MISSIONARY HIRAM BINGHAM GOES HAWAIIAN

Hiram Bingham, along with seven other evangelical Calvinist missionaries and their church-selected wives, left Boston Harbor on this day in 1819, bound for the Big Island. The first missionaries assigned to Hawaii. They arrived five months later, and as Bingham noted in his journal, the boat was swarmed by natives "of every age, sex, and rank, swimming, floating on surf-boards, sailing in canoes."...