148 DAHLGREN, THE DISCOVERY OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS. 



manners and customs, and similar matters amongst the Hebrews, as we know them through 

 the Old Testament. Dibble has enumerated a number of such analogies; 1 but he does not 

 regard them as evidence of any Christian influence, but as memorials of a primitive anti- 

 quity common to all mankind; he even ventures on the hypothesis that the Hawaiians 

 were "a part of the scattered tribes of the children of Israel". Such views are of course 

 quite easily explicable among the older missionaries with their belief in an original revelation 

 made to the whole of humanity, which was corrupted or löst among the heathen peoples. 

 In order to show how little evidence is afforded by the memorials mentioned it will be 

 enough to observe that the institution of tabu, circumcision, places of ref uge where f ugitives 

 and criminals found shelter from their pursuers, belong to widely different spheres of 

 culture, and cannot be ref erred to prototypes in the Old Testament. The same holds good 

 of traditions such as that concerning a deluge, which also are widely spread in different 

 parts of the world, but which modern research regards as being due to local phenomena 

 and not as a flood covering the whole earth. 2 Moreover, we cannot be quite certain that 

 some part of the traditions in question had not been influenced by the missionaries' 

 Biblical instruction before they were noted down, although Dibble assures us that there 

 was not the least reason to regard them as modern inventions. 



If all the testimony is put together, there is only one indisputable piece of evidence 

 of an earlier intercourse between the Hawaiian people and Europeans. It is known that 

 Cook, on his first visit to the Islands, found some bits of iron in the possession of the 

 natives. He tells about this in the following words: 3 — 



The only iron tools, or rather bits of iron, seen amongst them, and which they had before our 

 arrival, were a piece of iron hoop, abont two inches long, fitted into a wooden handle; and another 

 edge-tool, which our people guessed to be made of the point of a broad-sword. — To this Cook appends 

 the following remark: — Their having the actual possession of these, and their so generally knowing 

 the use of this metal, inclined some on board to think, that we had not been the first European visitors 

 of these islands. But, it seems to me, that the very great surprize expressed by them on seeing our 

 ships, and their total ignorance of the use of fire-arms, cannot be reconciled with such a notion. 



Cook, therefore, considers that the occurrence of iron should be explained in some 

 other way: either it had been conveyed from island to island from a country where Euro- 

 peans were already resident — and in this respect he is thinking principally of the Ladrones 

 — or it had drifted ashore with wreckage. "This ocean", Cook says, "is traversed every 

 year by Spanish ships; and it is obvious that, besides the accident of losing a mast and 

 its appendages, casks with iron hoops, and many other things containing iron, may be 

 thrown or may fall overboard during so long a passage, and thus find their way to land". 

 As no inhabited island exists between Hawaii and the Ladrones (a fact not known to 

 Cook), we must regard the latter conjecture as the more probable. This agrees, too, with 



1 Op. cit., pp. 15 — 19. Jarves has reproduced most of this enumeration; op. cit., pp. 19 — 20. 



2 The Hawaiian flood-legend was told as early as 1810 by Alexander Campbell, an English sailor 

 who was working as a sail-maker for Kamehameha I. See A Voyagc round the World from 1806 to 1812, 

 by A. Campbell. Edinb. 1816, p. 175. 



3 A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, II, p. 240. 



