The seal was killed but, though baked for the necessary time in an earth oven, the seal refused to cook. Hence the people inferred that Tangaroa must have been a chief of power.

Tangaroa also appears in the king's lineage with Rongo as his son.

This scanty information is significant as an echo from central Polynesia.

Tane and Tu are absent from the pantheon but Tu-koihu is an early ancestor. He was a skilled artisan, which reminds us of the early functions of the god Tu in the Tahitian tale of creation.

Hiro, the famous voyager of central Polynesia, occurs in an invocation for rain. The first line runs:

E te ua, matavai roa a Hiro e -

(O rain, long tear drops of Hiro -)

Ruanuku, a well-known god, occurs in a genealogy. Atua-metua is present in a creation chant. This name is intriguing for it resembles Atu-motua, one of the early gods of Mangareva.

Though Atu (lord) and Atua (god) are different words, a change may have taken place in Easter Island. The qualifying words motua and metua are linguistic forms of the same word meaning father.

Atua-metua mated with Riri-tuna-rei and produced the niu.

The word niu is the widely spread name for coconut but, as there are no coconuts on Easter Island, the name was applied locally to the fruit of the miro.

The word tuna in the compound name of Riri-tuna-rei means eel, and it is evident that this fragment records a memory of the well-known myth of the origin of the coconut from the head of an eel."

(Buck)