The island born from a hook

At a Glance

• Central figures: Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga, the trickster demigod and youngest of five brothers; his brothers Maui-taha, Maui-roto, Maui-pae, and Maui-waho; and their ancestress Murirangawhenua, whose enchanted jawbone became the fishhook.
• Setting: Pan-Polynesian tradition, with this telling drawn principally from the Maori version preserved in oral whakapapa; the fishing takes place on the open ocean, and the catch becomes Te Ika-a-Maui - the North Island of Aotearoa.
• The turn: Maui, hidden beneath the floorboards of his brothers’ canoe, baits a hook with his own blood and casts it into deep water, snagging something far larger than any fish.
• The outcome: Maui hauls up a vast stingray from the ocean floor - an island, rough and ridged with mountains. His brothers, unable to wait, begin hacking at it before the proper rites are performed, and its surface buckles into the broken ranges and valleys that remain today.
• The legacy: The North Island of Aotearoa is still called Te Ika-a-Maui - the Fish of Maui - and its shape on the map preserves the outline of the great stingray, head to the south, tail to the north.

His brothers would not take him fishing. They said he was too young, too small, too strange - born before his time and thrown into the sea by his mother Taranga, wrapped in a knot of her hair. They said he had no business on the canoe. But Maui had been watching the catch come back short for weeks. The fish were thin. The nets came up half-empty. He decided he was going whether they wanted him or not.

The night before they launched, he crept down to the beach and hid himself beneath the boards of the hull, curled tight in the dark where the bilge water collected. He lay still. He had the jawbone of his ancestress Murirangawhenua in his hand - the hook she had given him, carved from her own bone, and it held power older than any line or net his brothers owned.

The Stowaway Under the Boards

The brothers pushed the canoe out before dawn, the four of them paddling hard into open water. They did not speak much. The swells were long and the current was pulling south. They paddled past the reef, past the deep channel, past the place where the bottom drops away and the water goes from green to black.

They fished. The lines went down and came up with small catches - enough, but nothing to boast about. They were ready to turn back when Maui shifted under the boards and knocked his elbow against the hull.

Maui-taha looked down. Maui-roto looked down. They pulled the boards up and there was their youngest brother, grinning, soaked in bilge water, holding the jawbone hook.

Go back, they said.

We are too far out to go back, Maui said. Which was true.

They argued. Maui sat up and took his place in the canoe and told them to paddle further. They refused. He told them the fish were better further out. They said the fish were fine where they were. He said the fish were nothing, scraps, and he could do better with one hook than they had done all morning with four lines.

They paddled further. Maui had a way of getting what he wanted.

The Jawbone of Murirangawhenua

When they reached water so deep the brothers could not see color in it - only darkness straight down - Maui told them to stop. He brought out the hook. The jawbone was smooth and white, curved like the inner bone of a jaw is curved, and it caught the light in a way that made the brothers uneasy.

He had no bait. Or rather, he had bait, but it was not the kind they expected. Maui struck himself across the nose and bled onto the hook. His own blood. The brothers watched him do it and said nothing. There was nothing to say to Maui when he was like this.

He dropped the line over the side. It went down and down. It went past where any fish should be, past where light reaches, past the cold layers where the pressure changes. The line kept paying out. Maui fed it with both hands.

Then it caught.

The Fish Beneath the World

The canoe lurched sideways. Water came over the gunwale. The brothers grabbed the sides and shouted. Maui braced his feet and held the line and began to pull.

Whatever was on the hook did not want to come up. The line sang with the weight. Maui pulled hand over hand, his shoulders tearing with the effort, and chanted as he pulled - a karakia, a fishing incantation, words that bound the catch to the hook and the hook to his hands. The ocean fought him. The canoe spun in circles. His brothers bailed water and screamed at him to cut the line.

He did not cut the line.

He pulled for hours. The sun moved across the sky and Maui was still pulling, still chanting, his hands raw and his blood on the rope mixing with the salt water. The ocean groaned. Something enormous was shifting on the bottom.

Then the surface broke.

What came up was not a fish. It was land. A vast back, ridged and dark, streaming water from its flanks. A stingray the size of a country, its spine a mountain range, its wings spreading north and south, its tail curling away into the distance. Water poured off it in rivers that carved valleys as they went.

Maui stood in the canoe and looked at what he had caught. He told his brothers not to touch it. He said he had to go and perform the proper rites - the karakia of thanksgiving, the offering to Tangaroa for what had been taken from his ocean floor. The catch was sacred. It had to be blessed before anyone set foot on it or cut into its flesh.

The Brothers and the Knife

Maui left. He went to make the offering. His brothers stayed.

They looked at the fish. It was still alive, still heaving, its surface wet and raw. They could see the ridges of its back, the valleys between them, the places where forests would grow if it were left to settle. It was magnificent and it was right there.

They could not wait.

Maui-taha took a knife and began to cut. Maui-roto followed. They hacked at the flesh of the great fish, carving pieces for themselves, arguing over who would claim which side. The fish thrashed under their blades. Its back buckled and split. Where it had been smooth, mountains crumpled upward. Where they cut deep, gorges opened. The surface that might have been flat and gentle became broken, jagged, impossible - ranges folded over ranges, cliffs where there should have been plains.

By the time Maui returned, the damage was done. The fish had stopped moving. Its body had hardened into rock and soil and forest, but all of it twisted, all of it scarred by the brothers’ impatience. The mountains of the North Island - the Tararua, the Kaimanawa, the volcanic plateau - carry the shape of that butchering.

Te Ika-a-Maui

The fish lies there still. Its head is at the southern end, where Wellington sits in the crook of the jaw. Its tail stretches north to Cape Reinga, where the spirits of the dead leave the land and slide down the roots of the pohutukawa tree into the sea. The great harbor of Wellington is the mouth of the fish, open and gaping. The ranges along the spine are the ridges of its back.

Maui’s canoe became the South Island - Te Waka-a-Maui, the Canoe of Maui - resting where he left it, long and narrow, its hull the Southern Alps. Stewart Island, at the bottom, is the anchor stone - Te Punga-o-te-Waka.

The whole country is the shape of a catch. A hook, a line, a pull from the deep, and the impatience of brothers who could not leave well enough alone.