| “Oh, How I Want To See Owhyhee”
His dry, hacking cough could be heard throughout the large, two-story colonial saltbox that served as the parsonage of the Rev. Timothy Stone, pastor of the South Parish in Cornwall, Connecticut, a picturesque town tucked in the state’s Litchfield Hills. The entire Stone family, along with four of his Native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) companions, stood witnesses to the violent attack on his body, but could not feel the intense pain of his muscles or the severity of his headaches. The young Hawaiian Christian man, Henry “Obookiah,” lay in bed during a cold, bitter New England February in 1818, surrendering to the ravages of typhus fever, far from his warm island birthplace. Henry had been studying at the newly formed Foreign Mission School with hopes of returning to Hawai‘i with the Gospel of Jesus Christ in his hands. His early death would steal the opportunity.
Throughout his month long illness, Henry’s attitude remained steadfast, patient, even cheerful at times, and above all resigned to the Will of God. Mrs. Mary Stone, who took it upon herself to care for Henry on his deathbed, read the Bible and pray with him daily, was impressed with his Christian conviction. Near the end she inquired if he thought he was dying, and Obookiah responded in the affirmative, weakly uttering, “Mrs. Stone, I thank you for your kindness.”
Fighting back tears, she responded, “I wish we might meet hereafter.”
Feebly, he assented, “I hope we shall.”1
When asked if he was afraid to die, Henry cried, “No, I am not. Let God do as He pleases.” Then again, he so desperately wanted to live. Live to be a powerful witness to the one, true God. Live to bring salvation to his people. Live to see Hawai‘i. “Oh, mortality!” he cried out one night.2
Insisting that his Native companions remain close to him during his ordeal, he beseeched William Kanui, fellow-student at the Foreign Mission School, who also nursed ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia during his sickness, “William, if you live to go home, remember me to my uncle.”3 Bursting into tears and raising his hands heavenward, Henry lamented, “Oh, how I want to see Owhyhee!”4
His approaching death was peaceful. He seemed to be free of pain for the first time in weeks. With his compatriots beside his bed, he spoke in his native language, “Aloha o‘e”—My love be with you.5
Damp with perspiration, the cotton shirt clung to my back as I hunched on hands and knees over a narrow dirt base leveled at almost five feet into the earth alongside the burial. But it wasn’t until the moisture gravitated onto my nose, dripping to the ground below that I truly appreciated the July heat and humidity that had descended onto the small knoll in Cornwall Center Cemetery that summer morning in 1993. The stage from which we excavated was only a foot wide at the head area, leaving sparse room to maneuver beside the grave, necessitating balance and concentration to gently scrape away earth while not impacting the fragile skeletal remains hidden under mere inches of loose sandy soil.
Portrait of Henry Obookiah. by Adelle Summerfield, n.d. (Courtesy of Author).
The anticipated skeleton would, hopefully, be the remains of ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, the first Christianized Native Hawaiian—the young man whose untimely death in 1818 inspired missionaries to venture off to the Sandwich Islands, charged with converting the “heathen” who up to that time possessed no knowledge of Christ; whose intelligence had created a phonetic Hawaiian alphabet which he applied to translate the book of Genesis from Hebrew; whose personality and cogent arguments for allowing Native men to save Native souls led to the development of the Foreign Mission School; and whose life and death story would be told in Sunday Schools to this day. His New England Calvinist patrons gave him the Christian forename of “Henry” while spelling and pronouncing his Hawaiian birth name “Obookiah.” As Connecticut state archaeologist, I was given the responsibility to conduct the professional and respectful disinterment of his physical remains per the request of his genealogical relatives for repatriation home to Hawai‘i. After almost two centuries in New England soil, the best we could hope to recover would be a decomposing skeleton.
Our archaeological field crew had already removed the heavy marble tombstone engraved with the epitaph of “Henry Obookiah” off a granite table marking the burial. The stone monument had also been systematically disassembled, as were three layers of supportive foundation, which extended well below the frost line. Thinly slicing through mixed-mottled sandy soils with the sharp edge of a mason trowel, I encountered the first evidence of the top of the coffin at fifty-two inches below ground surface when rusted metal hardware appeared. The horizontal pattern of nails revealed a hexagonal-shaped box laid in a classic Christian mortuary practice where the deceased was reposed supine with head oriented west, facing east, which means that as one reads the epitaph on a historic New England tombstone, the deceased is not in front of the stone, as most people suspect, but behind it with their feet moving away. Accordingly, on the Day of Resurrection, the dead would be able to witness the rising Christ coming up with the sun and awaken to join Him in everlasting life.
Further evidence of the wooden coffin became visible when a thin, dark, linear stain appeared, a decomposing shadow of the sideboards. Though all that remained of the wood was soil discoloration, it provided a clear outline to the coffin. Excavating within, a pattern of brass tacks with preserved wood adhering materialized along adjacent sides about the chest area. My initial impression was that the tacks secured a draped cloth or decorative linen lining the interior of the coffin. But as I carefully continued deeper into the side margins, the tack pattern changed, descending downward as we dug toward the pelvic area. A second row of brass tacks underneath the discovered row on the right side of the coffin also became visible, forming a semi-circular pattern like a half moon; on the left side, the second row tack configuration emerged but took on a dissimilar shape, horizontal.
As more of the arrangement was revealed, it became apparent that the wood and tacks were not associated with the sides of the coffin, but were actually part of the lid. When the overburdened soil collapsed into the decaying coffin interior due to weight pressure from the foundation tiers and monument above, it split the decomposing top board down the middle, filling the coffin housing with sand and compressing the lid along the sides like swinging a downward, horizontal gate. Brushing the edges revealed that the brass tacks patterned an “H” on the left side and an “O” on the right. “Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia!” I thought to myself, smiling.
Our mandate was to remove for repatriation the remains of “Obookiah,” and his remains only, so we had to be unconditionally certain that this was his grave and not that of another individual. Though we had yet to encounter skeletal remains, the brass tack pattern of initials was an optimistic first indication. We were confident now that this was his coffin, but would there be any associated remains? Acidic soils are the bane to organic preservation in New England. So we tested the sandy ground for its pH content, which fortunately yielded a relatively neutral reading (6.8), suggesting less acidity than we normally find in Connecticut’s mixed-deciduous and high precipitous environment. We remained hopeful.
Then, moving my trowel gently over the soil leveling the head region of the coffin, I heard a dulled tone. Immediately thinking I had encountered a small stone or another metal coffin nail, I put my trowel aside and grasped a small, fine-hair paintbrush among the various hand tools gathered under me. The material encountered felt hard, too hard for bone that had been in the ground for 175 years, I thought, but as my brush swept the granular soil aside, uncovering a one-inch diameter circle, I recognized the rounded structure of the forehead. My God, he is here, I realized, and his skeletal remains were firm, unusually well preserved for a grave of this time period.
An array of anxious people had aligned above
