The history of Hawaii may be said to be the story of arrivals. The early Polynesian adventurers, British navigators in search of a Northwest Passage, Protestant missionaries, and shipwrecked sailors all washed ashore on these islands—though no one seems to have left—and in their wake, myths and legends sprang up. The author of I Myself Have Seen It, Susanna Moore pieces together the dramatic story of late 18th-century Hawaii, in which an isolated pagan world of human sacrifice and strict taboo—without a currency or a written language—was confronted with the equally ritualized world of capitalism, Western education, and Christian values.