“Missionaries preaching under kukui groves, 1841,” from Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (Philadelphia, 1849).

Among the many disruptions caused by COVID-19, the coronavirus currently sweeping the globe, are those felt by Latter-day Saint missionaries. More than 1600 missionaries returned home on chartered flights from the Philippines last week. Others are beginning their missions at home, while still others are self-isolating in their apartments around the world, presumably passing their time reading scriptures, proselytizing remotely where possible, and otherwise trying to survive being stuck in place with a companion not of their choosing. At the time of writing, at least two missionaries have tested positive for the virus. A fairly comprehensive (and continually updated) list of how the pandemic is affecting Latter-day Saint missionary work can be found here.

This is not the first time an infectious and deadly disease has disrupted Mormon missions, however. On June 6, 1853, George Q. Cannon recorded in his diary receiving “several letters yesterday from Honolulu.” While most of the letters recounted the continued success of fellow missionaries, Cannon also noted, almost in passing, that “the small pox is spreading there.” Cannon had been busily engaged translating the Book of Mormon into Hawaiian for more than a year in Wailuku, Maui, evidently unaware of the quickly spreading disease on O’ahu and surrounding islands. He soon would have no choice but to pay more attention.

The following day Cannon noted that Francis Hammond and George Raymond were struggling to find preaching appointments “on account of a great many [Hawaiians] having gone to be vaccinated [against the smallpox].” On June 8, he reported that “the small pox is spreading and the city [of Honolulu] is all excitement,” and five days later, received word from O’ahu that “the small pox was still spreading” and “the brethren had vaccinated themselves.” By the end of the month, Cannon recorded that the disease had turned deadly, summarizing a letter from Philip Lewis in Honolulu: “small <pox> raging[,] a great many deaths.”

Cannon’s daily diary updates provide just a glimpse into what his fellow missionaries and the thousands of Latter-day Saints on other Hawaiian islands were dealing with over the spring and summer of 1853. The first reports of small pox on the islands occurred in February. “Heard Small pox is in Oahu,” missionary Francis Hammond recorded in his diary on February 15.[1] The disease had been carried to the islands by passengers on a ship from San Francisco, where it had spread over the preceding months. Upon its arrival in Honolulu, government officials and Protestant missionary physicians worked to contain its spread, recommending that infected individuals quarantine themselves and vaccinating as many people as possible. They also recommended social distancing, discouraging travel between and within islands. It was necessary to keep the pox contained as much as possible.

Mormon missionaries, meanwhile, opted to pursue their own course of action. The elders set aside May 15 “as a day of fasting & prayer” for relief from the smallpox. But they also promoted measures that directly contradicted recommendations and order from public health officials. On May 18, Francis Hammond preached to a small crowd, stressing “the necessity of having faith enough to have power over disea[s]es, and not to be afraid of the scourges.” When some in attendance asked “if they should not go and get vaxinated, as all the people were doing so,” Hammond “told them if their faith was weak and [they] dare not trust in the Lord to go[,] but as for myself I should not go.”[2]

At least part of the reason for the missionaries refusal to obey government orders was their dislike and distrust of those issuing them. In Maui, the vaccination effort was headed by Dwight Baldwin, a missionary physician from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions who had been in the islands since 1832 and had earlier led efforts against deadly outbreaks of influenza and dysentery. Upon their arrival in Lahaina, the elders and Baldwin butted heads, with Baldwin dismissing the Mormons as “all deluded” and Elder Philip Lewis retorting that “fight[ing] against [Mormonism]” was “fighting against God.”[3]

In addition to discouraging Hawaiian converts from getting vaccinated, the elders ignored orders to stop traveling in an effort to limit the spread of smallpox and flatten the curve as doctors worked to inoculate as many as they could. The missionaries continued to travel from village to village on their assigned islands and even between islands. Benjamin Johnson rejoiced that “the work is spreading rapidly,” unaware that the elders were also likely spreading small pox. As John Hammond noted, through their continued travels and efforts to heal infected Saints by the laying on of hands, the missionaries “were unwittingly traveling as angels of death.” More than one missionary developed mild symptoms but refused to cease preaching, administering the sacrament, and laying hands on other more severely afflicted, almost certainly further transmitting the disease in the process.[4]

The elders only began to reevaluate their anti-vaccination stance once sickness and death spread to their own ranks. But even then, they persisted in traveling and carrying on as normal. When the elders finally agreed to vaccinate, they opted to do it themselves, refusing to rely on Protestant physicians for assistance. Though they initially believed that “the Mormons on O’ahu had clearly found favor with God” and been spared, in the end more than 700 Latter-day Saints died from the disease – roughly 20% of the entire Latter-day Saint community in Hawai‘i .[5]

Their earlier predictions that the scourge of smallpox would pass over those Saints who rejected medical remedies and exercised requisite faith, the missionaries were now forced to wrestle with the decimation of the community they had worked so hard to build — to try and find meaning in the widespread death. They did so in two predictable ways. First, they understood the smallpox as a sign of the times, sure confirmation that the second coming was near. Death, they reasoned, was an inevitable part of that. And second, they expressed confidence that those Latter-day Saint lives lost were part of God’s larger purposes to preach the gospel to those Hawaiians awaiting its reception in the Spirit World.

In Hawai‘i, missionaries believed they had found a scattered branch of Israelites prepared to receive the gospel. Just as they were eager to read the converts they made into the sacred history of the Book of Mormon, they read the deaths of those same converts as fulfillment of New Testament prophecy. But Hawaiians themselves — those hardest hit by the smallpox epidemic of 1853 — rejected such reasoning. The rate of conversion on the islands dramatically decreased in the months following the smallpox outbreak — from approximately 188 per month to just 12 per month. And some who had already converted struggled to reconcile the deaths of family members and friends with the promises earlier made by the missionaries. Isaaka Kahoouluwaa, one of the deceased converts who often accompanied the elders in their preaching, grew disillusioned after contracting the disease and, just before dying, sought readmission to his former Protestant congregation. His wife likewise left Mormonism, joined by the families of others who passed away. In doing so, they articulated a different understanding of the epidemic and the lives it claimed.[6]

[1] Francis Hammond journal, 15 February 1853, as quoted in John J. Hammond, Island Adventures: The Hawaiian Mission of Francis A. Hammond, 1851-1855 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2016), 141. Chapters 13, 14, and 15 of Hammond’s book offer the most thorough description of missionary work and the smallpox epidemic in Hawai‘i that I’ve found, and I relied on his research in putting together this post. See also Scott G. Kenney, “Mormons and the Smallpox Epidemic of 1853,” Hawaiian Journal of History 31 (1997): 1-26.

[2] As quoted in Hammond, Island Adventures, 141.

[3] Philip Lewis Journal, 9 September 1851, Typescript, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (hereafter HBLL). See also Hammond, Islander Adventures, 73-74.

[4] Benjamin H. Johnson to George A. Smith, 22 May 1853, CHL; Hammond, Island Adventures, 145; R. Lanier Britsch, Moramona: The Mormons in Hawaii, Second Edition (Laie, Hawai‘i: Jonathan Napela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Islands Studies, Brigham Young University-Hawai‘i, 2018), 68-69.

[5] Hammond, Island Adventures, 152-56.

[6] Kenney, “Mormons and the Smallpox Epidemic of 1853,” 13-14; Hammond, Island Adventures, 164-65.