TWO PERIODS OF MAORI LIFE 53 



A preliminary word may perhaps now also be said as to the 

 seeming redundancy in coming chapters of seemingly irrelevant 

 names. Time to the Maori was of no account : every incident in 

 a story was to be fully given, no detail was to be omitted. Never, 

 therefore, must the reader be tempted to exclaim it would not be 

 tiJca, it would not be correct What do the names of Te Amohia's 

 two cronies, Mohu and Whangawehi I give both on principle in 

 her escape after the captivity of Tauranga - Koau, matter? What 

 does it avail to know that Tataramoa was the father and Porangi 

 the mother of the damsel Tukanoi all of them, by the way, 

 descendants of Kohipipi in her love affair with the gallant, the gay, 

 the red-headed Te-Whatu-i-Apiti ? Why, it just matters everything; 

 for after that fashion for ages have these stories been transmitted. 

 It is proper, therefore, that in that exact shape they shall be 

 crystalised in print. 



It may be well now also to emphasise the anglification of place- 

 and personal names during the brief space when heathendom and 

 Christianity still divided the allegiance of the tribes. During that 

 twilight interval it was that Te - wai - o - hinganga, for example, was 

 changed into Bethany or since there is neither B nor Y nor TH in 

 the Maori alphabet into Petane. Under the same scheme of things 

 Te - Iwi - Whati, the grandfather of a friend who has done yeoman 

 service in these chapters, became Abraham Aperahama. Correlative 

 to this change of place- and personal names was another in regard to 

 weapons of offence the musket was supplanting the spear. This 

 same Te-Iwi- Whati, for instance, was desperately hurt by eight heathen 

 spear-thrusts fighting the Urewera at Ngarua-titi. At a later period, 

 missionaryonised into Aperahama Abraham he was no less badly 

 wounded by Christian bullets at Tiekenui, again battling against the 

 Urewera. 



Of several of the lamentations, songs, and lullabies of the 

 gallant hapu whose story I am about to relate, only general renderings 

 into English are given ; the older poems are not properly translatable 

 into another tongue. I have not attempted it. There occur words so 



receive them from, the Maoris. The words must have come directly from Indonesia to New 

 Zealand in a migration which was not that of other Polynesians e.g., Samoans or Tongans. 

 These received their share of Indonesian speech from other places and at other times. Hawaiki 

 and Pulotu may stand for different origins, both possibly within the Eastern Ocean." 



