Maori Eels | Orion Magazine

What Cook described, “eight feet in length, and big round as a man’s body,” was most likely a longfin eel. I had been working on a book on eels for about three years when my friend David Seidler, a screenwriter in Santa Monica, asked me, “Have you heard about the sacred eels in New Zealand, mate?” I hadn’t. Soon David had connected me with Stella August, a Maori who had just completed her graduate thesis on eel migration. I began an e-mail correspondence, and she agreed to be my guide. My visit would be an opportunity to listen to men who had grown up fishing and hunting in New Zealand, speaking a language and practicing traditions that had gone largely silent and underground since the arrival of the British in the late eighteenth century.