The cuisine of Hawaii incorporates how many distinct styles of food reflecting the diverse food history of settlement and immigration in the Hawaiian Islands, in the pre-contact period of Ancient Hawaii (300 AD–1778), Polynesian voyagers brought plants and animals to the Islands?
Polynesian navigation Traditional Polynesian navigation was used for thousands of years to make long voyages across thousands of miles of the open Pacific Ocean. Navigators travelled to small inhabited islands using wayfinding techniques and knowledge passed by oral tradition from master to apprentice, often in the form of song. Generally each island maintained a guild of navigators who had very high status; in times of famine or difficulty they could trade for aid or evacuate people to neighboring islands. As of 2014, these traditional navigation methods are still taught in the Polynesian outlier of Taumako Island in the Solomons.
Pidgin Hawaiian Pidgin Hawaiian was a pidgin spoken in Hawaii, which drew most of its vocabulary from the Hawaiian language and could have been influenced by other pidgins of the Pacific region. Emerging in the mid-nineteenth century, it was spoken mainly by immigrants to Hawaii, and died out in the early twentieth century. Like all pidgins, Pidgin Hawaiian was a fairly rudimentary language, used for immediate communicative purposes by people of diverse language backgrounds, but who were mainly from East and South-East Asia. As Hawaiian was the main language of the islands in the nineteenth century, most words came from this Polynesian language, though many others contributed to its formation. In the 1890s and afterwards, the increased spread of English favoured the use of an English-based pidgin instead, which, once nativized as the first language of children, developed into a creole which today is misleadingly called Hawaiian 'Pidgin'. This variety has also been influenced by Pidgin Hawaiian; for example in its use of the grammatical marker "pau".