THERE ARE THOSE who claim the missionaries came to spoil a paradise enjoyed by a simple, carefree people by imposing burdensome religious demands on them, and destroying their natural lifestyle. The uninformed jest is that the missionaries “came to do good, and ended up doing well.” Novelist James Michener, whose novel Hawaii offers an unfavorable view of some missionary endeavors, agrees he was not writing history and admits that the missionaries were “stalwart people” and that much of the criticism of them was “ either malicious or uninformed.” This book is for those who have read Michener s powerful novel (Hawaii) and have wondered what is true and what is fictional.