Regina and Roxanna Kohler, ages 14 and 13, of Montoursville, Pa., for their question:
Who discovered Hawaii?
Long ages ago a family of seething volcanoes was born on the deep floor of the Pacific Ocean. With each undersea eruption, their piles and mounds of cooling lava grew higher and still higher. At last their peaks and then their sloping sides reached around the waves. They became the patches of dry land we call the Hawaiian Islands.
We say that America was discovered by Columbus or by Leif Ericson and his viking explorers. But these discoverers were late arrivals, for they found the Americas already occupied. It might be more accurate to say that the New World was first discovered by the American Indians who came here from Asia in the dim distant past.
We are told that the Hawaiian Islands were discovered on Jan. 18, 1778, by Capt. James Cook of the British Navy. It might be more correct to say that the balmy Pacific Islands were rediscovered by the great captain. For like Columbus before him, he found the place already populated. Later historical research revealed that the islands had been discovered, occupied and settled at least twice before Captain Cook of the western world arrived. The arrival of the first settlers is wrapped in legend and mystery. Ocean going volcanoes arrived there, it seems, about 1,000 years ago. The daring voyagers were led by their king, Hawaiiloa. Old legends handed down through generations claim that the wanderers came from a western Pacific island known as Hawaiki. In any case, we know that these first settlers were Polynesians from other Pacific Islands, perhaps from thousands of miles across the sea.
They may have named their new homeland for their first king or for the island they left behind in the west. Some 200 yearns later, the islands again were discovered, this time by wandering voyagers from the region of Tahiti. We might call them invadErs, for although they also were Polynesian people they soon dominated and took over the islands from the original settlers. They looked down upon the first Hawaiians and called them the menehumes, meaning the common people.
When Captain Cook arrived, the native population of some 300,000 was divided into small kingdoms, each with its ruling king. By our standards, things could have been better, for the island region included such barbaric customs as human sacrifice. Cook renamed his discovery the Sandwich Islands in honor of the Earl of Sandwich, then First Lord of the British Admiralty.
Captain Cook soon departed, but he returned to the islands the next year and was killed. Hawaii became a way station in the 19th century, a meeting place and a trading post for travelers and wanderers from many nations. Whaling ships stopped there on their way to Alaska. Settlers from China and Japan, Portugal and Puerto Rico, Korea and the Philippines came to work in the new sugar and pineapple plantations. The descendants of the original discoverers were merged in a melting pot of peoples from many nations.