9 88 AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



induced to venture on board the vessel. On the canoe returning to the shore, 

 seven other double-canoes forthwith proceeded to the Hectnskerck, and Tasman, not 

 knowing their intention, sent a boat with seven men to warn his comrades to be on 

 their guard and not to allow too many persons to come on board at once. When the 

 boat had cleared the ship, the canoes paddled towards her, and the foremost of the 

 natives, " with a blunt-pointed pike, gave the quarter-master, Cornelius Joppe, a blow on 

 his neck that made him fall overboard;" but Joppe and two others swam to the vessel 

 and were taken on board. In the scuffle that ensued three of the strangers were killed 

 and a fourth mortally wounded. A dead man was carried away by the natives, and, 

 without doubt, eaten. Tasman, finding there was small chance of getting supplies, hoisted 

 in the ships' anchors and called the place " Murderers' Bay." When the ships were 

 under weigh, twenty-two canoes crowded with natives put off from the shore, but they 

 were greeted by Tasman with a broadside, and a man in the foremost canoe was seen 

 to fall. The lesson was not lost on his fellows, who fled to the shore. Leaving the 

 Middle Island, Tasman went north and rounded the northern portion of the North 

 Island, calling its western extremity Cape Maria Van Diemen, after the daughter of the 

 Governor of Batavia. He sighted some small islands which he named the Three Kings, 

 it being the anniversary of the Epiphany. A boat was sent to the largest island in 

 search of refreshments, but returned without landing, the heavy surf forbidding the 

 attempt ; while the sight of " thirty-five natives of large size, taking prodigious long 

 strides, with clubs in their hands," apparently justified the caution. Tasman left the 

 new land with an unfavourable impression of its inhabitants, whom he described as 

 blood-thirsty and prone to hostility without provocation. He had been off the coast for 

 some three weeks without landing. 



More than a century and a quarter elapsed before another European is known to 

 have visited New Zealand, when Captain Cook, after having observed the transit of 

 Venus at Tahiti, went to the south in search of new lands, and re-discovered Tasman's 

 " Staaten Land." He landed in October, 1/69, at a place which he named "Poverty 

 Bay " from the hostility of the natives and their lack of hospitality. He circumnavigated 

 the main islands, and remained in New Zealand in 1769 and 17/0 no less than one 

 hundred and seventy-six days, surveying the coast-line and observing the country and its 

 people. In November, 1769, he touched at a point on the coast which he named 

 Mercury Bay, where he landed and erected an observatory for the purpose of observing 

 the transit of Mercury one of the chief objects of his expedition on that occasion. A 

 signal-station was erected on the headland from which Captain Cook took his observa- 

 tion, now known as Shakespeare Head. On the 3Oth of January, 1770, Cook erected a 

 flag-post on the summit of a hill in Queen Charlotte's Sound, where he hoisted the 

 Union Jack, and after naming the Bay where the ship was at anchor after the Queen, he 

 took formal possession of the country in the name of his Majesty King George the Third. 



Cook made three voyages to the South Pacific, during which he visited New Zealand 

 five different times, sojourning there on the several occasions three hundred and twenty- 

 six days. His graphic description of the country and of its aborigines has led to his 

 being generally regarded among English-speaking people as the discoverer. Examination 

 of the east and west coasts of New Zealand proved that it consisted of two or more 



