Paddlers in the mist
For more than 130 years, lovers of ghost stories have enjoyed talking about one of our most enduring mysteries: the Phantom Canoe of Lake Tarawera. But was it a put-up job, a piece of stagecraft devised by a local tohunga?
For more than 130 years, lovers of ghost stories have enjoyed talking about one of our most enduring mysteries: the Phantom Canoe of Lake Tarawera. But was it a piece of stagecraft by a local tohunga with time on his hands?
The tale of the waka seen on the waters of Lake Tarawera 10 days before the mountain erupted on June 10, 1886, is a tantalising one, a local cross between the Mary Celeste and the Loch Ness monster, with more than a hint of Māori leg-pulling.
The version most of us have known is the one written by Ronald Jones in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand:
“On 31 May 1886, so the story runs, a phantom war canoe sped silently across the waters of Lake Tarawera in the shadow of Mt Tarawera, the ‘Burnt Peak’ of the Maoris, its outline ghostly in the morning mists that a wintry sun could not quite dispel. Eerie and uncanny though it all was, watchers had no difficulty in discerning the craft’s double row of occupants, one row paddling and the other standing wrapped in flax robes, their heads bowed and, according to Maori eyewitnesses, their hair plumed as for death with the feathers of the huia and the white heron. To the terrified Maoris these were the souls of the departed being ferried to the mountain of the dead. But everyone knew there was no war canoe on the lake, which had borne no such craft in living memory …
“To the Maoris in the village and on the lake, the occurrence had only one meaning. It was an omen of disaster, dire and inevitable.
“So much for the story, which might readily be dismissed as just another myth. But in the case of the phantom canoe, there were independent eyewitnesses, disinterested persons uninfluenced by superstition and probably wholly unaware of the particular legend relating to these occurrences …
“The sighting of the phantom canoe is best described in [eyewitness] Mrs Sise’s own words: ‘After sailing for some time we saw in the distance a large boat, looking glorious in the mist and the sunlight. It was full of Maoris, some standing up, and it was near enough for me to see the sun glittering on the paddles. The boat was hailed but returned no answer. We thought so little of it at the time that Dr Ralph did not even turn to look at the canoe, and until our return to Te Wairoa in the evening we never gave it another thought.
“‘Then to our surprise we found the Maoris in great excitement, and heard from McCrae [a permanent resident] and other Europeans that no such boat had ever been on the lake.”
By 1966, when the Encyclopaedia was written, the yarn of the mystery canoe had sailed a little far from its origins, and separating fact from layers of myth and embellishment had become tricky. But let’s try.
OCCASIONAL TOURISTS
Te Wairoa village on the western shore of Lake Tarawera was the home of Tuhourangi, a 150-strong sub-tribe of Te Arawa. As early as the 1840s, a few hardy tourists had slogged through the bush on foot or horseback to see the incredible Pink and White Terraces on Lake Rotomahana, but the trickle turned to a flow after a road from Rotorua to the embarkation place at Te Wairoa was built in 1875.
By the beginning of the 1880s, the meeting house Hinemihi had been completed and two hotels built, and Te Wairoa was becoming something of a tourist hub. The village had a school, a church and a cemetery, three stores and a Temperance Hall. An experienced boatbuilder was engaged to make whaleboats for the tourist trade to replace the traditional canoes.
Tourists, who boarded the whaleboats at Te Wairoa, were rowed 12km to the southern end of the lake, where they disembarked and walked 800m south-east to Lake Rotomahana – then mostly a series of smallish, reedy meres – where a second boat took them to first the White, then the Pink Terraces.
The two months before May 31, 1886, had been unsettling for Tuhourangi, and nerves were jangled. The village had been hit with a bad typhoid outbreak and 13 tangi had taken place in just seven weeks. The latest to succumb was a revered chief, Aporo,
It took some persuasion to get the nervous oarsmen into the boats and, about a mile offshore, they saw an unusual canoe.
whose body lay unburied after his tangi, as some villagers believed he had been cursed. As the Otago Witness reported, with Victorian melodrama: “They had an old woman too amongst them at Wairoa – an infernal character, skilled in the black art – by whose machinations the defunct chief had been called to his account. They had also among them a tohunga, or professional prophet, who had served his apprenticeship to the business and had been sent for specially to curse the witch who had killed the chief. He was a vigorous and proficient curser, and great results were expected from his efforts.”
As if this tragedy and its attendant drama were not enough, the thermal activity around the lake had been unpredictable. As a party of 15 stood ready to climb into their whaleboats for their visit to the terraces, the lake produced a seiche, or sudden surge, that pushed the water up by about 150cm along that part of the shoreline and caused it to run out and in more than once. It took some persuasion to get the nervous oarsmen into the boats, but soon they pushed off and they were about a mile offshore when they saw an unusual canoe.
CLOSE-UP VIEW
American-born Dunedin businessman George Sise, 47, his Prussian-born wife, Louise, 37, and their teenage daughter, Frances, were holidaying in the area and were passengers on a boat to the terraces. Mr and Mrs Sise each gave their own account. They assured readers of the Otago Witness of June 25, 1886, that neither of them believed in the supernatural and hastened to correct fanciful additions to the story made by reporters who had interviewed them earlier for other newspapers. George Sise was reported in these terms:
“His party, composed of six Europeans and nine Maoris, started from Wairoa in a canoe at about 8 o’clock one fine morning to cross the lake to the terraces. When a little more than halfway across, another canoe emerged from the shore some distance to the northward, and kept a parallel course with them until a headland shut it from view. The strange craft might have been half a mile or so distant, or possibly more, it is not easy to judge distance upon the water.
“Mr Sise thinks that about nine persons were counted in the ‘Phantom Canoe’, not thirteen, and, as to their being ‘naked warriors’, the craft was by no means near enough to ascertain whether they were clothed or not, and there was absolutely nothing en evidence to show that they were warriors. They might have been apple-women or nurse-girls. No warrior-chief with feathers or anything else in his head-gear was seen brandishing his spear in the prow of the
“In a state of abject superstitious terror, they were prepared for anything marvellous, from a mermaid to a banshee.”