Hawaiki

“ Thus, on New Zealand testimony, Hema, Kahai, Wahieloa and Laka were chiefs of Hawaiki or Sawaii in the Samoan group, and not of Hawaii in this group. These names and their pedigrees must then have been carried from Hawaiki to Tahiti and from Tahiti to this group, unless we assume a direct settlement from Hawaiki to Hawaii.
It is true, certainly, that the Hawaiian legends ascribe a local habitation as well as a name to each of these four chiefs, either on Maui, Oahu or Kauai, and places and monuments connected with their names are existing to this day ”

“ Of these names Hawaiki—the Maori form of the word—is the principal, and is known to nearly every branch of the race, though it varies in form from island to island according to the changes that have taken place in the language since the dispersion. The universality of this name points to the fact that it is extremely ancient and that it was under that form the Fatherland was originally known. With many branches, it has now become synonymous with "Spirit-land:" the place to which the spirits of the dead pass as their final resting-place. In some parts it is said to be the "under world;" ”

“ Hikurangi, one of the mountains mentioned above, is also connected with the Deluge legends, and its name has been applied by the race to several other mountains in their later homes, e.g., Tahiti, Rarotonga, New Zealand, etc. Hawaiki-atua is another name for the Father-land—Hawaiki-of-the-gods—where the gods originated from Rangi and Papa—the Sky father and Earth mother, and where is "the meeting place of gods and men," as we shall see later on—where spirits foregathered with their deified ancestors. ”

“ To the Rarotongans, all the Western Groups including Samoa, Tonga and Fiji are known as Hawaiki-raro, [64] or leeward Hawaiki, whilst Tahiti and the adjoining groups are called Hawaiki-runga, or windward Hawaiki. Again, the ancient name for New Zealand—with which they were well acquainted traditionally—was Hawaiki-tautau, as well as the Maori name Aotea-roa. Tautau is the Maori word tahutahu, to burn, or burning, and the name was probably given to New Zealand on account of its active volcanoes. ”

“ Hence we find that the spirits after death went to the west, to Lavau, a name which I hope to show is as ancient as Hawaiki.
The above examples are taken from the principal homes of the race, and they all illustrate the one common idea that the spirit passes to the west to the ancestral home of the people. If enquiries were instituted in the other islands inhabited by the Polynesians, I have no doubt we should find traces of the same belief. ”

“ Of the islands mentioned above, I think Ra'iatea is clearly the Rangiatea of the Maori traditions preserved by the Taranaki and West Coast people, which they say was the name of Turi's home, and where also tradition says was the great marae "at Hawaiki, belonging to the warrior chiefs—to the great chiefs of the sacred cult, used for their invocations in time of war. ”

“ The Ngati paoa tribe’s chiefs, in 1853, counted fifteen generations from and with Hotunui who came from Hawaiki with the first settlers in New Zealand in the canoe Tainui, companion to Arawa. Average thirty years to a generation = 450 years—1400 or thereabouts. (Sir Geo. Grey’s Polynesian Mythology.)
The proper trade wind at Tahiti is from east-southeast to east-northeast and is called Maarai. When the wind is to south of southeast it is called Maoai. ”

“ It was our own countryman, Captain Cook, to whom we are so largely indebted for what we now know of the geography of the Pacific, who made us acquainted with the nature of the country and the character of its inhabitants. The aborigines were evidently of a much higher type than those of the Australian continent. They are a branch of the Polynesian race, and according to their own traditions came about 600 years ago from 'Hawaiki,' which ethnologists interpret to mean either Hawaii (the Sandwich Islands) , or Savaii in the Samoa group. ”

“ But here, I think, a confusion of terms has arisen in the use of the word raro, lalo, 'a'o which means below, but also means the west with all Central Polynesians. The very nature of the beliefs of the race as to the path of the spirit to its final home, encourages this confusion between the two meanings of the word. In all cases the spirit, whilst always passing to the westward, is said to go downwards, i.e., to dive into the sea, and then pass along to the sunset. It is in this manner that Hawaiki has come to be used for the place of departed spirits located underneath the earth. ”

“ If so, it is just possible, but not probable, that this may be Toi-te-hua-tahi known to Maori history, as living in Hawaiki. ↑ Mangaian legends relate that this Motoro, son of Tangiia was one of their ancestors. ↑ Here we recognise the same name as that of Mount Cook, in New Zealand. It is a very high mountain in Tahiti. ↑ Tamarua-pai (or as he is often called, Pai) , was a chief from Pape-uriri and Ati-maono, who also lived at Papeete, places in Tahiti. There is an "opening" at Moorea Island named Utukura, made by Pai. ”

“ Starting from Central Eastern Polynesia, as the ancestors of the Maoris did when they colonised New Zealand, and having as they had very correct notions of orientation, [3] they would know full well that their S.W. course to N.Z. must necessitate the adoption of a different direction for Hawaiki—the spirit land—from that they held in Central Polynesia. And hence the spirits gather at Cape Reinga, as being the nearest point to the old "spirits' road," by which their ancestors' spirits went back to the spirit land. ”

“ This people is also known in Hawaii under the same name, where they are described as somewhat like those of the Maori traditions. They appear to have been at one time very numerous, and lived in the mountains, but were in a state of subjection to the Hawaiians, performing for them many works that required great numbers, in order to complete the task at once. Like the Patu-pai-arehe of New Zealand story, these people are said not to like the daylight, but worked at night. Many of the heiaus and some of the loko-i'a, or fish-ponds, of Hawaii are said to have been built by the Manahune. ”

“ But the Maori is not the only branch of the race that retains this tradition of contact with a white race, for the Hawaiian history relates that Hawaii-loa, one of their great navigators, on one of his voyages apparently in Indonesia, brought back to his home two white men, poe keokeo kane, [4] who were married to his people. According to Fornander's genealogy this man appears to have flourished about A.D. 300, or whilst the Polynesians were probably on the move southwards towards Fiji. ”

“ The Hawaiians believed in a subterranean world of the dead divided into two regions, in the upper of which Wakea reigned; in the lower, Milu. Those who had not been sufficiently religious "must lie under the spreading Kou trees of Milu's world, drink its waters and eat lizards and butterflies for food." Traditional points from which the soul took its leap into this underworld are to be found at the northern point of Hawaii, the west end of Maui, the south and the northwest points of Oahu, and, most famous of all, at the mouth of the great Waipio Valley on Hawaii. ”

“ In 1900, by an act of Congress, the Hawaiian Islands became a territory of the United States. Of the one hundred and ninety and odd thousands of inhabitants of the islands, in 1910, nearly eighty thousand were Japanese. The native Hawaiians come next in point of numbers and are the most interesting people to the average tourist. Though dark-skinned, they are quite different in appearance from the negro, and many of the young men and women are decidedly good-looking. ”

“ The process of assimilation and decline is taking place with far more rapidity in Hawaii. Hawaii crashed like a meteor into America and was comminuted and absorbed. The finer dust of its primitive civilization is giving more color to our atmosphere than any other American possession. But the real Hawaii is rapidly receding into the past. On the beach at Waikiki there is a thatch-roofed hut, but like most of the Hawaiians themselves, it bears too obviously the ear-marks of the West, the imprint of invasion. ”

“ MYTHS AND MELES
ative Hawaiians—big, generous, happy, good-looking folk, athletic and fond of music—are in physical characteristics, in temperament, in language, traditions and customs, so closely related to the Samoans, the Maoris of New Zealand, and the other inhabitants of Polynesia, that it is clear they belong to the same race. Although Hawaii is two thousand miles from any other land, the people are so much like the natives of the South Sea Islands that I do not see how the relationship can be questioned. ”

“ A hundred years ago the Hawaiians, bred true to their Samoan progenitors, fearlessly embarked in their sliver-like, cinnet-sewed canoes on voyages that today would be deemed hazardous for hundred-ton schooners; and a half century or more back they were hailed throughout the Seven Seas as the most daring whalers that ever drove lances or hurled harpoons. So in assuming at the beginning of this century the title of "The Yachting Centre of the Pacific," Hawaii is not attaining to a new distinction, but merely claiming in a modernized form a heritage of ancient days. ”

“ Our captain of the roseate name is painting the Snark, and she floats, a boat of white enamel, in the still blue and silver of the morning flood; while for frame to the fair picture a painted double-rainbow overarches, flinging the misty fringes of its ends in our enraptured faces. From the shell-pink dawn, through the green and golden day, to sunset and purple twilight and starshine, we move in beauty. “What a lot of people must have been shanghaied here by their own desire!” Jack ruminates. And truly, Hawaii is sufficient excuse for never going home. ”

“ Waikiki is where the action is—wave action and people action. This long series of beautiful beaches is protected by an offshore reef a half mile out. Conditions are ideal for surfing, outrigger canoe paddling and catamaran sailing. The people come in waves that overflow the streets and fill the high rises. The ebb and flow of humanity is a fascination in itself.
Waikiki is a peninsula separated from Honolulu by the Ala Wai Canal and bounded by the sea and Diamond Head. Long a favorite summering place for Hawaiian royalty, it is today a monument to the jet age. ”

“ Up to that time their national life had been a long romance, abundant in strife and deeds of chivalry, and scarcely less bountiful in episodes of love, friendship and self-sacrifice. Situated in mid-ocean, their knowledge of the great world, of which their island dots on the bosom of the Pacific formed but an infinitesimal portion, did not reach beyond a misty Kahiki, from which their fathers came some centuries before, and the bare names of other lands marking the migratory course of their ancestors thither. ”

“ Kaimuki, on the rolling midlands beyond Kapiolani Park, formed quite a little city by itself. Kaimuki’s red lands, on the side of the gentle, seaward-tipped bowl that holds Honolulu, seemed always to be brushed by the raveled ends of rainbow-opal scarves. Never in the minds of living men, due to the continuous storms that year, were there such rainbows over Oahu. We lay, Jack and I, floating on the green hills of water beyond the inshore surges, and bathed our very souls in heavenly color. ”

“ Below is the national motto taken from the speech of the king upon Restoration Day: ‘The life of the land is perpetuated by righteousness.’”
The coat-of-arms has not been used by the government since the islands have been a territory of the United States.
No tapa “cloth” is made in Hawaii to-day, though these people formerly excelled all Polynesia for fineness of the almost transparent, paper-like tissue, beaten from bark of the wauke, paper-mulberry. It was worn, several deep, for draping the human form. ”

“ On landing in Kohala, Hiiaka took the road that led up through the thickly wooded wilderness of Mahiki, the region that had been the scene, now some months gone, of the most strenuous chapter in her warfare to rid Hawaii of the mo’o—that pestilent brood of winged and crawling monsters great and small that once infested her wilds and that have continued almost to the present day to infest the imagination of the Hawaiian people. ”

“ Far out in the broad island-dotted and island-fringed Pacific Ocean lies an island group known as the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands.
The brave voyager Captain Cook, who discovered these Hawaiian Islands, found living there a brown-skinned people, whose descendants live there to this day. Indeed, most of the island dwellers in the Pacific are of the brown race, which we know as one of the great divisions of the human family. ”

“ The American eagle, from its seat in the North, overshadows with guardian pinions the American continent.
In the case of Hawaii the American Republic seems likely to depart from its traditional policy of acquiring no territory beyond American bounds. The Hawaiian Islands were won from barbarism by the efforts and sacrifices of American missionaries and their descendants. A republic has been established there, and intelligent Hawaiians look hopefully forward to a common future with the United States. ”

“ Hawaii is a great experimental laboratory, not merely in agriculture, but in ethnology and sociology. Remote in the heart of the Pacific, more hospitable to all forms of life than any other land, it has received an immigration of alien vegetable, insect, animal and human life more varied and giving rise to more complicated problems than any other land has received. And right intelligently and whole-heartedly have the people of Hawaii taken hold of these problems and striven to wrestle them to solution. ”