50 POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
The \isits which most foreigners have paid to 
the Sandwich, and other islands of the Pacific, 
have been too transient to allow them, however 
well qualified they may have been, to obtain any 
thing beyond an exceedingly superficial acquaint- 
ance with the words in most common use among 
the natives, and certainly insufficient to enable them 
to discern the nice distinctions of vowel sounds, 
and peculiar structure, of the aboriginal lan¬ 
guages of the islands; and those individuals 
whom purposes of commerce have induced to 
remain a longer period among them, whatever 
facility they may have acquired in speaking it, 
have not attended to its orthographical construc¬ 
tion, but have adopted that method of spelling 
names of persons and places which happen to 
have been used by those of their predecessors, with 
whose printed accounts they were most familiar. 
The want of a standard orthography cannot be 
better illustrated, than by noticing the mistakes, 
often of a singularly ludicrous, and occasionally 
of an important kind, which occur even in the 
present day, or by glancing at the great variety 
of methods adopted by different voyagers to 
represent the same word. We have seen the 
name of Tamehameha, the late king, spelt in 
various publications twelve or fourteen different 
ways ; and the same variety has also prevailed 
in other popular names, though perhaps not to 
an equal extent. The above word is a redupli¬ 
cation of the word meha , (lonely, or solitary,) 
with the definite article Ta prefixed, which is a 
part of the name; though rejected in Cook’s Voy¬ 
ages, where he is called Maihamaiha. Captain 
Vancouver calls him Tamaahmaah, which is 
somewhat nearer. 
