FIRST of the organised white settlements were those of Marsden’s mission, which did most to make the Bay of Islands a cradle of civilisation, but before their beginning in 1814 a casual thread of European occupation was being loosely spun. Tasman (1642-43) might have started this, but he went away, angered and fearful, having made no landing; his ill report, black with memory of his fatal clash with Maori canoemen off the beach of ‘Murderers’ Bay,’ led Holland to throw away the chance of acquiring and peopling this country. Cook (1769-77) had better vision, although little better fortune at the outset; yet his repeated visits of   coastal   exploration,   and   even   his   famous kitchen-gardens in Queen Charlotte Sound, cannot be looked on as the intimate pioneering of settlement. Furneaux, de Surville, Marion du Fresne, and Crozet were similarly active, directly and in­directly, sometimes unwittingly, bringing ‘first settlers’ from Europe—plants useful and not so useful, besides pigs, black rats, and fleas.

Nearer to permanent white settlement, although still a hit-and-run impact, was the quest for fur seals and hair seals and for kindred sea mammals yielding blubber. A usual practice was to land parties for the purpose of collecting skins, and many of these gangs awaiting the return of their mother-ship became settlers under compulsion, sometimes for years, marooned upon rocky points of the coast and upon adjacent islands. The first— its tally was 4,500 skins in a year—was landed at Dusky Bay in 1792.