The Missionaries and the Whalers

The whaling fleets and the American Board missionaries, who landed in 1820, reached the islands within a few years of one another, in the years after the ʻai noa of 1819 had ended the eating rules of the ʻaikapu. Their chief ports of call, Honolulu and Lahaina, became the places where the Hawaiian table first met the foods and the commerce of the wider world.

The ʻai noa of 1819, under Liholiho with Kaʻahumanu and Keōpūolani, removed the eating prohibitions of the kapu system, and the missionaries landed the following year in a society whose old order at the table had just been set aside. Contact with Captain James Cook in 1778 had already brought new peoples, new animals and new diseases. Kysar gives the Hawaiian population of the 1840s as under one part in six of what it had been before contact, a loss that lies beneath every later change in the islands' food and labour. The whalers came for provisions and for fortune, and their ships created a steady demand for fresh fruit, cattle, white potatoes (where the Hawaiians themselves ate ʻuala, Ipomoea batatas) and sugar. Hawaiian farmers grew and supplied these goods, while Western merchants managed the sale and took most of the profit. The whaling trade lasted some forty years and ended suddenly, undone by overhunting. Its lasting gift to the kitchen was salted salmon, which Hawaiian cooks took up and worked by hand with tomato and onion into lomi salmon. The missionaries and their descendants led the effort to grow sugar in the islands, and the first plantation, opened by a trading company on Kauaʻi in 1835, set the course of the following century. Sugar and pineapple production grew rapidly, and the owners found that so much labour-intensive farming needed a far larger workforce than the islands could supply. That need led to the Board of Immigration and to the successive arrivals of Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Okinawan, Puerto Rican, Korean and Filipino workers, whose kitchens made the local table. The foods of the missionary and whaling years were thus the first layer of the mixed table, and they opened the way for the others.

The flavours of this period are those of preservation and exchange: salted salmon, beef, white potatoes, flour and sugar set beside kalo, ʻuala and fish. Lomi salmon, cool, salty and sharpened with tomato and onion, is the plainest survivor of the whaling years and still stands on the Hawaiian table beside laulau and kālua pig.