A tohunga is an expert practitioner of any skill or art, such as priests, healers, carvers, advisors.
The Tohunga Who Was Marooned
A Legend of White Island
Told by Hurinui Apanui, the old chief of Ngati-Awa
Out yonder on the plain, near by the present road that goes inland parallel with the river to Taneatua and Ruatoki, there lived some generations ago the wise old man Te Tahi o Te Rangi (The First of the Heavens). He was a man learned in all occult matters, a wonder-worker and magician, a healer of the sick, and, if need be, a slayer of man by mystic rites. He was a tohunga like that famous magician Tuhoto, whose secret appeal to the spirits of the underworld caused the Tarawera eruption. But he was not nearly so old as that ancient man when the great deed of his life was performed. He was grey and grim in appearance, yet were his physical powers not abated; and as for his mind, he was capable of performing the most amazing things by the projection of his will-force through space. The ordinary people dreaded Te Tahi; they beheld in him a power which could lay the evil eye on them, slay them by dreadful withering ways or by awful pains which would kill them in a night. The mothers called their little children in to them when they beheld the tohunga passing.
The wise man lived alone in a small raupo-reed house, near a peculiar great lone rock, a grey toka about ten feet high, which stood by the trail-side. You may see it now, this rock, which is called Te-Toka-a Houmea. It is in a wire-fenced paddock close to the road, on the right-hand side as you go, a short distance out of the town on the way to Taneatua. Flax-plants grew in the crevices of the rock; like the big boulder they were tapu, and the tohunga used them in his sacred rites. The rock was his tuahu, his altar of incantations, divination and sacrifice to the gods. No man knows what secret, man-slaying ceremonies went on in the shadow of that grey old stone of power.
The people among whom Te Tahi lived at last took secret council, because of their dislike of the tohunga, and resolved to be rid of his presence. They feared to shed his blood, but they could dispose of him without violence. So this was the scheme they devised. They planned a canoe expedition to Whakaari, the island-volcano out yonder in the Bay of Plenty, the ever-smoking, steaming, quivering island of the ahi-tipua, the enchanted fires; the volcano which the pakeha calls White Island. They gave out that they were going for the capture of mutton-birds, the sooty petrels titi and oii which live and breed in the cliffs on the outer rim of Whakaari. They prepared their canoes, large seagoing craft with high well-caulked topsides; they laid in their stores of food and water, for there is no drinking water on sulphurous Whakaari; and when all was ready they invited Te Tahi o Te Rangi to join them, as the tohunga of the expedition, to carry out the ceremonies when the first of the titi were taken, and the rites necessary for safety at sea.
And so, with the tohunga sitting in the place of honour in the stern of the largest canoe, off went the flotilla, out through the tidal channel to the river-mouth, with a hundred paddles dipping and flashing to the time of a great canoe-chant; then up went the raupo and woven-flax sails, lifting the narrow vessels northward over the long easy roll of the sea.
The canoes made Whakaari late in the afternoon, and the crews toiled hard, hauling the craft well up on the beach and making them fast against any possible heavy seas. Then the fowling expedition, having left some men to look after the canoes, set out in quest of the titi. The hunters divided into parties, and it happened that several of the principal men decided to make round along the cliffs to the north-east side of the island, and with them was Te Tahi. The tohunga and his companions, with a slave bearing a flax basket of food and taha or calabashes of water, travelled carefully, but nevertheless with some speed, along the cliff, where stunted pohutukawa trees grew and often offered hand-hold in steep places. By dark they had reached a place where there was a shallow cave in the mountain side, with the sea bellowing far below. They kindled torches, they sought about for the burrows in which the titi live, in the soft crumbling soil of the steam-sodden isle; they made up their catches of the strong-smelling petrel in readiness for carrying to the canoe bay in the morning; and then they rested for the night. Te Tahi, too, had taken his birds, but, as was needful, he set them apart from the others. And, being weary, he slept long and soundly.
Te Tahi was awakened by the warm sunlight streaming into his cave shelter. In a moment he was on his feet; something was wrong. A glance told him the truth. He was deserted. His companions were not in sight. He scrambled along the cliff; he toiled back along the perilous paths. At last he came in sight of the bay and the beach. The canoes were gone.
There they were, out on the ocean, that blazed under the morning sun like a great burnished undulating plate. They were flying-through the water under the driving impulse of two hundred strong arms; the treacherous chiefs Te Tahi could see, balanced amidships; he could almost hear their time-song, the measured “Rité, ko te rité, hukeré, ka hukeré!” He was alone on the desert isle, the island of terror, which he felt even now quaking under his feet, while from the hollow heart of it, where the boiling lake lashed its yellow banks, there came an awful never-ceasing roar, the horrible voice of Ruaimoko's steam fiends. Not even a drop of water did he have, for his cruel enemies had taken the calabashes with them. It was death to remain on that island of horrors, with its poison-waters.
But the tohunga was not without resource in even this dread extremity. A signal-fire, for haply, other canoes, other tribes on the mainland? Useless thought—who could distinguish a fire or a smoke signal on this place of a thousand steam clouds? Te Tahi had other ways. Was he not a god in himself?
About his waist the tohunga wore a girdle consisting of three green blades of flax intertwined. This, though his companions had known it not, was his potent talisman, a thing of sacred mana. He had plucked those leaves from the heart of the tapu flaxbush that grew in the weathered cleft of Te Toka-a-Houmea. Taking off the belt and untwisting the leaves, he waved it on high as he stood on the edge of the promontory, and in high quick tones he cried his appeal to the gods of the sea. He invoked Tangaroa and his creatures of the great deep, he called on the magic name of Tutara-Kauika, he recited the ancient charms, the rhythmic chants to the spirits of ocean.
And behold, the call was answered. A huge black shining shape broke water but a short distance out in the bay, a great sperm whale. From its spiracle it blew a geyser-spout of vapour with the hissing roar of one of those steam pipes on Whakaari. A little rainbow arched its head, in the misty spray of the spout jet. It raised its powerful tail and swept the flukes down and beat the water with a noise that could have been heard a mile away. The sea boiled about it with the commotion of its mighty salute to the magician who stood on the cliff-top.
Te Tahi o Te Rangi quickly descended to the beach. He swam out; it was but a little way, for the island shore was steep-to; Whakaari is just the shell of a precipitous mountain-top. It was Tutara-Kauika himself, the king of all the whales, that had answered his call. He touched the monster's side, and as he did so Tutara-Kauika gently sank; he submerged himself just under the tohunga, and rose with the man of magic seated safely on his back, in the little hollow which all taniwha have, for the special purpose of carrying those who need their aid.
And straightway the enchanted sperm whale turned about and headed southward for the distant shore, its steering mark the purple double hump of Moutohora or Whale Island, standing sentry off Whakatane harbour mouth. And as the tohunga, so strangely saved from the island of terrors, looked about him, he saw another whale appear. It was Tutara-Kauika's attendant. It took its place astern and followed in the white wake left by the swiftly moving monster.
The sails of the canoes were in sight. Tutara-Kauika sped with a movement amazingly swift, yet amazingly smooth, through the gently-heaving blue. Now the red hulls of the canoes were seen. The taniwha flew on, with a white wave spreading away on either side from his cliff-like head, rising like a black island above the foam.
The tohunga rose, he flourished his whale-bone meré in one hand, his three magic flax blades in the other. He chanted a high pealing war-song, the Maro-o-Whakatau, he beat time as though he were directing the paddles of a great canoe. The monster and his chanting chief shot past the canoes, and it was but a little while before he came to the mouth of Whakatane Harbour. And there Tutara-Kauika's mission ended. He stopped; the tohunga, reciting a thanksgiving karakia, dropped from the whale's back and swam to a near-by rock, which is known as Rukupo. The taniwha and his attendant turned about and sped northward across the Bay; sounding when they reached deep waters and rising again, and spouting at regular intervals as they went.
The tohunga, leaving Rukupo rock, swam up the Whakatane estuary and landed on the beach, near where this house “Wairaka” stands. Thence he travelled leisurely inland to his own abode. And, after a long space, when he knew that the treacherous crews would be approaching from the canoe landing, he went to his sacred rock of power, and there, by the side of Toka-a-Houmea, his magic flax blades in his hands, he was sitting, regarding them with grim, silent triumph, when the men filed past along the trail. Not a word spoke they; their hearts were filled with shame and fear.
And Te Tahi o Te Rangi stayed not much longer in this land of his deceitful tribespeople. He cast the earth of the place behind him; he travelled to distant parts. He settled himself at last at Matatâa, by the coast yonder, at the mouth of the Awa-a-te-Atua. There, with the smoking isle on which he had been marooned ever before his eyes, out across the Bay, he lived the rest of his years, and died. And when he died his spirit entered into the great deep. He became a sea-god, a maraki-hau, such as is pictured on our carved houses. And it may be that if I, Hurinui, were in trouble on the sea, and were in peril of drowning, he, or his whale-god, Tutara-Kauika, would come to my aid and lift my head up above the ocean, and bear me to the land as Te Tahi was borne in the days when he was a man of this world.