Two hundred years ago today — April 23, 1823 — the second company of Protestant missionaries arrived in Honolulu to do “God’s work” in Hawaii. The group of 14 men and women who came to teach Christianity to Native Hawaiians helped shape the history of the islands beyond the spread of religion.

The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent about 200 people, most of them married couples, to the isles in 12 companies over a period from 1820 to 1848.

It is thanks to these missionaries that the Hawaiian language became a written language; the missionaries believed that everyone should be able to read the Bible for themselves, but once Hawaiians were literate they could read and write about things that had nothing to do with Christianity.

To honor the second company’s arrival, the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives is celebrating the bicentennial with a new multimedia exhibit and other programs this week.

One of the most prominent members of the second company was Levi Chamberlain. He was sent to Hawaii not as a minister, but to be the business agent for the Hawaii Mission. He became an important point of contact between the missionaries and the Hawaiian alii (royalty). Chamberlain not only handled the economic and material needs of the missionaries on all islands but performed similar services for the alii as well.

Chamberlain became so close to the alii that he was officially made a “denizen” of the kingdom, the term for foreigners who had been granted the political status of citizenship.

His most visible legacy in Honolulu is the coral-block home, built to his specifications in 1831, which stands at the Mission Houses site.

Adjacent to Honolulu Hale and Kawaiaha‘o Church, the site sits on land that Kamehameha II gave to the first company of missionaries in 1820. The property includes Hawaii’s oldest Western-­style house (built in 1821) and the Chamberlain House, which now features an updated interactive exhibit that documents the close ties between missionaries and alii in the 1820s and 1830s.

“We’ve updated some of the scholarship behind the text (of the exhibit) and we decided to go for a more graphics-heavy format so people can visually pick up more things,” said Mike Smola, Mission Houses’ director of education. “We’re also very excited to open up some of the other exhibit spaces here for the first time in quite a number of years for rotating exhibits.

“For example, here we have a story spotlight on Clarissa Richards, who was with the second company of missionaries that came here in 1823, her description of the hale pili (grass house) that she and (her husband) Rev. William Richards lived in for about a month before going to Lahaina to found the mission station there,” he said during a tour of the Chamberlain House. In the same space, there is a 17-minute video on a loop where local actress Emily Jane Wright portrays Clarissa Richards; visitors can learn about Richards in her own words.

A highlight of the bicentennial celebration on Oahu is the production of “History Theatre: Hawai‘i 1823” at 5 p.m. Friday. The in-person event spotlights local actors portraying historic figures who have connections to the second missionary company.

Wright will deliver her performance of Clarissa Richards. Also performing will be Kevin Keaveney as William Richards, who spent 12 years painstakingly translating the Bible into Hawaiian from Greek and Hebrew; Jeanne Wynne Herring will play Betsey Stockton, the first African American and first single woman to serve as a missionary in Hawaii; and Albert Ueligitone will portray Tau‘a, a Tahitian arii (alii) who was an early convert to Protestant Christianity and worked on the Bible translation with William Richards and David Malo, a Native Hawaiian scholar of the time.

Keaveney, Herring and Ueligitone also will perform May 5 at Waiola Church in Lahaina. (See the lineup of bicentennial events at far right.)

The nonprofit plans to mark the other companies’ bicentennials with special programming as well; the first company’s bicentennial in 2020 was canceled due to the pandemic.

Looking beyond this week’s commemoration, Smola and his Mission Houses colleagues are committed to the nonprofit’s vision of encouraging conversation and understanding of how the missionaries impacted the history of Hawaii. The hiring of Executive Director Erin Shapiro on March 1, along with other staffing changes, underscores that commitment.

Shapiro, who has an extensive background with museums, said in a statement to members: “The Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives has a remarkable permanent collection spanning material culture, books, letters, illustrations and more. … Access to and engagement with an institution’s collections has been a priority throughout my career and will be a focal point as Executive Director. The ability to connect with people globally and serve as a resource for students, scholars, and the eternally curious is a gift. It allows history to live on, stories to be shared, and for connections between past, present, and future to be made.”

The nonprofit will continue to broaden the public’s access to its digital collections; its vast library and archive includes one of the largest collections of Hawaiian language printed material in the world.

Of course, the missionaries’ legacy comprises much more than establishing Protestant Christianity and a written language in Hawaii. They also edited and printed the first Hawaiian language newspapers, taught Hawaiians the Western techniques of vocal harmonizing and choral singing, introduced Western medical knowledge and shared the American concept of constitutional government.

Smola said this is not surprising once you know who they really were.

“(The missionaries) in the second company, in particular, were very educated. Almost all the (male) missionaries were highly educated, having attended college and seminary. Even many of the women had gone to female seminaries, basically secondary schools for women, which was not a terribly common thing back in the 1820s and 30s, but most of the missionary women had also attained a secondary education,” he said.

“So really, in the United States in the early 1800s, these were some of the most educated people in the United States coming out here as missionaries and assistant missionaries.”