THE ISLAND WORLD OF THE PACIFIC: BEING THE PERSONAL NARRATIVE AND RESULTS OF TRAVEL ISLANDS, AND OTHER PARTS OF POLYNESIA. BY REV. HENRY T. CHEEVER, " AUTHOR OF "THE WHALE AND HIS CAPTORS." With Engravings. The Sandwich Isles! the Sandwich Isles ! Reflecting the benignant Smiles That from the Source of Beauty beam. NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE. 1855. 56984 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty, by HARPER & BROTHERS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. PREFACE. POLYNESIA, or the realm of many Islands, within the last few years has been a rich field for the commerce, the literature, and the piety of the world. The name of one of the groups in it has become endeared to all Christendom, like Jerusalem or Antioch, where the disciples were first called Christians. The bare mention of it is enough to allure the interest of the Protestant world, for its associations connect it with the noblest triumphs of Christianity in modern times. Numbers, too, of both Englishmen and Americans are now actual residents at those Islands, and many more are anticipating a residence there, for purposes of honorable trade and emolument; and it is a transplanted off-shoot from the old Puritan vine, in the form of New England missionaries, which has wrought sc marvelous a change in Polynesian society, that merchants can now abide there safely with their families, under the vine and fig-tree of a genial civilization. These facts originate a natural desire, not only among sea-faring and commercial men who find a hospitable harbor there, but throughout the whole 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 society, usages, and annals, both civil and religious, up to the times when they wrote. 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 |