Introduction
Martyrs and Confessors of Hawaii
by John D. Fielding
The Catholic story in Hawaii began with a request aboard a French ship. On August 14, 1819, Kalanimoku, a high chief known as the “iron cable” of Hawaii, asked the chaplain of the Uranie about baptism. That day, the Abbé de Quélen baptized him, naming him Louis, with the ship’s commander, Louis de Freycinet, as godfather. When the Uranie continued to Honolulu, Kalanimoku’s younger brother Boki, the Governor of Oahu, heard what had happened and asked for the same sacrament. The priest baptized him on August 27 and named him Paul. Those two requests came eight years before resident Catholic missionaries reached the islands, and they gave the future mission its first names in the Hawaiian record.
On July 14, 1827, at ten in the morning, the first recorded Catholic Mass on Hawaiian land was offered inside one of three grass huts on a rented lot in Honolulu. The missionaries’ ship, La Comète, had left Bordeaux the previous November and reached the harbor on July 7. One hut served as a chapel morning and evening and as a study room during the day. Another held their tools and supplies. The third received visitors by day and became a sleeping place at night. A well stood inside the enclosure. Three priests and three brothers came ashore with a place to worship and almost nothing else. Bachelot was appointed prefect apostolic of the Sandwich Islands; Abraham Armand and Patrick Short were the other priests. Brothers Theodore Boissier, Melchior Bondu, and Leonore Portal carried tools, supplies, and the things needed for worship.
For a time, the mission had protectors. Boki, baptized eight years before the missionaries, gave them real but qualified support: the missionaries sought lodging through intermediaries, and Brother Melchior found the rented three-hut property; Boki visited their chapel. That support was not constant, and the court was divided. Ka’ahumanu, the Queen Regent, and her allies opposed the spread of Catholic practice, and people often described Catholicism as a foreign religion even though Short was British and the people being instructed were Hawaiian. In December 1829, Boki left Hawaii on an expedition and never returned. The balance of power shifted further against the priests. On April 2, 1831, Bachelot and Short were summoned to the fort and presented with a banishment decree dated January 8. In December 1831, they were forced aboard the Waverley and carried to California.
Sixteen years after that first Mass, they dedicated a stone church to Our Lady of Peace a few blocks from the grass-hut lot on August 15, 1843.
Between the grass hut and the church lay years of expulsions, arrests, forced labor, chains, and a death at sea. This book is about the people who lived through them.
The accounts of that persecution keep returning to a small number of people by name. Simeone Paele, a catechist from Waipio on the island of Hawaii, traveled to Honolulu for instruction and carried what he learned back to about a dozen neighbors. For that work, and for refusing to give up his religion, he was sentenced to haul waste from the fort with his bare hands. His wife, Maria Ana, was brought from Waianae at about sixty years of age to do the same work beside him.
Valeriano Hinapapa, an old, infirm man whose memory reached back to Captain Cook, learned Father Alexis Bachelot’s written exposition of Christian doctrine by heart and then passed it on as he traveled to teach. In March 1837, he was sentenced to the same scavenger labor.
Luika Kaunaka answered the chiefs who demanded that she abandon her faith. She was arrested, released through an intervention, and arrested again with Valeriano and Kimeone. Questions came with blows. She kept her answer.
Alokia was twenty-one when she was imprisoned, a widow with a nursing child. At first, the prisoners were denied food. When Brother Melchior managed to get a taro to them, they gave it to her.
Other people survive in the record with little more than a name. Monika Ai worked at a wall outside Honolulu next to her blind son Kikime, pointing him toward stones he dug out with his fingers and carried. Four women completed sentences requiring fifteen mats each and were released after four months of labor. Ailimu carried a six-year-old child into the same imprisonment.
A sentence to hard labor meant work done to a particular body, and the surviving descriptions specify what that meant. Prisoners pulled stones from the ground without tools and carried them to a wall section assigned to each. Men cut stone on the reef. Women made mats in numbers set by the authorities. Simeone and Maria Ana cleared human waste in public, and at night they were chained together by one hand and one foot, with the ground for a bed. On some nights a chain drew Simeone’s neck toward his knees. Morning came, and the work resumed.
Punishment reached into households as well as bodies. A wife could be summoned from another district to share her husband’s labor. A child could enter confinement with a parent. Relatives were barred from bringing food, though a night watchman sometimes let prisoners go to look for it, and the brothers smuggled cloth and matting into the fort when they could. These details are not decoration. They are how the sources describe coercion: not as an idea about religious policy, but as hunger, distance from home, and dependence on whoever held the keys.
When the priests left, the people who remained carried the faith. Catholics gathered in Brother Melchior’s house, especially on Sundays, to pray the rosary and recite lessons from Christian doctrine. Others traveled to teach. Valeriano is remembered for his zeal in that work. A community without clergy still knew where to meet, what to say, and who would teach next.
The years were not a single unbroken ordeal. Prisoners were released and arrested again. A sentence could end through a protector’s intervention, completion, or a guard’s resistance. In 1832, a group of laborers won their freedom. In July 1839, the prisoners still held were released on the 12th, three days after the French frigate Artémise arrived in the harbor on July 9 and on the same date as the settlement that secured protection for Catholic worship. Some people walked out of confinement, and some died within months of walking out, their deaths attributed by the chroniclers to the treatment they had received; the record does not supply a later outcome for every released prisoner.
The record is incomplete, and this book does not pretend otherwise. Where no death date exists, none is supplied here. The inclusion criteria for this roll are explicit: individuals are included if the sources ascribe to them a documented act, such as arrest, imprisonment, forced labor, or another specific punishment connected to the persecution for their Catholic faith in Hawaii during the period covered by this book. Reliable mention by name, with at least one concrete act or circumstance, is necessary for inclusion. Speculative entries or cases based only on rumor or hearsay are omitted in favor of trustworthiness. A name attached to one documented act is enough to place a person in a roll call, and inventing the rest would make the list less trustworthy, not more complete.
This roll presents only the individuals for whom the sources supply names and documented acts, but the full number of Catholics affected by the persecution was almost certainly much larger. Contemporary accounts suggest that at various points, the Catholic community in the Hawaiian Islands numbered in the hundreds, and in some districts, possibly more. Some accounts indicate that the Catholic population in Honolulu alone may have exceeded two hundred at its height before the expulsion of the priests, and reports from Maui and other islands suggest that smaller Catholic communities were present there as well. It is therefore likely that between several hundred and, at times, over a thousand individuals may have been subject to varying degrees of coercion, exclusion, or pressure during the main years of persecution, including family members and children who do not appear by name. (Tracy, 1843)
These figures must be taken as estimates: the exact number cannot be determined due to incomplete records, the loss of parish registers, and silence in some government and mission accounts. Many people likely endured penalties, coercion, or pressure that was not recorded with their names, and household or community-level suffering often goes unmentioned in official accounts. The limitations of the record mean that the present list is representative only of those the documents preserved; unnamed believers, children, and those whose stories survived solely in oral tradition or family memory are not captured here. The omissions are real, and the list should be read as a selection drawn from a wider and largely unrecorded community.
Where sources disagree about a person’s identity or experience, this book shows the ambiguity rather than smoothing it away. For example, in the case of Alokia, one account reports her death inside the fort with her child taken by another woman, while another source describes her dying with her infant after a brief release. Both readings appear in the roll and neither is treated as a correction of the other. Similarly, where variant names may refer to the same person or where a single act is documented by differently worded sources, the record carries both forms side by side and reports any uncertainty directly. This approach allows the list to remain open to correction and maintains transparency for readers when cases are contested or not settled by the evidence.
The priests and brothers belong in that roll as well, each with a part the record can name. Alexis Bachelot was expelled with Patrick Short in December 1831, returned six years later, and died at sea on December 5, 1837, aboard a schooner bound for Pohnpei. Maigret administered the last sacraments, and on December 14 the body was buried on the small island of Na, carried by two Hawaiians and two Tahitians. Robert Walsh reached Honolulu on September 30, 1836, and worked among believers who were still being punished for their faith. Melchior Bondu stayed behind after the priests boarded a ship, and he passed food to men and women inside the fort. Maigret returned with Bishop Étienne Rouchouze in May 1840, and by May 21 he was noting plans for a church. The building contract came in June, ground was broken on July 9, and the cornerstone was laid on August 6. Their work mattered. It did not replace what Hawaiian Catholics did for one another.
The pages that follow gather these lives, not the machinery around them. Decrees, treaties, and the movements of warships enter where they changed a person’s life. The rest belongs to the people the documents name: a catechist who taught his neighbors, an elder who memorized a manuscript, a woman who would not answer differently, a mother who never got her strength back.
What that asks of a reader can be said in a line and takes longer to practice. Keep the person attached to the punishment. Remember the age, the work, the child, the food shared in a prison, the answer given under questioning. Where the evidence stops, stop with it. A roll call that refuses to supply a satisfying ending can be trusted with the names it carries, and that is the only kind of remembering worth handing on.
Chapter 1: A Book of Names: How to Read This Martyrology
The record of the persecution comes down to us as a list that the author attributes to The Australasian Newspaper of 1842. One line gives a man’s name and the work he was forced to do. Another gives a woman’s name, her age, and the distance she was brought to share her husband’s sentence. A third offers only a name among prisoners.
Read that list slowly, and it stops being an inventory. Each entry becomes a person with a body, a household, and ground under their feet. This book follows the roll of Hawaiian Catholics who held to their faith while the authorities punished them for it, and it keeps every name attached to the punishment the records give.
The surviving entries offer little comfort. Monika Ai worked at a wall outside Honolulu next to her blind son, Kikime, who dug stones out of the ground with his fingers while she showed him where to reach. The list the author attributes to The Australasian Newspaper of 1842 places him among those who carried stones alongside criminals for eighteen months. Prisoners cut stone on the reef and went without food except what friends could get to them. Four women were sentenced to make fifteen mats each and finished the work in four months. Kimeone Paele cleared human waste from the fort with his bare hands, and on some nights a chain drew his neck toward his knees. His wife, Maria Ana, about sixty years old, was brought from Waianae to do the same work beside him, and at night the two were chained together on the cold ground.
An entry like that asks the reader to do something. It pairs a name with the power used against that person, leaving almost everything else outside the frame: the household waiting at home, the work the prisoner did before the sentence, and the neighbors who brought food or were forbidden to bring it. Reading such a list as a set of lives means asking those questions without answering them from imagination. Where the record supplies the answer, it belongs on the page. Where it does not, the question stays open, and the reader’s attention to the open question is part of the remembrance.
Why the Names Matter
A sentence to hard labor meant work done on a particular body, and the descriptions show what that meant in practice. Prisoners pulled stones from the earth without tools, and each carried the stones to a length of wall assigned to that person. Others cut stone on the reef and, at night, had their limbs confined so they could not sleep. A mat sentence had a number attached: fifteen mats each, made over months. People cleared waste in public view, under the sun, with no tool in hand.
Punishment also reached into households. A wife could be summoned from a district forty miles away to share her husband’s labor. A child could enter confinement with a parent. Relatives were kept from bringing food, though a night watchman sometimes let prisoners go to look for it, and the brothers of the mission smuggled cloth and matting into the fort when they could. These are not details added for effect. They show how the sources describe coercion, turning a policy question into hunger, distance from home, and dependence on whoever held the keys.
The pressure on the record ran in one direction. A decade’s history can be written from decrees and ship movements without naming a single Hawaiian Catholic. That telling erases a person as thoroughly as any official act. The manuscript behind this book borrows a phrase for it: damnatio memoriae, the erasure of a person or event from history. The names gathered here stand as an answer to that erasure, kept with the dates and the punishments the records actually give.
To strengthen the indigenous perspective, this book relies on Hawaiian-language sources and contemporary Hawaiian accounts wherever possible, not only as background but as direct evidence of how Hawaiians remembered and described these events. Among the key sources are nineteenth-century Hawaiian newspapers such as Ka Nupepa Ku‘oko‘a and Kumu Hawaii, as well as oral traditions preserved in local histories and parish accounts. For example, chapters on the royal edicts and responses to religious change draw directly on passages from Ka Nupepa Ku‘oko‘a, while accounts of the hidden church in Waialua are formed by oral histories documented in parish records. These Hawaiian-language sources are explicitly identified throughout the text, and their inclusion aims to keep the perspective of those who lived through the persecution at the center of the narrative. In Ka Nupepa Ku‘oko‘a, a Hawaiian writer recalled: “Ua ho‘omāke‘aka ‘ia mākou i ko mākou ho‘olohe‘ana i ka pule Katolika, akā, ma ka pa‘a o ka na‘au i kēia manaʻo, ua ho‘omau nō mākou,” meaning, “We were mocked for our Catholic prayers, but in holding this conviction in our hearts, we persevered.” Oral histories from Waialua, faithfully retold by parish elders, describe how Luika gathered the faithful in secret to recite the rosary and teach catechism, even as officials sought to enforce the law against them. Local recountings, such as that of a kupuna from Waipio who remembered the church growing “ma lalo o ke kia‘i a nā kūpuna,” under the protection of the elders, bring forward the actual experiences of Catholic believers as told from within the Hawaiian community. By incorporating these indigenous voices and testimonies, this account keeps the story grounded in the words and memories of those who bore witness to these events. Because the record is built this way, the book is built this way. Decrees, treaties, and the movement of warships enter these pages where they changed what happened to a person. The rest belongs to the people the documents name: a catechist from Waipio who traveled to Honolulu for instruction and carried what he learned back to about a dozen neighbors, an elder who memorized Father Alexis Bachelot’s written exposition of Christian doctrine and then taught it to others, a woman from Waianae who would not answer her questioners differently, a mother who entered prison nursing a child.
Two records naming the same person and the same punishment can do more than a single record, but only when you consider their independence. When the January 15, 1840 Supplement to the Sandwich Island Mirror and the list attributed by the author to The Australasian Newspaper of 1842 both place Kimeone Paele at the scavenger’s work, or give Maria Ana’s age and the distance she was brought, the agreement is useful. It is not by itself proof that the identities are settled, and it is not independent corroboration if one account depends on the other or both depend on a common source. The reader must ask whether the two corroborate or merely repeat. When only one of them holds a particular, the particular is credited to the record that carries it, and the silence of the other is not treated as a denial.
The faith outlived the priests who were taken away from it. Catholics gathered in Brother Melchior’s house, especially on Sundays, to pray the rosary and recite lessons from Christian doctrine. Believers who sought instruction privately when public attendance became dangerous returned to it more openly when they judged the ground safer. A community absent its clergy still knew where to meet, what to say, and who would teach the next person. That work has no list of its own. It shows up in the names of the people punished for doing it.
This roll is not closed here. The manuscript behind the book describes itself as open to correction and enlargement, and the pages that follow keep to that standard. When a life is documented in a single act, the reader gets only that act.
A martyrology keeps the memory of witnesses to the faith. In these pages, a martyr is described as someone whose death, in historical accounts, is connected to suffering for the Catholic faith. A confessor is someone who maintained that belief through persecution, including those who lived beyond it. These definitions correspond in substance to the traditional language found in Catholic martyrologies and also appear in Orthodox usage and in historical scholarship. While the precise canonical process or title is not assigned here, this book follows established precedent by using “martyr” for those whose death resulted from religious persecution, and “confessor” for those who endured hardships for the faith but were not killed because of it. It should be made clear that no formal process of canonization or beatification has been initiated by the Catholic Church for the figures named in this book. Their remembrance here is entirely historical and devotional, and does not imply official recognition or a cause opened by Church authorities. Alokia, condemned while wasted with sickness and nursing an infant, belongs in the first group. The list attributed by the author to The Australasian Newspaper of 1842 reports that she died with her young infant about a month after obtaining her freedom, while Yzendoorn’s account places her death in the fort and says that a Catholic woman adopted the baby. Both accounts connect her death with her punishment, and both are carried in the pages that follow. Simeone Paele and Maria Ana endured years of hard labor and imprisonment, and they belong in the second.
A martyrology keeps the memory of witnesses to the faith. In these pages, a martyr is described as someone whose death, in historical accounts, is connected to suffering for the Catholic faith. A confessor is someone who maintained that belief through persecution, including those who lived beyond it. These definitions correspond in substance to the traditional language found in Catholic martyrologies and also appear in Orthodox usage and in historical scholarship. While the precise canonical process or title is not assigned here, this book follows established precedent by using “martyr” for those whose death resulted from religious persecution, and “confessor” for those who endured hardships for the faith but were not killed because of it. Alokia, condemned while wasted with sickness and nursing an infant, belongs in the first group. The list attributed by the author to The Australasian Newspaper of 1842 reports that she died with her young infant about a month after obtaining her freedom, while Yzendoorn’s account places her death in the fort and says that a Catholic woman adopted the baby. Both accounts connect her death with her punishment, and both are carried in the pages that follow. Simeone Paele and Maria Ana endured years of hard labor and imprisonment, and they belong in the second.
Both words are used here in their historical and devotional senses. For example, “martyr” is applied to those whose death, as shown by the sources, was directly connected to suffering for the Catholic faith—such as Alokia, who died after the punishments inflicted on her, according to the records. “Confessor” is given to those who endured persecution but survived it, such as Simeone Paele or Maria Ana, who suffered chains and forced labor but are recorded as living at the time of the 1839 release. These terms recognize both the historical events and their devotional remembrance, and their use here reflects long-standing conventions in the Catholic and wider Christian traditions. Nothing in this book announces a beatification, a canonization, an approved feast, or any other formal judgment of the Catholic Church. The prayers in the back are private devotions addressed to God. A reader can honor these lives and still ask, of any single claim, what the evidence carries.
Keeping the two words apart does practical work. A confessor’s entry can end with a release, a return home, or nothing at all, and the honor given that life does not depend on a death. A martyr’s entry includes a death, and the source of the death notice matters as much as the notice itself. A reader who knows which word an entry uses will not be disappointed when a story stops short of an ending, and will not read a harder ending into a life than the documents support.
That is why the book refuses certain moves. Where the record gives no death date, none is supplied. Where the sources used here give no outcome, the pages stop at the last documented act and leave the rest where it stands. A name attached to one documented act places a person in the roll call. Filling in the rest would make the list look fuller and, at the same time, less trustworthy.
The Three Parts of This Book
The historical chapters establish the setting: how the faith arrived, how the mission was pushed out of the islands, and how the July 1839 settlement changed what the authorities could do. The roll call at the center ties each person to a documented act of faith and suffering, and the fuller accounts follow couples and elders whose records offer more than a single entry. Reflections and prayers come last, offering a place to pause over what these lives may mean for faith today.
The historical chapters tell what the records support. The devotional pages ask what those lives ask of a reader. The two jobs are kept apart on purpose, and a reader may take the book in order or begin with a particular person and return to the dates later.
The Sources Under the Names
The starting point is the manuscript written for this book, which gathers the roll of persons, punishments, and dates, sets out the argument these pages follow, and reads the records on behalf of the people they name. That purpose is stated here rather than hidden, because a reader who knows what a document is trying to do can still use what it finds.
Father Reginald Yzendoorn’s history of the Catholic mission in the Hawaiian Islands is the fullest published account of the mission’s early years and of the persecution. The manuscript draws on it, and the two agree on many names and dates. Where Yzendoorn alone carries a particular detail, the pages credit it to him. Where he and the manuscript part company on a date or a figure, both readings stand.
The January 15, 1840 Supplement to the Sandwich Island Mirror preserves names, dates, and testimony from the years when the punishments were happening. It is a contemporary prison account, and it argues against the persecution; we read it with that in mind.
It also includes a list of prisoners and punishments attributed to The Australasian Newspaper of 1842. The author received that list from the author, who supplied it and later corrected the attached year. The list names people the manuscript omits and gives particulars the manuscript leaves out, including the size of the mats the women were sentenced to make: six fathoms by five. When the list and the manuscript differ, the pages carry both forms as variants: Luika Kaunaka in the manuscript and Luika Kaumaka in the list, Simeone and Kimeone and Kimione for the same catechist, Maria Ana Kamakai and Maria Ana Kamokaia for his wife. Neither record is presented as a correction of the other. The list corroborates the accounts of the persecuted and adds the detail it preserves.
Bishop Desire Louis Maigret’s diary provides the European side of the mission’s history. He kept it in French in four small notebooks from 1834 until 1880, and the notebooks survive in the archives of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace in Honolulu. Jean Charlot presented and translated them. The diary records Maigret’s own dates for Father Bachelot’s death at two in the morning on December 5, 1837; his burial at Nara on December 14; the Laplace affair as Maigret recorded it; the building of the cathedral; Restoration Day; and the later mission years. Its dates follow the diary’s dates. It does not record the imprisonment and hard labor of the named Hawaiian Catholics in the roll, so it cannot confirm or extend those accounts, and it never implies that Maigret stood near their punishments.
The French record of the Laplace affair, translated by Mary Ellen Birkett, supplies the orders the minister of the navy sent from Paris in 1838, Laplace’s own published narrative, his dispatches, the protest lodged by American missionaries, and the reply of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1841. Laplace wrote years after the event and argued his case. The translator notes errors in his narrative, plain and subtle. His testimony is worth having as long as the reader knows whose story it is.
Each of these documents has its own interests. The January 15, 1840 Supplement to the Sandwich Island Mirror and the list the author attributes to The Australasian Newspaper of 1842 make a case for the persecuted. Laplace makes a case for France and for himself. The mission histories preserve the mission’s perspective. Asking who wrote a document, when, and for whom keeps a reader from taking any one of them as the voice of the whole record.
When sources conflict, the standard for weighing them begins with their proximity to the events described, the interests and possible biases of the author, and the independence of the account. Contemporary eyewitness records, documents created near the time of the events, and testimony that includes verifiable detail are considered especially valuable, though each carries its own partiality. Where possible, I look for independent corroboration—that is, details confirmed by sources not in direct dependence on each other—while also considering the purpose and audience each document serves. For example, in the case of Alokia’s death, the list attributed to The Australasian Newspaper of 1842 reports that she died with her young infant about a month after obtaining her freedom, while Yzendoorn’s account places her death in the fort and records that a Catholic woman adopted the baby. In weighing these sources, I consider Yzendoorn’s reliance on mission testimony and the proximity of the Australasian account to the events, and since neither source can securely be preferred over the other, both accounts are presented, with the disagreement stated openly. Historiographical practice also requires transparency about uncertainty: when two or more sources disagree and neither can securely be preferred, both accounts are presented with the disagreement made explicit. This approach preserves room for correction and avoids imposing a false certainty where the surviving record does not support one.
Where the accounts differ, the pages say so and carry both readings: the dates of Simeone’s and Maria Ana’s arrests, the circumstances of Alokia’s death and the fate of her infant, the public Mass in July 1839, which Laplace’s narrative places on Sunday the 13th and the manuscript on July 14, and the duty on French wines and brandies, six percent in Laplace’s telling and five percent in Maigret’s diary. Both readings appear in the chapter that reaches each one. Neither is settled here by preference or by silence.
A Timeline to Hold Onto
Kalanimoku, the high chief known as the iron cable of Hawaii, and his younger brother Boki, the Governor of Oahu, were baptized Catholic aboard the French ship Uranie in 1819. Kalanimoku was baptized on August 14 and given the name Louis, with the ship’s commander, Louis de Freycinet, as godfather. Boki was baptized on August 27 and named Paul.
The Picpus party left Bordeaux in November 1826 on La Comete, sighted Hawaii on July 6, 1827, and entered Honolulu harbor the next morning. At ten in the morning on July 14, 1827, the first recorded mission Mass on Hawaiian land was offered in a compound of three grass huts on a rented lot in Honolulu.
Bachelot and Father Patrick Short were summoned to the fort on April 2, 1831, and handed a banishment decree dated January 8. That December, they boarded the Waverley and were carried to California. Father Robert Walsh reached Honolulu on September 30, 1836, and ministered to believers who were still being punished for their faith.
Bachelot returned to Honolulu in April 1837. On November 2, Father Maigret waited at the mouth of the harbor aboard a ship he was not permitted to leave, and Bachelot, ill and marked for deportation, came out to him. On November 23, the two sailed aboard a schooner renamed Our Lady of Peace. Bachelot died at two in the morning on December 5, 1837, and was buried at Nara on December 14.
The Artémise anchored beyond the reef at Honolulu on July 9, 1839. A treaty signed on July 12, 1839, secured freedom of conscience, a site for a church, and the release of prisoners held on religious grounds; Laplace dates the public Mass that followed to July 13, and the manuscript to July 14. The named prisoners left their labor that day.
News of the change in the islands reached Maigret’s mission in the Gambier Islands in March 1840, ten months late. He and Bishop Etienne Rouchouze landed at Honolulu on May 13, 1840. On June 22, 1840, they signed a contract for a church for 13,000 piasters. Workers broke ground on July 9, and the king, Governor Kekuanaoa, and the officers of the French corvette Danaide laid the cornerstone on August 6.
In February 1843, a British commander, Lord George Paulet, pressed his demands on the kingdom, threatening to fire on the town, and the king provisionally gave up his authority rather than expose Honolulu to attack. Hawaiian rule was restored on July 31, 1843, a day the kingdom kept as Restoration Day. Two weeks later, on August 15, 1843, the church was dedicated to Our Lady of Peace.
Those dates give the shape of sixteen years. The names decide what the years were worth. A reader can follow the sequence straight through, or take one person at a time and return to the dates later. Either way, the test of these pages stays the same: keep the person inside the sentence, and stop where the record stops.
Chapter 2: The Seed Arrives: Boki, the Picpus Priests, and the First Mass
The crew set up an altar on the deck of the Uranie, and the king came aboard with members of his court to watch a high chief of Hawaii be baptized.
The mission history draws on Freycinet’s published account of the voyage. The chief was Kalanimoku, known as the “iron cable” of Hawaii, and the priest was the ship’s French chaplain, the Abbé de Quélen. On August 14, 1819, Kalanimoku was baptized and given the name Louis. Louis de Freycinet, the commander of the Uranie, stood as his godfather.
According to the same history, Kalanimoku himself made the request. He had noticed the chaplain aboard the ship, asked about him, and the conversation ended in a request for the sacrament. That brief sequence gives the Hawaiian chief an active part in the event. He sought something, and the priest answered him. The record does not go further, and supplying his private thoughts or treating a baptism request as a complete account of his religious life afterward adds nothing.
Samuel Manaiakalani Kamakau’s Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii gives a different sequence, in translation. In late 1819, at Kawaihae, Kalanimoku boarded the Uranie with John Young and others. The captain and the clergyman asked Young about Kalanimoku’s rank, and Kalanimoku was then baptized. This is a different sequence from the mission-history account, and the sources do not establish which telling is correct.
The surviving description, however, suggests the occasion was public. This was not a private ceremony performed below deck for a curious visitor. An altar stood in the open, the king was present with members of his court, and the commander of a French naval expedition acted as godfather to a high chief of Hawaii. For a day, a Catholic rite entered the islands’ political life, and the record was kept in the published account of a French voyage rather than in the papers of a mission that did not yet exist.
Boki and His Brother
When the Uranie went on to Honolulu, Kalanimoku’s younger brother heard what had happened and asked for the same sacrament. Boki was the Governor of Oahu. De Quélen baptized him aboard the same ship on August 27, 1819, and named him Paul. Two brothers entered the Catholic record on different days and in different harbors, eight years before a resident Catholic mission existed in the islands.
The two requests are worth keeping apart. Kalanimoku saw the chaplain aboard his own ship and asked about him before requesting baptism. Boki acted on word that reached Honolulu. The surviving account records the two requests without attaching a plan for a church, mission support, or a change in the kingdom’s religion. It records two chiefs seeking a sacrament, but leaves their further intentions unrecorded.
Kalanimoku was the older of the two, and the mission history follows his course beyond that day. It records his favorable reception of the Protestant missionaries and his admission to their church membership in 1826. It adds that they accepted the baptism administered by the French chaplain and did not baptize him again. He died in February 1827, several months before the Picpus party reached Honolulu.
That part of his life need not be hidden to preserve the meaning of the earlier baptism. It shows a period in which religious commitments, family obligations, and political responsibilities were still being sorted out. A Hawaiian leader’s life extends past the single event for which a Catholic history remembers him, and the record is more useful when it is allowed to say so. The 1819 baptism was real, and so was the later affiliation. Seeing both keeps neither one from being asked to carry more than it can.
Freycinet’s voyage was not the only French vessel in Hawaiian waters during those years. Birkett’s study of French records notes that Freycinet’s scientific expedition and a good half-dozen private French trading vessels stopped in Hawaiian ports between 1819 and 1830. These visits do not fill the interval with a documented resident Catholic mission. The gap between the 1819 baptisms and the 1827 mission remains visible; the sources used here do not trace what instruction the two men received during those years.
Boki lived long enough to meet the missionaries. As Governor of Oahu, his welcome carried weight his brother’s could no longer, and mission history remembers him as a protector of the priests. The concrete account of that welcome begins with the missionaries’ search for lodging. Bachelot and Short first sought help from Don Francisco de Paula Marín, a Catholic businessman living in Honolulu, then met the American consul, John C. Jones. Through those contacts, they reached the governor and asked him for a place to live. Boki’s favorable response gave them hope and put a powerful name behind a new household with no secure ground of its own.
His protection had limits, and both halves of the record belong here. Boki visited their chapel, but his friendship did not settle the court. A friendly assurance from the governor could open the possibility of shelter and work. His standing could also restrain people who wanted the priests removed. He governed within a court of other powerful chiefs, and his wishes did not settle every question of residence or religious practice. Ka’ahumanu, the Queen Regent, and her allies opposed the spread of Catholic practice, and people often described Catholicism as a foreign religion even though Short was British and the people being instructed were Hawaiian. Consultation among the chiefs left the terms of the missionaries’ presence uncertain even after the governor answered them favorably, and Brother Melchior found the property they finally occupied—the rented three-hut compound—rather than any chief granting it.
In a qualified sense, then, Boki stands near the root of the mission’s establishment. His baptism was not a royal decree founding a Catholic kingdom, and his willingness to help did not guarantee an uncontested future. Together, those acts gave the first missionaries a connection to Hawaii before they arrived. When they came ashore, they found a man whose name had already entered the Catholic record as Paul.
The Voyage of the Picpus Priests
The party that sailed from France belonged to the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, known in the islands as the Picpus Fathers after the street in Paris where the congregation had a house. Alexis Bachelot was appointed prefect apostolic of the Sandwich Islands. Abraham Armand and Patrick Short were the other priests assigned to the work. Brothers Theodore Boissier, Melchior Bondu, and Leonore Portal traveled with them, along with other passengers and mechanics, and the community carried tools, supplies, and what was needed for worship. Its members would have to support a household while they began their work.
Both religious and commercial arrangements shaped the voyage. John Rives, a French businessman in Hawaii with court connections, sought missionaries in France, and his request passed through ecclesiastical channels until the congregation accepted the mission. He was expected to prepare a reception at the other end, and he never returned to Hawaii. The missionaries therefore reached their destination without the man whose arrangements the enterprise depended on. Their commission to serve the mission was real. They still had to secure lodging and an agreed place in the islands.
La Comète left Bordeaux in November 1826. Sources differ on the exact day, so the month is enough. The route ran around Cape Horn and up the Pacific coast of South America, with a ship’s commercial itinerary setting the pace rather than the needs of a missionary party. The party reached Valparaíso in February 1827, called at ports in Peru and Mexico, and then crossed toward Hawaii. The party said Mass in the cabin on Sundays and holy days, with little room for those assisting, and the mission history records Short’s trouble with seasickness on the first long passage. At Valparaíso, the priests found a welcome among local clergy, and the French members of the party began learning English after realizing how much they would depend on English-speaking residents and consular representatives in Honolulu.
Death touched the voyage before it ended. A man was lost overboard before the ship reached Valparaíso, and later, at Mazatlán, a fishing boat capsized and three men drowned. The mission history warns specifically against identifying one of those dead as Father Armand. He survived, landed at Honolulu with his companions, and took part in the first settlement, so the correction preserves the actual victims of the accident while returning Armand to the work he performed.
The ship sighted Hawaii on July 6, and La Comète entered Honolulu harbor the following morning, July 7, 1827. Bachelot celebrated Mass aboard the vessel before it anchored, so the later celebration ashore on July 14, 1827, is described as the first recorded Catholic Mass on Hawaiian land. The party came ashore into the governor’s welcome and the uncertainty the chiefs had left standing. The party also disputed the captain over the missionaries’ passage and baggage, putting the new household’s tools and possessions at risk before the work had begun.
The First Mass
Brother Melchior found the property during those unsettled days. It was a rented enclosure with three grass huts on a lot leased from a foreign carpenter named Moore, directly mauka—that is, on the mountainside—of the property of an American sea captain named George Wood. The three priests and three brothers brought their belongings ashore and settled there.
On July 14, 1827, at ten in the morning, the first recorded Catholic Mass on Hawaiian land was celebrated inside the hut that served as their chapel, one of three rented grass huts in Honolulu. We can fix the hut’s location more precisely than the town’s name. Samuel Kamakau places the lot immediately next to Ka-‘ōpua-ua’s residential yard and seaward (makai) of the traditional Kapauhi sector. On the modern street grid of downtown Honolulu, that ground is the lower part of Nu’uanu Avenue between Kukui Street and North Beretania Street, running down toward Hotel Street. It lies on the eastern edge of what is now the Chinatown and downtown capital district. The first Mass was celebrated a few blocks mauka and west of where the permanent Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace was later built on Fort Street Mall. The January 15, 1840 Supplement to the Sandwich Island Mirror gives the same date of July 14 for that first Mass, and the sources that differ over the days just before it agree on the event itself. The setting was a rented grass-house compound, not a beach and not the later cathedral.
Armand’s description shows how the household worked. One hut served as a chapel in the morning and evening and as a study room during the day. Another held supplies and tools. A third received visitors during the day and became a sleeping place at night. A well stood inside the enclosure, so worship, work, rest, and study shared the same small space. The men who said Mass there also had to find water, prepare food, and care for their tools. No complete attendance list for that morning survives; the surviving accounts focus on the newly arrived community establishing worship in its own dwelling.
That arrangement says something about what the first Mass was and what it was not. Three priests offered a Catholic celebration inside the chapel hut—one of the three rented grass huts—while the ordinary work of a new household went on around it. It was not yet the worship of an established congregation, because the congregation did not yet exist. That day established a place where Mass could be said and where people could come afterward.
Life soon fell into a rhythm of morning prayer and Mass, work and meals, the Rosary, and evening prayers. Visitors came, sometimes chiefs with attendants, sometimes foreign residents. The priests’ letters show these meetings were not simple, since language limited speech and different expectations shaped what a visitor might ask for and how a household might answer. Learning Hawaiian became part of the chapel’s work. Short’s account of a copied vocabulary that he translated into French shows a beginning made through small acts of study: the missionaries had to explain what they believed, understand questions, and tell a person’s assent apart from mere familiarity with unfamiliar words.
Early in 1828, the mission moved to a more permanent site, where the chapel drew people seeking instruction. The Mirror records Boki and other chiefs among the visitors to its services. That follows the first Mass, when the private worship of a new religious household became the shared life of a resident community that included Hawaiians.
The historical account Persecutions in Hawaii in the 1800s—a newspaper-reprint history—reports that in April 1828 Bingham, Clark, and Chamberlain were appointed a “committee to inquire into the plans and operations of the Jesuits settled in this place.” The account presents this as an early organized inquiry and says that hostility followed: from that period, it reports, the Catholics had no peace, and they resorted to every means that could injure the priests in the eyes of the people and bring the Catholic mission into odium with the chiefs. That is the account’s own characterization, offered as its attribution rather than as a statement that every Protestant missionary shared its motive or conduct.
The Court Divided
The missionaries’ early reception drew both favor and opposition. Boki, baptized in 1819, eight years before the missionaries, gave them real but qualified support, and other chiefs visited the mission. Ka‘ahumanu, the Queen Regent, and her allies increasingly opposed the spread of Catholic practice. The court was not united in welcoming the faith and then rejecting it. Its members held different religious commitments and competed over authority in a kingdom already negotiating rapid change.
Language helped merge religion with nationality. Catholicism was commonly associated with the French, even though Short was a British subject and the people being instructed were Hawaiian. Describing the faith as foreign could make attendance at its services look like service to outsiders’ ambitions. At the same time, for believers, baptism and worship were decisions made within their own country. Protestant missionaries also disagreed among themselves over the right response. The Catholic mission history quotes a report by Hiram Bingham of Kawaiahaʻo Church that one missionary advised leaving the priests free to remain and teach. At the same time, another defended the government’s authority to exclude them. Opposition to Catholic worship did not require every Protestant resident in Honolulu to share the same opinion, and the record does not claim it did.
The rivalry between Boki and Ka‘ahumanu sharpened the religious conflict. Their relationship affected how strictly restrictions could be enforced, and a believer’s ability to attend a chapel could depend on which chief’s command prevailed. That is what makes the question of protection so hard to settle. The governor’s word mattered greatly while he was present to enforce it, and little once he was gone. Permission in the islands was less a standing law than a balance among particular persons, which is why the mission’s position could change without any document changing with it.
In December 1829, Boki left Hawaii on an expedition and never returned. Sources speculate about the fate of his vessel and the men with him, but the record leaves it unproven. The mission’s experience was simpler and harder: the protector who had helped the priests remain was no longer there to intervene, and the balance that had allowed the Catholic community to grow was gone.
Restrictions on attendance and instruction turned into coercion aimed at individuals. The mission history names Louisa, called Luika Kaunaka, as one of the early victims. She was imprisoned, freed through an intervention, and arrested again with Valeriano and Kimeone. Such episodes mark how short the distance had become between a quarrel over clergy and the punishment of Hawaiian believers. Catholic instruction went on under that pressure, with the Mirror describing believers who sought it privately after public attendance became dangerous and returned more openly when they judged it safe. The church did not go underground overnight, or stay there. Its members moved as their opportunities changed.
Liliha, Boki’s wife, resisted Ka‘ahumanu in the same unsettled setting, and by early 1831 that resistance had been overcome. The authorities could then act more decisively against Boki’s former allies and against the Catholic clergy. The two brothers from the deck of the Uranie were both beyond the reach of those decisions: Kalanimoku had died, while Boki had left Hawai‘i on an expedition from which he did not return. Neither could speak for the community that had grown in their country. When the chiefs summoned the priests and handed them an expulsion decree, the argument over permission to remain had become a plan to compel departure.
What began on the deck of a French ship and continued in three grass huts had by then acquired a local life of its own. The next assault would target the shepherds, but the people they served were already part of the story in their own right.