
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.
- To learn more about Princetonians in national service,
see quotation #3, 8, 11,
17, 19, 20,
21, 25, 33,
and 41, and Café Vivian picture #5,
15, 35, 41,
42, 74, 107,
110, and 119.
- To learn more about notable Princeton undergraduate
alumni, see icon #4, 5,
and 10, quotation #3,
4, 5, 7,
8, 10, 14,
16, 17, 18,
19, 20, 21,
22, 23, 24,
25, 27, 29,
33, 36, 37,
and 41, and Café Vivian picture #1,
5, 7,
15, 17, 39,
41, 55, 57,
59, 74, 76,
84, 88, 99,
101, 102, 107,
and 123.
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