THROUGH HAWAII. 
29 
advantages of Christianity, they remained under the 
thick darkness, and moral wretchedness, of one of the 
most cruel systems of idolatry that ever enslaved any 
portion of the human species. 
The attention of the American churches was at 
length directed to the Sandwich Islands. Their sym¬ 
pathies were awakened, and resulted in a generous 
effort to meliorate the wretchedness of their inhabitants. 
A society already existed, under the name of the 
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mis¬ 
sions , the chief seat of whose operations was in the 
city of Boston, Massachusetts, though including among 
its members many distinguished individuals in different 
states of the Union. 
In the autumn of 1819, a select and efficient band of 
missionaries was appointed by this society to establish 
a mission in the Sandwich Islands. They landed at 
Kairua, in Hawaii, on the 4th of February, 1820, and 
had the satisfaction to find the way in a measure pre¬ 
pared for them, by one of those remarkable events 
which distinguish the eras in the history of nations, 
whether barbarous or civilized. This was no other than 
the abolition of the national idolatry, which, though it 
was closely interwoven with all the domestic and civil 
institutions of every class of the inhabitants, upheld by 
the combined influence of a numerous body of priests, 
the arbitrary power of warlike chiefs, and the sanction 
of venerable antiquity, had been publicly and authori¬ 
tatively prohibited by the king only a few months 
before their arrival. The motives which influenced the 
monarch of Hawaii in this decisive measure, the war it 
occasioned, and the consequences which ensued, are 
detailed in the following narrative. The missionaries 
