Amazing Missionaries

Meet Rev. and Mrs. Hiram Bingham, first missionaries to Hawaii who arrived in 1820 from New England with the Congregational Church.  I read their story in a book of the diary he kept after returning to America after 21 years.  He preached the first message ever preached in Hawaii on April 23, 1820, "Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy."  They had several children, the whole family sleeping in one bedroom, with a study desk too.  You parents would be interested in knowing that they would send children back to America at age 7 for education.  She wrote that she cried for weeks before and after sending her children away.  

Hiram designed this church which is held in respect as the Westminster Abbey of Hawaii, after the New England design, but he never saw it completed.

In those twenty one years he reduced the Hawaiian language to writing, translated books, wrote and taught music theory (the Hawaiians had mostly chants), and translated the Scriptures into the Hawaiian language.  Oh, let me add, he led thousands to the Lord including kings, queens, and chiefs.  The stone above concludes, "From here amid loud wailings of hundreds of his flock, he sailed on August 3, 1840, to revisit his native land but never returning."  He left because of his wife's ill health and it took them 6 months and a few days to make the trip home to New England.  The church was dedicated the next year. 

The church was quarried from coral deposits several miles away in the Pacific and transported to the site.  There was a wedding going on when we visited, so we couldn't go inside. 
Hiram's legacy: Bingham's son, Hiram Bingham II, was also a missionary to the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. His daughter Lydia married the later Hawaiian missionary Titus Coan.

His grandson Hiram Bingham III was an explorer who discovered Machu Picchu and became a US Senator and Governor of Connecticut.

His great-grandson Hiram Bingham IV was the US Vice Consul in Marseilles, France during World War II who rescued Jews from the Holocaust. Another great-grandson, Jonathan Brewster Bingham, was a long-time Reform Democratic Congressman from The Bronx from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s.

In World War II, the United States liberty ship SS Hiram Bingham was named in his honor. It was hull number 1726. Bingham was caricatured as the character Reverend Abner Hale in James Michener's novel Hawaii.

Next to the church is a cemetery of many of the missionaries and families who died while evangelizing the islands.  Some familiar names Castle, Dole, and the stone below is of the first Hawaiian man ordained as a missionary, Rev. James Kekela.

In 1853, four years after his ordination, he went to the Marquesas Islands "where for 49 years he served as a pioneer missionary exercising remarkable influence against cannibalism and tribal warfare."  In 1864 he was recognized by President Abraham Lincoln for rescuing an American seaman from cannibals. 

After first living in grass huts, the Missionary Society built a New England style home on the east coast and then disassembled it, transporting it to Hawaii around Cape Horn.  Eventually a kitchen was added to the structure with a beehive oven.  Previous separate grass kitchens had burned down.   

Mrs. Bingham recorded that she baked 40 loaves of bread one day in the oven (with wheat shipped from the east coast which after six to nine months sea travel, had some additional protein, I'm sure). 

As we left the mission house tour, we looked down the street to see the top of a modern day sea going vessel parked in the Hawaiian Harbor.  What changes have occurred since those first missionaries arrived in 1820!