Charles Brewer was born on March 27, 1804 in Boston, son of Moses, a dry-goods dealer, and Abigail (May) Brewer, both of old New England families. An ancestor, Daniel Brewer, had come from London to Roxbury, Massachussets, in 1632. His father died in 1813 and the widow carried on the business while Charles.
The only boy in a family of five, Charles attended various near-by private schools.
Apprenticed to a merchant at the age of fourteen Charles Brewer acquired a knowledge of business but a loathing for the counting room. His mother, who knew his longing for adventure and hoped that the hardships of seafaring life would prove an antidote, allowed him when seventeen to go on a sixteen-months voyage to Calcutta. Undismayed, he next went on voyages to England and the East Indies.
In 1823 he sailed on the ship Paragon for the Hawaiian Islands. There the loading of sandalwood was interrupted when the vessel was chartered by King Kamehameha II for a state funeral. Returning to Boston, Brewer was promoted to second officer for a trip to England, and during a storm fell from the main yard, bruising one leg so badly that he was permanently crippled.
From 1825 to 1829 he was first officer on the brig Chinchilla, which used Honolulu as her base for trading cruises between Alaska, Kamchatka, and China. Early in 1829 he returned to Boston, but in October sailed as mate of the brig Ivanhoe, which traded between Canton, Honolulu, and Mazatlan in Mexico until 1831.
He finally quit the vessel in Honolulu because of a quarrel arising out of a hint to the captain that the attempt to fill water casks on Sunday was an infraction of the laws which American missionaries had induced the Hawaiian king to make so strict that smoking and cooking on the Sabbath were crimes. He then became captain of a small schooner trading between Hawaii and the American coast from Mexico to Alaska. In 1833 he commanded the schooner Unity, the second American vessel to enter the Sea of Okhotsk, and later claimed credit for discovering the whale fishery there.
In 1834 and 1835 he again visited Okhotsk and Petropavlovsk, and in February 1836 was taken as a partner in a prosperous Honolulu trading establishment by Henry A. Peirce, who departed for Boston leaving him to manage the local business of bartering cotton goods, rum, and "yankee notions" for sandalwood, furs, and hides.
In 1839, when France took umbrage at the refusal of the native king to allow Roman Catholic missionaries to land and threatened hostilities, his was the largest contribution to the fund of $20, 000 raised to satisfy the demands of Commander La Place. Another benefaction was the introduction to the islands of the beautiful night-blooming cereus.
In 1845 he disposed of most of his Hawaiian interests and took his family to Boston. A business trip to Honolulu in 1847-49 completed his seafaring life, but he continued in the Hawaiian and Far Eastern trade, establishing after the Civil War a company which owned a fine fleet of barks sailing to Hawaii, Manila, and Hong-Kong in the eighties.
Brewer retired in 1884 and in the following year died at his home in Jamaica Plain.
Charles Brewer's chief achievement was taking charge of the business in Honolulu, and in 1843 the firm became C. Brewer & Company. Under this name it still flourishes. In Honolulu, then the Pacific emporium for whalers, fur traders, and China merchants, Brewer prospered greatly and established an enviable reputation for integrity and public spirit.
(Lang:- English, Pages 85. Reprinted in 2015 with the help...)
A man of strong character and sharp tongue, he was at heart kindly in disposition and liberal in giving of the large fortune which he had accumulated.
Brewer in turn went to Boston, where he married Martha Turner and set sail with her for Hawaii in March 1841.
dry-goods dealer
Charles Brewer gave liberally to local charities, and in 1843 enabled King Kamehameha III, his intimate friend, to finance a mission to England which secured recognition of Hawaiian independence.
