New Zealand Company ships
The New Zealand Company was a 19th-century English company that played a key role in the colonisation of New Zealand. The company was formed to carry out the principles of systematic colonisation devised by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who envisaged the creation of a new-model English society in the southern hemisphere. Under Wakefield's model, the colony would attract capitalists who would then have a ready supply of labour—migrant labourers who could not initially afford to be property owners, but who would have the expectation of one day buying land with their savings.
History of New Zealand
The first Europeans known to reach New Zealand were the crew of Dutch explorer Abel Tasman who arrived in his ships "Heemskerck" and "Zeehaen". Tasman anchored at the northern end of the South Island in Golden Bay (he named it Murderers' Bay) in December 1642 and sailed northward to Tonga following an attack by local Māori. Tasman sketched sections of the two main islands' west coasts. Tasman called them "Staten Landt", after the "States General of the Netherlands", and that name appeared on his first maps of the country. In 1645 Dutch cartographers changed the name to "Nova Zeelandia" in Latin, from "Nieuw Zeeland", after the Dutch province of "Zeeland". It was subsequently anglicised as "New Zealand" by British naval captain James Cook of HM Bark "Endeavour" who visited the islands more than 100 years after Tasman during 1769–1770. Cook returned to New Zealand on both of his subsequent voyages.