The Children’s Mission Ship: The 1856 American Board Mission to Micronesia and the Making of a New American West

With money raised from children, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions purchased a ship in 1856 to support a mission to Micronesia. Drawing from children’s literature, newspaper articles, pamphlets, and missionaries’ letters, this article follows the “Children’s Mission Ship,” or Morning Star, from Boston to Ebon Atoll in the Pacific. It argues that missionaries viewed the Pacific not as a border or vast empty space, but rather as a “sea of islands” and as contiguous with “missionary settler archipelagos” throughout the Hawaiian Islands and North American continent. The article further argues that stories from the ship and the Micronesian mission helped forge a multi-generational capitalist and Protestant public that enacted and enabled subsequent American missionary and United States imperial expansion in the Pacific. This article is part of a special issue of Pacific Historical Review, “Religion in the Nineteenth-Century American West.”