Aloha, Hawaii
This month we head to both Kauai and the Big Island in Hawaii; in fact, the trip is my birthday present (from last year’s birthday)! Since my birthday was six months ago, I have had a good long time to prepare for this trip, and that includes finding lots of great reading about Hawaii. While my husband scours the Lonely Planet and Moon guidebooks for the islands and my first grade daughter eagerly listens to geographical and historical information set out in the Hawaii: The Aloha State book (one of a set of the fifty states) she found in the children’s section of our library, I opt for more literary preparation: Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes, The Story of Hawaii by Hawaii’s Queen, Jack London’s Hawaii Stories and Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii.
I have relied on Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes (published by Riverhead Books in 2011) for a general overview of the history of Hawaii especially in the context of the colonial contact and consequent invasion by first the British (Captain Cook, Captain Vancouver) and later the Americans (New England missionaries then whalers and finally sugar plantation owners). Vowell is witty and her humor makes every history she delves into a fast and entertaining (albeit highly educational) read. I’ve enjoyed Vowell’s book in its audiobook form (published by HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books) which I borrowed from my public library via Libby (a new app from OverDrive). Vowell reads the book herself but other narrator’s (reading historical documents) include Fred Armisen, Catherine Keener, Edward Norton and Keanu Reeves (to name a few). Listening to Unfamiliar Fishes has been a pleasure and I recommend it (or any of Vowell’s books in their audio form).
I have also begun to peruse Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen written by Queen Liliuokalani following her overthrow by the sons of white missionaries and plantation owners. Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen was published in 1898. I found it on Google books and downloaded it to my tablet.
“While I much prefer to read a physical book, these old books are now public domain and not always easy to find in book form”
Jack London has short stories from Hawaii. I found some of them (On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales and The House of Pride and Other Tales of Hawaii) on the Project Gutenberg app. I have greatly enjoyed “Good-bye, Jack” in which he relates:
“Hawaii is a queer place. Everything socially is what I may call topsy-turvy. Not but what things are correct. They are almost too much so. But still things are sort of upside down. The most ultra-exclusive set there is the ‘Missionary Crowd.’ It comes with rather a shock to learn that in Hawaii the obscure martyrdom-seeking missionary sits at the head of the table of the moneyed aristocracy. But it is true.The human New Englanders who came out in the third decade of the nineteenth century, came for the loft purpose of teaching the kanakas the true religion, the worship of the one only genuine and undeniable God. So well did they succeed in this, and also in civilizing the kanaka, that by the second of third generation he was practically extinct. This being the fruit of the seed of the Gospel, the fruit of the seed of the missionaries (the sons and grandsons) was the possession of the islands themselves,—of the land, the ports, the town sites, and the sugar plantations: The missionary who came to give the bread of life remained to gobble up the whole heathen feast” (34).
I plan to read the other stories in this collection on the flight and during the vacation itself. While I much prefer to read a physical book, these old books are now public domain and not always easy to find in book form. Before looking on Project Gutenberg, I was only able to find London’s Hawaii stories (written after he and his wife sailed across the Pacific from 1907-1909) in his Complete Collected Works, which was a wrist-sprainer to say the least. Thus, I opted for the convenient, if less aesthetically pleasing, option of a digital copy available for free of the marvelous Project Gutenberg app.
And finally, I checked Mark Twain’s Letters From Hawaii out of the library to see what old Samuel Clemens made of the tropical paradise originally referred to as the Sandwich Islands. In 1866 he spent four months and a day in Hawaii during which time he wrote this series of letters for publication in the Sacramento Union. I am enjoying working slowly through the twenty-five letters penned by the prolific writer, and am eager to set sail myself (metaphorically speaking) for another adventure to aloha.
