Captain Cook becomes the first European to reach Hawaii
On this day · 18 January 1778
Sailing north for a polar passage, Cook stumbled onto islands no European had recorded, and named them for his patron.
On January 18, 1778, the crew of Captain James Cook’s ships Resolution and Discovery sighted a mountainous island on the horizon, later identified as Oahu. It was the first recorded European contact with the Hawaiian Islands, which Cook named the Sandwich Islands in honor of his patron, the Earl of Sandwich.
Cook had not set out to find them. He was steering north across the Pacific in search of a Northwest Passage linking the Pacific and Atlantic when the islands appeared. Two days later, on January 20, he anchored and went ashore near the mouth of the Waimea River on Kauai.
The meeting opened the islands to far wider outside contact, with lasting and often devastating consequences for Native Hawaiians. For Cook, the encounter would prove fatal: returning to the islands the following year, he was killed in a confrontation at Kealakekua Bay in February 1779.
Sources & references
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