Southern California Quarterly
Fall issue, 2001.
Review by Richard H. Dillon.
Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
To some academics, bibliography is the stoop labor of scholarship. But to most of us it is the servant of - no, the foundation for - the research that makes possible an accurate historical narrative. And many of us, who consider bibliography to be a very demanding, taxing effort, find ourselves in a kind of awe of practitioners of this difficult discipline.
California has done well by bibliography ever since the Book Club of California published Robert E. Cowan's A Bibliography of California and the Pacific Coast during World War I. That inaugural publication of the Club was followed by works from other presses, such as the various editions of The Plains and Rockies by Wagner, Camp and Becker. And surely the high point of the state's current Sesquicentennial celebration has been the Book Club's publishing of Gary Kurutz's splendid California Gold Rush.
We now have another bibliographic tour de force and it is, again, from a member of the Book Club of California. However, it is published by the University of Hawaii in association with Hordern House in Sydney. (Forbes ransacked New South Wales libraries in his quest, as well as those in London, Paris and the U.S.)
This first volume of an eventual multi-volume set has already been praised by the prestigious London book firm Bernard Quaritch, Ltd, for its "meticulous descriptions". Amen! The Britons particularly liked the bibliographer's coverage of Captain James Cook's third voyage, in which he discovered Hawaii, but was killed at Kealakekua Bay. This reviewer is impressed with the high quality of all Forbes's detailed annotations. Here is a book to shelve alongside The Hill Collection of Pacific Voyages.
Besides describing what the Dean of Hawaiian historians, the late Grove Day, jocularly called "Cook Books," you will find here the accounts of other explorers up to Victorian times, and even a careful selection of periodical, newspaper and ephemera entries on the subject. We could, perhaps, wish for more illustrations. There are only 30, of title-pages, etc. One early reviewer lamented the lack of space to include more information on the artists and engravers responsible for the books early pictures of Island life.
The ties between Hawaii and California are many and strong. The former was a kingdom and the latter a part of the Spanish Empire. Before statehood, both states were republics. The myth or legend of both places utterly fascinated Europe and the U.S. in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And Californians pioneered all-important Hawaiian tourism, thanks in part to the fascination of the Islands for world-class writers then residents in California, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Mark Twain and Jack London.
There is a rare, magic, magnetism that still attracts Californians to "their" offshore vacation land of Kona and Poipu and Laperouse Bay. Here in the detailed notes of this excellent reference work is a history-in-brief of the early exploration of these "Paradise Isles.
"Richard H. Dillon has written extensively on the history of California and the American West, covering a vast range of topics both
local and regional. He is also a Hawaiianaphile (to coin a word) and is well versed in the history and literature of the Islands"