W. N. Armstrong

Born in Lahaina, Maui, in 1835, W. N. Armstrong—William Nevins Armstrong—grew up in the Hawaiian Kingdom and was educated at Punahou School, the Royal School, Phillips Academy, and Yale. He trained as a lawyer and later moved between Hawaii and the mainland United States, building a career that combined law, politics, and writing.

Armstrong was a close associate of King David Kalākaua and served in the government of the Kingdom of Hawaii, including as attorney general in the early 1880s. He is most widely remembered for joining Kalākaua on the king’s 1881 trip around the world, then turning that experience into Around the World with a King, an insider’s account of the journey and its political purpose.

He also wrote fiction connected to Hawaii, including "Peleg Chapman’s Sharks," which appeared in a collection of Hawaiian stories in 1899. Today, his work is valued both for its storytelling and for the window it offers into Hawaiian history during a time of major change.