TARANAKI’S VOLCANO

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 30 March 1931, Page 7

TARANAKI’S VOLCANO

THE PISCOVERY ON EGMORT

It is not safe to conclude, as some of those who made the discovery of an ancient Maori oven under a layer of volcanic ash on Mount Egmont have concluded, that the mountain was in active eruption about six hundred years ago, writes J.C. in the “Auckland Star.” Man has been in New Zealand for far longer than six centuries. A scientific man in the Egmont party spoke of n volcano legend associated with a Polynesian chief who arrived on these shores in “the fourth emigrating canoe” from tho traditional Ilawaiki. But it is impossible to say which was the fourth canoe. No one who has studied Maori migrations from the tropic islands will commit himself to so positive a statement. There probably were scores of canoes from Polynesia and Melanesia. The names of many are mentioned in traditions; and there must have been many whose stories are lost. There is a strain of Melanesian in the Maori race to-day, and there most likely were immigrants here from the New Hebrides and New Caledonia and neighbouring islands due north of New Zealand, much nearer to this country than the Eastern Pacific Hawaiki, many centuries before any canoe crews arrived from Tahiti or Rarotonga. There are authentic genealogies and traditions supporting the belief that Polynesian Maoris were here more than a thousand years ago, and it is possible that there were human beings in these islands a thousand years before that. Nearly seventy years ago the geologist Sir Julius von Haast, when exploring on the West Coast of the South Island, un earthed an ancient stone oven which from the evidence of the soil that overlaid it had been made in very remote times, to be reckoned in thousands of years. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of course are responsible for great changes in a. short space of time, as the Tarawera eruption and the West Coast and Hawkes Bay earthquakes prove, but in the case reported by von Haast it was evident that tho accretion of rock and soil above the oven could only be the work of ver” many centuries. So it is nob wise to assume that Taranaki’s wonderful peak has been active within recent times The well-known volcano-legends concerning the mountains of the Tongariro-Ruapehu group mention Taranaki as having originally occupied a position in that part of the island and describe its mythical journey to the West Coast where it stands now. These legends obviously embody a dim recollection of activity in Taranaki, but it would bo absurd to limit that period to the last few centuries. Traditions of this sort, would be handed down from one tribe to another, and one face to another, over untold centuries. The great luxuriant forests which grow on the slopes of Taranaki are the gvowti} of thousands of years. The discovery of the long-ago “umu ’, or “Maori oven,” in such a position on the mountain is of particular interest because it indicates that showers of volcanic ash came from the crater at a somewhat later period than was generally supposed. But that this occurred in historic Maori t imes is unlikely. _ Rangitoto Island was no doubt an active volcano at a period far more recent than Egmont’s fiery age, and it is improbable that tho island crater was discharging lava within the time covered by the life of the Hawaikian Maori in New Zealand.