Biography
Titus Coan was born on February 1, 1801, in Killingworth, Connecticut, the son of a farmer of New England stock. His family was poor and pious, and Titus grew up on the farm. He had little schooling. He worked in the fields and was a strong and healthy boy. At the age of eighteen, he was a school teacher in Ohio, in the western part of New York, and later he worked on the Erie Canal as a laborer. He was a young man of energy and good humor, who read widely. In 1821, he was converted in a revival. He felt a call to the ministry, and he went to study at Auburn Theological Seminary, in New York, which was a center of evangelical preaching. There he came under the influence of the revival spirit that Charles Finney was spreading, and he was drawn by its power and its warmth.
He was ordained in 1833, and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent him, with a colleague, Mr. Arms, to Patagonia, at the tip of South America, to see whether a mission could be started among the Indians there. It was a bold venture. They traveled in a small boat and were exposed to the cold and hunger. The Indians were suspicious, and the two men were able to spend only a few weeks with them. They found that it would be hard to start a mission, as the natives were nomadic and hostile. They returned in 1834, having failed. It was a bitter disappointment for the young man. He had hoped to give his life to the Patagonians.
He returned to the United States, where he married Fidelia Church, a young woman of strong faith, in November 1834. The next year, the Board sent them to the Hawaiian Islands, then known as the Sandwich Islands, where the mission was in need of a worker on the island of Hawaii, the Big Island. They sailed from Boston in December 1834 and arrived in Honolulu in 1835. He was assigned to the district of Hilo, on the east coast, which was a remote district with a scattered population of about ten thousand. The people were poor and lived in grass houses. The mission station was small.
He took up the work with energy. He learned the Hawaiian language and within a few months was preaching in it. He made tours around his district on foot and by canoe, visiting the villages along the coast and in the mountains. He walked many miles through lava fields and through ravines. He was a man of great strength and endurance. He preached in the open air, to crowds who came from all over, and he spoke in a simple and warm way. He loved the Hawaiians, and they loved him. He was soon known among them as a friend. The mission house was a place of welcome.
In 1837, a revival broke out at Hilo. It began at a time of distress. The people came in great crowds. They would gather by the thousands to hear him preach, and he addressed them for hours. They would sit on the ground under the open sky, listening in silence. They wept and cried for mercy. The movement continued for about two years, and it spread across the island. Thousands were converted. In 1838 and 1839, he received into the church several thousand people. On a single Sunday, he baptized well over a thousand. In the course of his years at Hilo, he is said to have received about twelve thousand people into the church. It was one of the largest revivals in the history of missions.
He was careful in admitting converts. He did not baptize them at once but kept them under instruction for a time, and he examined them. He had a system of discipline. He kept a close watch on the church members and removed those who fell into sin. He organized schools, which taught the converts to read, and he translated parts of the Bible and wrote hymns in Hawaiian. He also took an interest in the volcano of Kilauea, which he explored, and in the geology of the island. He sent reports to the mission board in Boston, which were widely read in America and stirred interest in missions.
He was criticized for the numbers that he received. Some thought that he had been hasty and that he had admitted too many. After the revival, a number of the converts fell away. He admitted that this was a grief. He said that the sheep had wandered. Others complained that the Hawaiian church was too dependent on the missionary. He also was a man of strong will, who was not always easy to work with. He had his share of sorrows. He lost several of his children, and his wife, Fidelia, died in 1872. He remarried, in 1873, to Lydia Bingham, the daughter of another missionary.
He stayed in Hilo for forty-seven years. He wrote a book of his memories, Life in Hawaii, which was published in 1882. He died on December 1, 1882, in Hilo, at the age of eighty-one. His life shows the effect of a man who failed in Patagonia and who found a great harvest in the islands. He is remembered as one of the great figures of the Hawaiian mission.