As merchant Captain Hunnewell sails off to Canton, China as a passenger aboard a sandalwood run, he notes in his log the plans of the other ships. Captain Reynolds of the Sultan was remaining in port.  He was the one who had paid off Joseph back on Hawaii on Aug. 24 for his work. So Reynolds would have been seeing Joseph around Honolulu’s waterfront....

One of the seaman dies aboard the patriots’s ship. William Bush had been confined to quarters for 10 months. The first act of the Argentines mariners was to bury the man with military honors in Honolulu. According to James Hunnewell’s account, Bush “lived respected and died lamented.” This doesn’t sound like the exploits of some...

Sea captain/merchant James Hunnewell keeps a record of the ships coming and going at Honoraru (another spelling that the Western ear heard of the Hawaiian word) since he’d become a resident nine months earlier. It is generally a pretty quiet village. But on this day, two Spanish warships ships arrive from Owyhee (Hawaii). They’d been expecting one...