Investigating in New Zealand

Joe Nickell

From: Volume 44, No. 6
November / December 2020

In amazing sea voyages seven centuries ago, Polynesians discovered and settled the island country they called Aotearoa—today’s New Zealand. Their descendants became the Maori people, with a distinct culture that was less nomadic, more dependent on garden food (such as gourds and sweet potatoes), and largely directed by utu (“reciprocity”), whether as gift-giving or by warfare. The Maoris’ rich mythology includes creation myths and beliefs about the origins of natural phenomena, together with sacred lore involving various supernatural entities (“Maori Mythology” 2016).

I visited New Zealand as a side trip to my Australian investigative tour in October 2015. I spent three wonderful days in Auckland with my friend and sometimes coauthor Robert Bartholomew; his wife, Zalina; and their family. I returned not only with great memories but also with some New Zealand mysteries to share. My article “The New Zealand Moa: From Extinct Bird to Cryptid,” has previously appeared (Nickell 2017). Here, I investigate three other cases.

Sacred Volcano

New Zealand has numerous volcanoes, although none is active in the South Island. Volcanoes and other natural phenomena stirred the imaginations of the myth-making Maoris. For example, according to one legend, Lake Taupo—the country’s largest lake, which occupies an ancient volcano crater—is the “beating heart” of the North Island.

Among the volcanic mountains around Lake Taupo, three are the subject of an engaging Maori legend: Taranaki (aka Mount Egmont), Tongariro (a compound volcano with as many as twelve cones), and Pihanga. The legend tells how the latter’s beauty caused the others—both warrior mountains—to fight for her love. Their anger made the earth tremble, and their fierce combat produced great smoke and fiery eruptions, until at last Taranaki lost the combat. Defeated, he moved away to where he now stands, near New Plymouth. His movement west left a great gouge in the earth that filled with his tears, becoming Whanganui River (“Volcanology” 2016; “New Zealand’s” 2016).

In the Auckland area off the east coast, I viewed scenic Rangitoto Island, a symmetrical volcanic cone, and visited Mount Eden, or Maungawhau, as it is known to the Maoris. Walking along its rim (Figure 1), I encountered a sign prohibiting entering the crater, which was described as a “fragile and sacred area.” The word sacred lingered in my mind, and I wished to know more about the special status of the volcano.

Figure 1. Author at the mist-shrouded rim of the crater of Maungawhau volcano (aka Mt. Eden), a sacred place in Maori tradition.

I learned that the Maoris called the crater itself “the bowl of Mataaho.” He was a Maori deity, the god of secrets that are concealed in the earth. According to legend, Mataaho was indirectly responsible for other volcanoes of the region. When Mataaho’s wife left him, taking his clothes (a charmingly human concept!), the goddess Mahuika saw his need and sent fires to warm him (“Story: Tāmaki tribes” 2020).

From then on, a Northland Peninsula tribe continued to take care of Mataaho. For him, they left their best offerings, placing them in the center of the crater, that is, “The bowl of Mataaho.” For the Maori, the site is a taonga—that is, a treasure, such as an heirloom or memory or spiritual belief. Mataaho’s bowl is all of these, a sacred place.

Enduring myths such as these supernatural accounts of the natural are not merely the products of tribal raconteurs. While not science, they are attempts—intertwined with religion—to explain the mysteries of the Maori world. For us, they also provide insights into the ways in which human thought interprets experiences, whether involving natural phenomena or social customs. As a poet, I find them especially resonant.

Water Monsters

Among the fearsome creatures of Maori tradition are the taniwha (pronounced ton-e-fah in Maori). These monsters were analogous to dragons in certain other cultures. They lurked in the deep pools of rivers, lakes, oceans, and caves. Some tribes believed them to be their guardians, offering the creatures gifts and addressing them with incantations. To others, however, they were fearsome beings that kidnapped women or killed and even ate people.

The monsters had various forms. Some resembled giant lizards—with or without wings. Some were reptilian sea creatures, while others looked like whales or large sharks, and still others appeared in the form of floating logs in rivers. (More on this image presently.) Some taniwha were even shapeshifters. Here is one legend:

The taniwha Tutaeporoporo began life as a shark. A chief caught him and kept him as a pet in a river. Then Tutaeporoporo changed, growing scaly skin, wings, webbed feet and a bird-like head. He began eating people traveling on the river. To catch him a taniwha slayer, Ao-kehu, hid inside a hollow log in the river. The taniwha smelt him, and swallowed the log. Slashing his way out of the taniwha’s stomach, Ao-Kehu soon killed him. Inside the taniwha were the remains of people and canoes that he had eaten. (“Taniwha” 2016a)

In Auckland I visited Hotunui, the great meeting house of the Hauraki, a Maori tribal people. Built in 1878 and now entirely preserved in the Auckland Museum, it bears on a side wall an elaborately carved wood figure of Ureia, a sea monster and guardian of the Hauraki. It is rendered with a serpent-like body, in the style of Marakihau, a deep-sea-monster type of taniwha.

According to legend, Ureia was lured by the Waikato people to their fishing settlements on the north shore of Manukau Harbour. There they caught his head in a snare they had set and, in his efforts to free himself, he heaved the waters for two days, before dying. This cheered the 1,000 exhausted warriors, ranged on either side of the harbor, who had to keep the snare ropes taut all the while. “To this day,” the story concludes, “one often sees the waters of Piponga Point heaving and boiling just as they did when Ureia was snared there” (“Ureia” 2016). Of course, myth aside, the roiling is due to other factors, such as gusting winds and playing seals that are common to those waters.

The highly stylized carving of Ureia indicates that it has become a fully mythologized figure, far from a realistic depiction of whatever real creature may have been snared long ago at Puponga Point, assuming an actual event is related in the folktale. If not, it may nevertheless evoke similar events involving Maori warriors.

Even if we suspect that taniwha grew gigantic and changed shape only in colorful Maori legends, nevertheless the tales may have been inspired by actual creatures. Recall, for example, that Tutaeporoporo “began life as a shark.” Human remains (along with inedible objects) have indeed been found inside tiger sharks (Pleasance 2016), which inhabit New Zealand coastal waters. This shark has come to be called a “garbage eater” and can attain a length of over sixteen feet. In the Pacific Ocean, it ranges as far south as New Zealand, sometimes leaving deep water for shallow channels (“Tiger shark” 2016).

It can hardly be a coincidence that taniwha derives from the Proto-Oceanic word tanifa, “Shark species,” or that the Tongan and Niuean tenefa describes a great shark, as does the Samoan tanifa. Although in the Tokelauan language tanifa describes a man-eating sea monster, most of the other Polynesian languages have cognates that mean “shark” or even just “fish” (“Taniwha” 2016b).

Again, especially fearsome taniwha may simply have been the distorted and mythologized folk memories of the western Pacific or Asian crocodile (“Animals” 1966). Appearing like a log that could suddenly transform itself into a ferocious, man-devouring monster, and having reptilian, even dragon-like features, the crocodile is the likely real-life creature behind some Maorian taniwha narratives.

As to the taniwha’s guardian aspect, consider the true story of Pelorus Jack, a dolphin that became famous for meeting and accompanying ships in the area of Cook Strait for nearly a quarter century, from 1888 to 1912. The world’s first dolphin to be given legal protection, Pelorus Jack was believed by Maoris to be a guardian taniwha named Tuhirangi who had taken the form of a dolphin (“Taniwha” 2016a; “Rare” 2016).

Cryptozoologists (those who study “hidden” animals such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster) are naturally interested in the taniwha, one of which created a sensation in 1887 at New Zealand’s Raglan Harbour. It had reportedly “cleared carcasses out of slaughter houses, chased children, left peculiar tracks, etc.,” but Maoris found it on the beach and shot it. It was eleven feet long, and from details of its appearance—hair coat; pectoral and tail fins; eight pairs of teeth in each jaw, “four of them [the canines] being like tusks”; and lack of external ears—it was “supposed to be a sea elephant” (“The Waikato” 1887).

To be more precise, it was a Southern Elephant Seal. I suspect that at eleven feet—because females are typically shorter (only eight-and-a-half to almost ten feet long), whereas males are larger (in the fourteen- to nineteen-foot range [“Southern” 2016])—the “monster” was a juvenile male.

Considering all the evidence regarding the taniwha, we may well ask whether they are mythical or natural creatures! The answer is yes.

Parnell Outbreak

Speaking of New Zealand coastal waters, a more modern case involved nothing so exotic as a sea monster but rather something quite the opposite: a mundane cargo ship with the placid name Good Navigator. Still, the case is quite instructive, related to me Bartholomew. It is included in his book (coauthored with Peter Hassall), A Colorful History of Popular Delusions (2015, 141–146). He first sketched the story for me on a visit to the original site on October 24, 2016.

Bound for Sydney, Australia, the Good Navigator had left a Mexican port on January 26, 1973, but by February 10, some of the fifty consigned drums of a chemical it was carrying became damaged when the vessel endured fierce winds and rough water. It was consequently diverted to Auckland, arriving on February 26. At once, wharf workers encountered a sickly, sweet smell and balked at unloading the cargo. They relented after being issued protective suits and respirators, along with extra wages. The resulting two truckloads of drums were stored at a temporary waterfront site at Parnell.

Soon, however, the odor spread into the inner city, resulting in a four-block area being evacuated. By the next afternoon, a larger area was cordoned off, and “Parnell had effectively become a ghost town,” noted Bartholomew and Hassall (2015, 142). Then:

On the morning of February 28, the Parnell fumes scare dominated the news with dramatic headlines. Four thousand people had been evacuated. Hundreds have been treated for symptoms—half at Auckland City Hospital and half on-site by ambulance staff. In all, twenty-three streets were evacuated, and many residents from young children to the elderly were temporarily housed at the Pitt Street Ambulance Station in central Auckland City. The feelings of most were probably summed up by ninety-five-year-old Mrs. N.A. Ha’ul: “All I want to do is to get back to my room, but they won’t let us yet. It is not safe.” An elderly couple—a Mr. and Mrs. Carlton, were the first locals affected. Many people, including police and firemen, felt ill and were rushed to the hospital.

The spreading evacuation and shop closings brought still more people complaining of such symptoms as headaches and nausea, tightening of the chest, weakness and fatigue, and soreness of eyes.

A psychiatrist from Auckland University, R.W. McLeod, soon brought some sense to the situation. Because the captain and crew had known of the leaking drums because of the smell but themselves suffered no adverse effects over a two-week period, McLeod came to question the nature of the outbreak. The fact that some persons who remained in the area were not affected, along with numerous pets, served as corroborative evidence that, as McLeod (1975) concluded, the episode was an outbreak of mass hysteria, heightened by confusion over exactly what was in the container.

In fact, it was a light, oily chemical called Merphos (butyl mercaptan), commonly used both as a pesticide and a defoliant. Of course, the chemical is highly toxic, but the Encyclopedia of Toxicology—citing the very case we are discussing—questioned whether there was a causal relationship between the exposure and the reported symptoms. Indeed, “the incidence and severity of the physical symptoms in individuals exposed to mercaptan-containing air pollution were not proportional to the intensity of the odor but rather to the emotional response that it induced.” The encyclopedia’s entry on mercaptans noted that the 1973 incident in New Zealand had been “reevaluated, with a diagnosis of mass hysteria” (Munday 2005).

* * *

As diverse as these brief studies are, they nevertheless illustrate the power of imagination—often at the expense of rational, scientific thinking—regarding emotionally held beliefs. They therefore should not be dismissed but carefully studied to understand the lessons they can teach.

 

Acknowledgments

I continue to be grateful to John and Mary Frantz. Their generous financial help makes possible many of my investigations. I also thank my friends Robert and Zalina Bartholomew for their wonderful hospitality during my 2015 visit to New Zealand. I am also indebted to Craig Shearer, secretary of the NZ Skeptics Society, and the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

References

Joe Nickell

Joe Nickell, PhD, is senior research fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and “Investigative Files” columnist for Skeptical Inquirer. A former stage magician, private investigator, and teacher, he is author of numerous books, including Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (1983), Pen, Ink and Evidence (1990), Unsolved History (1992) and Adventures in Paranormal Investigation (2007). He has appeared in many television documentaries and has been profiled in The New Yorker and on NBC’s Today Show. His personal website is at joenickell.com.


This article is available to subscribers only.
Subscribe now or log in to read this article.