Daniel & Charles Wheeler:
1832–1836 | The Pacific & Australia
Journey 3: Daniel and Charles Wheeler’s tour to the Pacific, including Hawaii and Tahiti in the 1830s
Authors: Audrey Gerrard And Penny Edmonds
In 1833–1838 British Quakers Daniel and Charles Wheeler sailed in the ship Henry Freeling, purchased with Society of Friends funds, to the Australian colonies, the colony of New Zealand and the Pacific. Wheeler travelled on this ‘voyage of concern’ with his son Charles.
During this five-year voyage travelling ‘under concern’, Daniel Wheeler, as the senior Quaker, wrote reports to the London Society of Friends ‘Committee for the Meeting for Sufferings’. He was a renowned temperance reformer and abolitionist and sought to document the ‘situation of the injured natives of the South Sea Islands’.
In her recent PhD Thesis, Humanitarianism, Imperial Commerce, and Colonial Hegemony, part of the ‘Reform in the Antipodes’ project, Audrey Gerrard offers the first critical examination of Daniel and Charles Wheeler’s Quaker travels and their ‘testimonials’ to suffering from Tahiti and Hawaii during 1835 and 1836. As a voyage undertaken with official sanction from the Society of Friends, the Wheelers’ Pacific voyage was an important chapter in a longer tradition of Quaker humanitarian travel and reportage. Produced in a climate of protectionist and abolitionist fervour in the mid-1830s ‘age of reform’, the Quaker humanitarian publications reflect wider contemporary concerns for Indigenous populations and post-British emancipation labour conditions.
Read more
Audrey Peyper, ‘Bound for Slavery? A Quaker Humanitarian Critique of Waged Labour at Koloa Plantation, Hawaii, 1836‘, Labour History 113 (2017): 79–102.
In this article ‘Bound for Slavery?’, Audrey examines the humanitarian testimonials of Quakers Daniel and Charles Wheeler, written from their visit to the Koloa plantation on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai in June 1836. The travelling Quakers critiqued the early years of Hawaii’s foreign-owned sugar plantation system.
The Wheelers met key Indigenous Pacific leaders on the voyage, including a formal meeting with Queen Pomare IV of Tahiti and King Kamehameha III of Hawaii. Charles Wheeler, the junior Quaker, controversially critiqued the activities of other missionaries from the British London Missionary Society (LMS) at Tahiti and the Boston-based Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) stationed at the Hawaiian Islands. Charles’s youthful, raw and sincere yet unpublished documentation of life in the Pacific provides intriguing – and often controversial – depth to the formal public reports of his esteemed father, Daniel.
The Wheeler archives at Friends House Library, London
Prior to his Western Pacific journey, Daniel Wheeler had travelled outside the British Empire to St Petersburg, Russia, to investigate what some believed to be slavery there. This voyage was a significant undertaking, and it was closely followed by the Quaker and humanitarian press on both sides of the Atlantic.
Rich and rarely studied archives of Wheeler’s journey are held at the archives of the Library of the Society of Friends, at Friends House, London. This large collection contains a vast amount of detail on their journey, daily life, politics, traditions and business in the Pacific and Australia. From journals to letters, and shipping documents to laws, the material created and gathered by the Wheelers portrays a vibrant snapshot of the Pacific in one of its most important ages of transformation.
Pictured above is Audrey at Friends House Library on one of our research visits and her discovery of fragile pressed hibiscus flowers in one of Daniel Wheeler’s large handwritten journals from the 1836 visit to the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
At Papeete Bay they expressed their moral concern over exploitative trade and the European supply of alcohol and firearms by so-called temperance ships to the Indigenous inhabitants of Tahiti. Wheeler wrote:
Scarcely a ship arrives (at Papeete, Tahiti), but what has for sale rum, muskets, and gunpowder, for all of which the natives are extremely eager: and many of these are denominated ‘Temperance ships’, and yet are engaged in producing madness amongst the natives, by furnishing the means of intoxication, at the same time supplying them with weapons of destruction to complete their misery.
The adventurous and dutiful British Quaker father-and-son travelling pair held strong transatlantic connections within the Society of Friends and in the business community in the United States. Gripping accounts of their travels were published in Quaker periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic, as a wide representation from the Society of Friends eagerly sought news regarding business, shipping, society and religion in the distant Pacific. Wheeler, in turn, communicated his warnings and advice back to members of the Society regarding the impact of their enterprises. Sitting at the intersection of British, French and American empires, this early humanitarian journey reveals a historically unique moment in the history of the Pacific and within wider British reformist politics and sentiments of the 1830s.
As an abolitionist and temperance reformer, Wheeler drew upon his earlier life in merchant sailing and agricultural trades to record a powerful testimonial to the conditions of trade, temperance and early plantation labour in the Pacific Islands. Through examination of this rare archival and published material, Audrey argues that humanitarian endeavour and capitalist expansion operated as joint forces of imperial cultural hegemony in Indigenous Pacific kingdoms, which were subject to nascent forms of European imperialism in the 1830s. The thesis offers a new perspective on the themes of exploitative trade and unfreedom in plantation labour and interrogates the imperial role of mercantilist trade, land acquisition and labour policy in the 1830s Pacific.
The archival material created by the Wheelers on their Pacific voyage provides intriguing layers of their witnessing. Daniel Wheeler produced formally written journals, recounting formal engagements with missionaries, traders and Indigenous leaders. These journals were posted back to the Committee for the Meeting for Sufferings in London, who then edited them for publication. This process remains evident in the archives, with editorial marks revealingly still visible on the manuscripts.
Providing an illuminating and at times controversial counterpoint, the diaries and letters of Charles Wheeler, Daniel’s son, are of a more personal and critical nature. Often scrawled in a tiny notebook, with hurried marginalia, or squashed in a letter on a single sheet of paper, Charles’s testimonials were posted to family and personal acquaintances. In her research, Audrey has painstakingly sought to read and analyse these visually complex and often damaged or faded documents. The two accounts – which were possibly intended to be read together by associated groups of people – reveal the formal and informal networks of Quaker life and activity and show how the social politics of humanitarianism could operate across the globe and between different religious and business concerns.
Charles’s personal interactions with missionaries, Indigenous leaders, traders, local characters and ordinary people in the wharves and villages created a shocking report on the reality of missionary and trading life in Tahiti. Writing to his siblings back in Britain, Charles recorded the local gossip as well as his own observations. Never outwardly intending for his letters to be published, he portrayed a complex world of underhanded dealings in everything from alcohol and women to ships, law codes and port taxes. Missionaries, leaders, traders, sailors and beachcombers bartered everything from breadfruit to salvation. He wrote of violence in homes and churches, of desperate missionaries fighting their demons and clutching at survival in what many at home imagined as paradise. Charles furthermore recorded what his father could not, including the sometimes suspicious activity of British, American and French government officials, and the day-to-day conduct of Indigenous leaders, often riddled with the tensions of entanglement between private trade and government ambitions, yet exercising powerful and often invisible agency. Examination of Charles’s letters and diaries from the Pacific form an archive enticingly positioned to promote new thinking about how Tahiti and other Pacific islands became integrated in imperial, and globalising, systems of governance, cultural exchange and trade.
Meeting Queen Pomare of Tahiti and Resisting Missionary Influence
In Audrey’s forthcoming paper, ‘Through the Latticework: Temperance Laws, “Shadow Networks”, and Queen Pomare IV of Tahiti in Quaker Humanitarian Writing’, she writes that the island was in the midst of a major transition. Queen Pomare IV had passed a landmark set of laws prohibiting alcohol in Tahiti. Through the published and archival layers of the Quaker humanitarian testimonials recorded by the Wheelers in Tahiti, the paper interrogates the significance of temperance reform and lawmaking in Pacific harbours. It considers how a humanitarian narrative of ‘salvation’ of Indigenous people versus their ‘corruption’ at the hands of mercantile Europeans moved through networks of empire and in the British missionary and humanitarian press. The unpublished letters and journals of Charles Wheeler, however, portrayed a very different picture of this seemingly triumphant legal development. Charles’s testimonial and his observations of Queen Pomare’s attitude to temperance law offer an opportunity illuminate, as Tracy Banivanua Mar has noted, the ‘latticework of empires [that] was frequently used as scaffolding for Indigenous peoples as they strived to understand, resist or exploit imperial networks’. This paper will use Charles Wheeler’s archival material to capture brief but significant moments of how a ‘shadow network’ of Tahitian resistance and subversion of missionary influence upon law-making ran through the harbours of Tahiti in 1835.
Visit to Koloa Plantation, Hawaii
In the article ‘Bound for Slavery?’ A Quaker Humanitarian Critique of Waged Labour at Koloa Plantation, Hawaii, 1836’ Audrey examines the humanitarian testimonials of Quakers Daniel and Charles Wheeler, written from their visit to the Koloa plantation on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai in June 1836.
The travelling Quakers critiqued the early years of Hawaii’s foreign-owned sugar plantation system and feared a new form of slavery was developing:
The proprietors have adopted a system which altho’ in some respects humane … in other points [it is] highly objectionable… [and] excites my suspicions. Another step, and the horrors of West India slavery are in Tauai [sic] – and now they are showing themselves.
The key themes of this article prompt important questions about wider labour regimes in this era of colonialism and capitalism in the Pacific. Although the newly introduced wage system at Koloa plantation was intended by the resident missionaries and the founding American company Ladd and Co. to liberate the Indigenous Hawaiian plantation labourers from existing feudal obligations, the Wheelers claimed that a different form of ‘slavery’ was being imposed on them within the new system. They argued that this was actively enabled by the American missionaries from the Puritan Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Boston.
This idyllic portrayal of the sugar plantation at Koloa in a lithograph by artist Peter Hurd was commissioned by American Factors Ltd to commemorate its 100th anniversary. The company began as a dry goods store in Honolulu and later became the business agent for the plantation. In 1836 Daniel Wheeler’s humanitarian reportage, and his concerns with Koloa plantation’s labour system, were situated within shifting abolitionist definitions of slavery in the post-British colonial emancipation years and developing capitalist systems of plantation labour at the frontier of capitalist expansion in the Pacific.
The Quaker testimonial that was published brought the matter to the attention of the evangelical reading public in Britain and the United States. This article argues for the Quaker humanitarian testimonial as a resource, as yet under-utilised, through which to explore the relationship between slavery, Hawaiian plantation labour and post-emancipation abolitionism as it was introduced to the islands.
Through through examining the archives containing the Wheelers’ critique of Koloa in the formative years of Hawaii’s foreign-owned sugar plantation system, this article offers a new perspective on the key question of whether earning wages under the conditions at Kauai in 1836 excluded the Koloa plantation labourer from slavery. Prying open these critical issues provides fresh insights into the relationship between unfreedom and wage labour in the immediate wake of British colonial abolition as new systems of coerced labour were being developed and tested in new plantation regions.
How to cite this page:
Audrey Gerrard and Penny Edmonds, ‘Journey 3: Daniel and Charles Wheeler’s tour to the Pacific, including Hawaii and Tahiti in the 1830s’, Eyewitness to Empire: Quaker Humanitarians, Imperial Journeys & Early Histories of Human Rights website, https://eyewitnesstoempire.com/ 2025, [date accessed].