Hawaii - James Michener [487]
"No mission child has suffered more from a vicarious contemplation of these hardships than I. In fact, I have recently gone so far as to reconstruct the actual conditions under which my forebears struggled against the sea, and for several nights I have tried to live as they must have lived, endeavoring by these means to project myself into their reactions. In the first pictures that accompany this essay will be found my responses to the hardships borne by my ancestors."
Hoxworth Hale turned the page gingerly and found that Whipple Janders' Leica had been used to excellent effect. From the bunk leered Bromley Hale, his body contorted by the narrow quarters and . . .
"Good God!" Hoxworth gasped. "Isn't that Mandy Janders?" He studied the next photograph, which showed how husband and wife slept in the narrow bunks, and sure enough, there was his son Bromley Hale snoring while pretty, long-legged Amanda Janders, in a poke bonnet, lay beside him, staring in disgust. "Oh, my God! I'd better call Mandy's father right away," he said weakly, but the essay held him captive, just as it was imprisoning everyone in Honolulu lucky enough to possess one of the three hundred mimeographed copies accompanied by Whip Janders' glossy photos.
"As can be clearly seen," Bromley Kale's essay continued, "life aboard the brigantines must have been exactly as bad as our forebears have reported. But it has always seemed to me that our good ancestors were strangely silent on one important matter. Life on the brigantines was unadulterated hell, granted. But life went on. Oh, yes indeed, it went on. In fact, aided by the superb libraries resident in Honolulu, I have assembled certain statistics about just how fast life did go on. Take, for example, the brig Thetis, on which some of my ancestors, both on my father's side and on my mother's, reached these hospitable shores. The Thetis departed Boston on September 1, 1821 and reached Lahaina on March 26, 1822, after a passage of 207 storm-ridden days.
"Applying to these data certain facts which have been established beyond chance of successful, contradiction in Botany 2, any child born to the eleven mission couples prior to May 27, 1822, must have been conceived--in holy wedlock to be sure--on land in New England, and any infant born after December 21, 1822 must by the same reasoning have been conceived on land in Hawaii. But surely, any child born to these particular mission families between May 27 and December 21, 1822, could have been conceived nowhere else but aboard the bouncing brig Thetis. Let us look at what happened to the occupants of one stateroom:
Parents Offspring Born
Abner and Jerusha Hale son Micah October 1, 1822
John and Amanda Whipple son James June 2, 1822
Abraham and Urania Hewlett son Abner August 13, 1822
Immanuel and Jeptha Quigley daughter Lucy July 9, 1822.
Relying upon old records, Bromley Hale proved that of the eleven mission couples aboard the Thetis, nine had produced offspring within the critical period. In turn, he moved to each of the other revered missionary companies, establishing departure and arrival dates, against which he compared the birth records until at last he was able to present a fairly staggering array of statistical evidence. "Good God!" Hoxworth groaned, "if a boy spent half as much ingenuity on something important . . ." But like the rest of Honolulu, he read eagerly on.
"Does not this amazing fecundity aboard the brigantines suggest rather directly that in the crowded staterooms there must have been one additional occupation whereby the idle time was whiled away, an occupation which our forefathers, through considerations of modesty, did not report to us? I think so.
"In what I am now about to discuss, I consider myself far from an expert, but from having hung around poolrooms