Word: kamehameha
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hawaii' s Kamehameha the Great...
...similarity to Arthurian legend is hardly coincidental, though Richard Tregaskis, the war correspondent (Guadalcanal Diary) and novelist who died last August, was writing about the ruler of a small island kingdom a millennium removed from Camelot. In telling of Kamehameha, the very real soldier who waged a 30-years' war (1780-1810) to create an Hawaiian nation, Tregaskis leaned indulgently on legends of the sort that defy time and locale. The Polynesians had neither calendar nor alphabet before English-speaking traders started settling in the islands in the 1780s. Knowledge of Kamehameha's early career is misty, accounts...
Arms from George III. Richard Tregaskis' "biography" is therefore a blend of the fanciful and the factual. But it makes a fascinating tale that hurtles home like one of its hero's long spears. Kahekili, the warlord who was probably Kamehameha's real father, attempted to have the infant killed because of a threatening prophecy. Later, other princes were awed when the stripling moved a huge stone that mature warriors could not budge. Kamehameha began as a not-so-noble savage who brained and impaled foes in combat, conquered cousins, uncles and dear...
...widespread became his fame after his death that a move was started to have him canonized in Rome. And when Hawaii was asked to contribute statues of two of its heroes to the Capitol's Statuary Hall in Washington, he and the 19th century Hawaiian King Kamehameha were the nearly unanimous choices. A statue of Kamehameha presented no problem: one is already standing before the state judicial building; all the legislature needed to do was order up a replica...
Only a 15-minute drive from Kaanapali is the 19th century town of Lahaina, capital of Hawaii in the days of King Kamehameha III (1833-54) and a brawling happy-go-lucky port of call for whaling fleets. Under a $1,600,000 state grant, Lahaina's old palaces and prisons, missionary homes and hospitals are being restored into a sort of Polynesian Williamsburg. Tourists can cruise offshore in the 53-ft. schooner The Allure and, in wintertime, watch the herds of 50-ft.-long humpback and lob-tail whales that frolic and cavort with their calves as close...