Maui fishing up islands

At a Glance

• Central figures: Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga, the youngest of five brothers, trickster and demigod; his brothers Maui-taha, Maui-roto, Maui-pae, and Maui-waho; and their ancestress Murirangawhenua, whose jawbone became the enchanted fishhook.
• Setting: Pan-Polynesian tradition - the story of Maui fishing up land is shared across Polynesia with regional variations. This telling draws principally from the Maori tradition of Aotearoa, where the land Maui pulls from the sea is Te Ika-a-Maui, the North Island of New Zealand.
• The turn: Maui hides in the bilge of his brothers’ canoe, and when they refuse to give him bait, he strikes his own nose and bloods the hook, then casts the enchanted jawbone into the deep.
• The outcome: Maui hauls up a great fish from the ocean floor - a fish that is land, Te Ika-a-Maui. But while Maui goes to make offerings to the gods, his brothers hack at the fish, and its thrashing body becomes the jagged mountains, valleys, and harbors of the North Island.
• The legacy: The North Island of New Zealand is still called Te Ika-a-Maui - the Fish of Maui. The South Island is Te Waka-a-Maui - the Canoe of Maui. The shape of the land itself is the record of the story.

Maui’s brothers did not want him in the canoe. They had said so the night before and the night before that. He was the youngest, the runt, the one their mother Taranga had cut from her hair and wrapped in a knot of seaweed and thrown into the surf when he was born too early to live. He had lived anyway. The ocean raised him. Tama-nui-ki-te-rangi found him tangled in kelp and took him in, and Maui grew up asking questions that made people uneasy and doing things that had not been done before.

His brothers were fishermen. Good ones. They went out past the reef in their canoe and came back with enough fish to feed the village. Maui wanted to go. They said no.

The Bilge

Maui waited until dark. The canoe sat on the sand with its hull turned to the stars, and he crawled underneath and pressed himself into the bilge where the water pooled and the wood stank of old bait. He curled small. He had always been good at fitting into spaces that were not meant for him.

Before dawn his brothers dragged the canoe to the water. They did not check underneath. They paddled out - Maui-taha on the left, Maui-roto and Maui-pae on the right, Maui-waho at the stern calling the stroke. The canoe cut through the swell and the brothers sang a fishing chant, voices rising and falling with the paddle rhythm. They went far. Past the reef, past the place where the water changed color, past the currents they knew. When they were deep into open ocean and the fishing was good, Maui unfolded himself from the bilge and sat up.

They shouted. They swore at him. They told him to lie down, to stop rocking the boat, to be quiet. Maui grinned and said nothing and watched them fish. When the canoe was heavy with the catch and his brothers wanted to turn back, Maui asked them to go farther.

They refused.

Maui pulled the jawbone from under his belt. It was the jawbone of his ancestress Murirangawhenua. She had given it to him - or he had taken it; the stories differ on this point, and Maui was not the kind of person who clarified. The bone was old and smooth, curved like a fishhook, and it held mana that went back to the beginning of the world.

The Blood and the Hook

His brothers would not give him bait. So Maui struck himself in the face - hard, with his fist - and his nose bled. He smeared the blood on the jawbone hook and tied it to a line of plaited flax. He chanted a karakia, a fishing incantation, the words coming fast and low, and he cast the hook over the side of the canoe.

The line ran out. It ran and ran. The hook sank past the fish his brothers caught, past the depth where light stopped, past the cold layers where only blind things moved. It struck the ocean floor and caught.

Maui pulled. The line went taut as stone. The canoe tipped. His brothers grabbed the sides and screamed at him to cut the line. Maui planted his feet against the gunwale and hauled. His arms shook. His back bent like a green branch. The ocean resisted. Something enormous was moving below, something that did not want to come up.

He chanted. He pulled. Sweat ran into the blood on his face and the blood dripped onto the flax line and the line hummed like a bowstring. His brothers, terrified and unable to do anything else, began to paddle, keeping the canoe from capsizing.

The sea bulged. A dark shape rose beneath the surface - too large to be a fish, too solid to be a wave. Water poured off its back in white sheets. The thing broke the surface.

Te Ika-a-Maui

It was land. A great fish made of earth and rock and forest, streaming seawater, steaming in the air. Its spine was a mountain ridge. Its fins were headlands. Its eye was a lake. The fish lay on the surface of the ocean, still alive, still breathing, its flanks heaving.

Maui told his brothers not to touch it. He said he had to go and make the proper offerings to the gods - to Tangaroa of the sea, whose domain he had just torn open, and to the other atua whose permissions were needed before anyone could set foot on new land. He said: do not cut the fish. Wait.

He left. He went to perform the rites.

His brothers did not wait.

The Cutting

They were hungry. They were scared. They were angry at Maui for always doing things like this - pulling impossible things out of the ocean, changing the shape of the world without asking. And the fish was right there, enormous, and they had knives.

They began to cut. They hacked at the flesh of the fish, each brother claiming a portion, fighting over the best parts. The fish was not dead. It thrashed. It twisted under their blades. Its body buckled and split. Where the knives cut, the land cracked into valleys. Where the fish arched its back in pain, mountains pushed up. Where it slammed its tail, harbors opened. The surface that might have been smooth and flat and easy to walk on became the broken, ridged, steep-sided landscape of the North Island - gorges, cliffs, the jagged peaks of the Tararua and the Kaimanawa ranges, the deep harbors of the coast.

By the time Maui came back, the damage was done. The fish had stopped moving. It had become land - but land scarred by greed and impatience, cut into shapes that made travel hard and farming harder.

The Shape of the Land

Maui did not say much about it. The stories do not record a speech or a punishment. The land was what it was. The brothers’ canoe became the South Island - Te Waka-a-Maui - long and narrow, its prow pointing south. Stewart Island, small and round at the bottom, became Te Punga-a-Maui, the anchor stone. And the North Island kept its name: Te Ika-a-Maui, the Fish of Maui.

The fish’s head lies at the bottom, in Wellington, where the harbor is the mouth. The tail is at the top, in Northland. Anyone who looks at a map can see it - the fish shape, the broad body, the tapering tail. The mountains along the spine are where the brothers cut deepest.

Maui went on to other things. He slowed the sun. He stole fire from Mahuika. He tried to defeat death and failed. But the fish stayed where he left it, and people came and lived on its back, and they remembered whose hook had pulled it up.