Trombes de mer aupres de la Nouvelle Zelande.

Title

Trombes de mer aupres de la Nouvelle Zelande.

Description

Engraving showing William Hodges observing the waterspouts at Cape Stephens, Marlborough. From the French edition of Cook's second voyage, which first appeared in: Wales & Bayly, The Original Astronomical Observations made in the course of a Voyage towards the South Pole, and round the world, in His Majesty's Ships the Resolution and Adventure. This report provided the astronomical information for Cook's second voyage. The title of the English version was: Waterspouts in Cook's Straits in New Zealand. Engraved by Benard.

ca. 1778

Artist

Hodges (1744-1797)

William Hodges (1744- 1797 ) was an English painter. Hodges accompanied Captain James Cook aboard the Resolution on his second voyage to the South Seas, including Tahiti, the Tonga Islands, New Zealand, Easter Island and Antarctica. During his stay on board Hodges mainly made landscape sketches, but also some portraits of expedition members as well as special personalities of the visited islands. His landscape paintings usually also include elements showing the way of life of the people visited. His sketches were further worked on after his return to London, Hodges obtained employment for some time with the Admiralty, which allowed him to produce oil paintings from the sketches and to supervise the production of engravings of the same. Hodges' pictures illustrate as engravings in large quantity the later published travel descriptions of James Cook.

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.