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According to oral tradition, the heroic explorer Kupe was the first discoverer of New Zealand or “Aotearoa”. In an early European synthesized interpretation of these accounts, around 750 CE he had discovered New Zealand and later, around 1350, one great fleet of settlers set out from Hawaiki in eastern Polynesia. [6]
Kupe was a legendary [1] Polynesian explorer who, according to Māori oral history, was the first person to discover New Zealand. [2] He is generally held to have been born to a father from Rarotonga and a mother from Raiatea , and probably spoke a Māori proto-language similar to Cook Islands Māori or Tahitian .
Other books presenting such theories include The Great Divide: The Story of New Zealand & its Treaty (2012) by journalist Ian Wishart, [47] and To the Ends of the Earth by Maxwell C. Hill, Gary Cook and Noel Hilliam, which claims without evidence that New Zealand was discovered by explorers from ancient Egypt and Greece. [48] [49]
The New Zealand Geographic Board discovered in 2009 that the names of the North Island and South ... New Zealand was the first nation in the world to grant all ...
Aotearoa (Māori: [aɔˈtɛaɾɔa]) [1] is the Māori-language name for New Zealand.The name was originally used by Māori in reference only to the North Island, with the whole country being referred to as Aotearoa me Te Waipounamu – where Te Ika-a-Māui means North Island, and Te Waipounamu means South Island. [2]
Abel Tasman was born around 1603 in Lutjegast, a small village in the province of Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands.The oldest available source mentioning him is dated 27 December 1631 when, as a seafarer living in Amsterdam, the 28-year-old became engaged to marry 21-year-old Jannetje Tjaers, of Palmstraat in the Jordaan district of the city.
Many New Zealand species may have been heading for slow extinction after Polynesian settlement. [2] The extinction of the mega fauna (moa) seems to have occurred quickly, within 100 years. [43] The first settlers came to New Zealand from tropical Polynesia and adapted to a temperate environment while preserving many of their old practices.
In 1642, the first Europeans known to reach New Zealand were the crew of Dutch explorer Abel Tasman who arrived in his ships Heemskerck and Zeehaen. Tasman anchored at the northern end of the South Island in Golden Bay (he named it Murderers' Bay) in December 1642 and sailed northward to Tonga following a clash with local Māori.