When twenty-three-year-old Carrie Prudence Winter caught her first glimpse of Honolulu from aboard the Zealandia in October 1890, she had never seen anything so beautiful. She had been traveling for two months since leaving her family home in Connecticut and was at last only a few miles from her final destination, Kawaiaha'o Female Seminary, a flourishing boarding school for Hawaiian girls. As the daughter of staunch New England Congregationalists, Winter had dreamed of being a missionary teacher as a child and reasoned that teaching for a few years among the Sandwich Islands seemed...