232 Ponmmlcr CoUccliou of Hawaiian Folk-lore. 



and occupied the Hawaiian Islands, it is now impossible accurately to define. Ethno- 

 logically, we can trace them backward to India ; historically, we can not trace them even 

 to their last point of departure, the Marquesas or the Society Islands. That they are 

 of the same race that now inliabit the eastern and southern parts of Polynesia is be- 

 yond a doubt. That that race was settled in the Asiatic Archi])elago centuries before 

 the Christian era, 1 believe to be equally certain ; but whether the emigration into Poly- 

 nesia took place before the Christian era, or was -occasioned by the invasion of the fore- 

 fathers of the Malay family from India about the commencement of that era, there is 

 nothing, that I am aware of, either in Polynesian, Malayan or Hindu traditions to 

 throw any light upon. In Hawaiian tradition, there is no distinct remembrance, and 

 ])ut the faintest allusion to the fact that the islands were inhabited while the volcanoes on 

 the leeward islands were still in an active state. It is impossible to judge of the age of 

 a lava flow by its looks. Portions of the lava stream of 1840, flowing from Kilauea 

 into Puna district of Hawaii, were in 1867 covered with a luxuriant vegetation; while 

 older flows in Puna, of which no memory exists, the last flow from Hualalai in 1791 

 or I7<;2 through Kekaha on the west of Hawaii, and the flow near Keoneoio in Honu- 

 aula, Maui, called Hanakaie, which is by tradition referred back to the mythological 

 period of Pele and her compeers, look as fresh and glossy today as if thrown out but 

 yesterday. 



Geologically speaking, the leeward islands are the oldest in the grouj) and, with 

 the exception of the legends of Pele and Hawaii Loa, there is no trace or tradition in 

 the popular mind that their volcanoes had been active since the islands had been in- 

 habited. But both on Molokai and on Oahu human remains have been found imbedded 

 in lava flows of undisputed antiquity and of whose occurrence no vestige of remem- 

 brance remains in song or saga. 



In 1859, Mr. R. W. Meyer, of Kalae, Molokai, found in the side of a hill on 

 his estate, some seventy feet beneath the surface and in a stratum of breccia — volcanic 

 mud, clay and ashes — of several feet in thickness, a human skull whose every cavity 

 was fully and compactly filled with the volcanic deposit surrounding it, as if it had 

 been cast in a mould, evidently showing that the skull had been filled while the deposit 

 was yet in a fluid state. As that stratum spreads over a considerable tract of land 

 in the neighborhood, at a varying depth beneath the surface of from ten to four hun- 

 dred feet, and as the valleys and gulches, which now intersect it in numerous places, 

 were manifestly formed by erosion — perhaps in some measure also by subsequent earth- 

 quake shocks — the great age of that human \'estige may be reasonably inferred, though 

 impossible to demonstrate within a period of one or five hundred years preceding the 

 coherent traditional accounts of that island. 



Hawaiian traditions on Hawaiian soil, though valuable as national reminiscences, 

 more or less obscured by the lapse of time, do not go back with any historical precision 

 much more than twenty-eight generations from the present (about 1865), or say 840 

 \-ears. Within that period the harbor and neighboring coast-line of Honolulu has re- 

 mained nearly what it now is, nor has any subsidence, sufticient to account for the for- 

 mation of the coral-pan in that place, or subsequent upheaval been retained in the mem- 

 ory of tlKJse twenty-eight generations. 



