Los Angeles in the days of the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii)


I just finished reading "Two Years Before the Mast", which is simple narrative story of a young man who spends two years (1835-6) on a ship that sails from Boston, Massachusetts, around the tip of South America, and spends a lot of time on the coast of California.

The book is public domain, and you can read it for free. I spent 99 cents to get it on my Nook (an ereader), and I have to admit that it wasn't really catching my attention until it got to places that I recognized, like San Diego, and Santa Barbara. And then the term "Sandwich Islands" was mentioned, so I looked it up. It was what Hawaii was called back then! How about that?

When the author visited California it still belonged to Mexico, and Hawaii was still called the Sandwich Islands. If you read the book, you'll see Los Angeles mentioned, as "El Pueblo" when they stop at San Pedro. Of course, the rest of the names you'll know, such as Monterey, and San Francisco.

When the author revisits 24 years later, I noticed that he used the term "Los Angeles" instead of "El Pueblo", but he still was calling Hawaii the "Sandwich Islands". He was forty by then, and often old-timers have difficulty adjusting to the new names of things. I suppose that the young 'uns would either correct him, or have no idea what he was talking about? Sandwich Islands?

The drawing at the top of this post is from 1873, long after Los Angeles was called "El Pueblo", and long after Hawaii was called the Sandwich Islands. But it's all that I can find, and I wanted to have a picture with this blog post. The real image of Los Angeles at the time will take your imagination. If you read the book, you'll see it. I did.

Thank you to my patrons on Patreon who help support History Adventuring! If you like these blog posts, and would like to make suggestions for future ones, please become a patron.

Become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more