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.”