ARA MOANA THE PATHS OF THE SEA

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 66, 19 March 1938, Page 7 (Supplement)

ARA MOANA THE PATHS OF THE SEA

IT was with a bone hook that Maui recaught his great fish which ifi the North Island of New Zealand. He went with his brothers, who were ' poor fishermen, but Maui the cunning secretly took his magic hook. He had pointed it with a piece of bone from the tapu jaw of his ancestor Muri Rangi Whenua. Besides being such a 6acred hook it wag a very beautiful one, carved and decorated with inlaid paua shell. When they came to deep water and could no longer see the land Maui dropped his line overboard and

By. . . . Olwyn Rutherford.

hooked a mighty fieh. With all his strength he pulled, reciting powerful charms to lighten the weight. Very slowly Te Ika a Maui, the fish of Maui upon which we live, rose under the canoe. You can still see the hook in the sweep of the surfbeaten shore of Hawke's Bay. This was a mythical hook, full of magic for the Maori told this story to explain the discovery of his land. In the legend the hook was made of bone and so were many of the Maori hooks before pakeha times. Even when iron hooks were first brought here by the traders some of the old men still preferred the rather curi-ously-shaped ones which they made themselves. Sometimes they tipped with bone their wooden hooks and often they made them in one piece from bone. The old warriors liked to use human bone, for to make a fieh hook from that material was to insult the memory of a dead enemy and annoy his relatives. We find numbers of hooks made from the bones of that great extinct bird, the iroa, which once was founl in this country. Perhaps some day when you are walking on a beach, or in the sandhills, you will come upon an old Maori workshop which has at last been uncovered again by the winds, or very high tides, which have moved aside the sand. You will know it by the chips of stone and the bone fragments lying scattered where the

craftsmen left them so long ago. The stone tools will be there, too. ivith articles in various stages of manufacture. Some of them broke before they were finished and remain to tell of the sad disappointment which must often have come to men ■vhen they worked with clumsy stone tools. If in this place the fish hook makers have been working you will find a scattered pile of strangelyshaped pieces of bone whic'i will remind you of a big jig-saw puzzle.

If rou sort through these fragments and chance to find a number of pieces which fall into place as the part§ of a puzzle you hold in your hand the story of the making of a fish hook. The fragments, forgotten all this time, tell you for themselves the stages of that long and delicate process. The key piece to this puzzle and the one which speaks first, tells how the workman chose a pie?e of bone and worked its outside edges in the form of a hook. He worked with

THE STORY OF A BONE FISH HOOK

the sandstone rasps which are to be found in the workshop among the fragments of the things they fashioned. After the curve was smoothlyrounded the man. for some reason, decided not to finish this hook for he threw aside this piece without which this story would have had no beginning. The next piece tell? us in turn how the inside curve of the hook was cut and roughly shaped. The cratershaped holes show that a native drill was used. The stone points of it lie amongst the other pieces. Try using a native drill, or the model of one. and yon will understand why the holes were this ' strange shape, and why they had to i be drilled from both sides to meet in i the middle and form a hole wide at j both surfaces and narrow in the ; centre. In using the drill the cord? j are wrapped round the shaft and the ends are tugged sharply downward. As the drill spins and the cords unwind, the tension is relaxed a little so that the spin of the drill over-runs enough to wrap the ends rounds it again, and so th j clumsy wobbling | goes on. The craftsmen had to judge i accurately to make the two holes meet. Sometimes a fragment shows where he has been unlucky and his failure is marked by holes which never connected. * When all these holes had been drilled round the centre of the piece of bone a gentle tap knocked out the '"core"' and left these two pieces. The finished hooks show the workman smoothed away with raeps the clumsy jagged edges which the drill had left. This hook he made is a delicate, smooth, rounded thing, with a sharply-curved point and a little knob round which the line was fastened. We. who are accustomed to using open wire hooks with sharp barbs, find it hard to understand how the Maori could have had successful fishing with this kind of hook. He will tell you. though, that it did not need to be jerked and once a fish was hooked a steady pull on the line gave the catch no chance of escape. He made shell ones in the same form from a single piece of material. Large curved hooks of tough wood, often pointed with bone, were u-ed for catching shark l and other big fish. The Maori used to bend a growing hard-wooded plant and tie it in that position until in a few rears it had grown and set in the shape of a hook. The bait was fastened on with a light piece of twine and stone sinkers of different forms were used for line fishing. A fisherman often gave a favourite hook a special name to show his affection for it and the value he placed upon it.