KUPE
- and his crew in their waka (canoe) Matawhaorua,
journeyed far from their home in Hawaikinui, deep into the southern ocean where they first visited the land they named
Te Ika a Maui (Maui's fish), around 950 AD.
Kupe's wife Kuramarotini gave the land the name
Aotearoa meaning the Land of the Long White Cloud.
Their waka made its first landing in New Zealand on the shores of the
HOKIANGA HARBOUR and many Northland tribes proudly trace their ancestry back to Kupe and his crew.
European settlement began in Northland in the late eighteenth century with
scientific expeditions, traders then missionaries, making their way to the North.
On Christmas Day in 1814, in the Bay of Islands,
Samuel Marsden is credited with preaching the first Christian sermon in New Zealand.
The Stone Store and Kemp House , still standing in Kerikeri - 'Cradle of the Nation' -
are respectively the oldest stone building and oldest house in New Zealand.
At Waitangi - 'Birthplace of the Nation' -
a copy of the treaty that tied the lives of Euorpean and Maori together, even to the present day,
was signed in 1840.
Across the harbour from Waitangi, Russell (or Koroareka as it was then known) was the site of New Zealand's earliest centre of government
and was once known as 'the Hell Hole of the Pacific'.
