Hawaiians, on the other hand, packed family, livestock, seed stock, tools, food and fresh water onto double-hulled sailing vessels and sailed those across 4,000 miles of open ocean with only the stars and a kinship with the ocean as guides. They did this en masse not once, but twice, and made regular trips back and forth during the years between the two waves of settlement. When Captain James Cook arrived here in 1778, Hawaiians had been in residence for somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 years. They had a complicated culture, a rich language and a passion for genealogy which they exercised in religious and historical chants. Much of the information we have about Hawaii s past prior to contact with Western culture comes from transcriptions of the chants.
Family remains the first consideration here.
Hawaiians had by Cook s time abandoned the spectacular open ocean voyages, but were still skilled coastal seamen and crossed the rough interisland channels regularly. They were accomplished fishermen and farmers, and had developed sophisticated fisheries and irrigation and aqueduct systems. The populated islands were ruled each by their own king. A complex system of rules and regulations, kapu, controlled the interactions among the people. Conflicts between various factions of ali i and between kings were not infrequent, but the relatively small numbers of fighting men and the demands of fish and fields made long-term wars impractical.