and all the way back …

Waka 59 Elsdon Best

I have begun reading The Maori Canoe.

The detail is gratifying. Discussions

of the double canoe, the single canoe

with outrigger,

the single canoe with no outrigger,

various descriptions and commentaries,

all gathered in one meeting place: The Maori Canoe.

To be fair to Best he did find the term canoe

an inadequate word, quoting from the copy of

Webster’s available to him around 1925:

A boat used by rude nations, formed of the trunk of a tree, excavated by cutting or burning into a suitable shape.

He found it, however, ‘…scarcely advisable to employ

the native term of waka …’ (p.18) without saying why.

I am still grateful to Best. He saw the beauty

in our stories. He noticed that names

of some constellations correspond with the names

of waka: Te Waka o Tama-rereti is Scorpio,

Te Waka o Mairerangi includes Antares.

He found it remarkable,

indeed these are in his introductory remarks,

that the stars were placed in Tama-rereti’s waka

so that the sun and the moon

would not jostle them.

He mentions ara moana too. The great path

resting on the sea’s surface, a path set down

by the lips of the navigators who used every sense

about them to find the path that expands

and contracts between the compasses

of Polynesian culture, an accumulation halted

by literacy and modern navigation –

recorded as an afterthought by those Europeans

not overly preoccupied with other things,

and sifted out by people such as Best.

Waka 60 Dead Reckoning

The heights and shapes of waves, flotsam

and jetsam, indicate the direction of currents.

Lewis says that a line of jetsam clearly delineates

the meeting point of two currents –

so for instance, where the refuse from Taco Pronto

and the refuse from Burger King meet

should indicate the meeting point of currents halfway

around the globe (although I hear that Taco Pronto

is down to just one franchise in Auckland).

The McDonalds jetsam indicates nothing, of course.

Waka 61 Fragment

(adapted from HetarakaTautahi)

This is the paddle Te Roku-o-whiti

who stays close to the side

encircles the side

stands forward

flies ahead

springs onward

slaps Tangaroa’s back

(who sometimes slaps back)

Waka 62 A narrator’s note

There is no Odysseus to lead this fleet –

not even Maui who sent waka to their petrification,

the waka Mahunui, for instance, placed exactly

in the centre of the South Island at Maui’s command.

I have only waka floating beneath the stars,

at night and in the day, directed by swells,

whose crews are sustained not by seabirds

or fish, but by memory – some in conflict

with the written record. I have seen waka only at rest.

They are beings worthy of the company they keep –

tohunga to furnish voyagers with karakia, taniwha for security,

the very stars in motion with them.

I cannot provide you with a leader of the fleet.

This fleet navigated centuries. The names

of captains were known to their colleagues