In 1907 Hawai'i's fledgling College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts, boasting an enrollment of five students and a staff of twelve, opened in a rented house on Young Street. The hastily improvised college, and the university into which it grew, owed its existence to the initiative of Native Hawaiian legislators, the advocacy of a Caucasian newspaper editor, the petition of an Asian American bank cashier, and the energies of a president and faculty recruited from Cornell University in distant Ithaca, New York. Today, nearly a century later, some 50,000 students are enrolled yearly at ten...

This story is a fictional reconstruction of the momentous visit to the island of Hawaii in 1779 by Captain James Cook and his company aboard H.M.S. Resolution and Discovery. The natives believed this first white visitor to be Lono, their long-awaited god of agriculture and the harvest. Realizing the benefits of being thought a god, Cook did nothing to dispel the misconception. Although most of his crew thoroughly enjoyed the pleasures offered by the island paradise, some men, including Ship's Master William Bligh (later captain of H.M.S. Bounty) and the American colonist John Ledyard,...