Kauai History and Polynesian Migration

The particular genius of the Polynesians was the development of seafaring expertise, navigation skills, and canoe technology that enabled them to voyage back and forth among the islands of the Pacific. From their natural surroundings they assembled koa trees for hulls, coconut husks for lashings, and vegetable fibers for sails. Their motivation for the exploration was probably a universal one: the search for new lands for settlement and new resources for survival. With their expertise in fishing, farming, and Malama’aina (caring for the land) they were able to develop healthy, stable communities on islands with limited resources. These extended families, or ‘ohana, worked the land and sea and stayed on the new island until their canoe was filled with food and fish, and some could return the same way they came. (Imagine turning around and making the ocean voyage back.) The Polynesian migration to Hawaii was one of the most remarkable achievements of humanity: the discovery and settlement of remote, widely scattered islands in an ocean of over 10 million square miles. This migration began at a time when Europeans, with more resources at their disposal, were sailing close to the coastlines of continents. At a time before the Europeans developed navigational instruments that would allow them to venture out into the open ocean. At a time more than a thousand years before Captain Cook was born. At a time when migration involved finding and fixing in their mind the position of islands, sometimes less than a mile in diameter on which the highest landmark was a coconut tree. By the time European explorers entered the Pacific Ocean in the late 1700’s the Island of Kauai had been settled for hundreds of years. And the Hawaiian ‘Ohana was well established.

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