Portrait of Ka'ahumanu

"Royalty. And last of all, I have found a people who combine the beauties of all these beautiful races, the Hawaiians.

As though descended from gods of heroic proportion, the royalty in Hawai’i were, almost always six feet tall and a had a weight to match. Intelligent and brave, bearing a strong affinity to the Greeks both in legends and in their person, their strange perfection increasing always with the various racial mixtures, these super Polynesians are equaled only by those who live in our imagination through Homer."

from The Art and Writing of Madge Tennent, by Arthur Tennent