William Wyatt Gill’s Mangaian myths and sacred locations

Record summary

William Wyatt Gill’s Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, published in 1876, preserves Mangaian and wider Cook Islands narratives involving gods, spirits, the underworld, sacred places and extraordinary transformations. It offers a nineteenth-century Pacific textual comparator for how anomalous places are embedded in genealogy, ritual and cosmology rather than presented as isolated hauntings. The account is mediated by a missionary collector and English publication conventions. Researchers should establish which stories are specifically Mangaian, how names were rendered and what later scholarship says about Gill’s methods.