My friend Jim Reed asked me some time ago how Hawaii came to be called the Sandwich Islands. I didn’t know but it got me thinking.

Did Native Hawaiians eat sandwiches when Capt. James Cook arrived in 1778? Surely not. Did the islands look like some sort of submarine sandwich to the Brits? I couldn’t see how, so I decided to sink my teeth into the subject. It was a lot to put on my plate, but it gave me the unusual opportunity to offer my readers some awful puns. Sorry. Here’s what I found.

It was common for explorers, such as Cook, to create maps of their journeys and name the places they found, even if they already had native names.

Cook did that for his benefactor, John Montagu (1718-1792), the fourth Earl of Sandwich. The town of Sandwich is about 50 miles east of London, on the coast facing the French town of Calais 30 miles away. Canterbury is 10 miles to its west.

Montagu was a great supporter of Cook’s Pacific exploration. He helped fund the purchase and outfitting of Cook’s ships: Adventure, Resolution and Discovery.

So it was natural for Cook to name the islands of Hawaii after his patron. We might have been called the Montagu Islands, but Cook used that for an island in Alaska. He chose the Sandwich Islands as the name for his 1778 "discovery."

Hawaii was not the only place Cook named for his benefactor. In 1775 he named a group of islands 1,500 miles east of Argentina in the Atlantic the South Sandwich Islands. One of them is Montagu Island. Confused? It gets worse. He also named an island in the Cook chain and another in Vanuatu "Sandwich Island."

Forty years later, in 1818, when Russian Vasily Golovnin visited the islands, he wrote that King Kamehameha I was unhappy with the name Sandwich Islands. Kamehameha said each island had its own name and that the chain should be called the "Islands of the King of Hawaii."

I wondered about the name "Hawaii" and where it came from. Available sources say that it is Polynesian, but its meaning is no longer known.

Hawaii had a close relationship with Great Britain, and many of our royalty visited those other, distant islands. It’s not known whether they discussed their preference for the name of our kingdom.

It may not have helped that the first English-language newspaper in Hawaii called itself the Sandwich Island Gazette and Journal of Commerce. It began publication in 1836.

The term "Sandwich Islands" continues to occasionally be used to this day. It’s generally accepted that in official communications between governments, it fell into disuse after 1844.

But let’s finish everything on our plate, so to speak. Was the sandwich invented by the famous earl? Clearly, the answer is no. Records of bread and meat or cheese being eaten together go back centuries, and it is certain the Earl of Sandwich did not invent such dinner fare.

One source has him asking his valet for meat tucked between two pieces of bread so that he could work at his desk or play cards without making a mess.

Historians aren’t sure what is true and what is legend about the Earl of Sandwich. We might never know, but his name has been permanently associated with that portable meal of infinite possible combinations, including bread, meat, cheese, vegetables and condiments.

Bob Sigall, author of the "Companies We Keep" books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories each Friday of Hawaii people, places and companies. Email him at Sigall@Yahoo.com.