A Pacific Ocean Childhood

George Douglas Freeth Jr. was born into an Anglo-Hawaiian family at Waikīkī during the last decade of the Hawaiian monarchy. King David Kalākaua (ruled 1874–1891) championed traditional Hawaiian cultural activities like hula and he‘e nalu (surfing) despite condemnation from a powerful Caucasian elite that within a decade of Freeth’s birth would overthrow the monarchy altogether. Freeth’s family would not be present for these events. Freeth’s father—George Douglas Freeth Sr. (1854–1914)—operated a guano mining business on Laysan, part of the distant chain of Hawaiian islands some nine hundred miles northwest of Honolulu. The whole family had sailed