Legends & Myths of Hawaii. King David Kalakaua

      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,