These old gourds are now in the Dominion Museum in Wellington. The Old Maori Water Bottles In the old days, when people had no pottery, they grew gourds to use as containers—to keep water in, and wild honey, and also meat, preserved in its own fat—such as rats, pigeons, tuis, and human flesh. Often they used carved wooden bowls too, and baskets of totara bark or flax. But they valued gourds very much, and went to a great deal of trouble to grow them well. Legends say that the gourd plant was one of the earliest to be introduced to New Zealand, since its seeds were so easy to carry, easier than the tubers of the taro and kumara, for instance. It is said that Ngati Toi were the first people to cultivate it; according to one story, they were given the gourd by a god called Pu-te-hue. Pu-te-hue was one of the offspring of Tane, the Fertiliser of all of the productions of the earth. Pu-te-hue is, at the same time, the personification of the gourd, and one of the names by which it is called; he said, as he gave himself to the people, that ‘the seeds within me shall provide water vessels for my descendants’. Gourd seeds were always planted on the 16th or Turu, and 17th or Rakau-nui, days of the moon's age, that is to say just after the full moon. There was a ritual which had to be performed at the planting, so that the gourds would grow well.