I have the trunk used by my great grandfather, a congregational minister, and my grandmother and baby, when they traveled to (the territory of) Hawaii in late 1900 to live and minister to the populace there. The coolest part is that there was so much interesting stuff happening around this old trunk.
There was a letter written by him that was published in a 1900 Massachusetts newspaper documenting their travels to, and arrival and early experiences in Hawaii, including descriptions of the bustle of people in Honolulu (indigenous Hawaiians which he called “natives”, Chinese, Japanese, Australians, sailors, soldiers—he described “free democracy and exceeding thoughtfulness of the rich for the poor”), an enumeration of all the varieties of palms he encountered, a mention of drenching daytime rains, and descriptions of the abundant fruits available for picking “steps from” their back door.
They’d had a terrible voyage from San Francisco, all so seasick for so many days they felt they could have perished. He remembered only seeing flying fish rocketing through the air 30-50 feet at a time from a deck chair as he lay there in misery in the spray on the fifth day. After their harrowing voyage and the overwhelming crush of their city arrival, he wrote from their quiet house, “If I saw with all this that there is the serpent in the Paradise of the Pacific, it certainly is a beautiful dawn after the night of the deep.”
There are also a number of articles in the Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser between 1901 and 1903 about his work there with the Boys’ Brigade, a school dedicated to reforming and teaching trade skills and manners to “the younger element which has hitherto been allowed to roam almost at will upon the streets day and night without any special object in view except to learn evil things such as playing “craps”, playing truant, smoking in side streets, and becoming generally incorrigible.”
He was the shop foreman so he was in charge of teaching woodworking skills. He had a letter published in the Advertiser asking for donations of furnishings for a room which was newly renovated by the students as an extracurricular “club room” (after they completed other needed renovations at the trade school). Requested furnishings from the letter were “pictures of heroism or natural history, or men; books of animals, birds, or pictures of travel. Any kind of games from tiddle de winks to chess; boxing gloves, or punching bags; a gramophone, phonograph, music box or brass bugle; unmounted pictures, miniature dynamos, mechanical toys, microscope, telescope, model canoe, ship, anything which would hit a boy.”
Ministers (at least the east coast ones by my research) got tons of newspaper mentions around that time, so it’s been relatively easy to “follow” his life and work, and his Hawaii time had the most documentation.
Back to the trunk. It’s cool to have a piece of that history and imagine it shifting around on that lurching ship and in the Hawaii house as he wrote those letters. Side note: the trunk still has travel labels adhered to the outside, including one for a transport company that used a swastika as its logo (inoffensive at the time, but unsettling to see today).
