship was greeted by fast many canoes off and one of which was the father and other relations of our Sandwich Island lad.
They came on board and the meeting was very affectionate, but still our lad refused to go on shore.
And Captain Gray did not think it proper to force him.

[53:21] Boyd was apparently quite taken with Hawaii and who wouldn’t be when the Columbia left on November 3rd, he wrote Boro and made all sail for the coast of China and soon lost sight of these beautiful islands.
The inhabitants of which appeared to me to be the happiest people in the world.
Indeed, there was something in them so Frank and cheerful that you could not help feeling prepossessed in their favor.
On December 6th, they spotted mainland China and anchored Macau two days later, there, they stayed for about two months while Captain Gray found buyers for their sea otter furs and loaded the hold full of valuable tea.
When the time came to start the voyage home, John Boyt noted that the Columbia had a steady leak that required constant pumping, but nobody on board was too worried with the prospect of home on the horizon.
For some in the original crew, it had been over five years since they had spent more than a few weeks in Boston on February 8th.
He wrote in his journal, ran through Macau roads and stood to sea.
The ship’s crew are all well and hearty and looking forward with anxious solicitude to a happy meeting of sweethearts and wives.
How can we be other ways than happy when anticipating the joys that await us there.

[54:40] They sailed south down the coast, then turned northwest through the strait, dividing Malaysia and Sumatra, steering clear of pirates from many nations from there.
It was across the open Indian Ocean to Mauritius, south of Mussel Bay in today’s South Africa and around the cape of good hope.
On May 5th, they spent a few days restocking on Saint Helena Island in the middle of the South Atlantic, then ran for home under full sale.
They finally got there on July 28th, 17 93 with boys log stating at daylight, Boston light bore west by northwest three leagues distant, at eight A ma pilot came on board and took charge to take the ship to Boston, at Meridian passed the lighthouse with the light air from the eastward.
At six, we passed Castle William and gave a federal salute which was returned, a fine breeze at southeast, at seven, anchored off the long wharf in the stream and saluted the town with 11 guns which was returned from the wharfs with three welcome Hazar.

[55:47] At making Boston Light. From which place we took our departure, we have just made 360 degrees of longitude west which is the circumference of our globe.
Of course, we have lost one complete day. It was Friday at Boston and Thursday with us.
After serving as fifth mate on the Columbia, John Boyd almost immediately got the opportunity to captain his own vessel with the Union sailing from Newport from the Northwest coast in August 17 94, his grandson Robert Ab Thorpe Boy wrote in 1916.
After returning from this voyage, John Boyt circumnavigated the globe and commanded the sloop Union.
The many adventures of this voyage are fully told in his journals and logbooks.
Besides these are the logs and journals of various other voyages of our protagonists.
Boyt was the only one who didn’t die at sea after the Union became the first sloop to sail around the world.
He served briefly as captain on a handful of other vessels. But by age 40 he retired from the sea and worked as a merchant in Boston until his death in 18 29.

[57:00] Gray’s original first mate, Robert Haswell shipped on the second voyage as well.
And when the time came to leave the Northwest coast at the conclusion of their second expedition, he was put in charge of a sloop called the adventure that the crew had built during the long winter of 17 91.
After spending a season trading on the coast, the adventure was sold and he rejoined the Columbia for the journey home.
After his adventures with Gray, he commanded a series of merchant vessels before enlisting as a lieutenant in the US Navy during the quasi war with France, where he served on the US S Boston.
After the war, a mass historical society profile says when newly elected President Thomas Jefferson reduced the US Navy in 18 01.
Haswell went back to merchant service as the captain of the Louisa, a ship bound for the northwest coast in China.
The Louisa sailed from Boston on August 10th 18 01 and disappeared.
Robert Haswell was 32 less than a year after his second return to Boston.
Captain Robert Gray got married as described in a 1929 essay by Edmund Meany.

[58:08] It’s known that in February 17 94 Captain Gray married Martha, daughter of Silas Atkins, one of Boston’s wealthiest merchants of the time.
When Captain Gray on one of his trading voyages died and was buried in Charleston, South Carolina in 18 06, he left in Boston, a widow and four small daughters.
She and her Children evidently remained with her father’s people.

[58:32] In 18 46 Martha petitioned Congress for some sort of monetary support since her late husband’s claim over the Columbia River had resulted in such a windfall for the United States.
And due to a month’s delay in her marriage, she wasn’t eligible for any other federal pension.
She wrote your petitioner was left a widow nearly 40 years ago with four young daughters and without adequate means for their education and support, that her late husband, Captain Gray was in the naval service of his country during a part of the war of revolution.
But that your petitioner is unable under the existing laws to entitle herself to be placed upon the list of the United States pensioners.
The act granting half pay and pensions to certain widows. And for other purposes, providing only for widows whose marriage took place before the first of January 17 94.
And her marriage having taken place in the month of February 17 94, as far as I can tell, she received no pension.

[59:31] Of the original officers from the Columbia expedition. Captain John Kendrick suffered perhaps the most embarrassing fate having basically stolen the Washington from the investors who entrusted it to him.
Kendrick and his crew struck out on their own in the roughly five years following the final split between the Columbia and the Washington.
Kendrick visited the Hawaiian Islands several times on one of these voyages, he learned that Hawaii produced a commodity that could fetch a higher price in China than even sea otter scans.
As we discussed in episode 2, 20 sandalwood could be sold at a high premium in China and it grew at high elevations in Hawaii at least for a while.

[1:00:16] Once the word got out about Kendrick’s discovery and especially when the young king Kamehameha, the second loosened restrictions on logging to help keep his nobles in line.
The sandalwood trade became an ecological catastrophe in Hawaii.
However, Kendrick himself wouldn’t live long enough to see the consequences of his discovery in his essay about early Boston traders in the Hawaiian islands.
Morrison describes how the captain’s deep involvement in the sandalwood trade led to his demise.
Captain Kendrick was killed as an accidental result of his intimate interest in Hawaiian affairs.
He and his crew helped the chief of Oahu defeat the chief of Kowai in December 17 94 lying in Honolulu Harbor with him was the English trading vessel.
Jackal, Captain Brown, the crew of which had also taken part in the battle to celebrate their victory.
Captain Kendrick hoisted his in sign in the Lady Washington and fired a federal salute to which the Jackal replied.
Captain Brown ordered several of his guns uns shotted for the purpose.
But by mistake, the gunner fired one of those that was still charged with rounding grape.
A ball penetrated the lady Washington’s cabin and killed her commander.
One of the ablest of our pioneer ship masters in the Pacific.

[1:01:35] A replica of Kendrick’s sloop was built in Aberdeen, Washington in 1989.
It’s usually used for education, but it’s also appeared in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie as well as several TV episodes and music videos since 1958.
A replica of the Columbia has been part of the frontier land attraction at Disneyland in California.

[1:01:58] The command module during the Apollo 11 moon landing was named in honor of the original Colombia’s voyage of discovery as was the space shuttle Columbia which flew 28 space missions over 22 years before breaking up on re-entry. In 2003.

[1:02:15] The Colombia may have been the first American ship to land in the Hawaiian Islands, but the crew of the Colombia didn’t have nearly the transformative effect on Hawaiian culture.
As another group who sailed from Boston just a few years later in episode 2 20 we followed the Park Street missionaries who left their homes and were prepared to never return.
They didn’t know much about the land they were going to settle in or the people they were trying to convert to Christianity.
But what little they had heard was frightening.
The missionaries came from a religious tradition that was directly descended from the harsh Calvinism of the puritans.
And they’re on their way to a land where the people worshiped a pantheon of many gods from a society where men and women were basically always covered from neck to ankles.
They were going to a land where the people wore tattoos and not much more.
They had heard rumors of graven idols and human sacrifice and they believed they were on the way to do battle with the devil himself.
Many of them believed that they were being sent into the gates of hell.
But in fact, they were on their way to heaven, on earth, the kingdom of Hawaii.

[1:03:29] In 2016, my wife and co-host Emerita Nikki took an anniversary trip to Maui.
It seemed like everywhere we went, we bumped into a tiny rustic church in a breathtaking Hawaiian landscape.
First, we stumbled across the Kawai Church on our way to snorkel at a place called mckenna Landing.
It had walls made of coral blocks that looked like limestone and shingles on the eaves roof and slim steeple that looked like cedar but were probably some more tropical wood.
It was nestled between coconut palms and a brilliant green lawn with a handful of headstones in the corner of the churchyard overlooking a pocket beach.

[1:04:08] A few days later, all the way on the other side of the island, we are driving down a very narrow, very rough dirt road.
The kind where you have to pull off to one side when a car comes in the other direction and where you have to beep the horn before going around a tight turn, down a long lane off that winding dirt road was Aloha church which looked like it was taken out of the same kit as the church, same proportions, same slim steeple, but this one had whitewashed walls and dark stained planks cladding, the eaves and steeple.
It was on a narrow lava peninsula with surf breaking right outside the back windows.
There was a cluster of palms and hardwoods around the church building with a low slope leading down to the rocky beach. Below.
On the day we visited, there were snorkeler spear fishing in the rough surf behind the church.
On the very last day of our trip, I went out for a run an hour or two before the sun came up and ran past a small stick built church across the street from a waterfront park.

[1:05:09] Later that day, I passed another church on the northern end of the island that seemed to be the exact same model but more brightly colored.
It was in a narrow valley above a rocky coast with dark green walls, white trim and a bright red roof.
That roof was steeply pitched and it had a tiny porch with a little roof with the same pitch and again, a low steeple.
A few hours later still, I passed a third church with the same basic design.
This one painted a bright green and looking across a dune at the beach that finally made me curious enough to pay attention.
And I realized that not only those three identical churches which I’ll mispronounce as the.

[1:05:53] And ali churches, but also the and, and nearly every other church I’d seen on the island was a congregational church.
I knew that the congregationalists and the unitarians were the direct descendants of New England puritanism.
But I couldn’t quite figure out how they came to be so ubiquitous on Maui.
I put the question away for later. And when I dug into it, it turned out that the traditional Hawaiian religion had been supplanted by congregationalist churches, started by missionaries from Park Street Church beginning in 18 19.

[1:06:33] The story begins when British captain James Cook went searching for a northwest passage around the North American continent.
He stopped briefly at a remote Pacific archipelago on his way to North America, then stopped again.
On his way back to trade, he named the chain the sandwich islands after the Earl of Sandwich.
Although the residents of the island he stopped at preferred the name Hawaii.
Before long, that entire chain would be united into a new kingdom of Hawaii.

[1:07:04] When Cook visited Hawaii in 17 78 and died there.
In 17 79 a local priest and chieftain named Kaha Mea was beginning a military and diplomatic campaign to unite all the neighboring islands under his rule.
First, he defeated the other chieftains on the island of Hawaii.
And then as more European and American ships visited the island chain, he traded sandalwood and other natural resources for cannons and gunpowder and hired British military advisors.
In 17 95 he launched an army of 10,000 warriors and over 900 canoes against the neighboring island of Maui which had fought against Hawaii for generations.
His forces quickly defeated Maui, then leapfrogged to Moai before moving on and subduing the island of Oahu before the end of the year for the next several years, Kaha Me, the great known later as Kaa Mea.
The first, the founder of the House of Kia Mea was occupied by establishing a set of laws, negotiating to bring the island of Kwai under his rule and putting down rebellions around the islands. He’d already conquered.
One of those rebellions took place in 18 96 in the Hilo Valley on Kamehameha’s Home Island of Hawaii.
Today, one of the two major cities on what’s known as the big island.

[1:08:24] A local chief named Nama. Kaha formed an alliance with other mid-level leaders who resented Kamehameha’s dominance and tried to establish a local fid independent of the king’s influence.
The experiment was short lived. The king’s warriors quickly routed the rebels and implemented a form of collective punishment against the warriors who supported the rebel cause.
Villages emptied as entire families fled into the hills to try to avoid being put under the knife but many were unsuccessful.
An independent researcher of Hawaiian history describes how one family took refuge in a cave for days before finally being discovered by Kamehameha’s forces.

[1:09:06] A survivor, a son, Ou Kaha was at the age of about 10.
Both his parents were slain before his eyes.
The only surviving member of the family besides himself was an infant brother.
He hoped to save from the fate of his parents and carried him on his back and fled from the enemy, but he was pursued and his little brother while on his back was killed by a spear from the enemy taken prisoner because he was not young enough to give them trouble nor old enough to excite their fears.
Kaha was not killed instead, Kaha was sent to live with an uncle began training the boy to follow in his footsteps.
As a priest in the Hawaiian animist religion, he practiced complex prayers and rituals which he would repeat daily at the Hayao or temple that was maintained by his uncle.

[1:09:58] However, Kaha would not grow up to be a Hawaiian priest.
He missed his parents and as an orphan, he had very little status in Hawaiian culture.
Perhaps that’s why in 18 07, when he was about 15 years old, he swam out into Honolulu Harbor and tried his luck on a ship that was moored there.
He later told a biographer about this time, there was a ship.
The triumph come from New York, Captain Brent, the master of the ship as soon as it got into the harbor and the very place where I lived, I thought of no more, but to take the best chance I had.
And if the captain had no objection to take me as one of his own servants and to obey his word after supper, the captain made some inquiry to see if we were willing to come to America.
And soon I made a motion with my head that I was willing to go.
This man was very agreeable and his kindness was much delighted in my heart as if I was his own son and he was my own father.
Thus I still continue thankful for his kindness toward me.

[1:11:07] Another native Hawaiian teenager named Hou also enlisted for the voyage.
The triumph had traveled from the US east coast to the coast of Oregon, which was claimed by Britain Russia, France and the US there.
They purchased valuable furs from the indigenous tribes which they would take to China, which already had a well established fur trade.
The intermediate stop in the Hawaiian islands was relatively new but it would allow captain Caleb Britnell of New Haven to augment his cargo with sandalwood and pick up new crew members.
It was also a crucial replenishment stop in the middle of the Pacific far from any other port traders like Brine.
And soon thereafter, whalers from New England and elsewhere would come to cherish their layovers in an island chain where they could stock up on freshwater and provisions and where their crews could be entertained with plentiful booze and prostitution.

[1:12:03] An article about trade between Boston and Hawaii by Se Morrison gives an outline of what a typical trading voyage of that era would have looked like, a typical voyage is that of the ship Pearl captained by John Sutter, owned by James and Thomas Lamb.
James and Thomas H Perkins and Russell Sturgis, all of Boston.
She sailed Vince on July 23rd, 18 07 on January 13, 18 8, she anchored at the Sandwich Islands and procured fresh provisions.
The next 20 months from February 18 08 to October 18 09 were spent along the northwest coast, procuring Beaver and sea otter skins to the islands.
Stopping a few days in late October and taking on provisions in wood.
Arrived in China December 5th, sailed March 11th 18 10 in company with Theodore Lyman ship Vancouver, the two vessels sailing up Boston Harbor almost abreast on August 4th 18 10.

[1:13:07] If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you’ll recognize a lot of those names from episode 89.
When we interviewed Stephen Yusa about his book barons of the sea Boston merchants dominated the early China trade using Boston built clipper ships.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the same families also dominated the early trade with the Hawaiian Islands for Hou and Ou Kaha.
The two year voyage from Hawaii to China and then back to New England must have seemed never ending en route.
They had to not only learn how to be sailors but also how to speak English, after they finally arrived in Connecticut in the fall of 18 09, an 18 16 biographical sketch says on their arrival in this country, Obua, which is how Americans tended to pronounce his name, received.
The additional name of Henry and Hou, that of Thomas Kaha was taken into the family of Captain Britnell.
And for Hou, a suitable place was found in the neighborhood.
Both of them expecting to return to their native island. By the first favorable opportunity.

[1:14:19] That quick return was not to be sometime during their journey, a Yale graduate named Hubbard had begun teaching Henry Opua to read and write in English.
And now that he found himself in a college town, Henry was eager to continue his education as the sketch continues.

[1:14:39] After his arrival in New Haven. While residing with the family of Captain Britnell, he used frequently to visit the colleges in that place at the door of one of the colleges, he was found one evening weeping.
I’m being asked the cause of his tears. He replied that nobody gave him learning, several of the students having learned who he was and where he lived and having obtained the consent of Captain Britnell agreed to instruct him and accordingly received him under their care.

[1:15:11] Opua Hay was a quick study. The profile says that as he learned to speak English, he learned to read it just as quickly.
Within a few months, he was reading Bible verses and in four years, he went off to the public school in Litchfield.
By 18 15, he’d studied English geography arithmetic and was teaching himself Hebrew, one of his tutors wrote as to Henry Obua. He is certainly promising.
He is possessed of an amiable disposition and talents capable of being useful.
He has a quick apprehension and good memory and considering all the disadvantages under which he labors from early habits.
And from the fact that he studies in a strange language, I think is improvement more than ordinary.

[1:15:59] That year, he formally converted to Christianity, expressing a desire to return to his native island and spread the gospel there.
To that end, he started working on an alphabet and grammar to create a written version of the Hawaiian language.
In 18 16, he was recruited into the inaugural class of the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut.
It had been founded by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which was based out of Park Street Church in Boston.
Morrison’s 1921 paper about the links between Boston and Hawaii traces the board’s early focus on the so called Sandwich Islands to a sailor on the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe.

[1:16:43] Probably the first American vessel to touch at Hawaii was the famous Columbia of Boston captained by Robert Gray on August 24th, 17 89.
In the course of our first voyage around the world, she remained 24 days at the islands salted down five punches of pork and sailed with 155 live hogs on deck.
A young native called ATU who shipped there as an ordinary seaman attracted much attention at Boston on the Columbia’s return by his gorgeous feather cloak and helmet, was the first of several young Hawaiians who arriving in New England as seamen on merchant vessels influenced the American Board of foreign missions to found the mission school.
Cornwall was chosen as the location for the school because the religious fervor of the surrounding community made it an excellent area for fundraising.
The school had the state admission of the education in our own country of heathen youths in such manner as with subsequent professional instruction will qualify them to become useful, missionaries, physicians, surgeons, school masters or interpreters and to communicate to the heathen nations.
Such knowledge in agriculture and the arts as may prove the means of promoting Christianity and civilization.

[1:18:04] The first class at the mission school was made up of 12 students of whom seven were native Hawaiians.
Henry Opua helped recruit many of them including a hereditary prince of the island of Kawai who was about Ou’s age known to white Americans as George Prince.
He had been born Hume Hume and had been sent off to sea at a young age, eventually ending up in the United States.
He enlisted in the Marine Corps served on the US S Wasp during the war of 18 12 and was discharged after being wounded in action.
He soon reenlisted with the US Navy serving during the first barbary war.

[1:18:50] And the school aggressively recruited him as his military record would help burnish the reputation of the mission school.
The rest of the inaugural class was rounded out by two white Americans, a Bengali, a Hindu and a native American who might have been Cherokee or Choctaw.
The two nations most heavily represented at the school throughout the years, before Henry Obua, Haa could complete his written Hawaiian grammar and before he could return to the nation of his birth as a missionary, he died of yellow fever in Cornwall on February 17th, 18 18.

[1:19:27] A world away.
And 15 months later, the death of Kaa, the great would lead to a period of upheaval in Hawaiian culture that unbeknownst to the Hawaiians helped pave the way for the New England missionaries who would soon find their way to the islands.
The king’s eldest son assumed the throne as Kame Maya the second, but he would share power with his stepmother.

[1:19:50] Ka Aum Manu was his father’s favorite wife and a member of the traditional royal family of Maui.
Keeping her in power helped bind Maui and the other islands to Hawaii.
After the great king’s death, the new king also used trade policy to help maintain power.
While his father had ordered a cautious and conservation minded approach to the sandalwood trade. The son lifted almost all restrictions.
This ensured that local chieftains throughout the islands would get a taste of the trade as described in the 1938 book about the Hawaiian kingdom by Ralph S Kendall.
The wide open market in Hawaii therefore proved an irresistible attraction to the New England traders and they descended upon the islands in a swarm, bringing with them everything from pens, scissors, clothing, and kitchen utensils to carriages, billiard tables, house frames, and sailing ships and doing their utmost to keep the speculating spirit at fever heat.
Among the Hawaiian chiefs and the chiefs were not slow about buying if they had no sandalwood at hand to pay for their goods they gave promissory notes.
Even after Sandalwood had become scarce, they still kept buying, led on by a species of salesmanship at which these Yankee traders were adept.

[1:21:11] In part to emphasize a sense of unity with the other islands.
Kaha Maya, the second moved the kingdom’s capital to the town of Lahaina on Maui.
In 18 20 there, he and Kaau Manu moved into what had been the royal residence of Maui.
Before unification, the Lahaina was located in the desert in the island’s rain shadow.
A complex system of canals carried fresh water out of the mountains to fill a 17 acre fish pond just feet from the waterfront.

[1:21:42] In the middle of this pond was a one acre man-made island called Mocoa where the royal palace complex stood from this island.
Kaau Manu would challenge beliefs at the very heart of traditional Hawaiian religion and customs.
At the time, the Hayan culture was rigidly hierarchical.
People were divided into strict castes that were impossible to transcend and could never mix in public.

[1:22:09] These human casts corresponded with the rigid hierarchy within the pantheon of gods and deities.
Religious practices also required strict separation on gender lines with women forbidden from eating meals alongside men from eating many common foods like banana and pork and from any participation in any mixed gender context.
While menstruating forum manu.
These restrictions were a barrier to her participation as a full partner in the Yang kings regency together with Kaya Maya, the second’s wives.
She started a campaign of co eating through the simple act of eating at the table with the king.
The queen regent could both participate more fully in politics and also challenge the ancient hierarchies.
According to religious law, this act should have led to a death sentence but the young king couldn’t make himself execute his beloved stepmother and co monarch.
The high priests also refused to step in making it clear to the people that the old mores would no longer be enforced.
This launched a period of extreme religious and cultural upheaval in the Hawaiian islands, temples were torn down and idols were burned while the traditional hierarchies evaporated, leaving each family to decide for itself whether to continue worshiping the old gods.

[1:23:34] So as 18 20 dawned a new king had moved into a new capital city, the old gods had fallen and Boston merchants were draining the island’s dry of natural resources.
This year of extreme transition was far from over though Se Morrison’s 1921 paper notes, another event which made the year 18 20 memorable in Hawaiian economic history was the arrival of the first Massachusetts whaling vessel.
The ship Marrow of Nantucket, Nantucket whalers had rounded the horn as early as 17 91.
But until this year, their activities have been confined mainly to the South Pacific.
Captain Allen’s discovery of the Japanese whaling grounds made Hawaii as essential to whalers as to China traders.
Within just a few years, the shallow Anchorage before Lahia would be transformed into a forest of masts.
In the show notes this week, I’ll include a depiction of Lahia in the early 18 forties by a pair of painters who embarked on a whaling voyage around the world.
A few years earlier, there are dozens of ships on the water.
The royal palace at Moula is visible on one side and in the middle is a whitewashed fortress built of coral blocks which was erected after a dispute between locals and whalers resulted in a whaling ship opening fire on the town with cannons in 18 27.

[1:24:58] Another catalyst of change would arrive in Hawaiian waters on March 31st, 18 20.
In his 18 48 memoir, congregational missionary Hiram Bingham described his first glimpse of native Hawaiians soon after making landfall, their maneuvers in their canoes.
Some being propelled by short paddles and some by small sails attracted the attention of our little group and for a moment gratified curiosity, but the appearance of destitution, degradation and barbarism among the chattering and almost naked savages whose heads and feet and much of their sunburnt swarthy skins were bare was appalling.
Some of our numbered with gushing tears turned away from the spectacle.
Others with firmer nerve continued their gaze. But we’re ready to exclaim.
Can these be human beings? How dark and comfortless their state of mind and heart, how imminent the danger to the immortal soul shrouded in this deep pagan gloom?
Can such beings be civilized? Can’t they be Christianized?
Can we throw ourselves upon these rude shores and take up our abode for life among such a people for the purpose of training them for heaven.

[1:26:13] Bingham was one of the two ordained ministers and the first group of Boston congregationalists to arrive in Hawaii.
The book by Kendall describes the makeup of this group. The first company of missionaries included two ordained ministers Reverend Hiram Bingham and Reverend Asa Thurston, a physician, Doctor Thomas Holman, two school masters and catechists, Samuel Whitney and Samuel Ruggles, a printer, Elisha Loomis, a farmer, Daniel Chamberlain, their wives and three Hawaiian youths have been attending the Foreign Mission School at Cornwall Connecticut.
These 17 persons constituted the original Hawaiian church whose membership was increased by later editions, accompanying them on the voyage to Hawaii were five Children of the Chamberlain family and a young Hawaiian chief George Prince Kau Ali, son of the king of Hawaii.
The prince had been a sailor in the American Navy and later a student at the Foreign Mission School where he made an excellent record as a student but gave no very satisfactory evidence of being a Christian.

[1:27:21] This so called pioneer company of missionaries had departed Boston 163 days earlier, just a few days after Bingham and Thurston got ordained and almost immediately after a solemn ceremony at the Park Street Church on October 15th, 18 19.
On that day, all the members of the Pioneer company gathered together including wives and Children.
They sang hymns, listened to sermons by several fellow missionaries, including the native Hawaiian Hou.
And they were formally organized into a church for transplantation that was charged with spreading the gospel to Hawaii.

[1:27:58] In a book about gender in the Hawaiian missionaries, Jennifer Thigpen wrote, on a fall day in 18 19, Mercy.
Whitney gathered with her new mission family at Boston Harbor in preparation for a journey to the Hawaiian islands.
Mercy was young just 26 and recently married in the preceding weeks.
Mercy had surprised her family by agreeing not only to wed Samuel Whitney, a virtual stranger but also to accompany him on a mission to the Pacific for a term of no less than 20 years.
Mercy and Samuel were not alone in taking such a leap of faith of the seven missionary couples preparing to board the brig Thaddeus six had married in preparation for their journey.
The missions governing board, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions had clearly articulated its marital requirement.
Missionary hopefuls like Samuel understood that if they were unmarried, they simply would not be assigned to the field.
Similarly, women understood that they would only be allowed to participate in the growing foreign mission movement as wives and help meets to full fledged male missionaries.

[1:29:11] For the small crowd gathered to see the group off. The mood surely must have been mixed coupled with the dangers associated with the months long sea voyage and the long term of mission service.
It was possible even likely that the group would never be reunited with their families and friends.

[1:29:32] Sie Morrison’s paper describes their departure from Boston a week later on Saturday morning, October 23rd.
The final farewell took place at Long Wharf, crowded with sympathetic Spectators.
The Reverend Doctor Wooster offered up a prayer hope who delivered another speech and all united in singing.
Blessed be the tie that binds.
And when shall we all meet again?
A barge from the US S independence, conveyed the missionaries to the vessel charter for the voyage by the American board, the brig Thaddeus of Boston, which in just a short time weighed anchor and dropped down the stream to Boston Light.
As you might gather from the narrative of the first contacts between Hiram Bingham’s missionary company and the court of Kha Me.
The missionaries expected the absolute worst when they arrived in Hawaii and they were perhaps disappointed not to find it.
Rufus Anderson’s 18 70 history of the Sandwich Islands mission provides an example of what the American missionaries expected to find.

[1:30:38] The missionaries had expected to find the old king Kamehameha ruling the islands with despotic power and zealously upholding idolatry.
They expected to see the temple standing to witness the baleful effects of idolaters rights to be shocked by day with the sight of human sacrifices and alarmed at night by the outcries of devoted victims.
They expected to encounter a long and dangerous opposition from the powerful priesthood of paganism.
They expected to hear the yells of savage warfare and to witness bloody battles before idolatry would be overthrown.
And the peaceful religion of Jesus Christ established no anticipations were more reasonable yet not one of them was realized, their first information from the shore was that Kaha Mea was dead and that his successor had renounced.
The national Superstitions, destroyed the idols, burned the temples abolished the priesthood, put an end to human sacrifices and suppressed a rebellion which arose in consequence of these measures.
And that peace once more prevailed. And the nation without a religion was waiting for the law of Jehovah.

[1:31:50] Even though the New King had upended the old traditions. There were still plenty of signs of the old religion. When the pioneer company of missionaries arrived.
For example, Hiram Bingham took the time to view a Haa or temple on his first day in Hawaii.
He described it as a monument of folly, superstition and madness which the idolaters conqueror and his murderous priests had consecrated with human blood to the senseless deities of pagan Hawaii, as a fortification of Satan’s Kingdom.
Its design was more for war against the human species than the worship of the creator.

[1:32:29] About half of the first party of missionaries settled at a mission at Kailua on the big island of Hawaii.
When Bingham arrived at Kailua a few days after making landfall, he described the reception he received as we proceeded to the shore.
The multitudinous shouting in almost naked natives of every age, sex and rank swimming, floating on surfboards, sailing in canoes, sitting, lounging, standing, running like sheep, dancing or laboring on shore, attracted our earnest attention and exhibited the appalling darkness of the land which we had come to enlighten.

[1:33:09] The other half of the initial missionaries were split between the big island, Oahu and Kawai though they established at least four churches.
And though the Hawaiian crown would adopt Christianity as the official state religion.
The first mission was broadly considered a failure, perhaps racist attitudes toward the indigenous people and their cultural practices had something to do with it.
The missionaries thought that the locals would be dazzled by the Western dress and demeanor of the three Hawaiian members of the party.
But the locals were mostly nonplussed.
An official history of the mission school says that those who had returned to their native lands failed to meet the expectations of their friends.
Perhaps the locals saw just another Westerner who happened to have darker skin.

[1:34:00] Racist assumptions about what work should look like also sabotage the missionary’s efforts.
The Hawaiians were expert hunters and master Mariners and they cultivated breadfruit, banana taro and other staple crops.
But because their labor didn’t look like the typical New England farm, the missionaries believed that the locals needed instruction on how to feed themselves on their own land.
This did not work out as well as intended as Rufus Anderson recorded in 18 70.
Another error naturally committed in the necessary absence of experience.
So near the outset of this enterprise was the comparative estimate put on mere civilizing agencies.
Hence the sending of a farmer as part of the mission to the islands.
It was supposed that the natives would at once profit by improvements in tillage such as an American farmer would be able to introduce.
But the facts did not correspond with those anticipations and the farmer returned after three years.

[1:35:03] Kaha Me I had his own concerns about the arrival of the missionaries.
He was reportedly skeptical when he heard that the American men took only one wife apiece.
He was also worried about upsetting the balance of power between the British Russian American and other merchants who were operating in the islands eventually.
However, he was prevailed upon by his mother, Queen Kalai, his stepmother in co regent Kaman and a high priest named to let the newcomers stay.
Unlike the missionary mercy, Whitney who has pledged to be a help meet to her new missionary husband Gaum Manu saw the arrival of these Christians as a new avenue to power.
While their efforts at direct conversion to the example posed by their three Hawaiian missionaries failed.
As did the experiment in New England style farming.
The missionaries were soon successful at building ties with the chiefly class in the islands.
Ralph Kendall’s history of the Hawaiian kingdom describes the early success.

[1:36:09] From the beginning, the chiefs were friendly to the missionaries for the first few years.
Indeed, they practically monopolized the efforts of the new teachers.
The latter have sometimes been criticized for giving so much attention to the chiefs.
In reality, they had no choice in the matter. And if they could not win the chiefs, they had little chance of success with the common people.
Visitors to the islands. In 18 22 remarked that all seemed to hang on the word of the king.
He said that by and by, he would tell his people that they must all learn the good word and worship Jehovah, but that the missionaries must teach him first and themselves get well acquainted with Hawaiian.
They had a head start in getting acquainted with Hawaiian. Not only did Thomas Hou William Kai and John Hooli have native fluency with the language, but a British missionary came to work with them for about a year and a half.
Reverend William Ellis had spent years in Tahiti and learned the local language in Hawaii.
He discovered that he quickly picked up Hawaiian and was able to preach to the locals in their own language.
Also among the first party were Samuel Ruggles, a classmate of Henry Opua Haa who continued working on Henry’s Hawaiian grammar after his death.
And Asa Thurston who would single-handedly translate 14 books of the Bible into Hawaiian.

[1:37:33] Kendall’s history continues before the missionaries were well settled in their thatched houses built for them by the king at Honolulu.
They gathered some of the people into a school.
The same thing was done at Kailua in Waa.

[1:37:49] In these little schools, English was taught, it was obvious.
However, that while it was desirable for the king and chiefs and their business agents to know English teaching such a difficult language to the people as a whole would require an immense expenditure of time and effort.
If the Hawaiians were to be made literate in a reasonable period, it must be in their own language.
If the work of the missionaries was to be effective, it must be carried on in the native tongue.
Their first task was to learn the language and to reduce it to written form.

[1:38:23] Within two years, enough translation was done to start pressing Elisha Lois’s print shop into service.
A 1962 article in the journal of the American Society of Church history describes the moment when the first Hawaiian language printing was struck, on Monday, January 7th 18 22 in the presence of a gathering of missionaries chiefs and foreign residents.
Chief Ke A Moku assisted in taking the first impression of printed matter to come from the press in the Hawaiian islands.
This spelling premer, the first so-called book was only a broadside six by four inches headed lesson one containing the alphabet and some short lessons in spelling and reading, which later appeared on the 2nd and 3rd pages of the completed text.
Before the end of the month, an elementary spelling book of 16 pages was printed in an addition of 500 copies.
King, the second Kau Boki and other chiefs and numbers of people came to the printing establishment in Honolulu to gaze in awe at the new machine that could turn out papa, or the written word on blank sheets of paper.
From this point onward, the missionaries would use educational texts and gospel tracks just as fast as the press could print them.

[1:39:42] As the initial failure of the mission began to turn around, the pioneer company was joined by a second party of missionaries which had sailed out of New Haven and arrived in Hawaii in April of 18 23.
This group would be split among the big Island Oahu. And for the first time, Maui, a group including William and Clarissa Richards, Charles and Harriet Stewart and Betsy Stockton were stationed in Lahaina starting in May of that year where Betsy Stockton would be praised for the success of the school.
She founded the first mission school in Lahaina and the first in the Hawaiian islands that enrolled the Children of commoners and not just the chiefly class.
Becky was also notable because she had been enslaved at birth and only manumitted five years before she volunteered as a missionary.

[1:40:32] The second company may have sailed from New Haven but more of its members were from Boston than had been in the first company that had sailed from Boston with their arrival in Lahaina.
That town became crowded with Boston, merchants, whalers and missionaries, all of whom were right on the doorstep of the royal complex at Moca Ulla Se Morrison described the base of competing New England influences.
As early as 18 23 there were four mercantile houses in the islands, Honeywell’s jones’, Northwest John DeWolf and another from New York, the little community of respectable traders and missionaries with a disreputable fringe of deserters from and whalers was so predominantly Bostonian that Boston acquired the same connotation in Hawaii as along the northwest coast.
It stood for the whole United States.
Hawaii had in fact become an outpost of New England.
The foreign settlement with its frame houses shipped around the horn haircloth furniture, orthodox meeting house built of coral blocks in New England.
Sabbath was as Yankee as a suburb of Boston.

[1:41:45] That year, William and Clarissa Richards erected the Viola Church immediately abutting the royal complex when Nicky and I visited, it was a perfectly clear and sunny day.
And the manicured cemetery and churchyard fairly gleamed within the enclosing lava stone walls.
We wandered among the graves and noted veterans of both world wars as well as headstones with surnames indicating families of Hawaiian, North American Filipino and Chinese descent.
Immediately facing the church building, a small wrought iron enclosure denotes the royal grave of Queen Kopan.

[1:42:23] In 18 23 she was one of the many wives of Maui, Governor HOA Pili.
But she announced that from that point onward, Hawaiian royalty would adopt the strange Christian custom of monogamy.
So she became his only wife.
Unfortunately, she became gravely ill that August and soon lay on her deathbed.
In the weeks before September death, she asked to be baptized and to be buried in the Christian custom.

[1:42:54] Kai’s public embrace of Christianity helped accelerate the religion’s acceptance among the Hawaiian people a year and six days after her death, her fellow queen called a public meeting in Lahaina on September 24th, 18 24.
Kendall describes the meeting Manu called forward three young men belonging to her private school, informed us that she had appointed them teachers for her people on the Winward side of Maui and desired that they might be supplied with books sufficient for large schools.
She then addressed herself to the headman of that district who were present, commanding them to have good schoolhouses erected immediately and to order all the people in her name to attend to the pa pa and the or education and worship.
She didn’t yet know it when she ordered this additional religious education for the island of Maui.
But Kaau Manu’s son and king was already dead.

[1:43:54] The second and his wife, Kama Malu were on a state visit to Great Britain when they both died of measles in July of 18 24, his younger brother would take the throne as Kaa Maya the third, but the new king was just 12 years old, investing the dowager Queen Ka Aum Manu with ever more power.
In part, she used her influence to promote Christianity and specifically protestant congregationalism.
She was publicly baptized in 18 24 and she soon gave her stamp of approval to the Kingdom’s first written body of laws based on biblical values.
Within the next few years, she would outlaw Catholicism and banish priests from the kingdom.
She would sign the Kingdom’s first Foreign treaty, a free trade agreement with the US and she would ban liquor and prostitution in Lahia.
This last order led to a violent pushback by the New England whalers who had become accustomed to procuring not only pork bananas and fresh water, but also booze in women in Lahaina.
In October 18 27 a small group of women went on board the English whale ship, John Palmer, which is under the command of an American captain.

[1:45:09] Holy demanded that the women be returned to shore and the crew of the Palmer refused things escalated until HOA Pili took the captain hostage and the ship’s mate ordered his men to load their cannons.
Hiram Bingham recalled the ship commenced firing cannonballs which by their horrifying sound as they passed near us and by their plowing the ground behind us and the relative position of the ship, the house and the striking of the balls appeared with little room for doubt to have been aimed at the house of Mr Richards.

[1:45:43] The captain was eventually returned. The women weren’t and everything went back to square one to protect against future misunderstandings.
A large coral block fortress was built in downtown Lahaina which is visible on the 18 48 panoramic painting I mentioned before.
The other landmark that’s visible in that painting is the Lahaina Luna Seminary.
In 18 28 the third company of missionaries came on the ship Parthian from Boston, they sailed from Boston.
But this group was from a wide swath of the country including members from Kentucky, Vermont, New Jersey, New York, Missouri, New Hampshire and Connecticut.
One of the Kentuckians, Lauren Andrews was tasked with starting a seminary now that the Hawaiians had a few years of literacy and religious instruction under their belts.
The church believed that they were ready to start training as clergy themselves.

[1:46:43] Considered the first American college west of the Rockies.
Lina Luna is just a high school today standing high on a hill above downtown Lahaina.
The campus has changed little since the 19th century, including Hale Pai, the printing house in 18 34 Alicia Lois’s old press was moved from Honolulu to Lahaina and the students started printing the first Hawaiian newspaper.
By 18 37 they were cranking out 18 million printed pages per year.

[1:47:17] Park Street Church. And the American Board of Commissioners for foreign missions would send nine more companies of missionaries over the next 20 years, over the 12 companies that were sent by 18 48 7 were sent directly from Boston.
All were operating under the auspices of Park Street and most included members from Boston.
A fair number of missionaries returned home after a handful of years or moved on to other missionary work in South America Asia or even among the indigenous nations of the American West.
But some stayed on for 10, 20 or 50 years.
Hiram Bingham would live in the islands for 21 years.
The congregational missionaries from Park Street went to civilize Hawaii almost 200 years after their Puritan ancestors went to civilize the Massachusetts people.
In both cases, the indigenous culture had already been weakened in the case of colonial Massachusetts by the great plague that had decimated native villages a few years before.
And in the case of Hawaii, by the religious upheaval that had preceded the arrival of the missionaries.
The outcome for the Hawaiians was very nearly as disastrous as it was for the Massachusetts, Wampanoag and Nip Muck who had called the Massachusetts Bay home. Prior to 16 30.

[1:48:41] In many cases, the Children of missionaries were among the planters who implemented a brutal nearly feudal plantation system in Hawaii, forcing most native Hawaiians to work in sugar cane fields or pineapple farms on their ancestral homelands for starvation wages.
The grandchildren of the missionaries became the Imperialists who forced King David Kaleka to sign the 18 87 bayonet constitution that stripped Hawaiians of their right to self government and turned over most political power to the white planters.
It only seems appropriate that when the US Marines came ashore in 18 93 to back a coup that deposed and imprisoned Queen Lilia Kalani ended Hawaiian royal rule and forced annexation to the United States.
Those marines were carried aboard the US S Boston.

[1:49:35] However, the tragic history of the missionary system in the Hawaiian islands does not translate to a disdain for the churches that remain there today.
Wherever I traveled on Maui, the congregational churches in tiny towns and rural enclaves were meticulously maintained.
The proof is in the evident care given to the lava stone K and I church embraced between tarot fields and coconut palms on a windswept peninsula or the, church where Charles Lindbergh’s buried, wrapped in a colorful tropical garden atop a cliff or the tidy church at the end of the winding road to the tiny village of Nahi.
The proof is also in the church histories which proudly note that the congregations refused to deed their church buildings and land over to the missionary society back in Boston when they were asked to in the 18 sixties.

[1:50:28] The religious tradition planted by these missionaries was celebrated at Park Street Church on the 2/100 anniversary of the pioneer company in October 2019.
About 100 church members, descendants of missionaries and historic interpreters from the Hawaiian Islands traveled on a commemorative tour of New England.
They started in New Haven, traveled through the Connecticut Valley where the mission school had been hosted and they wound up in Boston on Sunday, October 20th.

[1:50:58] 200 years and one day after the mission church had been gathered at Park Street, the Hawaiians attended morning services at Park Street Church.
One of them wrote in a travel log.
The service was a beautiful blend of Hawaiian language and English.
There was a huge contingent of people from Hawaii.
The inside of the church is so contemporary that I had to actually make myself stop and remember that this is where the commissioning happened 200 years ago.
What might it have felt like cold, damp, joyful, not likely to have been filled with flags from around the world like it was today.
What did those who were about to set out? Feel like on the inside and what face might they have put on for others to see.
One of the many highlights here was a Thurston descendant, sister from the East Coast, meeting a Thurston descendant sister from Hawaii. For the first time.
This was in the same church where their shared great many times over, great grandmother and grandfather set out 200 years ago.

[1:52:02] The first time this podcast made a visit to the Pacific Coast was back in October 2020 in episode 206, at the time COVID was in full swing and MRN A vaccines were still a dream on the horizon.
So I was really missing travel.
I took the opportunity to share a story that I had learned about on a trip.
I took two years earlier.
It’s the story of a shipwrights apprentice from Boston who went to sea with a whaling voyage.
He somehow ended up being recruited either by hook or by crook into a crew that was assembled in the Hawaiian Islands.
Then captured by Spanish authorities on the California coast and accused of piracy, escaping the gallows through hard work and Yankee ingenuity, Joseph Chapman would build a new England style mill for the San Gabriel mission, which is referred to as the first encroachment of the industrial revolution into Alta California.
He would live through tumultuous times, witnessing the independence of Mexico from Spain, the downfall of the mission system that he’d become part of and eventually the American annexation of California, co-host Emerita Nikki and I have been trying to get some camping trips in this fall since we can’t really travel anymore.
No trip to Washington to see my uncle get interred at Arlington National Cemetery.
No trips to Maine or the White Mountains and probably no tropical vacation for our 10th wedding anniversary this winter.

[1:53:31] What’s most galling is that I’m probably not gonna be able to see my mother this year at all.
I like traveling. I miss traveling. So this week I’m telling a story that’s inspired by travel, both historic travel and my own.

[1:53:47] In the late fall of 2018, Nicky and I went on a great trip to Southern California.
We flew into LAX and then drove to Las Vegas with lots of adventures along the way.
One of the first places we stopped on that trip was San Gabriel Mission just off the I 10 on the way out of L A.
It’s a magnet for history lovers with original cisterns bread ovens and aqueducts in the courtyard and an extensive museum with original artifacts and displays about daily life at the Mission in the 18th century.
While we were there, a groundskeeper was putting back a grapevine that was as big around as my waist at the base and had a sign saying it was planted in 17 74.
He even let us eat some of the tiny tart grapes that have provided the mission with Sacramental wine for almost 250 years.
After making my way through the museum, I stepped outside the mission walls to get a picture of the Campanaro or wall of bells where the church’s six bells are visible mounted in the outer wall.

[1:54:51] After I got my picture, I paused and read the historic marker plaque by some sort of stone artifact in the grassy area between the mission walls and the busy road.
It was the last remnant of a mill race that fed water to a nearby grist mill, built in the 18 twenties.
The plaque identified the mill as one of the first traces of the industrial revolution in California.

[1:55:13] The mill itself was bulldozed to make room for a housing development in the 19 forties.
And for decades, it was thought that all traces of the mill were lost forever.
Then in 2009, the Alameda Corridor East project began an archaeological survey of the nearby Union Pacific railroad tracks as part of a decades long, much larger project to make rail traffic play nicely with the densely settled neighborhoods of the San Gabriel Valley.
A 1.4 mile long section of the track was going to be lowered into a 30 ft deep trench so it would have less impact on surface traffic, much like our own orange lines.
It runs through the depressed Southwest Corridor trench.
Archaeologists discovered the foundation of the mill which was left in place, buried under a nearby residential street and they found the mill race.

[1:56:01] The eventual report on the survey says during an archaeological excavation in 2009, a 30 ft segment of the mill race was discovered roughly 25 ft south of the Union Pacific railroad tracks along with a much shorter section north of the tracks.
The remainder of the mill race was demolished by railroad road and civic construction between 18 34 and the present constructed out of procured stone and cement mortar.
The primary remaining mill race segment measures roughly 6 ft wide, 30 ft long and 2.5 ft deep.
The mill race consists of a long straight water conveyance feature that’s shaped like a squared u in cross section.

[1:56:44] Now that it was found, the remaining fragment of mill race had to be moved because it was right where the new railroad tracks were gonna go over the next few years.
A plan was hatched to excavate the larger section of the mill race stabilize it and move it.
It was eventually moved across the railroad tracks across the road and into the small park where I encountered it.
It was reinstalled in line with where period maps of the mission show the mill race running and then unveiled in a 2013 ceremony with descendants of the Tonga people who are indigenous to the area and would have worked on building the mill and race as well as a descendant of the mill’s designer.
The Pasadena Star News wrote the 20 ft 15 ton section of the historic mill race was relocated to Plaza Park and restored using rocks from the same area across the street from the mission where archaeologists found it explained, John Die, the lead archaeologist on the project, the reconstructed mill race also has water flowing through it.
This is really unique. We do excavations all the time, but this is once in a lifetime die said I can’t think of any other example of a mission artifact that has been reconstructed and actually works.
What stopped me in my tracks though was a sentence on the historic marker stating that the mill had been designed and built by an American named Joseph Chapman, who was originally from the Boston area.

[1:58:12] In one of the displays in the mission museum. A caption says called El Diablo or the pirate by some.
Chapman is considered to be the most popular man in early California.
Well, that got me hooked. Why was some Boston guy, both a pirate devil and the most popular man in Alta California.
Joseph Chapman’s later years are covered by Spanish, Mexican and American histories of California.
But his early life isn’t well documented.
Some articles say he was from Maine and some say he was born in Ipswich.
About the most solid and reliable primary sources I could find was his baptismal and marriage records to the Catholic missions of California.

[1:58:57] In both Chapman listed Siad to Boston, the city of Boston as his birthplace.
His parents’ names were Daniel and Rosenda. And according to a book of Chapman genealogy, several generations of Daniel Chapmans lived in Ipswich, which may be where the confusion came. In.
A note on his baptismal record also says that he had never been baptized before and continues, that his sister older in age was not baptized until she was 20 years old, having requested it on her own shortly before marrying and finally having come to know that.
So her father, like her mother were of the sect of the Anabaptists whose heretics believe that Children should not be baptized before they reach the use of reason.
Anti Baptists are a branch of protestantism that descends from a persecuted German minority sect.
They do indeed practice adult baptism. They treat the sermon on the mount as the core of their liturgy and most Anna Baptist churches are considered peace churches today.
The most recognized Anabaptist groups in the US are the Amish Mennonite and brethren churches.
My family is actually from an Anabaptist tradition and my mother still attends a brethren church.
However, it would have been very unlikely for a family of Anna Baptists to be living in Boston at the time of Joseph Chapman’s birth, sometime between 17 84 and 17 89.

[2:00:24] Throughout the late 17th and early 18th century Cotton Mather and other puritan ministers tried to stamp out competing denominations like Quakers Baptists and Anabaptists.
In past episodes, we’ve heard how the Quaker martyrs were hanged on Boston common for professing their faith publicly and we’ve heard how the puritan authorities nailed the door.
The first Baptist church in Boston closed Cotton Mather also railed against Anabaptists calling them schism ical scandalous, disorderly disturber of the peace undermining of the churches, neglects of the public worship of God on the Lord’s Day, idolaters and enemies to civil government.

[2:01:06] In no small part due to Mather’s efforts a large community of Anabaptists never arose in Boston.
It’s possible that Chapman’s parents were secret anabaptists, but it’s just as possible that something got lost in translation.
Perhaps Chapman said that he was a baptist and the Friar heard an a Baptist, or perhaps Chapman described the beliefs of a Quaker family and the Friar interpreted them as an a Baptist either way.
It’s unlikely that he was raised in an Anna Baptist tradition in 18th century Boston.
Despite the lack of primary sources about his early life, most profiles of Chapman agree that he was trained as a shipwright in a 1956 article for the Historical Society of Southern California.
Paul Scott wrote in the year that George Washington was elected president of the youthful United States. Joseph Chapman was born.
He was 11 years old when Washington died and he had already learned to read and write so that he could be apprenticed early by his father, Daniel Chapman to a Boston shipwright.

[2:02:11] From the year when George Washington died 17 99 the historical record runs dry for almost two decades.
His apprenticeship likely lasted seven years, but Chapman doesn’t appear in print again until 18 18.
At some point in the intervening decades, Joseph Chapman went to sea most likely as a whaler, he reappears as the first mate on a ship called the Santa Rosa that was involved in raiding the California coast.
It was this expedition that earned him the title pirate and most articles about Chapman will call him a pirate.
However, one man’s pirate is another man’s freedom fighter and the 18 18 raids are not a clear cut case of piracy.

[2:02:57] Hipolito Bouchard was a French born citizen of Argentina.
He fought in Napoleon’s Navy and campaigns in the English Channel, Mediterranean and Caribbean Seas before becoming disillusioned with the French revolution.
Meanwhile, a revolution was brewing against another European empire.
And Bouchard sailed to Buenos Aires in 18 09 and threw in his lot with the Argentine rebels who were fighting for independence against the Spanish Empire after winning citizenship through battlefield heroics.
In 18 13, Bouchard became an Argentine corsair in 18 15 leading naval campaigns against Spanish strongholds in Peru Ecuador and Chile.
Over the next couple of years, he fought pirates in Malaysia and conducted raids against the Spanish in the Philippines.
Finally heading into port in the Sandwich Islands in the summer of 18 18.
In search of new crew members, many of Bouchard’s original crew had died in combat or of scurvy since leaving Argentina almost three years before.
And the Sandwich Islands now known as Hawaii were an easy place to find sailors as long as you didn’t ask too many questions about where they came from.

[2:04:10] It was in Hawaii that Joseph Chapman joined Hipolito Bouchard’s crew.
Bouchard negotiated with Hawaii’s King Kaha Mea the first to reclaim an Argentine Corvette called the Santa Rosa that had been seized by mutineers and sold to the king.
When Bouchard took possession of the Santa Rosa. Chapman was either among the crew that had mutinied but not a ringleader or he was impressed against his will to serve on the Santa Rosa.
Given the fact that he would serve as the ship’s first mate, I find it unlikely that he was impressed into service unwillingly as you’ll see in a few minutes after settling in California.
Chapman would have good reason to present himself as an unwilling member of Bouchard’s crew.
In the fall of 18 18, Bouchard took the Santa Rosa and his flagship, La Argentina and sailed for the California Coast.
By this time Mexican guerrillas have been fighting their own war for independence against the Spanish Crown for almost a decade.
However, the frontier settlements in Alta California were barely affected due in part to the deeply conservative nature of the mission system and in part to the territory’s relative isolation and distance from Mexico City.

[2:05:22] The isolated but prosperous ports of California seemed ripe for the picking but Bouchard didn’t know that the Presidio had been warned of his approach.
An article from the California Missions Resource Center explains that in October of that year, an American ship, the Clarion had arrived in Santa Barbara from the Sandwich Islands.
The ship’s captain was a friend of the Presidio commandant Jose de la Guerra in Noriega.
He warned Don Jose that an Argentinian backed privateer, Hipolito Bouchard was planning an attack on California.
The Spanish Presidio’s missions and Pueblos were put on high alert.
The governor ordered lookouts to be posted at 25 strategic locations along the coast as always, the actual work fell to the Indians.
Hipolito Bouchard with two heavily armed ships and 350 men did attack in November 18 18.

[2:06:21] Most accounts of the Bouchard raids on the California coast straddle the line between history and legend and this description from an 18 83 history of Santa Barbara is no exception.

[2:06:32] One day in the year 18 18, a vessel was seen approaching the town of Monterey as she came near her.
She was seen to be armed her decks swarming with men and she flew some unknown flag.
Arriving within gunshot. She opened fire on the town and her fire was answered from the battery while the Lancer stood ready to repel a landing if it should be attempted or covered the retreat of the families in case their effort at a repulse should be unsuccessful.
For Spain was at peace with every maritime nation and the traditions of the atrocities committed by the Buccaneers at the end of the 17th century, on the Spanish main were familiar to the people.
After some firing, the strange vessel appeared to be injured by the fire from the battery and bore away and disappeared.
The alarms spread along the coast as fast as swift riders could carry it and all the troops at every point were ordered to be on the alert.
The strange craft next appeared off the Ortega ranch situated on the seashore above Santa Barbara and landed some men who while plundering the ranch were surprised by some soldiers from Santa Barbara.
And before they could regain their boats, some four or five were captured.

[2:07:43] She next appeared off San Juan Capistrano landed and plundered the mission and sailed away and was never heard of more.
All that is known of her is that she was a Buenos Airan privateer and that her captain was a Frenchman named Bouchard, one of the men who was captured either in the first artillery duel between the Santa Rosa and a shore battery at a ranch near Santa Barbara or at San Juan Capistrano, depending on the source you believe was Joseph Chapman.

[2:08:13] Paul Scott’s 1956 article for the Historical Society of California describes Chapman’s arrival in California and an account that’s no less embellished with legend than the 18 83 version.
His article said, unfortunately, Joseph Chapman’s entrance into his California promised land was anything but auspicious.
He was second in command of the Santa Rosa during the insurgents attack upon Monterey.
In 18 18, Chapman was probably the fall guy.
The expendable one who with Tom Fisher, an African American went ashore under a flag of truce to order Governor Sola either to a surrender or b join the revolution.
Sola who thought the men had come to surrender, promptly, accused them of lies and deceits and threw them into the Cali Bozo, Stephen C foster journalist of the seventies gives a dramatic account of how Joseph Chapman was lassoed during the later pirate attack on the Ortega Rancho at the Refugio landing, and was saved from death by the beautiful Guadalupe Ortega whom he afterward married, his Mexican captors had preferred to drag him to death behind their horses.

[2:09:26] Joseph’s own explanation when he was interested in his conversion and wished to present his best face to the world states that he had been impressed in the Bouchard’s expedition at the Sandwich Islands.
A cynic might say that he was impressed indeed by a promised share in the gold of Concord California.
Even Joseph does not tell why he was released from jail in Monterey.

[2:09:50] Among his descendants, there is a story handed down a very simple one for more than a century after his landing, Gracia El Zale.
Now an elderly woman living in Santa Barbara says her mother, Luisa could speak with authority of family tradition because her mother was Fever Rosa Chapman, born in 18 39 9th child of Joseph and Guadalupe Chapman.
And this is the account which Gracia El Zale, great granddaughter of Joseph Chapman gives.
Yes great grandfather, Joseph was the officer imprisoned by solo at Monterey, but he was released the next day when Bouchard’s crew captured and sacked the town.
He stayed with the Marauders till the Refugio landing. But he had been astonished by the essential honesty and kindness of the Californians, their practice of Christian charity and his mild treatment at Monterey when his captures could have tortured or hanged him as a common pirate, Joseph simply escaped from the ship at Refugio made his way up the canyon and over the pass to mission Santa Inez there, the friars hit him and befriended him there.
Antonio Maria Lugo found him, liked his straightforward appearance and offered to sponsor him if he would work on the plaza church in Los Angeles.
This less dramatic story of Joseph Chapman’s rescue is probably the way it really happened.

[2:11:11] Whichever version of his capture is correct. Chapman was almost immediately paroled, which is given liberty to move about freely.
As long as he promised not to leave California, he almost immediately got busy building a life for himself there and pitching in to help out the colony.
When asked in 18 21 he was officially freed though he had already been pretty free, especially for a supposedly imprisoned pirate with Mexico’s independence from the Spanish empire.
Chapman and all Anglo American prisoners were granted amnesty.
Almost immediately. Governor Pablo Vicente de Sola came calling asking for Chapman’s help in building a fulling mill at Mission Santa Inez, northwest of Santa Barbara.
About two years before a water powered grist mill had been constructed at the mission, the Santa Barbara Trust for historic preservation has a page about the historic mills that says in 18 19, Father Francisco Xavier de La Concepcion, called for the construction of a water powered grist mill in an effort to increase agricultural production at Mission Santa Anez.

[2:12:22] By 18 22 stone reservoirs and a stone mill building were built into the slope of a small hill above Alamo Pintado Creek.
About half a mile from the church.
Water was supplied by an earthen ditch or Zana that diverted water from Zana Dakota Creek. More than three miles away.
The mill was of an ancient design using a horizontal wheel powered by a water jet to turn a millstone attached to its axle.
It was used to grind wheat, oats and barley into flour and corn into meal.

[2:12:54] You may recall from episode 59 about the Mother Brook and Demon Hyde Park that a falling mill was designed to improve the quality of wool cloth, which was important in the mission system that raised many sheep, cloth woven out of wool is soaked in a solution of diatomaceous earth and urine.
Then it’s fed into the mill where rounded wooden hammers pound it as it’s drawn through the machine.
The process scours and thickens the cloth making it stronger and more waterproof.
Chapman was able to design and build such a mill from scratch though there’s very little in his background to indicate that he was a skilled mill designer.
All the articles about Chapman say that he was apprenticed to a shipwright in Boston as a teenager.
But his baptismal records in California said that he was learning to be the carpenter de Rivera, which roughly translates to a carpenter of the riverbed.

[2:13:50] Given the sparsity of reliable historic sources about his early life.
I wonder if the reference to his being a shipwrights apprentice is actually a mistranslation of this phrase.
Maybe it was intended to mean that his apprenticeship had something to do with water power no matter how he came by the ability.
The fulling mill at Santa Inez was impressive enough to establish Joseph Chapman as a gentleman of substance and to make his reputation as an engineer with more projects to follow.

[2:14:20] The following year, 18, 22 would be a big one for Chapman.
In short order, he got baptized, got married, moved to Los Angeles and helped build the first church in that city.
His baptism as a Catholic opened the door for him to be employed within the mission system as well as opening the door to romance with the proper young ladies of Southern California.
On June 24th, Joseph John Chapman of Boston became Jose Juan Chapman I Cannata.
And on November 22nd, he married Guadalupe Ortega of the Presidio of Santa Barbara.
Writing in 18 91 of later events in Chapman’s life, Alfred Robinson describes Jose Juan in his life in California.

[2:15:06] He was one of the crew on board the Py radical cruiser that attacked Monterey at which time he was taken prisoner and had lived in the country ever since, from his long residence, he had acquired a mongrel language, English, Spanish and Indian being so intermingled in his speech that it was difficult to understand him.
Although illiterate, his great ingenuity and honest deportment had acquired form the esteem of the Californians and a connection in marriage with one of the first families in the country.
That first family of California was Guadalupe’s father, Don Jose Vicente Ortega, who owned Rancho Refugio, a 41 square mile land grant in today’s Santa Barbara County that had been granted to his father by Spanish King Charles the fourth.

[2:15:54] In Scott’s 1956 article which we know by now to take with a grain of salt.
He describes how the couple met and courted Gracia Elizalde.
S mother also told her how Joseph the Americano first met Guadalupe, his senior of beloved Maria Guadalupe Ortega was extremely religious and a member of the Santa Inez parish, with her aunts and her cousins.
She often rode over the past to launder and mend the church linens.
She may even have met Joseph on the day in December when he came knocking at the mission door asking the privilege of surrender because she and her family had certainly fled from the pirates up Refugio pass to the mission before the prosperous ranch buildings could be burned.

[2:16:37] She was not quite 22 a cela dedicated to her family and the church, but big blonde and handsome Joseph.
Then 34 changed her mind when he sent his representative Antonio Maria Lugo to her worthy uncles to beg her hand in marriage.
She bore him 11 Children, all but one of whom were healthy and happy in the first year of their marriage.
The couple moved to the Pueblo of Los Angeles, which is then a town of about 1000 people.
That year, Jose Juan volunteered to help rebuild and expand the town’s original church, hauling logs out of the San Gabriel Mountains on Oxcarts.
That effort caught the attention of Father Jose Bernardo Sanchez who ran the mission and started a partnership that would last for years.

[2:17:26] As a white man chapman moved easily between missions and between mission and secular town.
But it wasn’t that easy for the indigenous Californians who entered the mission system around San Gabriel.
The native people mostly belong to the Tong tribe.
The Tongs had tried to fight off the first missionaries who arrived in 17 71.
But within a few years, many tribe members were lured into the mission with the promise of food trade, goods or the promise of a better life.
Under the mission system, the natives were not legally enslaved, but after being baptized, they were no longer free to leave the missions, either they were forced to labor, growing crops and raising livestock.
While all the, while the Franciscan missionaries tried to eradicate all traces of their indigenous culture and language.
Jose Juan Chapman became a willing participant in this system with Robinson’s life in California.
Recounting how Father Sanchez of San Gabriel used to say that Chapman could get more work out of the Indians in his unintelligible tongue than all the major domos put together.
I was present on one occasion when he wished to dispatch an Indian to the beach at San Pedro with his ox wagon, urging him to return as soon as possible.
His directions r somewhat in this manner.
Ventura Vamos Treos Buel, go down to the player and come back as quick as you can.

[2:18:54] When you marvel as I did at the work Chapman accomplished at San Gabriel Mission between 18 21 and 18 23.
You have to measure against the unfree labor of the tong events.
It took to complete the task even before moving his family from Santa Barbara to the Pueblo of Los Angeles.
Chapman had already been tasked by Governor Solo with rebuilding San Gabriel’s Chris Mill.
A 2012 archaeological report for the National Park Service describes the original grist mill that existed at the San Gabriel Mission before Jose Chapman was assigned to replace it.
The irrigation system became more complex following the arrival of master Masons and Potters from Mexico in the 17 nineties who were able to construct substantial structures with stone and fired tiles set in mortar.
This led to construction of the San Gabriel Mission’s first Crest mill which was constructed under the direction of Father Jose Maria de Zala.
In 18 16, the mill was a dramatic improvement over the manual grain processing that the mission had previously relied upon.
It was built northwest of the mission at the confluence of two small Arroyos in present-day, San Marino.
This facility later known as El Molino Viejo. The old mill was the first water propelled grist mill in the state.

[2:20:12] Now that old mill may have been an improvement over grinding grain by hand, but it left a lot to be desired.
Writing in the California historical quarterly in 1974 Jean Bruce Ward and Gary Kurtz described the work completed by Padre Alva Salvia in planning the mill employed as a basic design.
The Spanish style tub mill powered by a horizontal water wheel.
Contrary to local histories, introduction of this type of grist mill was not without precedent.
A tub mill ground wheat and pulverized bone for fertilizer at mission San Jose in Texas as early as 17 30.
In California, horizontal water wheels turn the millstones at Santa Cruz, San Luia Bispo and San Antonio de Padua.

[2:21:02] Examination of mission archives indicates that California’s first water powered grist mill was constructed in northern California at Santa Cruz built in 17 94.
It predated the Saint Gabriel mill by at least a generation mission.
Padres operating in a frontier environment and dependent upon Indian labor and their own limited mechanical knowledge utilized the tub mill because of its simplicity composed of a minimum number of parts.
It proved more advantageous to build than the well-known New England style mill with its gearing and vertical or overshot wheel.
As alluded to previously, the bill operated on simple engineering principles.
Water captured from Los Rola and Mil Canyon streams powered the water wheel.
The Franciscans expert in irrigation first directed the stream water to a small dam above the mill.
From there, ditches channeled water through a race to a cistern or reservoir located on the West wall.
This funnel shaped cistern approximately 15 ft deep, 10 ft wide at the top and 4 ft wide at the bottom held an enormous quantity of water which was stored until ready for use.
Remains of the cistern and mill race can still be seen today.
The next process the operation of the mill was best described by Alexander Forbes in 18 39.
This description, while the earliest dealing with the mechanical operations of a California mill is extremely lucid.

[2:22:31] The mills for grinding flour in upper California are but few and of the most primitive construction, but none better are to be found in the other parts of Spanish America.
These mills consist of an upright axle to the lower end of which has fixed a horizontal water wheel placed under the building and to the upper end, the millstone.
And as there is no intermediate machinery to increase the velocity, it’s evident that the millstone can make only the same number of revolutions as the water wheel.
This makes it necessary that the water wheel should be a very small diameter.
Otherwise no power of water thrown upon it can make it go at a rate sufficient to give the millstone the requisite velocity.
It is therefore made of very small dimensions and constructed in the following manner.
A set of what is called Karras or spoons are stuck into the periphery of the wheel which serve in place of float boards.
They’re made of pieces of timber and something of the shape of spoons.
The handle being inserted into mortises on the edge of the wheel and the bowls of the spoons made to receive the water which spouts on them later and forces around the small wheel with nearly the whole velocity of the water which impinges upon it.

[2:23:43] Indian laborers then poured the grain into a hopper. Mr Jackson, in his book Mills of yesteryear describes this action.
In the following passage, the hopper supported by a wooden framework slightly above and off center from the stones fed the grain to them by means of a small trough.
The grain in turn poured from a spout at the base of the lower stone into a barrel like receptacle.
After serving its purpose, the spent mill water was conveyed by a lower ditch to the nearby fields.

[2:24:15] While the work that Salvia and his Tongan laborers completed was impressive.
It had two critical flaws as warden Ks continue.
Although constructed with permanency in mind, the Padres of San Gabriel replaced the mill in 18 23 during its seven years of service, two irritating problems arose.
The basic design of the mill was an obvious drawback as all Spanish style mills operated at an extremely slow speed.
The horizontally mounted water wheel required a large quantity of water to turn it. And in a short time, the supply was exhausted.
Furthermore, one revolution of the wheel represented only one turn of the stone and only a small amount of grain could be milled in one day.
Criticism of the tub mill design was not uncommon. Such mills in New England were described as equally inefficient and slow at mission.
San Jose de Bexar in Bexar County, Texas.
The Millers became so impatient that they switched from water power to Indian manpower.
The mill’s simplicity, however assured its place in minor settlements.

[2:25:25] In addition to the slow speed of the mill dampness permeated the building for El Molino Viejos.
Builders had located the structure above a small natural spring hiram reed postulated that the position was chosen with the thoughts of providing a water supply in case the mill was besieged by hostile Indians.

[2:25:44] Nonetheless, the spring dampened the walls and probably caused a certain amount of mildew, therefore making storage of grain on the lower level difficult.
It is probable however, that the underground grain was stored there while the grist was kept in the granary on the upper level.
Despite the slow speed and dampness, it’s most likely that the advent of a superior mill design in California caused the relegation of El Molino Biejo to a secondary role at San Gabriel.
In 18 21 Joseph Chapman, a reclaimed member of a pirate community which sailed the California coast in the 18 twenties and who was described as the Yankee Jack of all trades, built a mill at Mission Santa Inez, powered by a vertical overshot water wheel.
An important feature of Chapman’s mill was its bevel gearing which enabled the millstones to turn at a much faster rate than the water wheel and thereby grind a greater quantity of wheat than the tub mill.
On September 25th, 18 21 Governor Armando Sola impressed by Chapman’s demonstrated mechanical acumen, ordered that the pilot prisoner be sent to build a mill at San Gabriel like that he had built at Santa Inez.

[2:26:59] Chapman conveniently located the new mill just south of the mission quadrangle and finished construction around 18 23.
Thus, in one short decade, milling at San Gabriel had progressed to the semis sophisticated horizontal wheel introduced by Chapman.

[2:27:15] The 2012 National Park Service report details some of the improvements Chapman made beyond the use of a vertical wheel and beveled gearing to transfer the movement of the wheel’s horizontal shaft to a vertical shaft to spin the millstone.
It says Chapman used existing infrastructure for the foundations of his new mill in its mill race.
Archaeological data indicate that his Saint Gabriel mill used the walls of two earlier water reservoirs to frame its foundation.
And he situated the mill in the center of the garden to take advantage of pre-existing water lines completed in 18 23.
It came to be called Chapman’s Mill.
It stood about 246 ft south of the mission and featured a 13.5 ft diameter undershot water wheel housed in a masonry chamber that drove large millstones in a separate gear room.
Chapman dug the wheel pit low into the ground to gain as much power from the rushing water as possible and created high foundation walls to keep water out of the mill itself to avoid humidity.
The grinding stones were made of either granite or cyanide boulders from the Santa Anita Canyon were roughly 3.5 ft in diameter and about 1 ft thick.

[2:28:27] Some accounts say that Jose Chapman was paid 300 pesos for his work on each mill.
However much his payment was it was enough for him to buy a large adobe home near Mission San Gabriel in 18 24 setting out a vineyard of 4000 vines.
In the coming decades, the Chapman Ortega family would continue growing a substantial fortune as Jose Juan sold real estate and worked as a carpenter in blacksmith.
Over those same decades, he had also lived through two major transitions in California life, secularization and Americanization.

[2:29:02] While Joseph Chapman had landed in California during the midst of the Mexican war for independence.
The struggle went on for years, mostly far from Alta California.
Mexico became an independent state in 18 21. But major change didn’t come to far away California until five years later.

[2:29:21] In 18 25 Jose Maria de Ean became the first Mexican born democratically elected governor of California.
And in 18 26 he issued a proclamation of emancipation.
All California natives were freed from missionary rule and made eligible to become citizens of Mexico.
During the next few years, further decrees would expel all white Spaniards over a certain age and began breaking up mission lands either for sale or for the use of indigenous people.
As secularization began, Jose Juan Chapman had an encounter in 18 27 that presaged the next major transformation of California.
The previous year, the Mexican government of California was surprised by visitors from the East.
In his history of California, James Miller Gwenn wrote the Californians had grown accustomed to foreigners coming to the country by sea, but they were not prepared to have them come over land.
The mountains and deserts that intervened between the United States and California were supposed to be an insurmountable barrier to foreign immigration by land.
It was no doubt with feelings of dismay, mingled with anger that Governor Esan, received the advanced guard of Malto Estranges who came across the continent.

[2:30:42] That ran hero was an American trapper named Jedidiah Smith, who’d come over the Rockies and then south from the Great Salt Lake in search of a trading route that would allow pelts to be shipped out of a Pacific port instead of packed all the way back to Saint Louis each year.
After stumbling across a couple of mission Neophytes in the Mojave desert, his party got directions to San Gabriel and Father Sanchez welcomed him with a lavish dinner on November 27th, 18 26, three days later, Smith’s diary recorded Mr Chapman, the American spoken of by the father came from the village of the angels, accompanied by Captain Anderson of the Break Olive branch and the Supercargo, Mr Scott.
Mr Scott, being a good translator, I was able to make my situation fully known.
I soon ascertain that nothing could be done until the arrival of an answer from the governor at San Diego.

[2:31:37] During these first days in California. Smith also noted the Indian inhabitants are kept in the strictest order being punished severely for the most trifling offense or neglect.
They are whipped like slaves. The whip being used by an Indian, a soldier standing by with a sword to see that it’s faithfully done.

[2:31:58] Smith would be taken to San Diego where he asked the governor for permission to seek a coastal route north to Oregon where known trails would take him back to American territory while Smith was in San Diego waiting for the governor’s decision.
His party waited at San Gabriel where Harrison G Rogers, the clerk and quartermaster of the expedition got to know Chapman a bit better.

[2:32:22] The day after New Year’s 18 27 he wrote Tuesday the second still at the mission of Saint Gabriel.
Nothing new has taken place today.
The men commenced work again this morning for the old Padre.
No news from Mr Smith. Friendship and Peace still prevail, Mr Joseph Chapman, a Bostonian by birth who was married in this country and brought over to the Catholic faith came here about 10 o’clock am to superintend the burning of a pulpit for the priest.
He is getting wealthy being what we term a Yankee. He is a jack of all trades and naturally a very ingenious man.
Under those circumstances, he gets many favors from the priest by superintending the building of mills, blacksmithing and many other branches of mechanism.
The next day, Rogers also noted the cruel treatment of the mission Indians.
Writing there was five or six Indians brought to the mission and whipped, and one of them being stubborn and did not like to submit to the lash, was knocked down by the commandant tied and severely whipped, then chained by the leg to another Indian who’d been guilty of a similar offense.

[2:33:30] Before Smith rejoined the party. And the party left for their journey back across the desert.
Rogers recorded several trips into the mountains with Chapman to cut wood for charcoal. Also taking the opportunity to hunt for deer and ducks.
Chapman showed him the mission soap works where lie solution was boiled down in progressively smaller kettles from 2500 gallons all the way down to two gallons.

[2:33:54] Chapman also told the explorer about the nearby la Brea tar pits which Rogers described as a natural pitch mine where there is from 40 to 50 hogsheads of pitch thrown up from the bowels of the earth. Daily.
The citizens of the country make great use of it to pitch the roofs of their houses.
He showed me a piece which had the smell of coal more than any other thing I can describe while Rogers and the rest of the party gated around San Gabriel Smith was receiving bad news in San Diego.
Instead of being allowed to travel north to Oregon, he was commanded to leave California the way he came through the Mojave desert and over the mountains, as he returned to Saint Gabriel to prepare for his departure.
He wrote in company with Mr Chapman.
I moved on to the mission of San Gabriel where I found my party.
All well, I must not omit the cordial welcome with which I was received by Father Sanchez.
He seemed to rejoice in my good fortune and well sustained the favorable opinion I had formed of him.
You are now says he to pass again that miserable country.
And if you do not prepare yourself well for it, it is your own fault if there is anything you want and that I have let me know and it shall be at your service.
I thanked him for his kindness and made every exertion to start as soon as possible.

[2:35:17] Increasing contact with American trappers and others interested in the resources of California helped inspire the last major construction project that Chapman is known to have undertaken in his history of California.
Gwenn explains, Father Sanchez of Saint Gabriel mission was an enterprising man awake to every opportunity to make money for his mission.
He had long looked with disfavor on the encroachment of the Russian and American fur traders and hunters.
The sea otter was being exterminated and but little profit had come to the Californians for this valued poultry.
So in 18 31 Father Sanchez would task Jose Chapman with building a schooner at Saint Gabriel that could be used in hunting seals and sea otters off the California coast.
They are only mildly hampered by the fact that Saint Gabriel is not, in fact located on the coast.
Richards gives what’s generally considered the best account of the vessel’s construction and launch in his life in California.

[2:36:16] A launch was to take place at San Pedro of the second vessel ever constructed in California.
She was a schooner of about 60 tons that had been entirely framed at San Gabriel and fitted for subsequent completion at San Pedro.
Every piece of timber had been hewn and fitted 30 miles from the place and brought down to the beach upon carts.
She was called Guadalupe in honor of the patron saint of Mexico.
And one notes in honor of Chapman’s wife, Guadalupe Richards continues and as the affair was considered quite an important era in the history of the country, many were invited from far and near to witness it.
Her builder was a Yankee named Joseph Chapman who had served his apprenticeship with the Boston boat builder as migrants from the US began to take a more central role in California life.
And as the mission that Jose Chapman had attached himself to waned in power, he began to fade from the historic record.
Paul Scott’s biographical sketch records. These twilight years.

[2:37:21] Joseph watched the mission’s perish after 18 32 his favorite Padre Sanchez before the priest’s death must have warned Joseph to go to his ranch.
So the Chapman family moved not to the ranch. Joseph must be forever tinkering, repairing and building.
But to Santa Barbara where the Padres gave him the old hide house on the beach atop what’s now called Burton mound with such a view of the mountains and sea as would melt the heart.
In 18 38 Governor Alvarado gave Joseph Chapman now a well known and useful citizen member of the powerful Ortega family, a square league of land in San Pedro colony on the Santa Clara river 10 miles east of Mission, San Buena, Ventura.
It may have been near or part of the 13,320 acre Sanchez Rancho in which Guadalupe’s mother had an heir’s interest in 18 40.
After Joseph sold his remodeled hide house on Burton mound to George Ver, he built an adobe on his lot a half mile from the sea.
The location in Santa Barbara today is 1 82 East Haley Street.

[2:38:31] In 18 46 war broke out between Mexico and the United States.
Although word of the conflict didn’t arrive in Alta California for months after the initial hostilities along the Texas Mexico border.

[2:38:44] With an exploring party from the US army scouting along the California Oregon border and the Mexican army busy fighting the Americans along the Rio Grande.
The rest of American settlers in California saw a chance to act on June 14th, about 30 men took over a Mexican military outpost at Sonoma and they raised a new flag that Paul Revere’s grandson Joseph Warren.
Revere later described as a grizzly bear rampant with one straight below and the words Republic California above the bear and a single star in the Union.
With that. They proclaimed California a republic. By early July, the rebels numbered over 300 they’d been joined by the US army scouting party under John C. Fremont.
Together they took over San Francisco known then as Jarba Buena on July 2nd 18 46, A US fleet that was cruising the California coast under Commodore John D Sloat used word of the bear flag Republic as a pretext to sail into Monterey harbor and take over, on July 7th Sloat, read a proclamation claiming all of upper California in the name of the US government and raised an American flag.
Joseph Warren Revere later wrote that on July 9th, I had the honor to hoist the flag at Sonoma as the bear flag was replaced by the stars and stripes.
The California Republic ceased to exist after just 25 days.

[2:40:11] The war dragged on for months in Southern California with Los Angeles changing hands multiple times until Mexican forces capitulated in January 18 47.
In 18 48 the treaty officially ending the war gave the US possession of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Colorado, Mexican citizens living in those territories were given the choice of moving across the new border into Mexico’s smaller territory or becoming us citizens.

[2:40:43] In the last year of his life, Jose Juan Chapman, the converted Catholic and naturalized Mexican became once again, Joseph Chapman, the American citizen.
His feelings on the Americanization of California aren’t recorded.
And as Paul Scott notes, he only enjoyed his new citizenship status for a brief time.
It was in the humble Adobe built by his own hands that Joseph Chapman, the California pioneer died on January 9th, 18 49.
He was buried the next day in the cemetery at Mission Santa Barbara, the first American to be interred there in his lifetime.
He’d seen the downfall of Spanish power, the disintegration of the missions, the debauch and death of the Indians and the defeat of the Mexicans by the Americans.
We’ll give the last word to California historian Hh Bancroft, who said among all the earliest pioneers of California, there was no more attractive character, no more popular and useful man than Joseph Chapman, the Yankee.

[2:41:49] Well, that about wraps it up for this week to learn more about the voyages of the Columbia, the Park Street missionaries or Joseph Chapman, San Gabriel Mill.
Check out this week’s show notes at hub history dot com slash 280.
I’ll have links to tons of primary source documents for all three of this week’s stories, historical maps and pictures, plus some photos that I’ve taken myself and my travels over the years.
Plus, stay tuned next week for a brand new story of a Bostonian on the South Pacific.
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Jake:
[2:43:39] That’s all for now. Stay safe out there listeners.