In the long Hotu Matu’a cycle as Barthel systematised it, two named men are easy to confuse with each other: Nga Tavake meets the seven scouts while they are still alone on the land—he is said to have preceded them onto the island. Oroi belongs to a later episode: he hides aboard Hotu Matu’a’s migration fleet, lands unseen at Anakena, and continues a blood feud from Hiva against Hotu’s children and allies. The quoted paragraphs below follow the University of Hawaiʻi digest of Barthel’s The Eighth Land (1978), the same English source used on this site’s Hotu Matu’a page.
Excerpt from Barthel’s Hotu Matu’a narrative (English digest)
The four paragraphs reproduce contiguous wording from the Polynesian Voyaging Society / University of Hawaiʻi page summarising Thomas S. Barthel, *The Eighth Land* (1978). Minor punctuation matches that web digest; it is not Father Englert’s Spanish or Rapanui column, though Englert recorded related material in *Leyendas de Isla de Pascua* (see Koha “Story of Oroi”).
A man named Nga Tavake, who had preceded the explorers onto the island, then appeared, and the six explorers told him, "This is a bad land, for when we planted yams, grass grew up instead." Then they all went to the yam plantation planted by Kuukuu and weeded it.
Among Hotu Matua's company there was a concealed passenger whose name was Oroi; he was an enemy of Hotu, who had killed some of Hotu's children in Hiva, and had hidden himself on board the migration canoe. He got on shore at Anakena without anyone having guessed at his presence. One day the five children of a man named Roro went to bathe at Ovahe (a small cove east of Anakena), and as they lay on a rock in the sea, Oroi came from behind and killed them by thrusting a lobster spine up their anuses and pulling out their intestines.
When the children did not return, the father said to the mother, "Where are the children?" The mother said, "On the rock." But when Roro went to look, the rock was covered with water, for it was high tide; by and by when the water went down, he saw the five children were dead. Roro then told Hotu Matua: "Oroi, that bad man, is here, for he has killed my children." Now Hotu Matua went to see his adopted daughter Veri Hina, who was married and who lived at Mahatua (past Ovahe on the north coast). Oroi put a noose in his path and tried to catch his foot in it, but Hotu avoided it by stepping to one side. When he had finished his visit to his adopted daughter, he said to her and her husband, "Follow me and watch above me. If the sooty terns circle high above me, I will live; if the terns dive down on me, I have been killed." As he returned, he saw that the noose was still on the path, and he knew his enemy was hidden behind the rock. Terns circled high above him. This time Hotu Matua intentionally stepped on the noose and fell, and when Oroi came at him with a bone knife, he killed Oroi with a spell—"Spin! Spin! Fall down! Fall down! Die!"
Then he called to his adopted daughter and son-in-law to see that Oroi was dead. When, however, they put the corpse in the oven to cook it, it came to life again, so they had to take it over to the other side of the island to an ahu called Oroi, and there the corpse cooked quite satisfactorily, and they ate it.
Why two different men matter
Nga Tavake’s cameo answers the implicit question “Was the island empty?” in the scout narrative: tradition inserts a prior human presence without explaining whether he was castaway, spirit, or ancestor—readers should not merge him with Oroi’s stealth immigration.1
William Thomson’s 1886 report (via Easter Island Travel) preserves another Oroi-shaped feud on the homeland before migration; Barthel’s ordering instead stresses Oroi aboard the fleet to Te Pito te Kainga. The same name can carry different manuscript lines—compare this page with the Hotu Matu’a overview here and with ethnographic summaries in the references.2
Violence, tapu, and comparative context
Métraux’s 1940 *Ethnology* cautions that grotesque murder motifs in Rapa Nui ‘a’amu often encode feud logic and food metaphors; modern retellings should flag content carefully for classrooms.3
The lobster-spine detail parallels Marquesan ethnographic notes Barthel’s note 5 already flags; it is evidence of eastern Polynesian narrative diffusion, not a recipe for sensational tourism copy.
Reading with other site pages
Pair this excerpt with the Hotu Matu’a overview here (dream, scouts, Kuukuu’s turtle) and with the Hanau ʻeʻepe / momoko article for Poike settlement after Hotu’s fleet lands.4
For Englert’s own chapter ordering and Rapanui wording, open the Internet Archive scan of *Island at the center of the world* or Koha’s legend index; Koha lists a dedicated “Story of Oroi” page digitised from the 1980 Chilean edition.5
Sources
- Polynesian Voyaging Society / University of Hawaiʻi — Barthel digest of Hotu Matu’a (includes Nga Tavake and Oroi passages). Open link
- Koha U Motu — Englert corpus: “The Story of Oroi” (bilingual page; URL follows Koha numbering). Open link
- Englert, S. (1970). Island at the center of the world (Mulloy trans.). Internet Archive. Open link
- Métraux, A. (1940). Ethnology of Easter Island — narrative genres and caution on myth reading. Open link
- Wikipedia contributors (ongoing). Hotu Matuʻa. Open link