Free Republic

HONOLULU - Without passenger boats, bridges or tunnels linking the islands of Hawaii, the state's four island counties in some ways are as isolated from each other as they are from the mainland. That may change when the Hawaii Superferry, a four-story catamaran, begins running from Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, to Maui and Kauai in a little over a year. A second boat connecting Honolulu with the Big Island is expected to start service in 2009. "This is like the coming of the jet age. It's a new transportation mode," said John Garibaldi, president of Hawaii Superferry. "How...

[Captain Cooke] continued by stating that the people he met on Kauai were not "aquainted with our commodities, Except iron; which however, it was plain, they had....in some quantity, brought to them at some distant period.... They asked for it by the name of Hamaite." It is interesting to note that a Spanish word for iron is "Hematitas"... No Spanish map has yet been found which shows the location of a shipwreck in the mid-Pacific., However, many maps show these islands. In fact most charts of the Pacific printed in Europe after 1570 show a group of Islands in this...