Ma-ui had four brothers, and each of them was named Ma-ui. The doer of
the great deeds was known as “the skillful Ma-ui,” and the other four
brothers were called “the forgetful Ma-uis.”
But there was one brother who should not have been called “forgetful.”
He was the eldest brother, Ma-ui Mua, and he was sometimes called
Lu-pe. He may have been forgetful about many things that the skillful
Ma-ui took account of, but he was not forgetful of his sister, of
Hina-of-the-Sea.
His great and skillful brother had set Hina-of-the-Sea wandering. She
was married, and her husband often went on journeys with the skillful
Ma-ui. And once Ma-ui became angry with him because he ate the bait
that they had taken with them for fishing; he became angry with his
sister’s husband, and in his anger he uttered a spell over him, and
changed his form into the form of a dog.
When Hina-of-the-Sea knew that her husband was lost to her she went
down to the shore and she chanted her own death-song:
“I weep, I call upon the steep billows of the sea,
And on him, the great, the ocean god;
The monsters, all now hidden,
To come and bury me,
Who am now wrapped in mourning.
Let the waves wear their mourning, too,
And sleep as sleeps the dead.”
And after she had chanted this, she threw herself into the sea.
But the waves did not drown her. They carried her to a far land. There
were no people there; according to the ancient chant—
“The houses of Lima Loa stand,
But there are no people;
They are at Mana.”
The people were by the sea, and two who were fishermen found her. They
carried her to their hut, and when they had taken the sea-weed and the
sea-moss from her body they saw what a beautiful woman she was. They
brought her to their chief, and the chief took Hina-of-the-Sea for his
wife.
But after a while he became forgetful of her. After another while he
abused her. She had a child now, but she was very lonely, for she was
in a far and a strange land.
“The houses of Lima Loa stand,
But there are no people;
They are at Mana.”
She was not forgotten, for Ma-ui Mua, her eldest brother, thought of
her. In Kahiki-mo-e they tell of his search for her, and they say that
when he heard of her casting herself into the sea, he took to his canoe
and went searching all over the sea for her. He found new Islands,
Islands that no one had ever been on before, and he went from Island to
Island, ever hoping to find Hina-of-the-Sea. Far, far he went, and he
found neither his sister nor any one who knew about her.
“The houses of Lima Loa stand,
But there are no people;
They are at Mana.”
And every day Hina-of-the-Sea would go down to the shore of the land
she was on, and she would call on her eldest brother:
“O Lu-pe! Come over!
Take me and my child!”
Now one day, as Hina cried out on the beach, there came a canoe towards
her. There was a man in the canoe; but Hina, hardly noticing him, still
cried to the waves and the winds:
“O Lu-pe! Come over!
Take me and my child!”
The man came up on the beach. He was worn with much travel, and he was
white and old-looking. He heard the cry that was sent to the waves and
the winds, and he cried back an answer:
“It is Lu-pe, yes, Lu-pe,
The eldest brother;
And I am here.”
He knew Hina-of-the-Sea. He took her and her child in his canoe,
rejoicing that his long search was over at last and that he had a
sister again. He took her and her child to one of the Islands which he
had discovered.
And there Hina-of-the-Sea lived happily with her eldest brother, Ma-ui
Mua, and there her child grew up to manhood. The story of her eldest
brother’s search for Hina is not told in Hawaii nei, and one has to go
to Kahiki-mo-e to hear it. But in Hawaii nei they tell of a beautiful
land that Ma-ui the Skillful came to in search of some one. It is the
land, perhaps, that his brother and sister lived in—the beautiful land
that is called Moana-liha-i-ka-wao-ke-le.