Predicting Weather By The Moon - Xavier University Libraries

Weather By The Moon
A publication of the Bishop Museum at Honolulu
states that the Cucurbita maxima, the giant Hawaiian gourd,
was cultivated in pre-European Hawaii in this exact lunar
period also. It seems to have been common practice
throughout the Pacific.
Fishing was similarly tied to lunar events. Certain
winds were known to blow at certain times of the month.
To the eastern Maori, four days after New Moon came the
so-called ‘Winds of Tamatea’, which turned to blow from
the east, bringing wind and a rougher sea – at least, on the
East Coast. Fishermen did not venture out to sea during
that period.
Some Moon phases were said to bring more fish. Although
there was no written language, the Maori had a rich
artistic culture and fishermen kept tallies using an intricate
system of symbols. On the next page is a list of the
Tuhoe tribe names of the ‘nights of the Moon’ as the Maori
put it; (for they spoke of ‘nights’ where we use the term
‘days’) together with their value as fishing nights for the
fish called Kokupu.
The typical Maori fisherman’s calendar looked like a
series of dots, dashes, crosses, L shapes etc. Perhaps it
was all that remained of what might have once been a written
almanac. After all, wherever the Maori people came
from, thousands of years ago, there would have existed a
written language, be it India, China, Egypt or the Americas.
And each of those had accrued almanac information for
thousands of years. The beginning of the Maori new year
was the June New Moon coinciding with the appearance of
Pleiades, located in Taurus, popularly known to us as the
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