I recorded this excerpt several years ago in one of my personal journals and now I am very happy to say I have found the original source again.
This is a wonderful informative website if you have an interest in Kanaka Maoli - Hawaiian culture pre-contact and present. We are working hard to preserve and perpetuate Hawaiian culture, language, sacred Hula, chanting, oli, and mele for our children and our children's children. Hawaiians have always had an enormous impact on the world's culture.
My quote is an excerpt from The Settlement of Polynesia Part 1, the authorship is credited to Dennis Kawaharada and is published at this link
Polynesian Voyaging Society
Here is an additional quote from the same source to add interest to a discussion forum titled "What is cultural impact and how is it measured":
"The Polynesian migration to Hawai'i was part of one of the most remarkable achievements of humanity: the discovery and settlement of the remote, widely scattered islands of the central Pacific. The migration began before the birth of Christ. While Europeans were sailing close to the coastlines of continents before developing navigational instruments that would allow them to venture onto the open ocean, voyagers from Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and Marqueses Islands began to settle islands in an ocean area of over 10 million square miles. The settlement took a thousand years to complete and involved finding and fixing in mind the position of islands, sometimes less than a mile in diameter on which the highest landmark was a coconut tree. By the time European explorers entered the Pacific Ocean in the 16th century almost all the habitable islands had been settled for hundreds of years.
The voyaging was all the more remarkable in that it was done in canoes built with tools of stone, bone, and coral. The canoes are navigated without instruments by expert seafarers who depend on their observations of the ocean and sky and traditional knowledge of the patterns of nature for clues to the direction and location of islands. The canoe hulls are dug out from tree trunks with adzes or made from planks sewn together with a cordage of coconut fiber twisted into strands and braided for strength. Cracks and seams are sealed with coconut fibers and sap from Ulu (Breadfruit) or other trees. An outrigger is attached to a single hull for greater stability on the ocean; two hulls are lashed together with crossbeams and a deck added between the hulls to create double canoes capable of voyaging long distances.
The canoes are paddled when there is no wind and sailed when there is; the sails are woven from coconut or pandanus leaves. These vessels are seaworthy enough to make voyages of over 2,000 miles along the longest sea roads of Polynesia, such as the mighty ocean channel between Hawai'i and Tahiti." end quote
Information Source Wikipedia and other resources "In central Europe, adzes made by knapping flint are known from the late Mesolithic onwards ("Scheibenbeile"). Polished adzes and axes made of ground stone, such as amphibolite, basalt or Jadeite are typical for the Neolithic period. Shoe-last adzes or celts, named for their typical shape, are found in the Linearbandkeramic and Rössen cultures of the early Neolithic. Adzes were also made and used by prehistoric southeast Asian cultures, especially in the Mekong River basin. An adze (pronounced /ˈædz/) is a tool used for smoothing rough-cut wood in hand woodworking. Generally, the user stands astride a board or log and swings the adze downwards towards his feet, chipping off pieces of wood, moving backwards as he goes and leaving a relatively smooth surface behind. Adzes are most often used for squaring up logs, or for hollowing out timber. Prehistoric Māori adzes from New Zealand, used for wood carving, were made from nephrite, also known as jade. At the same time on Henderson Island, a small coral island in eastern Polynesia lacking any rock other than limestone, locals may have fashioned giant clamshells into adzes." Another source states: "Imagine a world with no knives or cutting blades made out of metal. This is the world of the Hawaiians. The primary tool for cutting, chopping, forming and shaping was the stone adze (adz). On a grand scale the adze was used for cutting trees and shaping canoes. On a smaller scale, the adze was used to carve idols, shape calabash bowls and cut plant material. The Bishop Museum has adzes in their collection from almost two feet down to an inch. Adzes are made from dense basalt. The finest some say are made at the Mauna Kea quarry on the Island of Hawaii. This preserved area shows evidence of large-scale quarry, which had permanent workers. Mauna Kea black adzes are among the most prized. Their cutting edge could be razor sharp."
"The Hawaiian Adze is unique among Pacific cultures and is called a hafted adze. The adze would be fastened to a special handle that would enable the user to swing it in a cutting motion. Sometime the adze would be fastened at the end of a stick and used like a chisel. Other adze were in fact fashioned like chisels and hit with a stone. Along with the Poi Pounder, the adze is Kanaka Maoli - Hawaiian's most important stone implement."
This is a composite of three of my portrait-vertical photographs of the beautiful hand crafted Mo'olele Double Hulled Canoe at Hui O Wa'a Kaulua Lahaina Maui Hawai'i, taken with permission.
"To keep track of their position at sea during long sea voyages, the navigators used a system of dead reckoning "memorizing the distance and direction traveled until the destination was reached. Finding islands before they could actually be seen was also part of the art of navigation. Voyagers followed the flight of land-dwelling birds that fished at sea as these birds flew from the direction of islands in the morning or returned in the evenings. The navigators also watched for changes in swell patterns, clouds piled up over land, reflections on clouds from lagoons, and drifting land vegetation.
When European explorers found the islands of Polynesia, the common ancestry of the Polynesians was evidentÑthe inhabitants of widely separated islands looked alike, spoke alike, and had similar cultural practices. Their manufactured products such as fishooks, trolling lures, adzes, and ornaments also revealed similarities. And they had the same basic stock of domesticated plants and animals.
The peoples of Polynesia came from a common ancestral group that developed a distinctive fishing and farming culture in the islands of Tonga and Samoa.
While dates constantly change with new archaeological discoveries, the general sequence for the settlement of Polynesia has been relatively well established (Dates represent earliest archaeological finds; they almost certainly do not represent the earliest presence of human beings.):
--Hunters and gatherers inhabited Australia and New Guinea by 50,000 years ago.
--Around 1600-1200 B.C., a cultural complex called Lapita (identified by a distinctive pottery and named after a site in New Caledonia) spread from New Guinea in Melanesia as far east as Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga. Polynesian culture developed at the eastern edge of this region (i.e., in Samoa and Tonga).
--Around 300 B.C. or earlier, seafarers from Samoa and Tonga discovered and settled islands to the eastÑthe Cook Islands, Tahiti-nui, Tuamotus, and Hiva (Marquesas Islands).
--Around 300 A.D. or earlier, voyagers from central or eastern Polynesia, possibly from Hiva, discovered and settled Easter Island.
--Around 400 A.D. or earlier, voyagers from the the Cook Islands, Tahiti-nui, and /or Hiva settled Hawai'i.
--Around 1000 A.D. or earlier, voyagers from the Society and/or the Cook Islands settled Aotearoa (New Zealand).
The ethnobotanical evidence reflects this progression of settlement from the Western Pacific islands, through central Polynesia (the Cook Islands, Society Islands, and Hiva), and then to Hawai'i. Of the 72 plants identified as having been transported to Polynesia by people, 41-45 are found in the Cook Islands, the Society Islands, and Hiva; 29 are found in Hawai'i, including taro, breadfruit, sugar cane, bamboo, ti, yam, banana, 'awa, paper mulberry, kukui, coconut, gourd, sweet potato, and mountain apple. The settlers also brought the pig, dog, chicken, and rat along with them. The transport of plants and domesticated animals on voyaging canoes suggests that the early settlers planned to colonize Hawai'i, after having discovered its location.
The Settlement of Hawai'i
Hawai'i, which contains the largest islands in Polynesia outside of Aotearoa, must have appeared particularly rich in land and resources to its discoverers. The tradition of Hawai'iloa records the event as follows: "[The voyagers] went ashore and found the land fertile and pleasant, filled with 'awa, coconut trees, and so on, and Hawai'iloa, the chief, gave that land his name. Here they dwelt a long time and when their canoe was filled with vegetable food and fish, they returned to their native country with the intention of returning to Hawai'i-nei, which they preferred to their own country." (Fornander, Vol. 6, 278; other traditions suggest that 'awa and coconut were brought by those who settle Hawai'i.)
Scholars believe that early settlers of Hawai'i came predominantly from Hiva (Marquesas). The argument for a Hivan homeland is based in part on linguistic and biological evidence: "Indeed, the close relationship between the Hawaiian and Marquesan languages as well as between the physical populations constitutes strong and mutually corroborative evidence that the early Hawaiians came from the Marquesas" (Kirch 64).
The Marquesan language has been grouped under the category Proto Central Eastern Polynesian, along with Hawaiian, Tahitian, Tuamotuan, Rarotongan, and Maori. Vocabulary comparisons seem to indicate that the dialect of the Southern Marquesan Islands (Hiva Oa, Tahuata, Fatu Hiva), is the closest relative of Hawaiian language (Green 1966)"
Information credit Dennis Kawaharada The Settlement of Hawai'i
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