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LIFE IN THE SANDWICH ISLANDS:

OR,

THE HEART OF THE PACIFIC,

AS IT WAS AND IS.

BY REV. HENRY T. CHEEVER,

AUTHOR OF THE ISLAND WORLD OF THE PACIFIC," "THE WHALE AND
HIS CAPTORS, ETC.

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WITH ENGRAVINGS.

Histories make men wise; poetry, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural
philosophy, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend; voyages and travels, tɔ
entertain and illustrate.
LORD BACON.

NEW YORK:

PUBLISHED BY A. S. BARNES & CO.,

NO. 51 JOHN-STREET.

CINCINNATI:-H. W. DERBY & CO.

1856.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-one,

By A. S. BARNES & COMPANY,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.

STEREOTYPED BY
RICHARD C. VALENTINE,

NEW YORK.

PREFACE.

We call this book "The Heart of the Pacific," for two reasons: first, because the Sandwich or Hawaiian Islands, which form its subject-matter, hold about the same relation to other parts of the Pacific as the heart does to the rest of the human body. Second, because these Islands bid fair to become the religious Protestant Heart of the great Ocean, whose pulsations at different times we have herein marked and interpreted.

Although independent and whole of itself, it has a connection which will be seen with "The Island-World of the Pacific." The writer believes it may fulfil a useful part, in directing the general interest now felt in the young Island-Kingdom of Hawaii. The perpetuity of the pure Hawaiian race there is daily becoming more and more doubtful. But, as it has been remarked of New Zealand, the natives, though melting away, are not lost. They are emerging into another and a better class. In this process there lacketh not sin on man's part; but Providence will overrule it for good, and bring forth an order of things which shall

be far better for the world, for the Church of Christ, and for the new race.

Perhaps it is in the providential plan of the world's great Ruler, that the Sandwich Islands should yet be adopted into the great American Confederacy. Won as they have been from the lowest barbarism by American missionaries, having had expended upon them in the process, nearly a million and a half of dollars from America, and the services of fifty families now possessing there valuable homesteads,-harboring a permanent American population, foremost in energy and influence, now little short of one thousand, besides a floating American population that touch and recruit annually to the number of fifteen thousand, in whaleships and merchantmen, and consuming yearly a million of dollars' worth of American merchandise ;-on all these grounds there would seem to be a propriety in their enjoying an American Protectorate, if not an admission under the flag of the American Republic.

"American enterprise," says a writer* who has been for many years familiar with the history and progress of the Hawaiian Islands, "both commercial and philanthropic, has invested the group with its present political importance-bestowing upon the inhabitants laws, religion, civilization-and will soon add to these gifts

*J J. Jarves.

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language; for the English tongue is rapidly superseding the Hawaiian. The Islanders have thus a moral claim upon the American nation for protection. In no way can this be more efficiently bestowed than by receiving them into the family of this great Republic. The native population are as well prepared to be American citizens, as the multitude of European emigrants. Unlike the generality of them, they can read and write, and have already acquired democratic ideas under the operation of their own liberal constitution of government, which will readily enable them to incorporate themselves under our institutions. They are destined to be supplanted in numbers and power by a foreign race. They desire us to be their successors and protectors. The present revenues of the Islands are more than adequate to the expenses of its governmenttime, opportunity, the interests of the inhabitants and ourselves point to this result."

Events will soon determine whether they are to retain their independency, or to be merged in the nation that has civilized them. In either event they are to constitute no mean a portion of the kingdom of Christ; and if this book shall be found to have helped at all to the production of that better order of things, when HE WHOSE RIGHT IT IS SHALL REIGN, the labor bestowed on it at a time when the decay of health, and circumstances not to be controlled, precluded the exercise

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