World | Other World Stories
Skull suggests Europeans landed in New Zealand before Cook
The discovery of a European skull dating back more than 260 years has cast doubt on the belief that Captain James Cook was the first Westerner to step foot on the shores of New Zealand.
- By Paul Chapman, The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2008
- Published: 00:07 August 7, 2008
Wellington: The discovery of a European skull dating back more than 260 years has cast doubt on the belief that Captain James Cook was the first Westerner to step foot on the shores of New Zealand.
Scientists are baffled after carbon dating showed that the skull, a woman's, which was found near the country's capital, Wellington, dates from 1742. Cook's Pacific expedition arrived in 1769.
The discovery was made by a boy walking his dog on the bank of a river in the Wairarapa region of the North Island, an area settled by Europeans only after the establishment of a colony by the New Zealand Company in 1840.
Dr Robin Watt, a forensic anthropologist called in by police investigating the find, said: "It's a real mystery. We've got the problem of how did this woman get here? Who was she?"
The mystery of the skull, found four years ago, was raked over last week at an inquest in Masterton, the provincial capital.
John Kershaw, the local coroner, was told that police at first thought they had a murder inquiry on their hands.
"One of the reasons some work was done on the skull was because it had a number of puncture wounds," Kershaw said. "We don't know how this lady met her death, although the historian we used indicated drowning was a reasonable guess."
Maori belief
The inquest heard that the skull was definitely not Maori - the only race known to have inhabited New Zealand in the 18th century - and almost certainly of European origin.
The European discovery of the shoreline of New Zealand was made by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1642. Tasman had no women aboard his expedition and there is no record of him landing.
The Maori are believed to have settled in the country in about 1200. The first white women known to have arrived in the country were two convicts who escaped from a penal colony in New South Wales, Australia, in 1806.
Gareth Winter, the official Masterton archivist who was called as an expert witness, told The Daily Telegraph that the possibility of a hoax could confidently be ruled out. Winter said that Captain Cook recorded, in the log of his second journey to New Zealand in 1772-75, a tale told to him by a Maori chief of a ship having been wrecked many years earlier.
Early missionaries wrote of hearing the same story from Maori, who related that the survivors of the ship had been killed and eaten when they came ashore. They said that many Maori had subsequently died in an epidemic, possibly as a result of exposure to a newly introduced infection from Europe.
Historians believed that the most likely site of such a shipwreck was Cape Palliser, the windswept southernmost point of North Island.
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