Paikea

The canoe was new that morning. It had been felled from a tall tree, hollowed and smoothed and carved, painted red and hung with strings of feathers, and seventy young chiefs had had their hair combed and oiled and tied into topknots by their father’s own hands so they would look well on its first voyage. It went very fast over the waves. Far out, out of sight of land, one of the paddlers lifted his heel.

That is how the Māori Affairs magazine *Te Ao Hou* set the scene when it retold the story in 1962. There once lived in Hawaiki a chief called Uenuku, who had seventy-one sons. Seventy were chiefs, because their mothers were of noble birth. The seventy-first, Ruatapu, was the son of a slave wife, and on the day of the combing he asked his father whether his hair was to be done as well. Uenuku told him the combs were sacred and could not be used on a person of no importance. Ruatapu said he had thought he was his son. Uenuku agreed that he was, and that his mother was only a slave.

Ruatapu ate nothing that night. He went down to the canoe, cut a hole in its hull, packed it with wood chips and hid the bailer. When the brothers were far out he kept his heel over the plug, and when the land was gone he pushed the chips away. The water came in, the brothers shouted for the bailer, and there was no bailer. The canoe went down with all of them.

All of them but one. Ruatapu swam after the last brother and could not catch him, and called across the water to ask which of the two of them would carry the news back to land. The brother answered that he would, because he was descended from Tangaroa, the god of the sea, and Tangaroa would help him. Tangaroa heard, and sent a whale.

Ruatapu had one more weapon. He recited an incantation and sent five great waves rolling across the ocean after the brother on the whale. They arrived a moment too late. The whale reached the shore first, the waves struck the land and rebounded, and they rolled back over the open sea and drowned Ruatapu in his own magic.

The survivor’s name had been Kahutia-te-rangi. He came ashore as Paikea, and *paikea* is the word in te reo Māori for the humpback whale, the most abundant of the great whales in the waters of Aotearoa. The *Te Ao Hou* telling ends with a line that is really an address: the whale brought him to the East Coast of the North Island, his children’s children live there still, and the whale became an island you can go and see.

The tradition does not stop at one telling, and the others are worth having. In 1989 Hēni Sunderland of Gisborne, herself a descendant of Paikea, went to the island of Mauke in the Cook Islands, whose older name is Ahuahu, looking for his roots, and found that the elders there knew him well. In their account a hurricane struck Mauke and many people died, and Kahutia-te-rangi survived by clinging to debris that carried him across the sea to Mangaia. His wife watched from a clifftop as he was swept away and waited there for him until she died. Her grave is still marked and honoured. On Mauke his new name came not from a whale but from a crab, the *paikea*, known for holding on to wreckage through any storm. He lived on Mangaia for a time, and some of his descendants still live there. The New Zealand Geographic Board’s Māori oral history atlas, which records her journey, suggests that the whale of the New Zealand telling may remember a canoe called a *tohorā*, carved in the shape of a whale and named for one.

The Ngāti Porou account printed in John White’s *Ancient History of the Maori* fixes the season of his arrival by the gardens rather than the calendar: he came when the kūmara seedlings were ready, when the mounds were being heaped to receive them, and when the wind was blowing the perehia seeds out to sea.

He made his first landfall at Ahuahu, Great Mercury Island, where he heaped warm sand around himself against the cold, and married a woman of the people already living there, Ahumoa i Raka. He took a second wife at Whakatāne. At Waipahu he married Huturangi, daughter of the chief Whironui, built a pā for his father-in-law near Roto a Tahe, and then kept going south down the coast with Huturangi and her people.

At Koutū a Moa and Torouka the party stopped and looked back towards Whāngārā. Paikea began pointing. That is like Pākārae, he said, and that is like Waingutu, and that like Toka Kuku and Rangitoto and Pukehāpopo, and so on through the headlands and streams, fifteen names in that one speech, every one of them a place at his old home. It was exactly like the Whāngārā he had come from, he said, except that the place he now called Waimoko sat behind Pukehāpopo, when at home it lay near Ahi Rārāriki. So he named the whole place Te Whāngārā mai Tawhiti, Whāngārā from afar.

The homesickness in that speech is plain, and the precision of it is the remarkable part. A man who had lost every brother he had, and in one telling a wife as well, stood on a hill and furnished a new coast with his old one, name by name, and then noted the single stream that was in the wrong place.

At the southern end of the bay lies an island that looks, at first sight, like a large whale lying stranded. It is Te Ana o Paikea, the Cave of Paikea. He built his first house on its highest peak and called it Whitirēia after his former home, and the meeting house at Whāngārā carries the name today. When he died, his remains were placed in a cave on the island, which is why it is called what it is called, and why it is sacred.

Paikea had no powers of his own in any of the tellings. What saved him was descent. He could call on Tangaroa because Tangaroa was his ancestor, and the whale came because of who he was, not because of anything he could do. His limits were the ordinary ones of a man in the sea: he could not save his brothers, he could not undo the drowning, and the one thing the tradition gives him the strength to do is hold on, whether to a whale or to a piece of wreckage.

What he became was a beginning. Eight generations after Paikea were born two brothers, Porourangi and Tahupōtiki. Porourangi is the eponymous ancestor of the Ngāti Porou confederation of tribes. Tahupōtiki went south to Te Waipounamu and is the ancestor of Kāi Tahu. Kahungunu, founder of Ngāti Kahungunu, descends from Porourangi, and Mahinarangi, descended from Kahungunu, is an ancestor of the Tainui chiefly line. Witi Ihimaera’s 1987 novel *The Whale Rider*, set at Whāngārā, is a modern story built on this tradition. The ancestor himself belongs to the East Coast, and to the genealogies that begin with him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Paikea in Māori tradition?

Paikea is an ancestor of the East Coast of New Zealand’s North Island who, according to tradition, came from Hawaiki on the back of a whale. His earlier name was Kahutia-te-rangi. Ngāti Porou, Kāi Tahu and Ngāti Kahungunu all trace descent from him.

Why did Paikea ride a whale?

His half-brother Ruatapu, shamed by their father Uenuku for being the son of a slave wife, sank the canoe carrying Uenuku’s chiefly sons and drowned them all except Paikea. Paikea called on the sea god Tangaroa, his ancestor, and Tangaroa sent a whale that carried him to land. In the 1962 Te Ao Hou telling, the waves Ruatapu sent after him rebounded off the shore and drowned Ruatapu instead.

What does the name Paikea mean?

In te reo Māori, paikea is the humpback whale, and most tellings say Kahutia-te-rangi took the name from the whale that saved him. An account from the island of Mauke in the Cook Islands, gathered by Hēni Sunderland in 1989, gives a different origin: a crab called paikea that clings to wreckage through storms, as he did when a hurricane swept him to Mangaia.

Where did Paikea land in New Zealand?

Tradition gives his first landfall as Ahuahu, Great Mercury Island. He travelled on by way of Whakatāne and Waipahu and settled at Whāngārā, north of Gisborne, which he named Te Whāngārā mai Tawhiti after his homeland.

What is Te Ana o Paikea?

Te Ana o Paikea, the Cave of Paikea, is the island at the southern end of the bay at Whāngārā, which looks like a stranded whale. Paikea built his first house, Whitirēia, on its highest peak, and his remains were placed in a cave there, which makes the island sacred.

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