The Origin of the Maori Curve and Spiral

(7) But the feature in which Maori carving art transcends all the rest of Polynesia is the use of the curve, and especially the spiral. In the bow and stern pieces of the canoes it is called by the natives pitau, the name for the centre frond of an edible tree-fern. And there it has indeed a strong resemblance to the young half-uncurled fern frond. But in tattooing and in the carving on the bargeboards and lintels of runangas and patakas it does not so closely resemble this; whilst in some of the older bow-pieces of canoes the two spiral whorls are more concentric than the fern frond, and in far the larger majority of those open-work carvings it is a double spiral that appears, and not a single spiral, such as this vegetable model would suggest. And it is difficult to page 183understand why the Maori artists should have taken it as the pattern of the main ornament on their canoes. On the food-store one can see its relevancy, as the fern-root was such an important constituent of their food supply, especially before the kumara was acclimatised, and from the tree-fern the pith was extracted as another source of sustenance. But on the large canoes there is no relevancy in it, unless we take it in a far-fetched way as representing Tane, the god of the forests, out of the trees of which the canoes were made. But if this is their model, why did such supreme artists omit the most graceful element in the fern frond, the long, tapering, feather-like stem, as it unwound its spiral into a leaf? To take the end and omit half the beauty does not seem consonant with the great artistic taste that produced these lace-like wood-carvings. Doubtless the resemblance to the fern frond is an afterthought, suggested partly by the analogy, and partly by the name, pitau, given to a canoe without a human figurehead.