298 HAWAIIAN ROMANCE OF LAIEIKAWAI [ETI. ANN. 33 
Hawaiian tradition reflects these days of wandering. A chief 
vows to wed no woman of his own group but only one fetched from 
“the land of good women.” An ambitious priest seeks overseas 
a leader of divine ancestry. <A chief insulted by his superior leads 
his followers into exile on some foreign shore. There is exchange 
of culture-gifts, intermarriage, tribute, war. Romance echoes with 
the canoe song and the invocation to the confines of Kahiki?—this 
in spite of the fact that intercourse seems to have been long closed 
between this northern group and its neighbors south and east. When 
Cook put in first at the island of Kauai, most western of the group, 
perhaps guided by Spanish charts, perhaps by Tahitian navigators 
who had preserved the tradition of ancient voyages,* for hundreds 
of years none but chance boats had driven upon its shores. But 
the old tales remained, fast bedded at the foundation of Hawaiian 
imaginative literature. As now recited they take the form of chants 
or of long monotonous recitals like the Laietkawai, which take on 
the heightened form of poetry only in dialogue or on occasions when 
the emotional stress requires set song. Episodes are passed along 
from one hero cycle to another, localities and names vary, and a 
fixed form in matter of detail relieves the stretch of invention; 
in fact, they show exactly the same phenomena of fixing and re- 
shaping that all story-telling whose object is to please exhibits in 
transference from mouth to mouth. Nevertheless, they are jealously 
retentive of incident. The story-teller, generally to be found among 
the old people of any locality, who can relate the legends as they 
were handed down to him from the past is known and respected in 
the community. We find the same story® told in New Zealand and 
in Hawaii scarcely changed, even in name. 
2. POLYNESIAN COSMOGONY 
In theme the body of Polynesian folk tale is not unlike that of 
other primitive and story-loving people. It includes primitive philos- 
ophy—stories of cosmogony and of heroes who shaped the earth; 
primitive annals—migration stories, tales of culture heroes, of con- 
1 Lesson (11, 190) enumerates eleven small islands, covering 40 degrees of latitude, scat- 
tered between Hawaii and the islands to the south, four showing traces of ancient habita- 
tion, which he believes to mark the old route from Hawaii to the islands to the south- 
east. According to Hawaiian tradition, which is by no means historically accurate, 
what is called the second migration period to Hawaii seems to have occurred between 
the eleventh and fourteenth centuries (dated from the arrival of the high priest Paao 
at Kohala, Hawaii, 18 generations before Kaméhaméha) ; to have come from the south- 
east; to have introduced a sacerdotal system whose priesthood, symbols, and temple 
structure persisted up to the time of the abandoning of the old faith in 1819. Compare 
Alexander’s History, ch. 111; Malo, pp. 25, 823; Lesson, 11, 160-169. 
2 Kahiki, in Hawaiian chants, is the term used to designate a ‘‘ foreign land”’ in general 
and does not refer especially to the island of Tahiti in the Society Group. 
8 Lesson, 11, 152. 
4Ibid., 170. 3 
SIbid., 178. j 
