In 1899 a chartered yacht, the Casco, brought to Honolulu Robert Louis Stevenson and his family. The writer was then already at the height of his popularity in Europe and the United States. He spent the next six months and another, shorter period in 1893 in the Hawaiian Islands, participating in the life of the "royal crowd" and enjoying the best health of a lifetime plagued with illness. Travels in Hawaii brings together many of the diverse works from a romantic interlude in the career of this famous writer.

From the totem-pole makers of the Northwest to the hunters of the eastern woodlands, from the horse nations of the plains to the desert dwellers of the Southwest and the Mayas and Aztecs of ancient Mexico--from some forty tribal groups--A. Grove Day has collected examples of traditional American Indian verse. "This is a book to be read for pleasure," he writes; its purpose is "to show the variety and excellence of many kinds of authentic Indian poetry." Set in their cultural context, the selections also illustrate the major role, practical as well as aesthetic, that poetry played in the lives of Native American peoples. The translations are those of professional students of Indian languages who were also endowed with poetic powers of their own: people such as Franz Boas, Natalie Curtis, Frances Densmore, Washington Matthews, Herbert J. Spinden.