The Hue, Lagenaria siceraria, in Eastern Polynesia.
Other Hue in Eastern Polynesia
The Hue in Aotearoa.
Māori names for varieties of Lagenaria gourds.
Māori words for stages of growth and treatment of gourds.
Māori words for calabashes & vessels made from gourds.
The importance of the hue in Māori life.
Pū-tē-hue
Whānaua
The Hue in Te Paipera Tapu
Raukatauri
Gallery, Further Information, Credits.
The Hue, Lagenaria siceraria, in Eastern Polynesia.
The Lagenaria gourd was a carefully cultivated and economically important plant throughout Eastern Polynesia, and especially so in Aotearoa, where it needed special care to grow well, and was a critically important source of containers for water and preserved birds. Seeds of the gourd may have been collected in Chile or Peru by voyagers from East Polynesia about 1,200 years ago, while contact between Tahiti, the Marquesas and Easter Island was still maintained but after direct contact with Western Polynesia (Samoa and Tonga) had ceased. It could also have drifted from either the American or Asian mainland to some part of Eastern Polynesia (Easter Island, the Tuamotus and Hawaii are possible contact points) and been discovered and distributed by the early settlers. Both scenarios are possible, as the Polynesian gourds have both Asian and American traits, reflecting characteristics of both the African/American (Lagenaria sicareria siceraria) and Asian (L. siceraria asiatica) subspecies (see the paper by Andrew Clarke et al., details in the Bibliography). The different varieties of these gourds hybridize easily, so the Asian traits in the Eastern Polynesian gourds could be a late addition, after the arrival of Captain Cook. The Asian gourds were known as far east as the Solomon Islands, but neither the Asian nor American strains were known in the region bounded by Samoa, Tonga and Fiji.
The importance of this plant in East Polynesia is underlined by the name given to it. The source word, a generic term for members of the convolvulus family and similar creeping and climbing plants, was brought to Polynesia from "Near Oceania" in the course of the first forays into the uninhabited areas of the tropical Pacific. However, once the gourd had been acquired, the old meanings were transferred to a derived noun, *pōhue (meaning "reminiscent of the hue", or something to that effect), and the direct reflexes of *fue were monopolized by the new plant and/or its fruit.
The gourd also took on symbolic associations in many Eastern Polynesian languages. Dordillon, for example, reports that in the Marquesas it was used figuratively to represent chieftainship, as for example in the saying:
Ua poha te hue, pehea te haatita?
The gourd is shattered, how can it be put together again? -- i.e. the chiefs are at loggerheads, how can unity be restored? (Dictionnaire, p. 174)
In Rarotongan the idiom 'ue 'enua means "native to the land". In Hawai'i the fruit of the gourd, which was an important adjunct in some ceremonies, symbolized the universe: "the seeds of the gourd when scattered through the sky, become stars, and the pulpy mass inside the clouds, the cover belikened to the solid dome of heaven, ka lani" [David Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities, p. 91]. In Hawai'i the gourds also have a prominent role in both traditional and modern music. In those contexts I saw many impressive-looking dried gourds with double bodies and was told that the fruit was trained to develop like that, although the only gourds I saw growing on vines when I went looking for them in 2007 and 2010 were rather sad-looking specimens with a single bulbous body. However, I did find one picture on the internet of a double-decker gourd on the vine, reproduced above. There are more photographs of gourd vines and fruit in Hawaii and Aotearoa in the gallery at the end of this page.
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Other Hue in Eastern Polynesia
Four other endemic or heritage plants have names incorporating the word root hue, either qualified by another word or phrase, or in reduplicated form, in parts of East Polynesia. Reduplication is a device to indicate some kind of deviation from or similarity to what is designated by the root word, as with a number of common affixes, so these words and expressions could also be grouped with pōhue and its variants, but since one is clearly a metaphorical reference to the calabash gourd, and two of the others are also members of the gourd family, they are dealt with here. One of these plants, Te Hue o Raukatauri, is found in Aotearoa (follow the link for more information). Two others, the wax gourd, Benincasa hispida var. pruriens, and the forest-dwelling Zehnaria grayana, are members of the Cucurbitaceae like Lagenaria siceraria. The other is a vine of the Menispermaceae family, Cocculus orbiculatus, which would indeed seem to have more in common with the plants grouped as pōhue in this part of the world. A more recent arrival in Polynesia, the pumpkin, Cucurbita melo, could be added to this list: it is called hue akau in the Marquesas.
 The Polynesian wax gourd, Benincasa hispida var. pruriens, is particularly interesting. It was brought into the Pacific by the ancient Polynesians, but it is markedly different from its Southeast Asian counterparts. Although botanists still group them as part of the same species, the Asian variety of the wax gourd is very much larger than its Polynesian counterpart (they can grow more than 40 cm or diameter and weigh up to 20 kilos), it may be round or cylindrical in shape (the Polynesian one is always round), and edible with a soft skin, rather than inedible with a very hard skin. During his stay in Tahiti in 1769, James Cook noted that the fruit of the Polynesian wax gourd was "about the size of a small orange, very hard, and quite round, serving them instead of bottles to put their monoe or oil in". The "monoe" was mono'i, scented coconut oil, called fangu (which is also the word for the gourd) in Tonga and Samoa (fagu), where the fruit serves the same purpose.
 Cook's description of both the size and the use of the gourd was quite accurate. The fruit is up to about ten centimetres in height and diameter, and covered with a white, powdery wax. The hard skin made it an ideal storage container for precious liquids. A hole was made around the area where the stalk joining it to the vine was located, the seeds and soft tissue were removed, and the resulting bottle closed with a small stopper. The wax gourd is known as hue 'aroro in Tahiti and hue pu'o'o in the Marquesas (i.e. "oil gourd" in both cases. The name 'ue roro, with the same meaning as the Tahitian and Marquesan terms, was probably used in the Cook Islands; there are still a few locations where the vines are growing in the wild in Rarotonga. However, Te Rangi Hiroa makes no mention of wax gourds in his Material Culture of the Cook Islands (1917); the only mention of gourds in that work is the tahā, bottles for storing water made from hollowed out Lagenaria gourds ('ue). The stems of the wax gourds are covered with firm bristles. The small, bright yellow flowers may possibly account for the name tūtae-fatitiri (lightning deposits) recorded by Stimson for an unidentified gourd in the Tuamotus; on the other hand this could be a species of Zehneria (look left, and see below). Like most other Cucurbits, the flowers of the wax gourd are either male of female, both borne on the same stems. (If you are curious about the use of the word tūtae in plant names, see the "News" for March 2020 for further information.)
Zehneria grayana, a thin-leaved vine with tiny white flowers and orange fruits, is found in forest clearings from sea level to high altitudes from New Caledonia to Tahiti, where it is called huehue. It does not seem to have had the press coverage of many of the plants discussed in these pages: possibly it is one of the many endemic plants that have suffered as a result of colonization and culture change. The best illustration I could find of it is a drawing made in Tahiti in 1769, by Cook's artist Sydney Parkinson (reproduced above, left). However, there is a photograph in the gallery of the fruit of a closely related species, Z. mucronata, which ranges from the Philippines to the Pacific Islands. This species is also present in Tahiti and probably shares the name huehue. In his Botanical Inventory of Ta'u, American Samoa (1992), W. Arthur Whistler notes that the botanist A. C. Smith in his Flora Vitiensis Nova combines these two species and another into a single species; however Dr Whistler prefers to keep them separated. In his Tuamotuan dictionary, under the heading for pōhue, J. F. Stimson includes "a kind of gourd-bearing creeper", and cross references this the term tūtae whatitiri, which he defines as "the round berries of the pōhue plant; the kernels [of which] are used to prepare a medicine for swellings and nodules". The small, round, bright-orange fruit of the Zehneria would fit this description, and be in harmony with the name, but I have not been able to find any mention of the plant's being present in the Austral Islands, nor of its medicinal uses (if any) in Eastern Polynesia.
 The leaves and habit of Cocculus orbiculatus are quite similar to those of the Zehnerias, but there the resemblance ends. It belongs to the family Memispermaceae, the "moonseed" family, most members of which are twining vines, growing in tropical and subtropical locations. This Hawaiian huehue is indigenous to Hawai'i but widely distributed from the Himalayas through Southeast Asia to parts of the Pacific, including some of the Southern Cook Islands where it is regarded as critically endangered. It has slender stems bearing widely-spaced, green heart-shaped leaves, and yellowish-white flowers. In Hawai'i it grows on lava fields and in open places and forest in areas of low or moderate rainfall. The fruits are dark-blue, eliptical drupes, about half a centimetre in diameter -- more like a fuchsia berry than a gourd. In Hawaii the plant is a particular favourite of the caterpillars of the fruit-piercing moth, Oraesia excavata, which feast on its leaves. The vine is sometimes used in landscaping in Hawai'i, but I have seen no record of the plant's being used medicinally in Polynesia.
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The Hue in Aotearoa
As noted above the hue (calabash gourd, Lagenaria sicareria) was distributed throughout Eastern Polynesia by Polynesian explorers some time after contact with Western Polynesia, where the plant was unknown, was lost, but while communication among the people settling the Marquesas, Tahiti and Rapanui (Easter Island) was still being maintained.
I have had an interest in these plants ever since I first encountered them in the 1950s, and was given some seeds of one of the Maori varieties, accompanied by directions for the care of the plants and their fruit, and strict admonitions to respect their sacred quality, by the Dutch artist Theo Schoon who spent many years learning about traditional Maori art and design by living in Maori communities, and who among many other things played a major part in reviving interest in the growing, conservation, and artistic possibilities of the hue. Unfortunately, my parents moved from our family home in Russell to Auckland about the time I left for Hawaii in 1965, and although some of the seeds were kept for me, they were no longer viable by the time I returned more than six years later. However, when I became Director of the James Henare Māori Research Centre at the University of Auckland in 1999, Dante Bonica, who taught traditional Māori art and artisanship at the University, gave me seeds of the hue he was cultivating, and we have been growing them in Te Māra Reo, where many of the photographs illustrating this page have been taken, ever since.
The importance of the gourd up until the nineteenth century is underlined by the large number of words in classical Maori for kinds of gourds, stages of growth, and things made from or associated with its fruit. The list below is probably not exhaustive, but includes most of those recorded in the Williams Dictionary.
Māori names for varieties of Lagenaria gourds
Variety used for bowls:
mānukaroa
Variety used for ceremonial calabashes:
paretarakihi (a large variety)
Varieties used for making containers for specific uses:
pūau (for preserved birds)
... also, possibly
whāngai-rangatira ("feed the chief")
wharehinu ("oil house")
Unspecified varieties:
arero-uru
whakahaumatua
ikaroa (also a name for the Milky Way)
ikaroa a Rauru
kōkakoware
omoomo
pahaua
Pūtēhue (also the personification of the gourd -- see comment below)
upokotaipu ~ upokotaupu
Māori words for stages of growth and treatment of gourds.
Growth and development:
 whakarau (treat gourd seeds to get them to germinate by soaking them in water and applying gentle heat)
whānaua ("be brought forth" -- the opening word of a karakia used when planting the seeds to ensure germination -- see the final section in this commentary)
pātangaroa (the seedling leaves [cotyledons], illustrated on the left)
tara (to put forth the second pair of leaves)
rautara (The third leaf of a seedling gourd after the cotyledons [the tara leaf])
pūtauhinu ~ pūtaihinu (fourth leaf of a seedling gourd)
tautototoro (to throw out runners)
uma (a plant that has put out all its leaves)
whānaua (be brought forth -- see note in the column opposite)
Parts of the plant and fruit:
 emiemi (bract at the footstalk of a gourd, i.e. the point where the remains of the flower adheres to the bottom of the gourd -- illustrated on the left)
karu ~ karukaru ~ pukahu (spongy matter enclosing the seeds)
kautahu (runners of the gourd, also tributaries of a river)
kāwai ~ kāwei (runners of a gourd, also lines of descent)
kīwai ~ kīwei (runners of a gourd, also loop or handle of a basket)
kōngutu (stalk end of a gourd, also mouth of a river)
kōpuka (the soft pulp around the seed)
kotawa (fruit when young and edible)
maupu (fruit growing near the base of the plant)
rewa (fruit growing near the end of a runner
taunuke (stalk)
wene (a shoot or runner)
wenewene (a general term for gourds and other creeping plants)
Treatment of fruit:
kārure (scoop out the pith)
Māori words for calabashes & vessels made from gourds
Calabashes in general: :
kāhaka
kia
kiaka
kimi
kōaka
koki
pahaua
tawā ~ tawhā
Calabashes with special qualities or uses:
hōteo (large)
hue kautu (gourd shaped like a carafe)
hue kiato (gourd used as a water vessel)
ipu (a calabash with a narrow mouth)
kāraha ~ kararaha ~ karahe (wide mouth)
kārure (small calabash or vessel)
kina ("sea urchin" - a globular calabash)
kōmutu ~koromutu (with top cut off and used as a lid)
kotimutu (with small end cut so as to form a bottle)
pāhaka (calabash of medium size)
pāpapa-koura ("crayfish shell" - calabash & bowl made from a slice of calabash)
tahā ~ tahē (with a narrow mouth)
takawai ~ wai (used as a water bottle)
Calabash parts and accoutrements:
hōrere (wooden mouthpiece attached to a calabash)
ngutu (rim of a vessel, mouthpiece of calabash)
matua (body of a calabash, to which the paewae was fixed)
paewae (the wooden mouthpiece for a calabash, "often handsomely carved")
titi (the wooden collar or mouthpiece for the calabash)
tuki (carved wooden mouthpiece for a calabash, pūkaea or pūtara)
Dishes and other artefacts made from parts of calabashes:
hakehake (a small vessell made by cutting a gourd
pararaha (a shallow dish made by slicing a gourd)
ipu pararaki (a dish made by cutting a slice of a skull or gourd)
porotiti ~ porotītiti (a small top made from a piece of a gourd with a peg inserted in it)
pōtaka hue (a top made from a small or medium sized gourd by cutting holes in the side to remove the seeds, then inserting a stake through the stalk end and out through the emiemi; when it is spun the air whirling through the holes makes a loud humming sound)
Other calabash-related terms:
rūruru tahā (a bundle of calabashes tied together for carrying; also a metaphor for loud thunder)
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The importance of the hue in Māori life.
The hue was an extremely important plant for the Polynesian settlers of Aotearoa, as it provided an irreplacable source of storage containers for water and preserved foods. The art of making pottery (which would have been possible in Aotearoa) had been forgotten centuries earlier, when pottery had been replaced by wooden containers and gourds in Samoa and Tonga, because these were much more practical and easier to make for Polynesian cuisine. The young fruit of the hue were also a good supplementary food when in season. Planting and cultivation of the hue were attended with ritual and great care was taken to protect and nurture the growing plants. New Zealand growing conditions were much more difficult than in tropical Polynesia, and the young plants in particular needed protection from adverse weather early in the growing season.
There is a poignant oriori (lullaby) to a gourd in the Ngata's collection of traditional songs and chants, composed by a woman who was unable to conceive, and, dreaming of the child she would have liked to raise, composed her song while holding a hue in her arms. It ends:
Nō te hika anō te aituā
He hue te tamaiti oriori, ē!
[It was in the begetting where (I) failed
Thus 'tis to a hue child (I sing) a lullaby.]
NM V. 3, 219, pp. 112-3.]
The runners of the gourd (kāwei, kāwai) were a metaphor for lines of descent, and also models of determination and persistence, as in this proverb, which Mead and Grove interpret as an exhortation to follow a course of action once it is commenced:
Ka rere te hue mataati
'The first shoot of the gourd stretches out' (M&G # 1109)
The calabashes made from the dried fruits also provided a metaphor for both the unruliness and innovative capacity of young people:
He tamariki wāwāhi tahā
'Children who break the calabashes' (M&G #714)
Pū-tē-hue
Pū-tē-hue is a personification of the gourd and the tutelary deity associated with this plant, who was invoked also for the protection and welbeing of seedling and young cultivated plants generally. Margaret Orbel (Illustrated Encyclopedia, p. 145) notes that according to the Ngāti Awa people she was the last born of the children on Tāne and Hine-rauāmoa. Tāne was the child of Rangi and Papa who organized the separation of his parents and thus enabled the world to emerge from the primal darkness. He was the overall god of the forest.
During the quarrels among the children of Rangi and Papa, Pū-tē-hue, Rongo (associated with the kūmara) and Haumia (associated with fernroot and other uncultivated food plants) worked together to try to maintain peace -- they are the quiet, peaceable beings. Some accounts have Tangaroa (god of the ocean) as the husband of Pū-tē-hue, others have Tāwhirimātea (god of the wind) -- either would have been a suitable accomplice in the transport of the hue from South America via Tahiti to Aotearoa.
Whānaua
The hue was an extremely valuable plant in Aotearoa for the seven centuries following the arrival of Polynesian settlers, as it was the only convenient vessel for storing and transporting water and other liquids, and also provided the ideal containers for storing preserved foods (the alternative was to make food containers from the inner bark of the tōtara tree, Podocarpus totara, which took a lot more effort to fabricate). The planting, cultivation and harvesting of hue therefore was surrounded by protocols and ceremonies. Williams dictionary has an extract from a karakia chanted when hue seeds were planted, to ensure that the resultant crop would thrive:
Whānaua kia tini
Whānaua kia mano
Whānaua kia rea
[Be brought forth as many
Be brought forth as a multitude
Be brought forth innumerably]
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The Hue in Te Paipera Tapu
Although the word "hue" appears twice in Māori translation of the Bible, this is in sections which follow what in one case turns out to be a mis-translation paralleling that in the King James Bible, corrected in more recent versions. However the calabash gourd had reached the Middle East via Africa in Biblical times, and other gourds also had become established in Africa. Gourds had probably floated over from the Americas to Africa (the seeds of some species can remain viable for several years in the ocean), and bottle gourds have been found in Egyptian tombs from around 3,500 BC. Michael Zohary thinks that the bottle gourd, Lagenaria siceraria, is reflected in the place name Dilean (Māori Rireana), a place where gourds were cultivated mentioned in Joshua 15:38 (Plants of the Bible, p. 89). The direct references to hue in Te Paipera Tapu are in the second Book of Kings and in the Book of Jonah.
2 Kingi 4:39 Nā, ka haere tētahi ki te parae ki te kohi pūwha, ka kite i te hue māori, ka kohia e ia, kī tonu tona kakahu.
One of them went out into the field to gather herbs; he found a wild vine, and gathered from it a lapful of wild gourds.
Hona 4:6 Nā kua rite i a Ihowa tētahi hue, meinga ana e ia ki eke ki runga ki a Hona, hei whakamarumaru mō tōna māhunga ...
And the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head.
 In the first example, both the vine and its fruit are represented by hue in Māori, and the herbs by pūwhā, the sowthistle, Sonchus kirkii. The Samoan version refers to the "herbs" as mea 'ai "things to eat", the vine as just that (vine, from English) and its fruit likewise as ona fua. The Cook Island version has them gathering rākau rikiriki, literally "very small plants", encountering a pō'ue ngangaere (a wild pōhue), and gathering its fruit ('ua). In this case the Biblical translation uses a local plant name for the vine, which is unusual in Biblical translations of Polynesian languages other than Māori, but it clearly refers to a vine in a generic sense, not a calabash gourd. Pōhue is an appropriate word to translate this term in that the plant it refers to, the Palestinian wild gourd Citrullus colocynthis (illustrated on the left), has, like the pōhue (Rarotongan pō'ue) from the Convolvulus family, cathartic properties that can cause serious illness or even death if too large a quantity is eaten. (The quotation from the Book of Kings is part of an account of how Elisha saved some fellow prophets from being poisoned by a pot of wild gourd stew.)
 The second example is particularly interesting as it is from a section of the Bible where the translator has followed the King James version, rather than translating directly from the Hebrew or Greek, or referring to more recent scholarship (as had evidently been done by the translators of some other books). The King James version has Jonah sheltered by a gourd vine, whereas the Jerusalem Bible and Revised Standard Versions specify a Castor Oil plant (Ricinus communis, Euphorbiaceae), as does Michael Zohary in his Plants of the Bible; the New Revised version simply says a "plant". The other Polynesian versions also specify the castor oil shrub (a seedling of which is pictured on the left): lā'au aila in Hawaiian, kikaiona in Samoan and kikiona in Cook Island Māori (the latter two from Hebrew kikayon).
Raukatauri
 There is one context in which the Māori word "hue" comes close to approaching its original Proto Polynesian connotations, though it is in regard to a mountain rather than a seaside plant. The plant concerned is Ourisia macrophylla, Te Hue o Raukatauri. In English it is the Mountain Foxglove. The plant is not a gourd, or even much of a vine, but it does form rosettes ground-cover style which vaguely resemble the leaves of a gourd plant. There the resemblance ends -- it has sprays of white flowers on stems about two feet high, unlike the solitary flowers of the other kind of hue (although they are white).
Raukatauri (also known as Raukataura in the far north, and Raukata 'ura in Tahiti) and her sister Raukatamea are goddesses of music, dance, the forest and the air, traditions concerning whom were brought from Tahiti to Aotearoa. Raukatauri is said to have been so overcome by the beauty of the music of her flute that she came to take up residence in it: in the forest her flute is represented by the case of the case-moth, Liothula omnivora, te pūtorino o Raukatauri, her hair by the trailing fronds of the epiphytic fern Asplenium flaccidum, ngā makawe o Raukatauri, and, when you emerge in the higher altitudes, her gourd plant, te hue o Raukatauri. Strange, muted noises heard in the forest are said to come from her singing or playing her flute. Accounts of the traditions surrounding Raukatauri can be found in Margaret Orbell's Encyclopedia, and also in Jo'el Komene's M.A. Thesis, Kōauau auē e auau tō au e: The Kouauau in Te Ao Māori (University of Waikato, Hamilton, 2009).
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