Smoke Signals.

Now coming to smoke signalling, Elsdon Best says it was called whakapua, and a writer in “Jacobson's Tales of Banks Peninsula” says it was the Maori telegraph. There is no doubt smoke was used to a fair extent to let parties indicate their whereabouts to keep in touch with one another, and as an invitation to anyone to come and see what it was about or who was making it. In the former case we are told that a party of bird-snarers on the Blue Mountains would make a big column of smoke to let a party on the Hokanui Hills, 25 miles away, know where they were. In the latter case history records a smoke signal at Lake Wakatipu over two centuries ago, and another near the Bluff a century ago. I was also told of smoke having been used to lure an enemy in warfare in Canterbury.

Although I have used the term “smoke-signalling” for these columns of smoke, a better definition would be “smoke-sign,” for they could not be compared with the wonderful “smoke language” of the American Indian or the Australian Black, whereby long and complex messages and descriptions could be repeated from point to point and carried on for hundreds of miles. Apparently this was a sort of Morse code in smoke. Instead of the dots and dashes of the telegraph operator, the expert use of a blanket sent forth long and short puffs of smoke which conveyed a world of meaning to the initiated.