February 1, 1823
Betsey Stockton, a young black woman in company with 13 white missionaries, was on board a ship rounding the southern tip of South America. Those missionaries were on their way to the Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawaii). They had left New Haven, Connecticut in November, having been sent by the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, an agency at the forefront of American Protestantism’s burgeoning interest in foreign missions. Betsey Stockton was in the second group of missionaries to go to Hawaii, the first having gone two years before. Besides Stockton, this second group included six couples and a single man, plus three Hawaiian men and a Tahitian. The trip took five months by sea with no stopovers. Like several others on board, Stockton kept a journal of the voyage and of her first couple of months in Hawaii. She had joined the company partly as a missionary and partly as a servant to one of the couples, Rev. and Mrs. Charles S. Stewart, who were expecting a child. However, Betsey’s contract with the American Board did make clear that she was not to be simply a servant but was also to share in the mission’s primary work.
-From Good News Florida Website
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