The Islands of the Pacific

Phillips, Clifton Jackson (1969). "The Islands of the Pacific". Protestant America and the Pagan World. Leiden, The Netherlands: Harvard University Asia Center. pp. 88–132. ISBN 978-1-68417-163-7.

Abstract: While the first American foreign missionaries were entering Asia by sailing eastward to India and Ceylon around the Cape of Good Hope, others of their countrymen plied an enterprising commerce to the west of Cape Horn which touched at the Pacific Islands, the mouth of the Columbia River, and the roadsteads of the Far East. Not many years after Captain James Cook's famous exploring voyage, Yankee skippers were making port in Hawaii, or Owhyhee, as the intrepid English navigator transcribed the native word for the largest of the islands which he renamed for his patron, the Earl of Sandwich. Northwest fur trader s on their way to the Canton market stopped at Hawaii to reresh their crews and subsequently found an abundance of the sandalwood so much prized in China. This discovery laid the basis for a vigorous American traffic in the Pacific connecting the Sandwich Islands with Boston, Canton and the Columbia River country. One result of this intercourse was the appearance in New England of a number of natives of Hawaii, brought by indolent shipmasters. The first, clad in the g ay plumes and feathers of Polynesian costume, arrived in Bos ton as early as 1790, in the company of Captain Robert Gray, who was returning from his adventurous voyage to the Columbia. By the middle of the second decade of the nineteenth century, the presence of these heathen lads had so quickened the imagination of the religious conformity that benevolent individuals were planning to educate them as missionaries to their benighted· fellow islanders…

Extra details:

DOI: 10.1163/9781684171637_005
MAG: 3164509628
OpenAlex: W3164509628
CorpusID: 210741386