UC researcher uncovers information on European explorers

University of Canterbury researcher uncovers fresh information on European explorer encounters

February 15, 2015

Scholars who have scoured the written records for information on the first encounter of European explorers with New Zealand Maori in 1642 and believe that there is little more to discover may be proven wrong.

University of Canterbury maritime history student Dr Rosanne Hawarden found surprising detail when she enlarged a high resolution scan of the first printed image of New Zealand and the Maori people during Abel Tasman’s first visit to New Zealand in 1642.

As four Dutch sailors were killed during this encounter, the bay was called Massacre Bay. Embedded in one of the images and all but invisible to the naked eye are a dozen tiny canoes on beaches. This is the first printed image of Maori watercraft on land or at anchor.

Dr Hawarden and independent scholar Rudiger Mack made several trips out to sea to find the exact place from which the original Dutch drawings were made. The canoe beaches can be identified in the landscape with two of them, Taupo Point and Takapou in Wainui Bay, Golden Bay in the South Island, being recorded archaeological sites.

“Taupo Point, which is part of the Abel Tasman National Park, is an historic pa site drawn by an early surveyor John Barnicoat in 1844. His image shows canoes on the same rocky beach which has been cleared of large boulders to create several canoe haulages or tauranga waka, which were thought to pre-date European arrival in the area.

“The landing site was ignored in previous archaeological surveys nor had the pa site been radiocarbon dated. Dating a canoe landing site has not previously been done in New Zealand. If the landing site was in existence before the Dutch arrival it would be the oldest existing maritime structure in New Zealand and a site of national importance.

“The first step was to prove it had existed intact in the earliest known photographs. We conducted extensive interviews with local iwi, Maori scholars and former land owners in the quest for information and images of the beach site. They searched multiple photographic archives and all the evidence shows that the rows of cleared boulders had changed very little in living memory.

“Maori selected waka landing sites carefully, in stable marine environments which hardly change over time. To prove the canoe haulage concept, Menzies Bay on the Banks Peninsula was surveyed. Despite the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes, individual stones in that boulder bank could be identified in a photograph taken in the 1980s and had not shifted.”

Dr Hawarden’s research has been accepted for presentation at the ninth International Conference on Easter Island and the Pacific in Berlin in June 2015.

ENDS

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