Nathaniel Bright Emerson

Nathaniel Bright Emerson (1839–1915) was an American physician and scholar of Hawaiian culture. Born in Hawaii to missionary parents, he served as a Union soldier in the Civil War, took his medical degree at Harvard and practiced in Honolulu, where he served on the Board of Health. His chief contributions were literary: he translated David Malo's Hawaiian Antiquities (1898), and wrote Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula (1909) and Pele and Hiiaka: A Myth from Hawaii (1915), which preserved the chants of the volcano goddess cycle with translations at a time when the tradition was fading.