Maui
The island of Maui in Hawaii was named for a goddess of that same name. Before Europeans arrived in that part of the world, that goddess and her legend were also known a thousand miles south in the Samoan Islands, and hundreds of miles south of that in the Tonga Islands and nearly a thousand miles south of that in New Zealand. Back then, the only way to travel long distances in the South Pacific was by out-rigger canoe. For the legend of Maui to have spread thousands of miles, people must have traveled that distance in canoes through the open ocean, where on a clear day waves can be ten feet high, and on a stormy day the waves can be horrendous.
They had no navigational instruments. So how could they have known where they were and where they were going?
And in the open ocean, because of the curvature of the Earth, they could only see a few miles to the horizon.
Imagine the faith and courage it would have taken to row a canoe in the open ocean — with no land in sight and no assurance that you would ever reach land — for weeks or even months.
Then imagine a simpler explanation. Instead of hundreds or thousands of people with primitive technology making that trek over the course of hundreds of years, imagine an extraterrestrial making a few stops on South Pacific islands and retelling the same story of Maui.
