A husband-and-wife team introduced a royal to Christianity and her conversion changed the islands forever.
In 1822, a group of Protestant missionaries arrived in Hawaiʻi. But unlike the dozens of American missionaries who would make their way from New England over the course of the 19th century, this party sailed from another Polynesian island, Huahine. Among those aboard were three English missionaries and four Tahitian missionaries.
Though Tahitians had settled in Hawai‘i hundreds of years previously, the two kingdoms had had little contact until recent decades. The missionary party saw the Hawai‘i trip as merely a stopover on a voyage to restart a mission to the Marquesas Islands. Instead, in a series of serendipitous coincidences, the Tahitian missionaries connected with the Hawaiian royalty and used their shared Polynesian culture to share the gospel with them.
After centuries of no contact between Tahiti and Hawaiʻi, British explorer James Cook unknowingly sailed the ancient sea lane between the two kingdoms in late 1777. When he anchored off Kauaʻi in 1778, Cook asked native Hawaiians if they knew Tahiti, and they responded that Kahiki, as they called Tahiti, was their homeland in the South Pacific. (In the Hawaiian language, Kahiki refers to both the islands of Tahiti and all the lands in all directions located beyond the horizon of Hawaiʻi.)
While the ancestors of the pioneer settlers of the Hawaiian Islands are likely indigenous people from the Marquesas Islands who arrived between A.D. 1000 and 1200, a second wave of settlement came from Tahiti between 1200 and 1400.
By 1400, the Tahitians ruled Hawaiʻi politically and transformed how it practiced religion. An influential Tahitian tahu‘a (kahuna, priest) introduced human sacrifice and helped establish an all-powerful royal caste known as the aliʻi. Over …