Pele, goddess of volcanoes and fire, leaves her homeland Kahiki, a name applied in Hawaiian tradition to distant, ancestral Polynesian homelands generally rather than one fixed location, after conflict with her older sister Namakaokahai, goddess of the sea, whose hostility Pele can never fully escape by staying anywhere close to the water her sister controls. Traveling in a canoe with several of her siblings, guided partly by her youngest sister, the hula goddess Hiiaka, who in some tellings is carried the whole journey as an egg kept warm beneath Pele's arm, Pele searches the islands of the Pacific for a place to make a permanent home for her fire.
At island after island along the way, Pele digs a testing pit with her sacred digging stick, the paoa, to see whether it is a suitable place to establish herself, but each attempt is answered by Namakaokahai flooding the pit with seawater, since a place close enough to the sea for her sister to reach can never be safe from her, forcing Pele onward each time just as she believes she may have found rest.
Hawaiian tradition names several other siblings as part of Pele's traveling household, including Kamohoalii, a shark god who commands the canoe on the crossing, and a number of sisters besides Hiiaka, so that the journey is remembered less as one goddess traveling alone than as an entire divine family relocating together, with roles and responsibilities that persist once the family settles permanently on Hawaii Island.