Teacher David Kawika Eyre was surprised to learn how little some of his Hawaiian students at Kamehameha Schools know about their school’s namesake.

Sure, they knew a few stories, that Kamehameha I existed, that he united the Hawaiian Islands. But that’s about where their knowledge ended.

“As a writer, I had to fill in the facts of life, birth, death, war, yearning for peace,” Eyre said in a recent phone interview from his Volcano home. “He was a fierce fighter, but he was also a peacemaker.”

So Eyre delved into historical sources, particularly Hawaiian language newspapers, and crafted a piece of historical fiction around the known facts about Kamehameha. The story, “Kamehameha: The Rise of a King,” was published earlier this year and provides readers with a moving story filled with sometimes tense, sometimes humorous and sometimes tender stories that track the king from his birth in Kohala to his death in Kona, as well as his training and the many battles he fought in between.

Eyre’s goal was to “fill in the blanks in a culturally rich, culturally authentic way,” he said.

To that end, he focused on using Hawaiian descriptions, naming the winds and rains as Kamehameha and his contemporaries would have known them, and chose Hawaiian metaphors and descriptions over Anglicized and Americanized ones.

Eyre also wanted to describe a vivid and living world.

“Until 30 or 40 years ago, Hawaiian culture was museum culture, display cases, pictures of dead people” he said.