Totaranui Beach, between Golden Beach and Tasman Bay, South Island of New Zealand. The area now stands within the Abel Tasman National Park.
Part 1 of 2
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.
Part Two
Cape Reinga, North Island, New Zealand. Close inspection will reveal, on the far horizon just above the little lighthouse, the largest of the Three Kings Islands.
HE anchored in Golden Bay;* but luck was against him. First of all the natives of the bay paddled out to view his ships, and, falling on a boat’s crew, clubbed four out of seven of the men. He says that he took no vengeance, but sailed away further into the strait. Next morning a strong gale had sprung up. Tasman, therefore, turned and ran on northward, merely catching glimpses, through scud and cloud, of the North Island.*
Finally, at what is now North Cape,* he discerned to his joy a free passage to the east. He made one attempt to land, in search of water, on a little group of islands hard by, which, as it was Christmastide, he called Three Kings.* But a throng of natives, shaking spears and shouting with hoarse voices, terrified his boat’s crew. He gave up the attempt and sailed away, glad, no doubt, to leave this vague realm of storm and savages.*
A large, curved natural harbour on the northwest tip of South Island.
The Cook Strait between North and South Islands turns and narrows suddenly at the eastern end, where North Island’s Wellington looks across to South Island’s Blenheim. Tasman had no way of knowing that where the Strait dog-legs at this point there lay a passage through to the east, so he let the ill-timed gale drive him back the way he had come.
North Cape is the northernmost tip of North island, a few miles to the east of Cape Reinga (Te Rerenga Wairua).
Manawatawhi, a group of 13 uninhabited islands about 34 miles northwest of Cape Reinga, New Zealand. Tasman named the islands on January 6th, 1643, the Feast of the Epiphany.
The author of this account, William Pember Reeves (1857-1932), was born in Lyttelton, Canterbury region, New Zealand, and served as Minister of Labour from 1891 to 1896. He subsequently became Director of the London School of Economics (1908–19) and chairman of the board of the National Bank of New Zealand (1917-1931). A keen social reformer, he was President of the Anglo-Hellenic League (1913–25), founded to reply to anti-Greek propaganda in Britain following the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, and headed the committee organising the First Universal Races Congress in London in 1911, an early initiative to combat racism.
