Even if they hadn’t been printed just a year after Hawaii’s first newspaper was launched, Lawrence Ha‘ae’s lucky find would still shed light on the early missionary days.
The 17 sheets of Ke Kumu Hawaii, a missionary newspaper published in 1835, were unearthed more than two decades ago from beneath a coffee shack in Holualoa. And Ha‘ae, an amateur historian from South Kona, bought the documents from a used bookstore in Kainaliu in 1997. Since then, he and his cousin, Jessica Lindsey, have pored over the moldering brown pages. They have not yet deciphered all of the information the newspaper contains.
Saturday, Ha‘ae spread out the sheets on a desk at West Hawaii Today and ran his fingers down a list of some 57 generations of the royal family. His hand stopped at the name of a woman he identified as his fifth generation great-grandmother, Kekuiopoiwa Ha‘ae.
Some of the newspaper’s list duplicates the genealogical detective work Ha‘ae and Lindsey have done over four decades.
“But this is going to take us way back deep,” he said.
Ha‘ae translated from another page: “We are the missionaries. We are here now, on all of the islands. We want to know what you feel about our presence here … We are here to bring you out of the darkness.”
Then the newspaper dipped into fire and brimstone.
“Then they hit us,” Ha‘ae said: “’You don’t pray, you pay homage to stone figures and wooden figures, and put a lot of emphasis on the small creatures of the earth.’”
Other sections of the newspaper give information on the banishment of the kapu, along with more everyday items like the arrival of ships.
“They had a limited supply of paper in the islands, so our conjecture is that this would have been placed where many people could read it,” Ha‘ae said.
The oldest newspaper published in Hawaii, Ka Lama Hawaii, was produced Feb. 14, 1834, the same year that saw the launch of Ke Kumu Hawaii, the state’s first regularly published newspaper, according to research by Tom Brislin, associate dean of the College of Arts &Humanities at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Ke Kumu Hawaii was published from 1834 to 1839, according to information from the Bishop Museum.
“As missionary papers, they were educational tools to increase literacy for reading the Bible in Hawaiian,” Brislin said.
“It would be a rare find,” he added.
Ha‘ae has pages from at least three different editions of the paper, published from July 22 to Aug. 19. Several kupuna friends have dug into the newspaper with great interest, some marveling over the historical details and strident language, others keeping silent about what they had read.
Many others have clamored to see it, and Ha‘ae said he wished he could republish the entire document in a way that could be widely dispersed.
Generally not a collector of antiquities, Ha‘ae does have several emblems from the royal family, and he felt compelled to acquire the pages for a price he did not want published. The former owner also wanted him to have them, because he felt they shouldn’t leave the islands and worried they would end up on the mainland, Ha‘ae said.
Ha‘ae looked forward to puzzling out the entire contents of the 17 sheets.
“It’s a powerful piece of historical knowledge coming to light,” he said.