The Hook That Hauled Up Land

Halvard Nyström
Field Correspondent, The Drowned Coast

Fieldnotes — the Hawke's Bay coast, late winter

A fisherman in Napier told me not to look for a memorial when I asked after the hook. Cape Kidnappers, he said, is not shaped like one. It is one. I drove out along the coast road until the cliffs gave way to that long curling spit of land, and stood there trying to see it the way he meant, as barb rather than headland, as tool rather than geography.

The story, as it is told across the Māori tradition, begins before the hook. Māui was the youngest of his mother Taranga's sons, born early and small enough that she wrapped him in her hair and gave him to the sea. He was raised among ancestors rather than mortals, and it was from one of these, the ancestress Muriranga-whenua, that he obtained the jawbone he made his hook from, some say freely given, some say taken. He baited it with his own blood and let the line down far past any known bottom, and what came up was not a fish so much as a country. Te Ika-a-Māui, the fish of Māui, is the North Island itself. His brothers, told to wait for a priest before touching the catch, could not wait, and their hacking at the flesh is why the land now stands in ridges and valleys instead of lying flat as it was pulled from the water. The canoe he fished from became the South Island, Te Waka o Māui, and its anchor stone became Stewart Island at the very foot of the country.

It is worth saying that the versions disagree, and disagree in ways that matter. Some tellings have Māui's brothers doing the damage out of hunger, others out of fear, others out of simple impatience with a tapu they did not respect. Some place the hook itself in the land afterward, lodged at Cape Kidnappers or, in other tellings, at Māhia. Others send it skyward. In Hawaiian tradition the hook is called Manaiakalani, and its story runs differently again, Māui using it in one telling to try to draw the scattered islands together into a single landmass, breaking the line before the work was finished, which is offered as the reason the islands remain apart. The hook is said to have flown into the heavens after that, and become the curved chain of stars that European charts call Scorpius, known across Hawaii and much of the Pacific as Ka Makau Nui o Māui, the great fishhook of Māui, still visible bending low over the southern sky each winter.

I do not think the disagreement is a flaw in the record. A hook that raised an island, wrecked a canoe's worth of careful work, and ended up nailed into the sky besides, was clearly too useful an object to belong to only one telling. Standing on the cape with the wind coming hard off the Pacific, watching the gannets work the very curve the old men call a barb, it did not feel like a question that needed settling.

Halvard Nyström is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Drowned Coast. The sea north and everything it has taken: wrecks, drowned parishes, bells said to still be audible under water. He approaches each account as a question about tide and sediment first and a ghost story second, without ever quite dismissing the second.