Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California

The Story

The book begins not in Hawaii but in transit, with a family crossing from New York toward the tropics and the Pacific. The voyage is full of practical discomforts and small spectacles: a schooner runs into trouble, a gale tears at the steamer, and the passengers measure their days by sickness, rough weather, and brief excitements such as porpoises racing beside the ship or sea-turtles appearing near the Florida coast. The narrator’s voice stays close to what can be seen and touched—berths, sails, food, the behavior of crew and passengers—while also giving the journey a moral shape. The Sabbath matters even on a ship, and the travelers try to keep hymns and worship amid the disorder of travel. The trip is at once ordinary and ceremonial, a movement away from home that keeps reminding the company of home.

The route takes them through Aspinwall and Panama, where the change of climate and landscape becomes part of the lesson. The ports are busy, the houses tiled or built of adobe, and the streets and beaches full of details that are carefully observed: mud pies, crabs, shells, and little natural aquaria in the rocks. The narrator lingers over the everyday life of the place, but always from the vantage of a visitor who is both amused and grateful. Panama appears as a place of heat, unfamiliar habits, and improvised living, where people borrow houses and work around tropical conditions. From there the steamship carries them onward through the Gulf of California, past Cape St. Lucas and along the western coast of America, which she describes as a grand chain of mountains, the “backbone of America.” The route itself becomes part of the argument: the world is wide, beautiful, and connected, and the travelers see it in sequence as they move westward.

San Francisco stands as the first major settling point. The city is approached by sea, and the account dwells on wharves, hills, the Lick House, churches, Mission Dolores, street cars, and the maritime labor of entering and leaving the harbor. The city is both practical and picturesque, with its bay, surf, and “bar,” but it is also already part of a larger western world. From there the journey turns more explicitly missionary and domestic as the party reaches Honolulu. The landing is dramatic: the ship Archer is signaled, the passengers are hoisted into boats, and the surf breaks over coral reefs in a way that is exciting but safe because of a pass in the reef. The welcome on shore is warm and immediate. Native women call with gifts of food, speak in Hawaiian, and greet the visitors with “aloha.” The narrator moves among missionaries, officials, and Hawaiian royalty, and the scenes are as social as they are scenic.

The Honolulu chapters build a sense of a society in transition. The party calls on Prince William Lunalilo and his father Kanaina, visits the royal cemetery with its crown and coffins, and attends prayer-meetings, school exercises, sewing circles, and church services. The narrator notices that these gatherings resemble home in some ways, yet are also distinctly island scenes, marked by lush flowers, open air, and a climate that frees people from northern winter. The book pauses often to show the missionary world at work: Oahu College at Punahou, young people studying and singing, families meeting for worship, and Hawaiian Christians organizing their own deacons, choirs, and teachers. A strong theme emerges here: the islands are no longer described as mere mission field but as a place where Christian forms have taken root and are visibly shaping public life.

From Honolulu the journey spreads outward to the islands themselves. On Hawaii, the travelers move from shoreline to uplands, from Hilo’s rain to Waimea’s wind, from volcanic country to high mountain views. The approach to Hilo includes surf landings in the dark and rain, a reminder that travel remains physically risky. Then comes the volcano section, where the party goes to Kilauea and the narrator connects the natural landscape to a historical story about Kapiolani. This story becomes one of the book’s central moral episodes. Kapiolani, a Hawaiian princess who has become a Christian, deliberately journeys to the crater to challenge the old belief in Pele, the volcano goddess. She travels over rough country, endures hardship, and intends by her act to break the hold of superstition on her people. The volcano is therefore not only scenery but a stage for religious and cultural change.

Other parts of the islands are rendered through travel by horseback and boat: Lahaina, Iao Valley, Waimea, Hanalei, Koloa, Princeville, Ewa, Waialua, and the circuit around Oahu. The company receives fruit, eggs, shells, flowers, and hospitality from local residents. Valleys open under towering cliffs, waterfalls descend in ribbons, and narrow paths, swollen streams, and steep ridges make the route memorable. The narrator often pauses to describe the productive and ornamental life of the islands—tree-shells, ohelo berries, candle-nuts, ti root, taro, poi, and the native use of tapa cloth—so the journey becomes a lesson in local knowledge as much as in scenery. The people are not simply looked at; their routines of food, cloth, worship, and travel are shown as part of the islands’ daily reality.

The final movement of the book returns toward departure and reflection. After tours, meetings, and repeated visits, the party leaves the islands, pauses again at San Francisco and Oakland, and finally sails back to New York. The closing pages shift from travel narrative to thanksgiving. The narrator quotes a hymn about divine protection in foreign lands and seas, then prints the Lord’s Prayer in English and Hawaiian. That ending gives the journey its final meaning: the long path across ocean and islands is not presented as adventure for its own sake, but as a passage under providence, in the service of mission, observation, and Christian fellowship. What lingers is not a dramatic plot twist but the cumulative shape of a route that turns travel into witness.

The People

• The narrator, Mary E. Anderson, is the observer who gathers the book’s details. She wants to understand what she sees and to share it simply and gratefully. She is curious about everything—food, customs, geography, flowers, shells, and public life—and she keeps returning to the missionary frame that gives the journey its purpose. Over time, her tone moves from wonder at novelty to a settled admiration for the islands’ beauty and for the Christian life she sees there.

• Grandpa, Rev. Rufus Anderson, is the center of the mission journey. He travels on official business and is repeatedly received with respect by missionaries, Hawaiian Christians, and local leaders. He wants to strengthen and assess the missionary work already underway. In the book he appears as a figure of authority and continuity, speaking in churches, meeting chiefs, and representing the long American missionary connection to the islands.

• Grandma is the steady companion whose discomforts and endurance help ground the travel scenes. She is often sick or constrained, yet she travels, visits, and endures the rough parts of the route. Her presence keeps the narrative domestic as well as public; she is part of the family body moving through difficult spaces.

• The Hawaiian people, especially the native women, church members, and students, are not one person but a living collective. They want to welcome, feed, speak, learn, worship, and preserve dignity in the face of change. They bring gifts, attend services, sing hymns, organize choirs, and participate in schools and meetings. In the narrator’s telling, they are visibly transformed by Christianity but also active, hospitable, and capable of self-direction.

• Kapiolani is the book’s strongest individual example of courage and change. She wants to free her people from fear of Pele and superstition. Her obstacle is not only physical distance and a dangerous volcanic landscape, but the weight of belief itself. By going to Kilauea and defying the goddess, she becomes a symbol of religious renunciation and moral resolve.

• Prince William Lunalilo, Kanaina, and other Hawaiian chiefs and governors represent the political and ceremonial world of the islands. They are shown in houses, at royal burial places, and in conversation with missionaries. Their role is to show that the old hierarchies remain visible even as the islands change under new religious and social influences.

In Its Own Voice

The narrator pauses often to let the travelers’ wonder or the island scene speak plainly. When the ship reaches Honolulu, the arrival is marked by both geography and emotion:

“Then we neared the land, and the pretty little village of Waikiki, with its thatched cottages snugly reposing in a tall cocoa-nut grove; then the green trees of Honolulu...”

That image gathers the book’s attraction to lush contrast, from bare volcanic slopes to cultivated life.

The most famous story in the book turns on Kapiolani’s deliberate challenge to old belief:

“She was not to be moved from her purpose.”

That sentence is the heart of her episode: steadiness against fear, a personal act meant to matter to a whole people.

Near the end, the book turns from travel and description to prayer and thanksgiving:

“Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.”

The line signals how thoroughly the journey is framed as a spiritual one, not just a scenic tour.

What It's Really About

The book is, on the surface, a travel narrative, but its real subject is encounter: between ocean and land, old belief and new religion, home habits and island life, observation and persuasion. The narrator does not simply collect picturesque scenes. She repeatedly asks what they mean in a moral and missionary sense. A mountain is not just a mountain; it is “the backbone of America.” A volcano is not just a volcano; it is the scene of a struggle against superstition. A school, church, or sewing circle is not merely social life; it is evidence that a once “barbarous” place has become orderly, literate, and Christian in the narrator’s view.

The book’s strongest pattern is contrast. It contrasts rough seas with calm harbors, barren lava with lush valleys, the bare outward look of the islands with their rich interior life, and old pagan fears with Christian confidence. Yet the contrasts are not always hostile. Often they create balance: a red volcanic mountain gives way to green villages; a hard road ends in hospitality; a formal royal cemetery leads into a prayer-meeting at a college. The world is presented as full of differences that can be read, compared, and placed within a providential frame.

Another important theme is domesticity in motion. The narrative turns travel into family conversation, with children asking about crabs, tapa, tree-shells, or sea-life, and the narrator answering patiently. This makes the book feel like a home education carried across the Pacific. The children’s questions become a way to slow the world down and make it legible. The result is gentle instruction: geography, natural history, and custom are folded into a family voice.

The book is also deeply interested in Christian institutions as forms of social order. It praises native congregations, choir discipline, school exercises, and missionary meetings, and it rejoices in the number of converts and church members. At the same time, it does not portray Hawaiian life as empty before mission. The hospitality, skill, beauty, and social intelligence of the people are always visible. That tension gives the book its shape: it is celebratory, but not entirely simple. It sees transformation everywhere, yet it also depends on the worth of the culture it is describing.

Why Read It Today

Readers who like nineteenth-century travel writing, missionary history, or vivid descriptions of landscape will find a great deal here. The book moves easily between sea travel, island scenery, domestic anecdote, and ceremonial visit. Its pleasures are in specific things: surf landings, steep valleys, bright flowers, ships’ routines, local foods, and the social choreography of calls and services. It also gives a useful glimpse of how an American Protestant visitor in 1863-65 sees Hawaii and California together as parts of a wider Pacific world.

What stays with you is the mixture of intimacy and distance. The narrator is often warm, amused, and attentive, but she is also clearly writing from a missionary point of view. That means the book can be charming in one line and historically revealing in the next. It is especially valuable when it notices the texture of ordinary life: women bringing eggs and taro, children learning, people singing in Hawaiian, or the small practical details of travel. Those moments feel alive.

At the same time, readers should expect period attitudes. The language of “barbarism,” “darkness,” and “civilized” culture is part of the book’s frame, and the missionary confidence is sustained throughout. That perspective is essential to the text; it cannot be separated from its observations. The book is most rewarding when read as a document of how one educated American Christian woman understands the Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century, and as a record of the landscapes and people she encounters along the way.