The big island of Hawaiʻi is said to have been named after Hawai’iloa, the legendary Polynesian navigator who first discovered it. Other claims attribute the name to the legendary realm of ‘Hawaiki’, a place from which the Polynesian people are said to have originated. It’s also known as the realm of the gods and goddesses where they’re souls go in the afterlife. Captain James Cook, the English explorer and navigator who was the captain of the first European expedition that discovered the Hawaiian Islands, called them the “Sandwich Islands” after his patron, the ‘Earl of Sandwich’. Incidentally, Cook was killed on the Big Island at Kealakekua Bay on February 14th 1779, in a melee which followed the theft of a ship’s boat. Hawaiʻi was also the home island of Paiʻea Kamehameha, later known as ‘Kamehameha the Great’. Kamehameha united most of the Hawaiian islands under his rule in 1795, after several years of war, and gave the entire island chain the name of his native island.