Missionaries in Hawai‘i: The Lives of Peter and Fanny Gulick, 1797–1883 by Clifford Putney (review)

The nineteenth-century American Protestant mission to the Hawaiian Islands has been the subject of a wide range of histories seeking to shed light not only on this evangelical by-product of the Second Great Awakening but also on the social, political, and economic development of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Clifford Putney has added to this important discussion of transnational history a new work that offers a detailed look inside the lives of the missionary couple Peter and Fanny Gulick. The biography aims to offer significant information on these American evangelical agents and their influence within a foreign land, while addressing historiographical issues within the field of missiology that have created a problematic paradigm for the study of missionary families.

Putney explains the relevance of his book’s subjects by writing, “Of all the reform-minded families in American history, few were more active than the Gulicks” (p. 1), and noting the broader family’s 140-year service to foreign missions. Peter and Fanny, the founders of this evangelical clan, arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in 1828 as members of the third company of Protestant missionaries sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). In addition to the prolific record-keeping that often characterized these missions, the couple and their extended family produced and retained a vast collection of personal papers, making them, according to the author, “one of the best-documented middle-class families in American history” (p. 6). Putney accesses this material to bring the story of the Gulicks to the reader with detail, offering vivid description of their lives and their interactions with a people very foreign to these New Jersey and Connecticut natives. The book follows the couple through chapters that act as geographic markers of the differing mission stations where the Gulicks were assigned. This serves the overall narrative well, especially when the work allows for rich depictions of the kuahiwi (mountains), kahawai (rivers), and other natural features of these areas that were so prominent in the lives of their native inhabitants. Putney’s significant knowledge concerning the ABCFM and the evangelical movements of the period lend context to the writing, especially in areas such as when offering background on the Calvinism that motivated Peter and Fanny.

The book’s sourcing is one of its strengths, but it also raises questions that are at the fore of a leading, current historiographical issue in nineteenth-century Hawaiian history. The Gulicks lived and worked in a foreign nation amidst a native population that by the 1860s was nearly fully literate and who produced a prolific collection of writing about their lives, their land, and their lāhui (nation). During the nineteenth century, there were nearly 100 Hawaiian-language newspapers published in the islands; the first in 1834. This prolific collection, nearly 125,000 over-sized pages, makes up only a part of the varied native-language source material available today. Additionally, the local mission institution to which the Gulicks belonged after 1854, the ‘Ahahui ‘Euanelio o Hawai‘i (Hawaiian Evangelical Association), printed all reports and records in Hawaiian and in English. The English-language annual reports, produced for the ABCFM, regularly differed from the native-language versions, often substantially. Although histories on nineteenth-century Hawai‘i sourced exclusively from English-language materials have added and will continue to add tremendously to our understanding of the islands of that period, any text that seeks to shed—as the book’s publisher expresses it—“new light on the democratization of government, the spread of capitalism, and the privitization of land” without accessing the native-language archive must be clear about what voice it is offering and what has been left behind.

Putney raises his own important historiographical issue by pointing to the need for complex, balanced histories of the mission and missionaries that are neither hagiographic nor strictly condemnatory. In...