shipwreck story
p. 69 · Read in the full issue
Rarotongan man's old sword , anchor add weight to shipwreck story
A TRADITION that a Euro pean ship was wrecked on Rarotonga many years before Christianity was introduced to that island in 1823 is well known on Rarotonga among those who take an interest in historical matters. However, little has ap peared about it in print.
The tradition was briefly men tioned in PIM for January, 1945 (p. 22). It was then stated that gold and silver Spanish coins and fragments of a vessel were re puted to have been found on Rarotonga’s reef; and that black bearded white men were said to have come from the sea and to have lived on the island in the reign of Rau, 300 years ago.
The only other account of the tradition that seems to have ap peared in print was published in the Cook Islands Review for last October.
Its author, Mr. C. T. Cowan (also known as Tumu Korero), is Rarotonga’s foremost historian.
Mr. Cowan, who is part-Scottish, part-Rarotongan, was born on Rarotonga in 1886. He succeeded to his mother’s mataiapo title in 1908, and in 1909, he married Nuka Nuka, daughter of Kainuku Ariki, one of the Ngatangiia district’s two hereditary leaders.
According to his article in the Cook Islands Review, the ancient ship that is reputed to have been wrecked on Rarotonga was cast up on the reef at Ngatangiia, which is at the eastern end of the island. The name of the ship, pronounced in Maori, was Kora, and the captain’s name was Koni.
Canoe stolen
Except for the captain and three of his men, all of the crew were lost in the wreck. The four survivors came ashore, bringing a chest and some sacks with them. They lived on the marae of Kainuku (an ancestor of Mr.
Cowan’s father-in-law) at a place called Vaerota, and were kindly treated by the local people.
Captain Koni gave his sword to Kainuku, whose full name is thought to have been Kainuku-te- Anguangu.
One night Koni and the three seamen sailed away in a big canoe which they stole from the beach.
They were never heard of again.
Mr. Cowan said that when Kainuku Parapu (his father-in law?) was alive, he gave him a
sword which he (Kainuku) had found in the sand on his marae at Vaerota. The hilt was rotted and rusty. It was believed to be the same sword that had belonged to Koni.
“Some years ago,” Mr. Cowan added, “I got hold of an anchor found on the beach very close to the place where the Kora was wrecked. It was a strange anchor with only one fluke, unlike our modern-made anchor. ... It now lies in my home. . . . The name of the ship Kora was given to the place where it crashed and it is still being called that to this day.” ☆ ☆ ☆ MUCH less is known about the early European ship that was apparently wrecked at Anaa Atoll than about those at Amanu- Hao and Rarotonga.
J. R. Forster, a scientist who accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific, re corded in his Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World, that Cook’s Tahitian pilot, Tupaia (or Tupaya), had spoken of a ship that had been wrecked at a low island called O-anna. “Some men perished, according to Tupaya’s account”, Forster said. He added that Tupaia was “the most in telligent man that ever was met with by any European navigator in these isles”; and this praise was echoed by Captain Cook.
Confirmation that a European ship was apparently lost at Anaa appears in the journal of the Spanish explorer Tomas Gayangos, whose ship Aguila was driven by a storm close to Anaa in November, 1774. Gayangos recorded seeing a big wooden cross standing on the beach on the inner side of the reef. “It was of moderate size, regular in all its proportions, and showed signs of having been erected there a long
time ago”, he wrote.