d the Hawaiian Islands in the middle of the sixteenth century on one of their regular voyages between Latin America and the Philippines. However, it was often the case that the Spanish would make discoveries and then not make the information public, so any knowledge of the islands was effectively lost to future generations. When Cook arrived, the Hawaiians showed an immediate interest in iron, which may indicate that they had had some earlier contact with Europeans, though the residents of the island had no oral tradition about such contact. The Hawaiians in fact told the Europeans that they and obtained iron from pieces of driftwood that had washed up on their shores (Withey, 1987, 360). Captain Cook reported on this first meeting in his journal and offered his impressions of the impact the coming of the Europeans had made:
In the course of my several voyages, I never before met with natives of any place so much astonished as these people were upon entering a ship. Their ignorance about everything they saw indicated that till now they had never been visited by Europeans nor been acquainted with any of our commodities except iron; which, however, it was plain they had only heard of, or had known it in some small quantity brought to them at some distant period (Dale,1969, 180).
None of those who arrived that day in 1778 had any idea that these islands existed, for they did not appear on any known charts but only existed in legends and memories in Tahiti and the Marquesas. In the legends, the islands were known as Havaiki. The Polynesians were expert navigators and roamed thousands of miles across the Pacific in great mat-sailed double canoes. When they arrived in Hawaii and Kauai, perhaps as early as 700 A.D., they had with them pigs, dogs, fowl, and the beginnings of their basic food plants, including coconut, taro, breadfruit, and bananas. The shelters on these twin-hulled vessels contained the ti, with long, broad lea...