Cook Discovers Hawaii: First Europeans Reach Islands

Captain James Cook's two ships, the Resolution and the Discovery, sighted the Hawaiian Islands on January 18, 1778, while sailing north from Tahiti toward the coast of North America in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. Cook had not expected to find anything in this part of the Pacific. No European chart marked the islands. No previous expedition had reported them. The discovery of a populated archipelago in the middle of the world's largest ocean was entirely accidental. Cook named them the Sandwich Islands after his patron, the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty. He made landfall at Waimea on the island of Kauai, where his crew became the first Europeans to encounter Hawaiian civilization. The Hawaiians, a Polynesian people who had settled the islands roughly a thousand years earlier, had developed a complex society with a rigid social hierarchy, sophisticated agricultural systems, and navigational knowledge that had allowed their ancestors to cross thousands of miles of open ocean in outrigger canoes. The initial encounter was remarkably peaceful. Cook traded iron nails and other metal goods for fresh provisions, and the Hawaiians appeared fascinated by the ships and their occupants. Cook noted the cultural and linguistic similarities between Hawaiians and the Tahitians he had encountered previously, correctly intuiting that both peoples shared Polynesian origins. He spent several days at Kauai and the neighboring island of Niihau before continuing north toward the Pacific Northwest. Cook returned to Hawaii in November 1778 to winter his ships before a second attempt at the Northwest Passage. He spent weeks sailing along the coast of the Big Island before anchoring in Kealakekua Bay in January 1779. The arrival coincided with the Makahiki festival honoring the god Lono, and some historians believe the Hawaiians initially received Cook with divine honors. The relationship deteriorated rapidly when Cook attempted to leave and was forced back by storms. A dispute over a stolen boat escalated into violence, and Cook was killed on the beach at Kealakekua on February 14, 1779. The "discovery" Cook made was, of course, a discovery only from the European perspective. For Hawaiians, it was the beginning of a catastrophic transformation: disease, foreign exploitation, and cultural disruption that would reduce their population by more than 80 percent within a century.