The Phantom War Canoe of Lake Tarawera

In 1886 Lake Tarawera was the road to a wonder of the world. Tourists landed at Te Wairoa and crossed the lake by boat towards the Pink and White Terraces. The best known of their guides was Sophia Hinerangi, Guide Sophia. The lake was already restless. On 24 May 1886 her party found their boats beached in the mud of a drained creek. Then the water surged back in, and out again.

31 May 1886. Sophia led another party across the water. On board were George Sise, a Dunedin businessman, his wife Louise and their daughter Frances, with Dr T. S. Ralph, Father Kelliher and William Quick. Māori rowers pulled at the oars.

Mrs Sise later described what they saw. "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."

Sophia noticed something stranger. "When we rowed quicker they did the same and when we stopped they also did." George Sise put the canoe at "half a mile away or possibly more". Then it was gone. Swallowed by the mist.

Later Māori accounts filled in the picture. A war canoe. A double row of occupants, one row paddling, the other standing wrapped in flax robes, heads bowed, hair plumed as for death with the feathers of the huia and the white heron. It paddled straight towards Mount Tarawera. No canoe like it was known on the lake.

At Te Wairoa the tohunga Tūhoto Ariki gave his reading. The tourists had sighted a waka wairua, a spirit canoe. It heralded the destruction of the region.

10 June 1886. At about 2 a.m. Mount Tarawera erupted. Te Wairoa and five other villages were buried. The Pink and White Terraces were destroyed. About 120 people died, all but seven of them Māori. More than 60 survived inside Sophia's solidly built house. Tūhoto was dug out of his buried hut alive after four days. He died about two weeks later in Rotorua.

The witnesses were careful. On 25 June 1886 the Sises told the Otago Witness that none of them believed in the supernatural, and they corrected fanciful additions made by reporters. George Sise said the crew could just as well have been "apple women or nurse girls".

The physicist Ron Keam weighed the accounts in his 1988 book Tarawera and suggested two small, real canoes. A 1989 NZ Skeptics review doubted that anyone could see feathers at such a distance, and noted that the huia plumes first appear with James Cowan in 1925. Others have proposed a mirage on the mist, or a sunken burial canoe shaken loose by the surging lake.

In 1888 Kennett Watkins painted The Phantom Canoe: A Legend of Lake Tarawera. The Buried Village of Te Wairoa still tells the story. And Māori hold that the canoe will appear again before Tarawera next erupts.