The Hawaiian Archipelago

"The Hawaiian Archipelago" is a great eyewitness account of Hawaii in 1863, by one of the era's most intrepid travelers, after it had been impacted by its collision with the American and European powers but while it was still a robust independent Kingdom and before its forced assimilation into the USA. Isabella Bird visited the Sandwich Islands in 1871, when she was forty. Her letters home to her sister Henrietta have a remarkable freshness and spontaneity, and reveal the transformation of ...