The first immigrants to Hawai`i traveled over 2,000 miles of open ocean in large double-hulled canoes with sails of woven leaves.
No one knows exactly when they arrived, but most historians agree that the first settlers came from the Marquesas Islands, sometime between the first and fifth centuries CE. We have very little archaeological evidence of this first group. A second wave arrived, probably from Tahiti, between 1100 and 1300 CE. These settlers apparently pushed aside the first group, and it is their culture that we think of as ancient Hawaiian.