About a thousand years ago, the ancestors of the Maori people settled in New Zealand. They were from Polynesia and were expert navigators. They had an advanced stone-age culture and could make fire and stone tools. They brought kumara (sweet potatoes), taro (a large turnip-like vegetable) and a kind of rat with them for food. They easily caught the flightless birds including the moa, which they hunted to extinction.

The Maori were fearsome warriors, as the first Europeans to see New Zealand found out. The Dutch explorer, Abel Tasman, anchored his ship off its coast in 1642. Maori warriors in canoes fought off his sailors and he was unable to land. The country was given the name Nieew Zeeland by the Dutch but they did not settle there. In 1769, the English explorer James Cook claimed New Zealand for Britain.

“In the English-speaking World”