ABSTRACT
In 1778, when James Cook in the ship Resolution rested offshore the islands of Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau, he named this archipelago the “Sandwich Islands” in honour of the prominent sponsor of his third voyage, the Earl of Sandwich. By this appellation-as recorded in Cook’s journal and subsequently engraved onto maps, charts, globes, and geography texts of the time-did this group of islands become known to the Westernized world. An identity imposed from without, this designation sprang from the process of inscription and classication that was producing the modern scientic and geographical order. Though over subsequent decades this name would yield to the epithet “Hawaii”, this too is a colonial by-product; there was no overarching name for the entire archipelago prior to Western contact. Occupied by up to 1 million Polynesians who had been in residence for at least 1000 years, it was not, in effect, one place, but several places. It is supposed that because most early contact took place on the island of Hawai‘i, this name became synonymous in Western discourse with the entire group (Blaisdell 1989).1
