@coracle Thank you for your research! I hope you enjoyed learning about NZ

You're welcome and thank you for that valuable link which showed clearly how united the Māori people were in asking for this Declaration of Independence. It also confirms to me that though Captain James Cook did carefully circumnavigate New Zealand, to clear up Abel Tasman's Staten Landt mystery, and discovered the strait which still bears his name, he probably didn't claim New Zealand for Great Britain. I think, myself, people take far too much of what Captain Cook did do for granted.

According to The Encyclopedia of New Zealand which I consulted & linked to, Abel Tasman named the places he discovered Staten Landt, thinking it was part of South America. There is a chart attached to the article, which features Farewell Spit, wherever that is, but I won't reproduce it here, obeying the instructions beneath the chart. If you follow the links, you can see the chart & article, yourselves. Tasman's two ships were, of course, the Heemskerk and the Zeehaen.

Ever since 2023 it seems that Captain Cook gets blamed for a good many things, when he wasn't even the first Englishman to set foot on the territory which Abel Tasman called New Holland. That would be William Dampier and his buccaneer mates on board The Swan, in 1688. He came back later, in 1699, in the Roebuck to take another look at now Western Australia, & it seems, reached Shark Bay, or the Houtman Abrolhos, complaining in his diaries about the lack of water there. Both Captain Cook's cottage in Fitzroy Gardens, and the Hyde Park Statue in Sydney have been vandalised, just before 24/6/2024, and another one was vandalised in the Eastern Suburbs at the beginning of last year I think it was.