The Long Journeys Home. Nick Bellantoni
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loved his uncle and grandmother and he would surely miss them, but the urgency he felt was overwhelming, driving him forward on his journey. Challenged by the uncertainty, he was in pursuit of a new life, an existence rid of the violence and despondency that took its unrelenting toll on his youth. The physical journey over the vast oceans would be outward, his personal quest rooted within the depths of his psyche inward.
The sailors began calling ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, Henry, a name Capt. Caleb Brintnall entered into the ship’s log and, in an attempt to pronounce and spell his Hawaiian name, they contrived the phonetically sounding, “Obookiah.” Accordingly, “Henry Obookiah” would become his common name onboard ship and for the rest of his life in New England.
The crew of the Triumph reunited with more than twenty sailors decamped off the Baja coast to procure seal furs for the China trade. One of the crewmembers culled was Russell Hubbard, a Yale College divinity student who embarked on this sea voyage to improve his health. Hubbard took a shine to the bright and engaging Hawaiian and took it upon himself to tutor “Obookiah” in the fundamentals of the English language, using the Bible as a primer to learn reading and writing. Henry felt the friendship and protection of at least two men onboard the Triumph, Capt. Brintnall and Hubbard, sensing himself a fortunate young man at the start of his journey.
From Baja, loaded with about 50,000 sealskins,2 the Triumph sailed back to Hawaii for further provisions, providing the youths with a chance to return home, though both Hopu and ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia were determined to proceed on the voyage to China and America. In Macao, a well-established trading post for Europeans, Brintnall exchanged sealskins for tea, silk, cinnamon, and other commodities. The Chinese valued the under-fur of the seals to line winter clothes and were willing to exchange items of high value to New Englanders.3 The China trade brought extraordinary profits for all parties, even to the sealers who had the bloody and rancid work of killing and curing furs. After a six-month stay and the fulfillment of all regulations and protocol, including taxes and bribes, the Triumph left China in March, 1809, embarking on the last leg of the voyage through the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, into the southern Atlantic Ocean, and finally northward toward New York City, their home destination.
The Triumph’s arrival in New York City completed a 157-day voyage from China and two years from its New Haven departure. Formerly the budding nation’s capital, New York City in 1809 was a growing metropolis, second in population only to Philadelphia, the municipality that took its place to become the temporary home of the incipient United States government. Only the southern tip of 14-mile-long Manhattan was occupied. The rest of the island was made up of scattered farms and forests. However, residential buildings were quickly advancing northward, driven by population increase and fear of yellow fever; the most desirable locations were now located beyond Canal Street. Ferry boats crossing the Hudson River between Manhattan and Staten Island were stiffs or rowboats—one of the operators, a young Cornelius Vanderbilt. The new City Hall was in various phases of construction at the cost of an astounding half a million dollars. Two years earlier, Robert Fulton and Chancellor Livingston successfully ran their steam-powered Clermont up the Hudson River to Albany, marking the beginning of regular ferry service between the cities without the worry of tides, currents, and winds. Mayor Clinton DeWitt established the first public school with forty students in attendance, and the city had recently christened its second playhouse, the Bowery, to accompany the venerable Park Theater.4 The waterfront of lower Manhattan teemed with wooden sailing vessels, moored side-by-side, their masts rising like dense forests with leafless branches of yardarms jutting out from the shore. More ships, more buildings, and more people than Henry and Thomas could ever have imagined: New York overwhelmed them with culture shock and bewilderment, awed silence and mutterings in their Native language.
The timing of the Triumph’s departure and arrival could not have been more fortuitous. The ship left port prior to President Thomas Jefferson’s Embargo of 1807, designed to keep America out of the Napoleonic Wars by instigating economic hardships against England and France and as punishment to Britain for impressing U. S. sailors into the Royal Navy. The embargo halted all commercial sailing vessels going to and coming from the United Kingdom. The Triumph was able to obtain highly desired trade goods in China and return in time to be one of the first ships re-entering the port after the unpopular embargo was lifted. Needless to say, Brintnall found buyers to be plentiful in New York and received especially high prices for their cargo.
Once the Triumph docked and unloaded its valued goods, with the paid crew dispersed, the two young Hawaiians remained with Capt. Brintnall, accompanying him to his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut. Prior to setting out via Hell’s Gate and Long Island Sound, the boys were entertained in the city by two local merchants who invited them to attend a performance at one of the playhouses with its candlelit stage, proscenium, and celebrated orchestra. Henry and Thomas knew little of the English language and had difficulty understanding the show’s content other than interpreting the physical movements, facial expressions, and tone of the actor’s voices. Probably attending the newly-built Bowery Theater, they had never seen so many people in one “hut.”5
Their first real exposure to American culture outside life aboard the ship was overwhelming, loading them with so much information to decipher, “it seemed sometimes that it would make one almost sick.”6 The effects of culture shock heightened when the gentlemen brought the boys home for dinner. They had never seen so many rooms in one house and were especially shocked to see men and women eating at the same dinner table together,7 a behavior that never would have gone unpunished back on the islands.
Henry and Thomas’s acculturation persisted in the strangeness of New Haven where they were introduced to many new people, including young students from Yale College. They were readily accepted into Brintnall’s household as servants and were treated with utmost kindness. However, as men of color, they were considered “heathens,” socially defined as worshipers of pagan gods, possessors of limited intellectual potential, and containing the inherent possibility of becoming slaves. As servants, Henry and Thomas labored side-by-side with enslaved and free people of African descent, adding to their own curiosity of human biological variability. British-American New Haven society was relatively unfamiliar with Polynesians and remained challenged as where to place Hawaiians within their social hierarchy. Eventually, Thomas and Henry separated when Hopu was sent to live with the family of physician Dr. Obadiah Hotchkiss, Brintnall’s neighbor, while “Obookiah” remained within the captain’s household.
It was during these early days in New Haven that Henry once again heard the Christian Word of God, recalling his initial teaching by Russell Hubbard aboard the Triumph. At first, his English-language skills improved slowly, but the bright and inquisitive “Obookiah” longed for more formal learning. Hopu had begun to receive instruction, attending school with other students, but ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia had yet to be present at these tutorials. He was obliged to sit through Sunday service, understanding little of what the minister said, no matter how much he longed to comprehend. Was the congregation listening to the memorized verses of their traditional stories, as he had learned at the Heiau Hikiau? If so, where were the ki‘i, the wooden idols, and why didn’t the kahunas conduct their rituals privately behind wooden enclosures? Strange as the behavior appeared to him, his inquisitiveness sought knowledge and understanding of the peculiar behaviors of the haole.
An account from Thomas Hopu’s journal relates the story of young Henry weeping on the steps of Yale College. Approached by Edwin W. Dwight, a Yale divinity student and a relative of college president Rev. Timothy Dwight, concerning the cause of his distress, Henry cries, “No one will teach me.”8 The Memoirs of Henry Obookiah do not mention this crucial meeting in quite the same emotional manner, though ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia does state that Edwin approached him, inquired if he was the friend of Thomas Hopu, and asked if he also wished to learn how to read and write.9 Henry was eager, and Dwight assumed the role of his personal tutor.
At this junction in Henry’s emerging American cultural experience, Brintnall informed the boys of a ship preparing to sail out of New Haven for the Pacific Ocean, stopping at the Sandwich Islands. The captain assured both Henry and Thomas that should