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Ranolf and Amohia

I.—Miscellaneous Notes

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I.—Miscellaneous Notes.

  • Pages 1 and 2.—"Rata root" and "koromiko"; see note below on "Natural Objects."
  • Page 5.—" Keen Searcher of the Seas": "Acerrimus Oceani Investigator."—See Cap. Cook's epitaph in St. Paul's.page 490
  • Page 5.—The legend of MauI, chief of Polynesian hero-gods, and his fishing up the islands, is found with variations in the Tongan, Samoan, Tahilian, and Sandwich-Island groups as well as in New Zealand.
  • Page 7.—"Asphodel" and "Tree-fern," note below, "Natural Objects," where the scientific names of other plants or animals alluded to will he found.
  • Page 11.—Seizure of Amohia. That this incident is sufficiently in accordance with Maori usages will appear from the following extract of an official letter received by the author in the colony:—

    "Ranganui, Waikato, 4th October, 1869.

    "Sir,

    —Last June I petitioned H. E. the Governor relative to certain lands in right of my wife, who is a native of the Whakatane district, who was stolen with her mother by Potatau" (since the so-called Maori king) "taken as slaves and removed to the Waikato, where they were forced to remain," &c.

    In the petition the writer says, "She belonged to a tribe having large possessions in her original district; having been twice married (to Europeans), lias been the mother of nineteen children, of whom fourteen are now alive, and twelve of whom reside near the Waikato River." A list of the family accompanying the petition showed that her three elder daughters have respectively six, six, and five children—again by Europeans.A fact for the Anthropologists.

  • Page 16.—"A parrot for a pet." "Possessing excellent powers of mimicry, and useful to the natives as a decoy-bird, the Kaka (parrot) is much sought after, and almost every native village has its 'mokai' "—History of the Birds of New Zealand, by Dr. Buller.
  • Page 17.—"Haere atu, Go your way." Common form of words used by the Maori to persons taking leave of them.
  • Page 26.—"Ahuvamasda," "living I Am." See Professor Max Miiller's Chips from a German Workshop. So with respect to Buddha.
  • (See below.)
  • page 26.—" Egg of Order." By the Egg of Ormusd (Ahuramasda) the old Magians typified the moral and physical order of his work, thepage 491
  • Universe; pierced by Ahriman with Evil, of which he was the origin and author, Sec Gibbon's Decline and Fall, ch. 8, &c.
  • Page 27.—"Jamaica" means "Isle of Springs;" see Bryan Edward's West Indies.
  • Page 31.—"What other just conclusion, &c," I cannot help venturing to think, in spite of the high authority of Mr. Grole (Plate and other Companions of Socrates), that Socrates must have held the opinions here attributed to him because It is difficult to conceive, that with the general notions of the Gods or God, the leaned historian himself describes as those of Socrates, the latter could have arrived at the conclusions Mr. Grote, discarding the evidence of Plato, conceives him to have come to.
  • Page 31.—"Bullwise"—[unclear: Though] directed towards the gaoler, was not the expression of the look of Socrates caused as supposed in the text?
  • Page 35.—Kapila's "Perfect Wisdom." Kapila, founder of the Sankhya system; one of the systems of Brahmann philosophy prior to Buddhism, though the Kapila Sutras ("Aphorisms or Precepts of Kapila") are subsequent. Kapila gives his philosophy in the book he styles "Pragnaparamita," or "Perfect Wisdom." Both Hindu and Buddhist philosophers deny the reality of the objective world. See Essays of Professor H. H. Wilson, and Professor Max Miiller's Chips, &c., above cited.
  • Page 35.—Sakya Muni or Guatama, the Buddha, founder of Biuddhism lived about 500 B.C. A Buddha (" the enlightened one") was a human being, who had attained, by the practice of virtue through millions of ages and many transformations, to that highest state of perfection.
  • Page 35.—"Its founder's self, made God, &c." "Buddha being supreme, worship of gods was superfluous; but the mass of mankind needing sensible objects of worship, Buddha came to be substituted for the gods. In course of time other inconsistent gods were added. Relief in a supreme Being, Creator, and Ruler of the Universe is a page 492modern graft upon the unqualified atheism of Sakya Muni."—Essays by H. H. Wilson, Boden Professor of Sanskrit, Oxford. Vol. 4.
  • Page 35.—"Night of non-existence." "Utter extinction, as the great end and object of life, was a fundamental feature of Buddhism;'Nir-vana,'a 'blowing out' as of a candle-annihilation."-Ibid. It seems doubtful (according to Professor Miiller) whether this last doctrine was really that of Sakya, or only of Kasyapa, and other followers.
  • Page 35.—"High-moralled faith." "This moral code, one of the most perfect the world has ever known."—Max Miiler's Chips, &c.
  • Page 36.—"Basket." The earliest Buddhist canon is called the "Tripitaka," or "the Three Baskets;" the Ist, contains the Sutras or discourses of Buddha, written by Ananda and, Vinaya, his code of morality, by Upali 3rd, Abhidarna, his system of meta-physics, by Kasyapa. All the writers, pupils and friends of Sakya Muni.—Ibid.
  • Page 39.—"No vision of the City, &c." "Hast them not considered how thy Lord dealt with Ad, the people of Irem, adorned with lofty boil dings, the like whereof hath not been erected in the land?"—Koran, ch. 98, Sale's Trans1ation ln a note, Sale says the passage refers to the "sumptuous palace and delightful gardens built and made in the deserts of Aden iu imitation of the celestial paradise," by Sheddad, son of Ad, the king and founder of "a potent tribe destroyed for their infidelity. When finished, he set out with a great attendance to take a view of it, bat within a day's journey of it they were all destroyed by a terrible noise from heaven. Al Beidawi adds, that one Abdullah Ebn Kdabah accidentally hit on this wonderful place as he was seeking a camel."—Sale's Koran, vol. ii. p. 484.
  • Page 40.—"Three-tongued wedge-rows." Cuneiform inscriptions in Assyrian, Persian, and Tahtar.
  • Page 41.—"Portico," and "Academe." See the magnificent picture of Fichte by the great portrait-painter of the age. "The cold, colossal, adamantine Spirit, standing erect and clear like a Cato Major among men; fit to have been the teacher of the Stoa, and to have discoursed of beauty and virtue in the graves of Academe, &c."—page 493"State of German Literature," in Essays and Misellanies, by Thomas Carlyte,
  • Page 42.—" Healthier dreams." "Exemption from being born again, the summum bonum, The Brahmins think this, but effect it by spiritual apsorption elther into the universal spirit or into an all-comprehending divine spirit; but the Buddhists recognize no such recipient for the liberated soul.—Wilson's Essays, &c. The heterodox Buddhists, in Thibet, Ceylon, and Burmah, probably all but the learned everywhere,—seem to havc relapsed into the old Hindu doctrine. "The modem Buddhists of Burmah hold Nirvana (their Nigban) simply to be freedom from old age, disease, and death… Buddha, who denied the existence, or at least the divine nature of the gads worshipped by the Brahmans, was made a deity by some of his followers as early as the age of Clemens of Alexandria; and we need not wonder if his Nirvana was gradually changed into an Elysian field."—Muller's Chips, &c.
  • Page 42.—"Red robes," &c, Worn in heterodox Tartary and Thibet; the priests in Ceylon, Ava, and Siaro adhering to the more orthodox fashion of yellow robes, with shaven heads.—Wilson's Essays.
  • Page 42.—"Gem in the Lotus-flower, Amen." "The sacred formula," says M. Hue, "'Om muni padme houm' spread rapidly through all the countries of Thibet and Mongolia…. They (the Buddhists of these districts) have written an infinity of voluminous books to explain their famous mami. The Lamas say the doctrine contained in these marvellous words is immense, and that the whole life of a man is insufficient to measure its breadth and depth." The Regene of Thibet, however, explained it to M. Hue, who sums up the explanation thus: "The lilcral meaning of the words is 'O the gem in tht Lotus, Amen.' The gem being the emblem of perfection, and the Lotus of Buddha, it may perhaps be considered that the words express the desire to acquire perfection in order to be absorbed in the Universal Soul. So the symbolic formula might be paraphrased thus: 'O may I obtain perfection to be absorbed in Buddha, Amen.'"—Hue's Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China; translated by Hazlitt.
  • Page 45.—"A clay-clad wingless weak ephemeral," &c,
  • [unclear: Aristophanes,] Aves, 685.page 494
  • Page 46.—" Scarab-worship." The beetle (Searabcus sacer. Linn.) was an emblem of the Creative Power, Pthah; also of the Sun, the World, &c. But like other sacred animals, it was worshipped without reference to any type, for reasons difficult or impossible to discover. Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptians, vol. v., &c.
  • Page 48.—"Ding the book," &c How refreshing the chance to quote a few words that recall the slashing energy and hearty idiomatic downrightness of Milton's wonderful prose! and more refreshing, in these days, when they give us a glimpse of the great free soul of this spurner of every kind of spiritual tyranny; "When every acute reader, upon the first sight of a pedantic licenser, will be ready with these-like words, to ding the books a coil's distance from him; 'I hate a pupil-teacher; I endure not an instructor that comes to me under the Wardship of an overseeing fist.'"—Areopagitica.
  • Page 50.—" Nature in her insentient Solitude," &c. See Mr. Lewes's admirable Biographical History of Philosophy.
  • Page 53.—" As Dante's heard, &c.:—
  • "La miserella……
  • Parea dicer……
  • Colui, che mai non vide cosa nuova,
  • Pradusse esto visibileparlare,
  • Novello a noi, perchè qui non si truova."
  • —Purgatorio, Cant. X. 82–96.
  • Page 67.—"Cold and stony flowers." Described afterwards. Canto xvii. P. 271
  • Page 74.—"Naraka," the Hell of the Hindu, as "Niftheim," that of the Scandinavian mythology.
  • Page 75.—"Aztec birds." "There was such a multitude of Birds that the Ponds could not hold them, and so extraordinary was their variety for Shape and Feathers that our men were annoyed when they maintained that every son was supplied with the proper Food they lived upon abroad. &c. Above 300 persons were appointed to attend them; … some looked to their Eggs; others did set them when brooding; others curd them when sick; others pulled their finest Feathere in hot page 495weather, which was their motive for being at all that Charge and Trouble, They-made of them rich Mantles and Carpets, Targets, Plumes, Fans, and several others Thing interwoven with Gold and Silver, all of them extraordinary curious and strange Works."—From the description of Montezuma's palace, Gardens, Aviaries, &c, at Mexico: Herrara's History of America, vol. ii; Stevens's Translation. The finest of these birds were Trogons—the species Trogon resplendens and Trogom Maxicannus, found only in (he gloomy forests of the Southern Mates of Mexico.
  • Page 89.—The Maorics trace their origin to the occupants of certain eanoes who first came from "Hawaiki," probably "Owhyhee," now spelt "Hawaii."
  • Page 91.—The reception of missionary teaching attributed to Tangi-moana was that actually given to it by a Maori chieftain. See Narrative of a Twelve Months' Residence in New Zealand, by Augustus Erle, Lond. 1832, The remark and gesture relating to divisions of faith were those of Te Hëu-hëu, a famous "heathen" Maori chief. He and aportion of his tribe were stilled in a liquid land-slip as described at p. 97.
  • Page 102.—Some of these necromantic powers are attributed to a sorcerer in Sir George Grey's Polynesian Mythology.
  • Page 103.—"Central Lake," Lake Taupo, the great lake about the centre of the Northern Island.
  • Pagt 122.—"Te Ra, the Sun." A curious coincidence, if nothing more, that the Sun, personified or deified throughout Polynesia under the name "Ra," was worshipped under the same name Ra, or Rê, (The Sun, Pi-Ra, = Phrah, = Pharaoh, the royal title) universally throughout Egypt, and especially at Heliopolis in Lower Egypt, the "On" of the Jewish scriptures. Sec Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptians, vol. iv., p. 287, &c
  • Page 135.—For the beginning of motion in the nebulous matter, see Vestiges of Creation, &c.
  • Page 136.—"Himself best proclaims," &c The following extract will explain this allusion to the doctrine of the "Correlation of Forces;" "It seems to me," says Mr. Grove, after speaking of magnetism electricity, light, heat, and chemical affinityy, "that it is now proved that page 496all these forces are so invariably connected inter se, and with Motion, as to be regarded as modifications of each other, and as resolving themselves objectively into Motion, and subjectively into that something which produces or resists Motion and which we call Force." Address to the British Association, 1866; Correlation of Physical Forces, and Address, &e., by W. R. Grove, President, &c &c. That all the "wisest and best" of our philosophers do not hold the opinion glanced at in the text is shown perhaps from the last paragraph of this philosopher's Address: "In all phenomena, the more closely they are investigated, the mure we are convinced that, humanly speaking, neither Matter nor Force can be created or annihilated, and that an essential Cause is unattainable. Causation is the will—Creation the act—of God."—Ibid-For the correlation of sound, see Prof. Tyndall's work on Sound, &.c.
  • Page 149.—The desecration of the grave. "To eat in a canoe while passing a spot where the dead had been buried was considered a great impiety; drowning was expected to result."—Polack's Manners andCustoms of the New Zea landers, Lond. 1840. Spirits of the dead often appeared in the form of birds.
  • Page 155.—"Fitted up a canoe," &c. A slight undertaking compared to what a ctually done by a first-rate settler and pioneer, Mr Rees, of otago, who, in the early days of its history, used to navigate and carry provisions up the the dangerous Lake Wakatipu (a lake with grand swiss like scenery far in the interior of the country) in a boat built by himself of rough frame-work cut in the neighbouring forrest, and

    "Nailed all over the gaping sides

    Within and without, with red bll-hides."

  • Page 165.—The incident of Amohia swimming across the Lake to her lover is taken from the legend of Hinemoa (an ancestress of the Arawa tribe, inhabiting, Rotorual) in Polynesian Mythology. The shock given to the maidain's I which makes her resolve to escape is in the same legend compared to that of an earthquake, and herself at the well to a white crane.
  • Page 168.—"Dread Spirit," &c. The natives, on coming into a new place, always uttered an incantation to the sprit presiding over the spot, the genious loci.
  • Page 173.—Stump of trees, remnants of a submerged forest, are found in Lake Rotorua.page 497
  • Page 182.—" Ami apprehend," &c. Is it necessary to refer to that profound metaphysical distinction of Hamlet?—" What a piece of work is Man! … In apprehension how like a Gog!"—where the word "apprehension" suggests the complement of the thought, "in comprehension how like a worm!" as vividly as if it had been expressed—as of course it could not have been there. All the distinction between Noumenal and Phenomenal, Ideal and Real, Object and Subject, the Metaphysicians make such a to-do about, rolled up in that little phrase!
  • Page 213.—"Robe-skirt's splendour ": "
  • Dark with excessive bright his skirts appear
  • Yet dazzle heaven," &c.
  • —Paradise Lost.
  • Page 221.—"Some earthquake's pant," Such a rupture of a swamp occurred at Wellington after the earthquakes of 1848,
  • Page 222.—"By all the law the land supplied," &c. "The Maori," says the rev Richard Taylor, "seems to differ from almost every known tribe or nation in having no regular marriage ceremony; they had no karakul (incantation), or any rite to mark an event which, in nearly every other part of the world is accounted the most joyous in life."—New Zealand and its Inhabitants, p. 163.
  • Page 229.—"The Bounteous Bay." The Bay of Plenty.
  • Page 236.—" Campaspe,"
  • "Cupid and my Campaspe played
  • At cards for kisses. Cupid paid," &c.
  • —Song, by John Lyly, the Euphuist.
  • Page 276.—'Savarin." Brillât-Savarin, author of that drily-hutnorous cookery-book, La Physiologic du Goût,
  • Page 282.—The description of carriages in the test was actually given by a Maori, and is recorded in some book of travels, I have fur-gotten whose.
  • Page 291.—Origin of Woman. "The first woman was not bom, but formed out of the earth by the Arohi-rohi, or quivering heat of the sun, and the echo."—New Zealand and its Inhabitants, p. 18.
  • Page 298.—The Maori to this day have a superstitious dread of as-sending the mountain alluded to.
  • 32page 498
  • Page 308.—" A cockle-shell" Shells of cockles, whelks, or Other marine mollusks, are sometimes found on the banks of fivers or freshwater lakes in the heart of the country.
  • Page 315.—" Some hot mead where violets hid," &c. One of the beautiful rural images with which Aristophanes tantalizes the Athenians peat up so many years within their town-walls:
  • [unclear: other language]
  • For the kind of well, see Dr. Clarke's Travels in Gruet.
  • Page 316.—The readers of good old-fashioned Lempriere will remember the golden grasshoppers the Athenians used to slick in their hair, as emblematical of their nation's origin from the soil, and consequently great antiquity.
  • Page 319.—"Dynamic energies immense," &c. Referring to our power of converting one mode of force into another, Mr, Grove says, "We may probably be enabled to absorb or store up, as it were, diffused energy… - As the sun's force, spent in time long post, is now returned to us from the coal, which, was formed by that light and heat, so the sun's rays, which are daily wasted, as far as we are concerned, on the sandy deserts of Africa, may hereafter, by chemical or mechanical means, be made to light and warm the habitations of the denizens of other regions." "Correlation of Forces," it, quoted above.
  • "Dynamic energy" is force in motion; when at rest and latent, it becomes "potential energy," with "distance to act in." The law of conservation affirms "the constancy of the sum of both." See Professor Tyndall on the "Convertibility of Natural Forces," in "Neat as a Mode of Motion."
  • Page 323.—"Immeasurable abyss," &c Let not the English reader think this too high a flight for a Maori girl. It is but a slight amplification of an epithet not uncommonly applied in their songs by a woman to her lover: "taku torere—my Abyss.!" And a pel phrase of theirs in the like case, given by Mr. Shortknd in one of the books above cited, is, "Taku huia kaimnawa—my Spirit-devouring Hoopoe!" the hoopoe being, as the Maori describe it, a bird "nui nui rangatira—very chieftainlike—very, very much of a gentleman."page 499
  • Page 326.—"War-chief." Napoleon in Egypt.—Baurrienne.
  • Page 337.—"Diviner bald," &c As Kepler, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, foretold the existence, between Mars and Jupiter, of the planet required by the laws and analogies he had established; which planet, in its fragmentary condition, was discovered about 200 years later by Baron Zach, Piazzi, D'Olbers, and others, as Ceres, Pallas and the numerous asteroids in their neighbourhood, Similar instances of the accordance of Nature with the independent deductions of Science will occur to the reader as given in the prediction by Copernicus of the existence in Venus of phases like the Moon's; and in our time, the indication by Leverrier, from intricate and abstruse calculations, to account for the "perturbations of Uranus," of the existence and precise locality of the new planet Neptune, discovered as soon as sought for in the direction pointed out by the prophetical nstronomer.
  • Pages 364 to 370.—The reader will, I trust, pardon this degression; written (like the rest of the poem, in New Zealand) at a lime when the English Government showed no doubtful symptoms of a desire, or intention, to throw off the Colonies, and so dismember the British Empire.
  • Page 366.—" Race of War-fleets." Every one knows the object of the French and Spanish fleets was to drew Nelson away from the British seas; but the affair was none the less a flight and a chase, and the grandest in history.
  • Page 367.—" Bandit in his lair," &c. "There come from the traveller Wolfe, then at Bokhara, a letter saying the General's anger was dreaded there; and at the same time presents and assurances of goodwill arrived from many other quarters, amongst them, from the Affghn Chiefs of Candahar and Herat; and it was at this time the Khan of Khiva, whose dominions border on the Aral and Caspian seas, sent a prince of his family to negotiate an alliance with the victorious General."—Sir W. Napier's Administration of Scinde by Sir C. f. Napier, p. 140. Could he but have had 10,000 men and earte-blanche!
  • Page 367.—" Brother of Shay-tan." A name given at first, in their wonderment and terror, by some of the subdued tribes to Sir C. Napier.Two or three years of such a man's government would have made the Maories peaceful, industrious, contented, and loyal.
  • Page 369.—Capt. St. George, a young and most promising officer in the Colonial service, was killed while leading the native contingent page 500in a successful attack upon a "pah "or fortified village at Poutou, near Roto-aira, occupied by rebel natives under the religious fanatic, Te Kooti, on the 4th of October, 1869. Being alone ahead of the others, he drew the enemy's fire upon himself as, in the words of an eyewitness and fellow-combatant—Captain Mair, in the same service—he "led his men on in his usual dashing style".
  • Te Kooti is the principal leader or founder of the "Hau-hau," who attracted his followers with pretensions to revelations from an Angel of the extermination of the whiles and their own invulnerability, both of which predictions were speedily falsified.
  • Page 373.—The author of Rambles in New Zealand, 1841, Mr. J. Bidwell, compares tht harsh groans of Maories in a war-dance to the sound of a regiment returning ramrods.
  • Page 385.—"Is this your mutton-fish!" &c. (See note below, "Natural Objects," p. 385) The ptoverb is given by Mr. Short land. The natives make the eyes (or lather the irides of the eyes) of their wooden images, and of spearheads. &c, out of the nacre or mother-of-pearl lining of these shells. Hence possibly, I think, the allusion to this shell-fish with the gesture (attributed to Tangi in the text) may beimagde? am I a dead or senseless thing like it, you can do what you likee with?"
  • Page 388.—"Tongariro"—a volcano, 6,500 feet high, in the centre of the Northern Island; in active eruption when this was written (May, 1871).
  • Page 396.—" Mawai, the Gourd," and "Manipo," are real names given for the reasons stated in the text.
  • Page 398.—"Pry into the wound," &c. "Natives used kaikatea and kaua-kaua leaves, and oiher herbs as medicines…. Bulle wounds were well-washed, lead extracted, boiled herbs applied exter-nally".—Polack's Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders, vol. ii p. 99, &c.
  • Pages 409, 410.—The sounds described here were those which accompanied the approach of spirits in Maori conjurations.
  • Pages 413 to 418.—The deathwound—occu pat ions during his last illness—and tile last words attributed to Tangi, were really those of a celebrated Maori warrior, E Hongi, killed in the early part of the page 501century, as narrated in Missionary books.. The conduct and exclamations of the Priest are from a description of the denth of a Chief in Old New' Zealand, a very graphic and humorous book by F. E. Maning, Esq., now a Judge of the New Zealand Native Lands Court.
  • Page 418.—"Made breezes sigh," &c. The "pathetic fallacy," denounced by Mr. Husk in, is at least undeniably and purely natural, and perhaps universal. Instances of it occur very frequently in Maori songs.
  • Page 440.—"The gleam iridescent"—called by sailors, a sun-dog.

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