Hawaii-loa sailed to the northeast, following “Iao,” Jupiter, as the morning star. Iao was a favorite guiding star among the Hawaiians. Five of the planets were known by the sea-rovers. The planets were called “Na Hoku hele”—“the going stars.” Mars was known as “Hoku ula,” “the red star.” “Na hoku paa” were “the fastened stars, immovable in the heavens.” The name “Iao” is given to one of the mountains of the Island of Maui.
Hawaii-loa found the fire islands—the islands somewhat like the old Java home, luxuriant and volcanic. He named the large island Hawa-i-i—“the little or the burning Java.”
The large island was full of delight to the bold navigator, and he determined to bring his family to this new land for their permanent home. He took them from “the land where his forefathers dwelt before him.” He sailed through the “dotted sea,” the sea with many islands lying near his old ancestral home, “the rainy Zaba”—the modern Zaba or Saba of the Arabian seacoast—from which his own name, “Hawa,” is easily derived. On his journey back and forth he passed through a sea which delighted his heart as a fisherman—“a sea where the fishes run.” He must have found excellent deep-sea fishing. He crossed the “many-coloured [[38]]ocean” and the “sky-blue sea.” He revelled in the beauty of the sun rising and setting in glorious colours on the restless waves. On he sailed with his family until he came to Hawaii—“the burning Java,” the land of volcanoes and earthquakes and of luxuriant valleys and fertile seacoasts.
Fornander suggests that Hawaii is derived from Java and Java from the Arabian Saba.
Evidently a Polynesian chief of high rank gathered a number of adherents or members of his tribe, and sailed eastward over the Pacific, about the beginning of the Christian era. His descendants, or at least such portion of his family as did not follow him on his voyage, seem to have moved from Java to the Molucca Islands and settled in Jilolo.
It is said that after he brought his family to Hawaii, new islands sprang out of the sea, well wooded and well watered. These he divided among his children.
When the later sea-rovers came to Hawaii, possibly in the fifth or sixth century, they found the islands already inhabited by people of their own race, and yet apparently without a chief—probably a servant class. If we sift the legends and then assume that in the course of three or four hundred years the family of the chief, Hawaii-loa, became extinct in Hawaii, leaving only the servants on the islands, we have at least a probable explanation [[39]]of the coming of the so-called little people, or fairies, from the Southern Pacific to Hawaii.
The South Pacific islanders called their servants, or laborers, the Manahune people.
The fairies were known in the Hawaiian legends as the Menehunes. Sometimes they were credited with powers like the gnomes of old England. They were supposed to work only at night. A very ancient stone water-wall along the side of one of the swift-flowing Hawaiian rivers has no tradition or history save that the Menehune people built it in one night. Another very ancient stone wall around a large fish pond is referred to the Menehunes, who did not finish their work in one night, therefore the wall has always been incomplete. So also some of the most ancient temples were referred to the mysterious midnight labors of this people.
One of the legends states that a priest desired to carry the Menehune people across the long stretch of ocean between the foreign lands and the Island of Oahu, therefore “he stretched out his hands to the farthest bounds of Tahiti and over him the Menehunes—the servants—crossed to Oahu.”