POLYNESIAN LEGENDS.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue LXVIII, 26 June 1912, Page 2

POLYNESIAN LEGENDS.

A classic Maori term for tbe North Island of New Zealand is "Te Ika-a-Maui" ("the Fish of Maui") a name which preserves the legend of the ancient canoe-navi^ator and explorer who is said to have fished the island up from the depths of the ocean—the Polynesians' allegorical fashion of describing the discovery of a new land. Acording to the Rev. W. D. Westerveld, a visitor to Sydney from Honolulu, where for twenty years he has mado a study of Polynesian folk lore, being the author of "Maui, the, Demigod of the Polynesians," the people of nearly twenty of the island groups have a similar legend of their origin, and venerate the memory of the same magic fisherman. Maui is, he says, the Hercules of Polynesian mythology, and is credited with almost every feat performed by that celebrated hero, except the cleaning out of the Augean stables. Mr Westerveld spent a couple of months in New Zealand looking into the Maori legends, which bear a remarkable similarity, he said, to those of Hawaii and other groups, thus proving a common origin. His own idea is that tbe Polynesians came from some part of India, through the Malay Archipelago, and in tbe corse of centuries scatered over the wide Pacific, leaving traces of their migrations on those islands which they had merely used as resting-places on the way to Hawaii, Samoa, the Society Islands, and NewZealand, where they had finally settled.