Cook reached Hawaii in 1778, centuries after Polynesians

British navigator James Cook made the first recorded European contact with Hawaiʻi in January 1778: his crew sighted Oʻahu at daybreak on 18 January, and on 20 January Cook went ashore near the mouth of the Waimea River on Kauaʻi. He called the chain the Sandwich Islands, after the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty.

“First” needs a qualifier. Polynesian voyagers from the Marquesas settled the islands long before, and the National Park Service says the most recent radiocarbon estimates put their arrival at 1000–1200 AD — some six to eight centuries before Cook. He was not even looking for them; he was heading north from Tahiti to search for a Northwest Passage.

The crew’s journals show what first contact looked like from the deck. Islanders traded hogs and potatoes for nails and iron worked into chisels. Knowing that some of his men carried venereal disease picked up in the Society Islands, Cook banned contact with Hawaiian women; on 25 January seaman William Bradley got two dozen lashes for breaking the order. Even Cook, his officers noted, doubted it would hold.

What happened next

• February 1778: The ships leave Kauaʻi and Niʻihau for the coast of North America.
• Summer 1778: Cook charts the southern coast of Alaska until a wall of ice turns him back.
• January 1779: He returns, this time to Kealakekua Bay on Hawaiʻi Island, during the Makahiki season.
• 4 February 1779: Relations strained, he leaves — but a sprung foremast forces him back days later.
• 14 February 1779: After islanders take a longboat from HMS Discovery, Cook goes ashore with nine marines to recover it; he and four marines are killed.

Even the landing is hard to pin down: the Park Service notes that tides and shifting sand mean the precise spot at Waimea is unknown. Cook’s earlier voyage had produced the first recorded crossing of the Antarctic Circle.