Introduction
New Zealand came under British control with the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840; James Cook had charted its coasts in the 1770s, but Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had set the first European eyes on the islands, over a century before. As William Reeves notes, however, he was interested only in getting past them.
NEARLY at the end of 1642, Tasman,* a sea captain in the service of the Dutch East India Company, sighted the western ranges of the Southern Alps.* He was four months out from Java, investigating the extent of New Holland,* and in particular its possible continuation southward as a great Antarctic continent. He had just discovered Tasmania, and was destined, ere returning home, to light upon Fiji and the Friendly Islands.*
So true is it that the most striking discoveries are made by men who are searching for what they never find. With his two ships, the small “Heemskirk” and tiny “Zeehan,” he began to coast cautiously northward, looking for an opening eastward. He seems to have regarded New Zealand simply as a lofty barrier across his path, to be passed at the first chance. Groping along, he actually turned into the wide opening which, narrowing further east into Cook’s Strait, divides the North and South Islands.
Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603–1659), a native of Lutjegast in the Netherlands, who was the first European to reach Van Diemen’s Land, modern-day Tasmania, and New Zealand, and to sight the Fiji islands. He died in Batavia, modern-day Jakarta in Indonesia, in 1659, then a possession of the Dutch East Indies.
The Southern Alps (Kā Tiritiri o te Moana) in South Island. “Even through the dry, matter-of-fact entries of Tasman’s log” Reeves wrote “we can see that it impressed him. He notes that the mountains seemed lifted aloft in the air.”
‘New Holland’ was Tasman’s name for Australia. The Dutch did not follow up on Tasman’s discoveries any more than the British did on Cook’s, but after Britain founded the Australian colony of New South Wales in 1788 the name of New Holland was gradually restricted to western Australia, until British colonial expansion in Queen Victorian’s time saw the term fall out of use altogether.
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