"So intense was this period of voyaging and exploration that in the single milenium beginning with the birth of Christ, the Polynesian would establish his culture as the most geographically dispersed on earth. By 1200 A.D. he had settled remote Easter Island to the east, Hawai'i to the north, New Zealand to the south - in short, every habitable island in a sweep of blue roughly equal in size to the entire land mass of the western hemisphere. He had turned a trackless blue desert into a network of familiar seaways where there were but two units of land for every thousand of water - an uncommon achievement by uncommon people.

I would be centuries, before western man would venture out of sight of land. Hawai'i, land of the most geographically isolated culture on earth, would be discovered and settled more than a thousand years before Captain Cook was born."

From the book "The Hawaiian Canoe"

By Tommy Holmes