Ebook Our Hawaii

This book was originally part of the jottings I kept during a two years' cruise of Jack London and myself in the forty-five-foot ketch Snark into the fabulous South Seas, by way of the Hawaiian Islands. The seafaring portion of my notes was published in 1915 as "The Log of the Snark." The record of five months spent in the Paradise of the Pacific, Hawaii, I made into another book, "Our Hawaii," issued in 1917.

The present volume is a revision of the other, from which I have eliminated the bulk of personal memoirs, by now incorporated into my "Book of Jack London," a thoroughgoing biography. I have substituted more detail concerning the Territory of Hawaii, and endeavored to bring my subject up to date. Also, instead of making an independent work out of Jack London's three articles, written in 1916, entitled, "My Hawaiian Aloha," I am making them a part of my book, placing them first, because of their peculiar value with regard to vital points of view on Hawaii. These articles, published in 1916 in The Cosmopolitan Magazine, were pronounced by one citizen of Honolulu, eminent under more than two forms of government in the troublous past of the Group, as of a worth to Hawaii not to be estimated in gold and silver.

"They don't know what they've got!" Jack London said of the American public, when, in the Snark, he made Hawaii his first port of call, and threw himself into the manifold beauty and wonder of this territory of Uncle Sam.