Another New Zealand legend says that Hina came to the sea and called for a little fish to aid her in going away from the island. It tried to carry her, but was too weak. Hina struck it with her open hand. It had striped sides forever after. She tried a larger fish, but fell off before they had gone far from shore. Her blow gave this fish its beautiful blue spots. Another received black spots. Another she stamped her foot upon, making it flat. At last a shark carried her far away. She was very thirsty, and broke a cocoanut on the shark's head, making a bump, which has been handed down for generations. The shark carried her to the home of the two who rescued her and gave her new strength.
Meanwhile Rupe or Maui-mua, a brother of Hina-uri and Maui, grieved for his sister. He sought for her throughout the land and then launched his canoe upon the blue waters surrounding Ao-tea-roa (The Great White Land; the ancient native New Zealand) and searched the coasts. He only learned that his sister had, as the natives said, "leaped into the waters and been carried away into the heavens."
"Outside Were Other Worlds."
Rupe's heart filled with the desire to find and protect the frenzied sister who had probably taken a canoe and floated away, out of the horizon, seen from New Zealand coasts, into new horizons. During the Viking age of the Pacific, when many chiefs sailed long distances, visiting the most remote islands of Polynesia, they frequently spoke of breaking through from the home land into new heavens—or of climbing up the path of the sun on the waters into a new heaven. This was their poetical way of passing from horizon to horizon. The horizon around their particular island surrounded their complete world. Outside, somewhere, were other worlds and other heavens. Rupe's voyage was an idyll of the Pacific. It was one more story to be added to the prose poems of consecrated travel. It was a brother feeling through the mysteries of unknown lands for a sister, as dear to him as an Evangeline has been to other men.
From the mist-land of the Polynesian race comes this story of the trickery of Maui the learned, and the faithfulness of his older brother Maui-mua or Rupe—one of the "five forgetful Mauis." Rupe hoisted mat-sails over his canoe and thus made the winds serve him. He paddled the canoe onward through the hours when calms rested on glassy waves.
Thus he passed out of sight of Ao-tea-roa, away from his brothers, and out of the reach of all tricks and incantations of Maui, the mischievous. He sailed until a new island rose out of the sea to greet him. Here in a "new heaven" he found friends to care for him and prepare him for his longer journey. His restless anxiety for his sister urged him onward until days lengthened into months and months into years. He passed from the horizons of newly-discovered islands, into the horizons of circling skies around islands of which he had never heard before. Sometimes he found relatives, but more frequently his welcome came from those who could trace no historical touch in their genealogies.
Here and there, apparently, he found traces of a woman whose description answered that of his sister Hina-uri. At last he looked through the heavens upon a new world, and saw his sister in great trouble.
According to some legends the jealous wives of the great chief, Tini-rau, attack Hina, who was known among them as Hina-te-ngaru-moana, "Hina, the daughter of the ocean." Tini-rau and Hina lived away from the village of the chief until their little boy was born. When they needed food, the chief said, "Let us go to my settlement and we shall have food provided."