Tangaroa is the Rapa Nui form of the great Polynesian sea-god, but on Easter Island he is remembered above all as the ancestral chief who came from Hiva in the shape of a seal with a human face and voice. Killed and placed in the earth-oven, his flesh would not cook — proof of his mana. He is the brother of the rain-god Hiro and, in the royal genealogy recorded by Métraux (1940:127), the father of Rongo and, with Rongo, a divine ancestor of the first king Hotu Matu'a.