English and American public, to be definitely informed respecting a people and a country where the outlay of Protestant benevolence has been so signally rewarded.

In these considerations, together with all the interwoven associations of boundless mineral wealth, indomitable American energy, and greatness yet to be, that come trooping into the mind with the words CALIFORNIA and PACIFIC, the present volume has its origin. And it is for the same reasons, also, that the author hopes to gain a hearing for this series of reverberations from a quarter of the world that bids fair to become the moral heart of the Pacific. After a few introductory chapters, therefore, historic, descriptive, and statistical, the book is made up of echoes and glances caught by the author after leaving the good ship Wales at Oahu.

The design of the whole is to present a true and life-like picture of the best part of Polynesia as it is seen now in 1850. Other writers, as Ellis in the Polynesian Researches, Stewart in his Journal of a Residence at the Sandwich Islands, Tyerman and Bennet, in the volumes compiled from their manuscripts of travel through the South Seas, between 1821 and 1829, by James Montgomery; Jarves, Dibble, and Bingham, in their several histories of the Sandwich Islands, have given to the world very accurate and entertaining delineations of Polynesian and Hawaiian

PREFACE.

society, usages, and annals, both

up to the times when they wrote.

xi

civil and religious,

But such has been

the rapidity of changes in that part of Polynesia with which this volume has most to do, that the lapse of seven years suffices to effect a total revolution. This book is intended, therefore, to answer a want of the times, by affording, both to the wanderer abroad and to the stayer at home, a correct view of the Island World of the Pacific as it now is, just midway in the arch of the nineteenth century.

The scraps of vernacular Hawaiian occasionally introduced and translated, will be read with ease by remembering that a is always pronounced like the English vowel a in father; e like the English a in cane; i like ee in seen ; u like oo in moon. The illustrative engravings are mostly reduced from original designs or sketches never before published, some of which were presented to the author on leaving the Island World for America by Rev. Lorrin Andrews.

Some writer has said, for substance, that it is a blessed mission to write books, which abate prejudices, unlock the hearts of men, strengthen the cords of human brotherhood, and make the kindly sympathies to flow. The author is not without hope that this mission may be fulfilled, in some good degree, by the present volume. Though not a missionary, it will be at once seen that he was a missionary's friend, which every self-respecting and sensible man will be who

goes ashore at the Sandwich Islands, and uses his own eyes and ears instead of others'.

The writer publishes now what he saw, and what he thought and felt while seeing, as a book both for ship and shore. But should it gain only the ear and heart of seamen, whom as a class he loves and would labor for, his end will be answered. To them especially, and to the missionaries who have opened for them Bethels and Hospitals, and Homes in the Pacific, this volume is now dedicated by

THE AUTHOR.

New York, June 11th, 1850.