p Almost all the Polynesian legends, including the myth of the deluge, mention the land of Hawaiiki either as a "land of the deceased”, where the souls of the dead go, or as the "land of ancestors”, the parent land of the Polynesians. That a parent land existed scholars do not doubt. The astonishing similarity of the languages, mythology and customs of islanders living many hundreds and even thousands of kilometres apart indicate that the remote ancestors of the present inhabitants of the Marquesas Archipelago, Tuamotu, Tahiti, New Zealand and other islands of Polynesia once all dwelt in the same place, where the Polynesian or, rather, the proto-Polynesian culture developed.

p Where was the legendary land of Hawaiiki located? There are many assumptions, but at the present time only one thing is certain—that the Hawaiian Archipelago is not the parent land of tho Polynesians, no matter how tempting the idea may be. True, the name of the archipelago is a dialect form of the word “Hawaiiki”. But many places in Polynesia have similar names, for instance, Savaii, the chief island in the Samoan group, which is also a dialectical form of the word “Hawaiiki”.

p Proto-Polynesian culture and language developed in remote antiquity, somewhere in the second millennium B.C. The Hawaiians appeared on their islands only in the second millennium A.D., according to their genealogy. Linguistic findings confirm this. The Hawaiian language separated from the main trunk of Polynesian languages about 1,000 years ago. Still, there is much that is vague about the origin of the Hawaiian people.

p Archeological excavations have shown that people settled Hawaii at the beginning of our era. In other words, the ancestors of the present Hawaiians were preceded by another, more ancient people. Who were they? Archeologists cannot give a precise answer as yet. Hawaiian folklore describes in detail the oldest dwellers in the "land of eternal spring" as the Hawaiian Islands are sometimes called because the annual average temperature there fluctuates between +20° and -f-22°C.

p According to a legend which has come down by word of mouth "from innumerable generations”, a vast land covered a large part of the Pacific Ocean. It was called Ka Houpo o Kanne, which means "Solar Plexus of Kanne”. (Kanne was the 90 Hawaiian form oi’ the word Tunne, one of the main Polynesian gods.) Tin’s land was destroyed by a great flood. All the inhabitants were drowned except three groups of people, the dwarflike Menehune, the Kenamu and the Kenawa. Later the Menehune completed the job started by the flood—they killed off all the Kenamu and Kenawa. The Menehune were the first people to live on the Hawaiian Islands. The ancestors of the present-day Hawaiians arrived on the islands later. To prevent intermingling with the newcomers the ruler of the Menehune ordered his people to withdraw into the forests on Kauai Island.

p Other Hawaiian legends describe in detail the appearance and customs of the Menehune, stressing that now they live on Kauai. The legends disagree on one point: some say the Menehuue were about one metre high, while others insist they were tiny creatures, tlie size of a human finger. Once there were more than half a million Menehune, but their numbers gradually decreased. Under the last independent Kauai ruler (who came under the sway of King Kamehameha I, ruler of the entire Hawaiian Archipelago) there were only 10,000 Menehune left. Afterwards they disappeared completely, although old people on Kauai claim that their grandparents occasionally met those tiny human beings.

p Who were the Menehune? Were they just fairy-tale personages, like the European gnomes or the Abkhazian dwarf atsans, as Katherino Luomala, the world’s leading authority on Polynesian folklore, believes? Or were they Polynesians who may be considered to have been the first mariners to cross the Pacific to the Hawaiian 91 Islands, and who were later turned into fairytale personages, as Hiroa Te Rangi, expert on ancient Polynesian culture, maintains? Or were the Menehur.o not Polynesians but the darkskinned inhabitants of Melanesia or Micronesia? Or members of pygmy tribes, which are found not only in Africa but also on some islands of Oceania? We have no answers to these questions. Besides, a detailed discussion of them does not come within the terms of reference of this book.

p What interests us is whether the legend of a deluge lias any basis in fact. It is quite possible that the story of the destruction of a vast continent that united all of Polynesia, from the Hawaiian Islands to New Zealand and the Fiji Islands, is an exaggeration. But did land submerge in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands? If so, could it have happened in human times?

p Oceanographers believe that land did subside there. Moreover, there is evidence of an opposite process, the rise of the ocean floor. Actually, the Hawaiian Archipelago was formed by the action of gigantic submarine volcanoes. Volcanism is still going on there. The largest volcano in the world is situated on Hawaii, the main island of the group. If we were to measure the height of Mauna Loa or "Long Mountain" not from sea level (where it is four kilometres) but from the ocean floor, on which its base stands, the height is about 10 kilomelres, which would make Mauna Loa more than 1,000 metres higher than Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world.

p Coral reefs, as we know, grow only at moderate depths. Hence the thickness of a coral island 92 indicates the depth to which the undersea mountain or shoals on which the corals build their colony has sunk. On the Hawaiian Islands, coral remains are found in the mountains as well as in the ocean. On Kauai they have been discovered at a height of 1,220 metres, which means land rose there by almost 1,500 metres.

p Considerable subsidence of land has also occurred in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands. Corals were found at a depth of 353,4 metres when soil from artesian wells near Honolulu, capital of Hawaii, was tested. This shows that the ocean floor there dropped by at least 300 metres. The valleys of Hawaiian rivers continue out into the ocean. Wells bored on Oahu Island have shown that river deposits here can be traced to a depth of 300 metres below the level of the Pacific Ocean. Twenty kilometres south-west of Honolulu, ocoanographers have brought fragments of coral and shallow-water mollusks up from a depth of more than half a kilometre. This indicates that Oahu Island, on which Honolulu is situated, has subsided by at least 500 metres.

p The most characteristic feature of the Hawaiian Archipelago is that its foothills slant inland instead of towards the ocean. This, say modern oceanographers, may be explained by a general intensive subsidence in this region. The Hawaiian Islands lie on the slope of a rise in the oceanic bed, as though they had arisen out of an embryonic mountain ridge. It is possible, say the experts, that the islands appeared as the result of the formation of an underwater ridge.

p Indeed, the Hawaiian Archipelago is only the highest part of the giant Hawaiian Ridge, a vast mountain system hidden beneath the 93 Pacific. This ridge is 1,100 kilometres wide and from live to eight kilometres high. Its highest point is the Mauna Loa volcano, 10 kilometres high measured from the ocean bed. The northern section of the underwater ridge is level and is covered with smooth pebbles, a sure sigzi of shallow water. The claim that glaciers carried the pebbles to the ridge is not convincing since this area was not affected by the Ice Age. Besides, only waves could have levelled the tops of the mountains. In other words, there was a time when not only the Hawaiian Islands but other parts of the Hawaiian Ridge lifted their summits above the surface of the water. This must have been a very long time ago. Underwater research will show whether the land in the Hawaiian area sank at a time when the islands were inhabited. It is quite possible that some colossal tsunami may have given rise to the deluge legends, for the Hawaiian Islands have suffered time and again from these great ocean waves that carry death and destruction.

p The history of the Hawaiian Ridge and other underwater ridges and mountains that stretch across the ocean to the shores of Asia is interesting not only because it gives us a clue to the origin of the Hawaiian people but also because it may help to answer the question of how Oceania was peopled.

p Writing in the magazine Okeanologia about the 34th voyage of the research ship Vityaz, V. G. Kort, Soviet oceanographer, tells how the expedition discovered several new volcanic underwater mountains that once were islands and then sank. Discovery of these mountains, he says, supplements the data on distribution of volcanism in the Pacific and confirms the existence in the 94 past of island bridges connecting’ the continents lying on the surface of the ocean.

The interesting question is: did men use those bridges?