By: Amy Schwab
When Kauikeaouli was proclaimed Kamehameha III on June 6, 1825, the new king was only about eleven years old — yet the words attributed to him that day set the course for his reign. Addressing the chiefs and people, he declared, “My kingdom shall be one of letters.” By “letters” he meant literacy: reading, writing, and learning. It was a striking vow for a child, and it pointed directly to the work of the American Protestant missionaries who had arrived only five years earlier.
The Pioneer Company of the ABCFM had landed in 1820 with a promise that would change the islands: in exchange for permission to stay, they would teach the Hawaiian people to read and write. The aliʻi drove the effort. King Kamehameha II asked the missionaries to teach his people to read and write in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, and Queen Kaʻahumanu later declared, “When schools are established, all the people shall learn the palapala (writing).” Crucially, Liholiho ordered the missionaries to instruct the aliʻi first, which gave them unprecedented access to the chiefs and their households — and made the young Kauikeaouli one of the first royals tutored in the new learning.
To teach reading, the mission first had to give Hawaiian a written form. There had been no written Hawaiian; all knowledge passed orally. The missionaries listened, identified the sounds of the language, and rendered it in a Romanized alphabet — ultimately an alphabet of five vowels and twelve consonants. Then came the press. On January 7, 1822, Elisha Loomis pressed the first page of the Hawaiian language into print, and the first 500 copies of the pīʻāpā, the Hawaiian alphabet, came off the Mission’s printing press and were snapped up immediately, generating even greater demand.
The king’s own education ran along these lines. His earliest instruction came at Kailua-Kona under the Pioneer Company missionary Rev. Asa Thurston, and once the court moved to Honolulu he became the pupil of the mission’s leader, Rev. Hiram Bingham. So when Kauikeaouli vowed a “kingdom of letters,” he was not speaking abstractly — he was pledging the monarchy to the very project that had shaped his own boyhood.
The results were extraordinary. The chiefs threw the weight of the kingdom behind learning, and demand for books outran supply. Literacy would have a profound effect on Hawaiian society: beyond its proselytizing purpose, it ensured that knowledge no longer belonged to the aliʻi alone. Within a few decades, Hawaiʻi had become one of the most literate societies in the world — a nation of letters, just as its boy-king had promised.
Want to learn more about Kamehameha III? We suggest purchasing the book Leveraging Soverignty by J. Susan Corley. CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE
