Footnotes to Section II, 4:  The Earthly Paradise

[Footnote 1:  Grey, pp. 1-15; White, I, 46; Baessler, Neue Suedsee-Bilder, pp. 244, 245; Gill, Myths and Songs, pp. 58-60.]

[Footnote 2:  Compare Kraemer’s Samoan story (in Samoa Inseln, p. 413) of the quest after the pearl fishhooks kept by Night and Day in the twofold heavens with the Hawaiian stories collected by Fornander of Aiai and Nihoalaki.  Kraemer’s story begins: 

  “Aloalo went to his father
   To appease Sina’s longing;
   He sent him to the twofold heavens,
   To his grandparents, Night and Day,
   To the house whence drops fall spear-shaped,
   To hear their counsel and return. 
   Aloalo entered the house,
   Took not the unlucky fishhook,
   Brought away that of good luck,”
     etc.]

[Footnote 3:  Kraemer, Samoa Inseln, pp. 44, 115; Fison, pp. 16, 139-161, 163; Lesson, II, 272, 483 (see index); Mariner, II, 100, 102, 115, et seq.; Moerenhout, I, 432; Gracia, p. 40; Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia, p. 237; Gill, Myths and Songs, pp. 152-172.

In Fison’s story (p. 139) the gods dwell in Bulotu, “where the sky meets the waters in the climbing path of the sun.”  The story goes:  “In the beginning there was no land save that on which the gods lived; no dry land was there for men to dwell upon; all was sea; the sky covered it above and bounded it on every side.  There was neither day nor night, but a mild light shone continually through the sky upon the water, like the shining of the moon when its face is hidden by a white cloud.”]

5.  THE STORY:  ITS MYTHICAL CHARACTER

These mythical tales of the gods are reflected in Haleole’s romance of Laieikawai.  Localized upon Hawaii, it is nevertheless familiar with regions of the heavens.  Paliuli, the home of Laieikawai, and Pihanakalani, home of the flute-playing high chief of Kauai, are evidently earthly paradises.[1] Ask a native where either of these places is to be found and he will say, smiling, “In the heavens.”  The long lists of local place names express the Polynesian interest in local journeyings.  The legend of Waiopuka is a modern or at least adapted legend.  But the route which the little sister follows to the heavens corresponds with Polynesian cosmogonic conceptions, and is true to ancient stories of the home of the gods.

The action of the story, too, is clearly concerned with a family of demigods.  This is more evident if we compare a parallel story translated by Westervelt in “Gods and Ghosts,” page 116, which, however confused and fragmentary, is clearly made up of some of the same material as Haleole’s version.[2]