New Zealand History
Settlement and colonization Traces of Maori settlement are archaeologically documented from the middle of the 14th century. The myths of the Maori tell of a Polynesian settlement between the middle and the end of the 1st millennium AD. In 1642 the Dutch navigator A. Tasman sighted the west coast of New Zealand. Dutch cartographers first named the country “Staten Landt”, later “Nieuw Zeeland” after a province in their homeland. In October 1769, the English explorer J. Cook set foot on…