That the memory of the northern Hawaii should in process of time, and after the cessation of this period of intercourse, have faded from the minds of southern chiefs and bards, or been confounded with that of the Samoan Sawaii, is natural enough; though I think it possible, were Tahitian, Tongan and Samoan legends—if yet existing—properly compared with each other and with the Hawaiian, that many proofs may yet be drawn from that side of the frequent intercourse, hostile, or friendly, of those days between the northern and southern groups of the Pacific.
Though the northern Hawaii was apparently unknown to the Tonga and Society Islanders in Captain Cook’s time, yet the Marquesas retained the memory of former intercourse with that northern Hawaii whose burning mountain, Mounaoa (Maunaloa), is referred to in some of their songs, but these reminiscences are apparently [[339]]confused and mixed up with others of that older and far-off Hawaii and Vevao where they had sojourned before arriving at their own group of islands.
On October 31, 1527, according to Burney, three vessels left a port called Zivat-Lanejo, said by Galvoam to be situated in latitude 20 north, on the coast of New Spain, for the Moluccas or Spice Islands. They were the Florida with fifty men, the St. Jago with forty-five men, and the Espiritu Santo with fifteen men, under command of Alvaro de Saavedra, with thirty pieces of cannon and merchandise. These vessels were said to have sailed in company for 1000 leagues[2] and then to have been separated by bad weather. The two smaller vessels were never afterward heard of, and Saavedra pursued the voyage alone. (Burney, Discoveries in the South Seas, I, 147–148.) [[340]]
[1] Written probably about 1870. [↑]
[2] A Spanish or Portuguese league is 17¼ to an equatorial degree, 1000 = to 584⁄15 of a degree. [↑]
On the Word Amama.
Lenormant[1] says: “All the hymns of the third book finish by the Accadian word Kakama, which is translated in Assyrian by ‘amen,’ ‘amanu.’”