Arapawa or Arapaoa?

By Michael Trotter

Figure 1. Part of an 1835 map of New Zealand by J. Archer.
(Utrecht University Library, The Netherlands, Special Collections.)

In 2014 it was announced that the name of Arapawa Island in the Marlborough Sounds had been changed to Arapaoa. This put us in the anomalous situation of having three of our rarest breeds of New Zealand livestock – the Arapawa pigs, sheep and goats – being named after an island that now has a different name. Having previously been involved in archaeological research of this area I was aware that there had been historical references to alternative spellings but thought the matter had been resolved a century or more ago.

James Cook, who visited the island several times in the late eighteenth century, mistakenly thought that it was part of the mainland so he neither noted a Maori name for it nor gave it a European one. This is shown on “A Chart of Cooks Straights in New Zeland” [sic] Number XVII, drawn in 1770 (published by Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, in 1955).

Figure 2. Part of an 1850 map of the Colony of New Zealand by John Arrowsmith. (Collection of Puke Ariki, New Plymouth, ARC2015-079.)

One of the earliest maps in the nineteenth century to show the island and give it a name was one drawn by J. Archer in 1835 and he gave the name as “I. Alapawa” – Figure 1 (above) is the relevant part of this map. A better map was produced by John Arrowsmith in 1841 with the same name but now with the addition of the alternative name of Wellington Island. By 1850 the coastline had been redrawn more accurately by him as in Figure 2 (on the left).

Also about 1850 James Wyld produced a map entitled “The Islands of New Zealand from the Admiralty Surveys of the English and French Marine from the Observations of the New Zealand Company and from Private Surveys and Sketches” in which the island was named Alopawa (Figure 3, below).

Figure 3. Part of James Wyld’s 1850 map of The Islands of New Zealand. (Utrecht University Library, The Netherlands, Special Collections.)

In 1849-50 a survey of the part of New Zealand was made by the H.M.S. Acheron. When their map of “Cook Strait and the Coast to Cape Egmont with depths in fathoms” was first published the island was simply named Alapawa but in a ‘corrected’ version of 1869 it was changed to “Carlyle or Alapawa”. Around this time numerous maps were produced showing the island named Alapawa with an ‘l’ – for example, those produced by John Rapkin in 1851, by J. & F. Tallis in 1851, and by Edward Stanford in 1864.

Since the general adoption of the Maori alphabet that had been devised by missionaries in the North Island in the early nineteenth century the letter ‘l’ is not used in written Maori but prior to that words were often spelt as they sounded, and some tribal dialects used sounds not included in that alphabet. The ‘l’ sound has survived in some place-names such as Little Akaloa on Banks Peninsula and Waihola in Otago but otherwise it is now written as ‘r’, hence the Alapawa of these early maps has become Arapawa. The latest use of Alapawa Island that I could find was in 1872 when several newspapers referred to a shipwreck having occurred there.

Figure 4. Part of an 1864 map of New Zealand by Henry G. Clark.
(Alexander Turnbull Library, MapColl-834.2a/1864/Acc.24793.)

One of the earliest maps of confirmed date with the name spelled as Arapawa with an ‘r’ was one by Henry G. Clark in 1864 (Figure 4, on the left).

Besides maps, different spellings of the name have appeared in a number of different documents over the years, though some of them referred to a wider area than the island itself. In the Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle on 13 March 1847 there was a reference to “Arapawa (Queen Charlotte Sound)”. In the New Zealand Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian on 17 February 1849 a letter written in Maori by Matiaha Tiramorehu referred to “Arapaoa” but in this case it referred to the general Marlborough area. Another letter in Maori in the same newspaper on 13 June 1855 from some principal Ngāti Awa chiefs mentioned “Arapawa” meaning the Queen Charlotte Sound area, and there were further newspaper references to both “Arapawa” and “Arapaoa” for the general area over the next few years.

Arapawa was specifically listed as an island in the “New Zealand Company’s Third Deed of Purchase from the Natives” in 1839 (see Alexander Mackay’s 1873 A Compendium of Official Documents Relative to Native Affairs in the South Island). This was possibly the earliest spelling of Arapawa with an ‘r’ instead of an ‘l’ for the island.

John White’s monumental The Ancient History of the Maori includes a Ngāti Hau (Whanganui River area) tradition, collected in 1842, in which the place-name is given as Aro-pawa though again this refers to the general Queen Charlotte Sound area rather than the island.

Figure 5. Excerpt from W. H. S. Roberts’
1903 article in the Marlborough Express.

W. H. S. Roberts, a long-time collector of Maori history who published a series of articles on Maori Nomenclature in New Zealand newspapers, noted that the old spelling of the island’s name was Aro-paoa in the Marlborough Express of 12 September 1903, and he also considered Arapaoa to be incorrect (Figure 5, on the left).

In 1935 A. H. Carrington, an authority on Ngāi Tahu history, published a series of newspaper articles on Maori History in the Auckland Star and the Christchurch Times. In the first one of these he related the tradition of how Kupe killed a monstrous octopus “and thereupon named the South Island Arapaoa, in reference to the great downward blow with which he killed the octopus.” In an earlier 1934 manuscript (now in the Turnbull Library), however, he also wrote “Arapawa (correctly Ara-paoa) is the name for Cook Strait.”

I asked the New Zealand Geographic Board about the change from Arapawa to Arapaoa and was told that the place name Arapawa Island was altered to Arapaoa Island under the shared Te Tau Ihu Treaty Settlement legislation – that is, the Treaty of Waitangi settlements that were reached with Maori tribes in the Nelson-Marlborough region, and which were passed into legislation in 2014. The word Awapaoa came from the Kupe killing the octopus tradition and in different versions could mean either to rise up and strike with a weapon or to a downward blow.

Incidentally, although the latest topographical map of the area (1:50,000 scale, revised and published in 2023) has the new spelling for the island, a 485 metre high hill in the central part of the island is still named Arapawa, as it has been since at least 1899. In 1929 the name of the hill was modified to “Arapawa (Arapaoa)” on the inch to the mile series of maps but it reverted to plain Arapawa in 1944. (The name of the island remained simply Arapawa throughout this time.)

In summary, two main conclusions may be drawn from the examples given in the above account:

• Based on the mythological story of the oceanic explorer Kupe killing a monstrous octopus there is some traditional evidence that the name Arapaoa or similar (depending on tribal dialect) was applied to the upper part of the South Island, possibly to Queen Charlotte Sound or even to the whole of the South Island.
• In the early nineteenth century the name Alapawa or possibly Alopawa was specifically given to the island in the Marlborough Sounds. The first consonant in the name was initially rendered as ‘l’ on early maps but later changed to ‘r’ in conformity with the missionary-devised Maori alphabet.

I could find no evidence that the name Arapaoa was traditionally applied specifically to the island, but sound historical evidence exists for calling the island Arapawa or its dialectal variation, Alapawa. So, I for one will continue to refer to Arapawa sheep, Arapawa pigs and Arapawa goats, and for consistency, as well as because of the historical background, will keep calling the place where these breeds originated Arapawa Island.

(And as a postscript, I’m glad to see that the Arapawa Goat Association has resolved keep the name for the Arapawa goats on the grounds that changing it would be detrimental to the breed and cause confusion.)

Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement for permission to use early maps is made to the Utrecht University in the Netherlands, the National Library of New Zealand, and Puke Ariki in New Plymouth. Good use was made of the National Library of Australia’s Trove website, Peter Maling’s 1999 publication of Historic Charts & Maps of New Zealand, the invaluable Old Maps Online website operated by Klokan Technologies in Switzerland, the Papers Past website operated by the National Library of New Zealand, and the extremely useful MapsPast website of historical topographical maps of New Zealand.