Stephen Shender

"Once There Was Fire is the story of Kamehameha the Great, who rose from inauspicious beginnings on the Big Island of Hawai'i in the mid-1700s to conquer the entire archipelago by 1810. The founder of the Kingdom of Hawaii, Kamehameha was born into a Neolithic society, unchanged for generations since the islands' settlement by voyagers from distant Polynesia a thousand years earlier. As a young man, Kamehameha witnessed the arrival in the Islands...