John Kanaka
Item Number: 00-VEI1083
Format: Choral Octavo
Voicing: SATB
Arranged by Stephen Chatman
John Kanaka is a great example of sailors adopting words and phrases from the lands they visited. "Kanaka” is the Hawaiian word for man, or perhaps "Man from Hawaii." Many sailors had difficulty pronouncing the names of the Hawaiian natives that worked with them on the ships, and so would call them “Kanaka.”
The repeated syllables "naka" might sound nonsensical, but in Hawaiian it means "shell" or "sea creature", so “John Kanaka-naka” would mean "John the Hawaiian sea creature."
"Tu Lai e" are very common words in Polynesian languages, and roughly translate to "stand your ground", referring to the necessity of planting one's feet firmly on the deck when hauling on a halyard at sea, to raise sails for example.
