The origin of coconuts
At a Glance
- Central figures: Hina, a beautiful young woman of Mangaia (some traditions say a chief’s daughter); and Te Tuna, an eel-god who was her lover and who offered his own death so that something new could grow.
- Setting: Mangaia in the Cook Islands, central Polynesia; the story is preserved in oral tradition across several island groups with local variations, but the Mangaian version is among the most detailed.
- The turn: Te Tuna tells Hina to cut off his head after he dies and bury it in the earth.
- The outcome: From the buried head of the eel-god, the first coconut palm grows, its fruit bearing Te Tuna’s face - two eyes and a mouth visible in the shell.
- The legacy: Every coconut carries the face of Te Tuna. The tree that feeds, shelters, and clothes Polynesian peoples across the Pacific grew from the skull of a lover who chose to be useful in death.
Hina was tired of Te Tuna. She had lived with the eel-god a long time in his pool, the water dark and cool around her legs, his body coiling near her while she bathed. He was immense - longer than a canoe, slick-skinned, his eyes old. She had loved him once, or at least she had not minded him. But now the pool felt small and the eel felt heavy against her, and she wanted something else.
She left the pool and walked.
Hina Leaves the Water
She went looking for another lover. This is how the Mangaian tellers say it - plainly, without apology. Hina walked from one end of the land to the other, and the gods she met would not have her. She went to Maui. Some say she went to other figures first - minor gods, spirits of reef and forest - and each one turned her away when they learned who her husband was. Te Tuna was powerful. His domain was the fresh water, and no one wanted trouble with the eel.
Maui was not afraid of trouble. Maui had never been afraid of anything, which was both his great quality and his flaw. When Hina came to him, he took her in. He knew what would follow. Te Tuna would come looking.
Hina stayed with Maui. The days passed. She did not go back to the pool.
Te Tuna Comes for Maui
Te Tuna gathered his people - the eels, the water-creatures, the things that live in deep freshwater pools where light does not reach. He sent a flood ahead of him. The waters rose around Maui’s dwelling. Waves of river-water, not salt, came crashing through the trees, and with them came Te Tuna, enormous, his body filling the channel he made as he moved.
Maui stood in front of his house. He was not large. He had always been the smallest of his brothers, born too early, thrown into the sea by his mother Taranga, raised by the foam. But he had caught the sun, and he had fished islands out of the ocean floor, and he was not going to run from an eel.
The battle was short. Some versions say Maui used an atua - a god-weapon, a power that came from his ancestors. Some say he simply knew where to strike. He killed Te Tuna. He cut the eel-god’s body apart. The body fell in pieces, and from its segments came the freshwater eels that still live in every river and pool across the islands - the smaller eels, the descendants, the scattered remnants of what had once been a god.
But the head. Maui kept the head.
The Burial
Te Tuna had spoken to Hina before the end. Or perhaps he had spoken to Maui. The traditions vary on this point, but the instruction was the same: bury my head in the ground.
Hina took the head. It was heavy in her arms, the jaw still set, the eyes dull now but recognizable. She dug a hole in the earth near the shore where the soil was sandy and loose and the rain would reach it. She placed the head in the ground and covered it.
She did not know what would come from it. Te Tuna had not told her that part. He had only said to bury it, and so she did, and she waited.
The First Coconut Palm
A shoot came up. Green, pale, curling out of the sand like a tongue. It thickened. It grew tall - taller than a man, then taller than a house, then taller than any tree Hina had seen on the island. The trunk was smooth and fibrous, ringed with the scars of old fronds. The crown opened into long leaves that moved in the wind like hair.
And the fruit came. Hard-shelled, round, clustered beneath the fronds in bunches. Hina pulled one down and stripped the husk. Beneath the fiber was a dark brown shell, and on the shell were three marks - two round, one oblong. Two eyes and a mouth.
Te Tuna’s face.
She cracked the shell. Inside was white flesh, dense and sweet, and water - clear, clean water that tasted nothing like the dark pool where Te Tuna had lived. It tasted like rain.
What Te Tuna Became
The coconut palm spread across the islands. It went wherever the Polynesian voyagers went, carried in canoes along with taro and breadfruit and sweet potato and the small pigs and the red jungle fowl. It grew on every atoll where almost nothing else would grow - its roots reaching into coral sand, its fronds making shade, its fruit giving food and drink and oil and fiber for rope and coir for lashing canoe hulls. The husk could be burned. The shell could be carved into cups. The leaves could roof a house.
Every part of the tree was useful. This was Te Tuna’s gift, or his punishment, or simply what he became - a god who lost his lover and whose skull sprouted into the one tree that could sustain life on a bare reef island in the middle of the Pacific.
Hina lived with Maui. The old stories do not say much more about her after this. She had done the necessary thing: she had buried the head, she had waited, she had pulled the first fruit. The rest was the tree’s work.
On Mangaia and across the Cooks, and on Samoa and Tonga and the atolls of the Tuamotus, when people husk a coconut and see the three dark marks on the shell, they see the face. Two eyes. A mouth. Te Tuna, still looking out.