Two Homes, One Family: John Young's House and Kaʻōanaʻeha's Hale, 1829

When the American missionary Laura Fish Judd reached Oahu in 1828, she found the islands already home to many foreign groups competing for trade and religious influence — and quickly saw that royal Native Hawaiian women held real political power. Over the decades that followed she built alliances with them, grew close to Queen Kaʻahumanu, widow of Kamehameha I, and wrote a memoir. It can't speak for the Hawaiian women she knew, but it offers clues to how settlers and Hawaiians made homes — and how different ideas of home lived side by side.

A visit to Kawaihae, 1829

In 1829, Judd stayed with the elderly John Young, a British sailor stranded on Hawai'i in 1790, and his wife Kaʻōanaʻeha, a niece of Kamehameha I, at Kawaihae. Her short account is one of the few descriptions of the John Young Homestead, now within Pu'ukoholā Heiau National Historic Site — and it shows two kinds of home in one family.

His house: Western-style

"He lived in a dirty adobe house, adorned with old rusty muskets, swords, bayonets, and cartridge boxes. He gave us a supper of goat's meat and fried taro, served on old pewter plates… We were sent up a rickety flight of stairs to sleep. I was afraid…Sleep was out of the question; I was afraid of the wind, which sometimes sweeps down the gorge of the mountain…"

What was probably the first Western-style house in the islands left Judd unimpressed — and uneasy. By then Young had long been a close adviser to Kamehameha I and an ali'i nui (high chief). Judd also found fault with the man: he spoke Hawaiian "imperfectly," she wrote, and was "heartless enough to laugh" when she asked him to check the bedroom for danger. Her mission was to "civilize" Hawaiians through Western ways, and Young was a poor example.

Her house: a traditional hale

"…got up at midnight, and went down to the grass house of Mrs. Young, which was neat and comfortable. She is a noble woman. She lives in native style; one of the sons is with the king, and the daughters in the train of the princess."

Kaʻōanaʻeha's hale, built in the lashed and thatched grass-house style from native materials, won Judd over: neat, comfortable and safe enough to sleep in. That is striking, since the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions had told missionaries to fill the islands with Western-style "pleasant dwellings." In a moment of fear, Judd preferred the Hawaiian home. She noted Kaʻōanaʻeha's noble rank and her children's standing; her granddaughter became Queen Emma, wife of Kamehameha IV.

A royal woman's independence

Though married to a foreigner, Kaʻōanaʻeha kept her own home in the traditional style. Her independence likely reflected both her arranged marriage — she wed Young at 14 or 15 at Kamehameha I's direction — and the power royal women had gained since the 1819 end of the 'ai kapu, the sacred eating laws that kept men and women from eating together and barred women from certain foods.

While many ali'i embraced Western goods and ways, she openly resisted missionary Christianity. When she died in 1850, she was buried on the 'Iolani Palace grounds in Honolulu without the ceremony her rank warranted — likely because of her loyalty to traditional ways.

Across cultures

The brief meeting also shows mutual regard: a royal Hawaiian woman offering generous hospitality to a foreigner, and a missionary admiring a Hawaiian home and homemaking. A few decades into sustained contact, ideas of home, hospitality and belonging already crossed cultural lines.

Sources

Based on "Young's Homestead and Hale of Kaʻōanaʻeha," by Nicole Martin, from the Home and Homelands Exhibition, National Park Service, supported in part by a National Park Foundation grant; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Quotations are from Laura Fish Judd's memoir, Honolulu: Sketches of Life … in the Hawaiian Islands 1828–1861 (1880).