 Born and raised in Hilo , Hawaiʻi , he was the eldest son of <unk> , a Hawaiian high <unk> , and Benjamin Pitman , an American pioneer settler from Massachusetts . Through his father 's business success in the whaling and sugar and coffee plantation industries and his mother 's familial connections to the Hawaiian royal family , the <unk> were quite prosperous and owned lands on the island of Hawaiʻi and in Honolulu . He and his older sister were educated in the mission schools in Hilo alongside other children of mixed Hawaiian descent . After the death of his mother in 1855 , his father remarried to the widow of a missionary , thus connecting the family to the American missionary community in Hawaiʻi . However , following the deaths of his first wife and later his second wife , his father decided to leave the islands and returned to Massachusetts with his family around 1860 . He continued his education in the public schools of Roxbury , where the Pitman family lived for a period of time . 
