Timeline in Hawaiian History...

The Hawaiian Islands lie in the eastern half of the North Pacific (Kykendall & Day, 1948 p.3), more than 2,400 miles from the closest continental land mass, it is one of the last spots on the globe to be populated (Barnes, 1999). Hawai‘i consists of eight major islands: Hawai’i, Maui, ‘Oahu, Kaua’i, Moloka’i, Lana’i, Ni’ihau, and Kaho’olawe.

Nobody knows for sure exactly where the first Hawaiians came from or exactly dates of arrival were. The Hawaiians embraced an oral tradition that preserved their stories through chants and dance, legends of creation, mythology, genealogy, and stories of travel from far away lands that were passed down for centuries, from generation to generation. Time was not measured by the Christian calendar because the first protestant missionaries did not arrive until the early 1800s.

Anthropologists study the bones of the earliest settlers to determine where they had migrated from, and have determined that, although the bone structures differ slightly, scientific examination of skulls reveal that the ancient Hawaiians were a mixed race, predominantly Caucasoid, some Mongoloid, with traces of Negroid ancestry. In researching, I have found slightly differing stories about the origins of the very first people to arrive in Hawai’i.

The ancestors of the Polynesian people are held by most scientists to been a Caucasian offshoot which worked east from south of the Himalayas and reached the islands of Malay Archipelago collectively known as Indonesia…there they came in contact with the Mongoloid ancestors of the Malays…a certain amount of intermixture took place, followed by a conflict which resulted in the push east into the Pacific of the mixed Caucasian-Mongoloid people. This mixed people, largely Caucasian and to a lesser degree Mongoloid, formed what are termed the Polynesians. (As sited in Barnes, 1999, p. 19)

The dominant theory is that the people are from Polynesia, the region within a geographic triangle that connects New Zealand, Easter Island, and the northern point of Hawai‘i (Barnes, 1999; Emory, 1999) and that they arrived in small groups sometime around 500 – 750 AD searching for food and a new place to settle (Dunford, 1980, p. 21).

They migrated from Asia to the Southeast Asian Peninsula and then continued across the sea into Indonesia. From there they followed an easterly route across Melanesia and Micronesia to the vicinity of Fiji. From this juncture one strand headed south to New Zealand. Another headed north, through the Society Islands, to the Marquesas, and then on to Hawai‘i. (Barnes, 1999 p. 8)

Later, many other people came from Tahiti and other nearby islands over a thousand years ago (Dunford, 1980). These people came to be known as Hawaiians. “They traveled back and forth to Tahiti for a few hundred years, and then those trips stopped. The people of Hawai‘i did not see people from other lands for many, many years” (p. 22).

The Hawaiians were expert sailors, skillfully navigating their double hulled canoes by the stars. Their voyages were planned with care; taro, sweet potato, yam, coconut, bananas to plant were brought for food, ‘ōlena (turmeric) and noni (Indian mulberry) for medicine and dye; on later voyages they brought more people on larger canoes, and land animals such as pigs, chicken and dogs, to be raised for food (p. 25 – 27).