Chapter I: Part 1

At the
Gateways of the Day

by Padraic Colum
with illustrations by Juliette May Fraser

New Haven
Published for The Hawaiian Legend & Folklore
Commission by the Yale University Press

London · Humphrey Milford · Oxford University Press
1924

I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME
TO THE MEMBERS OF
THE HAWAIIAN LEGEND AND FOLKLORE COMMISSION

JOHN R. GALT
EDNA J. HILL
MARY S. LAWRENCE
EMMA AHUENA D. TAYLOR

AND TO FIVE KAMA AINA WHO HELPED ME

JOSEPH S. EMERSON
WILLIAM HYDE RICE
JULIE JUDD SWANZY
THOMAS G. THRUM
WILLIAM DRAKE WESTERVELT

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

Introduction xiii
The Boy Pu-nia and the King of the Sharks 1
The Seven Great Deeds of Ma-ui 7
How Ma-ui won a place for himself in the House 7
How Ma-ui lifted up the Sky 10
How Ma-ui fished up the Great Island 15
How Ma-ui snared the Sun and made Him go more slowly
across the Heavens 20
How Ma-ui won fire for Men 27
How Ma-ui overcame Kuna Loa the Long Eel 32
The Search that Ma-ui’s Brother made for his Sister
Hina-of-the-Sea 38
How Ma-ui strove to win Immortality for Men 41
Au-ke-le the Seeker 45
Pi-ko-i: The Boy Who Was Good at Shooting Arrows 69
Paka: The Boy Who Was Reared in the Land that the Gods
Have Since Hidden 81
The Story of Ha-le-ma-no and the Princess Kama 93
The Arrow and the Swing 107
The Daughter of the King of Ku-ai-he-lani 117
The Fish-Hook of Pearl 131
The Story of Kana, the Youth Who Could Stretch
Himself Upwards 137
The Me-ne-hu-ne 149
The Story of Mo-e Mo-e: Also a Story about Po-o and
about Kau-hu-hu the Shark-God, and about Mo-e Mo-e’s
Son, the Man Who Was Bold in His Wish 165
The Woman from Lalo-hana, the Country under the Sea 193
Hina, the Woman in the Moon 199
Notes 203

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Facing page

“Then Pu-nia dived ... into the cave, took two lobsters in
his hands, and came up on the place that he had spoken from” 2
“Four birds ... came and lit on the yards, and asked of those
below what they had come for” 52
“The owl of Ka-ne came and sat on the stones and stared at him” 150
“Koni-konia and Hina ... climbed to the tops of the trees that
were on the tops of the mountains” 198
“It made an arching path for her from the rocks up to the
heavens. With the net in her hands she went along that path” 200

HELPS TO PRONUNCIATION.

There are three simple rules which practically control Hawaiian pronunciation: (1) Pronounce each vowel. (2) Never allow a consonant to close a syllable. (3) Give the vowels the following values:

a = a in father
e = ey in they
i = i in machine
o = o in note
u = oo in tool

INTRODUCTION.

If you draw a line from the tip of New Zealand to the top of the Hawaiian Islands, you will be able to indicate the true Polynesian area. On the islands towards the Malay Peninsula there is a mixed people who show the Papuan strain that is in them. They are the Melanesians. On the American side of the line there is a singularly homogeneous people who are of a type like to our own. They are the Polynesians. We have been able to pay ourselves the compliment of admiring them ever since the chronicler of Mendaña’s voyages looked upon the men and women of the Marquesas and found that “they had beautiful faces and the most promising animation of countenance; and were in all things so becoming that the pilot-mayor Quiros affirmed nothing in his life caused him so much regret as leaving such fine creatures to be lost in that country.” [1]

And yet the Polynesians, so like us physically, have in their romances none of the familiar veins that one can discover in, let us say, the folk-tales of the darker peoples in the lands around India. I take up Studies in Religion, Folk-lore, and Custom in North Borneo and the Malay Peninsula, [2] and I strike at once into:

Now the Raja had given it out that whoever could remove the
dragon’s head should marry his daughter, who was shut up in an
inner room and enclosed by a seven-fold fence of ivory; but nobody
could do it, for the dragon’s head was as big as a mountain.

This is from a folk-tale told amongst the aboriginal tribes of the Malay Peninsula. And when I read the opening of another tale I am in an imaginative land so familiar that I know every turn and track in it.—

“Oh,” said Serunggal, “it is no use my stopping here. I had better
go and marry a Raja’s daughter.”

The tale goes on, and we have the Raja setting the adventurous youth three tasks, just as the King or the Enchanter sets the youth three tasks in a story that has been told in every village in Ireland and Serbia, in Spain and Sweden, in Russia and Italy; in a story that was given literary form in classic Greece in Jason and Medea, and in mediæval Wales in Kulhwch and Olwen. And this tale of Serunggal and the Raja’s daughter belongs to one of the dark tribes of Borneo.

There are animal helpers in this particular tale, just as there are animal helpers in the ancient Greek folk-tale of Cupid and Psyche. Indeed, the stories belonging to Borneo and the Malay Peninsula are well filled with animals—turtles and deer, elephants and ant-eaters; they might be the material out of which Rudyard Kipling made his unforgettable Jungle Book and his Just-So Stories.

In Polynesia we find no romance that is based on formulæ familiar to us. Only occasionally does a helping creature appear. There are practically no animal stories, for the sufficient reason that the Polynesian did not have opportunities for forming a wide animal acquaintanceship. He brought the pig and the dog to the Islands with him; and the shark and the turtle, the owl and the plover, were the only creatures that aroused an interest in him. Even the way of counting things is changed when we get into Polynesian romance: instead of three, seven, and nine, we have four, eight, and sixteen for the cabalistic numbers.

And yet, as all human desire is the same, and as human mentality compels a certain sequence of incident, and there seem to be patterns in incident that all human beings find it delightful to work out, the Polynesian stories have the elements and the combination of elements that make fine narrative. Often the Polynesian story-teller rediscovers a formula that we have used to make a memorable tale. Thus, in the present collection, the daughter of the King of Ku-ai-he-lani will recall Cinderella, and the story of Au-ke-le will recall the story of the Irish hero Oisin and all the other stories of men who travelled far and returned to their own land; it will remind us of Odysseus and Rip Van Winkle.

In the folk-romance and in the mythological stories of Europe there are places that may not be entered, and there are women whom a man must not approach. There is Blue Beard’s Chamber; there is Danaë, and there is the Eithlinn of Celtic mythology. Polynesian romance has places that may not be entered, and women who must not be approached by men. And it has these instances in almost every story. Indeed, without the guarded maiden and the forbidden place a Polynesian story-teller would find it difficult to carry on. And one knows that when he was dealing with one or the other he was dealing with the life around him: the place was tapu, [3] the maiden was tapu. And the place or the maiden was tapu simply because a king or a chief with the privilege of declaring tapu had so declared it. When we read the story of Ka-we-lu in The Arrow and the Swing, or of Kama in The Story of Ha-le-ma-no and the Princess Kama, we can easily see how, as the simplicity of tapu was forgotten, the maiden would be given a fantastic security like that of Danaë in her brazen tower, or like that of Eithlinn in her inaccessible island, and we can see how motives would be invented for keeping her apart: Danaë’s son and Eithlinn’s son are destined to slay their grandfathers. Every race has had tapu. But the Polynesians held to it and made it their single discipline. In these Polynesian stories we are at the very beginning of a romance that for Europeans has grown to be fraught with magic and mystery.

I spent the months of January, February, March, and April of 1923 in the Hawaiian Islands. I went there under the following circumstances: The Hawaiian Legislature had formed a Commission on Myth and Folk-lore; the function of the Commission was to have a survey made of the stories that had been collected and that belonged to myth and folk-lore of the Islands, and to have them made over into stories for children—primarily for the children of the Hawaiian Islands. By an arrangement made between the Commission and the Yale University Press, I was invited to make the survey and to reshape the stories.

I learned something of the language; I sought out those who still had the tradition of Hawaiian romance and who could recite it in the traditional way; I made a study of all the material that had been collected; I placed myself in the hands of the very distinguished group of Polynesian scholars that is in Honolulu. Quite early in my researches I came to the conclusion that my work should be based on the Fornander Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-lore, published by the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History, in Honolulu, and I made it my main task to understand the background of the stories given in that collection, and to hear as many of them as possible from the lips of the surviving custodians of the Polynesian tradition in Hawaii.

I found in the Hawaiian Islands conditions that are lamentably like the conditions in certain European countries where separate and interesting cultures are being pushed aside by this or that culture that is politically and commercially important. In Hawaii there is a great breach in the native tradition: I have been in houses where a grandmother or grandfather knew traditional Hawaiian poems (mele) and could chant them in the traditional way, while a son or daughter would be able to translate them, but not able to chant them, and a grandchild would be able neither to chant the poems nor translate them. Once, I remember, in such a house, I went to see what a little girl, the granddaughter of a lady who had chanted mele to me for about an hour, was studying. This child had not allowed herself to be interrupted either by the chanting of her grandmother or by the translating that her father did for me; she was bent on mastering a lesson in a book that she kept before her—an American school geography. “Stockholm is the capital of Sweden, Vienna is the capital of Austria,” was one of the items that had kept her absorbed.

I discovered that of the stories which I knew from the Fornander Collection, few lived in the memory of the generations at present in the Islands. On the Island of Maui I met a distinguished Hawaiian lady who had been at the court of King Kalakaua, and who, in her youth, had been a trained story-teller. She tried to give me some of the stories that belonged to her repertoire. But no sooner had she begun than she declared that she was no longer familiar with the language in which the stories were told—they were in the idiom of the Alii or the Chiefs, an idiom that she had not used since her days at court.

I heard many stories told, some by men, some by women. One of the best story-tellers that I came across was a young man whom I met on the Island of Molokai. His father was Chinese, and he had learnt the stories from his grandmother. He told me several stories; one of them was the story of the rescue of Hina by her son Kana, a story given in Fornander, and evidently belonging to the folk.

What impressed me most in these recitals was the gesture of the story-teller. Every feature, every finger of the man or woman becomes alive, becomes dramatic, as the recital is entered on. The gesture of the Hawaiian makes the telling of a story a dramatic entertainment. Scholars have written of the long and monotonous stories told in the old days in Hawaii. The stories were long, but the gesture of the story-teller must have saved them from an unrelieved monotony. I was made to recall again and again Melville’s description of an entertainment given him by a genial Marquesan youth; it is a description that gives the spirit in which the unspoiled Polynesian dramatizes his moods and his reactions. Says Melville: “Upon my signifying my desire that he should pluck me the young fruit of some particular tree, the handsome savage, throwing himself into a sudden attitude of surprise, feigns astonishment at the apparent absurdity of the request. Maintaining this position for a moment, the strange emotions depicted on his countenance soften down into one of humorous resignation to my will, and then looking wistfully up to the tufted top of the tree, he stands on tip-toe, straining his neck and elevating his arm, as though endeavoring to reach the fruit from the ground where he stands. As if defeated in this childish attempt, he now sinks to the earth despondingly, beating his breast in well-acted despair; and then, starting to his feet all at once, and throwing back his head, raises both hands, like a school boy about to catch a falling ball. And continuing this for a moment or two, as if in expectation that the fruit was going to be tossed down to him by some good spirit on the tree-top, he turns wildly round in another fit of despair, and scampers off to a distance of thirty or forty yards. Here he remains a while, eyeing the tree, the very picture of misery; but the next moment, receiving, as it were, a flash of inspiration, he rushes again towards it, and clasping both arms about the trunk, with one elevated a little above the other, he presses the soles of his feet close together against the tree, extending his legs from it until they are nearly horizontal, and his body becomes doubled into an arch; then, hand over hand and foot after foot he rises from the earth with steady rapidity, and almost before you are aware of it, has gained the cradled and embowered nest of nuts, and with boisterous glee flings the fruit to the ground.” Imagine this spontaneous gesture applied to the telling of a story, every incident of which gives rise to gesture. But the gesture in the story-recital was not merely spontaneous; it was trained, as was the gesture in the hula or Polynesian ballet. Dr. Nathaniel Emerson has a chapter on gesture in his Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, and he gives this instance amongst others: “To indicate death, the death of a person, the finger-tips, placed in apposition, are drawn away from each other with a sweeping gesture and at the same time lowered till the palms face the ground. In this case also we find diversity. One old man, well acquainted with hula matters, being asked to signify in pantomimic fashion ‘The king is sick,’ went through the following motions: He first pointed upward, to indicate the heaven-born one, the king; then he brought his hands to his body and threw his face into a painful grimace. To indicate the death of the king he threw his hands upward towards the sky, as if to signify a removal by flight.”

This unconstrained, dramatic gesture is being lost. There is no longer a school for gesture in the hula. And the Hawaiian is checking his movements towards gesture. It used to be said: “Tie an Hawaiian’s hands and he can’t talk.” The older men and women still have that wonderful command of their features and their hands—a command that made them the greatest ballet-performers that the world, I believe, has ever had—but the younger generation feel that to use gesture is to be rustic, to be “Kanaka.”.

There is still, amongst the Hawaiians who live in the old Polynesian way, in villages along the beaches, with the taro patches near, a great treasury of poetry and native lore. But the newspaper and the victrola are taking up the time and the interest that used to be devoted to poetry, traditional games, riddles, and the like. I have been in cottages where the people still sit or lie on their mats on the floor, ignoring tables, chairs, and beds, and where they eat with their fingers, lifting the poi out of the common bowl. In such houses I have found a real scholarship, a delight in poetry, and the possession of such a quantity of it as would put to shame a cultivated American, Englishman, or Frenchman. But even in such houses I was aware that the tradition was passing. Sitting on the floor in one such house, around a petroleum lamp also on the floor, I have spelled out news items in an Hawaiian newspaper that told of the French in the Ruhr and preparations for elections in Ireland.

The world surges in on the Hawaiian Islands. And the Hawaiian can no longer give himself solely to the tradition that bound him to the valleys and the mountains, and that knit him to Wakea and Papa, who begat and brought forth the islands and the men and women upon them. That separate tradition, which for thousands of years he lived by, is being broken up, as the surge breaks up the lava on his coast. The Hawaiian who, at the time when the Americans were making their declaration of independence, was still working with tools of stone, knowing nothing of metals, of pottery, of the loom, and knowing of no animal larger than a dog or a pig, has now to take some account of the continents.

With one exception the titles in this collection cover stories that are Hawaiian in the sense that they were given their shape upon the Hawaiian Islands. That exception is The Seven Great Deeds of Ma-ui. Although the scene of the demi-god’s adventures is Hawaiian, I have used incidents related of him in other Polynesian islands—in New Zealand, Samoa, and the lesser islands. I have treated Ma-ui, not as an Hawaiian, but as the Pan-Polynesian hero that he is. With this exception the stories are all out of the Hawaiian tradition, or rather out of the Polynesian tradition as it has been shaped in Hawaii.

And the stories are mainly taken from that treasure house of Hawaiian lore, the Fornander Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-lore, which form Volumes IV–VI of the Memoirs of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Honolulu, published 1916–1919. I have gone outside the Fornander Collection in several instances. The Seven Great Deeds of Ma-ui comes out of Mr. Westervelt’s valuable book, Ma-ui the Demi-God; the stories of the Me-ne-hu-ne come out of Mr. Thrum’s Stories of the Menehunes and Mr. Rice’s Hawaiian Legends; and I have drawn the story about Hina, the Woman of Lalo-hana, from David Malo’s Hawaiian Antiquities, and the story about the Shark-god from an old publication of the Islands, The Maile Quarterly. But it is the Fornander Collection that has given a cast to this book, and I must now give a brief account of it.

Abraham Fornander, the author of The Polynesian Race, lived on the Islands for over forty years. He edited a journal called The Polynesian, and he was Superintendent of Public Instruction on the Islands in 1865–1866. He had married an Hawaiian lady, and he was a strong partisan of the native race.

The theory which he expounds in The Polynesian Race is that the Polynesian people carried with them into the islands of the Pacific a culture and a set of ideas that connect them with the East Indians—with the pre-Sanscrit culture and with an Arabian culture that touched both the Hebrews and the East Indians. There is no reason to take this theory into account now. The important thing is that Abraham Fornander, in order to substantiate it, made an appeal to the traditions that were then current amongst the natives of Hawaii.

At that time, over forty years ago, there was considerable native scholarship. Haleole, who made an attempt to found a native literature with his romance Laieikawai, was writing and publishing. The Mission School in Lahainaluna on the Island of Maui had become a sort of Hawaiian university. Abraham Fornander had the good sense to appeal to native scholars, and he was able to get the best of them to interest themselves in his project of collecting all the native lore that could throw a light on the migrations of the Polynesian people. The Hawaiian monarchy was then in undisputed existence; native institutions were still vigorous; everywhere there were men and women whose memories were stocked with the historical traditions and the romances of Hawaii.

With the help of a corps of native scholars a great deal of the surviving tradition of Hawaii was collected by Fornander. Some of it was published in the Hawaiian newspapers of the time, but no extensive publication was given to it. The manuscripts were kept together; then, on the death of Abraham Fornander in 1887, the collection was acquired by Charles R. Bishop, the husband of Bernice Pauahi, an Hawaiian royalty whose estate went to the foundation of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History in Honolulu.

Forty years after it had been got together, the publication of the material was begun by the Bishop Museum. That was in 1916. The volumes have appeared under the editorship of that veteran Hawaiian scholar, Mr. Thomas Thrum, with the Hawaiian text on one page and the English translation by Mr. John Wise on the other. It is Mr. Wise’s translations that have furnished me with the bulk of the material for this book.

Although the stories are described in the Museum publications as folk-lore, I doubted from the time of my first reading of them that they were folk-lore in the strict sense of the word; that is, I doubted their coming out of an unlearned and popular tradition. The greater number of them seemed to me to be deliberate compositions intended for a rather select audience. And then I found that a great master of Hawaiian tradition, Mr. William Hyde Rice, favored this opinion. In the Introduction to his Hawaiian Legends [4] it is said:

Mr. Rice’s theory as to the origin of these legends is based on the
fact that in the old days, before the discovery of the Islands by
Captain Cook, there were bards and story-tellers, either itinerant
or attached to the courts of the chiefs, similar to the minstrels
and tale-tellers of mediæval Europe. These men formed a distinct
class, and lived only at the courts of the high chiefs.
Accordingly, their stories were heard by none except those people
attached to the service of the chiefs. This accounts for the loss
of many legends, in later years, as they were not commonly known.
These bards or story-tellers sometimes used historical incidents or
natural phenomena for the foundation of their stories, which were
handed down from generation to generation. Other legends were
simply fabrications of the imagination, in which the greatest
“teller of tales” was awarded the highest place in the chief’s
favor. All these elements, fiction combined with fact, and shrouded
in the mist of antiquity, came, by repetition, to be more or less
believed as true. This class of men were skillful in the art of the
“apo”—that is, “catching,” literally, or memorizing instantly at
the first hearing. One man would recite or chant for two or three
hours at a stretch, and when he had finished, his auditor would
start at the beginning of the chant and go through the whole mele
or story without missing or changing a word. These trained men
received through their ears as we receive through our eyes, and in
that way the ancient Hawaiians had a spoken literature much as we
have a written one.

And as to the substance of this spoken literature, Miss Martha Warren Beckwith, who has made by her edition of Haleole’s romance of Laieikawai a valuable contribution to the knowledge of Polynesian poetry and romance, states that the traditional Hawaiian romance belongs to no isolated group but to the whole Polynesian area. “We find,” she says, “the same story told in New Zealand and Hawaii, scarcely changed, even in name.” Miss Beckwith thinks that the bulk of Hawaiian romance consists of stories about the demi-gods—beings descended from the gods, or adopted or endowed by them. These legendary tales reflect actual Polynesian conditions—“Gods and men are, in fact, to the Polynesian mind, one family under different forms, the gods having superior control over certain phenomena, a control which they can impart to their offspring on earth.... The supernatural blends with the natural in exactly the same way as to the Polynesian mind gods relate themselves to men, facts about one being regarded as, even though removed to the heavens, quite as objective as those which belong to the other, and being employed to explain social customs and physical appearances in actual experience.”

The bulk of the stories in the present volume are founded, then, on Polynesian literature rather than on Polynesian folk-lore. They are based on the compositions of men who were trained in the handling of character and incident. There are stories in the volume that obviously belong to folk-lore, however. The stories of the Me-ne-hu-ne, which are not given in the Fornander Collection, but are taken from the work of Mr. Thrum and Mr. Rice, are folk-lore, I believe. The stories of Ma-ui the demi-god are folk-lore, too. The story of Hina coming from the land under the sea, and the other story of her going to the moon and becoming the woman in the moon, undoubtedly belong to Polynesian folk-lore.

I do not believe that the Polynesian language, with its sounds that seem to belong to the forest and the sea, is going or that it has to go. Indeed, there may be a Polynesian revival similar to the national revivals which we have seen in European countries; the Polynesian, with tragic exceptions in the case of the people of the Marquesas, is coming back. He has turned the corner; our diseases no longer threaten his very existence. And yet, although his language and parts of his culture will probably remain for many generations, his children, if they are in the American territory of Hawaii, and if they are to read the romances of old Hawaii, will have to read them in English. For them, and for the neo-Hawaiian children—the children of American, British, Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese parents, mixed or unmixed with Hawaiian blood—these stories have been reshaped. I have had to condense, expand, heighten, subdue, rearrange—in a word, I have had to retell the stories, using the old romances as material for wonder-stories. The old stories were not for children; they gave an image of life to kings and soldiers, to courtiers and to ruling women. As in all stories not originally intended for children, much has had to be suppressed in retelling them for a youthful audience.

And retelling them has meant that I have had to find a new form for the stories. The form that I choose to give them is that of the European folk-tale.

In Hawaiian romance there is a feeling that is rare in any body of popular European romance—a feeling for the beauty of nature, for flowers and trees, the aspect of the clouds, the look of the sea, the sight of mountains, for the beauty of the rainbow and the waterfall. And part of the delight in retelling these stories is in recalling the beauties of places that are beautifully named. To be true in any measure to the originals these stories of my retelling should have in them the rainbow and the waterfall, the volcano, the forest, the surf as it foams over the reef of coral. In the hula or Hawaiian ballet, and in the poetry that is related to the hula, there is, as Dr. Nathaniel Emerson has observed, always an idyllic feeling. This idyllic feeling pervades Hawaiian romance also. The scene of many of the stories, when not laid in lands that are frankly mythical, is laid in an Hawaiian Arcadia. And how memorable these lands are!—Ku-ai-he-lani, the Country that Supports the Heavens, and Pali-uli, the easeful land that the gods have since hidden. Who would not roam through these lands with those who first told of them and who first heard of them—the gracious and vivid children of Wakea and Papa?

PADRAIC COLUM.

THE BOY PU-NIA AND THE KING OF THE SHARKS.

On one side of the Island there lived a great shark: Kai-ale-ale he was named; he was the King of the Sharks of that place, and he had ten sharks under him. He lived near a cave that was filled with lobsters. But no one dared to dive down, and go into that cave, and take lobsters out of it, on account of Kai-ale-ale and the ten sharks he had under him; they stayed around the cave night and day, and if a diver ventured near they would bite him and devour him.

There was a boy named Pu-nia, whose father had been killed by the sharks. Now after his father had been killed, there was no one to catch fish for Pu-nia and his mother; they had sweet potatoes to eat, but they never had any fish to eat with them. Often Pu-nia heard his mother say that she wished she had a fish or lobster to eat with the sweet potatoes. He made up his mind that they should have lobsters.

He came above the cave where the lobsters were. Looking down he saw the sharks—Kai-ale-ale and his ten sharks; they were all asleep. While he was watching them, they wakened up. Pu-nia pretended that he did not know that the sharks had wakened. He spoke loudly so that they would hear him, and he said: “Here am I, Pu-nia, and I am going into the cave to get lobsters for myself and my mother. That great shark, Kai-ale-ale, is asleep now, and I can dive to the point over there, and then go into the cave; I will take two lobsters in my hands, and my mother and I will have something to eat with our sweet potatoes.” So Pu-nia said, speaking loudly and pretending that he thought the sharks were still asleep.

Said Kai-ale-ale, speaking softly to the other sharks: “Let us rush to the place where Pu-nia dives, and let us devour him as we devoured his father.” But Pu-nia was a very cunning boy and not at all the sort that could be caught by the stupid sharks. He had a stone upon his hand while he was speaking, and he flung it towards the point that he said he was going to dive to. Just as soon as the stone struck the water the sharks made a rush to the place, leaving the cave of the lobsters unguarded. Then Pu-nia dived. He went into the cave, took two lobsters in his hands, and came up on the place that he had spoken from before.

He shouted down to the sharks: “Here is Pu-nia, and he has come back safely. He has two lobsters, and he and his mother have something to live on. It was the first shark, the second shark, the third shark, the fourth shark, the fifth shark, the sixth shark, the seventh shark, the eighth shark, the ninth shark, the tenth shark—it was the tenth shark, the one with the thin tail, that showed Pu-nia what to do.”

When the King of the Sharks, Kai-ale-ale, heard this from Pu-nia, he ordered all the sharks to come together and stay in a row. He counted them, and there were ten of them, and the tenth one had a thin tail. “So it was you, Thin Tail,” he said, “that told the boy Pu-nia what to do. You shall die.” Then, according to the orders of Kai-ale-ale, the thin-tailed shark was killed. Pu-nia called out to them, “You have killed one of your own kind.” With the two lobsters in his hands, he went back to his mother’s.

Pu-nia and his mother now had something to eat with their sweet potatoes. And when the lobsters were all eaten, Pu-nia went back to the place above the cave. He called out, the same as he had done the first time: “I can dive to the place over there and then slip into the cave, for the sharks are all asleep; I can get two lobsters for myself and my mother, so that we’ll have something to eat with our sweet potatoes.” Then he threw down a stone and made ready to dive to another point.

When the stone struck the water the sharks rushed over, leaving the cave unguarded. Then Pu-nia dived down and went into the cave. He took two lobsters in his hands and got back to the top of the water, and when he got to the place that he had spoken from before, he shouted down to the sharks: “It was the first shark, the second shark, the third shark, the fourth shark, the fifth shark, the sixth shark, the seventh shark, the eighth shark, the ninth shark—it was the ninth shark, the one with the big stomach, that told Pu-nia what to do.”

Then the King of the Sharks, Kai-ale-ale, ordered the sharks to get into a line. He counted them, and he found that the ninth shark had a big stomach. “So it was you that told Pu-nia what to do,” he said; and he ordered the big-stomached shark to be killed. After that Pu-nia went home with his two lobsters, and he and his mother had something to eat with their sweet potatoes.

Pu-nia continued to do this. He would deceive the sharks by throwing a stone to the place that he said he was going to dive to; when he got the sharks away from the cave, he would dive down, slip in, and take two lobsters in his hands. And always, when he got to the top of the water, he would name a shark. “The first shark, the second shark, the third shark—the shark with the little eye, the shark with the grey spot on him—told Pu-nia what to do,” he would say; and each time he would get one of the sharks killed. He kept on doing this until only one of the sharks was left; this one was Kai-ale-ale, the King of the Sharks.

After that, Pu-nia went into the forest; he hewed out two hard pieces of wood, each about a yard long; then he took sticks for lighting a fire—the au-li-ma to rub with, and the au-na-ki to rub on; he got charcoal to burn as a fire, and he got food. He put all into a bag, and he carried the bag down to the beach. He came above the cave that Kai-ale-ale was watching, and he said, speaking in a loud voice: “If I dive now, and if Kai-ale-ale bites me, my blood will come to the top of the water, and my mother will see the blood and will bring me back to life again. But if I dive down and Kai-ale-ale takes me into his mouth whole, I shall die and never come back to life again.” Kai-ale-ale was listening, of course. He said to himself: “No, I will not bite you, you cunning boy; I will take you into my mouth and swallow you whole, and then you will never come back to life again. I shall open my mouth wide enough to take you in. Yes, indeed, this time I will get you.”

Pu-nia dived, holding his bag. Kai-ale-ale opened his mouth wide and got Pu-nia into it. But as soon as the boy got within, he opened his bag and took out the two pieces of wood which he had hewn out in the forest. He put them between the jaws of the shark so that Kai-ale-ale was not able to close his jaws. With his mouth held open, Kai-ale-ale went dashing through the water.

Pu-nia was now inside the big shark; he took the fire-sticks out of his bag and rubbed them together, making a fire. He kindled the charcoal that he had brought, and he cooked his food at the fire that he had made. With the fire in his insides, the shark could not keep still; he went dashing here and there through the ocean.

At last the shark came near the Island of Hawaii again. “If he brings me near the breakers, I am saved,” said Pu-nia, speaking aloud; “but if he takes me to the sand near where the grass grows, I shall die; I cannot be saved.” Kai-ale-ale, when he heard Pu-nia say this, said to himself: “I will not take him near the breakers; I will take him where the dry sand is, near the grass.” Saying this, he dashed in from the ocean and up to where the shrubs grew on the shore. No shark had ever gone there before; and when Kai-ale-ale got there, he could not get back again.

Then Pu-nia came out of the shark. He shouted out, “Kai-ale-ale, Kai-ale-ale, the King of the Sharks, has come to visit us.” And the people, hearing about their enemy Kai-ale-ale, came down to the shore with their spears and their knives and killed him. And that was the end of the ugly and wicked King of the Sharks.

Every day after that, Pu-nia was able to go down into the cave and get lobsters for himself and his mother. And all the people rejoiced when they knew that the eleven sharks that guarded the cave had been got rid of by the boy Pu-nia.

THE SEVEN GREAT DEEDS OF MA-UI.

There is no hero who is more famous than Ma-ui. In all the Islands of the Great Ocean, from Kahiki-mo-e to Hawaii nei, his name and his deeds are spoken of. His deeds were many, but seven of them were very great, and it is about those seven great deeds that I shall tell you.

HOW MA-UI WON A PLACE FOR HIMSELF IN THE HOUSE.

When Ma-ui, the last of her five sons, was born, his mother thought she would have no food for him. So she took him down to the shore of the sea, she cut off her hair and tied it around him, and she gave him to the waves. But Ma-ui was not drowned in the sea: first of all the jelly-fish came; it folded him in its softness, and it kept him warm while he floated on. And then the God of the Sea found the child and took charge of him: he brought him to his house and warmed and cherished him, and little Ma-ui grew up in the land where lived the God of the Sea.

But while he was still a boy he went back to his mother’s country. He saw his mother and his four brothers, and he followed them into a house; it was a house that all the people of the country were going into. He sat there with his brothers. And when his mother called her children to take them home, she found this strange child with them. She did not know him, and she would not take him with the rest of the children. But Ma-ui followed them. And when his four brothers came out of their own house they found him there, and he played with them. At first they played hide-and-seek, but then they made themselves spears from canes and began throwing the spears at the house.

The slight spears did not go through the thatch of grass that was at the outside of the house. And then Ma-ui made a charm over the cane that was his spear—a charm that toughened it and made it heavy. He flung it again, and a great hole was made in the grass-thatch of the house. His mother came out to chastise the boy and drive him away. But when she stood at the door and saw him standing there so angry, and saw how he was able to break down the house with the throws of his spear, she knew in him the great power that his father had, and she called to him to come into the house. He would not come in until she had laid her hands upon him. When she did this his brothers were jealous that their mother made so much of this strange boy, and they did not want to have him with them. It was then that the elder brother spoke and said, “Never mind; let him be with us and be our dear brother.” And then they all asked him to come into the house.

The door-posts, Short Post and Tall Post, that had been put there to guard the house, would not let him come in. Then Ma-ui lifted up his spear, and he threw it at Tall Post and overthrew him. He threw his spear again and overthrew Short Post. And after that he went into his mother’s house and was with his brothers. The overthrowing of the two posts that guarded the house was the first of the great deeds of Ma-ui.

In those days, say the people who know the stories of the old times, the birds were not seen by the men and women of the Islands. They flew around the houses, and the flutter of their wings was heard, and the stirring of the branches and the leaves as they were lit upon. Then there would be music. But the people who had never seen the birds thought that this was music made by gods who wanted to remain unseen by the people. Ma-ui could see the birds; he rejoiced in their brilliant colors, and when he called to them they would come and rest upon the branches around the place where he was; there they would sing their happiest songs to him.

There was a visitor who came from another land to the country that Ma-ui lived in. He boasted of all the wonderful things that were in his country, and it seemed to the people of Ma-ui’s land that they had nothing that was fine or that could be spoken about. Then Ma-ui called to the birds. They came and they made music on every side. The visitor who had boasted so much was made to wonder, and he said that there was nothing in his country that was so marvellous as the music made by Ma-ui’s friends, the birds.

Then, that they might be honored by all, Ma-ui said a charm by which the birds came to be seen by men—the red birds, the i-i-wi and the aha-hani, and the yellow birds, the o-o and the mamo, and all the other bright birds. The delight of seeing them was equal to the delight of hearing the music that they made. Ever afterwards the birds were seen and heard, and the people all rejoiced in them. This Ma-ui did when he was still a boy growing up with his brothers and with his sister in his mother’s house. But this is not counted amongst the great deeds of Ma-ui the hero.

HOW MA-UI LIFTED UP THE SKY.

Then he lifted up the sky to where it is now. This was the second of Ma-ui’s great deeds.

When he was growing up in his mother’s house the sky was so low that the trees touched it and had their leaves flattened out. Men and women burned with the heat because the sky was so near to them. The clouds were so close that there was much darkness on the earth. Something had to be done about it, and Ma-ui made up his mind that he would lift up the sky.

Somewhere he got a mark tattooed on his arm that was a magic mark and that gave him great strength. Then he went to lift up the sky. And from some woman he got a drink that made his strength greater. “Give me to drink out of your gourd,” he said, “and I will push up the sky.” The woman gave him her gourd to drink from. Then Ma-ui pushed at the sky. He lifted it high, to where the trees have their tops now. He pushed at it again, and he put it where the mountains have their tops now. And then he pushed it to where it rests, on the tops of the highest mountains.

Then the men and women were able to walk about all over the earth, and they had light now and clear air. The trees grew higher and higher, and they grew more and more fruit. But even to this day their leaves are flattened out: it is from the time when their leaves were flattened against the sky.

When the sky was lifted up Ma-ui went and made a kite for himself. From his mother he got the largest and strongest piece of tapa-cloth she had ever made, and he formed it into a kite with a frame and cross-sticks of hau wood. The tail of the kite was fifteen fathoms long, and he got a line of olona vine for it that was twenty times forty fathoms in length. He started the kite. But it rose very slowly; the wind barely held it up.

Then the people said: “Look at Ma-ui! He lifted the sky up, and now he can’t fly a kite.” Ma-ui was made angry when he heard them say this: he drew the kite this way and that way, but still he was not able to make it rise up. He cried out his incantation—

“Strong wind, come;
Soft wind, come”—

but still the kite would not rise.

Then he remembered that in the Valley of Wai-pio there was a wizard who had control of the winds. Over the mountains and down into the valley Ma-ui went. He saw the calabash that the wizard kept the winds in, and he asked him to loose them and direct them to blow along the river to the place where he was going to fly his kite. Then Ma-ui went back. He stood with his feet upon the rocks along the bank of the Wai-lu-ku River; he stood there braced to hold his kite, and where he stood are the marks of his feet to this day. He called out:

“O winds, winds of Wai-pio,
Come from the calabash—‘the Calabash of perpetual winds.’
O wind, O wind of Hilo,
Come quickly; come with power.”

The call that Ma-ui gave went across the mountains and down into the valley of Wai-pio. No sooner did he hear it than the wizard opened his calabash. The winds rushed out. They went into the bay of Hilo, and they dashed themselves against the water. The call of Ma-ui came to them:

“O winds, winds of Hilo,
Hurry, hurry and come to me.”

The winds turned from the sea. They rushed along the river. They came to where Ma-ui stood, and then they saw the great, strange bird that he held.

They wanted to fall upon that bird and dash it up against the sky. But the great kite was strong. The winds flung it up and flung it this way and that way. But they could not carry it off or dash it against the sky as they wanted to.

Ma-ui rejoiced. How grand it was to hold a kite that the winds strove to tear away! He called out again:

“O winds, O winds of Hilo,
Come to the mountains, come.”

Then came the west wind that had been dashing up waves in the bay of Hilo. It joined itself with the north wind and the east wind, the two winds that had been tearing and pushing at Ma-ui’s kite. Now, although the kite was made of the strongest tapa, and although it had been strengthened in every cunning way that Ma-ui knew, it was flung here and flung there. Ma-ui let his line out; the kite was borne up and up and above the mountains. And now he cried out to the kite that he had made:

“Climb up, climb up
To the highest level of the heavens,
To all the sides of the heavens.
Climb thou to thy ancestor,
To the sacred bird in the heavens.”

The three winds joined together, and now they made a fiercer attack upon Ma-ui’s kite. The winds tore and tossed it. Then the line broke in Ma-ui’s hands.

The winds flung the kite across the mountains. And then, to punish it for having dared to face the heavens, they rammed it down into the volcano, and stirred up the fires against it.

Then Ma-ui made for himself another kite. He flew it, and rejoiced in the flying of it, and all who saw him wondered at how high his kite went and how gracefully it bore itself in the heavens. But never again did he call upon the great winds to help him in his sport. Sometimes he would fasten his line to the black stones in the bed of the Wai-lu-ku River, and he would let the kite soar upward and range here and there. He knew by watching his soaring kite whether it would be dry and pleasant weather, and he showed his neighbors how they might know it. “Eh, neighbor,” one would say to another, “it is going to be dry weather; look how Ma-ui’s kite keeps in the sky.” They knew that they could go to the fields to work and spread out their tapa to dry, for as long as the kite soared the rain would not fall.

Ma-ui learned what a strong pull the fierce winds had. He used to bring his kite with him when he went out on the ocean in his canoe. He would let it free; then, fastening his line to the canoe, he would let the wind that pulled the kite pull him along. By flying his kite he learned how to go more swiftly over the ocean in his canoe, and how to make further voyages than ever a man made before.

Nevertheless, his kite-flying is not counted amongst the great deeds of Ma-ui.

HOW MA-UI FISHED UP THE GREAT ISLAND.

Now, although Ma-ui had done deeds as great as these, he was not thought so very much of in his own house. His brothers complained that when he went fishing with them he caught no fish, or, if he drew one up, it was a fish that had been taken on a hook belonging to one of them, and that Ma-ui had managed to get tangled on to his own line. And yet Ma-ui had invented many things that his brothers made use of. At first they had spears with smooth heads on them: if they struck a bird, the bird was often able to flutter away, drawing from the spear-head that had pierced a wing. And if they struck through a fish, the fish was often able to wriggle away. Then Ma-ui put barbs upon his spear, and his spear-head held the birds and the fish. His brothers copied the spear-head that he made, and after that they were able to kill and secure more birds and fish than ever before.

He made many things that they copied, and yet his brothers thought him a lazy and a shiftless fellow, and they made their mother think the same about him. They were the better fishermen—that was true; indeed, if there were no one but Ma-ui to go fishing, Hina-of-the-Fire, his mother, and Hina-of-the-Sea, his sister, would often go hungry.

At last Ma-ui made up his mind to do some wonderful fishing; he might not be able to catch the fine fish that his brothers desired—the u-lua and the pi-mo-e—but he would take up something from the bottom of the sea that would make his brothers forget that he was the lazy and the shiftless one.

He had to make many plans and go on many adventures before he was ready for this great fishing. First he had to get a fish-hook that was different from any fish-hook that had ever been in the world before. In those days fish-hooks were made out of bones—there was nothing else to make fish-hooks out of—and Ma-ui would have to get a wonderful bone to form into a hook. He went down into the underworld to get that bone.