Monday, Jul. 13, 1998
Christoph Jardin's Secret Life
By Ann Blackman/Washington
My great-grandfather Johann Christoph Jardin was a whaler. Born in Germany, he was a cooper by training, making barrels aboard ship to hold the whale oil gathered by men who spent months, even years, roaming the seas. He sailed out of New Bedford, Mass., in the late 1840s. When his ship was wrecked in the Arctic a decade later, those who made it to shore survived the cold by stomping back and forth across the frozen tundra. My father remembers Christoph (as he called himself) telling him how his hair turned white overnight. Eventually they were rescued and taken to Hawaii, where Christoph spent the next 15 years making barrels for sugar planters in Maui's beautiful coastal village of Haiku.
On Aug. 7, 1873, he sailed for San Francisco, taking with him Emma Walters, a young German-born woman he had married the previous week, as well as a four-year-old, brown-skinned boy named Alexander, whom Christoph claimed to have adopted. Eventually they made their way to upstate New York, where Christoph bought a hotel and saloon in Callicoon, a small town on the Delaware River. Knowing little else about my great-grandfather, but appreciating the tales of adventure and bravery, my husband and I named our son Christof, altering the spelling slightly.
Six years ago, as my parents were moving into a retirement home, we found Alexander's adoption papers, handwritten in elegant script and signed by two Hawaiians, Kailiino and Kekua, first names only, as was the Hawaiian practice at the time. While on vacation that spring in Maui, I took the papers into the Lahaina Restoration Foundation in hopes of learning more. "Too bad the name is Jardin and not Farden," said the museum director. He showed me a book, Sweet Voices of Lahaina: The Life Story of Maui's Fabulous Fardens, by Mary C. Richards. "The Fardens are well-known Hawaiian musicians," he said, "and they have been looking for their grandfather for more than 50 years." The proximity of the names and circumstances caused him to take a closer look at Christoph's signature. He decided that what we had thought was a J was really an F. Turns out that while he was in Hawaii, the man we knew as Christoph Jardin had called himself Christoph Farden. The director then arranged a meeting with one of his granddaughters, Diane Farden Fernandez, saying, "You may be related."
And so we were. Alexander, the "adopted" child Christoph brought with him to the mainland, was in fact his son, born to a handsome Hawaiian woman named Kailiino. Alexander's younger brother Charles, who had been too young to make the Pacific crossing, stayed behind with his mother. Charles Farden grew up to be a successful sugar-plantation overseer and had 13 children of his own. He tried once to find his brother on a trip to New York, but he failed.
Now we know why. When Christoph sailed for America, he changed his last name back to Jardin and, with Emma, raised a new family that would include my grandmother, Matilda Jardin Blackman. A pious, churchgoing Mason by the time he reached his 40s, Christoph never told my father's family that he had left a child in Hawaii--or that Alexander was, in fact, his flesh and blood.
Today both sides of the family have been enriched by our discovery. Irmgard Farden Aluli, the matriarch of the Hawaiian branch, made a pilgrimage to her grandfather Christoph's grave site in upstate New York, where, accompanying herself on the ukulele, she sang the Hawaiian farewell song. Two years before my father died, he went, along with my sister and nephew, to Hawaii to meet the Fardens. They were greeted with alohas, flower leis and the native music made famous in part by the Fardens. Last spring, at a party to celebrate Irmgard's induction into the Hawaiian Music Hall of Fame, our Hawaiian relatives taught my son Christof, now 18, a hula. And he gave them a taste of his own music, which he played for them on his great-great-grandfather's handmade, koa-wood guitar.