THE SECOND EDITION.

ix

grace and truth of His Gospel into every dark corner of earth and ocean, and cause it to shine abundantly not only on Hawaii, but on the regions beyond.'

In the spirit of conciliation I have in this edition withdrawn the sketch of a person who played a considerable part in the earlier history of the country; because I find that the attached friends of the late Mr. Richards supposed that the drawing-which was a sketch from recollection only, and somewhat altered in engraving—was intentionally a caricature, a thing which was not meant.

I have enriched the present volume with a few extracts which I have been permitted to make from the letters and journals of Archdeacon and Mrs. Mason.

I have added an important summary of the commerce of Hawaii, and an able statement concerning the trade and producing powers of the islands drawn up by W. W. Follett Synge, Esq., late British Commissioner and Consul-General in Hawaii, now our ConsulGeneral in Havana and Judge of the Court of Mixed Commissions.

Some fresh works touching, in part or entirely, on the islands have come into my bands; of which the most important is the brochure published in Boston, by the Rev. Dr. Rufus Anderson, of which some mention will be found in these pages.

In my chapter on the English Church Mission, I have endeavoured to correct several misconceptions

X

AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

about it which have obtained currency in England, America, and elsewhere.

Whilst re-editing a work which deals with a state of things existing four years previously, I have been unable altogether to avoid some literary inconsistency. In reproducing generally my former volume, it was necessary to correct some figures to the present time, and, in places, to complete the history of transactions which were then in progress. A few paragraphs, therefore, belong to two periods. I can only ask indulgence for a defect which is almost unavoidable.

I have to thank the press for the cordial and gratifying manner in which they noticed my former volume, and made it known to the public. With a painful consciousness of all its shortcomings, I commend the present work to the attentive consideration of my readers.

The excellent likeness of Her Majesty Queen Emma of Hawaii is engraved by Mr. Adlard after a photograph by Messrs. John and Charles Watkins, of Parliament Street.

PREFACE.

IT

T is not much that need be said by way of preface to this volume. Few will begin to read it who will not soon find that it is not a book to be laid down when it has been commenced. It is, indeed, a notable record of a very peculiar form of our common humanity. The character of the Sandwich Islanders is, in many respects, one of those clearly marked developments of national life on which we always gaze with peculiar interest, from the distinctness with which we trace the lines of dissimilarity to ourselves, even whilst we feel everywhere present the great underlying basis of our essential brotherhood.

There is about these islanders a remarkable union of the attractiveness of childhood with the strength of maturity. And this union of diverse elements in their nature has embodied itself strikingly in their institutions, and fixed itself in their history. In this they greatly resemble the Coral Islands of their own seas,

which combine in such picturesque unity the conditions of freshness and perfection. But as yesterday, the secret labours of a million of animalculæ deposited that coral reef to chafe the blue waters, and let them sleep in the still lagoon. Then soine volcanic eruption cast up far above the ocean plain the mountain which startles the eye with its abrupt suddenness of elevation--and, now, the palm-tree, and the cocoa-nut, and the sandalwood, and all the prodigality of tropical nature, are clothing every spot of the well-watered island with fertility and grace.

This volume will conduct the reader through the great national changes which, in our own age, have passed over the critical youth of this people. Some of its scenes can hardly be equalled elsewhere. The rapid development of true principles of commerce; the struggle for independence; the passage from barbarity to a great degree of refinement; the ripening of such a character as that of the present King--all of these are transacted with a strange singularity of event, in the most glowing colours before our eyes. But perhaps of all others the religious history of the people is the strangest. The sudden abandonment of their whole. heathen mythology-not for the verities of a sounder faith, but from very weariness of the intolerable and degrading burthen of heathendom itself,-and the entire destruction of their idols, stand almost alone in the history of man. Most strange is it to contrast this with

the long remaining fears of their old idols and love for their old idolatry, which in the apostolic epistles we trace as clinging to and haunting the earliest converts to Christianity. It is not a little remarkable, too, that in this sudden and entire deliverance of the people from the meshes of their old superstition, the leading instrument should be a woman-a Queen-mother, strengthening the halting hands of the young and trembling king, to break the bondage under which he groaned, but before the threats of which he quailed.

Nor is this the only instance of the sort. It would be difficult to find in any history the record of a nobler act of faithful courage than that of the descent of another noble woman into the very crater of the volcano, in order to convince her countrymen that they might fearlessly brave the supposed deadly indignation of the evil god to whom tradition had assigned the crater as a home, and of whose wrath it had taught the islanders to believe that the destroying eruptions were the manifested consequence.

All of this, moreover, has at this time a special interest for us. The Royal Family of those islands have long sought to cultivate an English alliance; but it has been reserved for the present enlightened king to seek it in the way in which it can be most certainly secured by planting among his people, with all the advantages which can be derived from his own adhesion to it, a branch of our Reformed Church. At his desire,