110. Sketch of Hawaii

 


The Reverend Charles Stewart, Princeton Class of 1815 and Princeton Seminary Class of 1821, was one of the first Americans to visit the Hawaiian Islands as part of a missionary expedition in 1823, drawing this sketch of a village in Maui shortly thereafter.  Stewart kept and later published his private journal about the five month-long voyage on a whaling ship, a document that became a primary source for Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and James Michener’s Hawaii.  Accompanying Stewart was his wife and a former slave named Betsey Stockton, who had been emancipated early in her life by Princeton’s eighth president, Ashbel Green, and raised and educated as a family member.  Stockton assisted the reverend and his pregnant wife on the journey and in Hawaii, but she also completed missionary work, founding the first school on the islands for non-royal children. Stockton returned to the United States with the Stewart family in 1826, continuing her work in education and religion by helping to organize Princeton’s First Presbyterian Church of Color and founding schools for black children in the community.  Reverend Stewart became a pioneer of the U.S. Navy chaplaincy, beginning a forty-year career by serving on board the USS Vincennes during its historic voyage around the world (the first American warship to do so) in 1829 and 1830.

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