Across the Miles
The Rice Family on Kauai

Founded in the early 1850s, the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society was almost immediately named the “Cousins’ Society.” Parents of the mission children addressed one another as “Brother Rice” or “Sister Cooke” and so of course their children were “cousins.” Their generation, however, called their seniors “Mother Cooke” or “Father Rice” – none of the present-day “Auntie” and “Uncle.” The most important aspect of this pattern was the family feeling. It was intense in the latter two thirds of the 19th century, from 1840 on. Even when missionary families moved out of Honolulu to neighbor island communities, the feeling of kinship persisted. No matter where one went in the Hawaiian islands, one found family.

The couple who established Cooke Foundation nearly a century ago, Charles Montague Cooke and his wife, Anna Charlotte (Rice) Cooke, were part of this ‘ohana. She was four years younger than he; her family moved to Kauai from Punahou when she was barely two years old. But the families kept in touch, and when they married in 1873, “Charlie” Cooke became the Rice family’s business agent in Honolulu. Father Rice died not long afterwards; Anna’s husband took care of Mother Rice’s affairs from then on.

When separated by inter-island channels or even by long overseas journeys, people kept in touch in those days by handwritten mail only. Letters were voluminous, full of the daily round of chores, visitors, trips to see other families, and the like. Kids sent to Oahu for schooling; letters back and forth between husbands and wives when one or the other was away; and descriptions of homes, their surroundings, the people being helped, contact with local friends, and growth of the children filled their letters to friends and family in the islands, and back to the East and beyond, where parents and siblings still lived. Letters to and from family further abroad took months to make the round trip.

Over 80 years ago, in 1931, when some of the principals were still alive, Ethel M. Damon, a local historian, was given access to letters from and to the family of William Harrison Rice and his wife Mary Sophia Hyde Rice, as well as their children and friends. In the two-volume work Koamalu – named for the house where the Rices first lived on Kauai - Miss Damon gives us a vivid account of the Rice family in their Lihue milieu and away from it: as far as Germany on occasion. [Quite a bit of the text is copied verbatim from Reminiscences of Mrs. Mary S. Rice (1908); the copy available to the writer has lost its title page, but the preface is signed M.H.K. The name on the spine is Krout.] Travel – even inter-island - was also a challenge. Some of the letters were penned in haste when word came of a vessel in the harbor about to leave:

The journeys between the islands in that day [the 1800s] were regarded with dread, and with good reason. The schooners in use were small, crowded and seldom clean. The natives carried with them their supplies of poi, and they were always the immediate victims of the most acute form of sea-sickness, against which they made no resistance. The winds were variable, and there are traditions of voyages now [1908] made by steamer in twenty-four hours which then occupied from seven to eight days [and sometimes as many as ten] Food was not always supplied, and it was necessary to be prepared for any and all emergencies. There is a well authenticated statement that a thoughtful mother, setting out from Kauai to Honolulu during this period of painful navigation, took with her for the comfort of her two small children, not only ordinary food, but live fowls and a cow! (Reminiscences p. 36)

The voyage around Cape Horn from Boston to Honolulu took the Rices, in the “Gloucester” from mid-November 1840 to mid-May 1841 – 188 days – and was considered “protracted” even then. The Hawaiian mission, by then 20 years old, postponed their General Meeting for a month so that they could greet the new arrivals. Father Rice was the only non-ordained member of the Eighth Company, which included the Rev. Mssrs Bond, Dole, and Paris and their wives.

The Rices intended to go on to Oregon, as did the Parises, but word came that the mission there was in difficulty. Shortly after they arrived in Hawaii further news arrived that a complete massacre had ended the Oregon mission. By that time the Rices were settled in Hana, where they remained for two years, assisting the Condes. Mr. Rice found himself “often away for days at a time, inspecting in the large native schools of East Maui and preparing students for the High School at Lahainaluna.” [Koamalu 1, p. 104] Their first child, Hannah Maria Rice, was born there.

By 1843, Father Rice’s health had begun to deteriorate in cold, rainy Hana, so they sought a warmer climate in Lahaina. They’d traveled to Hana in a small schooner; the trip from Hana, however, with “No schooner arriving …[they] left … on a double canoe, the raised platform of which in good weather afforded comfortable seats for passengers in good health bound on a pleasure trip. But in uncertain weather, with a small child and both father and mother in frail health [she was eight months pregnant], the prospect of the forty miles to Kahului was not alluring … A storm of wind and rain setting in, the lashings of the double canoe were torn apart and a forced landing was made at the first possible inlet…A long walk stretched before them the next day …Mrs. Rice struggled on as best she could, ‘climbing with the aid of two natives who pushed and dragged her by the hand up the steep sides of the gulch, while she clung to the vines and bushes.’ And even in this extremity she found cause for rejoicing in the fact that there were no snakes in the tangle of undergrowth. Until eleven o’clock that night they walked, coming at last to the …mission home at Wailuku.” [ibid., pp 112-13] A few days later, they went by canoe – still on the windward coast – past Kahakuloa and Kaanapali to Lahaina. A month later, their second child, Emily Dole Rice, arrived.

General Meeting put the Rices at Punahou in 1844, where Father Rice became the manager, erecting new buildings and seeing to the farm and the cattle. A Hawaiian couple, Opunui and his wife Kaniho, followed the Rices from Hana to Punahou, and from there to Kauai. When school was out in 1846, Miss Marcia Smith and the Rices took ship for Hawaii island, as described in her letter to her sister, Mrs. Lyons in Waimea:

… Our school was dismissed one week short of the term, in order to embark on the Clarion … Mr. Rice tried to prevail on the Capt. to tarry till after the Sabbath, but he said he could not. As that was the only probable opportunity for several weeks, we commenced our preparations. Later we were informed that the clipper ship would sail on Monday at 2 P.M. for Kawaihae, & Mr. Rice then engaged our passage on the clipper. Monday came, & every thing except our food was sent on board before dinner. We were under way, nearly down to the Mission, when word came that we should not sail till next morning. So we turned about & went back to Punahou in the rain to stay the first night. The children’s beds & clothing, even to a nightdress, were on board, & they were compelled to sleep as they could. Tues. morn we started again, but on the way we discovered the schooner going out of the harbor. As soon as might be we procured a boat and gave chase, thinking that she would put back for us. But she soon lay her course, -- and we turned ours to land.

In the harbor we discovered the Amelia under sailing orders for Hilo the next day. So we made the best of our way home to Punahou & and I made provision to bake a new lot of bread, &c. The oven nicely heating & bread in the tins, in came a messenger. “The vessel is ready, come as soon as you can.” Again we were in motion and soon on board,

-- but our trunks gone to Kawaihae. With a very light breeze we did not reach Lahaina until noon. Here the vessel had some business & we were detained till after the Sabbath. The sea was very high, whale boats were upset and several men drowned … The Capt. said it would not be possible to land at Kawaihae, & Mahukona was out of the question. When daylight came Tuesday we were well nigh in sight of Hilo, and there we landed in the evening. It is now late Sat. P.M. & we are expecting to embark on the whale ship bound to Lahaina, at four o’clock Monday morning …

In those days “the overland journey on Hawaii from Hilo to Waimea over only the roughest trails, not often used by grown men, was not to be thought of with a woman and a number of children.” [ibid., pp122-23] And so the proposed visit to Miss Smith’s sister in Waimea was abandoned.

After 10 years at Punahou, during which time their family rounded out to five “sprouts of Rice,” – Hannah Maria, Emily Dole, William Hyde, Mary Sophia, and Anna Charlotte – Father Rice resigned from the mission and the family moved to Lihue, where he became the manager of Lihue Plantation. Their first home, Koamalu, had been pre-fabricated in China, and was surrounded by koa and kukui trees. It was across the gulch from Lihue proper and the mill. In true “plantation” style, their home also functioned as an ad hoc hotel, with visitors (and sometimes their families) turning up (often without warning) for a night or a week. The family itself visited as far afield as Waimea to the west and Hanalei to the east; the book is full of accounts of trips, visits, and parties back and forth.

When the family, or members of it, visited Honolulu on business or for school, the volume of letters swelled. During their time with the mission and at Punahou, the Rices had become firm friends with families living in “town”: Doles, Cookes, Thurstons, Dimonds, and so on. Father Rice and his daughter Hannah Maria visited Honolulu and even lived in California for a time as he sought to regain health and shake the scourge of “consumption”: probably tuberculosis. Hannah Maria married Paul Isenberg, who had come from Germany to try his hand at agriculture. He became manager at Lihue later, thanks to the Hackfeld (later American Factors) connection with the plantation. Their daughter became the beloved “Aunt Dora”; they also had a son, Paul Rice Isenberg, known in the family as “Rice,” who began a horse ranch at Wai‘alae on Oahu when he came of age. After Hannah Maria died of “consumption” in turn, Paul Isenberg returned to Germany (cutting months off the voyage by traveling overland via the Isthmus of Panama) and brought back a bride, Beta; but he had become so much of a son to Mother Rice that Beta was welcomed as another daughter. Paul’s brother Carl Isenberg, a Lutheran pastor, began a church in Lihue; for a time, he was the only “haole” Protestant clergyman on Kauai. And Dora married her uncle, Pastor Hans Isenberg, later on; they tried living in the Harz Mountains in Germany, but when their baby died and her own health deteriorated, they moved back to Kauai. Letters tell of numerous trips to Germany to visit the families there.

Family ties were also strengthened when Anna married Charles M. Cooke. They lived with Mother Cooke in what is now the “First Frame House” of the mission on King Street before moving out to their house on Beretania Street across the street from Thomas Square. Although she served for a time as a matron at Mills Seminary in Benecia, California, Mother Rice pretty much ended her days in the room that was “Grandmother’s” in the “Britannia Street” house. There she frequently dipped into her “black bag” which was the source of many munificencea, large and small.