CorrNso.—On the Moa. 88 
I cannot possibly tell a lie in this matter to thee (emphatic), and say, I saw, 
or I heard of it. Those men of olden time, as I have said, never saw* the 
Moa—that is, its body, its size, its length, its height, its feathers—never 
once. No man ever heard of the taste of its flesh, and of its appearance ; 
or of its fat, or its skin, or its being sweet or bitter to the taste.! For if, 
indeed, those men of old had known anything of the Moa, they would have 
left that knowledge to be talked of and handed down to the men of after 
times. But inasmuch as those men of the olden time did not know, there- 
fore it is most certain that these men who came after them did not know 
also. Again: you enquire, ‘How is it that the Maoris of to-day know these 
bones which they see to be of the Moa ?' According to my way of thinking, 
our old ancestors saw those said bones and called them so, and thus it is 
that we now know them to be such. But no man of old knew anything 
more of them, so that they knew it (as) food, or the real living appearance 
of its bones (when clothed with flesh), which are now seen by us bigger than 
those of a horse! Hawea also says, No man of old before the time of 
Wahotapaturangi knew anything of the food of the Moa, or of its habitat. 
This phrase, * the air-eating Moa '(—te Moa kaihau), is only a common pro- 
verbial saying among us; it is often applied to a man; à man-moa is such- 
a-one who turns away from his food and lives on air. Again, with reference 
to the feathers of the Moa, it is said that the feather called the plume of 
Piopio (Te rau-o-piopio) is from the Moa. When the chiefs of the Maoris 
die, then this feather is stuck in their hair, and the body so decorated is 
placed on the raised platform (prepared for it), and the friends and visitors, 
on seeing it, exclaim, ‘Thou art good (or beautiful), O plume of Piopio !' 
Here ends what was said by Hawea and his friends, visitors, about the 
Moa." 
2. (July 4, 1879.) ‘Referring to your further enquiries about the 
feather of the Moa, called the plume of Piopio, Hawea says,—there is no 
known body whence came this feather; the body in which it had been fixed 
was that of the Moa at the mountain Whakapunake ; it was a feather from 
it. It was blown hitherwards by the winds, and, on its being seen, drift- 
ing, it was picked up. When a chief died, that feather was taken and used 
for head decoration while lying on the ornamented stage, or bier; and when 
the corpse was finally borne away, that feather was taken out of the hair 
and preserved for some other chief who should afterwards die. Hawea 
also says that the look of this feather was just like that of the Peacock, 
that it did not differ a bit in its glossiness and variety of colours, in its 
* I believe the true meaning of the verb (kite), here, is—heard of, i.e., knew from 
relation; heard it clearly described. 
+ All this is with especial reference to my many separate enquiries. 
