page 69

Chapter XII. The Origin of the Maori Games.

The ceaseless hiss and clack of the cicada in the taraire trees livened all the forest edge that breathless midsummer day. There was bird-song, too, the frequent chuckle, the rich dropping notes of the tui, which the Northern Maori interprets as pa-re-ro; and the riroriro, the little grey warbler, trilled his melody, “half joy and half regret,” that seemed to stop half-finished. The teeming cicada, clinging to the sun-bathed branches, filled the whole air with a long-persisting soporific sound; it breathed the very spirit of grateful heat and blissful contentment. The inner deeps of the bush were more silent; it was on the taraire fringing that the little tarakihi basked, with endless wing vibrations.

“Listen to that bird, the tarakihi,” said Te Wheoro (the Maori always regards the cicada as a manu). “Listen to Raukatauri, how she sings. How she loves the sun! That is the spirit of Raukatauri, who taught our people all their games and their most amusing hakas long ago in Hawaiki. That is her aria [personification, embodiment], the chanting tarakihi.”

And talk of Raukatauri led to the story of the origin of the Maori games; and I remembered also hearing the tale of the co-goddesses of amusements in the whare-tapere from the old people at Waikaremoana. In the forests around that mountain lake the asplenium flaccidum, which hangs in graceful festoons from the mossy old tree branches, is called nga makawe a Raukatauri raua ko Hine-raukatamea, likening the trailing fern to the flowing hair of the two Hawaikian dancers and game-inventors of long ago. The tale links up the Maori of to-day with the ancient Polynesian in the wonder-story of Tinirau, of Holy Isle, and Kae, the magician, who feloniously compassed the death of Tinirau’s pet whale and thereby came to a painful end, and the clever sisters, whose special talent was the making of amusements and sport.

* * *

Far back in the Hawaikian days, when our Maori lived in the tropic South Seas, there was a man named Kae-niho-whati (“Kae of the Broken Teeth”)—he is also called Kau in some traditions—who borrowed the chief Tinirau’s pet whale Tutunui upon which to return to his own island from Tinirau’s home on Motu-tapu, the Sacred Island. The ungrateful Kae caused the whale’s death by urging it into the shallows, where it stranded, and he and his people cut it up and ate it. Tinirau waited long and anxiously for his pet whale, but it did not return, and at last he came to the conclusion that Kae must have slain it. He sent off a canoe, whose crew page 70 consisted only of women. They were led by his daughters (some accounts say sisters), Raukatauri and Hine-Raukatamea. They did not know Kae, but they were told they could identify him by his broken and uneven teeth. They must discover Kae the whale-killer and bring him to Motu-tapu for punishment, as utu for the slain Tutunui.

The party of clever women reached Kae’s home, and that evening, in the big talk-house, they put forth all their efforts to entertain their host and make the people laugh, in order to discover the broken-toothed stealer of whales. There was one chief who resolutely kept his mouth shut and declined to laugh, even at the ladies’ most energetic dances and liveliest songs. Their suspicion fastened on him, and they determined to make him display his teeth. So to put his identity beyond doubt the chieftainess Raukatauri set to to arouse the wanted man’s amusement. All imaginable kinds of games she and her companions played, but Kae’s mouth remained grimly shut.

The women played game after game taught by the two chieftainesses—the games of whai, cunningly worked with strings—the pakuru, a thin resonant stick held between the teeth and tapped with another stick—titi-torea (titi-to-ure), played with sticks thrown from one to the other, and all sorts of dances. One account (the Arawa version) says that the most amusing game of all was the whai-mouti, in which two figures bow and approach their forms one to the other, a game dexterously worked with string. But it really was the dances, the voluptuous dances, that most captured Kae’s fancy. Raukatauri and her party excelled themselves in one of these vigorous haka or seductive kanikani, and the pleased chief laughed outright with delight.

“Ha!” said the women of Tinirau’s isle, “see the broken teeth!” That established the guilt of Tutunui’s slayer. Kae and his family were mesmerised straightway with magic spells (rotu), and while in this condition he was taken to the beach and carried off in the canoe to Motu-tapu. There he was execrated, executed and eaten. And the whai-mouti remains to this day to tickle the Maori sense of the ridiculous and the Maori and their South Sea cousins have ever delighted in the energetic haka and the swaying, undulating body motions of the old, old danse du ventre that so pleased Kae to his undoing.

* * *

History repeats itself, world without end. It was much the same kind of ruse that Captain Kendall, of the Atlantic liner Montrose, adopted when he wished to satisfy himself of the identity of the murderer Crippen some years ago. He told his suspicious passenger a funny story in order to make him laugh and show his teeth. By those teeth, false ones with page 71 peculiarities of which the sailor-detective had been informed, the fugitive was identified; and, like Kae, he was taken back to meet capital punishment. A ruse as old as man himself.

Raukatauri and her sister, who created diversion for the long nights in the village meeting-hall and for the entertainment of visitors, certainly must not be forgotten; the whare-tapere owes much to them. But they are not likely to pass out of memory so long as the cheery cicada remains to make lively the summer days with its tireless stridulated harmony.

* * *

Many South Sea Islands have been named as the likely habitats of Tinirau and Kae. It seems most probable that Upolu, in Samoa, was Tinirau’s home, and that Kae lived on Savaii. The period was probably about fifteen hundred years ago. Some accounts say that Tinirau had an enchanted islet, which could move about from place to place.

Tinirau, according to the legends of Rarotonga and Mangaia Islands, lived on the islet of Motu-tapu, and also at Rangiriri; both these places are at Rarotonga. Tinirau was the lord of the ocean creatures, and at his call (according to the Rev. Wyatt Gill, the great folk-lorist of the Cook Islands), “the entire throng of his obedient subjects assembled on the moving Sacred Isle, and changing their forms into a partial resemblance to human beings, came dancing to meet their lord, who being himself in his true attributes half-man and half-fish, gladly united with them in their dance. The subjects, like the sovereign, were all arrayed in necklaces of sweet-scented pandanus (ara) seeds, which grow plentifully over the native home of Tinirau. The Sacred Isle, King, finny subjects and all, started off and were speedily lost to sight in the distant ocean.” Tinirau and his son Koro often enjoyed the pleasure of a dance with the fish of the sea on the enchanted isle.

* * *

Several of New Zealand’s islands were called by the Maori explorers Motu-tapu, after the tapu isles of Polynesia; there was a Motu-tapu in every group. The beautiful island of Mokoia, in Rotorua, was anciently called Te Motu-tapu-a-Tinirau, and the classic name is used to-day as a honorific term for this green mountain-isle, the centre of the sacred lore and the abiding-place of the tapu stone atua-images of the Arawa people.

page break page break