Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 9 (Oceanic).djvu/118

62 caught him and were drawn tight, and although he struggled tremendously, his wings (in some accounts he was winged ) were broken, and he was finally overcome and killed. Rata then gathered up the bones of his father and with them returned to his home.

The whole story of Whaitari, Tawhaki, and Rata does not appear to exist in other parts of Polynesia, at least in this form, so that the best and easiest method of discussing it and its relationships, both within and without Polynesia, will be to consider the various incidents separately. In no portion of Polynesia do tales involving cannibals and cannibalism appear quite so prominently as in New Zealand. Whaitari was, as has been seen, a female cannibal who, coming down from the sky to secure men for food, used to capture them with a net; and a somewhat similar idea is shown in a tale from Mangaia, where a sky-cannibal lets down a basket in which he catches and hauls up his human prey; while in Rotuma (a small island west of Samoa, containing a mixed Polynesio-Melanesian population) we again find something analogous, in that cannibal deities from the upper world were said to descend to earth to fish and to catch men, carrying them back with them to the sky.

Outside of New Zealand the Tahitian version alone brings in the cannibalistic ancestress, although in a somewhat different way, forming a prologue, as it were, to the tale as a whole. According to this story, a female deity named Haumea married Ro'o-nui, who came up from the underworld; but as a result of a quarrel between the two, Ro'o-nui abandoned his wife and child, Tuture, and returned to the lower world. Angry at this, Haumea became a cannibal, and Tuture feared for his life. He therefore constructed a magic canoe which the gods transported to the shore for him. In order to get a good start in his projected flight he secretly pierced holes in the bottom of the gourds used to carry water and then asked his mother to bring him a supply from a distant spring.