by Michael King
As they sailed, navigators would search for signs of land beyond the visible horizon: the presence of birds feeding offshore or migrating (and, in the years preceding the introduction of the kiore, the numbers of sea-feeding birds would have been immensely larger than in modern times); cloud formations which attached themselves to as yet unseen atolls; changes in the patterns of ocean currents and swells. These signs in combination created what have been called ‘island screens’, which greatly enlarged the navigator’s potential target areas. Stars at night and the direction of the sun and ocean swells by day enabled navigators to maintain a running fix on their position and to repeat voyages or to pass on sailing directions to subsequent travellers.
This combination of techniques permitted the discovery and settlement of the islands of West and East Polynesia, and took its practitioners as far east as Easter Island and South America. With such possibilities exhausted, subsequent exploration would have been attempted ‘across’ the wind, which permitted the discovery of the Hawai‘ian Islands to the north and, across and downwind, the difficult but by no means impossible 3000 km journey south-west to New Zealand.
Why were such voyages made at all? What drove Polynesian travellers eastwards, then north and southwards, other than the techniques which made such movement possible? We can only speculate. Some pressures would have been environmental: overcrowding, shortages of gardening space, depletion of lagoon resources. Other oral traditions speak of disagreements and warfare among kin, of sons who failed to inherit land or status, even of cannibalism, propelling island settlers into the role of their forebears, that of island migrants. But such circumstances were occasions for leaving home rather than causes.
James Belich identified what he called an ‘ethos of expansion’ which assured Polynesians that ‘new lands had always been found in the past, and therefore would be in the future. Failed migrations told no tales.’ One can take this concept further. There was clearly something spiritually significant about the movement eastwards. Early burials in Polynesian islands had corpses trussed into a sitting position and facing east. And a proverb carried from Island Polynesia to New Zealand may also express part of the reality of that ethos: ‘E kore au e ngaro, te kakano i ruia mai i Rangiatea.’ (I shall not perish, but as a seed sent forth from Rangiatea I shall flourish.)
There may have been a phase in Polynesian culture in which the urge to discover new lands was strong, even irresistible; as was, perhaps, the belief in personal and corporate invincibility, strengthened by proven navigation techniques and the development of large, fast and safe outrigger or double canoes under sail. In addition, there was confidence in the interventionary attention of protective deities – Polynesian tradition is replete with stories of individuals and crews saved from disaster by one or other of the gods – and in the power of priests to mediate between such deities and humankind. When the navigator Ru was travelling from Raiatea to Aitutaki, for example, his canoe sailed into a whirlpool which began to suck the vessel and its crew into the depths of the ocean. They were saved by a sacred invocation to Tangaroa:
Tangaroa i te titi
Tangaroa i te tata
Whakawateangia te kare o te moana
Whakawateangia nga kapua o te rangi
Kia tae au ki te whenua
I tumanakohia e au
As Belich observed, ‘magic, prayer and technical skill packaged each other’.
Evidence from the New Zealand region alone indicates just how confidently and how extensively widespread voyages may have been made. Ivory fishhooks and chert on Enderby Island in the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands reveal that the Polynesians were there, at the very least visiting, around 1350 AD. Similar carbon dates and fragments of Mayor Island obsidian link sites in the Kermadecs and Norfolk Island to New Zealand at about the same time. And adzes from the original colonisation of Pitcairn Island show an extraordinarily close affinity to those found in contemporary New Zealand sites.
At some point in the past millennium, however, possibly around the fourteenth or fifteenth century AD, the era of widespread Polynesian voyaging ceased. This may have occurred because of the change in climate that produced colder, windier weather and rougher seas, or, possibly, because of a change in cultural priorities. And this literal and metaphorical alteration in direction left colonists on the margins of their cultural and geographical triangle, especially in New Zealand and Easter Island, isolated from other Polynesians. It may also have led to the abandonment of earlier settlements on Pitcairn, Henderson, Norfolk and the Line islands – which were viable only in an era of regular contact with other food and population sources. By this time, however, the great voyages of exploration had been accomplished, and the Polynesians had become the most widely dispersed people on the planet.
Chapter 3
The Great New Zealand Myth
If popular mythology is to be believed, the discoverer of New Zealand was a Polynesian voyager named Kupe. Oddly, this myth was Pakeha in origin rather than Maori. Maori came to embrace it solely as a result of its widespread publication and dissemination in New Zealand primary schools between the 1910s and the 1970s.
One version of the narrative sequence that David Simmons characterised as ‘the Great New Zealand Myth’ went like this:
950 AD: the Polynesian navigator Kupe discovers New Zealand.
Between 950 and 1150 AD: Moriori people arrive in New Zealand.
1150 AD: the voyages of Toi and Whatonga lead to first Maori settlement.
1350 AD: the ‘Great Fleet’ of seven canoes arrives in New Zealand from Island Polynesia.
After the fleet came, fighting ensued between Maori and Moriori. Some Moriori were killed, some intermarried with Maori, and the remnants escaped to the Chatham Islands.
The Kupe part of this sequence was told as follows in the Department of Education’s School Journal in February 1916.
Kupe … lived on the island of Tahiti, though his father was a Rarotongan. His … canoe was named Matahorua, and, in addition to the crew, it carried Kupe’s wife and daughters. The Matahorua was accompanied by another canoe, the Tawirirangi, commanded by a chief named Ngahue.
For many days there was no sight of land to gladden their hearts. Weary and worn out by the long voyage, and faced with starvation, they eagerly scanned the unbroken horizon. At last Kupe’s wife, after gazing fixedly over the sea, exclaimed, ‘He ao! He ao!’ (A cloud! A cloud!), and pointed to a distant white cloud such as sailors often see enshrouding the land. Cheered by the hope that shone in his wife’s eyes, Kupe seized the steering-paddle and directed the prow of his canoe towards it. As he drew nearer it rose higher and higher. Able to read the signs of the sea as they could read the faces of their children, the voyagers now felt almost certain that they had reached their goal. ‘Aotea! Aotea!’ (The white cloud! The white cloud!) they shouted as they strained at the paddles, forgetful of all their weariness … Then beneath the fleecy whiteness appeared a dark streak of bush-clad hill and valley, and they knew that before them lay the land they had seen in their dreams, and for which they had braved tempests and faced even death itself.
It was as ‘Aotea’ that New Zealand became known those long centuries ago. Kupe called the … North Island ‘Aotearoa’ – the Long White Cloud; and today Europeans who love to keep alive the old names will call New Zealand Aotearoa.
It is not difficult to see why the story was embraced with enthusiasm by those very Europeans directly appealed to in the School Journal story. It was an inspirational account of the discovery of New Zealand. It gave names, Kupe and Ngahue, to Polynesian navigators who would otherwise be nameless. In its full elaboration through a series of adventures around the New Zealand coast involving moa, greenstone and a fight with a giant octopus, the saga gifts New Zealand a founding myth every bit as majestic as the stories that Pakeha settlers carried with them from Europe (Jason and the Argonauts, the labours of Hercules). Its telling was part of a process that fitted Maori tradition into the cultural patter
ns of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Pakeha New Zealand, which was looking for stories of resonance and nobility to make the human occupation of the country seem more deeply rooted and worthy of pride than it might by virtue of its (at that time) rather thin European heritage.
All that is understandable and excusable. And, one might add, that same account became a source of pride for Maori and an antidote to the concurrent and widespread view that Tasman and Cook ‘discovered’ New Zealand. As myth, then, the Kupe story worked well and had much to commend it.
The problem that late twentieth-century scholars had with it, Maori and Pakeha, is that, as told here and as compiled by its progenitor, amateur ethnologist Stephenson Percy Smith, the story had no sound basis in Maori tradition. About half the tribes in New Zealand have Kupe stories, but they are by no means congruent and can, in fact, be divided quite distinctly into east and west coast versions. In areas where he does figure, Kupe is a contemporary of the ancestors of the major canoes and located about twenty-one generations ago or in the fourteenth century AD. The Kupe of authentic mythology was not always associated with the name Aotearoa, and in more than one version of the story Aotearoa was given as the name of his canoe.
The Smith version of the Kupe story and its dissemination in the School Journal and other literature, and the title of the first widely read general history of New Zealand, William Pember Reeves’s The Long White Cloud (1898), all popularised and entrenched the notion that the Maori name for New Zealand had been and still was Aotearoa. After decades of repetition, Maori themselves came to believe that this was so. And, because shared mythology is ultimately more pervasive and more powerful than history, it became so.
In fact, in the pre-European era, Maori had no name for the country as a whole. Polynesian ancestors came from motu or islands, and it was to islands that they gave names. The North Island was known to them principally as Te Ika a Maui, the Fish of Maui, in recognition of the widely accepted belief that the land had been fished from the depths of the ocean by Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga. A smaller number of tribes knew the island as Aotea (though this was also the name given to Great Barrier Island) and as Aotearoa, most commonly translated, as in the Kupe story, as Land of the Long White Cloud, but perhaps more properly rendered as Land of the Long Clear Day or the Long White World. The second Maori King, Tawhiao, from Tainui, called his Kingitanga bank Te Peeke o Aotearoa, thus favouring Aotearoa as his preferred name for the North Island.
The South Island was known variously as Te Waka-a-Aoraki, the canoe of Aoraki (the ancestor frozen in stone and ice as the highest peak in the Southern Alps), and as Te Wahi Pounamu (the place of greenstone) and Te Wai Pounamu. Stewart Island to the south was Rakiura.
In the Maori world all these names would persist in simultaneous usage until around the middle of the nineteenth century. From that time, some Maori and Maori publications began to favour Nu Tirani and its variants, transliterations of the words New Zealand and conveniently applying to all the islands that would make up the modern nation state of New Zealand (the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840 and its 1835 predecessor, A Declaration of the Independence of New Zealand, used these forms). Apart from Tawhiao’s bank, operating in Waikato in the 1880s and 1890s, few Maori opted for Aotearoa. In the early years of the twentieth century, however, with the growing circulation and popularity of Stephenson Percy Smith’s version of the Kupe story, Maori use of the term Aotearoa to refer to New Zealand as a whole increased, especially in oral culture. By the twenty-first century it was entrenched as the Maori name for New Zealand, though many South Island Maori, favouring Te Wai Pounamu as the name for their own island, recognised Aotearoa as a name for the North Island only.
The conclusion that a historian might draw from the foregoing is that it is highly likely that there was a Maori ancestor called Kupe who sailed to New Zealand from Island Polynesia. But he certainly did not travel at the early date specified in the Smith story. It is also unlikely that he was the ‘discoverer’ of the country, but the number of placenames associated with him – particularly in the Hokianga, Mercury Bay and Cook Strait regions – make it probable that he was one of the earliest ancestors of the Maori to leave descendants and therefore memories in those parts of the country. And, finally, New Zealand was certainly not known to Maori as Aotearoa in the pre-European times. Just as certainly, it is called that now by most Maori of the modern era.
The story of Toi and Whatonga, also compiled by Stephenson Percy Smith, concerns a Tahitian chief and his daughter’s husband who, in the middle of the twelfth century AD, became separated at sea by a storm and then set out to look for each other. Toi, the chief, ended up living in Whakatane among the Moriori people who had landed in New Zealand after Kupe’s voyage. Whatonga found him there. The eventual settlement of these two men with their entourages in the Bay of Plenty was described by the purveyors of the myth as the first permanent habitation of New Zealand by ‘Maori’ colonists.
An examination of Smith’s sources in the twentieth century revealed that the story was not derived from Maori traditions. The Toi who lived in the Bay of Plenty did so in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, according to local genealogies. Another Toi, from Arawa tradition, was contemporaneous with the Arawa canoe. There is no Maori story from any source that tells the Toi–Whatonga story in the Smith sequence, or which places Toi in the twelfth century.
After Kupe, however, the second leg of the Great New Zealand Myth was the epic journey of the Great Fleet. Here is the School Journal version read and taught over decades to hundreds of thousands of New Zealand children in primary schools, and used as a basis for similar stories in a wide range of secondary literature.
We shall now tell of the Coming of the Fleet … About five hundred years ago, in the fourteenth century, a number of vessels set sail [from Island Polynesia] for New Zealand, their crews wearied by the fierce intertribal wars in which they had been constantly engaged, and glad to seek a more peaceful home in the fair land of Aotearoa, whose beauties had been so often described by voyagers who had visited it. The canoes in which they migrated, seven in number, were the Horouta, Takitimu, Arawa, Aotea, Tainui, Mataatua and Mamari … Some of the canoes were specially built for the voyage. Giant trees were felled and were shaped and hollowed out by skilled and noted chiefs [with] adzes made of greenstone taken from New Zealand by Ngahue … All the vessels set out about the same time, the Takitimu being last to leave …
After recounting the voyages of the individual canoes and the many setbacks and adventures that befell their crews, the narrative concludes:
Of the further movements of these immigrants it would be tiresome to tell … [Sufficient] to say that they mingled with the Maoris already here, and founded the great Maori race that occupied both the North Island and the South Island when the white man came. After the arrival of the fleet, canoe voyages between New Zealand and Polynesia became rare …
We have now seen how the islands of New Zealand were discovered and peopled by a race which … spread over the islands of the South Seas. Trimming their lateen sails to the trade-winds, they explored the vast Pacific in primitive outriggers and cumbrous double canoes – probably the most daring and adventurous navigators the world has ever seen. Obeying the call of adventure, and following the lure of Hine-Moana, the Ocean Maid, they laid down countless sea roads, and boldly faced the tempestuous open sea when few European sailors ventured to lose sight of land.
As with earlier stories, this account too had been compiled by Stephenson Percy Smith, supposedly from Maori informants. It was another saga redolent of derring-do, which Pakeha New Zealanders were quick to embrace and add to the founding mythology of the nation as a whole. Maori too would have felt uplifted by the story’s themes and accomplishments and the fact that they were descended from such enterprising and courageous people. Inasmuch as it showed groups of Maori from different places and backgrounds acting together for the common good, the Great Fleet would also become a metaphor for kotahitang
a (the fundamental unity of Maori origins and aspirations over and above tribal divisions). So taken were the first two generations of Maori educated to this tale that tribal leaders – Apirana Ngata, Te Puea Herangi, Maharaia Winiata – organised a series of hui in 1950 to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the arrival of the Great Fleet, which by this time had grown to nine canoes.
Alas and again, as in the case of Kupe’s deeds, the Great Fleet story proved to be without verifiable Maori foundations. David Simmons’s extensive research of nineteenth-century sources found that the fleet as a concept occurred only rarely in Maori tradition. One Ngati Kahungunu tradition spoke of six trees being cut simultaneously for five canoes, and some Tainui and Arawa stories spoke of those canoes setting out together. But the remainder of the canoe traditions were of individual voyages, albeit sometimes linked to a knowledge of others, and Percy Smith had come up with his date of 1350 AD by simply averaging out a great number of unrelated genealogical lines, from Mataatua, which was said to have arrived fourteen generations before 1900, to Aotea, which was calculated to have landed 26 generations before that date.