04/17/2020
Captain Cook named his "discovery" the Sandwich Islands. This was in honor of the benefactor of his voyage - Lord Montague, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich. This was what Hawaii was called for a hundred years. Mark Twain was totally enamored with The Sandwich Islands.
The following is one of my favorite collections of words ever assembled.
Twain:
“No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me the balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the spirit of its wildland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.”
