[This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
In October 1819, my grandmother’s grandfather’s grandfather, Hiram Bingham I, stood with his wife, Sybil, and his friends outside Park Street Church in Boston and bade farewell to family before venturing into the unknown. They would spend the next five months on a cramped ship sailing to a foreign land of strange people, full of “destitution, degradation, and barbarism.” They did not know if they would ever return to America.
Unlike others who voyaged out to sea, they were not whalers, nor merchants trying to make a quick profit. Instead, their goal was far more ambitious: to uplift an entire nation out of heathenry to civilization. Or as Hiram wrote, to “most effectually and most extensively promote the Redeemer’s cause with the means that are put into our hands”.
I first came across Hiram’s memoir, A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands, on my honeymoon to the Hawaiian Islands last summer. I had vague knowledge of a family connection to the area, and decided to do some research into it. As I started reading, I had a growing sense of deja vu as I recognized my own patterns of thinking in Hiram’s words.
Today’s Effective Altruists sincerely want to do the most good possible, and often focus on international development as a means of improving lives. However, there is another group who fits that description equally well: 19th-century missionaries.
Hiram and his colleagues believed that Heaven and Hell were not metaphorical, and that doing the most good meant saving the most souls from eternal torment. And what, they asked themselves, was the most effective means towards accomplishing this goal? Spreading the Gospel to those who had never heard it. All of humanity required salvation, and those who lived in foreign lands mattered just as much as those who lived nearby.
As a missionary destination, the Hawaiian Islands (then known as the Sandwich Islands), had several compelling advantages. First, the islands were very neglected, being recently discovered. While not as important as China, Egypt/Palestine, or India, they still held a sizable population. And unlike those places, there was little competition from other missionaries or pre-existing organized religions, making them much more tractable for conversion. The mission to Hawaii would prove notably cost-effective compared to other missions1. Basically all that was needed was a ship, a printing press, and missionaries to teach the Bible.
In other words, if the EA Forum existed in the early 19th century, I could easily imagine a post arguing that bringing the Gospel to the Sandwich Islands is a promising cause area.
So, with the benefit of 200 years of hindsight, what can Effective Altruists and other aspiring do-gooders today learn from the previous wave of people who wanted to save the world?
To find out, I read Hiram’s memoir, A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands. Published in 1847, it’s not a particularly engaging book2, but as a historical document, it’s a fascinating account of the effort of seven young missionary couples and their Hawaiian friends to do the most good possible by bringing Christianity, literacy, Western civilization, and Puritan social mores to a nation of 130,000 souls.
In many ways, the islands of Hawaii are a paradise on Earth, but to the missionaries who knew them as the Sandwich Islands, they were a savage place. These islanders, after all, had killed Captain Cook just 40 years ago3. From 1782 to 1810, the nation was ravaged by war. King Kamehameha I, adopting Western military technology such as gunpowder, forcefully unified the islands into a single kingdom and suppressed potential rivals.
A young boy, Opukaha’ia, was left an orphan by Kamehameha’s warriors, who killed his father, mother, and infant brother. With nothing left for him in Hawaii, he joined the crew of a passing ship, and eventually made his way to New England, where he converted to Christianity and befriended theology students at Yale and Andover. Opukaha’ia described his native Hawaii as a land in need of salvation, and the local ministers decided to send a mission to spread the Gospel and the light of civilization. Opukaha’ia would return to Hawaii with the missionaries and serve as a translator.
Hiram Bingham, a student at Andover Seminary, heard Opukaha’ia’s call to aid the Hawaiians. Born October 30, 1789, Hiram was one of the thirteen children of a Congregational deacon, Calvin Bingham. Although his parents had wanted Hiram to take over the family farm and care for them in old age, Hiram felt his duty to God was greater, and convinced his parents to allow him to study for the ministry. In Hiram’s own words, “Christ undoubtedly requires all his followers to bear their cross, and to forego or forsake whatever comes in competition with rendering him the highest service”. But service to God was not a gloomy undertaking; instead, it was accomplished “with joyful hearts and grateful praise.”
Hiram truly felt the commandment to “love thy neighbor”, and for him, the 130,000 native Hawaiians on the other side of the globe were neighbors just as much as the inhabitants of his hometown in Vermont. Thus, Hiram was eager to become a missionary as soon as he had finished his studies.
Unfortunately, during preparations for the mission, Opukaha’ia fell ill and died4. Still, the plan went ahead. As Hiram writes, a good Christian must “extend the influence of the Gospel, because Christ requires it, rather than because of his own engagement. To know, to be qualified, to have opportunity, constitute the special call to do good.” Parents and relatives urged the missionaries not to go, but Hiram saw things differently: somebody had to and no one else would.
There was just one problem: Hiram needed a wife. Sending a young single man to a land of licentious heathens was asking for trouble, and therefore only married couples were allowed to be missionaries. Thus, after being ordained as a Congregational minister, Hiram proposed marriage to Sybil Moseley, a woman he had met at the ordination ceremony just twelve days earlier. Fortunately, she accepted, and later that month, the couple was on a ship bound for Hawaii — not as a two-week honeymoon, but as a mission that would last twenty-one years.
After a sea voyage of 18,000 miles, during which Hiram and Sybil’s first child was conceived, the missionaries spotted the peak of Mauna Kea on the morning of March 30, 1820. Five months after departure, the sight was exhilarating: the work of spreading Christianity, literacy, and civilization was finally at hand.
There was just one important restriction, put in place by the American missionary board: absolutely no meddling in the politics of the natives5.
Upon arriving, the missionaries’ first request was for an audience with King Kamehameha, the fearsome conqueror of the islands. Kamehameha’s authority upheld the kapu (taboo) system6, the foundation of the native Hawaiian religion. Converting him to Christianity would be difficult, but crucial for the success of the mission. Kamehameha’s authority was absolute, and anyone who went against it would be exiled or killed. Unless he converted, the mission was doomed to fail.
However, the missionaries were shocked to find Hawaii in a state of political and religious turmoil. Several months before their arrival, Kamehameha had fallen ill and died. His son and heir, Liholiho, was just 21 years old and inexperienced in politics. Queen Ka’ahumanu, who had been Kamehameha’s favorite among his many wives7, took control. Officially, she was regent in the king’s name, but in practice she ruled Hawaii.
As a woman, Ka’ahumanu was burdened by the many restrictions of the kapu system. Among other things, many foods (such as coconut) were forbidden to women, and women were not allowed to eat together with men. Soon after becoming regent, Ka’ahumanu allied with Kamehameha’s other widows, including Liholiho’s mother, Queen Keopuolani, to abolish the kapu, which she “felt to be degrading and oppressive” to herself and the other women of Hawaii.
Conveniently, this also removed some of the customary limits on her power as a queen regent, and boosted her popularity. It seemed that all along, nobody had really liked the kapu. Well, almost nobody: there was a brief insurrection of traditionalists, but this was soon crushed. As the kapu system fell, so too did the native Hawaiian religion.
Thus, the missionaries arrived to find their work half done for them. The Hawaiians themselves had discredited and discarded their former religion. But what was to take its place? A missionary’s nightmare of rum and atheism, or “an elevated state of Christian civilization”?
The intended audience with Kamehameha was impossible, but the missionaries soon met with the Hawaiian royal family, including King Liholiho and Queen Ka’ahumanu. After twelve days of negotiations, during which the missionaries assured the Hawaiians that they were purely benevolent and definitely not looking to meddle in politics or “interfere with the government or trade of the islands”, Ka’ahumanu and Liholiho granted them permission to settle. Half the missionaries, including the expedition co-leader Asa Thurston, would remain on the big island, and the other half (including Hiram) would continue to Honolulu.
From then on, Hiram and his fellow missionaries worked tirelessly to establish “the school, the pulpit, and the press”. The royal family was impressed by their “kindness and demonstration of their ability and readiness to make themselves useful”, and their gifts of a telescope and ornate Bibles8. The missionaries were granted a plot of land on which to build a house and a church, and a school was soon added. Although Opukaha’ia had died before the mission departed, the missionaries brought four other native Hawaiians who were able to translate, including Prince George Humehume (the son of Kaumuali’i, chief of Kaua’i), and Hiram quickly learned the language himself.
The native Hawaiians were fascinated by the missionaries’ technology, even for seemingly simple things. Several high-ranking Hawaiian women requested that the missionary wives make American-style dresses for them. In traditional Polynesian culture, obesity is considered a mark of high status, and the missionaries had never seen women that big. Hiram describes one as a “rude giantess”9. Some initial attempts at dresses were “too tight” but after alterations, the dresses were well received.
Besides dress-making and other fabric production, the Hawaiians were intrigued by American-style houses. The missionaries brought pre-cut lumber to build a house, which was much more comfortable than the native grass huts: among other advantages, a chimney let smoke escape instead of filling the entire room. Music, and musical instruments, also delighted the Hawaiians, and Hiram adapted several hymns to the native language.
In addition to improving the physical lives of the Hawaiians, these new technologies were a gateway to what Hiram saw as spiritual improvement. Hiram remarked that initially, native Hawaiians “are not able to appreciate [a missionary’s] knowledge of the classics or what is called learning, but they can appreciate the talents of a man who can build a house or make a coat better than they can. By such means a missionary establishes, in their view, his superiority over them. This being done, they will listen to his religious instructions with deference, and feel confidence in him as a teacher.”
But Hiram and his missionaries were not the only Westerners introducing things to the Hawaiians. In 1820, the north Pacific had a large whale population, at a time when the Atlantic whales had declined due to overharvesting. This caused a whaling boom in the region. Many whalers supported the missionaries, but others were a bad influence. They brought rum and spread syphilis and other diseases. Even before Hiram’s visit, some native women were having sex with sailors in exchange for pieces of iron. As Hiram wrote, “That was the dearest bought iron, doubtless, ever bartered for guilty indulgences; and thousands have been the victims of suffering and death, throughout the whole group, as the lamentable consequence of evils thus introduced, and not yet wholly eradicated.”
Alcohol, especially distilled spirits such as rum, were also popular among the Hawaiians. Without any social immunity to alcohol or stigma about drinking, alcoholism was rampant. Foreign merchants repeatedly got the king drunk, then tricked him into making bad trade deals. Most of the sandalwood trees on the islands were cut down to sell the valuable wood. At one point, Hiram intervened when the king was offered a drink: “I gently took the uncorked bottle, and offering it to the earth rather than to his majesty, turned it bottom upwards on the mat.” Although Hiram’s “attempt to thrust aside a deadly weapon” did little to earn the king’s favor, most of the royal women were sympathetic to Hiram’s efforts to keep the king sober.
George Humehume, the Hawaiian prince who had accompanied the missionaries on their journey from Massachusetts back to his native land, also found the temptation of drinking too much to resist. Although Hiram had hoped George would be a key ally due to his high status among Hawaiians, his alcoholism led him to abandon the missionaries. Although Hiram was sad to lose a close friend, he notes that this ended up being a good thing for the mission, because later on, George would become even more disgraceful.
Faced with these difficulties, Hiram almost gave up and moved to Kamchatka in the Russian Far East (what a change of climate!), but heard from the Russians that the native Kamchatkans were all converted already. To Hiram, the Russian Orthodox church was a valid form of Christianity, and “though not in its unobscured glory”, it at least ”engaged in promoting the circulation of the Holy Scriptures”, unlike the “Popes and Jesuits”.
However, the missionaries would soon make an important breakthrough. In December 1821, Queen Ka’ahumanu fell ill with some unnamed disease. The missionaries prayed and cared for her as best they could, and Mrs. Sybil Bingham “sat down by the side of the sick queen, and with unfeigned sympathy for her sufferings and danger, bathed her aching temples, she bound a silken cord around her heart, from which I think she never broke loose while she lived.” Sybil’s compassion won the Queen over to Christianity, and she proved to be an invaluable ally for the missionaries. But King Liholiho, being polygamous, was reluctant to convert, since that would have required him to give up his wives.
Caring for Ka’ahumanu was far from Sybil’s only contribution to the mission. She also ran the school, which “having commenced with ten or a dozen children and adults, now numbered forty regular scholars, attending five or six hours daily”, made garments for the missionaries and any Hawaiians who requested them, led weekly prayer meetings, and managed all aspects of running a respectable household in an unfamiliar climate. Not to mention giving birth to seven children
Meanwhile, Hiram…
