344 COOK and cook: names of sweet potatoes 



and " water-soaked potatoes" are called kokokooha, koko being 

 the name of the fibers of the leaf-bases of the coconut palm, or 

 a net of braided strings to hold a calabash. One of the Hawai- 

 ian varieties is called Apo, while apoapo means a hill of sweet 

 potatoes, reappearing in New Zealand as apuapu. Other Hawai- 

 ian names for varieties of sweet potatoes mentioned in Andrews' 

 Dictionary are Kahe, Kipawale, and Koloaha. The variety called 

 Kihi is said to be "the ancient potato of Hawaii." 



Some writers have thought that the sweet potato must be a 

 recent acquisition among the Polynesians, because of the many 

 myths and traditions relating to its introduction. But such evi- 

 dence appears to have a different signification when we consider 

 how much the Polynesians were given to family pride and 

 genealogies. To say that one's forefathers came in the canoe 

 that brought the kumara certainly did not mean that the family 

 was recent, but was the Maori way of claiming a Mayflower 

 ancestry. White has given us a detailed account showing how 

 acutely the subject was debated by the Maoris, and the inten- 

 sity of feeling is reflected in the care taken by that author to 

 report the controversy in such a way as to avoid the appearance 

 of taking sides and thus offending some of his native neighbors. 



If weight is to be given to traditions of the introduction of 

 sweet potatoes, account must also be taken of the myths and 

 cosmographies that represent the sweet potato as one of the 

 primeval possessions of the human race, the first plant to be 

 recognized among the heavenly gifts. Thus the Maori pan- 

 theon began with Void (Kore) and Darkness (Po) as the parents 

 of Heaven (Rangi) and Earth (Papa). In the third generation 

 of deities came Tane, god of trees, forests, and birds; Tango- 

 tango, god of day and night; and Wai-nui, the goddess of water. 

 Tane figures as the grandfather of sweet potatoes and the bottle- 

 gourd, the former by his oldest child, the latter by his youngest. 

 The passage treating of the sweet potato is as follows: 



Tane took to wife Hine-rau-a-moa and begat Rongo-ma-Tane, who 

 was the parent, origin, or personification of the kumara (sweet potatoe) 

 and of cultivation and the arts of peace; and Hine-te-iwaiwa, the 

 guardian of motherhood; and Tangaroa, the Polynesian Neptune, who 



