Kauai is my topic of thought for the day, but I’ll yield in favor of the thoughts of Spanish galleons sailing into Honolulu Harbor a century or two before Captain Cook managed to sail into Hawaiian waters.

Captain Cook is widely credited with “discovering” Hawaii for Western civilization. What the locals in Hawaii discovered was disease and new ways to inflict pain and harm on each other. Regardless, Cook got all the credit and the monuments, despite the mounting evidence that says the Spanish landed in Hawaii long before.

Kauai seems to be the first place the Spanish galleons charted. Those charts eventually became the property of the English. And you know where Captain Cook is from.

What were the Spanish doing way out in the ocean, thousands of miles from nowhere? Remember, those folks built ships that went everywhere. America would still be lost if it weren’t for the Spanish, right?

Mexico and the Philippines are connected by 8,000 miles of Pacific ocean. Hawaii lies pretty much smack dab in the middle and that’s where the Spanish found it. Again, what were they doing? Transporting gold and silver one direction and bringing back silks, spices, and porcelain in the other—mostly.

History notes that several Spanish navigation charts, circa the 1600s, show islands at the same latitude as the Hawaiian islands—Kauai and the Big Island prominent among them.

The English captured such a map and Captain Cook found himself with a copy on one of his expeditions. Cook called them the Sandwiche Isles, named after a local telephone company which supplies service to rural areas. Everything in Hawaii was rural back then. So rural, in fact, that the Spanish didn’t bother to stick around; obviously preoccupied with their millions of acres of land in Mexico and full contingent of tropical islands in the Philippines.

Even Hawaiian history says there were white-skinned folks who came long before Captain Cook. Early missionaries to Hawaii were told by King Kamehameha II and others about foreigners who landed at Kalakekkua Bay and knelt in prayer after arriving (either very religious or just happy to see land and a place that wasn’t moving so they could go to the bathoom.

Back to the Kauai connection: it was here where some of Captain Cook’s men discovered iron utensils and a broken sword blade—all of Spanish origin.

Who “discovered” Hawaii? Captain Cook or the Spanish? Probably the Spanish, but they left. After all, there wasn’t a Waikiki back then. And, answer me this; how do you “discover” something that’s already there with people waiting to say hello?

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