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Events on this Day – 4 January

1869

Pursued by Māori and colonial troops to Ngātapa, an old hilltop pā inland from Poverty Bay, Te Kooti narrowly avoided capture after a three-day siege. Many of those with him were captured and executed the following day.

1958

Sir Edmund Hillary’s New Zealand team became the first to reach the South Pole overland since Robert Falcon Scott in 1912, and the first to do so in motor vehicles.