On October 8th 1769 during his first circumnavigation, Captain Cook landed on the easternmost tip of the North Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand (Māori: Te Ika a Maui). He was the first European whom the Polynesian Māori did not forcibly prevent from landing, as they had done 127 years earlier with the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, whose landing crew was slain by Māori warriors in their ship’s boat.
In fact, James Cook owed much of his lucky landing at Turanganui a Kiwa (Poverty Bay) to his Tahitian travel companion, Tupaia. This experienced priest-navigator from Marae Taputapuatea, the most important temple in Tahiti and the Society Islands, not only took the role of pilot on Cook’s ship Endeavour on the more than 4000 kilometers of risky coral sea between Tahiti and New Zealand. He also greeted the New Zealand islanders on their arrival with the sacred prayers of a high priest (Tahitian: tahu'a, Māori: tohunga), thus establishing – fortunately for the British – first contact with the Māori, whom James Cook described as a “noble, brave, open ... but warlike people.”
Tupaia’s name quickly became a household word in Aotearoa, the “land of the long white cloud.” Not only did he share the Polynesian language with the Māori, but he could also serve them in his role as a high priest (Tahitian: tahu'a; Māori: tohunga): He filled many spiritual gaps that had arisen in the 800 years since the Māori left tropical Polynesia for their new, much colder home in New Zealand. Tupaia’s mana – the divine energy of the ancestors – also empowered him, according to Polynesian understanding, to promote trade between the British and the islanders. It not only provided Cook’s ships with drinking water and the necessary provisions for further expeditions through Oceania, to the South Pole, and to Alaska, so that the British navigator anchored at New Zealand five times as a “base station” on his three voyages of discovery between 1769 and 1777. There were also gifts of sacred taongoa, mana-containing carvings, feather ornaments and green stone, as they are found in the Herrnhut Cook collection.