Tawhirirangi
Encyclopedia
In Māori tradition
Maori mythology
Māori mythology and Māori traditions are the two major categories into which the legends of the Māori of New Zealand may usefully be divided...

, Tāwhirirangi was one of the great ocean-going, voyaging canoes
Maori migration canoes
Various Māori traditions recount how their ancestors set out from their homeland in great ocean-going canoes . Some of these traditions name a mythical homeland called Hawaiki....

 that was used in the migrations that settled New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...

. Tāwhirirangi was captained by Ngāhue
Ngahue
According to Maori mythology Ngahue was a contemporary of Kupe and one of the first Polynesian explorers to reach New Zealand. He was a native of the Hawaiki and voyaged to New Zealand in “Tāwhirirangi”, his waka...

, and originally landed in the Bay of Plenty
Bay of Plenty
The Bay of Plenty , often abbreviated to BOP, is a region in the North Island of New Zealand situated around the body of water of the same name...

 before heading to the South Island
South Island
The South Island is the larger of the two major islands of New Zealand, the other being the more populous North Island. It is bordered to the north by Cook Strait, to the west by the Tasman Sea, to the south and east by the Pacific Ocean...

. Ngāhue is said to have then discovered pounamu.

Friedrich Ratzel
Friedrich Ratzel
Friedrich Ratzel was a German geographer and ethnographer, notable for first using the term Lebensraum in the sense that the National Socialists later would.-Life:...

 in The History of Mankind when discussing legend preserved in song reported in 1896 that a chief by the name of Ngahue was driven to flight by a civil war which devastated Hawaiki
Hawaiki
In Māori mythology, Hawaiki is the homeland of the Māori, the original home of the Māori, before they travelled across the sea to New Zealand...

. After a long journey he reached New Zealand and returned to Hawaiki with pieces of greenstone and the bones of a giant bird.
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