346 MYSTIC ISLES 



can territory, of which Honolulu is the capital, they 

 called it Hawaii, as they had an island of the Samoan 

 group, Sawaii. It was in the fifth century they peo- 

 pled the now American Hawaii, and they remained un- 

 known there until the eleventh, when Marquesans, 

 Tahitians, and Samoans began to pour in on them, and 

 continued to do so for a few generations. Then the 

 present Hawaiians were isolated and forgotten for 

 twenty-one generations until rediscovery by Captain 

 Cook in 1778. 



They gave the old names to Polynesia that they knew 

 in Asia, as all over the world emigrants carry their home 

 names, not only Hawaii, or Savaii, for Java, but 

 Moorea, a Javan place, to the island near Tahiti ; Bora- 

 Bora from Sumatra to a Society island; Puna of Bor- 

 neo to places in Tahiti, Kauai, and Hawaii ; Ouahou of 

 Borneo to Oahu, on which Honolulu is; and Molokai, 

 from the Moluccas, to another island of Hawaii. One 

 might cite hundreds of examples, all going to prove 

 their far-away origin, as Florida, San Francisco, and 

 Los Angeles, New England, New York, and Albany, 

 indicate theirs. 



That there were any inhabitants in the South Sea 

 islands occupied by the Polynesians is improbable but 

 a race of mighty stone-carvers had swept through that 

 ocean, perhaps many thousands of years before, and 

 had left in the Ladrones and in Easter Islands monu- 

 ments and statues now existing which are a profound 

 mystery to the ethnologist, the archaeologist, and the en- 

 gineer. If the Polynesians came upon any of the stone 

 builders, they had killed or absorbed them. 



The interpretation of the curious ideographs carved 



