In the archives of the American Antiquarian Society lies a strange and captivating map with an even more unlikely backstory. The map dates to 1838, though this copy was printed five years later. At first glance it looks as if it depicts a physical place, its islands and topography rendered with care. Closer inspection, however, reveals that this map records no actual location. Instead, it’s an allegory of temperance, framed as a journey through our animal appetites. Originally drawn by a temperance activist from the Northeast identified only as “C. Wiltberger,” the map found a following halfway around the world when the engraved plate was sailed to a small school run by missionaries on the island of Maui. The map asks each one of us: are you on the road to salvation or damnation?

The map’s second life was courtesy of Lorrin Andrews, a Connecticut carpenter turned missionary. Andrews was among the first generation sent to the Hawaiian Islands in the 1820s, and along with his Christian convictions he brought a determination to educate the young men of the island through a school built near Lahaina in 1831 (one could certainly imagine rougher assignments!).

Andrews’ mission work was in some ways a case of cultural imperialism, a Christian missionary exporting ideals of self-control and comportment to a benighted society. But there were twists, not least of which is that he and his fellow missionaries were the first to codify and print the phonetic alphabet for the Hawaiian language. They did this by bringing several hand presses to the islands, which by 1838 had printed 100 million pages of text in Hawaiian and nearly as many in English (including the first Hawaiian newspaper and the first English language newspaper west of the Rocky Mountains).

Andrews was also uncommon in insisting that his students—mostly grown men with families—learn to make maps, which he considered as essential to literacy as learning to read and write. This was especially true for Pacific Islanders, he believed, given how distant their lives were from the rest of the world. Andrews’ passion for map-making was made more unlikely given that this was the era before lithography: most maps were still made through the arduous, highly artistic process of engraving. Simply put, it was time consuming, and not the most immediately useful skill. But Andrews’ students were game, and over the course of the 1830s they printed hundreds of copies of at least 83 maps spanning every continent, as well as numerous charts, tables, and landscape views of life on Hawaii. Andrews soon found himself facing a strong demand for his students’ engravings, particularly the many maps that were bound into the first school atlases used on the islands. When his church balked at his requests for materials to meet the demand, he left the mission and made his own way on the island as an independent pastor.

One of the most unusual prints made by Andrews and his students was the imaginative “map” of temperance, which Andrews engraved with the help of one of his most skilled apprentices, Kepo Honi. It was as much a commercial venture as a moral act: Andrews hoped the map would have wide appeal, and even had his students design a second version with place names in Hawaiian rather than English.