The Project Gutenberg eBook of Maori folk-tales of the Port Hills, Canterbury, New Zealand
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Title: Maori folk-tales of the Port Hills, Canterbury, New Zealand
Author: James Cowan
Release date: June 4, 2024 [eBook #73766]
Language: English
Original publication: New Zealand: Whitcombe & Tombs Limited, 1923
Credits: Tim Lindell, Fiona Holmes and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAORI FOLK-TALES OF THE PORT HILLS, CANTERBURY, NEW ZEALAND ***
Transcriber’s Note
A few paragraphs are so long the position of the illustrations
are left as is.
A few words have been left as printed e.g. Rangi-whakaputa
Rangiwhakaputa.
[Illustration: Map of Lyttelton Harbour and Port Hills-Akaroa, Summit Road]
MAORI FOLK-TALES
OF THE
PORT HILLS
CANTERBURY, NEW ZEALAND
_By_
JAMES COWAN
WHITCOMBE & TOMBS LIMITED
Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin, & Wellington, N.Z.
Melbourne and London
1923
[Illustration:
_E. Cowan, photo_
HONE TAARE TIKAO, the narrator of the legends.]
PREFACE
In this little book I have endeavoured to interweave with descriptions
of the most picturesque parts of the Canterbury Port Hills some of
the Maori poetic legends and historical traditions which belong
to the Range, and which have not previously been recorded. These
stories, I hope, will invest with a new interest for many Canterbury
_pakehas_ the scenic beauties of the Port Hills now opened up
from end to end by the Summit Road. Here I desire to record also,
with feelings of gratitude, the name of the principal narrator of the
legends, Mr. Hone Taare Tikao, of Rapaki, a Ngai-Tahu gentleman whose
uncommonly retentive memory is a storehouse of information on local
history and who blends in himself the gifts of the folk-lorist and the
genealogist. Some of the place-names were supplied by the late Mr.
T. E. Green (Tame Kirini), of Tuahiwi, Kaiapoi, one of the last good
native authorities on the ancient history of the plains.
For the priceless gift of free access to these grand tops of the Port
Range the people are indebted to the efforts and the gifts of a few
public spirited residents, but most of all to the exertions of Mr.
H. G. Ell, whose enthusiasm, prescience of vision, and singleness of
purpose in developing the Summit Road along this mountain park have
properly earned him the admiration and the thanks of thousands of his
fellow-citizens who daily lift up their eyes to the Hills and who find
on those hills their pleasure and their solace for town-tired body
and brain. And maybe if Mr. Ell’s name were bestowed, like Tamatea’s
of old, upon one of these monumental crags still unchristened, it
would but fittingly preserve the memory of a man whose title to such
local honour and fame is certainly greater than that of some of his
forerunners whose names the landscape bears.
J.C.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
The Story of the Rocks.
The Port Hills and their geological history--The Dead Fire-Cones--“The
Fire of Tamatea”--Bold Cliff and
Mountain Scenery--Beauties of the Port Range 1
CHAPTER II.
The Port Hills and Their Names.
Maori Nomenclature of the Port Range--Hills of the
Rainbow God--“The Pinnacle of Kahukura”--Crags of
the Sounding Footsteps--Ancient Lyttelton: “The
Basket of Heads”--Ambuscades in the Bush 7
CHAPTER III.
Round the Sugarloaf.
The Flanks of Te Heru-o-Kahukura--Tracks on the Mountain
Side--At Dyer’s Pass--Maori Name of Marley’s Hill--Exploring
the Kahukura Bush--Needles of the _Ongaonga_--The
Valleys and the Small Timber--“Crest of the
Rainbow” 24
CHAPTER IV.
Rapaki: A Village by the Sea.
The Bell on the Ribbonwood Tree--Tikao and his Traditions--The
Days of the Ngati-Mamoe--Te Rangiwhakaputa’s
Conquests--The Crags of Tamatea--A Sturdy Pagan--Evening
Picture at Rapaki 39
CHAPTER V.
The “Ahi-a-Tamatea”: How the Sacred Fire Came to
Witch Hill.
The Giant’s Causeway--A Volcanic Dyke--Tamatea the
Polynesian Explorer--A Great March--The Camp at
Witch Hill--Tamatea’s Call for Fire--The _Tipua_ Flames
from Ngauruhoe--“The Ashes of Tamatea’s Camp
Fire” 52
CHAPTER VI.
Hills of Faery: The Little People of the Mist.
Legends of the _Patu-paiarehe_--The Fairies of the Port and
Peninsula Hills--Mountains of Enchantment--“The
Red Cloud’s Rest”--The Fairies and the Mutton-birds--The
Maero of the Woods--Mount Pleasant and its
_Tapu_ 61
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Map of Lyttelton Harbour and Port Hills-Akaroa,
Summit Road
Hone Taare Tikao, the Narrator of the Legends _Frontispiece_
The Seven Sleepers 5
Te Tihi o Kahukura, Castle Rock 9
Te Moenga o Wheke, Giant Tor 10
Witch Hill and the Giant’s Causeway 13
Orongomai, the Place of the Voices 15
View from Cass Peak 17
Whaka-raupo, Lyttelton Harbour and Quail Island 21
Te Heru o Kahukura, Sugarloaf 25
“The Sign of the Kiwi” Rest House and Marley’s Hill 27
The Port Hills south-west of Dyer’s Pass 31
The Old Maori Church at Rapaki 33
Whaka-raupo, Lyttelton Harbour from Kennedy’s Bush 35
Old Church Bell at Rapaki 40
Rapaki Village and Tamatea’s Breast 43
In a Rapaki Garden 47
Witch Hill 53
The Summit Road, overlooking Governor’s Bay 55
Te Poho-o-Tamatea, or Tamatea’s Breast 59
Rhodes’s Monument, Home of the Fairies 63
Kennedy’s Bush, Cockayne’s Cairn, and Cass Peak 67
Through the Devil’s Staircase 70
Hinekura 73
MAORI FOLK-TALES OF THE PORT HILLS
CHAPTER I.
THE STORY OF THE ROCKS.
With the opening of tracks along the bold range of heights between the
Canterbury Plains and Lyttelton Harbour, and the acquisition of new
reserves for the public, mainly through the efforts of one tireless
worker, Mr. H. G. Ell, Christchurch residents are perhaps coming to
a more lively sense of the value of the Port Hills as a place of
genuine recreation. The Summit Road has made city people free of the
grandest hilltop pleasure place that any New Zealand city possesses
within easy distance of its streets, and the worth of this mountain
track, so easily accessible and commanding so noble a look-out over
sea and plains and Alps, will increase in proportion to the growth of
the Christchurch population. The fragments of the native bush which
survive in the valleys will be of surpassing botanical interest in
another generation or two, but the vegetation of the hills inevitably
will suffer many changes, and an exotic growth will for the most part
replace the ancient trees. With all the alterations which man’s hand
may make in the reserves and along the public tracks, however, the
monumental rock-beauty will remain the great and peculiar feature
of the hills, their most wonderful and unalterable glory. The Port
Range and the Banks Peninsula system of mountains are indeed the most
remarkable heights in the whole of the South Island, not excepting the
snowy Alps; there is nothing like them outside the northern volcanic
regions, and in some aspects they carry a greater scientific and scenic
value than even the crater-cones around the city of Auckland. What
the Canterbury coast would have been like but for the vast volcanic
convulsions which formed these ranges and huge craters is not difficult
to imagine. It would have been a uniform billiard-table on an enormous
scale, very gently sloping to the sea, with scarcely a break but for
the snow rivers and with never a usable natural harbour. Volcanic
energy gave us Lyttelton and Akaroa harbours, and shaped for us also
the ever-marvellous hills that are at once a grateful relief to the
eye from the eternal evenness of the plains and a healthful place of
pleasure for our city dwellers.
The passage of untold ages has so little altered these fire-made
ranges that build a picture-like ring about Lyttelton Harbour that
their origin and history are plainly revealed to the climber and the
Summit Road stroller; the story of the rocks can scarcely be mistaken.
Geologists from the days of von Haast have written much of the
Lyttelton and Akaroa volcanic systems, and in truth it is an ever-new
and ever-fascinating subject. There is hardly a more interesting
specimen of vulcanism in New Zealand, for example, than the strange
wall of grey-white lava rock which Europeans call the Giant’s Causeway
and the Maoris “The Fire of Tamatea,” which protrudes from the hilltop
just above Rapaki, and which may be seen again on the far side of the
harbour, a volcanic dyke that the ancient people--with surely some
perception of geological truth--connected in their legends with the
internal fires of the North Island. Along the craggy hill faces again,
and particularly well in such places as Redcliffs and the Sumner end
of the range, it is easy to read the history of the rocks in the
alternate strata of solid volcanic rock and the soft rubble that seems
almost to glow again with the olden fires. The most wonderful example
of this stratified formation is the face of the south head of Akaroa
Harbour; but it is possible to study similar pages in the volcanic
chapter of Canterbury’s history without going many yards from the
Summit Road anywhere from the sea to the hills above the harbour head.
The most perfect local example of an ancient crater perhaps is one that
does not seem to have attracted much attention from scientific writers
and lecturers, and this may be mentioned as a type of the remarkable
places which build up the romantic ruggedness and savageness of our
harbour-palisading hills. It is to be studied especially well from the
Lyttelton-Governor’s Bay road. Above Corsair Bay and Cass Bay there
is a group of bold rocky peaks which, as the traveller passes onward
from Lyttelton, is seen to curve inward in a huge half-cup, open to the
south, and down this open side are strewn the disorderly remains of the
old lava stream which flowed from the core of the volcano and which
ran out into the harbour at Cass Bay in a tumbled black reef. It does
not require a great effort of imagination to reconstruct that fire-cup
as it must have appeared in the era when the fantastic hills were
still in the making and shaping. The Maoris, with a quick eye for such
significant topographical features, gave the place a name which blends
history with legend, “Wheke’s Sleeping Place.” Indeed, that strange
hollow in the hills might have made fit cradle for a Finn MacCoul. Like
the crater-topped cones of the Tamaki Isthmus, it is softly grassed; a
stray _ngaio_ is the one remnant of the bush that once covered the
volcanic detritus; but the hugely ramparted and square-hewn rim of the
basin stands indomitable and unchangeable, unmistakable memorial of the
active volcanic age. Such bold crags are “the eyebrows of the hills”;
they give what would otherwise be tame landscapes dignity and force and
wildness, and an exploration of these fastnesses of Nature so near our
doors, and opened up by the Summit Road, is not merely pleasurable, but
is fruitful in an intelligent appreciation of the amazing forces which
helped to mould the land in which we live.
All along the fire-fused line of these Summit Peaks from the Lighthouse
to the Seven Sleepers and beyond there are amazingly bold bits of
rock and cliff scenery--abrupt escarpments like huge redoubt walls,
bearded with mountain flax, and flakey from the attack of ages of
winter frosts; straight smooth cleavages that seem almost artificial,
so sharply and finely are they worked by Nature, the great sculptor;
rounded buttresses like enormous pillars shoring up the mountain side;
caves here and there, old bubbles in the molten lava, caves that
might have sheltered some cannibal highwayman in the days of stone
club and face-tattoo; strangely shapen projections of the cliff-edge,
some remindful of animal forms; tomahawk faces of grey storm-beaten
rhyolite dipping down into the green arms of the little woods where the
_tui’s_ rich echoing “bing-bong” and gurgling chuckle are still
heard in the shady depths when the bush fruits are ripe. Here and there
a little watercourse, its fountain-head waters dripping silently from
some cool crevice in the rocks, all arboured over by the matted roofing
of _kotukutuku_, twisty and witchy of branch, and _mahoe_ and
glossy-green _karaka_ of the plenteous foliage. Watercourses that
fit the bold mountain
[Illustration: The Seven Sleepers
_C. Beken, photo_]
pictures about them; dry in summer, they come down in tumultuous
little cataracts in time of heavy rain, plunging over the piled
fragments of lava rocks, and filling for a day or two the age-worn
pockets and pools and “pot-holes” in the winding valleys all arched
over with the close-growing light timber. Deep down in these twisting
gullies below the straight cut harbour-facing cliffs, there lingers
still a certain quality of primitiveness and a suggestion of the
ancient adventure; an atmosphere still in keeping with the legendry of
these Hills. Here in the leaf-thatched hollows of Taungahara or the
woven thickets that blanket the precipice fronts of the Seven Sleepers
still shall you have intimate glimpses of wild nature. Up on the
tussock-swarded mountains of the hawk and deep in the sudden valleys
still may you, though so near to the City, breathe the mind-refreshing
fragrance of the grand out-of-doors, hold healthy commune with
“All the still-eyed Soul that broods
In wide wind-whispering solitudes--
Each cloud chase chequering hill and plain--
Moon-shadows--sunny silences--
Lone mists on fire in glens profound--
Old half-lit trunks of twisted trees
And stealthy gleams in gloomy woods.”
CHAPTER II.
THE PORT HILLS AND THEIR NAMES.
It is the Port Hills’ nomenclature, perhaps, that carries the most
poetic suggestions of any of the Canterbury place-names, and here,
perhaps, the dwellers on the heights in the days to come when all
these Plain-ward-looking slopes are dotted with pretty homes, will
seek inspiration in such legendry and history of the soil as we of
the present generation have preserved. There are names of dignity and
beauty clustered about those old lava-built crags and ruined towers and
tors past which the Summit Road goes a thousand feet above the city.
Finest of all is the Maori name of Castle Rock, that from one point in
the Heathcote Valley looks like a colossal howitzer threatening the
Plains. To the old Maoris it was Te Tihi o Kahukura, “The Citadel of
Kahukura,” otherwise “The Pinnacle of the Rainbow.” The explanation
brings in a reference to the religion of the tattooed pagan pioneers
who explored those hills and plains, and planted their palisaded
hamlets by creek-side and in the sheltered folds of the ranges.
Kahukura--Uenuku in the North Island--was the principal deity for what
may be termed everyday use among the ancient Ngai-Tahu. He was the
spirit guardian most frequently invoked by the _tohungas_, and he
was appealed to for auguries and omens in time of war. Each _hapu_
had its image of Kahukura, a small carved wooden figure, which was kept
in some _tapu_ place remote from the dwellings, often a secluded
flax clump, or on a high, stilt-legged platform or _whata_. The
celestial form of Kahukura was the rainbow; literally the name means
“Red Garment.” Omens were drawn in days of war from the situation of
the arch of the “Red Garment” when it spanned the heavens. The name is
sometimes applied to that phenomenon of days of mist in the mountains,
the “sun-dog,” from which auguries were drawn. So when the Natives gave
the term to the Castle Rock they were conferring upon it a name of high
_tapu_ befitting its bold and commanding appearance.
And this is not the only Hills name that holds a memory of the cult
of the Rainbow-God. On the tussocky slope where the track goes over
from the St. Martins tram terminus to the Summit Road above Rapaki,
joining the hill track near Witch Hill, the _tohungas_ kept in
a sacred place one of the wooden figures representing Kahukura, for
_karakia_, consultation in time of need, and the spot became known
as “Te Irika o Kahukura,” or “The Uplifting of the Rainbow God.” In
time the name was applied to the Cashmere Hills generally. And the
lofty Sugarloaf peak immediately to the north of Dyer’s Pass, was Te
Heru o Kahukura, which being interpreted, is “Kahukura’s Head-Comb.”
So the olden folk occasionally displayed a fine taste in names; and
although some of those names may be a trifle long for _pakeha_ use
it would be well to save them from oblivion.
[Illustration: Te Tihi o Kahukura. Castle Rock.
_C. Beken, photo_
]
[Illustration: Te Moenga o Wheke, or Wheke’s Sleeping Place.
_W. A. Taylor, photo_
]
Otokitoki--“The Place of Axes”--is the name of Godley Head, the lofty
cliff upon which the lighthouse stands; its early-days _pakeha_ name
was Cachalot Head. Working south from the lighthouse we presently come
to the deep bay of Te Awa-parahi, where a little farmstead stands in
its well-hidden nest, between the lowering peaks. Nearer Lyttelton,
just where the Zigzag Road goes over Evans Pass to Sumner, are the
precipitous summit rocks of Tapuwaeharuru, “The Resounding Footsteps,” a
place-name met with in more than one locality in the volcanic country
of the North. Far below is the little indent of Te Awa-toetoe, or
“Pampas-grass stream” near the artillery barracks. Mount Pleasant,
where a Ngati-Mamoe _pa_ once stood, was known to the Maoris as
Tauhinu-Korokio, a combination of two names of shrubs common to the
ranges. Passing Castle Rock--Te Tihi o Kahukura--just on the right
hand or west as we travel towards Dyer’s Pass, we have on the other
hand Te Moenga o Wheke, or “Wheke’s Sleeping Place” and Ota-ranui, or
“Big Peak,” the towering rough-hewn crests of the Range looking down
on Cass Bay and lying east of the Summit Track. Then comes Witch Hill,
with “The Ashes of Tamatea’s Camp Fire,” of which a legend later, and
Te Poho o Tamatea, or “Tamatea’s Breast,” overlooking the Rapaki native
settlement.
Oketeupoko, or, to divide it into its component words, O-kete-upoko,
is the Maori name of the rocky heights immediately above the town of
Lyttelton. It means “The Place of the Basket of Heads.” A sufficiently
grim name this, remindful of the Whanga-raupo’s red and cannibal
past, for the heads were human ones. When the olden warrior Te
Rangi-whakaputa set out to make the shore of the Raupo Harbour his
own, he encountered numerous parties of Ngati-Mamoe, who put up a
fight for their homes and hunting-grounds. One of these parties of
the _tangata-whenua_, the people of the land, he met in battle
on the rocky beach of Ohinehou where the white man’s breakwaters and
wharves now stand. He worsted them, and the heads of the slain he and
his followers hacked off with their stone _patus_ and axes. Some,
those of the chief men, Te Rangi-whakaputa placed in a flax basket,
and, bearing them up to the craggy hill-crest that towered above the
beach, he set them down on a lofty pinnacle, an offering to his god of
battles. There they were left, say the Maoris, _he kai mo te ra, mo
te manu_--“food for the sun and for the birds.” “_O_” signifies
“the place of,” “_kete_” basket and “_upoko_” head, and
thus was the place named, to memorise the tattooed brown conqueror of
old and the ancient people whom he dispossessed on the shores of the
Whangaraupo.
[Illustration: Witch Hill and The Giant’s Causeway.
_W.A. Taylor, photo_
]
Orongomai, a melodious name when properly pronounced, is the old
Ngai-Tahu name of Cass Peak, the rhyolite height which lifts 1780 ft.
above the waters of Governor’s Bay, overlooking the remnant of the
ancient forest at Kennedy’s Bush. It means “The Place Where Voices
are Heard,” or, literally, “Place of Sounding-hitherward.” The name
has fittingly enough been given by Mr. Ell to the stone house for
visitors which stands under the ribbonwood trees at the head of the
Kennedy’s Bush Valley. The story is that when Te Rangi-whakaputa and
his followers landed, in their search for the Ngati-Mamoe, after taking
the _pa_ at Ohinetahi, in Governor’s Bay, the scouts entered the bush,
and at the foot of Cass Peak heard the voices of a party of men in the
bush; these men were Ngati-Mamoe, who had come across from their _pa_
at Manuka, on the plains side of the range. Led by the scouts--the
_torotoro_--the invaders rushed upon the Ngati-Mamoe some of whom they
killed. The survivors fled over the hills to Manuka, a large _pa_
which it is believed stood on a knoll at the foot of the range not far
from Tai Tapu. (Mr. Ell, on being told of this tradition, said that
he believed the site of Manuka would be found to be the spur running
into an old swamp upon which Mr. Holmes’s homestead is built, on the
old coach road south of Lansdowne, and about two miles from Tai Tapu.)
The Manuka village, although a strong defensive position, was stormed
and taken by Te Rangi-whakaputa. In the vicinity, it is said by the
Maoris, there was a shallow cave under the rocky hillside which was
used by some of the Ngati-Mamoe as a dwelling-place; it is known in
tradition as Te Pohatu-whakairo, or “The Carved Rock.” No doubt it
was so called from the natural markings sometimes seen on the faces
of these overhanging rock shelters, such as were used as dwelling and
camping-places in many parts of the South Island by the ancient people.
Ohinetahi[1] _pa_, defended with a palisade of split tree-trunks
and with ditch and parapet, stood near the shore at the head of
Governor’s Bay two hundred years ago. After the place had been captured
from the Ngati-Mamoe by Te Rangi-whakaputa, his son Manuwhiri occupied
it with a party of Ngai-Tahu. This chief Manuwhiri had many sons, but
only one daughter, and he named his _pa_ after his solitary girl,
“The Place of the One Daughter.” The Governor’s Bay school now occupies
the spot where this long-vanished stockaded hamlet stood.
[Footnote 1: This name was adopted by the late T. H. Potts for his
stone house at Governor’s Bay, directly below Kennedy’s Bush.]
[Illustration: Orongomai, the Place of the Voices, Kennedy’s Bush.
_W. A. Taylor, photo_]
The name of Cooper’s Knobs, the highest of the three tooth-like crags
lifting abruptly above the head of Lyttelton Harbour to an altitude
of 1880 feet, memorises, like so many others, an incident of the
head-hunting cannibal days. After the Rangi-whakaputa and his merry
men had conquered the various Ngati-Mamoe _pas_ around the harbour,
they found frequent diversion in hunting out stray members of the
fugitive _hapus_ and converting them to a useful purpose through the
medium of the oven. Often there were bush skirmishes, and although the
Ngati-Mamoe frequently put up a good fight, they usually got the worst
of the encounter. Mawete, the chief of Ngati-Mamoe, and a party of
men from Manuka _pa_ were on their way across the range to Lyttelton
Harbour to fish for sharks when they were ambuscaded in the bush just
below Cooper’s Knobs by a band of Ngai-Tahu warriors. The Ngati-Mamoe
chief and most of his followers were killed in the skirmish that
followed, with the Maori weapons of wood and stone, the spear, the
_taiaha_, and the sharp-edged _patu_, and their bodies went into the
oven, for the Maori’s commissariat in that age was the flesh of his
foeman. And the Mamoe leader’s name still clings to that wild craggy
spot where he met his death blow, for the peak which the _pakeha_ has
named Cooper’s Knobs was called by the Ngai-Tahu conquerors Omawete,
meaning the place where Mawete fell.
Beyond again are the peaks of Otuhokai and Te Tara o Te Raki-tiaia;
below the harbour head curves into the bay of Te Rapu. Next as we
go up to meet the hills of Banks Peninsula is the bold precipice of
Te Pari-mataa, or “Obsidian Cliff,” with the great volcanic dyke of
Otarahaka, and then our present pilgrimage ends, for we are right under
the hugely parapeted castle hill of Te Ahu-patiki--Mt. Herbert--with
its level top, where a lofty _pa_ of Ngati-Mamoe stood three
centuries ago.
[Illustration:
Cooper’s Knobs Dog’s Head Pinnacle Hill
View from Cass Peak, showing Cooper’s Knobs, Dog’s Head, and Pinnacle
Hill.
_W. A. Taylor, photo_]
Te Whaka-raupo is the ancient name of Port Cooper or Lyttelton Harbour.
The name sometimes has been given as Te Waka-raupo, which means “The
Canoe of Raupo reeds,” otherwise a raft or _mokihi_ of the
type so often used on the South Island rivers. This, however, is not
correct. “Whaka” here is the Ngai-Tahu dialectical form of “Whanga,”
which is a harbour or bay, as in Whangaroa and Whanganui. Whaka-raupo,
therefore, means “Harbour of the raupo reed.” The _tino_ or exact
place from which the harbour takes this name is Governor’s Bay, at the
head of which there was a swamp filled with a thick and high growth
of these reeds. It was here, at the head of Governor’s Bay, that the
stockaded pa Ohinetahi stood; it was occupied by Te Rangi-whakaputa’s
son after the dispersal of the Ngati-Mamoe tribe in these parts more
than two hundred years ago.
Corsair Bay and Cass Bay, as the _Kaumatua_ of Rapaki tells us,
have Maori names which contain a reference not only to the ancient
forests which clothed the slopes of the Port Hills and descended to
the sandy beachside, but to one of the vanished practices of the
native people, fire-making by wood-friction. Corsair Bay was named
by Te Rangi-whakaputa, Motu-kauati-iti, meaning “Little Fire-making
Tree-grove,” and Cass Bay was Motu-kauati-rahi, or “Great Fire-making
Tree-grove.” The bays were so designated because on the shores and the
slopes above there were plentiful thickets of the _kaikomako_
(pennantia corymbosa), the small tree into which Mahuika, a Polynesian
Prometheus, threw fire from his finger-tips, so that it should not
be extinguished by Maui’s deluge. A myth which to the Maori quite
satisfactorily accounts for the readiness with which fire can be
obtained from the _kaikomako_ by the simple process of taking
a dry block of the wood and rubbing a groove in it with a stick
of hardwood--with, of course an incantation to give more power to
the elbow--until the dust and the shavings become ignited. The
_kaikomako_ wood is used as the _kauati_, the piece which is
rubbed; the pointed rubbing stick which the operator works to and fro
is the _kaurima_. _Motu_ in these two names is a tree-clump
or grove. There are none of the ancient fire trees on the bay shores
nowadays; the _pakeha’s_ pinus insignis and cocksfoot grass have
long supplanted them.
Ri-papa is the full and correct name of Ripa Island, in Lyttelton
Harbour. It is an historic and appropriate name, carrying one back
to the ancient days when the brown sailors hauled their long canoes
up on its little shelving beach. _Ri_ means a rope, the painter
of flax by which canoes were dragged up on shore, and _papa_ is
a flat rock. Ripapa is a white man’s fort these days, but centuries
before a British gun was planted there it was a fortified place, though
the weapons of its garrison would hardly carry as far as those of the
present coast defence force. The Ngati-Mamoe three hundred years ago
had a small village on this rocky islet, commanding the harbour-gate;
it was defended with a palisade. But when the Rangi-whakaputa conquered
the inhabitants of Te Whaka-raupo, he took the island and named it
Ripapa--its first name is forgotten--and he built a _pa_ on the
spot where the fort of the _pakeha_ artillery-men now stands.
Quail Island, the dark-cliffed isle of the lepers, is known by the
Maoris as Otamahua. Herein is a reference to an era when the island was
a birding ground of the olden race. Many sea-birds, gulls and puffins
and divers, bred in the crannies of its fire-made rocky shores, and
the mainland Maoris canoed across on fowling expeditions. The eggs
(_hua_) of the sea-fowl were esteemed delicacies, especially by
the children (_tamariki_), who were fond of roasting them on their
island expeditions. _Manu-huahua_, or birds cooked and preserved
in their own fat, and done up in sea-kelp receptacles, as is the way
in the Stewart Island mutton-bird industry to-day, also formed a large
portion of the native supply of winter food in these parts.
Looking out from the Port Hills the olden Maori wayfarer surveyed
the far-spreading Plains and the name handed down from the days of
the Waitaha tribe, the forerunners of the Ngati-Mamoe, came to his
lips: “Nga Pakihi Whakatekateka a Waitaha.” It is a barbed-wire
fence, perhaps, to the average _pakeha_, yet abbreviated it
is not inappropriate as a Plains homestead name. In the long ago,
before water-races and artesian wells, the trails across the Plains
from the Waimakariri to the Selwyn and the Selwyn to the Rakaia and
the Ashburton were weary and thirsty tracks, for there were very few
springs of drinking water and the Maori disliked the water of the cold
glacial torrents. So the tired and thirsting trail-parties, swagging
it across the wastes of tussock and cabbage trees, came to call the
district “The Deceptive Plains of Waitaha,” for they discovered that
it was unwise to rely upon springs and streams on the long tramp. They
made water-bags of seaweed, the great bull kelp, which they split and
made watertight, and these _poha_ henceforth became as necessary
to the kit of a trans-“Pakihi” traveller as a water-bottle is to the
soldier in the field to-day.
[Illustration: Whaka-raupo, Lyttelton Harbour, looking south-west,
showing Quail Island.
_W. A. Taylor photo_
]
The Heathcote River, whose native name has been abbreviated to Opawa,
was originally the Opaawaho, which means “The outer, or seaward, _pa_,”
otherwise “An outpost.” A tribe-section or _hapu_ of the Ngai-Tahu,
about two hundred years ago, built a village on the left bank of
the river, on a spot slightly elevated above the surrounding swampy
country; the exact spot must have been close to the present Opawa
Railway Station. The name of the village was Poho-areare, or “pigeon
breasted,” after some chief of those days, and it was because of its
situation, the outermost _Kainga_ of the Plains and swamp dwellers,
commanding the passage down the Heathcote to the sea, that the river
became known as the stream of “The Outpost.” Here it may be recalled
that the _hapus_ who lived where Christchurch City now stands were
given a nickname by the outer tribes at Kaiapoi and elsewhere. They
were called “O-Roto-Repo,” or more briefly, “O-Roto-re’,” which means
“In the Swamp,” or the “Swamp-Dwellers.” They lived in a marshy region
which had its compensations in the way of abundant food, for the
swamps and creeks swarmed with eels and wild duck. The upper part of
the Heathcote was the O-mokihi or “The Place of Flax-Stalk Rafts.”
The _tino_ of the name, the place where it had its origin, was an
ancient lagoon-swamp at the foot of the Cashmere Hills, which the
river drained. Another version of the Heathcote name is Wai-Mokihi,
or “Flax-stalk Raft Creek.” Lower down the Heathcote, where the broad
tidal shallows are, the Maoris gave the place an equally appropriate
name; they called it O-hikaparuparu, which may be translated as “The
spot where So-and-so fell in the mud,” or “Stick-in-the-mud,” which
serves equally well to-day. About Redcliffs, where the tramline passes
round from the broads and under the great cave-riddled lava precipice,
there belongs a rather beautiful name, Rae-Kura, which is more modern
than most of the other Native designations. It means “Red-glowing
Headland,” or, let us say, “Rosy Point.”
Immeasurably more ancient is Rapanui, which is the name of Shag Rock,
in the Estuary; a place-name that could very well be appropriated by
some of the near-by residents. It is a far-travelled name, for it was
brought by the first Maori immigrants from Hawaiki, just as our white
settlers brought their Canterburys and Heathcotes and Avons with them.
We find it on the map of the Pacific some thousands of miles away; it
is one of the Native names of Easter Island, that strange relic of a
drowned Polynesian land in Eastern Oceania. And further out still,
there is Tuawera, the Cave Rock at Sumner, to which belongs a legend of
love and wizardry and revenge, to be narrated at another time, in which
the chief figures were a girl from Akaroa named Hine-ao or “Daughter of
the Dawn,” the chief Turaki-po, of “The Outpost” village, and Te Ake,
the _tohunga_ of Akaroa.
CHAPTER III.
ROUND THE SUGARLOAF.
“THE CREST OF THE RAINBOW.”
The saying that the best place to see the mountains is from below,
not from their summits, may properly be qualified in its application
to our Port Hills by the opinion that the finest view of the craggy
range of old volcanic upjuts is that to be had from a few hundred
feet below the range crest, on the Lyttelton Harbour side. Really to
appreciate the special and peculiar beauty of the hills, with their
nippled peaks and crags and their age-weathered cliffs, one must travel
along the Lyttelton-Governor’s Bay road rather than view the range from
the Plains, where the smoothed and settled ridges, like a series of
long whalebacks, give little hint of the sudden rocky wildness of the
precipitous dip to the harbour slopes. There, on the white road that
curves along the hillsides well above the waters of the Whanga-Raupo,
it is easy to understand something of the fiery history of these hills,
when the hollow that now is Lyttelton Harbour was one terrific nest of
volcanoes and when the tremendous forces of confined steam and gases
hurled whole mountain-tops skyward and helped to give savage shape
to the walls of rhyolite rock that stand to-day little altered by
the passage of the untold centuries of years. Better still, truly to
understand this most wonderful part of Canterbury, one should make a
traverse of the upper parts of the eastern dip by the new tracks, two
or three hundred feet below the pinnacles of the ridge. Off
[Illustration: Te Heru o Kahukura, Sugarloaf.
_C. Beken, photo_]
the tracks if you care for the exercise there is rock-climbing in
plenty and there are scrambles under the low-growing trees and along
steep faces hanging on to the flax clumps and the tough-branched
_koromiko_. And at about this level on the Hills side there are
aspects of crag scenery, and crag and woodland combined, that are
altogether missed by the stroller who keeps to the beaten track. Our
Christchurch artists need not go further away than the inner dip of the
range, the battered rim of the ancient fire cauldron, for impressions
of bold rock faces straightly grand and honeycombed with curious caves,
and witchy-looking weathered old trees; pictures that approach grandeur
when the storm clouds swirl about the tussock-topped tors of Kahukura,
the Rainbow God, giving the dark cores of the olden volcanoes an added
height and mystery, or when they drift softly and mistily from the deep
gullies between the ridges like steam masses from some hidden geyser.
The Mitchell Track that winds along northward between the tumbled rocks
and among the hill flax gives the explorer a start on his traverse
from Dyer’s Pass. It begins just opposite the picturesque stone-built
tea-house with its swinging signboard and its quaint inscriptions in
the saddle of the Pass, and it splendidly opens up the seaward face
of the Sugarloaf whose rounded summit lifts directly over us yonder
more than 1,600 feet above the harbour level. Immediately below us, in
the gully that long ago was a channel for lava flow, the rocky depths
are softened by the foliage of a fragment of the olden bush, a green
covering for the valley floor. The valley is more attractive outside,
for almost every vestige of the moss and ferns and underbrush has
disappeared before grazing stock and the
[Illustration: The Sign of the “Kiwi,” with Marley’s Hill in the
background.
_C. Beken, photo_]
sudden torrents that have poured down from the ridge to make the
little storm-creek flowing into the harbour beside the grassy mound
of Pa-rakiraki. The lava-builded, notched and caverned walls of the
Sugarloaf shoot up above us just here like a parapet, in regularly
marked layers; tufts of flax and tussock and wiry veronica beard the
face of the old fire-cliffs. Looking back at the Pass, just before
we round the first bend in the rocky traverse, the cliff makes a
terraced halt in its descent, and here on this tussock-grown tiny
level, broidered with flax bushes and their honey-sweet _korari_
blossoms, there is an eye-taking prospect of the Dyer’s Pass dip to the
soft-blue sunlit harbour and of the black rock-faces and strong folds
of the Port Hills southward.
Immediately southward of the Pass road the land goes easily swelling
up into Marley’s Hill, a little higher than our Sugarloaf, and now a
story of old-time explaining the meaning of the Maori name of that airy
saddle comes to mind.
The original name of the ridge leading southward from Dyer’s Pass,
and including Marley’s Hill, says Hone Taare Tikao of Rapaki, is
Otu-Tohu-Kai, which being translated is “The Place Where the Food Was
Pointed Out.” The tradition is that nearly two centuries ago, when the
Ngai-Tahu from the North conquered this part of the country from the
Ngati-Mamoe, a chief named Waitai ascended this height from Ohinetahi
(now Governor’s Bay), taking with him Manuwhiri and other of the
children of the chief Te Rangi-whakaputa who had taken possession of
the harbour shores, in order to point out to them the good things of
the great Plains. Waitai had already explored the country, and was able
to tell of its worth as a home for Ngai-Tahu.
When Waitai and his companions emerged from the bush and topped the
lofty round of the range, he halted, and bade them look out over the
wide, silent country. He pointed to the reedy lagoons and streams
that silvered the flax and tussock desert, where Christchurch City
and its suburbs now spread out leisurely and shade off into the rural
lands, and said: “Yonder the waters are thick with eels and lampreys,
and their margins with ducks and other birds; in the plains beyond
there are wekas for the catching.” The Plains, as he showed them,
were plentifully studded with the ti-palm, from which the sugary
_kauru_ could be obtained. Then, turning in the other direction,
he spoke of the fish-teeming waters of the harbour, where flounders,
shark, and other _kai-matai-tai_, “food of the salt sea,” were to
be had in abundance. Such were the foods of this Wai-pounamu; and so
good seemed the land to those conquistadors as they stood there on the
windy height surveying the great new country fallen into their hands,
that they decided to remain in so promising a place; and it is their
descendants who people Rapaki and other _kaingas_ to-day.
Now we turn and, passing a rugged cornice in the lava wall, descend
into the gully to examine for ourselves the tree-covering of old
Kahukura’s shoulders. There is a thick growth of flax on the little
terraces and steep slopes above the bush, and in one place we force
our way through a regular jungle of it, growing so thickly as almost
to encourage the idea that a flax-mill would find profitable business
here. Some of the tall _korari_ stalks are well in flower
and bees are busy; on others the long dark-sheathed buds are just
unfolding. Flax-flower honey-water makes a pleasant enough drink, and
the Boy Scout tastes and pronounces it good. There is a pretty Maori
love-lament in which a girl compares her sorrowing self to this blossom
of the flax:
“My eyes are like the wind-waved _korari_ blossoms; when the
breeze shakes the flowers down fall the honey showers; so flow my
tears.”
A little lower and we are in the bush, taking care as we enter it to
give a wide berth to the insinuating Maori nettle, the _ongaonga_,
with its unhealthy-looking light-coloured leaves covered with a thick
growth of fine spines or hairs. The Boy Scout sidles warily past
those bushes of _ongaonga_ when he is told of its poisonous
qualities, and of an experience the narrator had with it years ago in
the King Country bush. Away up yonder, in the Ohura Valley, between
the open lands of the King Country and Taranaki, the _ongaonga_
grew into tall shrubs, ten or twelve feet high, and its virulence
apparently was in proportion to its growth. All of our exploring party
were more or less badly stung and suffered the effects for a day or
two, but the unfortunate horses suffered most. Two of them went mad
with the poisonous stings, which swelled their sides and legs, and a
pack-horse actually drowned itself by bolting into a creek and lying
down in the water in its desperate need of ease from the pain. Really
bad _ongaonga_ stings provoke feverish sickness; and so it is
prudent to make a detour on these hill slopes rather than encounter
over-closely even these insignificant little specimens. If you are on a
steep, slippery slope and reach out for a hand-grip, as likely as not
instead of a friendly flax or tussock bunch the _ongaonga_ will
be there waiting for you with his devilish little stinging hairs. And
don’t attempt to apply to our Maori Land nettle the amiable counsel of
old Aaron Hill that was given out to us in our school days:--
Tender handed stroke a nettle
And it stings you for your pains;
Grasp it like a man of mettle,
And it soft as silk remains.
Don’t, if you value your skin, try that on the _ongaonga_.
[Illustration: The Seven Sleepers
The Port Hills, south-west of Dyer’s Pass, viewed from the lower slopes
of Sugar Loaf, above the Governor’s Bay road
_W. A. Taylor, photo_]
Lower down, however, the way is clear of this bush plague, and we
find ourselves under a shady roof of thick foliage, woven of the cool
green leaves of the broadleaf, a small _puka_, the _mahoe_
and _kowhai_ and other minor trees of the Maori bush with much of
the _kotukutuku_, the native fuchsia, now come into flower, with
its masses of slender pendulous blossom giving promise of abundant
_konini_ berries for the birds. (Like several other New Zealand
trees the fruit of the _kotukutuku_ is given a different name from
the plant itself.) The graceful lacebark or ribbonwood, too, is here in
plenty; there are some beautiful specimens on these hills and slopes,
and finest of all perhaps is the grand old _houi_ that overshades
the little Maori Church at Rapaki. _Aka_ vines interlace the
close-growing trees and here and there present tangling obstacles
to a passage along the gully sides. The place lacks the softness of
moss and fern underfoot to which we are accustomed in the real bush;
nevertheless it has something of the atmosphere of the olden forest
wild; grateful bush scents are in our nostrils, the leaf-covering is
close, though the trees are not tall, and the twisting character of
growth and the matting of creepers help to make compact the tentage of
green.
Making north-east with the general curve of the Sugarloaf slopes we
leave the first bush patch and, breasting another wild garden of flax,
with here and there a cabbage-tree sweetening the air with its creamy
flowers, discover a deep trend to the north-west into the main valley.
Here, under a steep-to uplift of the ancient igneous rock, curving out
above our heads in savage cornices and rude attempts at gargoyles,
we look down upon a picture of surprising beauty, one of the many
surprises folded in among these Port Hills.
[Illustration: The old Maori Church at Rapaki.]
On this side of the Heru-o-Kahukura the range is deeply bitten into
by a cup-shaped valley, with one side of the cup, that facing the
harbour, cut away for the passage of the old lava streams and now the
rainy season watercourses. The inside of the valley, too, is given
the semblance of a fan by the numerous converging tributary gullies,
separated by grassy and flax-grown ridges. There are perhaps half a
dozen of these subsidiary valleys, and each one is filled with a sweet
green mass of light bush similar to that behind us. The higher the
little valleys, too, the more bush there is; the gully bottoms are
hidden everywhere with many tinted foliage, a taller tree here and
there protruding its head above its fellows, and these remnants of the
ancient forest climb to the very parapets of dark and grey rock that
seem to form the main defences of Kahukura’s citadel. The curving lines
converge, the shouldering ridges fall away as the now dry watercourses
blend into one hundreds of feet below the rocky elbow of ours.
It is perhaps half a mile across the main gully and we fix a course for
the Summit track on the ridge northwards and strike down through the
bush. Here in the shadowy depths there is some bird life; the trill of
the _riroriro_, the little grey warbler, is almost constant, and
an occasional fantail flits about us; but the thrush is more numerous
than any native bird. When the bush bird-foods are ripe the _tui_
sometimes pays this valley a visit from larger woodland tracks. There
is a curious wildness in the valley bottom under the thicknesses of the
broadleaf and the _mahoe_ and _kotukutuku_; it is half-dark
in the deepest part, and great rocks lie hurled about, fire-born and
water-worn. The floods that sometimes tear down have worn pot-holes
here and there, and there are shallow caves obscured by tangles of
roots and
[Illustration: Whaka-raupo, Lyttelton Harbour from Kennedy’s Bush]
coiling stems. There is a venerable _kotukutuku_, a wizard of a
tree, its whitened bark hanging in strips like shaggy bits of beard,
its trunk all knotted and twisted, standing sentry at the entrance
to a little dusky cavern; its misshapen branches, storm-battered, go
searching around the broken top of the black and grey rock. Other of
the trees take goblin-like shapes, and stretch out their bare roots and
feelers, unsoftened by carpet of moss or ferns, to trip the intruder
into their dim solitudes. It is but a little bit of a wood, this bush
in the gully, but its aloofness and solitariness are made complete by
the close-growing habit of the small timber and the great tossed-about
rocks that help to seclude it. _Totara_ of some size, we observe,
once grew here; there is the tall, smooth barrel of a tree now dead.
In the next main gully to the northward, the Taungahara bush, on the
Native reserve, there is at least one fine _totara_, and some big
fellows were cut down there not so very long ago by the Rapaki people
for fencing posts.
As we make upwards, with care evading the diabolical _ongaonga_
that haunts the bush outskirts, we strike a steep face, with here and
there a dripping of water glistening on the moss-crusted rock and on
the little flax and _koromiko_ plants that root themselves in
tiny crevices. To gain the graded and formed track again, we swarm up
the fifty-foot cliff, with _koromiko_ and _aka_ and flax for
hand-grips. Above there is a jungle of _koromiko_, a veronica
which here assumes sub-alpine habit, and weaves a wire entanglement,
fortunately minus the barbs--the _tataramoa_ or bush-lawyer in
the thicket below supplies those in plenty. The butte here is topped
by a rock formation so regular and resembling a ruined fortification
that the Boy Scout opines it would be a splendid place for a fight,
and certainly the old shattered tor of the fire-kings, with its copses
of wire-branched _koromiko_ and its thick flax-clumps, suggests
itself as a first-rate natural redoubt, where a few riflemen might hold
out among their rocks and shrubby cover against a score of times their
number.
The little bush on either hand here runs almost to the ridge top,
and we come suddenly out of the _koromiko_ thicket on to the
great cave-worn ramparts and have a clear track to the Summit Road
again. The picture from the breezy ridge is worth the warm scramble
up through the matted bit of woodland. The long smooth rolls of hills
go down to the Plains on the one hand; on the other the harbour and
beyond the cloud-belted heights of the Peninsula. A misty shower is
sweeping over the far indigo hills, and a rainbow shines out, grandly
spanning a sector of the Peninsula, from the back of Purau to the
ocean. And as we turn southward the thought comes, observing the evenly
symmetrical round-sweep of the Sugarloaf summit from here, that the
Maoris of old-time, who, like the ancient Incas saw in the rainbow the
personification of a deity, may very well have caught from the peak’s
likeness to the iris arch the poetic fancy that induced them to name it
Te Heru-o-Kahukura, “The Comb (or crest) of the Rainbow God.”
By way of the easy return trail, we work back southward under the upper
cliffs. Out near the Pass the crannied walls of old Kahukura echo to
the voices of a party of girls, a botany class from the city. The
instructor is improving the half-holiday with a practical talk on the
native flora, and twenty notebooks are out and pencils busy.
“This,” announces the mentor as the class clusters round, “is a very
peculiar plant, Urtica ferox, so called because----”
“Wow!” interrupts one of the earnest learners, as she stoops to rub a
plump ankle. “It stings like billy-oh!” She has made the acquaintance
of the truculent _ongaonga_.
* * * * *
Jog on, jog on, the footpath way,[2]
And merrily hent the stile-a;
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad heart tires in a mile-a.
--Shakespeare.
[Footnote 2: Carved above the porch of the Summit Road Rest House on
Dyer’s Pass.]
CHAPTER IV.
RAPAKI: A VILLAGE BY THE SEA.
In the little Maori _kainga_ of Rapaki, folded away in a
valley-fan of Lyttelton harbour-side, there is a tiny, steep-roofed
church, of old-fashioned build, and by the side of this church stands a
twisty-branched old ribbonwood tree, that in summer showers over porch
and steeple its sweet, snowy blossoms, scented like the orange tree.
On the lowermost bough of this knotty ribbonwood, the _houhi_,
or _houi_, of the Natives, that stood here before the church was
built, over fifty years ago, hangs the bell that calls the remnant of
Ngati-Irakehu to worship; and it is this sylvan belfry that symbolises
for me the intermingling of modernism and ancientry in the Rapaki
of to-day. Like the other _hapus_ of the Ngai-Tahu tribe, the
Ngati-Irakehu and their kin are now half-_pakeha_ in blood; they
have intermarried with their European neighbours, and their little
township, with its sixty odd souls, is scarcely to be taken at first
sight for a Maori settlement. The communal house, of characteristic
Native build, with its carved frontal barge-boards and its
gargoyle-like _tekoteko_ perched above the entrance, familiar to
travellers in the Native districts of the North, is wanting here; but
a survey of the village scheme, with its tree-shaded cottages grouped
sociably about the central green space, and the hall and school-house
and church, soon makes it plain that here stood an old-time Maori
_kainga_, of totara slabs and raupo thatch, with maybe a tall
stockade guarding its landward side and stretching from cliff to cliff
of the little boulder-beached bay. The plan is the same; the buildings
have changed, for Rapaki to-day believes in
[Illustration: The church bell at Rapaki, suspended from historic
ribbonwood tree.
_E. Cowan, photo_
]
sanitation and modern comforts. Here and there a Maori tree, like our
ribbonwood yonder, and a tattered clump of light bush in the gullies or
on a rocky cliff-top, to remind us of the different setting when Rapaki
was tumultuous with wild Maori life; when tattooed Ngai-Tahu were in
fighting flower, and when dense and beautiful forest covered the feet
and shoulders of all those dark volcanic crags and tors lifting above
us there like so many ruined castles battered by the artillery fire
of the gods. A remnant, a _morehu_, now are tribe and forest;
alike they have dwindled to a shadow; “as the woods are swept away,”
says the Maori, “so shall the people vanish.” The young people are so
Anglicised that they use the _pakeha_ tongue chiefly; the older
ones only cling to Maori among themselves. Yet a brave little remnant,
with a fighting heart worthy of their warrior ancestry; for of these
descendants of fierce old Rangiwhakaputa and Wheke every eligible young
man went to the Great War, and some salted with their bones the world’s
greatest battlefields. (No Kipling monopoly in the phrase: “Bury me
here,” said old Major Pokiha, of the Arawa, a fighting chief of the
last generation--“bury me here as salt for the lands of my heroes”).
One-eighth of the population of little Rapaki voluntarily enlisted.
The well-plucked Ngati-Irakehu and their kinsmen have title to say, as
Nelson said of old of his fighting sailors, “We are few, but the right
sort.”
The _Kaumatua_ of Rapaki, the pleasant-mannered kindly greybeard,
Hone Taare Tikao, a gentleman of true _rangatira_ breeding
and demeanour, is the best informed man of his tribe-remnant on
the Peninsula and Port Hills history and legends and genealogical
recitals--_whakapapa_ in the Maori tongue. Tikao was born at
Akaroa over seventy years ago. He is of the Ngati-Irakehu _hapu_
of the Ngai-Tahu tribe, and he is descended by several lines from
Te Rangiwhakaputa and other of the warrior chiefs who wrested
the Whanga-raupo and the Whanga-roa--Aka-roa is the modernised
contraction--from the dusky men of Ngati-Mamoe. From his parents and
from Paora Taki, a picturesque old _rangatira_ who once was Native
assessor at Rapaki, and kindred people of the generation that has
gone, he learned the history and legends of these parts.
The old man tells us first how this village came to be named
Rapaki--not Raupaki, as it is erroneously spelled on the maps. The full
name of the place is Te Rapaki-a-Te Rangi-whakaputa which means “the
waist-mat of Te Rangi-whakaputa,” and to it, obviously, there hangs a
story, which when told leads on to the tradition of the conquest of
this district from the Ngati-Mamoe a little over two centuries ago.
The Rangi-whakaputa’s name in these parts is associated with Homeric
exploits with the weapons of old. This long-gone tattooed hero was
the Hector of the Whaka-raupo, and this well-hidden valley curving
down from the crags was the spot where he settled awhile when the
harbour-side fighting was done. He was one of the northern invaders,
a kinsman and contemporary of Moki, Tu-rakau-tahi, and other baresark
warriors of the end of the seventeenth century. On the beach below the
present village he left his waist-garment, a kilt of flax or _toi_
leaves, probably in connection with the act of _tapa_-ing the
place as his possession, and from the fact of this _rapaki_,
which would be a _tapu_ one, being cast there the place received
its name. Te Rangi-Whakaputa’s name has been translated as “Day of
Daring,” or “Day of Energy.” It suited this enterprising warrior, who
is described by his descendant Taare Tikao as a great _toa_ or
brave. He was indeed a fine figure of a man, nearer seven feet than six
feet high, it is said, very powerful, and a most skilful man in the use
of the _taiaha_, the Maori broadsword of hard tough _akeake_,
and the spear and the stone _mere_. All these harbour-front
villages and camping-grounds he captured from the Ngati-Mamoe who, as
Tikao says, were the fourth _iwi_--race or tribe--to occupy the
[Illustration: Rapaki Village, with Tamatea’s Breast in the background.
_W. A. Taylor, photo_
]
South Island; the first people were the Hawea, the second the Rapuwai, the
third the Waitaha and the fourth the Ngati-Mamoe, whom the Ngai-Tahu
dispossessed, in their turn to be supplanted by the white-skins with
their bags of gold sovereigns and their land-sale deeds.
And this Homeric figure of two centuries ago, great of stature and
terrible in fight, had a son whose name is scarcely less famous in the
little-written traditions of the conquest of the Whanga-Raupo. His
name was Wheke, which means “Octopus,” and like his father he spread
terror among the Ngati-Mamoe. With his war parties he scoured all these
ranges and tracked the frightened fugitives into their most secret
valleys and caves. One of his camping-grounds on a war expedition
was yon fort-like nest of basalt towers and upjuts above Cass Bay,
overlooking our Lyttelton road; he slept one night near the summit of
one of these crags, a wild hard camping place, and it is still known as
“Te-Moenga-o-Wheke” or “Wheke’s Bed.” And over the doorway of the large
meeting hall in the village of Rapaki you will see the name of Wheke
painted, in memory of a brown hero whose bones have been dust these two
hundred years.[3]
[Footnote 3: The following note describing the occupation of these
localities after the first conflict between the two great tribes of the
South Island was written by Mr. T. E. Green (Tame Kirini) of Tuahiwi,
Kaiapoi, who died in 1917, and who was an authority on the history of
his mother’s clan:--
“The Ngati-Mamoe were subdued by the Ngai-Tuhaitara section of the
Ngai-Tahu tribe under Moki, an account of whose expedition is given
in Canon J. W. Stack’s contribution to “Tales of Banks Peninsula.”
Te Raki (or Rangi) -whakaputa was of the Ngati-Kurii section of the
tribe; Ngati-Kurii carried their conquest no further south than
Kaikoura. From there southward is the conquest of Ngai-Tuhai-tara. The
second daughter of Te Rakiwhakaputa was the wife of Tu-Rakautahi, the
founder of Kaiapoi Pa, so Te Rakiwhakaputa came to Kaiapoi after the
settlement of the Ngai-Tuhaitara, here accompanied by other Ngati-Kurii
chieftains, namely, Mako, Te Ruahikihiki and others, and dwelt in the
vicinity of Kaiapoi for some time. There is a spot on the eastern
bank of the Whakahume (the Cam), about half a mile from the Kaiapoi
Woollen Mills, named Te Pa o Te Rakiwhakaputa. Some occurrence there
enraged Parakiore, youngest son of Tu-Rakautahi and grandson of Te
Rakiwhakaputa, and he declared that he would have no interloper in
his midst, referring to his grandfather Te Rakiwhakaputa, (to whom,
for brevity, I shall now refer by his short name Te Raki) and Mako
(Mango) who was married to his aunt (Te Raki’s eldest daughter). As a
result of this attitude of his son, Tu-Rakautahi said to Te Raki, ‘You
must go out to the Whaka-raupo (Lyttelton Harbour); there are sharks
there for us two.’ Mako he sent to Little River, to Wairewa, saying:
‘Yonder are eels for us two.’ To Te Ruahikihiki he said, ‘Go to Taumutu
(at Lake Ellesmere); there are patiki (flounders) for us two there.’
Kiri-Mahinahina he sent out to Paanau: ‘Go yonder and catch hapuku for
us.’
“Now this is what the present generation living at these places object
to, the idea that their ancestors were sent there to procure food
supplies for Kaiapoi. As Moki, the younger brother of Tu Rakautahi,
headed the Ngai-Tuhaitara clan who conquered the Peninsula, you will
readily perceive that no chief would deliberately go and settle on the
territory of another, and particularly one so powerful as Tu-Rakautahi,
without his permission--which in this case was given--and without
tribute being paid annually for the privilege. This was strictly
carried out by them until the advent of the _pakehas_. Of course
Kaiapoi gave them _kauru_ generally in return, merely in Maori
etiquette; some are now trying to make out that the _kauru_ (the
sugar extract of the _tii_, or cabbage tree) was the payment for
their fish.”]
When first I went round the high bend in the harbour-side road from
Lyttelton and saw Rapaki village a-slumber in the afternoon sun below,
all in its green and gold of groves and flowers, grassy fields lapped
about it in soft folds, the sea coming up in gentle breathings at the
foot of the little cliffs, and the grand old crags above, with one huge
_taiaha_-head of a peak lording it sentry-wise over all, I thought
that for beauty of setting very few Maori _kaingas_ even in the
romantic bushlands and highlands of the North Island were peers of this
hamlet of the Ngai-Tahu, almost jostled off the map by the crowding
hordes of the _pakeha_. Down the bend into the hollow, where the
ghost of a mountain stream goes tinkling through the little gully, and
the towns that are so near seem a hundred miles away. The mat-kilted
conquistador of old who gave his name to the place had an eye for a
secure, well-hidden site for his _pa_. He could scarcely have
chosen a spot more snug about these savage Port Hills. The dominating
tors and marline-spikes of fire-born rock and the great up-swell of
land on all sides but the sea ward off the cold winds. Loftiest of all
and nearest is that towering spear-head Te Poho-o-Tamatea, a dark
grey triangle of rhyolite, thrusting its naked apex into the warm sky
a thousand feet and more above the groves and dwellings of Tikao’s
people. It looks what it is, the mountain guardian of Rapaki; its
presence, grimly grand on dark lowering days when the mists trail about
it and give it added height and dourness, is no less overpowering in
the night, when it leans over the deep-cut valley of dreams, a huge
rugged blade of blackness etched against the sky. And even in this day
of sunshine, when every cave and cranny in the Poho-o-Tamatea were
searched by the golden light and when the mystery of its fiery birth
stood revealed, the great spear-rock still seemed a place of eeriness
and _tapu_.
That old ribbonwood tree that quite overshadows the little Rapaki
church holds memories of the vanished forests that once clothed all
these Port Hills and of the “flitting generations of mankind” it has
so long outlived. It is a dignified survivor of the woodlands of the
Rapaki-a-Te Rangi-whakaputa. Once upon a time the indigenous timbers
thickly covered all these now-grassy slopes slanting quickly from
the rhyolite hilltop crags to the quiet waters of the Whaka-Raupo.
There were big trees--_totara_, _rimu_, _kahikatea_ and _mataii_--but
all have gone long ago. Remains there but a remnant from the general
slaughter with fire and axe and crosscut saw--a copse on yonder rocky
point on the Lyttelton side of the hamlet, where the poetically
named _ake-rautangi_, the _ake_ of the “crying leaves” and a few
other shrubs hold their little stony fort; and in Taare Tikao’s
garden the _kaumatua_ has some treasured plants, such as the handsome
_rau-tawhiri_ shrub, and the flowering _hakeke_, a variety of _ake_,
the leaves of which when crushed in the hand have a lemon-like perfume;
the Natives used to boil them for the _hinu kakara_, the fragrant oil
expressed. But the old ribbonwood, or lacebark, or thousand-jacket, as
the bushman variously calls it, is the tree that takes the eye. The
Maoris of the north call it _whauwhi_ and _houhere_, here it is _houhi_
or _houi_. It takes its _pakeha_ name from the peculiar characteristics
of the inner bark, which is tough and strong of fibre and beautifully
netted and perforated. The early colonists have been known to use it
for the trimming of ladies’ hats and bonnets. I have seen a war-dance
party of Taupo Natives, more than a hundred strong, kilted with short
_rapakis_ made of this lacebark, deftly twisted and woven by their
womenfolk for the ceremonial leaping parade.
[Illustration: In a Rapaki garden.
_E. Cowan, photo_
]
That is the tree that extends its Maori _mana tapu_ and its
twisting flowery branches over the village church, with a little spire
like an old-time candle extinguisher, and it was under its shade that
Tikao told something of the past of these parts. The church itself,
as he remembered, was built in 1869 by the Wesleyan Natives, but the
Anglicans used it also, for in those days there was no _puhaehae_,
no violent jealousy of sects. And in its very shadow, when the sun
westers, is a tangled grassy spot sacred to the memory of a heathen
chief who would have none of the white man’s church or the white man’s
beliefs. Mahuraki was his name, a shaggy tattooed pagan of the first
half of the last century. He was exceedingly _tapu_, steeped in
wizardry and mysticism. Often the missionaries besought him to become
a Christian, but the grim old warlock scoffed at the Rongo Pai. “Hu!”
he grunted, “what is your Karaiti? Who was he? My god is Kahukura, the
god whose sign is the rainbow. As for yours, your Karaiti--he is a
_poriro_, a misbegotten!” And at last the sorely pained missionary
abandoned in despair the hopeless task of plucking the ancient man from
the burning. Mahuraki died sixty years ago and was buried in a hole dug
in the floor of his thatched hut, which was left to decay. As he lived,
he died, a sturdy unregenerate pagan, and the faith of Ihu Karaiti
prevailed; the bell of the Rongo Pai calls the _kainga_ to prayers
within a few paces of Mahuraki’s grave, and the _tohunga’s_
mumblings are a forgotten creed. The _tohunga_ himself is by
no means forgotten, for one of the names of yonder lofty arrowhead
of a crag that overlords Rapaki is “Mahuraki’s Head.” The original
name, as we have seen, is Te Poho-o-Tamatea, which means “Tamatea’s
Breast,” so named by this barefooted pioneer of Maori land surveyors
by way of claiming the land for his tribespeople. In about 1849-50,
when the commander of a British surveying ship made the first survey
of Lyttelton Harbour and named the landscape saliencies, his Maori
interpreter asked the name of this sharp peak, whereupon our old savage
claimed that it was named after himself, “Te Upoko-o-Mahuraki.” It was
his way of perpetuating his name and fame. But long-distance pedestrian
Tamatea fairly has prior claim.
So by the foot of the greenwood tree was begun the talk of olden days
that ended, as the sun declined behind the historic crags of Tamatea,
on Taare Tikao’s hospitable verandah, overlooking the little village
and the soft blue placid waters of the Whaka-Raupo. It was a rambling
_korero_, wandering deviously from _pakeha_ times into romantic
ancientry, when the wild men lived in the woods and when war canoes
filled with fierce tattooed eaters of men swept up and down this
shining harbour of ours. The _Kaumatua_, describing the old industrious
age of his people, told by way of example of the tribal communistic
energies how great flax nets fully a quarter of a mile long used to be
made for the catching of the shark in this sea arm. These immensely
long seines were six or eight feet deep, and were worked by canoes,
which would take one end out into mid harbour, the other being made
fast, and sweep the great _kupenga_ round the shoals of fish making
their way up the harbour with the flood tide. Huge quantities of sharks
and other fish were caught in this manner, a fishing fashion which was
only possible under the old tribal system, when the whole strength of
the _hapu_ was available for such tasks.
Lest readers should question the dimensions of that quarter of a mile
seine, let me say that in quite recent times, up to within the last
thirty-five years or so, an old Ngati-Pikiao chief, the late Pokiha
Taranui (better known as Major Fox), had a net nearly a mile in length,
which was used on special occasions, such as the gathering of food for
native meetings; the locality was Maketu village, on the shores of the
Bay of Plenty. But those enormous _kupengas_ will never again be
hauled through the fish-teeming waters.
From Tikao, too, we hear something of the poetic legend and nature-myth
that steep those swart hills above Rapaki. Yon savage Poho of rhyolite,
and the peaked and pinnacled cores of old volcanoes that break
through the grassy hills for mile after mile, all have their tales
of pre-_pakeha_ years, of which we shall chronicle something
again. Just now we may content ourselves with the gentler scenes in
Rapaki valley, where the kowhai has shed its showers of gold and the
_pakeha_ fruit trees in blossom sweeten the soft air deliciously.
That patch of ploughed land behind the settlement before long will
show the first shoots of _kaanga_, or maize; there is not much
grown in this island except by the Natives. The water-front, in spite
of its smart new jetty for the launches, is lonelier than in the old
days; for there was a time, long after the war-canoe era, when three
long whaleboats were hauled up on the sand where the boulders are piled
aside yonder and often these could be seen pulling down to Lyttelton
laden with potatoes, corn and fruit. That bit of beach is over-rough;
but a little way to the north, under the lee of a wild bit of a rocky
headland thick with beautiful light bush, is a gem of a white beach,
clean and hard and shining, a sandy alcove that must have been made
for picnicking. And from this hillside turn in the road where we get
our first glimpse of Rapaki, we may also most fitly take our sunset
farewell of the _kainga_ of an artist’s dream.
The sun is over the range, and Tamatea’s gloomy peak is outlined in
sharp symmetry against the burning west. In the deep gullies between
the spear-head and the ridge of the Sacred Fire the smoky-blue mists
are already forming, and wreathing and creeping around the tangled
shrubberies of bush that have escaped the general massacre. The harbour
lies a sheet of scarcely moving tender turquoise, just a shade lighter
than the face of the famous Tikitapu, inaccurately called the Blue
Lake by the _pakeha_; high beyond the shark’s-teeth of the peaks
that someone has named the Seven Sleepers are drawn in soft blue upon
the rose of the heaven above, their feet are bathed in violet, and the
purple mists swim wraith-like from their hidden hollows. The sun goes,
and the delicacy, the tenderness of colour, the fading of landscape
details into a haze like the camp-fire smokes of the legendary
_Patu-paiarehe_, weave a veil of faery over the valley and the
darkening sea. The little boys and girls of the settlement are still
at play around the meeting-hall, and every call and every laugh come
clearly through the velvet soft air. Down in a nearer dwelling, a girl
is rehearsing a _poi_-dance song, and the lilt is familiar, the
half-sad chant that begins,
“Hoki-hoki tonu mai,
Te wairua o te tau.”
(“Return, return again to me,
The spirit of my love.”)
It is the song crooned by the women and the children in every
_kainga_ that, like slumbrous little Rapaki down yonder, sent
its young men to use rifle and bayonet beside their _pakeha_
brothers-in-arms on the thundering battlefields half a world away.
CHAPTER V.
THE “AHI-A-TAMATEA.”
HOW THE SACRED FIRE CAME TO WITCH HILL.
As we travel northward along the Summit Track from the Poho-o-Tamatea,
observing from this commanding height--a thousand feet above little
Rapaki village, lying in its grassy nest below--how that great
spearhead of rock has in reality an almost level top, we come to a
remarkable broken wall of grey lava moss-crusted and shrub-tufted,
protruding from the grassy flanks of the craggy knoll called Witch
Hill. It is in fact a huge dyke of once-molten lava, cutting wall-like
through the old lava flows and trending southward across the shoulder
of its parent hill. From the very crest of the range it shoots in a
palisade of frost-shattered rock, towering thirty feet and more in
places above the stone-strewn tussocks, and it stretches some distance
in irregular cyclopean steps down the steep slope towards Rapaki. There
is an old stone quarry on the face of Witch Hill, where this dyke juts
out like a broken castle wall of the _Patu-paiarehe_, the Dim
People of long ago, and just there the old waggon track goes down over
the smoothed-out hills to the Canterbury Plains and the green banks of
the Opaawaho.
[Illustration: Witch Hill.]
The Giants’ Causeway some fanciful _pakeha_ has named this wall of
lava. To the Maori it is the “Ahi-a-Tamatea” or “the Fire of Tamatea”,
and a strange nature legend there is thereto; a folk tale in which
fable and geologic myth are curiously blended. It is a volcano myth
which closely resembles, and is no doubt a copy of, the North Island
legend of Ngatoro-i-Rangi and the origin of the Ngauruhoe volcano. The
march downhill of this curious upstanding dyke of lava, grey against
the more sombre tints of the range, may be traced in the masses of
lava boulders through which the Rapaki water-course has cut its way
in its lustier days. And if you turn your face southward and look
far across the upper part of the harbour, near the western slopes
of Mount Herbert, you will plainly see what seems a continuation of
the remarkable wall of lava which welled ages ago white-hot from the
cauldrons of Ruaimoko. Those grey-white parapets of fire-made rock are
the Ashes of the Fires of Tamatea, and this is the wonderful tale of
Tamatea and his magic fire, a tale of old which brings in, too, our
great arrowhead peak, towering yonder on Rapaki’s western side, yon
huge upjut lording it sentry-wise over the Maori _kainga_. The peak
of “Tamatea’s Breast,” is one of the very few landscape saliencies
in these parts which still remain in the hands of the people of
Takitimu descent. A venerable name this, for it is quite six hundred
years old and is a connecting link with the greatest land-explorer in
Maori-Polynesian story, a prototype of the adventurous “Kai-ruri,” the
white surveyor of _pakeha_ pioneering days.
Tamatea seems to have been possessed of the true “wander-hunger,” for
when he arrived on the shores of the North Island in his ocean-going
canoe the Takitimu (or Takitumu) from his Eastern Pacific home--Tahiti
or one of the neighbouring islands--via Rarotonga--his restless heart
impelled him to more adventure. First making the land in the far
north, he voyaged on down the East Coast, sailing and paddling from
bay to bay, leaving here and there some of his sea-weary crew, who
intermarried with the inhabitants, and he did not cease his sailorly
enterprise until he had reached the foggy shore of Murihiku, the “Tail
of the Land” which the white man calls Southland. Here the Takitimu
was hauled ashore and if one is to accept literally the legend of the
Maori, there she is to be seen now, metamorphosed in marvellous fashion
into mountain form, the lofty blue range of the Takitimu--mis-spelled
“Takitimos” on the maps and locally spoken of as “the Takitimos.”
It is curious that this isolated range--fairy-haunted in native
legend--lifting abruptly on all sides from the tussocky plains that
slope to Lake Manapouri, from more than one point bears a resemblance
to the form of a colossal canoe upturned. Legend, too, says that
Tamatea settled awhile at the foot of the Canoe Mountains, and that he
had a camp village at the lower end of Lake Te Anau, where eels and
birds were abundant.
[Illustration: The Summit Road, overlooking Governor’s Bay.
_C. Beken, photo_
]
Then, wearying for the trail and the _pikau_, he set out on a march
which was nothing less than heroic, from Southland to the newly-settled
homes of his people in the North. With a number of companions and
food bearers the barefooted explorer trudged across country, through
the unpeopled tussock prairies of Otago and the plains now known as
Canterbury, fording or swimming the rivers or crossing them on rude
rafts (_mokihi_) made of bundles of flax-stalks or of dried _raupo_,
until he reached the hills that wall in Lyttelton Harbour. He travelled
along the range-top, as was the way of the Maori explorer, until he
neared the dip in the sharp ridge at the back of Rapaki, over which the
Maoris and the pioneer white men made a track.
Now, Tamatea had carried with him, in a section of a hollow _rata_
log, as was the fashion of the Maori, a smouldering fire for his
nightly camps. No common fire this; it was an _ahi-tipua_,
a “magic blaze,” a sacred fire directly kindled from that
trebly-_tapu_ fire which Uenuku, the great high priest of far
Hawaiki, had sent with his canoe voyagers. The Takitimu, being a
_tapu_ canoe, carried no cooked food, and the only plants the
people brought in her were ornamental ones, for scent and beauty and
sweet flowers. She was a great double canoe, and could carry two
hundred people. Her consort was the canoe Arai-te-uru, which carried
“Te Ahi-a-Uenuku--Uenuku’s Fire”--and all kinds of food plants, even,
says Tikao, a grain which is said to have resembled the _pakeha’s_
wheat. Coming round Te Matau-a-Maui, Hawke’s Bay, the Arai-te-Uru
nearly capsized; she went over on her side, and continued in that
attitude until she finally overturned at Matakaea Point, near Oamaru,
where she still lies--turned to stone! The sacred fire was saved and
it was taken by the chiefs up the Waitaki River and placed there in
the ground; and there until about forty-five years ago it was still
actually burning, issuing from the earth in a little undying flame, and
it was called “Te Ahi a Uenuku.” (A seam of lignite is said to have
been found burning in the locality by the early settlers and explorers,
and this the Maoris identified with the Hawaikian sorcerer’s magic
blaze.)
But it seems that Tamatea’s fire so carefully tended by the gods went
out as he travelled slowly up the hills from Otago, and none had
been kindled again when he reached the Port Hills. And as he and his
companions came out of the bush and passed out on to the summit of the
mountain above Rapaki, a great storm of wind and rain, followed by
hail and snow, burst upon them from the south and they were like to
perish from the cold. It was freezing cold, and Tamatea was without
fire or the means of making one, for no fire-making timbers grew in
that spot. In his extremity he stood upon the tall crag-top yonder--the
one that now is called “The Breast of Tamatea”--and called aloud and
_karakia’d_ and made incantations for sacred fire to be sent
from the North Island, the land of active volcanoes, to save the
lives of himself and his companions. He called to his elder relative,
Ngatoro-i-Rangi, and to the guardians of the Ahi-Tipua, the volcanic
fires.
And the chief’s fervent prayer was answered in a moment. The fire,
sent by the gods in the heart of the North Island, burst forth from
Tongariro and speeding down the rift of the Wanganui River valley it
touched a spot near Nelson, and again it touched Motu-nau--the small
island close to the Canterbury Coast--and then it appeared again in a
magic blaze on the side of Witch Hill, and the Maori explorers warmed
their frozen limbs and were saved. The fire did not stop here in its
wonderful flight, for it went on across the harbour, and the white
chute of rock, like a huge sheep-dip trough, shining yonder above the
bay of Waiaki is the last of the sacred flames of Tamatea.
And when the chief left the spot next day to continue his
journey he said, “Let this place be called The Place where
Tamatea’s Fire-Ashes Lie”; and so to-day the rocky wall which
the white man has named the Giant’s Causeway is to the Maori “Te
Whaka-takanga-o-te-Karehu-a-Tamatea.” And the volcanic fire itself is
“Te Ahi-a-Tamatea.”
Such is the story of Tamatea’s Fire as told by Hone Taare Tikao, in
reciting the legends learned from the long-dead elders of his tribe.
A legend embalming a distinct perception of the geological history of
these hills. The _Kaumatua_ truly says that the magical walls of
Tamatea’s Fire Ashes are of later origin than the volcanic crags and
hills which lie about them, and across which they cut. The Wanganui
River, down which the sacred fire came from the crater of Ngauruhoe,
was then dry; it was a rift opened for it by the Volcano Gods. Tikao
speaks of a time when the lower part of Lyttelton Harbour was not in
eruption, but when the upper part was; from the southern side of Quail
Island to the head of the bay was a furnace; there was no water in it
at that immeasurably distant day. There are lava rocks, he says, like
those of the Ahi-a-Tamatea on the shore of Quail Island; and then there
are the always wonderful cliff of Pari-mataa and the wall of Otarahaka
on the Mount Herbert side of the upper harbour.
Of the lava dykes Professor R. Speight writes in his account of the
geology of the Port Hills that they radiate from the harbour as a
centre and form, as it were, the ribs of the mountain, holding it
firmly together and helping it to resist the enormous strains to
which it was exposed before and during eruptions. “Judging from the
persistent nature of these dykes,” he adds, “it is clear that the
mountain must have been split at times from top to bottom, and the
liquid material which welled from the fissures must have looked at night
like a red-hot streak across the country.”
[Illustration: Te Poho-o-Tamatea, or Tamatea’s Breast, in the middle
distance.
_W. A. Taylor, photo_
]
And so, by way of the long Maori story, the one solitary example of
volcano-legendry the writer has heard from the South Island, we come
to the Rapaki peak’s guardian name, Te Poho-o-Tamatea. The explorer
bestowed his name upon the height, _tapa-ing_ it after himself
and his sacred breast, much as a present-day traveller justly might
claim the right to map-name some peak after himself. Tamatea’s travels
led him far after he turned his back on the Port Hills. He marched
up on the coast to Kaikoura, and there or further north he built a
canoe, or, what is more probable, borrowed or forcibly appropriated
one belonging to the _tangata whenua_ who must already have been
living in the Marlborough country, and crossed to the North Island.
He canoed up the Wanganui River--there is a curious rock, the end
of which the natives used to paint red with _kokowai_ ochre,
projecting from the eastern bank many miles above Pipi-riki, still
known as Tamatea’s Rock--and crossed the central plateau to Lake
Taupo, and thence went on to the East Coast. There are innumerable
stories illustrating his genius for exploration, and from end to end
of New Zealand place nomenclature memorises his travels and justifies
the name by which he is known in history, Tamatea-pokai-whenua,
or “Tamatea-who-travels-through-the-land.” He was a true type of
the pioneer and the path-finder, the Fremont of Aotea-roa and the
Wai-pounamu, the man who heard the “one everlasting Whisper”--
Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges--
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!
CHAPTER VI.
HILLS OF FAERY.
THE LITTLE PEOPLE OF THE MIST.
Our talk turned one day to the poetic legendary past of the Port Hills
above us and the Banks Peninsula peaks yonder, hemming in Lyttelton
Harbour in an annular line of dead fire crags. They were the hills
of an artist’s dream this golden afternoon, all their asperities of
crag and bare bluff softened and gilded by the mellow light of a calm,
bright, windless day. There was just the faintest of hazy films drawing
over the nearer hills from the waters. The sea below us at Rapaki lay
in unbreathing quiet, as soft, as bright and blue as Kipling’s Indian
Ocean. The rich purple of distance painted the most remote of the
Peninsula peaks, and here and there a wispy tail of mist floated about
the head of a gully that cleft the crumpled hills swelling up into the
rocky summits of the Pohue and the Ahu-patiki. Just where the land went
steeply up from the head of the bay to the shoulders of Te Ahu-Patiki,
otherwise Mount Herbert, we could see the curious light grey rock wall
of the Tarahaka, above the Pari-mataa, “Obsidian Cliff,” like a great
chute down the mountain side, gleaming in the sun, the _tipua_
rock of the fire gods. Nearer, in the middle of the picture, were the
black volcanic cliffs, and the green slopes and pine-groves of the
Lepers’ Isle, the island which the Maoris of old called Otamahua,
mapped by the _pakeha_ as Quail Island; it was one tragic spot in
the picture, a place of living death.
The _Kaumatua_ spoke of the hilltop homes of the
_Patu-paiarehe_, the fairies, whose craggy castles defended by
the thick dark woods and the fogs and mists, ringed all this harbour
round and made the high places of the Peninsula an uncanny land, given
up to all manner of enchantments. Not that he reposed implicit faith in
the fairy stories himself, he told them as he had heard them from his
elders in the days of long ago. “We are half _pakeha_ ourselves
now, we Ngai-Tahu,” he said, “and our young people deride these notions
about the _Patu-paiarehe_. Yet--these hills were different in my
young days, when the mists came down and the fog enveloped the little
streams tumbling down all the valleys from the gloomy places. We went
birding into the forest, and we made clearings for cultivations and cut
firewood in the bush for sale to the _pakeha_. Sometimes, when the
mists came down and the fog enveloped the hills, on still, calm days
our old men and women would say the fairies were out, the sun-shunning
_Patu-paiarehe_, and it were well not to venture up the range. On
brooding quiet days our people could hear the thin voices of the little
folk--they were small, fair people, as all the elders said--crying
out to each other and singing fairy songs and playing little songs on
their wooden or bone flutes, their _koauau_ and _putorino_.
This Poho-o-Tamatea, the high peak behind the _kainga_ of Rapaki,
was one of their homes, their _pas_, but there were others, the
high places of the fairies, all around these hills, from my peak above
there right away along the peak-tops touched by the Summit Road, right
round to Cooper’s Knobs and then on to the Peninsula, even to Otoki,
the haunted mountain which the _pakeha_ calls Brazenose, on the
southern side of Akaroa town.”
[Illustration: Rhodes’s Monument (Home of the Fairies), to the east of
Mt. Herbert, taken from Lyttelton.
_W. A. Taylor, photo_]
The _Kaumatua_ swept his finger across the southern sky-line, the wild
and broken peaks of Banks Peninsula, rising up in powerful slants
from the soft blue of the harbour, creased with the gullies of
water-courses. “Over yonder,” he said, “are the chief _pas_ of the
_Patu-paiarehe_, which I shall list for you: There is the rock of
Te Pohue, which _pakehas_ call the Monument between Purau and Port
Levy; there is Hukuika Peak, on the hill road between Pigeon Bay and
Little River; there is the mountain-top of Te U-Kura, which commands
all the hill-country of the Peninsula--it is just at the back of
the stopping-place called Hilltop on the road from Little River to
Akaroa town. Also there are the high rocky peaks which overlook Akaroa
Harbour--Pu-Waitaha, or French Hill, between Wainui settlement and
Buchanan’s; Otehore, a rocky flat-topped height above French Farm, on
the upper part of the harbour; the summit heights above Akaroa town,
Purple Peak, Mount Berard and Brazenose--these we call O-te-Patatu,
Tara-te-rehu, and Otoki; and lastly Tuhiraki, the sky-pencilling peak,
which the French named Mount Bossu, on the western side of the harbour.
All these were the mountain _pas_ of the fairies.
“Now, amongst the fairy _pas_,” the word-of-mouth historian went
on, “there are two places of particular enchantment. One is that lofty
palisade of a peak which you call Brazenose, and the level-topped
hill above French Farm. Otoki--the Place of the Axe--is the name for
Brazenose, but there is an ancient burying-ground there, upon the
misty mountain immediately above the little Maori village of Onuku,
on the beach side, which is called Otehore; the _Wahi-tapu_, or
cemetery, makes it doubly sacred. This place and the height above
French Farm were both called Otehore, and the people of the mists loved
them well. On the small piece of level ground on that Otehore which
stands above French Farm the fairy _hapu_ of those parts had
their _pa_, and there they would gather at night for their fairy
meetings, and gather by day also in the foggy weather when no Maori eye
could see them; and then would be heard their sweet fairy songs, their
_waiatas_, and the tunes they played upon their flutes, sounding
faintly from the cloudy mountain.”
Indeed, on dim and foggy days, and when the wet vapours becloud
the long-dead volcano land, it is not difficult to enter into the
spirit of the Maori fancy, and in imagination people all these craggy
pinnacles with the _Patu-paiarehe_, and the wooded gulches with
_Maeroero_, the wild men of the bush. When the mists steal down
on the rhyolite knobs of the fire-fused Port Hills and the Peninsula,
craggy beyond description, peaked in a hundred fantastic shapes, with
great black and grey nipples of lava protruding from the grassy slopes
and the woody ridges, the land has an eerie look, fit playground
for the Forgetful People, as the old Irish would have called them.
In the early morning too, when the fogs are lifting from the bays,
and here and there a black broken thumb of a peak juts out above the
trailing vapours, or the mist-wreaths drape in torn veilings the huge
rampart-like scarps, and when the first rosy sunbeams glorify the
half-revealed mountains, the poetic mind can well conceive of this
region as one of fairy wizardry and all manner of dusk-time magic. One
day when it rained and blew, we were motoring over the hills from the
Plains to Akaroa, scarcely able to see twenty yards in front of the car
when we ran cautiously round to Hilltop. Suddenly the dense masses of
fog were rent aside by the wind, and right above us, with a fore-ground
of blackened tree-stumps, remnant of the ruined forest, we caught a
glimpse of the black, jagged tor which the Maori called Te Puha, thrust
up like a great spearhead by Ruaimoko, the Fire-God; in the light of
the _Kaumatua’s_ stories it was easy to imagine it a sentry-tower
of the fairies, or of such a place of witchery as the Ben Bulben of
which we read in W. B. Yeats’s “Celtic Twilight.”
There is another rugged, dark volcanic crag, wooded about its base,
crowning one of these Peninsula ridges, of which the Old Man of
Rapaki has a poetic story. This is the pinnacle above and to the
north of the Hilltop Hotel, on the divide where the traveller gets
his first sight of Akaroa lying more than a thousand feet below. The
_Kaumatua_ gave it as one of his fairy peaks, its Native name is
Te U-Kura, and as far as I have been able to ascertain, it bears no
official _pakeha_ name. Te U-Kura, he says, is an exceedingly
ancient designation; it was a name given by the fairies. It means “The
Resting Place of the Ruddy Light.” In his younger days, when he lived
at Tikao Bay, on the shores of Akaroa harbour, he frequently observed
for himself the peculiar fitness of the Hilltop name. Often at sunset
a cloud-cap would rest lightly on the dark skull of the fairy crag,
and to this cloud the declining sun would impart a bright red glow,
the _kura_ of the Maori. This was a sign to the weather-wise that
a nor’-wester was blowing on the Canterbury Plains--a _tohu_, or
token, that was seldom astray. “U” means to rest, as a canoe upon the
beach. This surely is a name that the _pakeha_ should imprint upon
his Peninsula maps. It lends itself to more than one euphonious variant
in the _pakeha_-tongue, as “Red Cloud’s Rest,” or “Place of the
Sunset’s Glow.”
Behind the town of Akaroa, the grassy hills, lightly wooded here and
there like a beautiful wild park, culminate in a craggy skyline,
more than a thousand feet above the fields and orchards on the town
outskirts. Dark tors of rhyolite, grassed to the base of
[Illustration:
Cockayne’s Cairn Cass Peak
Kennedy’s Bush.
_W. A. Taylor, photo_
]
their nippled upswells, dreamy on sunny days in their delicate
wash of hazy blue. Here near the Stony Bay road saddle, is the
legend-haunted O-te-Patatu, the old-time ridge of the fairies and the
_titi_. The _titi_ or muttonbird has long since disappeared
from the Port and Peninsula hills, but in the Maori days it was
plentiful on many such high places. It loved to build on lofty hills,
where the soil was soft enough to enable it to make its burrows.
There was a cliff at O-te-Patatu, says the _Kaumatua_, where
the _titi_ lived and bred in great numbers in the long ago.
The Maori tribes who lived on the beaches and on the trenched and
parapeted promontories made expeditions to the hilltop in the season
when the young birds were fat, and caught, cooked and preserved them
in kelp baskets and pottles, just as the Foveaux Strait and Stewart
Island Maoris do at the present time. But the _Patu-paiarche_
who lived on the crags of O-te-Patatu and Tara-te-rehu also hunted
these _titi_, and slaughtered them in such numbers, in a most
unfairylike manner, that presently these fishy petrels became extinct
in that locality. A woman of the Ngai-Tahu, or Ngati-Mamoe, at Akaroa,
who was said to be in love with a fairy, but who no doubt also loved
the palatable muttonbird, chanted this little _waiata_, a song
of fairy times which is still to be heard at Rapaki and other Native
villages:--
Titi whakatai aro rua
E hoki ra koe
Ki O-te-Patatu,
Ki te pa whakatangi
Ki te koauau,
Ki tauwene ai
E raro i au-e!
(Translation)
O titi, bird of the sea,
Bird of the hilltop cave,
Come back to O-te-Patatu,
To the lofty dwelling
Where the sweet sounds are heard,
The sound of the faery flute,
The music of the mountains
That thrilled me through and through!
The soft and plaintive flute song of the fair-skinned folk who lived
on these misty mountains seems to have appealed to the Native heart,
for it is described as sweeter by far than the _whakatangitangi_,
the “making sound upon sound,” of the ordinary Maori flute-players.
Distance, aided by imagination, no doubt lent it additional
enchantment. And the _Patu-paiarehe_ men appear often to have
made themselves agreeable to the _wahine_ Maori, for stories are
told of women being taken as wives by the fairy chiefs, and of girls
from the Maori villages wandering away into the woods to meet their
fairy lovers. The offspring of such unions were always known by their
extremely fair skins, unnaturally pale, and their light flaxen hair;
they were _korako_ or albinos.
And there was another people of the wilds. Sometimes on dark nights
the Maori villagers would see the light of torches moving about in
bays across Lyttelton Harbour, then the Bay of Raupo, where they knew
there was no settlement of their tribe, and they would say to each
other, “See! The _Maeroero_ are out, spearing _patiki_.” The
_Maeroero_ were the wild men of the woods, fierce hairy giants who
sometimes captured Maori women and carried them off to be their wives
in the bush of the Port Hills. The _Maeroero_ are described as
having very long and sharp finger-nails, so long that they were great
claws, and it was with these long talons that they speared the flatfish
and caught the birds in the forests.
[Illustration: The Summit Road
pathway, through the Devil’s Staircase, or The Remarkable Dykes (on the
way to Kaituna)]
To the matter-of-fact _pakeha_ and the modernised Maori there is a
very simple explanation of these fairy tales. The _Patu-paiarehe_ and
the _Maero_ were simply the remnants of aboriginal tribes, such as
the Ngati-Mamoe or the Waitaha or their predecessors, driven away into
the heart of the mountains and the forests, where they lived a wild,
secluded life, existing on the foods of the wilderness. The old English
and Scottish belief in fairy people arose in much the same way, the
very word “pixy” comes from the name of the Picts, who were driven
into the hills and caves. Nevertheless, for those who like to preserve
their Peter Pan fancies and illusions this theory may cheerfully be
disregarded, and we may still, on days of mist and cloudy calm, imagine
the little tribes of the rocks flitting out from their caves and hollow
trees and raising as of old their thin voices in their _waiatas_ and
piping their fairy sweet _koauau_ music on the level hilltop of Otehore
or the dark rock of Tamatea’s Breast.
MOUNT PLEASANT AND ITS “TAPU.”
Now the Old Man’s memories take him back seawards across the Port Hills
to the familiar knolls of Tauhinu-Korokio. This is the Native name
of Mount Pleasant, the great grassy upswell of land lifting sixteen
hundred feet above sea-level and looking down serenely on the vast
curving sand-line of Pegasus Bay. The Maori name is a combination
of the names of two Native shrubs which were very plentiful on that
portion of the hills in former times and specimens of which may still
be seen there. _Tauhinu_ is a heath-like plant found all over New
Zealand; it is the Pomaderis phylicaefolia of the botanists. It grows
two or three feet high, or sometimes higher, and it is so plentiful
and so prone to spread that it has been placed on the Agricultural
Department’s index expurgatorious as a noxious weed, in spite of
all the sweet heathery perfume of its blossoms which the bees love.
The _korokio_ is a small bushy black-branched growth which the
_tauhinu_, as the Maoris say, often embraces and smothers,
as the _rata_ eventually smothers the tree which it clasps.
Tauhinu-korokio was an ancient _pa_ of Ngati-Mamoe which stood on
the site of Major Hornbrook’s old homestead and the present house of
[Illustration: Hinekura.
_J. Cowan, photo_]
stay for visitors, just below a remnant of the ancient bush on the
northern and sunny slope of the green mountain. There was a good spring
of water close by, and this important fact no doubt determined the
situation of the Ngati-Mamoe hillmen’s village. In Ngai-Tahu times,
after Te Rangi-Whakaputa had conquered this _pa_ in the course of his
subjugation of the Whaka-Raupo aborigines, the vicinity was found by
the Ngai-Tahu to be a very suitable spot for such vegetable foods as
the _korau_ and the _pora_, or _pohata_, now extinct; the roots, which
were sweet, were dried in the sun and stored in _ruas_, or underground
pits and earthed-in storehouses, as potatoes and _kumara_ are now.
_Kumara_ and _taro_, the tropic foods of the north, did not flourish in
the hill country of the south, though they did well enough, with care,
on favoured parts of the Canterbury Plains and the Coast.
There is in Maori belief an exceedingly _tapu_ spot on
Tauhinu-korokio, close to where the old Ngati-Mamoe _pa_ stood.
It was probably either a _tuahu_ or a burying-place; the
_tuahu_ was the spot where the tribal gods, or, rather, their
symbols in wood and stone, were kept, and where the wise men, the
_tohungas_, resorted for incantation and occult ceremonies and
the black art of the _makutu_, by which enemies might be slain
though they were at a great distance, by thought transmission and the
malignant projection of the will. It is not well to camp there even
now, should you have Maori blood in your veins. The flax-clumps and the
_tauhinu_ bushes still murmur the name of Ngati-Mamoe, and though
_pakeha_ sheep have long grazed over the site of Tauhinu-korokio
and _pakeha_ voices make lively the mountain side, the soil holds
the mysterious spell of the _tapu_. Maoris who have camped on the
side of the track which goes over the hills there have spent a night of
inexplicable discomfort, inexplicable, that is, but for the presence of
the _tapu_ and the unseen spirits of Maoridom. Taare Tikao himself
says that many years ago, when he was shearing at Major Hornbrook’s,
he was taken suddenly and mysteriously ill, and that the illness was
probably the effect of the local _tapu_. However, these fancies
need not trouble the _pakeha_, whose constitution is not affected
by even the most virulent of Maori bedevilments.
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