Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands: Of the Civil, Religious, and Political History of Those Islands

The fascinating personal account from one of the first Westerners to live in Hawaii.

A Residence of Twenty-One Years in the Sandwich Islands, by the Reverend Hiram Bingham, was first printed in New York in 1847. The book provides a panoramic history of Hawaii from before its discovery in 1778 by Captain James Cook up to 1845. Hiram Bingham became Hawaii's most notable missionary, an adviser to kings and queens, and was truly one of Hawaii's most influential historical figures. His work did much to transform old Hawaii into a new Hawaii. He was a child of his time, an ardent advocate of the Calvinistic Christianity of New England. He was unsympathetic to the traditional Hawaiian culture, yet his book tells us an enormous amount about Hawaiians as well as the missionary endeavors of himself and his colleagues.

Personally Bingham was a man of great courage in a world of danger. Whaleers and their bottles of grog, the condemnation of those who opposed him, his worries about backsliding chiefs, wayward boy and girl converts, monarchs who liked alcohol—all these were very real problems to Bingham and his colleagues, amusing though they may seem to us today.