The Sea Inside

ancient islands, with their own unique, pre-human populations. New Zealand was formed out of the super-continent of Pangea, from which it had broken away sixty-five million years ago. Its only quadrupeds were reptiles, its largest animals, birds; and it was all the more Edenic for its dearth of fearsome predators. In such a place cetaceans were an important source of protein. (Western visitors would assume that the islands’ natives resorted to cannibalism out of that lack of flesh.) And while Europeans were still calling whales fish, the M ā ori had a long-established taxonomy for the species they knew intimately, that they both used and venerated. It was an alternative classification, created centuries before Carl Linnaeus had begun to itemise the world.
    Tohor ā
was the general name for whales, but also signified southern right whales.
Hakur ā
or
iheihe
were scamperdown or beaked whales, many species of which swam in these deep waters;
paikea
was the humpback,
pakake
the minke,
ū pokohue
the pilot, and
par ā oa
the sperm whale. Whale tribes had honorific titles, too, somehow more evocative, in their unfamiliar consonants and vowels, of the whales’ strange beauty than the ugly names Europe had bestowed on them:
T ū tarakauika
,
te Kauika Tangaroa
,
Wehengak ā uki
,
Ruamano
,
Taniwha
,
T ū -te-raki-hau-noa
.
    For the M ā ori there was no demarcation between the life of the land and that of the ocean; such distinctions made no sense. Trees and whales were as one. The god Te H ā puku was ancestor of both whales and tree ferns, known as fish of the forest. As medieval bestiaries drew correspondences between animals on land and in the sea – the elephant and the whale, the wolf as a shark, the goose born of barnacles – so the M ā ori saw the sperm whale in the kauri tree, a podocarp that grows to a hundred feet or more and can live for thousands of years. They related that when the
tohor ā
, or whale, asked the kauri to accompany him on his return to the ocean, the tree preferred to stay on the land. Instead, they shared skins. Hence the thinness of kauri’s bark, as oily as the whale’s blubber, both wrinkled in age and majesty.
    Humans too were interchangeable with whales.
Te k ā hui par ā oa
meant a gathering of sperm whales, but also a group of chiefs.
He paenga pakake
or beached whales indicated fallen warriors on a battlefield, while men assumed the guise of whales in their warfare. The Ng ā ti Kur? tribe created a Trojan whale from dog skins in which were hidden one hundred warriors; when their besieged enemy came out to feast on its meat, they were killed and themselves eaten. Other warriors lay on the beach in black cloaks to lure those who thought they’d found a pod of
ū pokohue
. And the greatest of all chiefs, Te Rauparaha, sustained his army with blackfish that had been driven ashore and tethered by their tails using strong flax ropes, to be killed as required, like a living larder.
    Like Australian Aborigines, the M ā ori did not actively hunt whales, but made good use of stranded animals. Unlike Westerners, they did not render the blubber into oil and discard the rest; the entire animal was a resource which could provide for the tribe. The meat was eaten immediately or dried for later use, and they drank the milk from nursing mothers. Whale oil supplied polish and scent. Teeth and bone became adornments, the most precious being the
rei puta
, a whale-tooth pendant. The sperm whales’ hard, dense bones also made broad blades and clubs that bore the power of the animal that had provided them.
    Hundreds if not thousands of whales still beach themselves on the shores of New Zealand every year, and are regarded as
tapu
, sacred signs. When a pod of pilot whales stranded on the South Island recently, a M ā ori elder arrived with his sleeping bag to spend the night with them in order that they should not die alone. Solemn blessings are given to dead or dying whales. In one famous incident in 1970, fifty-nine stranded sperm whales were declared to be
tangata
, or human, and were interred in a communal grave, five hundred feet long. Their deaths were, paradoxically, seen as a good omen for an imminent visit from the Queen (and an Antipodean reflection of the medieval right to ‘royal fish’). The same incident also inspired Witi Ihimaera’s novel
The Whale Rider
– although his book was born in New York.
    In 1985 the writer was working as a diplomat in Manhattan when a humpback