Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Memoirs of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History, Vol. 1
When I came to these islands a young man full of enthusiasm, fresh from the teachings of Agassiz, Gray, Wyman and Cooke, eager to study nature in all her aspects, unbiased by theory, only anxious to learn, I found a land where traces of a native civilization were not all effaced. The American Mission had labored a little more than forty years and the results of their work were still vigorous: the missionary homes still existed, oases in the outlying districts, where I could talk with venerable men and women who had landed in 1820 when the young son and successor of Kamehameha had cast aside all that his ancestors had held sacred in religion, and was not yet ready to assume new responsibilities, - indeed he hardly gave much thought to the great change that was impending. One era was at an end, another was on the threshold. Hitherto intercourse with for eigners had but little modified the native ways of living. There had been no interruption of the ancient worship although it had been for years falling into mild decay. The admirable unwritten system of law regarding land tenure, water rights, fishing privileges, and the stern but generally beneficial kapu were almost unimpaired, and that little band of missionaries that went like Joshua's spies to view the land, and whose story is so charmingly told in Ellis' T our of Hawaii, found people and things much the same as did the wrecked Spaniards when they knelt on the Hawaiian beach three centuries before. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
