Hiram Bingham

Hiram Bingham was born on October 30, 1789, in Bennington, Vermont, one of several children in a farming family of New England Congregationalist stock ^[1]. He grew up working the land, and his formal education came late by the standards of the ministry he would eventually join. A religious awakening in his youth turned him toward the church during the years when revival movements of the Second Great Awakening were sweeping through Vermont and the Connecticut River valley ^[2].

Bingham entered Middlebury College as a mature student and graduated in 1816, then moved on to Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, the training ground for the first generation of American foreign missionaries ^[1]. Andover was closely tied to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), the interdenominational body founded in 1810 that sent Americans to India, Ceylon, and the Middle East. While at Andover, Bingham committed himself to overseas service, and the board assigned him to a new field: the Sandwich Islands, as the Hawaiian archipelago was then known to Americans ^[3].

The assignment carried personal consequences. Missionary policy strongly favored married men, and Bingham, ordained at Goshen, Connecticut, in September 1819, married Sybil Moseley only weeks before departure ^[2]. Any account of who was Hiram Bingham has to begin with this rushed autumn of 1819, when a Vermont farm boy turned seminarian was ordained, married, and dispatched across the world within a single season.

On October 23, 1819, the brig Thaddeus sailed from Boston carrying the pioneer company of the Sandwich Islands Mission. Bingham and the Reverend Asa Thurston were its ordained ministers, accompanied by their wives, a physician, a printer, a farmer, teachers, and several young Hawaiians who had been educated at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut ^[3]. The voyage around Cape Horn took roughly five months.

When the Thaddeus reached the island of Hawai'i at the end of March 1820, the missionaries learned startling news. King Kamehameha I had died the previous year, and his successor Liholiho (Kamehameha II), pressed by the queen regent Ka'ahumanu, had abolished the traditional kapu system of religious law and ordered many temples destroyed ^[4]. The missionaries arrived, by accident of timing, in a kingdom whose old religious order had just collapsed from within.

Permission to land was not automatic. After negotiation, the chiefs allowed the company to stay for a trial year, and the group divided, with Thurston remaining at Kailua on Hawai'i and Bingham settling at Honolulu on O'ahu ^[3]. Honolulu, the busiest port in the islands, became Bingham's base for the next twenty years and the center of his authority within the mission.

Bingham's most durable work was linguistic. Hawaiian had no written form when the missionaries arrived, and the mission made literacy its first practical goal. Bingham took a leading part in the effort to fix the language in Roman letters, and in 1826 the missionaries settled on a compact alphabet of twelve letters, five vowels and seven consonants, that remains the basis of written Hawaiian today ^[5]. The mission press at Honolulu, the first printing operation in the islands, began producing Hawaiian spelling books, scripture portions, and hymns in 1822, and schools multiplied rapidly across the kingdom ^[4].

Translation of the Bible into Hawaiian occupied the mission for nearly two decades. Bingham personally translated substantial portions, working alongside colleagues and Hawaiian assistants, and the complete Hawaiian Bible, the Baibala Hemolele, was finished in 1839 ^[5]. Among Hiram Bingham achievements this translation ranks first for many historians of the Pacific, since it required not just rendering the text but building much of the written language around it.

He also left a physical monument. Bingham led the congregation at Honolulu through a series of thatched meeting houses before designing a permanent church of coral blocks cut from offshore reefs. Construction of Kawaiaha'o Church began under his direction in the late 1830s, though the building was dedicated in 1842, after he had left the islands ^[6]. Often called the Westminster Abbey of Hawai'i, it hosted royal ceremonies for the rest of the century. Bingham was additionally involved in securing the land grant on which Punahou School, opened in 1841 to educate missionary children, was established ^[6].

Bingham's standing in the kingdom rested on his relationship with the chiefs, above all with Ka'ahumanu, the formidable widow of Kamehameha I who governed as kuhina nui, or co-ruler, during the 1820s. After her baptism she pressed Christian observance on the population, and laws against murder, theft, and adultery issued under her authority in 1827 reflected missionary counsel ^[4]. Critics inside and outside the islands called Bingham the real power behind the throne, a charge he rejected but never fully escaped.

His moral program collided with the port economy of Honolulu and Lahaina. Missionary-backed restrictions on liquor and on women visiting ships enraged visiting whalemen, and the conflict occasionally turned violent. In 1826 crewmen of the USS Dolphin rioted at Honolulu and threatened Bingham personally, and in 1827 sailors from the whaler John Palmer fired cannon shot toward the Lahaina mission station ^[2]. Foreign merchants and some naval officers portrayed Bingham as rigid and meddlesome, and the nickname King Bingham circulated in the port towns ^[7].

Bingham also opposed the entry of Roman Catholic missionaries, and the expulsion of French priests by the Hawaiian government in 1831 was widely blamed on Protestant influence. The episode contributed to later French naval intervention in 1839, when the frigate Artemise forced the kingdom to grant Catholic toleration ^[4]. Historians continue to argue over how much of the government's policy in these years originated with Bingham and how much with the chiefs themselves, but no one disputes that his advice carried weight at court ^[7].

Sybil Moseley Bingham was a full partner in the mission. A former schoolteacher from Westfield, Massachusetts, she taught Hawaiian pupils, ran classes for women, and kept a journal that has become a valued source on the mission's first years ^[8]. The couple raised their children in the frame house at the Honolulu mission station, a New England dwelling shipped in sections around Cape Horn and still standing at the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site ^[8].

Seven children were born to the Binghams. Their son Hiram Bingham II, born in Honolulu in 1831, followed his father into mission work and spent decades in the Gilbert Islands, where he translated the Bible into Gilbertese ^[9]. The dynastic line continued with Hiram Bingham III, the grandson, who turned from religion to exploration and politics, brought Machu Picchu to world attention in 1911, and later served as a United States senator from Connecticut ^[9]. The recurrence of the name is a common source of confusion in Hiram Bingham facts, and the missionary is often distinguished as Hiram Bingham I.

By the late 1830s Sybil's health was failing. Her condition, combined with tensions between Bingham and some of his mission colleagues, led the family to sail for the United States in 1840 on what was framed as a temporary leave ^[2].

The leave became permanent. The American Board, aware of complaints about Bingham's domineering style and doubtful about his usefulness in a changed mission, never authorized his return, and he was formally released from the Sandwich Islands Mission in 1846 ^[7]. The decision wounded him, and he spent years lobbying unsuccessfully to go back.

He turned instead to writing. In 1847 he published A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands, a long narrative combining memoir, mission history, and defense of his conduct ^[10]. The book is partisan and often severe toward pre-Christian Hawaiian culture, but it remains a primary source that historians of Hawai'i still consult for its firsthand detail on the kingdom between 1820 and 1840.

Sybil Bingham died in 1848. Bingham later remarried, served for a period as pastor of an African American Congregational church in New Haven, Connecticut, and lived quietly on limited means ^[2]. He died in New Haven on November 11, 1869, at the age of eighty, and was buried in that city's Grove Street Cemetery ^[1].

Any balanced Hiram Bingham biography has to hold two judgments at once. Under the mission he led, Hawai'i became one of the most literate societies of its era, with a written language, a printing industry, and a school network that reached commoners as well as chiefs ^[5]. The twelve-letter alphabet, the Hawaiian Bible, Kawaiaha'o Church, and Punahou School all trace back, in whole or in part, to his twenty years in Honolulu ^[6].

The costs are equally part of the record. Bingham worked to suppress hula, traditional religion, and other Hawaiian practices he considered pagan, and the mission era opened the way for the missionary-descended business families who later dominated the islands' economy and helped overthrow the monarchy in 1893, long after his death ^[4]. Modern Hawaiian scholarship treats him as a central figure in a cultural transformation that many islanders experienced as loss, and his severe portrait in James Michener's novel Hawaii, as the model for the character Abner Hale, fixed that harsher image in popular culture ^[7].

His papers and those of his family are held in collections at Yale University and at the Hawaiian Mission Houses archives in Honolulu, and the coral church he planned still holds services in the Hawaiian language ^[8]. Few Americans of his generation left a deeper mark on any Pacific society, for better and for worse.