Beattie. — Nature-lore of the Southern Maori. 73 



" Horeta was the name of the old variety of potatoes which the whalers 

 brought. A black variety was called, I believe, mnngumangu in the North, 

 but we called it tatairaJco in the South. A potato which was veined 

 inside Avas named ropi, while our name for the Derwent was pikaukene.'" 

 I was also told about Te Puoho's raiders reaching Tuturau in 1836 — " It 

 must have been about Christmas, for the early potatoes were just ripe 

 enough to eat and the invaders had a fine feed' after their starvation trip." 



The early settlers in Otago found " Maori cabbage " growing wild. The 

 Maori gave me the name of this as pora, and further said that a kind of 

 turnip had grown wild in Central Otago, their name»for it being kawakaiva. 



One old Maori said, " In 1869 I was eeling at Longford (now Gore) and 

 was engaged to help harvest 30 acres of oats. Among it I saw a jaggy 

 plant and I wondered what it was. It was the first time I had ever seen 

 thistles." 



An old settler tells me the " Maori cabbage " was simply a degenerate 

 swede turnip. The leaves were turnip-leaves ; the body was a thin wiry 

 root and uneatable — it was the leaves which were eaten. From the 

 description of the kawakawa it is surmised to have been kohlrabi growing 

 wild but not yet degenerated. 



Shell-fish. 



I did not get very much information about shell-fish, although we know 

 that, judging by the middens left by the Maori, such were eaten with 

 avidity. The correct name of the Waikaka River, I was told, was Waikakahi, 

 so called because of the number of kakahi, or fresh-water shell-fish, in its 

 waters. The names of salt-water shell-fish are perpetuated in the place- 

 names Hakapupu (in northern dialect Whanga-pupu — " Periwinkle Har- 

 bour ") and Kaipipi (" eat shell-fish " — the kind usually called the cockle). 

 Hakapupu is the Maori name of Pleasant River, near Waikouaiti, and 

 Kaipipi is at Stewart Island. A kind of mussel {kutai) is mentioned in one 

 tradition as furnishing the relish (kinaki) for a cannibal feast. The eating 

 of the j)'^'^'^ or paua (mutton-fish — a univalve) is also mentioned in the 

 history. One of my informants said there was a thread in the limpet 

 (kaki), and this was said to represent the line which Maui was using when 

 he fished the North Island out of the deep. 



One old Maori mentioned oysters, and he thought they had been 

 brought by Captain Howell to Port William, and from there had spread 

 to Foveaux Strait. The story runs that about 1839 Howell brought over 

 some sacks of oysters from Australia as a treat to his men at Riverton, 

 but adverse weather compelled him to toss the sacks overboard off Bluff, 

 and that this was the nucleus of the extensive bed there now." I should 

 like to know if oysters propagate sufficiently fast to render this account 

 feasible. 



Paints and Dyes. 



Looking through my notebooks, I see casual references to paints and 

 dyes, but really so little it is scarcely worth mentioning. One of the old 

 Maori said that some of the people who came on the Arai-te-Uru canoe, 

 about twenty-seven generations ago, were skilled Avorkmen — at cultivating 

 the kumara, at carving, &.c. One in particular brought red paint with 

 him, but in exploring the land he dropped it in the hills east of Lake 

 Kaitangata, and hence those hills are famous to this day for yielding the 

 haematite stone from which the Maori got their red paint. It is said that 



