Publisher's Synopsis
From the FOREWORD.
JACK LONDON AND HAWAII! From the years of his youth the two names have been entwined in the minds of those who knew him best - since that day when, bound for the Japan sealing grounds and Bering Sea on the Sophie Sutherland (his model for the schooner Ghost of "The Sea Wolf"), he first glimpsed to northward the smoke and fire of Kilauea. Through successive visits, including eighteen months spent in the Islands during the last two years of his life, through early misunderstanding and final loving comprehension of him, Jack London and Hawaii have drawn together, with increasing devotion in his heart for "Aloha-land" - "Love-land" in his fashion of speech - until at the end he could answer to the long-desired appellation, kamaaina, one-who-belongs, and more."They don't know what they've got!" he said of the American public, when, a decade ago, headed for the South Seas in his own small-boat voyage around the world, he sailed far out of his course that Hawaii might be the first port of call, and threw himself into learning the manifold beauty and wonder of this territory of Uncle Sam. And "They don't know what they've got," he repeated to each new unscrolling of its wonder and beauty during five months of enjoyment and study of land and people. Again in Hawaii after the breaking out of the Great War, he amended: "Because they have no other place to go, they are just beginning to realize what they've got."
And, really, the knowledge of the citizen of the States is woefully scant concerning this possession but a few days distant by steamer, and woefully he distorts its very name in conversation and song into something like Haw-way'ah. To the adept in the lovely language there are fine nuances in the vowelly word; but simple Hah-wy'ee serves well.
What does the average middle-aged American know of the amazing history of this amazing "native" people now voting as American citizens? The name Hawaii calls to memory vague dots on a soiled map of the Pacific Ocean, bearing a vaguely gastronomic caption that in no wise reminds him of the Earl of Sandwich, Lord of the British Admiralty, and patron of the intrepid discoverer, Captain Cook, whose valiant bones even now rest on the Kona Coast. Savage, remote, alluring, adventurous, are the impressions; but few have grasped the fact that that pure Polynesian, Kamehameha the Great, deserves to rank as one of the most remarkable figures in history for his revolutionary genius, unaided by outland ideas. Dying in 1819, little more than a year before the first missionaries sailed from Boston, he had fought his way to the consolidation under one government of the group of eight islands, ended feudal monarchy, abolished idolatry, and all unknowing made the land ripe for Christian civilization.
Of those whom I have questioned, only one even heard that, before this generation, indeed previous to the discovery of gold in California and the starting of our forbears over the Plains by ox-team or across the Isthmus of Panama, early settlers in California were sending their children to be educated in the excellent missionary schools of these isles of inconsequential name, and importing their wheat from the same "savage" port.
