Maori proverbial sayings often embody references to traditional traits of persons and tribes, and memories of historical incidents, as well as philosophy and poetic thought. The following are some further examples of whakatauki.

Tohea! Ko te tohe i te kai. (Be strenuous—it is a struggle for food. A saying to encourage industry and perseverance.)

E kore te patiki e hoki ki tana puehu. (The flounder does not return to the place where it stirred up the mud when disturbed. Opportunity does not present itself twice.)

He takapau pokai, nga uri o Paheke. (The descendants of Paheke always have their sleeping-mats rolled up quickly to carry about with them. Always on the move. Swaggers of the Maori.)

Rangitihi upoko whakahirahira. Rangitihi, te upoko takaia ki te akatea. (A famous chief of the Arawa, Rangitihi of the proud and lofty brow; his descendants must be respected. A warrior of great powers of endurance; his head, gashed open in battle, was bound up with bushvines and he rushed into the fray again.)

Kai mata whiwhia, maoa riro ke. (Do not wait until the food is cooked, otherwise some one else will take it. A saying originating in a forest incident of old. Some of a party on the march ate their food hastily before it was properly cooked and went on to seek safety. Those who stayed to cook it thoroughly were overtaken by foes and killed.)

Haere, e taku hoa, ki te urunga te taka, ki te moenga te whakaarahia. (A farewell to the dead: Go, O my friend, rest on the pillow which will not fall, the sleeping place where there is no awakening.)

Wise Man of the Arawa.

The Maori medicine man, the tohunga skilled in sacred rites and spells, and bush remedies and the laying-on of hands, is not by any means extinct. There is one at any rate in the Rotorua district who is an expert in the ancient lore and ceremonies, an old acquaintance and Maori-lore tutor of mine; he is over eighty now, and he is regarded in his district as the last real tohunga of the tribe. He is a wise man by heredity; his father, a high chief of Rotoiti, was a wonderful ancient, credited with magical powers. The tohunga aforetime revealed to me some curious facts about his initiation into the sacred circle of wise men. He was rendered immune against sickness and the witchcraft of rival tohungas by his elder Tuhoto Ariki, the celebrated old wizard who was buried in the Tarawera eruption in 1886, and resurrected alive after four days in a mud-buried hut.

Tuhoto, after reciting long prayers over his young kinsman (it was about seventy years ago) gave him a small black volcanic stone and bade him swallow it; it was a whakangungu, or “warding-off” symbol and talisman; it would preserve his mauri-ora, the life essence, and avert all harm from him. An ordinary stone might cause serious trouble in man's interior, my old friend admitted, but this was no ordinary stone; it was tapu'd and charmed by the great tohunga for the special purpose of preserving life.

“And so,” said he, “here I am safe and well to-day; I have never had an illness, and although I have been in battle in the Maori War days, I have never been harmed, and I intend to live to be a hundred.”

And the wise man probably will, too, for he is the stuff of which centenarians page 55 are made, and his faith in the ancient gods will carry him through.

The Ariki-Tapairu.

One frequently sees the exotic title of “Princess” prefixed to the name of a Maori woman of rangatira rank. We have no princesses here, though the daughters of the successive heads of the old Maori kingdom have been styled such. That vigorous and enlightened chieftainess Te Puea Herangi is often termed princess, but those who really know the Maori people do not refer to her by this rather meretricious title.

There is a fine old Maori term applied to a chieftainess of long pedigree and semi-sacred mana, and that is “Ariki-Tapairu.” It is an ancient and venerated expression. Ariki is a high chief, the hereditary head of his tribe, and tapairu signifies the female ariki, the first-born female in a family of rank, a woman invested with sacred attributes. When a Maori address of loyalty and felicitation was sent to Queen Victoria on the occasion of her diamond jubilee, she was addressed not only as Queen but as the Ariki-Tapairu of both races.

As for Te Puea Herangi, first lady of Waikato, she needs no pakeha title. She is the real leader of Waikato to-day, the pioneer of the new order of industry and progress among her people. Her force of character, intellect and high standards of social organisation are doing much to set the Waikato tribes on the way to a settled and prosperous life on the land. By the way, Te Puea is “the daughter of a double race,” like “the island maid, the island rose,” Kaiulani, of Hawaii, to whom Robert Louis Stevenson wrote one of his poems. Her father, the late Tahuna Herangi, well beknown to the present writer in other days, was the son of a Mr. Searancke (“Herangi” is the Maori pronunciation), a magistrate who was in Waikato in the early days; and her mother was Tiahuia, daughter of King Tawhiao, who died in 1894.

Te Puea has established a model village at Ngaruawahia, and she gives her people a personal example of energy and hard work and high ideals.

The Meaning of “Monowai.”

A subject of some recent controversy has been the name of Lake Monowai, which has been given to one of our large liners. One newspaper correspondent after another has aired his views and exhibited his ignorance of the name's origin. Maori place-names are full of pitfalls for those who simply look up Williams' Dictionary for translations. It is unsafe to venture on translations without making enquiries from old Maoris in the district concerned. Many years ago, when in the Southern Lakes country, I looked up some of the aged members of the Ngati-Mamoe and Ngai-Tahu tribes on the Southland coast in order to elucidate the name-giving. Monowai had puzzled me; it was obviously not a genuine Maori name. Some people have imagined it might have been “Manowai.” Not so, said two old men of Oraka (Colac Bay). It was correctly Manokiwai, a personal name which had been given to the lake by its ancient discoverers. The pakehas had mangled it. But this did not explain altogether the change to Monowai. That explanation I obtained a little later on, in 1903, from Mr. James McKerrow, late Surveyor-General. He was the first surveyor to map the Waiau River, in Southland, and the lakes which it drained.

That was back in 1862. He did not know much Maori, and he imperfectly caught the name given him by the Maoris when he made enquiries. This particular lake of the woods west of the Waiau, on the border of Fiordland, he set down on his sketch-map as Monowai, the nearest he could get to it, and the first word in it he borrowed from the Greek, “monos,” meaning one. He thought this would be not inappropriate, for the lake was fed chiefly by one river. Thus we have Monowai on our maps, meaning “one water,” a half-caste Greek and Maori name, and pleasing and euphonious withal.

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