MAORI MEMORIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 November 1938, Page 3

MAORI MEMORIES

PELORUS JACK. (Recorded by J.H.S. for “Times-Age.”) This strange creature was a source of interest not only to every Maori tribe, and all the Pakeha people of New Zealand, but to almost every country abroad. The Maoris called it Upokehue (Head like a gourd), a name they gave to the porpoise. They thought its natural -colour, that of the Maori, had changed to creamy white because of its association with the white man. It was a really a grampus or dolphin, a species foreign to this country. Jacks fame was a topic of interest to sailors and travellers everywhere. His history and daily doings were pictured in the Press. Among these records Mark Twain made an early report of his observation. An Auckland merchant tells the story of two Englishmen with whom he travelled from Liverpool to Montreal. During the voyage these two had heard the history of Pelorus Jack from some one who said he had 1 seen the antics of this strange creature several times. One believed the story, the other ridiculed it as the fiction of a novelist, whose inventive faculties had induced Bernard Shaw to class all such writers as “Experienced Liars.” Their heated argument resulted in a wager for £lO. The stakes were held by the Captain, who produced a late volume by Mark Twain, that master joker, as proof that the whole story was purely imaginative. His decision was accepted without question, and the two tenners were handed over to the one who followed fiction. Maori fishermen in the vicinity of the French Pass, through which this strange white creature safely piloted the steamers almost daily for several years, regarded Pelorus Jack with religious fervour and conferred upon him Ihe name and honour of “Te Atua Moana” (The Sea God). To them he is not dead, but is piloting Maori canoes in Te Reigna, their heaven under the sea.