The “Go-ashore.”

The good old three-legged pot is still the most-used cooking utensil in many a Maori camp. I have never seen so many of these “go-ashores” in a native village as in a certain large but little-known kainga in the King Country, called Aotearoa—the famous name also of the whole island. Aotearoa is the headquarters village of the King Country section of the Ngati-Raukawa tribe. Those pots, there were dozens of them, scores, I think, in the large cooking-sheds, under the fruit trees of that beautifully situated but much run-to-seed old settlement, facing the rising sun. Curious word, “go-ashore,” and often ridiculously misconstrued. A popular version among pakeha old hands was that Captain Cook gave a three-legged pot to a Maori, and pointing to the beach, said “Go ashore,” hence the name. As with many another scrap of beachcombing lore, the facts are otherwise.

“Kohua,” the Maori term for the pot that replaced the earth-oven in many a kainga, is a genuine native word, meaning originally the method of heating water, or cooking food, by means of red-hot stones in a wooden vessel. The term was naturally

(Rly Publicity photo.)
The Department's up-to-date workshops at Addington, South Island.

transferred to the convenient pakeha pot when it reached the home of the Maori. Naturally, also, the whaler and the sailor and the trader, when they heard the New Zealander call the new household treasure a “kohua,” corrupted it to an expression they could get their tongues round and remember, hence “goashore.”