e adventures among similar surroundings and colored by the same
interests and desires. This means, in the first place, that the race
must have developed for a long period of time in some common home of
origin before the dispersal came, which sent family groups migrating
along the roads of ocean after some fresh land for settlement;[2] in the
second place, it reflects a period of long voyaging which brought about
interchange of culture between far distant groups.[3] As the Crusades
were the great exchange for west European folk stories, so the days of
the voyagers were the Polynesian crusading days. The roadway through the
seas was traveled by singing bards who carried their tribal songs as a
race heritage into the new land of their wanderings. Their inns for
hostelry were islets where the boats drew up along the beach and the
weary oarsmen grouped about the ovens where their hosts prepared cooked
food for feasting. Tales traveled thus from group to group with a
readiness which only a common tongue, common interests, and a common
delight could foster, coupled with the constant competition of family
rivalries.

Hawaiian tradition reflects these days of wandering.[4] A chief vows to
wed no woman of his own group but only one fetched from "the land of
good women." An ambitious priest seeks overseas a leader of divine
ancestry. A chief insulted by his superior leads his followers into
exile on some foreign shore. There is exchange of culture-gifts,
intermarriage, tribute, war. Romance echoes with the canoe song and the
invocation to the confines of Kahiki[5]--this in spite of the fact that
intercourse seems to have been long closed between this northern group
and its neighbors south and east. When Cook put in first at the island
of Kauai, most western of the group, perhaps guided by Spanish charts,
perhaps by Tahitian navigators who had preserved the tradition of
ancient voyages,[6] for hundreds of years none but chance boats had
driven upon its shores.[7] But the old tales remained, fast bedded at
the foundation of Hawaiian imaginative literature. As now recited they
take the form of chants or of long monotonous recitals like the
_Laieikawai_, which take on the heightened form of poetry only in
dialogue or on occasions when the emotional stress requires set song.
Episodes are passed along, from one hero cycle to another, localities
and names vary, and a fixed form in matter of detail relieves the
stretch of invention; in fa