THE FIRST MAN

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1174, 20 November 1913, Page 4

THE FIRST MAN

TO ARRIVE IN NEW ZEALAND.

The probable date of man’s first arrival in New Zealand is an interesting question upon which some new light is thrown by an historical article in the latest number of the Polynesian Society’s Journal. The article deals with the story of the discovery of New Zealand by the famous navigator Kupe as related half a century ago by the old tobunga Te Matorohanga, of the Wairarapa, and now for the first time translated by Mr S. Percy Smith, the leading living authority upon Native legendary lore. Hitherto the date of Kupe’s visit to New Zealand from the Eastern Pacific .in his sailing

cauoe, the Matahourua, has been a matter of conjecture, but Mr Smith, by taking the mean of a number of genealogical tables, fixes the approximate date at 925 A.D., or thirty-nine to forty generations back from the present time. He thinks that Kupe may have been identical with a celebrated South Sea navigator and sea adventurer called Te Aratauganuku, spoken of iu Rarotongan legends as having lived between nine hundred and a - thousand years ago. Kupe, according to Te Matorohanga's narrative—written down at the time by an intelligent Maori and carefully preserved in manuscript form—came from Tahiti, or Hawaiki, as the Maoris speak of it, in contradistinction to another near-by island home ot the old Polynesians known as Rangiatea. This is Raiatea, in the Society Group. He reached New Zealand and circumnavigated it, the first sailor to do so, some eight hundred and fifty years before the first white navigator performed a similar exploit. There was then no sign of man on the shores of New Zealand, says the legend of Kupe. The brown sea explorer, iu his outrigger cauoe, not only sailed right round the coast of “Aotea-ioa” and the “Wti-pounamu,” but also spent a considerable time at Harbours such as Porirua and Hokianga. He sailed into Queen Charlotte Sound, and also visited the Arahura River, on the West Coast, where he and his fellowvoyager, Ngake (or Ngahue), discovered greenstone. Nowhere did he see man or the smoke of man’s fire. It was a huge lone land, untouched by human hand and untrodden by the foot of the pioneer. So. at any rale, said Kupe to the assembled tribespeople when he returned to far-off Tahiti and told his wonderful Odyssey of ocean travel and of new lauds far to the south-west: “I found no one there,” he declared; ‘‘what I did see was a kokake, a tiwaiwaka, and a weka whistling in the gullies, Kokako was ko-iug on the ridges, and tiwaiwaka was flitting about before my face.” This was to say that all he saw were birds, such as the native blue crow, the fantail and the woodheu. Bird life was all that livened the silent shores of Aotea-roa.

Ten generations later the Polynesian voyager Toi came to New Zealand from Tahiti by way of Samoa aud Rarotonga, and when be lauded he found the land covered with men, a strange race, who seem to have been partly Melanesian. The ancestors of these people appear to have lauded on the northern coast soon after Kupe had sailed on his return voyage to Hawaiki. The two peoples fought aud then mingled, and, with the later immigrants who came to the country in the historic canoes six hundred years ago, became the ancestors of the present Maori-:. The Kupe story, however, does not altogether solve the problem of man’s antiquity in the South Island. The human remains aud stone implements found deeply buried, together with moa bones, in various parts of Canterbury and Otago, aud the discoveries made far down the West Coast by Sir Julius von Haast, seem to point to man’s habitation of this land far earlier than a thousand years ago. It is a fascinating: question that has not yet been satisfactorily answered, although contributions such as old Matorohanga’s poetical saga go some way towards telliug us what New Zealand looked like iu tht days of the great Polynesian voyages of discovery, the most dating the world has ever seen.