R. S. Kuykendall spent four decades of his life writing the history of Hawaii. He came to the Islands in 1922 as executive secretary of the newly formed Historical Commission of the Territory of Hawaii. The Commission planned, among other projects, to publish a large-scale history: a general narrative of a thousand pages or more, sufficiently documented to ensure "authoritativeness. " Working to this mandate, Kuykendall brought to bear on his task everything he could muster in the way of personal and professional resources. He was well suited to the sort of pioneer labor that faced him. He had a great appetite and aptitude for spadework of an archival kind, locating, acquiring, and organizing collections of documents. His use of materials was marked by a quite outstanding scrupulosity with regard to matters of fact. Whatever industriousness and commonsensical perceptiveness could wring from often inadequate, often intransigent sources, Kuykendall set himself to extract. Though the Historical Commission itself did not survive the Great Depression, Kuykendall, continuing his researches as a faculty member of the University o...

This volume is one of the fruits of a project undertaken more than a dozen years ago by the Historical Commission of the Territory of Hawaii and carried on since 1932 by the University of Hawaii. The project called for the preparation of a comprehensive general history of Hawaii based upon a thorough study of original sources. The first phase of the undertaking was to discover the source material not already available in Honolulu and to obtain copies of as much of it as possible, particularly of documents which shed new light on the history of the islands. For this purpose, extensive research has been carried on in the national archives of the United States, Great Britain, and France, and minor investigations have been made in the archives of Belgium and Mexico and in a number of libraries and collections in the United States. Many thousand pages of transcripts have been obtained from these places, supplementing at many points and in many important respects the materials previously available in Honolulu. Independently of this project, a large quantity of new material has been added to collections in the Territory, and there has...

Preface. xi -- List of Abbreviations. xiii -- Introduction: A Glimpse of Ancient Hawaii. 1 -- Coming of the Foreigners. 12 -- Kamehameha and the Founding of the Kingdom. 29 -- 1819. 61 -- Kamehameha II. 71 -- Early Commercial Development. 82 -- New Religion and New Learning. 100 -- The Early Years of the Reign of Kamehameha III: Regency of Kaahumanu. 117 -- The Troubled Thirties. 133 -- The Birth of Constitutional Government. 153 -- Industry, Agriculture, Manufactures. 170 -- The Recognition of Hawaii's Independence. 185 -- The Paulet Episode. 206 -- Governmental Reorganization in the Midst of Difficulties. 227 -- The Land Revolution. 269 -- Commercial and Agricultural Progress, 1830-1854. 299 -- Religious and Educational Development, 1840-1854. 335 -- The Struggle for Equitable Treaties. 368 -- The Shadow of Destiny. 383 -- On the Date of the Birth of Kamehameha. 429 -- On the Regency, 1823-1833. 430 -- On the Origin of the Hawaiian Sandalwood Trade. 434 -- On the Debt Settlement of 1826. 434 -- Index. 437 --...