People & lives

Deported twice, he won Hawaii's Catholics their freedom by dying

Alexis Bachelot was a French Catholic priest sent in 1827 to lead the first permanent Catholic mission to the Kingdom of Hawaii, arriving with two fellow priests to find the political ground had shifted beneath him. The king who had reportedly welcomed the mission had died, and the new regent, Queen Kaʻahumanu, under the influence of an established Protestant mission, treated the newcomers as suspect foreign agents. Lacking money after their patron abandoned them and unable to speak English or Hawaiian, the priests survived largely because a sympathetic local governor sheltered them. For four years they lived quietly in rented huts, held secret night meetings with converts, and slowly built a small Catholic community, even as the queen tightened restrictions and eventually forbade Hawaiians from attending their services.

In 1831 Bachelot was deported to North America, where his expulsion stirred outrage among Americans who saw it as a treaty violation. He spent several years in California assisting at a mission near Los Angeles, teaching school, and becoming a well-liked local figure, even stepping in to run the mission after its priest was reassigned. When word came that the queen had died and the new king might allow his return, Bachelot sailed back to Hawaii in 1837, only to find royal policy had swung against Catholics yet again. He and a companion were confined aboard ship for weeks until the ship's captain and British officials intervened, and the standoff ended only when British and French warships blockaded Honolulu's harbor and forcibly escorted the priests ashore with an armed guard.

Allowed to stay only on condition he stop proselytizing, an ailing Bachelot left Hawaii in late 1837 aiming to start a new mission in Micronesia, but his health collapsed at sea and he died before reaching his destination, buried on a small island near Pohnpei. His repeated mistreatment became a diplomatic grievance for France, which two years later dispatched a warship whose captain pressured the Hawaiian king into guaranteeing religious freedom for Catholics. Beyond the religious and political struggle, Bachelot left a quieter legacy: he introduced two plant species to the islands, one of which later spread across thousands of acres, and produced some of the earliest Hawaiian-language Catholic texts and notes on Hawaiian grammar. His story is remembered less as a triumph than as the opening chapter of a long, contested struggle over religious tolerance in Hawaii.

He was released from months of shipboard confinement only after the French and British navies blockaded Honolulu harbor. He died at sea soon after and was buried on an islet near Pohnpei.

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