New Zealand was discovered by Abel Jan van Tasman, in 1642, to whom it owes its name—a name, by the way, that may one day be changed to Zealandia, perhaps, just as New Holland has become Australia, and Van Diemen's Land, Tasmania. The natives received the Dutch navigator with hostility, massacring a boat's crew. He, therefore, drew off and left, merely coasting for a short distance. No one else visited the country until 1769, when Cook arrived in it for the first time. Captain Cook was likewise received with hostility by the Maori, on his first landing in Poverty Bay. But afterwards, in the Bay of Plenty, Mercury Bay, and the Bay of Islands, he met with better treatment, and was able to establish friendly relations with certain tribes. He spent altogether nearly a year in New Zealand, between 1769 and 1777, in which last year he left for Hawaii, to meet his death there in Kealakekua Bay. He circumnavigated the islands, which had previously been supposed to form part of a great Antarctic continent. He also bestowed upon the Maori the pig and the potato, and has left us some still interesting accounts of what he observed in the country. Subsequently to Cook's last visit, and in the intervals between his voyages, other explorers touched here. De Lunéville, De Surville, Crozet, D'Urville, and Du Fresne, the French navigators, followed in the footsteps of Tasman and Cook. Then, too, whalers began to call along the coasts; and, by-and-by, traders from Sydney adventured hither for timber, and flax (_phormium_), and pigs, and smoked heads. But it was a risky thing in those days to do business with the Maori. Any fancied slight or injury was resented most terribly. Several ships were lost altogether, their crews being butchered and eaten; while boats' crews and individual mariners were lost by others. In 1772, Du Fresne, with fifteen of his men, was killed in the Bay of Islands. He had aroused the wrath of the natives by trespassing on tapu ground; and they also avenged on him an action of De Lunéville's, who had rashly put a chief in irons. In 1809, the ship _Boyd_ was taken in Whangaroa Harbour, and all her company killed, because the captain had flogged a Maori thief. Again, in 1816, we hear of the American brig _Agnes_ meeting with a similar fate in Poverty Bay, or thereabouts.