The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  The first difficulty is agreeing on a date for settlement. One version of the islanders’ own traditions told how the inhabitants were led there by Hotu Matu’a from Hiva, who was seeking the sunrise; his name merely means ‘Great Parent’. There are several islands in the Marquesas group, to the north-east of Rapa Nui, that contain the word ‘Hiva’ in their name, and, as has been seen, the Marquesas may well have been the source of the Hawai’ian population.22 These traditions also report a six-week voyage inspired by Hoto Matu’a’s tattooist, who said he had dreamed of a fine volcanic isle to the east. The striking feature is not so much the detail in the story but the awareness that the islanders had come across the sea, and that the world consisted of more than their own island, a view that, in their extreme isolation, they could easily have held, and that other less isolated island peoples have held.23

  Counting the fifty-seven generations said to have elapsed between Hotu Matu’a and the recording of the legend one reaches a date of AD 450; but such methods, as will be clear from New Zealand, are without much merit, and some of those working with the same oral material have produced dates in the twelfth or even the sixteenth century. Fortunately modern science resolves the difficulty, up to a point: Carbon 14 dating shows that settlers were already installed on Rapa Nui around the end of the seventh century AD (690±130), a date derived from material found at a temple platform. Yet this too is not a flawless way of establishing dates; an even earlier date of AD 318 came from a grave that also contained a bone dated AD 1629. The language of the islanders, though clearly Polynesian (as seen in the place names especially) has distinctive features that lead linguists who specialize in glottochronology to conclude that it broke away from neighbouring tongues around AD 400; it mixes features from western and eastern Polynesian, and there has been time for a local vocabulary to develop, such as the word poki (child). The islanders also developed a very distinctive script, or possibly brought it along from somewhere else that abandoned its use, though that is to assume that the script was not developed after contact with and in imitation of the Europeans. It was a sacred script, almost always inscribed with care on wooden panels; unfortunately no attempt at decipherment has been totally convincing.24

  Rapa Nui is best known for the remarkable statues and temple platforms that pepper Easter Island. The high period of construction stretched over several hundred years from 1200 to 1600. The statues, which originally looked away from the sea and towards the volcanic interior, apparently represented ancestors, while the often elaborate platforms seem to have been used not just for rituals but as astronomical observatories, so that the loss of interest in navigation was evidently not accompanied by a loss of interest in reading the skies. Local priests saw the night sky as a calendar that they used to fix their festivals.25 Cut off from the rest of the world, the island tried to survive from its own resources, but, steadily denuded of tree cover by its inhabitants, Rapa Nui became impoverished. Environmental collapse provides the best explanation for the end of the era of prosperity that brought these platforms and statues into being – indeed, over the following centuries statues were cast down, the inhabitants went to war with one another, often living in caves, and competition for scarce resources intensified.

  Easter Island may well be the great exception to the general rule that islands were searched out deliberately; whether or not it was found by accident, it remained off the mental map of the Polynesian navigators. Like Hawai’i and New Zealand, it did not feature on the hand-drawn map the Polynesian navigator Tupaia prepared for Captain Cook, which only extended as far east as the Marquesas.26 Pitcairn Island too was cut off from the rest of Polynesia and was empty when the mutineers from the Bounty arrived in 1790; but it had been inhabited in the past, as stone remains were found – clearly there had been an extremely isolated population that had died out or emigrated. And a similar story can be told of Kiritimati (in Kiribati), to which the mutineers eventually moved.27 Some attempts at colonization were simply not successful, because the fortunes of these island communities depended on their position within still larger communities of islands that interacted across the ocean through trade, warfare and marriage ties.

  These most remote islands, then, were the realms of Pluto and the outermost planets, places beyond the outer edge of the interactive world of the Polynesian chiefdoms, who warred with one another, whose people traded with one another, and who preserved over generation after generation their unwritten but detailed and highly effective science of navigation. That still leaves untold the discovery and settlement of what are by far the largest islands in Polynesia, and the most inhospitable climatically: the North and South Islands of New Zealand.

  IV

  The history of the discovery of New Zealand has always been a tangle. In European accounts, Abel Tasman and Captain Cook appear prominently, as explorers who found the islands and who worked out their shape. That is to ignore the native Māori population of what the descendants of the original settlers still call Aotearoa, a name attributed to Hine-te-aparangi, the wife of Kupe, the first Polynesian navigator to reach North Island – the mountainous, often cold, South Island was visited and was lightly settled over the centuries, but the great majority of Māoris would choose to live in the warmer north. The Māori name of the island means ‘Long White Cloud’ (ao + tea + roa, ‘cloud white long’), because that is what Kupe’s wife thought she saw when she first approached its shores, not realizing that this was land. Calculating back the generations, orthodox opinion places the discovery of New Zealand in the middle of the tenth century AD, a date often refined to 925, though more modern research insists that the supposed founder may have arrived as late as the middle of the fourteenth century, assuming that these genealogies have any merit at all and that Kupe really existed, or indeed that he was not more than one person.28 This was supposedly followed by a second settlement, led by a certain Toi, around 1150, and then the arrival of a whole fleet of canoes in about 1350. That, at least, was the view accepted both by Māoris and by Pakeha (white Europeans) who tried to write the very early history of New Zealand in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kupe was enthusiastically described as the ‘Columbus, Magellan or Cook’ of the Māoris, a historical figure who certainly existed and who was the most eminent representative of hundreds of generations of Polynesian navigators in the Pacific.29 A Māori song began:

  Ka tito au, ka tito au,

  Ka tito au ki a Kupe,

  Te tangata nana i hoehoe te moana,

  Te tangata nana i topetope te whenua.

  I will sing, I will sing,

  I will sing of Kupe,

  The man who paddled the ocean,

  The man who divided up the land.

  The difficulty is that all the information we have about Kupe is derived from oral traditions, impressive in their command of the finer details of genealogy, so that even the names of the wives of slaves are given, but packed with legendary materials – sometimes a giant octopus, sometimes tribes of goblins, not to mention canoes that turned into stone and a miraculous belt that churned the surface of the sea. Just because the art of navigation was transmitted orally and was evidently a very exact science, we cannot assume that this genealogical information deserves the same credit; indeed, these genealogies vary from place to place, with generations added and subtracted to accommodate the traditions of local chieftains. History and symbolism were mixed together, and then contaminated by contact with the Pakeha.30 Nor is there a single agreed account of Kupe’s career; in one version Aotearoa was the name of Kupe’s canoe.

  These oral traditions themselves were written down, admittedly by Māoris, but under the influence of British missionaries and other modern settlers. In one version Kupe sees his god Io in a dream, and the god says to him: ‘Go forth upon the great ocean … take and possess yourself of some land which I will show to you.’ The strong echoes here of the story of Abraham being led to Canaan by God indicate that this tale tells one more about the impact of Christian mis
sionaries than about Māori traditions. The most vocal critic of attempts to use these tales as history has called them ‘modern New Zealand folktales’.31 That said, they are illuminating both for the stories they tell about the original settlement as the native inhabitants of Aotearoa imagined it and for the information they convey about navigating the open ocean. At their core is the certainty that the settlers came from far across the sea, and that their ancestors lived in a place called Hawaiki. It has been seen that the letter k becomes t in some Polynesian dialects, and in others a glottal stop is often used instead of either, so Hawaiki is another form of the name Hawai’i; or, rather, Hawai’i took its name from a supposed ancestral home much further to the south, to which the Māoris also attributed their origins.32 They did not claim to have come from the island group now called Hawai’i. Once again, though, it is important not to be too credulous. The name ‘Hawaiki’ was a generic term for the place of one’s ancestors – ‘the old country’, as it were, whose name was reused again and again to confer a sense that connections to those ancestors had not been lost by migrants as far away as what we now call Hawai’i. Children in the womb were described as being ‘in Hawaiki’ before they were born.33 Hawaiki is portrayed in the Māori legends as the home of a seafaring community that sustained itself by fishing and was riven by conflict between competing chieftains, but there is little information about the shape and size of the island or about what grew there, because it was an idealized place of origin.34

  There exist many versions of this story, some of which provide plenty of names and details, such as the number of people on board Kupe’s boat (one account says thirty). On both the North and the South Islands Kupe was said to have given a name to any number of places along the coast that he supposedly visited; for instance, his point of departure from North Island was and is known as Hokianga nui a Kupe, which means ‘Great Returning Place of Kupe’.35 It was natural that local chieftains sought to increase their prestige by showing that their territory had links to the discoverer of Aotearoa. The most dramatic version of his story celebrates Kupe’s contest with an octopus that led him southwards towards Aotearoa and then along the coasts of North Island, and in some variants South Island too.

  The tale begins back in Hawaiki. Muturangi was an inhabitant of Hawaiki who owned a pet octopus – not any ordinary octopus but an enormous one named Te Wheke (‘the octopus’) with dozens of children. (If the idea of an ocean-going octopus as a pet seems strange, so is the assertion that Kupe’s daughters kept an eel and a mullet as pets.) The octopus and her young would follow the boats of Kupe and his companions as they headed out into the open sea searching for deep-sea fish, and they would grab with their tentacles the bait Kupe trailed in the water, making the work of the fishermen impossible and leaving the islanders famished. Muturangi thought this was good sport and refused to rein in his pet octopus, so the only option left was for Kupe and his friends to go and search for Te Wheke and her brood, and kill all of them. This was agreed at a meeting of the village elders, who seem to have been quite unable to restrain Muturangi. So Kupe and his friends went out to sea with a simple but cunning plan: as a rule, the bait that the octopuses ate was trailed in the ocean, and allowed to sink far down, to a point where the fishermen could not detect their presence. This time they paid out shorter fishing lines, so they were able to sense when the octopuses seized the bait, and then they pulled in their lines, bringing up the young octopuses, which they cut to pieces. All the time, though, the mother octopus watched the massacre of her children without attacking, while keeping her distance from the canoes. Te Wheke planned to wreak revenge in due course. But Kupe and his friends were not content to have destroyed only the young octopuses. They would search out Te Wheke and destroy her as well. Kupe’s wife insisted he should not abandon her in Hawaiki and go on such a dangerous mission, so he solved the problem by taking her and his children along on his canoe, plus a crew of sixty, and set off in pursuit of Te Wheke; his companion Ngake, or Ngahue, who had sailed ahead of him, found Te Wheke and together they pursued the octopus further and further southwards, tracing the orange glow of the beast as she swam far beneath the surface of the sea.

  They found themselves in increasingly unfamiliar waters where the temperatures were much lower and the nights much longer, but still they refused to abandon their mission. Then Hine-te-aparangi, Kupe’s wife, saw the first signs of land and the two canoes were able to replenish supplies on the north coast of North Island. Ngahue was given the task of tracking Te Wheke down the east coast, in the hope of trapping her; and Kupe would explore the west coast, before returning to help Ngahue finish off the troublesome monster. Ngahue did manage to bottle the octopus up in a great cave, from which she could not escape without confronting his fully armed crew; but when Kupe arrived at last and engaged with her he was only able to wound her, and as evening fell she managed to escape in the confusion of battle. She swam south and this drew the two canoes ever further towards the southern tip of North Island, and then into what is now Wellington Harbour, a large volcanic caldera filled with ocean water. Here the crews rested and once again took on supplies. Ngahue set out to explore the South Island that lay on the horizon, but before long the canoes were reunited and tracked down Te Wheke. Their tactics involved a combination of subterfuge and brute strength. They confused Te Wheke by hurling calabashes at her head, and she was convinced these were human heads, so she turned her attention from the canoes to the calabashes and wrapped her already damaged tentacles around them. After this, Kupe launched his adze at the spot between the eyes where an octopus is most vulnerable and the animal was slaughtered.36

  Kupe sailed back to Hawaiki with the first news of this great land to the south. He was asked if the lands he had discovered were inhabited and gave a non-committal answer: he had seen a wood hen, a bellbird and a fantail; he had found that the soil was rich and that the islands had an abundance of fish. (All the signs are that the island was uninhabited before the arrival of the Māoris, but some oral traditions spoke of goblins or of red-skinned people with flat noses, thin calves and lank hair, for whom there is no archaeological evidence.)37 So would he go back there? He answered that question with the question: E hoki Kupe? ‘Will Kupe return?’, a phrase that continued to be used in Aotearoa as a polite but firm refusal. Needless to say, the Māoris could point to exact places where a canoe, or an anchor, a mast or even the first dog to reach North Island had turned to stone and could still be seen on the coast of Aotearoa.38

  Oral histories separated Kupe’s discovery from later phases of rediscovery and then of large-scale settlement. An important feature of these stories is the insistence that news of New Zealand was brought back to Polynesia (usually identified simply as ‘Hawaiki’). Toi was a chieftain from Hawaiki who is supposed, on the usual calculation of generations, to have lived in the twelfth century. The stories about him vary, and what will be followed here is a so-called ‘orthodox’ version that has been widely circulated because it is preserved in a nineteenth-century manuscript and goes into some detail; but there is doubt whether it records authentic Māori tradition.39 In Hawaiki, he and his men were challenged to a canoe race by neighbours from other islands, and sixty canoes entered the contest. Toi himself did not take part but watched the contest from a high point with a great crowd of onlookers; however, his two grandsons, Turahui and Whatonga, did join the tournament. The race took the canoes far out to sea, and for once the learned Polynesian navigators did not read the weather signs with due care and attention; winds and fogs dispersed the canoes and several disappeared entirely. Consultation of the gods produced no clear answers to the fate of Toi’s grandsons and the other canoes that had disappeared. Toi himself therefore set out, thinking that he might find the lost canoes far to the south, in lands he had only heard about: ‘I will go on to the land discovered by Kupe in the expanse known as Tiritiri o te moana, the land that is shrouded by the high mists. I may reach land, but if I do not, I will rest forever in the bosom o
f the Ocean Maid.’40

  Whether described as Aotearoa, the long white cloud, or as the land shrouded in mist, this was a place defined in large part by its unattractive weather. Toi reached the isthmus of Auckland and found a dense population, so many people that he compared them to ants. He lived among them and several crew members settled down with local women. (As has been seen, there is no doubt that these earlier settlers were a fantasy of later tellers of tales.)41 Toi established himself near Whakatane on the north coast of North Island, a particularly well-favoured area with a benign climate. But he was soon drawn into tribal wars, which proves that these accounts of the often difficult relations between those living on the island reflect the violent and destructive conflict that still characterized Māori society at the time of Captain Cook.

  Fortunately, Toi’s grandsons had survived the storm that had scattered the canoes during the contest back in Hawaiki, and they had indeed made landfall, though not in Aotearoa, but at a place named after its ruler, Rangiatea (this could be a reference to the island of Ra’iatea, a hundred miles from Tahiti). And, at home in Hawaiki, Toi’s daughter-in-law did not believe that Toi would find Turahui and Whatonga so easily; she had a much better plan, which was to send the pet green cuckoo owned by Turahui on a mission to find the lost grandsons. She tied a knotted message around the bird, which duly found Turahui on Rangiatea’s island, and he had no difficulty deciphering the message: ‘Are you alive? At what island are you?’ He made a new knotted cord that stated ‘We are all alive at Rangiatea’, and watched the direction the bird took; then the grandsons and their companions set out in six canoes along the same trajectory and reached Hawaiki safely, where they were rapturously received.42

  Once again, then, we have a story that not merely commemorates the discovery and settlement of Aotearoa, but one that places the islands of New Zealand amid the great island chains of Polynesia. Other stories confirm this: one account of journeys to and fro between Hawaiki and Aotearoa describes the introduction of sweet potato into Aotearoa. A visitor from Hawaiki had carried with him some dried sweet potato that he carried in his belt; he offered it to his hosts on Aotearoa, reconstituted with water, and they found it delicious. They then sent to Hawaiki for seeds, which duly arrived.43 But the fascination of the story of Turahui goes further: the use of knotted cords is reminiscent of the Peruvian quipus, which were the closest the Incas came to devising writing, and which they used for messages and for keeping accounts; this is not for a moment to suggest that Peruvians radiated as far as New Zealand, but it does serve as a reminder that apparently illiterate peoples have often developed their own mnemonic systems, and that archaeology is good at finding inscriptions on stone but not so good at finding knotted cords.