If you were packing for a trip to Hawaii in the 1820s, you wouldn't be bringing swimsuits, surfboards, and snorkel gear. You'd be dragging Bibles, dried meats, and household goods. When the newlyweds Peter and Fanny Gulick boarded the Parthian on November 3, 1827, to set sail for the Sandwich Islands, what awaited them was anything but a vacation. They were leaving a life of relative ease in New England for an arduous career as missionaries in Hawaii, a post they held for 46 years.

According to Clifford Putney, assistant professor of history at Bentley University, the Gulicks influenced the history of the 50th state in profound ways. In Missionaries in Hawai'i: The Lives of Peter and Fanny Gulick, 1797-1883, Putney turns his undivided attention on this displaced Puritan clan not simply because they lived fascinating lives but also because the Gulick family is "a window that offers a unique view of Hawaiian history and the American missionary enterprise." Seven of their eight children went on to become missionaries in other parts of the world, "creating one of America's most important evangelical dynasties."

Another book that has recently opened a window on the same subject, albeit from a different vantage point, is Sarah Vowell's Unfamiliar Fishes, a meandering survey of Hawaii's Americanization. Vowell, the irreverent historian who keeps Jon Stewart on his toes, "tells the story of how … Americans and their children spent the seventy-eight years between the arrival of Protestant missionaries in 1820 and the American annexation in 1898 Americanizing Hawaii, importing our favorite religion, capitalism, and our second favorite religion, Christianity."

While Putney plods through the chronology of a single family, from revivals and epidemics to adventures in ranching, sermonizing, and child-rearing, Vowell breezily paddles among Hawaiian religion, customs, and economics, touching on everything from whale oil, eating taboos, and environmentalism to sugar cane, incest, and plate lunches. Ever present in her account are the "finicky Protestant" Bible thumpers who had "drunk the Jesus juice" and were trying to get the natives to drink it too. Vowell is all over the place in her narrative; Putney remains focused solely on the events experienced by the Gulicks. Putney humanizes the missionary movement that Vowell gets at only through stereotyped shorthand. But both get caught in the limitations of trying to portray an undertaking as charged as the Hawaiian mission.

Vowell, who leaves the Gulicks out of her account, acknowledges her partiality: "my research into Hawaiian culture had made me more aware of my own biases and prejudices than any project I'd ever worked on." But this self-analysis doesn't take her very far. Unfamiliar Fishes is replete with unbridled biases, and Vowell's portrayal of the Hawaiian missionaries comes closer to contempt than it does to the cheeky but endearing curiosity with which she regarded the Puritans in Wordy Shipmates. Mission work, she pronounces, is "inherently patronizing to the host culture. That's what a mission is—a bunch of strangers showing up somewhere uninvited to inform the locals they are wrong." Every once in a while she'll spare a kind word for the mikanele (i.e., missionaries), but her overall feelings for them are not always charitable. Consider this backhanded compliment of Mercy Whitney, one of the women who boarded the first missionary ship to Hawaii: "Scrape off every irritating trait that mars Mercy and her shipmates—xenophobia, condescension, spiritual imperialism, and self-righteous disdain—and they have an astonishing aptitude for kinship and public-spirited love."

Not that Vowell's disdain is entirely without foundation. Even the Gulicks didn't get along with all the other missionaries. Samuel Whitney and Peter Gulick "heartily disliked each other." Peter complained about Whitney's "high spirit" and "rather dictatorial" habits. Putney himself concedes that the missionaries were a mixed lot, but he warns against stereotyping: "Some scholars are far more respectful of the non-Western world than they are of Christian missionaries, who are frequently depicted in academic works as ignorant or reactionary," Putney writes. "These terms undoubtedly suited a number of missionaries, but they do not accurately describe Peter and Fanny Gulick."

Yet this is precisely where Putney runs into certain limitations of his own. While doing an admirable job painting an honest, unsentimental portrait of a Christian family who truly sought to live for Christ and expand his kingdom, Putney isn't opening a window onto the missionary enterprise so much as a peep-hole. The extent to which the Gulicks were representative of the work of their agency, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), is by no means clear. In fact, Putney's account suggests that Peter and Fanny were notable precisely because of their integrity and reasonableness in dealing with the Hawaiians, traits that often brought them into conflict with other missionaries and the ABCFM.

What Vowell and Putney both demonstrate is that missions are terribly complex enterprises, often fraught with interpersonal quarrels, cultural snobbery, and religious intolerance. Even the dear Gulicks' "religious zeal and cultural parochialism acted as blinders, preventing them from seeing much of the value of traditional Hawaiian society," Putney admits. They were convinced they knew what was best for that foreign land, and strove to make it resemble New England, sometimes all too successfully.

Along with Christianity, the missionaries brought complications such as measles, small pox, commercial agriculture, and the problematic privatization of land. But on the flip side, they saved lives with new medicines. They, and particularly the Gulicks, built a seminary and schools for boys and girls, including Hawaii's prestigious Punahou School, which President Barack Obama attended, though admittedly it was built as a means for the missionaries to educate their children without risking contamination from the natives. And the missionaries converted Hawaiian into a written language and taught the Hawaiians to read and write, taking them from having no written language to high literacy in 41 years, an astonishing achievement that was almost solely a result of the Protestant conviction that every Christian should be able to read his or her own Bible.

In more ways than can be recounted here, the missionaries played a vital role in the chain reaction that led to Hawaii's annexation in 1898 and eventual statehood in 1959. The missionaries seemed unaware that they were contributing to Hawaii's metamorphosis from a sleepy tropical archipelago to a turbulent naval and economic playground. Some of that unawareness was culpable naïveté, and some of it was sheer human inability to predict the future. But any ulterior motives they had were secondary to evangelism, as even Vowell points out: "The mission's priority—first and last—was to save as many souls as possible."

In Unfamiliar Fishes, Vowell captures the wild array of factors swirling around Hawaii's reinvention. Despite her prejudices, she tells the story wittily and well. Putney, on the other hand, provides an inspiring account of a faithful family, one that offers a useful corrective to Vowell. Together, they show that the impact, good and bad, of American missionaries is not to be minimized.

Kristen Scharold is an editor for Wunderkammer Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.