Channels of the Hawaiian Islands 7 miles. ʻAlalākeiki means "crying baby." The Kealaikahiki Channel is the channel between Lānaʻi and Kahoʻolawe. It literally means "the road to Tahiti"; if one takes a bearing off of Kealaikahiki Point on Kahoʻolawe while in the channel and heads directly straight, one arrives, more or less, in Tahiti. In practice, however, Polynesian navigators probably did not quite ply a straight route to Tahiti. The channel is 17 miles wide. The ʻAuʻau Channel is one of the most protected areas of ocean in the Hawaiian Islands, lying between Lānaʻi and Maui. The channel is also protected by Molokaʻi to the
Ancient Hawaiian population Ancient Hawaiian population The exact population of the Hawaiian Islands at the time of Captain James Cook's arrival is not known. What is known is that the first voyaging canoes that landed on Hawaiian shores during the discovery and settlement of Hawaii cannot have carried more than a hundred people, and perhaps even fewer. For the purposes of this article, "ancient" Hawaii is defined as the period beginning with the first arrival of human settlers, around AD 1100, and ending with their initial contact with the first Western visitors. In the popular model of constant population growth, the human population