Legends of Old Honolulu

The legends of Honolulu and the shore around it: the migration that brought the Hawaiians, the gods of the fishponds and the temples, the owl-king who gathered the owls of every island, the ghosts of the Nuuanu valley. W. D. Westervelt collected and translated from Hawaiian speakers and from the nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language newspapers. He gives the places as they stood when he wrote, so the stories can still be walked. Nine plates of early Italian and Dutch painting, from Lorenzetti to van Aelst, carry the same old-world devotion and daily life that these island stories preserve.