Manaiakalani

Kūaliʻi’s chanters had the hook by heart long before anyone in Hawaiʻi wrote anything down. The chant sung for that Oʻahu chief around the year 1700 names the thing plainly and in order: the great fish hook of Māui, an earth-twisted cord tying it, its bait the red-billed ʻalae, the bird made sacred to Hina. Then it names the failure. Hina caught a wing, the land under the water broke, and the fishes below snatched the bait away and ate it at once. The oldest surviving mention of Manaiakalani is already an account of a job half done.

Nobody agrees on what the name means. William Westervelt read it as Made fast to the heavens. Martha Beckwith and the astronomer Maud Makemson both read it as Come-from-heaven. Rubellite Kawena Johnson and John Kaipo Mahelona give The Chief’s Fishline. All three readings pull the same way, upward rather than down, which is an odd property in a piece of fishing tackle and the first clue that this is not one.

The old hooks were made of bone, and the barb was the part that mattered. Westervelt records that fishermen took the sharp piece from the body of someone who had been noted in life for great power or high rank, then lashed it at a backward angle to the shank so that a fish could not shake it loose. Māui’s barb came from further off than any graveyard. It was cut from the magic bone he had taken from his ancestors in the underworld, the same bone he used to beat the sun into slowing down over Haleakalā. The lashing was described as earth-twisted, meaning vine fibre twisted while it was still growing, still green in the hand. The line was olonā, the longest and strongest thread the islands produced, and it had to be kept taut, because a hook of that pattern casts itself loose the moment the pull slackens.

The fishing ground is a real place and can still be lined up from the shore. Beckwith’s East Maui informants called it Poʻo, straight out to sea from Kīpahulu and held on a bearing with the low red hill of Ka Iwi o Pele. Māui’s brothers had stopped taking him fishing by then. He cheated at it, sliding his hook toward the head of whatever they had landed and flipping it into the canoe while their lines went slack, then commiserating with them about the one that got away. When they finally let him aboard again he baited the hook with one of Hina’s sacred mud hens and spoke over it, and the bottom of the sea began to move.

They pulled for two days. The canoe was dragged out until the line ran to its full length, and then the weight tired and the slack began to come in, and something black and streaming started to rise behind them out of the surf. Māui told his brothers not to look back. One of them looked back. The line slackened, snapped, and the land lay behind them in pieces. Beckwith’s version puts it without ornament: that is why the islands are not united into one.

The other islands tell it with different fish. At Waiʻanae on Oʻahu the quarry is Unihokahi, One-Tooth, and the canoe passes a bailer floating on the water which turns into a beautiful woman; she goes down with the hook and asks Unihokahi to open his mouth, since she and Māui have been arguing about how many teeth he has, and the hook takes him as he obliges. On Kauaʻi the fish is Luehu and the catch will only work on the night of Lono, and nine mud hens are posted to warn him, so Māui leaves a carved image of himself standing where he ought to be and takes the youngest bird from behind. In the Kumulipo the fish is Pimoe, a kupua and lord of the island that shakes the ocean, and there Māui wins: he pulls Pimoe ashore dead and eats all of him but the tail, and Pimoe goes on living through the tail.

Hina is the reason the archipelago is a scatter. She saw her bird struggling on the hook and came for it, got hold of a wing and could not free the rest, and the wing tore off. The fish gathered and finished the bait. Had the bait held whole, Westervelt writes, the land would have come up as a continent instead of an island chain. The world is the shape it is because a mother would not let a bird die quietly.

Manaiakalani does not belong only to Māui. In the fishing-god cycle set down in Hawaiian by Moke Manu and translated by Emma Nakuina, the hook is the property of ʻAiʻai, son of Kūʻula-kai. When ʻAiʻai left his birthplace at Aleamai to go and establish the fishing stations of the islands, he took the hook manaiaakalani and the aku pearl Kahuoi out of the little cave where he had been sleeping on the hill of Kaiwiopele. That is the same hill the Maui fishermen used to fix Poʻo from the shore. The sources do not remark on it.

It is also in the sky. Westervelt found the Cook Islanders saying that the hook was thrown up among the stars and hangs there as the curved tail of Scorpio, and the Hawaiian reading is the same stars: Ka Makau Nui o Māui, the Big Fishhook of Māui, with the red Lehuakona on the shank and Ka Maka at the barb, the point of the hook buried in a dark lane of the Milky Way that Hawaiians call Ka Iʻa, the Fish. It rises out of the southeast shank first and appears to tow the fish across the whole sky behind it. The arrangement of the sky into four named star lines, of which this is the third, is not ancient and has an author: Nainoa Thompson built it for the Hōkūleʻa navigators as a memory system, quartering the celestial sphere so that a bailer is followed by a backbone, a backbone by a fishhook, a fishhook by a kite. The star names are old. The scaffolding is his, and the Polynesian Voyaging Society says so.

There was also an actual hook. A record from the time of the Hawaiʻi island chief ʻUmi describes an immense bone fish-hook called Manai-a-ka-lani, and what it was for: on the last night of the month a priest and his servants took a man, killed him, lashed the body to the hook, dragged it to the heiau as a fish and laid it on the altar. The thing survived into Kamehameha’s reign. He tried to break it more than once, pulling until he sweated, and could not. Peʻapeʻa, a brother of Kaʻahumanu, took it and snapped it, then went in fear of his life until Kaʻahumanu talked the king round. The broken bone was probably thrown away. Peʻapeʻa is also the name of the eight-eyed bat god whose head Māui cut off to get his wife back. The record does not explain itself.

What the hook can do is not in dispute in any telling. It catches land. It grapples islands together out of the ocean. It takes the great shapeshifting fish that ordinary tackle cannot hold, and it does this on a line and a barb, without any charm beyond the incantation spoken over it and the bird on the point. Its limits are just as consistent, and they are not limits of the hook. Manaiakalani needs a bait that is somebody’s sacred animal, which guarantees an interested party will come for it. It needs a line that will not part, and the line is the one component nobody made out of anything supernatural. Above all it needs other people to keep pulling and keep facing forward, and every version of the story turns on the fact that they do not.

Every account agrees that it worked. Not one of them ends with the islands joined.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Manaiakalani?

Manaiakalani is the great fishhook of the demigod Māui in Hawaiian tradition, used to hook the sea floor and haul the Hawaiian islands up out of the ocean. Its barb was cut from a magic bone Māui brought up from the underworld and it was lashed with vine fibre twisted while still growing. The name is also carried by the fishhook of the fishing god’s son ʻAiʻai and by a Hawaiian star line.

What was Manaiakalani baited with?

The bait was an ʻalae, the Hawaiian mud hen, a bird sacred to Māui’s mother Hina. In the chant sung for Kūaliʻi it is the red-billed ʻalae specifically, and in the Kumulipo it is called the bird sister of the great fish Pimoe. Hina saw the bird struggling on the hook and tried to pull it free, tearing off a wing.

Why did Māui fail to join the Hawaiian islands together?

The line broke. Māui told his brothers to keep paddling and not to look behind them while the land was rising, and one of them looked back, at which the line slackened and snapped and the risen land fell apart into separate islands. In the Kauaʻi telling the distraction is a beautiful woman who appears in the canoe, and the crowd’s cheering makes the brothers turn.

Is Manaiakalani a real constellation?

The stars are real and the name is used for them, but the modern arrangement has a known author. Hawaiians identify the hook with the curve of Scorpius, called Ka Makau Nui o Māui, with the red star Lehuakona on the shank and the point set in a dark patch of the Milky Way. Grouping the sky into four star lines, with Manaiakalani as the third, was devised by the navigator Nainoa Thompson as a memory aid for the crew of the Hōkūleʻa.

Who else owned Manaiakalani besides Māui?

In the legend of Kūʻula, the Hawaiian fishing god, the hook belongs to his son ʻAiʻai, who carried it away from his birthplace at Aleamai along with an aku fishing pearl called Kahuoi and used it while founding fishing stations around the islands. Separately, a large bone hook bearing the name was held by Hawaiian chiefs into the eighteenth century, and it was used in temple sacrifice rather than for fishing.

Related Entries

Māui, Kupua, Kamapuaʻa, Kawelo (Kaweloleimakua), Kaupe, Kāne, Kū, Lono, Kanaloa, Pele, Halemaʻumaʻu, Moʻo, Hawaiki, Tangaroa, Cauldron of the Dagda (Coire Ansic)