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Originally published in 1906.This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies.All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume. ... Read more

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Charles H. Hammatt arrived in Honolulu in 1823 anxious to do business, not to save souls.Young, confident, and ambitious, Hammatt had been entrusted by a mercantile firm in Boston with the delicate task of negotiating trade agreements with Hawaiian royalty to secure sandalwood for the China Trade.We have no fears of your falling into any of the vices you will find at the Islands, his employers wrote in their detailed instructions, but it may be well to reflect on them, to be better prepared to reside in a Society where indolence, intemperance, debauchery, and gambling are so fashionable.

Hammatt remained in Hawaii long enough to form his own opinions about native society and the odd mix of miscreants and missionaries that populated the largest port in the Pacific.His personal and business dealings brought him into close contact with a wide range of people, from the king, Liholiho (Kamehameha II), and his wary ministers to unscrupulous harbor merchants and sea captains and other Yankee rogues.From time to time Hammatt also found himself among polite missionary society.He diligently recorded his encounters and observations in his journal, which, published here for the first time, provides an unexpected and intimate glimpse of life in frontier Hawaii less than half a century after Cooks arrival.

Ultimately, Hammatt proved unsuccessful in his business dealings, and in 1825 his employers ordered him home to Boston.But the account he left of his failed mission is an exciting and colorful addition to previous descriptions from the period.Hammatt learned the hard way that the Hawaiians were shrewd negotiators and in firm control of all aspects of trade with foreigners.Readers will delight in this unique view of a Yankee trader and his merchant rivals competing to do business with Hawaiian royalty. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Trapped ashore amidst "damned scoundrels"
Sandra Wagner-Wright, who teaches history at the University of Hawaii-Hilo, discovered Charles Hammatt's journal in the back pages of a Bryant & Sturgis account book at Harvard. She calls it "an exciting addition" to materials on a crucial period in Hawaii, and "a welcome change from (the views of) ubiquitous missionaries . . .laconic traders . . . or ship's officers who did not remain in Hawaii for any length of time."

That overstates the case a little, but Hammatt, a young New Englander about whom little is known, did keep an interesting diary.

Bryant & Sturgis was one of the leading firms in the sandalwood trade. These Bostonians were happy to sell beads and cloth, both in Hawaii and along the west coast of North America, but after Kamehameha I's death the chiefs wanted western ships more than anything else. Bryant & Sturgis had several sloops and brigs it was hopeful of disposing of, plus accounts due for the king's purchase of the famous Cleopatra's Barge, the first millionaire's yacht built in America.

Hammatt, an experienced supercargo who had spent time in India for his employers, was sent out to sell ships and collect sandalwood to pay for them. It was, as Wagner-Wright says, a crucial time in Hawaii.

The chiefs still completely controlled the small haole business community, promising wood but seldom delivering, but tensions were building.

Though Hammatt's notes offer character judgments of the other white traders and officers, unusually, he was not inclined either to praise or to censure the Hawaiians. He arrived when Liholiho was drinking himself to death, and noted the fact, but did not moralize. Nor, unlike the hot-tempered merchant Stephen Reynolds, did he express strong feelings about the missionaries.

He seems, in fact, to have looked about him with wide, fresh eyes. He did not come to conquer Hawaii, or to change it. He accepted its ways without demur, even hiring a "cruise wife."

If there is anything new to history in this slender volume, it is his amused account of how one of the other traders fell in love with one of the famous hapa-haole Holmes sisters and nearly ruined himself trying to persuade her to follow him to sea. This is the most direct account I know of this form of concubinage or prostitution (from the western point of view), which despite the missionaries and the chiefs persisted far in the whaling era.

Hammatt wanted only wood. He realized very soon after arriving that he wasn't going to get it.

Shortly after he left, an American warship arrived to force the chiefs to acknowledge and arranged to pay their debts. That, says Wagner-Wright, was the beginning of the end of Hawaiian sovereignty.

That is one way of looking at it, but her very short analysis is unpersuasive. Following the unreliable PC anthropologist Greg Dening, she argues that the chiefs did not pay wood because they were on a different kind of time from the Americans.

Even if true, that does not explain why the great Kamehameha paid his debts punctiliously. A far more likely explanation of Hammatt's trouble is that the chiefs felt no responsibility to pay, because no one could tell them to do anything.

The complete lack of business ethics on the part of the chiefs resulted in a beggar-thy-neighbor attitude among both chiefs and traders, with the commoners paying most of the penalty, dying in the uplands chopping down the sandalwood.

Hammatt was slow to anger, but after only a few months in Honolulu he was disgusted with the "damned scoundrels here, who are held by no contract & who regard no promises."
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Originally published in ca. 1922.This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies.All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume. ... Read more

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Visual C++ has become the industry-wide language to write Windows programs and is the corporate standard for programming languages.Kris Jamsa’s Starting with Visual C++ covers key aspects of this programming language.Because this book starts with the basics, it is an ideal introduction for anyone who wants to learn Visual C++ for the first time. ... Read more

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A rich collection of original research, the eighteen essays in this book originiated as a series of presentations at a Symposium on Irish and Anglo0Saxon Literary Culture in Honor of J. E. Cross held in conjunction with the 30th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in May 1996.The purpose of that symposium was to bring together a number of friends and admireres of Professor Cross to celebrate his remarkably rich career as a scholar of Old English and Insular Latin literature, Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, and medieval sermons, saints' lives, and apocrypha. ... Read more

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Quarter Notes harvests recent reviews, essays, memoirs, and interviews by acclaimed poet Charles Wright. Wright uses creative variations on the form of the linear essay including interviews with himself as interviewee, correspondence (with Charles Simic), and experimentation with what he calls Improvisations "non- linear associational storylines". The book's short, staccato-like bursts add up to much more than the sum of their parts.
This satisfying collection includes reminiscences and meditations on the details of memory and what it means to visit the past; the vices of titleism and the hydrosyllabic foot in poetry; a comparison of poems and journeys; appreciation of poets Donald Justice and John Crow Ransom; an attempt to define "image"; discussions of the current state of poetry; and various highlights from the Charles Wright Literary Festival.
Charles Wright's books of poetry include The World of the Ten Thousand Things and Country Music: Selected Early Poems. He received the 1993 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the 1992 Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Souder Family Professor of English, University of Virginia.
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This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's large-scale digitization efforts. The Library seeks to preserve the intellectual content of items in a manner that facilitates and promotes a variety of uses. The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the original text that can be both accessed online and used to create new print copies. The Library also understands and values the usefulness of print and makes reprints available to the public whenever possible. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found in the HathiTrust, an archive of the digitized collections of many great research libraries. For access to the University of Michigan Library's digital collections, please see http://www.lib.umich.edu and for information about the HathiTrust, please visit http://www.hathitrust.org ... Read more

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This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more