How Hawaii Got Its Name (and Lost "Sandwich Islands")

For much of the 1800s, maps called Hawaii the Sandwich Islands, Captain Cook’s name, while the islanders used a name of their own. That name, Hawaii, belonged first to one island, the biggest one, and spread from there to the whole chain.

Cook’s name

Captain James Cook was the English explorer behind the first name. James Jackson Jarves, who published a history of the islands in 1843, explains it. The group was “generally known as the Sandwich Islands,” he says, because Cook named them “in honour of his patron, the Earl of Sandwich, then First Lord of the Admiralty.”

W. D. Alexander says the same in the history he wrote in 1891 at the request of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s Board of Education. Cook gave the name “at the time of its discovery by him,” for the Earl of Sandwich, who was “then First Lord of the British Admiralty.”

Jarves didn’t like the name much. He thought explorers had no business renaming other people’s islands. He complained that the “caprices of their discoverers” had left names all over the Pacific “regardless of their aboriginal designations,” and he was glad the Hawaiian name was “gradually taking the place” of Cook’s “in charts, maps, and books.”

“O, Hawaii”

Jarves also explains a funny mistake. Cook wrote the name of the big island as “Owhyhee,” and the other islands came out as “Atooi” for Kauai and “Onehow” for Niihau.

Where did the extra O come from? Jarves says it’s grammar. In Hawaiian, “O” is the sign that marks the subject of a sentence. So if Cook asked what land that was, the answer would have been “O, Hawaii,” and the O ended up glued to the name. The same thing happened to Tahiti, which turned into “Otaheite.”

One island’s name for all of them

So where did the name of the whole group come from? Jarves says the islanders called the group “Hawaii nei,” a collective name that meant the Hawaiian Islands. “They are so called from the largest of the group, Hawaii,” he writes, “from which the reigning family originated.”

Alexander puts it the same way in 1891: “the name Hawaiian Islands, derived from that of the largest island in the group, is the official name, used by the people of the islands, and is generally taking the place of the former.” The U.S. Geological Survey’s note on the state agrees. Hawaii is “a Polynesian word applied to the largest of the islands and extended to the whole archipelago during the 19th century.”

And the island’s own name?

This is where the books get honest about what nobody knows. None of them says what the word Hawaii actually means. There’s an old Hawaiian story about a chief named Hawaii-loa, a “famous fisherman and navigator” who, Alexander says, “discovered and named Hawaii and Maui.” Alexander tells the story and then says flatly: “the truth of this story is very doubtful.”

Abraham Fornander, a circuit judge on Maui who wrote a long study of Polynesian traditions, took the legend seriously but read it his own way. In his telling, Hawaii-loa named the island he found “after his own name.” In 1878 he wrote that the Hawaii in the old story might be the Hawaii of the North Pacific, or Savaii in Samoa, or even Java. Later in the same book he argued that the two islands Hawaii-loa found were really Sumatra and Java, far to the west, and that he named one for himself and the other for his son Maui. That’s his own theory, built on his reading of the legend, and no other book here backs it up.

Alexander adds one more clue. The Maori of New Zealand tell of an ancestral homeland called Hawaiki, “which is the same word with Savaii and Hawaii.” So, by Alexander’s account, the word wasn’t only Hawaiian. It turns up in other parts of the Pacific too.

From kingdom to state

Hawaii was a kingdom when Jarves and Alexander wrote, with its own royal family. The USGS note gives the date it joined the Union: Hawaii “officially became the 50th state in the American Union on August 21, 1959.” If you go looking for the Sandwich Islands on a map today, you’re looking for Hawaii.

Sources & further reading

• James Jackson Jarves, History of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands (London, 1843), pp. 1–2. “Generally known as the Sandwich Islands, were so named by Captain Cook, at the date of their discovery by him, in honour of his patron, the Earl of Sandwich, then First Lord of the Admiralty”; the Hawaiian name “is now gradually taking the place of the former in charts, maps, and books”; “‘Hawaii nei,’ a collective term, synonymous with the Hawaiian Islands. They are so called from the largest of the group, Hawaii; from which the reigning family originated” (p. 1); the “caprices of their discoverers,” “regardless of their aboriginal designations” (p. 1); “Hawaii, he called Owhyhee; Kauai, Atooi; Niihau, Onehow”; the “O” as “the sign denoting the nominative case”; “O, Hawaii”; “Otaheite for Tahiti” (p. 2).
• W. D. Alexander, A Brief History of the Hawaiian People (published by order of the Board of Education of the Hawaiian Kingdom, 1891), pp. 13, 19–20. Cook named the Sandwich Islands “at the time of its discovery by him, in honor of his patron, the Earl of Sandwich, who was then First Lord of the British Admiralty”; “the name Hawaiian Islands, derived from that of the largest island in the group, is the official name, used by the people of the islands, and is generally taking the place of the former” (p. 13); the Maori Hawaiki, “the same word with Savaii and Hawaii” (p. 19, note); Hawaii-loa, “a famous fisherman and navigator,” who “discovered and named Hawaii and Maui”; “the truth of this story is very doubtful” (p. 20).
• Abraham Fornander, An Account of the Polynesian Race, vol. 1 (London, 1878), pp. 23–24, 134. Title page: “Circuit Judge of the Island of Maui.” Hawaii-loa, “a noted fisherman and great navigator,” reached “the eastermost of these islands which he called after his own name” (p. 23); whether the Hawaii of the legend “be the Hawaii of the North Pacific, the Sawaii of the Samoan group, or the Jawa of the Asiatic Archipel” (p. 24); the islands he found “can be no other than Sumatra and Java. He called the one after his own name, Hawa-ii, and the other after that of his son Maui” (p. 134).
• U.S. Geological Survey, GNIS feature 1779782, history note. “Hawaii officially became the 50th state in the American Union on August 21, 1959”; “a Polynesian word applied to the largest of the islands and extended to the whole archipelago during the 19th century”; Cook “named them the Sandwich Islands for the first Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of Sandwich.”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Hawaii’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1779782).