Page:Pounamu, notes on New Zealand greenstone (IA pounamunotesonne00robl).djvu/19

Rh they were taken as booty after a victorious war, and, as sometimes occurred, were handed over to cement a peace.

“We are told,” wrote Captain Cook in his Voyages, “a hundred fabulous stories about this stone, not one of which carried with it the least probability of truth, though some of their most sensible men would have us believe them.“

“According to an ancient legend,” says Canon Stack, “the reason why greenstone is found in such an inaccessible region is that the locality was chosen by the three wives of Tamatea, the circumnavigator, when they deserted him, as the hiding place most likely to escape discovery. Tamatea’s search along the east coast was unsuccessful; and after passing Foveaux Straits he continued to skirt the shore, listening at the entrance of every inlet for any sound that might indicate the whereabouts of the runaways. But it was not till he arrived off the mouth of the Arahura river that he heard voices. There he landed, but failed to find his wives, being unable to recognize them in the enchanted blocks of greenstone over which the water murmured incessantly. He did not know that the canoe in which his wives escaped from him had been capsized at Arahura, and that its occupants had been changed into stone, and so he passed them by and continued his fruitless search.”

Mr. J. Cowan in his book, Maoris of New Zealand, relates the legend as he heard it from the South Island people. They added the detail that Tamatea went as far down as Milford Sound where he found one of his missing wives transformed into greenstone. As he wept over her, Tama’s tears flowed so copiously that they penetrated the rock, and that is why the clear kind of bowenite found on the slopes and beaches of Milford Peak in that great sound, is called tangiwai, or tear water.