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INTRODUCTION TO THE

NEW EDITION

The Legends and Myths of Hawaii, by His Hawaiian Majesty King David Kalakaua, is here reprinted for the first time since the original 1888 edition was published in New York by Charles L. Webster and Company. The work has become a classic of its kind but has been virtually unavailable to students in recent decades. The 1888 volume has become a rare book indeed, much sought after by collectors.

The author, King David Kalakaua, spearheaded a renaissance of traditional Hawaiian culture, partly as a means of offsetting the many disintegrating influences under which the Hawaiians had fallen. In the eyes of many of his contemporaries, especially the European business fraternity and the missionaries in Honolulu, he was advocating a return to paganism. But they were wrong, and Kalakaua was right. We now know that the dignity of a people rests largely in respect for their culture and the activities in which that culture is expressed.

In the extensive introduction by the Hon. R. M. Daggett there is a gloomy reference to the condition of the Hawaiians: "slowly sinking year by year... their footprints grow more dim." Indeed, to the Hawaiians of the nineteenth century it appeared that the gods of old were taking revenge on them and that they were doomed to extinction. The king was an optimist, however, and The Legends and Myths of Hawaii is one of many practical steps taken in the direction of reviving and preserving Hawaiian culture.

The traditional Hawaiian culture to which King Kalakaua was so devoted had suffered three major traumatic shocks that had crippled its original vitality: namely, the realization that there existed another culture of technical superiority (first evident on the arrival of Captain Cook's ships in 1778), the renunciation in 1819 (by the Hawaiians themselves) of ancient traditional religion and revered social laws based on taboos, and the inflow of aliens to Hawaii from the mid-nineteenth century onward. A fourth blow to Hawaiian confidence came in 1893, when financially ambitious Americans overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy. Already the inroads of imported diseases and the dispirited condition of the Hawaiians had reduced their numbers to a fraction by the time of King Kalakaua's reign.

Fortunately, in the twentieth century, the number of native Hawaiians has increased, and there is a growing awareness of the value of their past. Today Hawaii is the fiftieth State of the U.S.A., a conglomeration of ethnic groups and racial admixtures. The Hawaiian is, however, still under the burden of an unequal battle with circumstances over the past two hundred years. The cry for identity that King Kalakaua put up has more meaning today than ever before, and it seems clear that right use of traditional Hawaiian culture will contribute tremendously to the life of modern Hawaii. The basic means of the study of Hawaiian culture today is literature, and no doubt King Kalakaua's book has a distinctive role to play.

Anthropology was an infant subject in Kalakaua's day, while Polynesian archaeology as a science was half a century in the misty future. The Polynesians are not, as he believed, Aryan wanderers out of "Asia Minor or Arabia" who reached Polynesia via India. In fact they are a racially mixed group whose ancestors ventured out from the eastern limits of the Southeast Asian islands and coasts in voyages of ever increasing length. Some eight hundred years after Christ it appears they had found and populated every habitable island from New Zealand in the south to Hawaii in the north and from Fiji to Easter Island. The entry of the Polynesian ancestors into Polynesia began some centuries before Christ. Hawaii itself was settled by migrations which seem to have originated first in the Marquesas Islands about 750 and then about 1250 in the Society Islands.

Modern scholars will also be critical of Kalakaua's belief that the first Western discoverers of Hawaii were Spanish. It seems clear that Captain James Cook was the first rediscoverer of Hawaii following its initial discovery by the first Hawaiians. Captain Cook was unquestionably the greatest Western explorer of the Pacific, humane and much loved by the Polynesians. One may say that Hawaiian history is dominated by two great symbolic figures. They are King Kamehameha I and Captain James Cook. The story in this book entitled "Kaiana, the Last of the Hawaiian Knights" concerns them both, but Kalakaua's description of Cook's character as Exacting, dictatorial, and greedy" is uninformed. One feels that Kalakaua was reflecting a fashion of the time to downgrade the contribution of Captain Cook and to justify Hawaiian treatment of him.

King David Kalakaua was born in 1836, when memories of old Hawaiian ways and beliefs were still fresh. He was a man of both past and present, singularly colorful in character. Robert Louis Stevenson, who became his friend, found in him a cultured intellectual of unusual mental powers. His warmth of feeling and his unsurpassed ability to absorb alcohol were evident to all in the kingdom.

Kalakaua sought a revival of traditional Hawaiian life along with a political and cultural revival elsewhere in Polynesia. In fact, he attempted to unify Polynesia into one state: an idea as impractical then as it would be today.

But the Hawaiian monarchy was soon to end. In 1893, two years after King Kalakaua died, Queen Liliuokalani, the sister who had succeeded him, was deprived of her throne. The sad story has been retold in varying lights, but the truth is that the end of the ruling high chiefs was as inevitable as the earlier rejection of the Hawaiian pantheon of gods, demigods, guardians, and ancestral spirits. The world of old Hawaii was then ended forever.

Finally it should be noted that The Legends and Myths of Hawaii is not all mythology. It is rich in historical narrative. King Kalakaua relates the stories of certain great events with such verve that one can readily imagine he was an eyewitness. No doubt he had heard the same tales from the sons and daughters of those who had been present on occasions such as the death of Captain Cook. Since the momentous Hawaiian rejection of the ancient gods took place only two decades before his birth, many of the people about him as he grew to manhood had lived under the old system. His sources of knowledge were direct indeed.

TERENCE BARROW, PH.D.