Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [7]
The other key element of Bingham’s winning formula, his ambition, was a gift from his forebears. In greater Polynesia, it is the explorer’s namesake grandfather, the Reverend Hiram Bingham I, who’s the famous one in the family. The Reverend Bingham arrived in what was then called the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) as the co-leader of a group of missionaries who sailed from Boston, landing in late March 1820. Only forty years had passed since the British sea captain James Cook made a return trip to the archipelago that he had just written onto the world map, whereupon he was clubbed and stabbed to death by a mob of islanders. The Reverend Bingham’s orders from his home office were to bring buttoned-up Yankee Christianity to this race of people who went about naked, swapped sexual partners and saw nothing socially unacceptable about human sacrifice.
The ability to arrive uninvited in an alien land and convince one’s hosts that almost everything they believe is wrong requires a rather forceful personality. The Reverend Bingham sought to Christianize Hawaii by bending its inhabitants to his will, which conveniently was indistinguishable from the will of God. Combining a passion for hard work with paternalism toward native peoples—other traits he would pass along to his adventurous grandson—the Reverend Bingham undertook an extraordinary program of church and school building. (His best-known legacy is the Punahou School, now famous for graduating President Barack Obama.) His missionaries created a written form of the Hawaiian language, which they used to translate the Bible into the native tongue.
Hiram Bingham I did little to hide his revulsion toward the chattering, “almost naked savages” who paddled out to meet him. Their appearance of “destitution, degradation and barbarism,” not to mention their “sunburnt, swarthy skins,” was nothing short of “appalling.” Bingham’s strong opinions didn’t entirely endear him to his fellow missionaries, either. When an illness that struck his wife required them to return to the East Coast, his superiors at the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions inquired of the settlers in Hawaii whether they’d like Bingham to return. The answer was an unambiguous no.1
Having put Hawaii on the road to salvation, Hiram Bingham I envisioned his proselytizing heir, Hiram Bingham II, spreading the good word all the way to China; the elder Bingham told his son that he could be “the teacher of the Celestial Empire as your father was of the Kings and Queens of the Sandwich Islands.” The son aspired to duplicate his father’s success in a locale even more remote and ungodly than Hawaii. In 1856, Hiram II and his wife, Clara (a pair who, judging from their photograph, rivaled his parents as the least fun couple ever to sail the South Seas), embarked for the Gilbert Islands, a string of Pacific specks midway between Hawaii and Australia, where two island clans were engaged in a bloody war over control of the archipelago.
Hiram II did repeat his father’s achievements, though on a more modest scale. A much more modest scale. He spent thirty-four years translating the Bible from Hebrew into Gilbertese, an idiom spoken by only a few thousand people. In nearly two decades of difficult missionary work, he tallied only a few dozen souls for the Lord, versus the two thousand strong congregation that his father had left behind in Honolulu. In 1875, seeking medical treatment for a crippling case of dysentery, he and the pregnant Clara left the Gilberts