Originally published in 1915, this book provides an abundance of legends of the struggles, the triumphs, and the wanderings of the people, of their thoughts, their aspirations; in short, they give us a twilight history of the race.As soon as the Hawaiian alphabet was prepared, in 1821, native writers began delving into their past, finding there a treasure-mine of romantic stories and of valuable ethnological and historical facts in regard to the Polynesian race. These stories were written originally in Hawaiian, for native newspapers, and have been collected and translated by the author, W. D. Westervelt was also the author of Legends of Gods and Ghosts and Maui: A Semi-God of Polynesia. He was president of the Hawaiian Historical Society for some time.