The life story of Kaiulani, an Hawaiian princess in the late nineteenth century, as written in her dairy.

Ka'iulani's story spans the years when Hawai'i struggled against foreign domination, the monarchy was overthrown, and Hawai'i became a U.S. territory. It is a dramatic story, full of interest, beauty, and pathos, both fascinating as the biography of a singularly gifted, beautiful, and wise young woman, and valuable as a chapter in the history of the fiftieth state. Ka'iulani was a fairy-tale princess, who as a child lived in an enchanted Waikk garden of huge banyan trees where peacocks roamed. Her uncle, King David Kal kaua, was overjoyed at her birth, happy to know that his sister, Princess Miriam Likelike, had produced an heir to the throne. She was a dazzled witness to the first formal coronation of a Hawaiian king; a princess who later suffered years of exile and humiliation, who became the shining heroine of a humbled nation, and who died still young and beautiful at the age of twenty-three. Richly illustrated with vintage photographs, Ka'iulani: Hawai'i's Tragic Princess, tells the story of Hawai'i's beloved princess while illuminating late nineteenth century Hawaiian history.

Learn all about the princess of Hawaii with some history of Hawaii.

The history of Hawaii may be said to be the story of arrivals -- from the eruption of volcanoes on the ocean floor 18,000 feet below to the first hardy seeds that over millennia found their way to the islands, and the confused birds blown from their migratory routes. Early Polynesian adventurers sailed across the Pacific in double canoes. Spanish galleons en route to the Philippines and British navigators in search of a Northwest Passage were soon followed by pious Protestant missionaries, shipwrecked sailors, and rowdy Irish poachers escaped from Botany Bay -- all wanderers washed ashore. This is true of many cultures, but in Hawaii, no one seems to have left. And in Hawaii, a set of myths accompanied each of these migrants -- legends that shape our understanding of this mysterious place. Susanna Moore pieces together the story of late-eighteenth-century Hawaii -- its kings and queens, gods and goddesses, missionaries, migrants, and explorers -- a not-so-distant time of abrupt transition, in which an isolated pagan world of human sacrifice and strict taboo, without a currency or a written language, was confronted with the equally ritualized world of capitalism, Western education, and Christian values.