placed in their former
abode toward India (Hawaii being undoubtedly Java; and Vevau being
Vavao, in Malagasy); but they had brought the names with them, and
when they reached the present American 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 peopled the now
American Hawaii, and they remained unknown 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 Borneo
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 monuments and
statues now existing which are a profound mystery to the ethnologist,
the archaeologist, and the engineer. If the Polynesians came upon
any of the stone builders, they had killed or absorbed them.

The interpretation of the curious ideographs carved on wood in Easter
Island by some of the Polynesians there half a century ago would
denote there had been intercourse with the people who had made them,
and who were not the Polynesians.

Once in Samoa, and finally at home there, after their Fiji disaster,
they had gone adventuring, or the canoe drift of unfortunates caught
by wind and tide had brought populations to all the other Polynesian
islands, and principally to Tahiti. This island in the center of
Polynesia, and especially favored by nature, had been a source of
growth and distribution of the race, the Paumotus, New Zealand,
and probably the Marquesas, and Hawaii having been stocked from it,
the language deve