I pass along the following email to me for anyone interested.

Wes Britton

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Just a FYI, if you haven't seen it already. I was looking up
dissertation abstracts on something else and came across it.

Zmijewski, David. "Huck Finn and Hawaii: A Study of Hawaiian Influence
on the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." American Studies Department,
University of Hawaii at Manoa, December 1998.

Mark Twain visited Hawaii in 1866 and wrote extensively on the history,
culture, and religion of the people, and later planned a novel set in
the Islands. In January 1884, Twain acknowledged that he had completed
the Sandwich Island Novel. Shortly thereafter, he stopped referring to
the novel, and the whereabouts of the manuscript still remain a mystery.
What happened to the Sandwich Island Novel? This dissertation examines
the significance of the Hawaii sojourn on the writer and his later
fiction and advances the thesis that Twain did not discard the Hawaiian
material. After discussing the social, political and cultural situation
in the islands as well as investigating the sources that influenced
Twain, this study shows how those Hawaiian materials--the superstitions,
natural scenery, people, and culture--were incorporated into his later
fiction, especially the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).