Polynesian Accounts of Creation
A similar character is given to Tangaroa in the Tuamotus.
There a Tangaroa god “who delighted in doing evil” set fire in the highest heaven “seeking thus to destroy everything.” “Tangaroa-i-te-po” he is called and “supreme ruler of the underworld.”
In New Zealand a quarrel is said to have arisen between Tane and Tangaroa when reptiles took to the land and Tangaroa resented this encroachment upon his preserves.
In New Zealand it is Tane son of Rangi by Papa-tu-a-nuku, originally Tangaroa’s wife, who takes his own daughter to wife, and it is she who, learning of her relationship to him, escapes to the lower world “to drag our offspring down.” “And now,” says one version of the tale, “from this time onward the flow of the ‘current of death’ of mankind to the ‘everlasting night’ became permanent.”
In Mangaia Tangaroa is the first-born son of ’Atea and Papa, but Rongo (Lono) not only secures for himself the main food supply but also takes Tangaroa’s wife Taka and has by her a daughter Tavake by whom he has children, and “with the birth of Tavake’s children the lineage of the main stock of Mangaia became definitely human.”