About Waikiki

A relatively unknown journalist named Samuel Clemens visited Hawai'i in 1866.   He came on an assignment for the Sacramento Union to explore the "Sandwich Islands" and write his impressions for an American audience.   His letters and sketches were the first widely read travelogue of the islands and served to introduce Americans to the land and people, as well as the politics and commerce, of mid 19th century Hawai'i.

To help place Mark Twain's visit on Hawaii's timeline, Kamehameha V, Lot Kapuâiwa, was the ruling monarch, having succeeded Alexander Liholiho in 1863. He was the last of the direct line of Kamehameha and would be succeeded by the Kingdom of Hawaii's first elected king following his death in 1872.   Almost 90 years had passed since Cook's "discovery", the missionaries had been in the islands for almost 50 years, and the local population (about 60,000) was believed one of the most literate in the world.   Whaling had declined as the Kingdom's primary export industry (supplying the ships with food and water) and growing sugar was on the rise, getting a boost during the U.S. Civil War which had ended the year before Mark Twain's visit. The first regular passenger service to the islands had just started earlier in 1866, so he really was one of the first tourists.

The native language is soft and liquid and flexible and in every way efficient and satisfactory--till you get mad; then there you are; there isn't anything in it to swear with. Good judges all say it is the best Sunday language there is. But then all the other six days in the week it just hangs idle on your hands; it isn't any good for business and you can't work a telephone with it. Many a time the attention of the mssionaries has been called to this defect, and they are always promising they are going to fix it; but no, they go fooling along and fooling along and nothing is done.
- Mark Twain's Speeches, 1923 ed. "Welcome Home"

Nearby is an interesting ruin--the meager remains of an ancient temple--a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old bygone days...long, long before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make [the natives] permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there; and showed the poor native how dreary a place perdition is and what unnecessarily liberal facilities there are for going to it; showed him how, in his ignorance, he had gone and fooled away all his kinsfolk to no purpose; showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for a pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but Nature. How sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their gaves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell.
- Roughing It

For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.
- Mark Twain, a Biography

Adultery they look upon as poetically wrong but practically proper...Kanakas will have horses and saddles and the women will fornicate--two strong characteristics of this people.
- quoted in Mark Twain in Hawaii, Walter Francis Frear

This is the most magnificent, balmy atmosphere in the world--ought to take dead men out of grave.
- quoted in Mark Twain in Hawaii, Walter Francis Frear

The missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there.
- Roughing It

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry,
and narrow-mindedness." 

--Mark Twain