Kupe

The Pursuit of the Octopus

In Maori oral tradition, Kupe sets out from Hawaiki, the ancestral homeland of Polynesian voyaging tradition, in pursuit of a great octopus, Te Wheke-a-Muturangi, that had been raiding the bait from his people's fishing lines. Different tribal accounts (iwi have their own versions of this story) vary on the exact reason for the voyage and on some of its details, but the pursuit across open ocean, ending far from Hawaiki, is the tradition's common thread.

Naming a New Land

Following the octopus south, Kupe is said to have sighted a long cloud on the horizon, which some traditions credit as the origin of the Maori name for New Zealand, Aotearoa, "land of the long white cloud." Various coastal features, headlands, and harbors around the country are attributed in local tradition to Kupe's exploration and naming as he mapped the new land's coastline, and he is credited with finally cornering and killing the octopus in Cook Strait.

An Oral Tradition in Writing

As with other Polynesian material in this encyclopedia, Kupe's story survives through oral tradition, transmitted for generations through whakapapa (genealogical recitation) and formal storytelling before European contact, then set down in writing by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collectors working with Maori informants, notably George Grey's Polynesian Mythology (1855) and the later compilations of S. Percy Smith. Because the tradition was never a single fixed text, different iwi preserve different versions of Kupe's route, his landfalls, and even his return, and no version should be read as the single canonical account.