Gone To The Sandwich Islands part 1

           Like the voyage of the mountain itself into the northwest, the eon
           of the birds seemed perpetual like the mountain
          long before another side of the night gave birth to humans
           and for an age after that there was no sign of them
           growing closer around the unbroken horizon
          the streams went on overflowing seaward…
          and small fish and crayfish brought their salt in from the sea
           and swam up the falling water
         to live in the falling before time until the first canoe
          appeared in the west and only the birds saw it…
                                                              (WS Merwin, The Folding Cliffs)


    

The 1890 edition of the two-volume Macy family genealogy devoted but a single line to my great- great grandfather: Benjamin Baxter Macy, born Nantucket 1842: gone to the Sandwich islands. Gone, at age 19, on an eighteen thousand mile sea voyage, first to Rio, around Cape Horn to Valparaiso, then northwest into the Pacific, never to return. Why leave Nantucket? Were there clues in some of the other genealogy entries? There was, unfortunately, another one-line entry, repeated many times for others in the family: “fell from aloft off the Vineyard, off New Bedford, off Nantucket.” A Macy occupational hazard. A fall also killed a cousin, George Nelson Macy, but on an icy sidewalk in Boston. A fall that might not have been fatal but for the Derringer in his coat pocket that discharged when he hit the bricks.

In early 1861, George had enlisted in the Twentieth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (the Harvard Regiment). By the battle of Gettysburg, he was a Lieutenant Colonel, and second in command of his company. He briefly took command when Colonel Paul Revere was killed, but soon after, when his left hand was blown off, he retired from the field.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Baxter, who chose not to enlist, boarded a ship that was leaving for San Francisco. In California, he booked passage on the clipper ship Yankee, bound for Honolulu. He was not the first in his family to undertake this voyage. His four older siblings had all preceded him on the many thousand mile journey to the Islands. The eldest, George Winthrop, had started a business provisioning the whaling ships that called at Kawaihae, on the lee side of the island of Hawaii.

Kawaihae in 1861 was a foul, depressing rathole; hot, dry, barren; so Ben went looking for work on the lush windward coast at Onomea, at the Austin sugar plantation, where he became a carpenter and later a supervisor. There, in 1873, he married Rebecca Ioela, a native of the area. Their daughter, Emma Mahulualani, was my maternal great grandmother.

Their first son was named George Manuhoa, perhaps for Benjamin’s older brother, George Winthrop, who died in Honolulu in 1883, or, possibly for cousin George Nelson, who distinguished himself in war service, only to die an untimely death on a Boston street corner.