Read this article in ʻŌ Hawaiʻi
Batimea Puaʻaiki was born in Waikapū, Maui in 1785. According to Richard Armstrong, an American missionary and the one who wrote Puaʻaiki’s story, the mother threw the deformed body of the child in a grave but he was saved by someone and raised by that unnamed person. The wretched child was blind and named Little Pig. The missionaries named him Bartimeus (Batimea) after the blind man who called out to Jesus of Nazareth, “O Son of David, have mercy on me.”
Although this person was blind, he became well-known for his memorization ability. Here is what Armstrong wrote about Batimea:
“Whatever he heard he took it into his memory. Second to none was his ability to memorize the word of God. He hears a topic and it is not lost to him even after many years, 10 or 15 perhaps – it is firmly secured within him. The words of Ezekiel were not translated yet he memorized 33 chapters, so too were the words of Isaiah and the Psalms, never written down, just pure oral delivery, memorized beforehand by Puaʻaiki. Before he died, he memorized the majority of the Holy Word; matchless.”
The missionaries were shocked that Batimea was so skilled at memorization, but for the Hawaiians this was a usual skill. Priests, prophets, orators, hula experts were all trained in memorizing chants, stories, and genealogies. Consider the Kumulipo with some thousands of lines in that vessel of knowledge.
Here is the reason for Batimea’s skill in memorization. In his childhood, he was sent to Kaupō. There, he learned the hula pahua. According to an attendant of Liholiho, this kind of hula involved “body standing, hand gesturing, feet moving, body moving, and the mouth chanting.” After his training, he was taken and supported by Kamāmalu, the royal wife of Liholiho, as part of her entourage.
According to Armstrong, the queen favored Puaʻaiki because of his knowledge of the hula pahua and because of his body hair as he was a hairy and stout man. If “the nobles wanted entertainment, they would fetch Puaʻaiki and have him dance before them, and when the hula was concluded he would receive his meal and some kava drink.”
In 1820, the time that the missionaries came to Hawaiʻi, Puaʻaiki was in Honolulu. He could not leave his bed because of some disease in his body. Honoliʻi heard about this and visited Batimea. Honoliʻi was one of the Hawaiians who returned to Hawaiʻi from Boston to spread the “good news,” namely that Jesus came “to seek the lost.”
Therefore, Puaʻaiki’s heart leaned to God and his illness was cured. From then until he died at Wailuku, he promised to follow the words of Jesus. Although blind, he was a man like Bartimeus of the Bible that could clearly see Jesus.
A copy of the story of Batimea can be found on Ulukau.org
