Page:Hawaiki The Original Home of the Maori.djvu/141

Rh seas; the female that dwells in those mountainous waves, whose tresses wave about in the waters and on the surface of the sea; and the frozen sea of pia, with the deceitful animal of that sea who dives to great depths—a foggy, misty, and dark place not seen by the sun. Other things are like rocks, whose summits pierce the skies, they are completely bare and without any vegetation on them." The above is as literal a translation as I can make, and the meaning is quite clear; that the bare rocks that grow out of the frozen sea are the icebergs of the Antarctic; the tresses that float on the monstrous waves are the long leaves of the bull-kelp—over 50 feet long—quite a new feature to a people who dwelt in the tropics, where there is nothing of the kind; the deceitful animal that dives so deep, is the walrus or the sea-lion or sea-elephant. The frozen ocean is expressed by the term Te tai-uka-a-pia, in which tai is the sea, uka, (Maori huka) is ice, a pia means—a, as, like, after the manner of; pia, the arrowroot, which when scraped is exactly like snow, to which this simple people compared it as the only or best simile known to them. Now, the Antarctic ice is to be found south of Rapa, in about latitude 50° in the summer time, and consequently both Ui-te-rangiora and Te Arutanga-nuku at different times (250 years apart) must have gone to those high latitudes, as the story says, "to see the wonders of the ocean."

Since the above account of these Antarctic voyages was written in 1897—I have come across a further confirmation of the story. When relating my visit to Eastern Polynesia to the Maoris of the Nga-Rauru tribe, west coast, New Zealand, I was asked if I had also visited that part of the ocean where their traditions state that the seas run