Page 12 - Puhipi

says that Whata was apparently responsible for the building also commander of

Tokomaru and Rakeiora and Tamaariki were its navigators. The canoe landed on the
west coast, the people settling in the Mohakatino river mouth area. There they built
house Maraerotuhia and there for centuries the anchor stone of the canoe was held in
safe keeping. It was placed in the Taranaki Museum by elders of Ngati Tama and Ngati
Mutunga, descendants of the people of Tokomaru. So the story goes, who did not leave

his old home because of war, murder or famine. He alone left no quarrel behind him.

European Exploration and Settlement

All that was Maori, things made, things said, and thoughts, had at base the ancient
culture common to all Polynesia.

In Aotearoa it had changed and developed as passing time and new conditions moulded
it, but it was still essentially Polynesian. Now it was to change drastically, radically,
in some ways happily, all to often tragically. It changed as the world began to shrink,
as the white sails of European navigators slipped over the horizon of seas that had
known no vessels save the great canoes and no men except the brown faced voyagers of

the sea of many islands. Herald of the change was a Dutchman, Abel Jansoon Tasman
who was on a voyage of exploration for the Dutch East India company, put into
rd
Golden Bay in the north of the South Island on 3 December 1642.

Muderers Bay he called it because Maori in canoes killed four of his men before they
even reached the shore. He called the land Nieuw Zeelander after a Dutch province
and so except for a couple of vowel changes it has remained.

The first significant meeting of brown New Zealander and white explorer came in 1769
when on the 7 October Lt James Cook in the Endeavour sighted land and two days
th
later landed in Poverty Bay on the East Coast. Cook can properly be regarded as one of

the greatest navigators and explorers. He has certainly been remembered for the way he
cared for his men. But to all who study the Maori these accomplishments are secondary
to the journal he kept so carefully and so honestly. A great deal of the evidence we have
of the pre-european Maori comes straight from the day to day writings of the Lt, later
Captain Cook. Even in this book are observations which come scarcely changed from

Cooks journal because some of the things he saw vanished for ever before even his
century had turned. He and the botanist of the first voyage, Sir Joseph Banks are the
authorities for instance of the growing of the yam and paper mulberry. He added to our
knowledge in his second and third voyages.

Three years after Cooks first voyage the ill fated Marion Dufresne and a number of his
crew died at the hands of Maori in the Bay of Islands, it is thought for breaking the
law of tapu. The British and French explorers came and went, and at their heels were

the sealers and traders. Australias new settlement at Port Jackson was too near for the