58 • Transactions. 



Eels (Tuna). 



An old Maori said to me that there were three kinds of eels that he 

 knew. The horepara is a light green, with white belly and white underjaw, 

 and is good for eating. The arokehe is a black eel, with big head, strong 

 jaw, thick skin, and does not taste very good^ Owing to the thickness 

 of its skin another name for it is kirirua (" two skins " or " double skin "). 

 The tunwpou is still bigger in the head than the arokehe and tapers to a very 

 small tail. It has the same kind of skin as the kirirua, and is not eaten by 

 the Maori but thrown away when caught. 



All or nearly all fish spawn in salt water, my informant thought, but 

 he was not so sure of eels. Lots of eels are cast up on the bars at the 

 mouths of rivers, and the old Maori would say these were aged breeding- 

 eels, which were done. It was only breeding-eels which came down to 

 the sea and then went back up the river. When they came down to 

 spawn you would not see them unless they were cast up on the beach. 

 This was about June. You could catch them in the rivers from August 

 to May, but not many in the latter month, as it was too cold for them. 

 In the town of Wyndham there is a lagoon called Pipi-a-Manawa, and it 

 is fed by a spring called Matatiki, and he remembered old Tangatahuruhuru 

 telling him this spring was a winter retreat of the tuna (eels). You could 

 see the hole in the ground from which the spring came, and' it was almost 

 blocked with eels in winter, the reason being that spring water is warmer 

 than river water. In the Otu Creek just before it enters the Mataura 

 River there is a > hole which is another winter resort of the eels. They 

 used to congregate thickly in that spot, and if you threw in a stone they 

 would swarm out in great agitation. There was a season for catching 

 everything, continued the old man, but eels could be caught the whole 

 year round in some places, although from a food view the best time to 

 catch them was from Christmas-time to Febn;ary, as the flies were not so 

 bad then, and the eels could be dried {tauraki). Hang them up for three 

 weeks, then put in an umu (earth-oven), cook, and put into a poha (kelp 

 bag), which can be bound with totara bark and flax, and there you have 

 your delicious eel-flesh preserved for an indefinite period. ' 



Eels from the rivers, continued my informant, are not so good as 

 those from the lakes, as the flesh is not so firm. The eels in the lagoons 

 were all right if one just wanted a few eels for daily use, but there were 

 not enough eels in the lagoons, as a rule, to make it worth while to fish 

 for them for preserving purposes. The lakes known to the Maori as 

 Roto-nui-o-Whatu and Kaitiria — but now called by the white settlers Lake 

 Tuakitoto and Lake Kaitangata — ^were great eeling-places, but to be truly 

 successful one had to be careful to say the right karakia (invocations) 

 before starting operations. The eels were usually caught in eel-pots {rohe- 

 waimn), the basket or cage part of which was called hinnki. A smaller 

 kind of eel-pot,, called hinaki-kanakana, was used for catching kanakana 

 (lampreys) ; and, strange to say, eels will not go into this, and, vice versa, 

 kanakana will not go into the ordinary eel-pots. There was one kind of 

 net to catch one size of eel, as a rule, but there was another mesh which 

 could be used to catch all sizes. Eel-pots were sometimes made of flax 

 in the South, as it took a lot of work and manipulation to make them of 

 the toraro vine. 



All the foregoing information was from one man, but I have still three 

 further notes. One man said, " At Manawapore (Upper Mavora Lake) 

 there is a stone eel-trap. Old Rawiri told us, if we went there, to block 



