Can the Māori Connection to Antarctica Help Safeguard the Continent’s Future?
It was a strange place: the edge of a frozen ocean with mountainous waves and bare rock summits that pierced the sky. Creatures dove deep into the dark waters. As the waka, or dugout canoe, sliced through this cold sea, its crew noticed a woman’s long tresses floating in the waves around them. Such details, preserved for nearly 1,400 years, come from a tale of exploration by the Polynesian navigator Hui te Rangiora, who set out from Rarotonga, the largest of the South Pacific’s Cook Islands, around the year 650. His intended destination is unclear—perhaps New Zealand, 2,000 miles to the southwest, or maybe he was following migrating whales—but what we know is this: Hui te Rangiora and his crew arrived in unfamiliar waters. He named the place Te tai-uka-a-pia, translated as “frozen ocean” or “sea foaming with arrowroot” (the rhizome’s flesh resembles snow), and returned home with descriptions of what are believed to be icebergs, marine mammals, and bull kelp floating in subantarctic and Antarctic waters.
Around the 13th century, as waves of Māori groups from East Polynesia settled the islands of New Zealand, the seafarer Tamarereti also sailed far to the south, and witnessed the aurora australis, or southern lights. Like Hui te Rangiora’s experience, Tamarereti’s journey, along with navigational and astronomical knowledge of the greater Antarctic region, is preserved in Māori carving, weaving, and oral traditions. Archaeological research on subantarctic islands confirms a human presence going back to at least the 14th century, and possibly much earlier. Yet, for decades, the names most closely associated with Antarctic discovery have been European: Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton.
