While undertaking a casual tour of New England one leafy summer day in 1983, I drove through a barn-red covered bridge and rolled up to a historic hillside cemetery in the village of Cornwall, Conn.
As I walked among the headstones, reading the inscriptions, I happened upon the grave of Henry Obookiah, a young Native Hawaiian who had died of typhus fever, 5,000 miles from home, in February 1818. A student at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Obookiah was homesick and never got used to the cold. He stuck it out to realize his goal of returning to introduce the Christian gospel to his people.
He never saw his island home again. Although his life and dreams were cut short at 26, Obookiah became famous for having inspired the first American missionaries to come to Hawaii; they set sail in 1819 on a voyage that was to have included him.
Most of what is known about Opukahaia, Henry’s proper Hawaiian name, is recorded in the 1818 “Memoirs of Henry Obookiah, a Native of Owhyee,” a slim, hand-size volume authored by Edwin W. Dwight, who had found Obookiah weeping in despair on the grounds of Yale University and later became his teacher at the Cornwall school.
I wanted to know much more about Obookiah than I could find in a book or online. I resolved to shadow him posthumously, traveling to the places where he had lived and breathed, employing a research technique called “footstepping” by Richard Holmes, author of “Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer.” Little did I know then my research would take me on a 30-year journey that continues to this day.
Standing on that grassy burial ground on a sunny morning, I seemed to hear Hawaii call out to me. At 32 I had spent the previous 12 years in Hawaii getting a bachelor’s degree in English, working for a military contractor and, mostly, surfing. I had thought it was time to get serious and find a career in New York City, where I grew up. But now I’d found a companion, a Hawaiian stranded a long way from home.
Forget New York. I was going back.
I found work as a journalist on Kauai, married and started a family, and, in 1993, heard that Opukahaia was finally coming home, too. I was there as his remains were brought ashore at Kealakekua Bay to be buried in the yard of Kahikolu Church in Napoopoo. At the reinterment services I met Deborah Liikapeka Lee, a lateral descendant of Opukahaia who, with her parents, had worked long for his return.
The Lees further inspired my book, “The Providential Life & Heritage of Henry Obookiah,” which I published this year after making several research trips, including three to New England between 2005 and 2011. My itinerary included every church, school and town in Obookiah’s 1809-1818 odyssey.
Everyone I approached in New England graciously offered their help: Mention Hawaii and doors open.
Opukahaia was born in Kau on the Big Island in the late 18th century. As a boy he witnessed the killing of his parents and baby brother by Kamehameha’s warriors. He was taken captive and later released into the custody of his uncle, a kahuna, but was nearly slain when enemies returned to kill his aunt.
Deciding to run away and see the world, he signed on as a seaman on the merchant ship Triumph for voyages to China and Chile in the fur seal trade. In 1808, at the invitation of the ship’s captain, Caleb Brintnall, he sailed on to New York. For a time he and another young Hawaiian, Thomas Hopu (Hopoo), lived in New Haven, Conn., with the Brintnall family; in 1819 Hopu would sail to Hawaii with the missionaries.
In 2010 I met Peter Brintnall Cooper, a descendant of Caleb Brintnall, at his law office in New Haven. We drove to his home, where his yellow Labrador retrievers, Caleb and Henry, kept an eye on us as he showed me paintings of Canton harbor that the sea captain had brought home from the China voyage with Obookiah.
In nearby Mystic, Conn., another discovery slipped out of a ragged journal in the archives of Mystic Seaport. Scrawls on a hand-drawn map by Brintnall told of the murder of his officer Elihu Mix, who died aboard the Triumph in Honolulu Harbor after allegedly eating a poisoned fish dinner sent to the ship.
An 1886 memoir by Mix’s grandson Edward Mix fingers the poisoner as “the Queen of the Islands,” motivated by Brintnall’s offer to carry a Hawaiian prince back to New England for an education. The ailing King Kamehameha wanted his heirs to learn Western ways, but if Prince Liholiho went his guardian, Queen Kaahamanu, might have lost power. (Mix’s accusation is not part of historical records.)
Luckily for Brintnall, he was ashore and missed the dinner. He sailed on to Kealakekua, where he met Obookiah and recruited him for his crew.
Further finds came from another branch of the Brintnall family in 2012, when a friend in the Bay Area found the address of a family who owned an 1840s portrait of Caleb Brintnall, painted by Thomas Rossiter.
I sent a letter. A week later Jim Dodds called me. A direct descendant of Capt. Brintnall, he had the original painting.
When I visited him at his condo in Stockton, Calif., Dodds, who was suffering from a disabling illness, welcomed me and laid out a treasure trove of unpublished Brintnall material, much of it related to his voyages to Hawaii.
I sensed that, when healthy, Dodds had been as adventurous as his ancestor. He related tales of cruising aboard a sailboat to the Line Islands, where a cape on Fanning Island was named for Brintnall in the late 1700s.
Dodds’ mother had gathered items from the family’s collection and organized them in a loose-leaf folder. One passage from a journal told of Obookiah swimming long distances in New Haven Harbor, a feat that amazed onlookers.
Dodds had a copy of the first edition of Obookiah’s “Memoirs” inscribed with Brintnall’s signature, written in neat script.
I put him in touch with Peter Cooper, and these two lines of the Brintnall family, separated for generations, were linked before Dodds died in 2013.
In new haven I also visited Yale University, where brick-walled Connecticut Hall, built in the mid-1700s, still stands. Here Dwight found Obookiah in tears and took him under his wing. Eager to learn to read and understand the Bible, Obookiah became a servant in the home of Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, and made friends with students.
I saw the Yale dormitory where, in 1809, Obookiah met Samuel Mills, the student leader who launched the foreign missions movement in America. The Mills family welcomed Henry as a hanai son. In nearby Torringford I stopped off to see their parsonage home, where he lived and paid his board by scything hay.
In Andover, N.H., Sally Holm, then director of publications at Phillips Academy, where Samuel had been a student, took me to an 18th-century brick building to see a room where Obookiah bunked and studied with Mills.
In 1818, while returning from a trip to Africa for the American Colonization Society to scout lands that later became part of Liberia, Samuel Mills died of consumption. Among his last words, according to a friend who sat by his bedside, was the wish to go with Obookiah to the Sandwich Islands. Unbeknownst to Mills, Obookiah had died three months earlier.
Driving northwest of Andover, along the Merrimack River, I arrived in the village of Hollis, N.H., where church historian Sarah Cushman greeted me at a Sunday morning service in the Hollis Congregational Church and afterward hosted me at a Yankee lunch. Here, in 1812, a pastor and his deacons nursed Henry back to health from a near-fatal illness. Their care led Obookiah to commit to a Christian life; his portrait hangs on the church’s history wall.
On another trip I discovered that Obookiah had known young New Englanders who, as adults, led the anti-slavery movement. As a student in Cornwall, he dined often with the family of Harriet Beecher Stowe, when the future author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a child. Her younger brother, Henry Ward Beecher, became a preacher.
In an 1887 sermon, he said, “I am what I am because Henry Obookiah, from the Sandwich Islands … in my boyhood came down to my father’s house and produced an impression on me which has undulated, and propagated, and gone on influencing me.”
Alongside a friendly, knowledgeable Cornwall Historical Society docent, Ann Schillinger, I strolled past the room in the home where Obookiah died. In exploring historical sites, my goal was to sense the “now” of Obookiah’s time; just a glance at his death site brought that feeling of immediacy.
I’m eager to discover more. Since that sunny day I chanced upon Henry’s grave, my pilgrimage continues to roll on, my destiny changed by the life of this humble and accomplished young Hawaiian.
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Chris Cook is a freelance writer on Kauai and former editor of The Garden Island newspaper.
