With the islands of Hawai'i, the British navigator James Cook made his greatest geographical discovery for western seafaring on his third and last expedition to the Pacific. In 1777, he had been commissioned by the British Admiralty to sail from tropical Tahiti to the far north to explore the Arctic waters to see if there was a northern sea route from the Pacific to the Atlantic. After a brief stop on the island of Bora-Bora, Cook set a direct northern course and, after a tight turn of 4500 kilometers, unexpectedly sighted the westernmost of the Hawai'ian Islands: O'ahu, Ni'ihau and Kaua'i on January 18, 1878.
A millennium earlier, Polynesians from Tahiti, the Society Islands, and the Marquesas had followed the same route as Cook and his crew in their double-hulled canoes (Tahitian: pahi) to find new home islands in the endless expanses of the “great archipelago,” as they called the seas of Oceania. Once again, the “Polynesian Triangle” expanded so that the settlement area of this seafaring culture in the Pacific stretched over 7000 kilometers from Samoa in the Western Pacific to Easter Island/Rapa Nui off the coast of Chile, and over 7500 kilometers from Aotearoa/New Zealand in the South Pacific to Hawai'i in the North Pacific. Captain Cook wrote in his journal, deeply impressed by the Polynesians, ”… though perhaps not the most numerous, certainly, by far, the most extensive nation upon earth.” He said of the Hawai'ians that they were “vigorous and most active.”
In their ocean-going canoes, the newcomers from Tahiti brought the basics of Polynesian life: staples such as the breadfruit tree (Hawai'ian: ulu) and the taro (kalo), as well as their domestic and sacrificial animals: pigs, dogs, chickens – and (unintentionally) rats. In many ways, the first Hawai'ians imitated the Tahitian way of life: the terraced farming and sophisticated irrigation systems, the gods, sacrificial rituals, and stone temple platforms, not to mention the caste-like social structure that gave a highly privileged status to the men and women of the aristocracy, who were considered descendants of the gods (ali'i).