The Greenstone Canoe.

Mt. Rolleston, the grand icy peak dominating the Otira region, is Te Tara-a-Tama-ahua. Tara means a mountain peak; Tama-ahua is referred to presently.

Many years ago, down on the West Coast, the Arahura Maoris—only a handful of them survived—told me some curious ancient legends concerning the pounamu or greenstone, and its discovery by their ancestors. They said that some miles up the Arahura River, if I cared to explore that far, I would be able to see the Ika-a-Poutini, which was a canoe turned into greenstone. “If you stoop down by the river's side at a certain place,” said Meihana, “and dip your head until your eyes are beneath the surface of the water, you may see the canoe of pounamu, stretching across the riverbed, with three knobs upstanding, like erect human figures. The crew are seated in their places, with their paddles in their hands.”

I never had an opportunity of testing for myself the authenticity of this bit of geological folk-lore, but I learned from one of the pioneer surveyors that there was undoubtedly a ledge of greenstone stretching across the Arahura River near a waterfall, and that it was from this ledge that the blocks and fragments of pounamu frequently found further down the river had come, broken off in times of heavy flood by the rolling boulders.

In another local legend, which links up with the Ika-a-Poutini tale, the Maoris explain that the three figures upstanding, silent petrified forms, in this canoe, were the three wives of the long-ago sailor explorer Tama-ahua; their names were Hine-Kawakawa, Hine-Aotea, and Hine-Kahurangi. (The names symbolise three of the varieties of green-stone.) They had been transformed into pounamu by the gods in punishment of Tama for slaying his slave, Tuhua. This is a story in itself, the legend of how the servant committed a breach of the tapu custom when engaged in cooking birds for his chief. He licked his fingers, a serious infringement of tapu, under the circumstances, and Tama, observing this, was so angry that he killed Tuhua with his stone club. For this the gods punished Tama by causing the land to swell up suddenly under his feet and form a mountain, and by petrifying his three wives in the canoe below. The mountain is called Tuhua to this day; it is yonder height overlooking Lake Kanieri. From the top of the magic hill Tama descended to the river, but only to find his canoe and his wives all fixed for ever in stony death. And there is the canoe to-day, or some of it, if you can contrive to find the spot, close to the waterfall in the Arahura's course.

No doubt some exploring canoe of long ago came to grief in the rapid Arahura, and that fact and the pounamu found there formed sufficient groundwork for the imaginative Maori legend-makers.

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