Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific

New Zealand. The two main islands of New Zealand, lying more than 1,000 miles to the east of Australia, have a land area of nearly 104,000 square miles, and are larger than the United Kingdom (94,000). South Island is rather bigger than North Island, but contains only a quarter of the people. In the mid-1990s the population was 3½ million, most of them living in towns. The capital, Wellington, with 329,000 people, is in North Island: Auckland has nearly 1 million people, and Christchurch 318,000. Mount Cook in the Southern Alps rises to more than 12,000 feet and in North Island there are geysers and hot springs. The economy is still largely based on cattle- and sheep-rearing, with Australia, Japan, USA, and UK the main markets, but New Zealand wine flourishes, industry increases, and tourism expanded rapidly after the spread of fast air travel.The first inhabitants were Polynesian people, ancestors of the Maoris, who settled by the 8th cent. Abel Tasman, the Dutch explorer, sighted the west coast of South Island in December 1642, but four of his men were killed by the Maoris and he did not land. The Dutch named the land New Zealand but showed no further interest in it. The first encounter confirmed the warlike nature of the natives. Captain Cook, in the 18th cent., guessed that there were 100,000 of them, but he had no means of knowing and the figure was probably a substantial underestimate. They lived mainly in North Island, expectation of life was little more than...

James Cook 1728-79, English explorer and navigator. The son of a Yorkshire agricultural laborer, he had little formal education. After an apprenticeship to a firm of shipowners at Whitby, he joined (1755) the royal navy and surveyed the St. Lawrence Channel (1760) and the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador (1763-67). Cook was then given command of the Endeavour and sailed (1768) on an expedition to chart the transit of Venus; he returned to England in 1771, having also circumnavigated the globe and explored the coasts of New Zealand, which he accurately charted for the first time, and E Australia. Cook next commanded (1772-75) an expedition to the South Pacific of two ships, the Resolution and the Adventure. On this voyage he disproved the rumor of a great southern continent, explored the Antarctic Ocean and the New Hebrides, visited New Caledonia, and by the observance of strict diet and hygiene prevented scurvy , heretofore the scourge of long voyages. Cook sailed again in 1776; in 1778 he visited and named the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) and unsuccessfully searched the coast of NW North America for a Northwest Passage . On the return voyage he was killed by natives on the island of Hawaii. During the course of his journeys Cook visited about ten major Pacific island groups and more than 40 individual islands, also making first European contact with a wide variety of indigenous peoples. Bibliography: See the definitive edition of his journals, ed. by J. C....