ting, biting below?
Beneath the earth
The power is felt,
The foam is seen,
Coming.
O thou loved grandchild
Of Tangaroa-meha."

This is an excellent poetical description of the great fish delaying the
quick hard bite. Then the island comes to the surface and Maui, the
beloved grandchild of the Polynesian god Kanaloa, is praised.

It was part of one of the legends that Maui changed himself into a bird
and from the heavens let down a line with which he drew up land, but the
line broke, leaving islands rather than a mainland. About two hundred
lesser gods went to the new islands in a large canoe. The greater gods
punished them by making them mortal.

Turner, in his book on Samoa, says there were three Mauis, all brothers.
They went out fishing from Rarotonga. One of the brothers begged the
"goddess of the deep rocks" to let his hooks catch land. Then the island
Manahiki was drawn up. A great wave washed two of the Mauis away. The
other Maui found a great house in which eight hundred gods lived. Here
he made his home until a chief from Rarotonga drove him away. He fled
into the sky, but as he leaped he separated the land into two islands.

Other legends of Samoa say that Tangaroa, the great god, rolled stones
from heaven. One became the island Savaii, the other became Upolu. A god
is sometimes represented as passing over the ocean with a bag of sand.
Wherever he dropped a little sand islands sprang up.

Payton, the earnest and honored missionary of the New Hebrides Islands,
evidently did not know the name Mauitikitiki, so he spells the name of
the fisherman Ma-tshi-ktshi-ki, and gives the myth of the fishing up of
the various islands. The natives said that Maui left footprints on the
coral reefs of each island where he stood straining and lifting in his
endeavors to pull up each other island. He threw his line around a large
island intending to draw it up and unite it with the one on which he
stood, but his line broke. Then he became angry and divided into two
parts the island on which he stood. This same Maui is recorded by Mr.
Payton as being in a flood which put out one volcano--Maui seized
another, sailed across to a neighboring island and piled it upon the top
of the volcano there, so the fire was placed out of reach of the flood.

In the Hervey Group of the Tahitian or Society Islands the same story
prevails and the natives point out the place where the hook caught and a
print was made by the f