The Polynesians are those people who, some two or three thousand years ago, spread to all the islands of the Pacific through the great triangle that reaches from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. that was their great cultural triumph. they had mastered the immense ocean. they had discovered all the islands of the Pacific and then in turn were discovered by European explorers from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries of the Christian ear.

In their different island worlds the Polynesians developed separately, playing variations on their common cultural themes. They held in common, however, an understanding of themselves - call it an historical consciousness - expressed in the mythical opposition of 'native' and 'stranger'. This opposition of 'native' and 'stranger' was prior to and independent of the European intrusion. the Polynesians were native and stranger among themselves and to themselves. they saw themselves as made up of native, those born of the land of their islands, and stranger, those who had at some time come from a distant place. "Tahiti" is the Hawaiian world for 'distant place'. Strangers came from "Tahiti". Or they came from 'Havaiki', the more general Polynesian word for a place of origin. Typically in their myths the first stranger, a chief, came many generations ago in a canoe from a distant place. He found the natives on their island and either overthrew the existing chiefly line by violence or married the highest born women of the natives and established his strangers' line.

In myth and in ritual this opposition of native and stranger was a constant metaphor of Polynesian politics and social organisation. Political power was thought to come through usurpation by the stranger and was given legitimacy by the native. A reigning chief would trace in genealogy his line to a hero who would have come from a distant place and conquered the native inhabitants of the island and their chief. It was not just an event of the mythical past, however. the reigning chief, even if he had come to power by the natural death of his father, would have played out a usurping role in the rituals of his accession and would have married into that line which connected him most closely with the original natives of the land. So the opposition native and stranger was both history and cosmology. It offered an understanding both of the past and of the present: the conqueror, the stranger, came from the sea; the conquered, but founding force, the people, were of the land. so Land and Sea had the oppositions of Native and Stranger. And because Polynesian cosmology imaged the sky as a great dome reaching down all around the island to the circle of the horizon, those who came by sea came from 'beyond the sky'. They were atua, gods. Being called atua, as they almost universally were, the European Strangers who came to Polynesian islands from beyond the sky, were both flattered and reinforced in their judgements of savage simplicities. We might hazard a guess that the Polynesians, just as they saw in their own Stranger Chiefs the incarnation of usurping power, so they expected the European Strangers from beyond the sky to play out their mythical usurping rulers. Native-Stranger:Land-Sea. There are other associations as well. Strangers from the Sea, from Beyond the sky, Usurping Power were chiefs, they were also man eaters, sacrificers. There was a Hawaiian proverb that caught it all: "Chiefs are sharks that walk on the land". 

In Hawaii, as elsewhere in Polynesia, the structural opposition of Native and Stranger was played out in an annual cycle of rituals. Eight months of the year belonged to the Stranger Chiefs, and were the ordinary time of human sacrifice and war, the time of kapu (taboos), and of those protocols of the dominance of chiefly power. It was the time in which the chiefs walked on the land like sharks and the people of the land, the commoners, obeyed all the kapu, or suffered death as kapu breakers. these eight months of the year belonged to Ku, the god of war and sacrifice, the ancestral deity of the Strangers.

These were the ordinary months of the year. but there were four months beginning October-November that were a sort of carnival time, when the ordinary was overturned, when the temple rises of Ku were suspended. In these four months the ritual focus of the island was on the fruitfulness of he land and the sea rather than on the power of the chiefs. it was the time of the year in which the god of the land, Lono, returned to the islands. At the end of these four months there were twenty-three climactic days. The highest ranked of the chiefs or 'king' temporarily lost his sovereignty. he and other chiefs went into seclusion, locked themselves away on their individual lands. the time of Lono was called makahiki and it followed a strict calendar. In the second month, there began a procession of the priests of Lono right-handedly around the island. That is, the land was always on the right and the sea on the left. right hand, life, land: left hand, death, sea. The procession of Lono was a symbolic act of the possessions of the land. At the same time there were left-handed processions, counter-clockwise, around the lands of the chiefs, symbolic act of his possession. In the time of their seclusion they lost that power which they had usurped from the people of the land. Lono's procession was led by Lono's symbol, a cross-like piece of wood from which hung banner-like pieces of white cloth made of bark. At all stages of the procession the common people came forward with abundant gifts. it was a time of feasting and games. There were great boxing matches, sledding, running races, javelin throwing and dancing. Like carnivals everywhere it was a time of freedom, sex roles were reversed, kapu were overthrown and none were sacrificed for breaking them. When the island was encircled, the procession ended at Lono's temple. During the four months of makahiki - ideally at the time of the winter solstice - there was a conflict ritual called kali'i. The 'king', coming from the sea, confronted Lono and was 'killed' in his usurping power. Then his sovereignty was returned in the name of Lono. At the end of makahiki, Lono's temple was dismantled and the new year of Ku was begun with a human sacrifice. Once again the sharks walked on the land.

In November of 1778 James Cook's Resolution and her consort the Discovery appeared off the north-west of the island of Hawaii. It was cook's third voyage. He was a world famous man. His voyages of discovery had captured the imagination of Europe and America. He was also a tired man. It was his tenth year at sea on Pacific explorations. Historians on Pacific explorations in hindsight, and indeed Cook's colleagues in reflection on what happened on this third voyage, have agreed that even at this stage all was not well. cook's temper, never good, was less in control, and he flogged more than forty-five per cent of his crew, and many of them more than once.

Check out Captain James Cook's Last Visit To Hawaii for the rest of the story.