Hinemoa

The lake is black at night, and wide. From the shore at Ōwhata the island of Mokoia is a low shape on the water, more than three kilometres off, and on a still evening a sound came across that distance that one young woman could not stop listening to. Somebody on the island was playing music. She knew who it was.

Hinemoa was the daughter of Umukaria and Hinemaru, a family of high rank among the Te Arawa people of Rotorua. She was so valued at home that her people declared her a puhi, a sacred maiden, and would not promise her to any of the chiefs who came asking. Her beauty was talked about all round the lake. That kind of fame brings suitors, and it brought a whole family of brothers from Mokoia.

The island belonged to Whakaue, and his household had a complication in it. His wife Rangiuru had once gone off with the visiting chief Tūwharetoa, and when Whakaue took her back she was carrying a child. That son was Tūtānekai. Whakaue raised him alongside his own elder sons and treated him as one of them, but the brothers never forgot whose blood he had. In George Grey’s 1855 version of the story, they let him know it.

The two young people had seen each other at the great gatherings of the Rotorua people, and each had come away thinking about the other, and neither was sure. Tūtānekai sent a go-between to tell her how he felt. The answer that came back was that she felt the same. Then, one evening in the meeting house on Mokoia, the elder brothers fell to arguing about which of them Hinemoa liked best. Each claimed some small sign. Tūtānekai said she had pressed his hand in answer to his, and the brothers laughed at the idea that a woman like her would look twice at a boy like him. He asked his father to remember what he had said.

He had already made a plan with her. Every night he would play from a raised platform on the hillside above his village, and when she heard the music she was to take a canoe and come. His friend Tiki played with him. In Grey’s telling, Tūtānekai had a horn and Tiki a pipe. In the Te Arawa tradition kept at Rotorua Museum, the instrument was a bone flute named Murirangaranga. Its history is grim. The priest of that name had botched the birth rite for the infant Tūtānekai, and Whakaue had him drowned and made the flute from his arm bone. Whichever instrument it was, the sound carried on the night wind to Ōwhata, and Hinemoa heard it.

Her people had guessed. Each night they dragged the canoes up the beach, well above the water, so that nothing was left afloat. For a while she simply sat on the shore and listened, with no way across.

Then she stopped waiting for a canoe. She took six empty gourds, dry and sealed, and lashed three to each side of her body as floats. She went down to the rock called Iri-iri-kapua, then to the edge of the water at Wairerewai, took off her clothes and walked into the lake. It was a long way and it was dark. Halfway across, her hands found a sunken tree stump called Hinewhata, and she held on to it until she had breath again. When her arms gave out she lay back on the gourds and drifted. When she could swim, she swam. She had no landmark in the black water except the music, so she steered by that.

It brought her to the island near Waikimihia, a hot spring separated from the lake by a thin ridge of rock. She climbed into it shaking. The cold had got into her, and so, perhaps, had the thought of what she had just done and who she was about to see. She stayed in the warm water and did not go up to the village.

Up in the village Tūtānekai was thirsty, and sent a servant down for water. In the dark the man heard a gruff voice from the hot pool asking for a drink. He handed over the gourd. The stranger drank and smashed it on the rocks. The servant went back for another and the same thing happened. When he reported to Tūtānekai that some man in the bath had broken his master’s gourds, Tūtānekai picked up his club and went down to deal with it.

He felt along the edge of the spring. Hinemoa, half hiding under a ledge and half wanting to be found, let him come close, and when he caught hold of her hand and demanded a name, she gave him hers. He took her up to his house. By the custom of the time, that night made them husband and wife.

The morning is the part people laugh at. The village was up and eating and Tūtānekai had not appeared, so Whakaue sent someone to wake him. The man looked in through the window, counted four feet, and went back confused. He looked again, saw who the other two belonged to, and shouted it to the whole settlement. The elder brothers flatly refused to believe it. Then Tūtānekai walked out with Hinemoa behind him, and they had to. Tiki went home miserable, having no wife of his own, until Tūtānekai asked Whakaue to give Tiki his sister Tupa, and Whakaue did.

The story did not stay a private romance. According to the museum account, the marriage joined two communities who had been rivals and brought peace around the lake, and Hinemoa’s father Umukaria later came across to Mokoia and accepted the match. The couple stayed on the island and had children, and Te Arawa genealogies run through them to people living in Rotorua today, about twelve generations on. The bone flute went down the generations too, was carried off to Auckland Museum in 1890, and came home to Rotorua in 1993.

The story was first written down by the Te Arawa scholar Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikāheke around 1849, and Grey worked that text together with what he heard from people on Mokoia when he published it in English. It is genealogy as much as legend. The ancestors in it are counted, named and descended from.

Her strength in the story is plain physical nerve: a long night swim in cold water, alone, with nothing to guide her but a tune. Her weakness is the same body that carried her. She could swim only so long before the gourds had to hold her up, and she came out of the lake too frozen to do anything but sit in a hot pool and wait to be found.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Hinemoa?

Hinemoa was a high-ranking young woman of Ōwhata on Lake Rotorua, daughter of Umukaria and Hinemaru and an ancestress of the Te Arawa people of New Zealand. She is famous for swimming across the lake at night to Mokoia Island to marry Tūtānekai.

How did Hinemoa swim across Lake Rotorua?

Hinemoa tied six dry, empty gourds to her body as floats, three on each side, because her people had pulled all the canoes ashore. She rested on a sunken stump called Hinewhata partway across and steered in the dark by the sound of Tūtānekai’s music.

What happened when Hinemoa reached Mokoia Island?

Hinemoa warmed herself in the Waikimihia hot spring and, disguising her voice, broke the water gourds of a servant Tūtānekai sent down to the lake. Tūtānekai came to find out who was breaking his gourds, discovered Hinemoa, and took her home as his wife.

Were Hinemoa and Tūtānekai real people?

Hinemoa and Tūtānekai are named ancestors in Te Arawa genealogy, and families in the Rotorua region trace their descent from them. Their children are recorded by name, and the bone flute linked to Tūtānekai is held by the people of Rotorua.

Who first wrote down the story of Hinemoa?

The story of Hinemoa was first written down by the Te Arawa scholar Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikāheke around 1849. George Grey combined his text with accounts from people on Mokoia Island and published it in English in 1855.

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