“Oh, father, dear father, do take me back!”

“Oh, father, dear father, do take me back!” In 1840, as the ship carrying the missionaries’ offspring pulled away from the dock, a distraught seven-year-old, Caroline Armstrong, looking at her father on the shore, the distance between them widening every moment … “Oh, father, dear father, do take me back!” Missionaries were torn between preaching the gospel and teaching their own kids. From 1826, until Punahou School opened in 1842, young missionary parents weighed the possibility of sending their children back to New England. The trauma mostly affected families of the first two companies, and involved 19 out of 250 Mission children. “This was the darkest day in the life history of the mission child.”

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