Kai popolohua o Kane.
A lealea au i ka’u hula,
Pau au i ka manó nui!
Footnote 418:[ (return) ] Lala-kea. This proper name, as it seems once to have been, has now become rather the designation of a whole class of man-eating sea-monsters. The Hawaiians worshiped individual sharks as demigods, in the belief that the souls of the departed at death, or even before death, sometimes entered and took possession of them, and that they at times resumed human form. To this class belonged the famous shark Niuhi (verse 5).
Footnote 419:[ (return) ] Papa-ku o Lono. This was one of the underlying strata of the earth that must be passed before reaching Mílu, the hades of the Hawaiians. The cosmogony of the southern Polynesians, according to Mr. Tregear, recognized ten papa, or divisions. “The first division was the earth’s surface; the second was the abode of Rongo-ma-tane and Haumia-tiketike; ... the tenth was Meto, or Ameto, or Aweto, wherein the soul of man found utter extinction.” (The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary, by Edward Tregear, F.R.G.S., etc., Wellington, New Zealand, 1891.)
Footnote 420:[ (return) ]
Verses 8 and 9 are from an old proverb which the Hawaiians put into the following quatrain:
A pua ka wiliwili,
A nanahu ka manó;
A pua ka wahine u’i,
A nanahu ke kanawai.
[Translation.]
When flowers the wiliwili,
Then bites the shark;
When flowers a young woman.
Then bites the law.
The people came to take this old saw seriously and literally, and during the season when the wiliwili (Erythrina monosperma) was clothed in its splendid tufts of brick-red, mothers kept their children from swimming into the deep sea by setting before them the terrors of the shark.
[Translation.]
Song
Alas! I am seized by the shark, great shark!
Lala-kea with triple-banked teeth.