Through archival work in British Columbia, Oregon, California, and Hawaii, the authors pieced together what is known about the sailors, laborers, and settlers from 1787 to 1898, the year the Hawaiian Islands were annexed to the US. They include biographical entries on some 800 Native Hawaiians, a useful complement to their narrative history.

Native Hawaiians arrived in the Pacific Northwest as early as 1787. Some went out of curiosity; many others were recruited as seamen or as workers in the fur trade. By the end of the nineteenth century more than a thousand men and women had journeyed across the Pacific, but the stories of these extraordinary individuals have gone largely unrecorded in Hawaiian or Western sources. Through painstaking archival work in British Columbia, Oregon, California, and Hawaii, Jean Barman and Bruce Watson pieced together what is known about these sailors, laborers, and settlers from 1787 to 1898, the year the Hawaiian Islands were annexed to the United States. In addition, the authors include descriptive biographical entries on some eight hundred Native Hawaiians, a remarkable and invaluable complement to their narrative history. Scholars and others interested in a number of fields-Hawaiian studies, Western U.S. and Western Canadian history, diaspora studies--will find Leaving Paradise an indispensable work.