Famille dans la Baye Dusky (Obseure) de la Nouvelle Zelande.

Title

Famille dans la Baye Dusky (Obseure) de la Nouvelle Zelande.

Description

View showing a family in Dusky Sound, New Zealand. Engraved by Benard.

ca. 1770

Artist

Webber (1752-1793)

John Webber R.A. (c.1752-1793), the son of a Swiss sculptor, living in London, submitted his work to the Royal Academy Schools, one of the first to admire his paintings was Dr Daniel Solander, the Swedish naturalist who had accompanied Cook and Banks on the first voyage. Knowing that no artist had yet been selected for Cook's voyage, Solander recommended Webber to the Admiralty and Royal Society. His appointment was made just days before the departure. Webber was lucky enough to escape the massacre in Hawaii, where Cook met his death, and returned to London in October 1780.

Historical Description

New Zealand was discovered by Polynesians around the end of the 13th century, or at the latest in the first half of the 14th century, and was settled in several waves of immigration. The descendants of the first immigrants founded the Māori culture. The first Māori to reach the land found no mammals. To feed themselves, they first hunted the moa, a flightless bird remotely similar to the African ostrich. The first European to set eyes on New Zealand was the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman. His mission was to find the "Great Southern Land" because valuable raw materials were suspected there. On his voyage, in 1642, he discovered a "great high land" on the South Island, today's West Coast region. He was not sure and suspected that he had discovered another piece of Staten Landt coast. When he went to Golden Bay in what is now the Tasman region to explore the land up close, he had his first bloody encounter with the "aborigines" in which four Dutch sailors were killed. The "discoverer of New Zealand" never set foot on New Zealand soil. A year later, when an expedition under Hendrik Brouwer determined that the coastal strip found by Tasman did not belong to Staten Landt, the country was named Nova Zeelandia (Latin) or Nieuw Zeeland (Dutch), in reference to Australia, which had been called Nova Hollandia or Nieuw Holland. Like Tasman, the British captain James Cook was to find a suspected southern continent. In 1769, Cook's ship Endeavour, coming from Tahiti, encountered New Zealand at the southwestern point of the bay called Poverty Bay. After first hostile encounters, but then also successful approaches with Māori, Cook first circumnavigated the North Island and, after a longer stay in the Marlborough Sounds, the South Island and was thus able to prove that New Zealand was islands and not part of a continent. Cook and the scientists accompanying him began to map the country thoroughly, they explored flora and fauna extensively and gathered information about the Māori. Only a few weeks after Cook, Jean François Marie de Surville also reached the islands. In the following years, mainly whalers, sealers and later missionaries migrated to New Zealand. These maintained pronounced contacts with the Māori. The two parties engaged in lively trade with each other, and some Europeans also lived together with the Māori.