Māui

The tide took a knot of hair with something alive inside it. Taranga had given birth too soon, and rather than bury the scrap of a child she wrapped him in the topknot cut from her own head and gave him to the sea. Kelp and jellyfish closed over the bundle. The waves worked it the way water works driftwood, smoothing and turning, and when an old sky-ancestor found the thing snarled on the beach beneath a churn of flies and gulls, it had become a breathing boy. He carried his beginning in his name ever after: Māui-tikitiki-a-Taranga, Māui formed in the topknot of Taranga.

He came back to his mother as a stranger. She counted her sons in the firelight one evening, the four she had raised, and found a fifth boy sitting among them who answered to no tally she knew. When she understood how he had been born she took him in, the last and smallest, Māui-pōtiki, the afterthought. He was quicker than his brothers and less patient with the way the world had been arranged, and he had powers they did not. He could put on the body of a wood-pigeon or a hawk and shed it again, and he could pull more from a thing than it seemed to hold.

No teller troubles much with his face. He is young, slight beside his elders, remembered less for how he looked than for what he could do and what he could become. The clearest pictures of him are borrowed shapes: the pigeon he flew as, the hawk, and at the very end the small pale worm. What every account agrees on is the strength folded into that unremarkable frame, enough to drag the sun to a halt and to haul a country out of the deep.

In the first days the sun bolted across the sky and the light was gone before any work was done. Māui had his brothers plait thick ropes of flax, and together they went east to the pit where the sun slept and laid their snare across its mouth. When Tama-nui-te-rā rose he was caught. Māui beat him with the weapon he prized above all others, the jawbone of his ancestress Murirangawhenua, until the sun, bruised and worn out, agreed to cross the sky slowly. The days have been long enough to live in ever since.

That same jawbone became a fishhook, and with it he did the thing his name is fixed to. His brothers were tired of him and would not take him fishing, so he hid in the bilge of their canoe and waited until the shore was a thin line behind them before he showed himself. They refused him bait. He struck his own nose until it bled, smeared the hook, and let it down. What took the hook was no fish. He hauled with everything in him, the line singing tight, the canoe tipping, and a great dark mass came up streaming out of the water, hills and ridges rising into the air. This was Te Ika-a-Māui, the fish of Māui, the North Island of New Zealand, and the canoe he sat in became the South.

He told them to wait. The catch was sacred and needed the right words said over it before anyone touched it, so he left to fetch a priest. The brothers did not wait. They fell on the fish with their blades while it was still writhing, cutting out pieces for themselves, and the land bucked and heaved under the knives. Where it should have been a smooth plain it set hard into mountains and gorges and broken coast. The rough country of the island is the shape of that impatience.

Fire he took by wearing his hosts down. When the cooking fires of the village went dead he climbed to the burning mountain where the fire-keeper Mahuika lived and asked for a flame. She drew one of her fingernails, each of which held fire, and handed it to him. He put it out and came back for another, and another, quenching each gift until her nails were nearly spent and her patience with them. She hurled her last nail at him in fury and the whole world seemed to catch. He fled as a hawk with the blaze at his heels, and where the fire fell into the kaikōmako and the māhoe trees it stayed, sleeping in the dry wood. That is why fire can still be coaxed out of those branches by rubbing, and why people have had it ever since.

His last theft was the one he could not carry off. He meant to win humankind immortality by turning birth backward, and for that he went to Hine-nui-te-pō, the vast goddess in whom the dead are gathered, asleep with obsidian teeth set between her thighs. Māui told the little birds who came with him to keep silent. He shrank to a worm and began to crawl up into her, meaning to pass through her body and out of her mouth and so undo death itself. The fantail could not hold it in. It laughed, a small bright chatter, and the goddess woke. She closed her thighs, and the volcanic-glass teeth cut him in two.

Everything he had won came from one place: a refusal to accept the given size of things. He could grow strong past any measure of his body, take other shapes at will, and force the sun, the sea, and the fire-keeper to give up what they held. His weakness sat in the same spot as his gift. He could not stop at enough. The land came up scarred because he trusted brothers who could not wait, and death stayed in the world because a bird laughed at the wrong moment and he had reached, one last time, past what even he could take. He was the first thing that ever died.

The Māori tell it most fully, but he is not theirs alone. From Hawaiʻi to Tahiti to Tonga the same figure hauls islands up on a hook, ropes the sun still above a mountain, and carries fire back to people who did not have it. The names of the trees and the peaks change from one archipelago to the next. The shape of him does not: the youngest, the smallest, the one who could not leave the world the way he found it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Māui in Polynesian mythology?

Māui is a demigod trickster and culture hero found across Polynesia, including Māori, Hawaiian, Tahitian, and Samoan tradition. He is famous for winning gifts for humankind, fishing up islands, slowing the sun, and bringing fire, using superhuman strength and the ability to change his shape.

How did Māui fish up New Zealand?

Māui stowed away in his brothers’ canoe, and once far from shore he baited a hook made from an ancestress’s jawbone with blood from his own nose. He hauled up a giant fish that became the North Island of New Zealand, called Te Ika-a-Māui, while the canoe he fished from became the South Island. When his brothers cut into the fish before it had been blessed, its thrashing formed the island’s mountains and valleys.

How did Māui die?

Māui died trying to win immortality for humankind by passing through the body of Hine-nui-te-pō, the goddess of death, while she slept. A fantail laughed at the sight and woke her, and she crushed him with the obsidian teeth set between her thighs. Because he failed, human beings remained mortal, and Māui became the first to die.

How did Māui bring fire to people?

Māui obtained fire from Mahuika, the fire-keeper, by repeatedly asking for her burning fingernails and putting them out until she grew angry. When she hurled her last nail at him, the fire lodged in the kaikōmako and māhoe trees. People have since made fire by rubbing sticks from those trees together.

Why did Māui slow down the sun?

Māui slowed the sun because it raced across the sky, leaving too little daylight for work and food. With his brothers he snared the sun, Tama-nui-te-rā, in ropes of flax and beat it with a magical jawbone until it agreed to travel slowly, giving people longer days.

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