Exploration

The renowned backwoodsman Donald Sutherland 'discovered' the waterfall that bears his name near what is now the Milford Track – New Zealand’s best-known walking track.

Arthur, George and Edward Dobson were searching for a route between Canterbury and the West Coast that the chief Tarapuhi had told them about.

In January 1863, geologist Julius von Haast led an expedition in search of an overland route from the east to the west coast of the South Island.

Captained by John Lort Stokes, the paddle steamer Acheron spent four years charting the New Zealand coastline.

HMS Britomart arrived at Akaroa, on Banks Peninsula, a week before a shipload of French colonists landed there. The Britomart's captain raised the Union Jack to confirm the British claim to sovereignty over the area.

In a feat of navigational daring – and after several attempts – the French explorer Jules Sébastien César Dumont d’Urville sailed the Astrolabe from Tasman Bay through the narrow ‘French Pass’ into Admiralty Bay in the Marlborough Sounds.

James Cook helped his astronomer Charles Green observe the transit of Mercury at Te Whanganui-o-Hei (Mercury Bay), Coromandel Peninsula.

Ship’s boy Nicholas Young received a gallon of rum and had a headland named after him for being the first aboard HMS Endeavour to spot land in the south-west Pacific.

Abel Tasman’s Dutch East India Company expedition had the first known European contact with Māori. It did not go well.

Towards noon the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman sighted 'a large land, uplifted high', possibly the peaks of the Paparoa Range behind Punakaiki.