Lowering of the flag of the Kingdom of Hawai’i at ‘Iolani Palace, Honolulu on 12 August 1898, to be replaced by the United States flag signaling annexation of the island chain. Soldiers on the steps of a palace lowering a flag while a crowd of well-dressed, mostly white men and women look on. Fountains and palm trees are in the background.
23 August 2021
The origin of Hawaiʻi, the name of the fiftieth state of the United States and of the “Big Island” in that archipelago, is rather obviously from the Hawaiian language, a Polynesian dialect. The name originally applied only to the one island, only later becoming a name for the entire island chain. Cognates of Hawaiʻi can be found as placenames throughout Polynesia, e.g., Havaiki in New Zealand and the North Marquesas, ʻAvaiki in the Cook Islands, and Saviʻi in Samoa. In these dialects the name means either homeland or is the name of the place of the dead, the underworld, but it does not have these associations in the Hawaiian dialect, where it is simply a place name with no additional meaning attached to it.
As a general rule, indigenous toponyms give way to settler-colonist ones, but Hawaiʻi is an exception. The name assigned by Captain James Cook when he became the first European to document a visit to the islands in 1778 was the Sandwich Islands, after John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, then the first lord of the British admiralty. But that name is all but forgotten today.
Meme of Homer Simpson with the words, “MMM Sandwich.”
Cook actually named two places the Sandwich Island(s). The first was an island in what is now French Polynesia he visited on his second voyage to the Pacific. In a journal entry dated 31 August 1774, Cook notes the positions of:
Aurora, Whitsuntide, Ambryn, Paoom, and its neighbour Apee, Threehills, and Sandwich Islands, lie all nearly under the meridian of 167° 29ʹ or 30ʹ East, extending from the latitude of 14° 51ʹ 30″, to 17° 53ʹ 30″.
The second place was Hawaiʻi, which he dubbed the Sandwich Islands in 1778. Cook would be killed there the following year, but the name is recorded in the astronomical and navigational observations from the voyage, posthumously published in 1782:
In the passage from Sandwich Islands to Kamtschatka, the pendulum spring of the clock No. 1, in the care of Lieutenant King, became rusty and broke, which rendered it in a manner useless during the remaining part of the voyage.
That same source also records one of the earliest appearances of the name Hawai’i in English writing, spelled Oeyhee in a table that gives the latitude and longitude of the Big Island.
The spelling Hawaiʻi started appearing in English in the 1820s. As rule, European settler-colonists were not good about recording Indigenous words or languages, but one exception has been Christian missionaries. Bringing the gospel to Indigenous peoples required learning Indigenous languages, and often what we know of these languages comes from missionary sources. Of course, those missionaries had their own self-serving reasons for doing so, and the result of their efforts was the destruction of Indigenous language and culture, but in the process they did leave a record of Indigenous language that has proven useful in understanding, reconstructing, and revitalizing those languages in more recent decades. A letter dated 1 October 1822 from Elisha Loomis, a missionary in Hawaiʻi, gives some details of the Hawaiian language and the new transliteration system for it:
Before closing, I will say something respecting the spelling-book and pronunciation of this language. By the first sheet of the Hawaiian spelling book, you will see the manner in which the vowels are to be sounded. Thus a, is pronounced as a in father, &c. We shall hereafter spell the proper names without regard to the former orthoraphy [sic], as that in most cases is incorrect. I send you a list of some words as they have formerly been spelt, and as we shall spell them hereafter. It is a singular fact, that there is no instance in the language where a consonant ends a word or syllable. The t and k, are used indiscriminately, as are also the r and l, and in some cases, the n, r and l. Thus, the word for fly, or insect, may be pronounced by one Ná-ro, by another Ná-lo, and by another Ná-no. The v and w, are also sometimes used in the same manner. The following is the orthography which we shall adopt of some of the proper names:
Ha-wái-i, Owhyhee
Maú-i, Mowee
Oá-hu Woahoo
The islands were politically united under King Kamehameha by 1810. The monarchy was overthrown in 1893, and the islands were annexed by the United States in 1898. Hawaiʻi became the fiftieth state in 1959.
Sources:
Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.
Cook, James. A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, vol. 2 of 2. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777, 98. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Cooke, James, James King, and William Bayly. The Original Astronomical Observations Made in the Course of a Voyage to the Northern Pacific Ocean. London: William Richardson, 1782, 69n, 320. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.
Loomis, Elisha. “Oahee, October 1, 1822.” Utica Christian Repository, 2.3, 1 March 1823, 90. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.
Pukui, Mary Kawena and Samuel H. Elbert. Hawaiian Dictionary, revised and enlarged edition. Honolulu: U of Hawaii Press, 1986, 62. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Pukui, Mary Kawena, Samuel H. Elbert, and Esther T. Mookini. Place Names of Hawaii, revised and enlarged edition. 43. Honolulu: UP of Hawaii, 1974. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credits: Frank Davey, 1898. Hawai’i State Archives. Public domain image. “MMM Sandwich.” Memegenerator.net. Accessed 10 August 2021. Based on a character created by Matt Groening, Gracie Films, 20th Television.