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Long History of the Area |
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| Mäori History | Mäori Legend | Geological History | Europian Settlement | Fiordland Map |
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Mäori HISTORY |
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| One of the earliest Mäori settlers of Te Wai Pounamu (the South Island) were the Waitaha people, who are believed by many to have settled directly in Te Wai Pounamu from Hawaiki on the Uruao canoe. Later migrations of Ngäti Mamoe from the east coast of the North Island slowly absorbed Waitaha, until no distinct separation of the more ancient group was possible. In a similar way Ngäi Tahu later migrated from the North Island and absorbed Ngäti Mamoe . Today Ngäi Tahu thus represents the three principal historic tribes of Te Wai Pounamu; Waitaha, Ngäti Mamoe and Ngäi Tahu. |
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| Mäori began to explore Fiordland from about 800 years ago. They were inventive, adventurous and resilient, as all who venture off the well-trodden way must be. Remnants of the major southern Mäori tribe Ngatimamoe, fled into remote parts of the Fiordland in the late 18th century. They were pursued by Ngäi Tahu tribesmen from the north, and about 1780 two battles are said to have been fought in the far southwest at Preservation Inlet which the Mäoris called Rakituma, ’the threatening sky’. About 5 years later legend has it that Pukutahi led another group of fleeing Ngatimamoe intending to take refuge and settle in the Murchison Mountains (’the land of the moho’ - takahe) between the south and middle fiords of Lake Te Anau. Te Hau, a Ngäi Tahu warrior, led a party which caught and slew some of the escapers in a fracas thought to have taken place across the lake from the hotel at Te Anau. |
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| The survivors disappeared and entered lore as the poignant holders of the names ’lost tribe’ or ’wild natives’ of Fiordland. In 1851 Captain Stokes of the survey ship Acheron recorded that he and his crew ’came on the fresh foot-marks of some natives’ in Bligh Sound, most likely members of the ’lost tribe’ that Paddy Gilroy, skipper of the Amazon, had seen there in 1842. And Captain Cook had earlier made contact with Mäoris when he put the Resolution in to Dusky Sound for repairs and to rest his crew from March to May of 1773. |
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Mäori LEGEND |
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| The Mäori history of Fiordland reaches back more than 1000 years into the creation mythology of Ngäi Tahu. Ngäi Tahu inherited this tradition from their Waitaha predecessors. The Ngäi Tahu account of creation explains the physical formation and shaping of the whole South Island and centres on the role of the atua (god) Aoraki, now standing as Aoraki/Mt Cook. The fiords of this region represent, in tradition, the raised up sides of Te Waka o Aoraki (the canoe of Aoraki). |
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| The Waka foundered on a submerged reef and its occupants, Aoraki and his brothers, Raraki, Rakiroa and others, were turned to stone. They stand now as the highest peaks of Kä Tiritiri o te Moana (the Southern Alps). The fiords at the southern end of the Alps were hacked out of the raised side of the wrecked waka by Tü Te Rakiwhänoa, in an effort to make it habitable by humans. The deep gouges and long waterways that make up the fiords were intended to provide safe havens on the rugged coastline, and stocked with fish, forest and birds to sustain travellers. |
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| The tradition of “Ngä Puna Wai Karikari o Rakaihautu” tells how the principal lakes of Te Wai Pounamu, including Moturau (or Motu-ua – Lake Manapöuri) and Te Ana-Au (Lake Te Anau) were dug by the rangatira (chief) Rakaihautu. Rakaihautu was the captain of the canoe, Uruao, which brought the tribe, Waitaha, to New Zealand. Rakaihautu beached his canoe at Whakatü (Nelson) and travelled south. |
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| Later Tamatea and his party passed this way in their journey back to their homeland after their waka, Takitimu, broke its back at the mouth of the Waiau River. The waka, transformed into the Takitimu Mountains, guards the eastern approaches to Fiordland. Tamatea, like Rakaihautu, named many places along the coast and inland routes on his journeys. |
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| Another legend has it that the lake was called “the lake of infidelity” after the wife of the head warrior betrayed her husband by showing a neighbouring tribal warrior where the sacred well of life was, and when the neighbouring tribesman drank from the well it over flowed flooding and drowning the tribe and forming what is now Lake Te Anau. |
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GEOLOGICAL HISTORY |
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| Fifty million years ago Fiordland was submerged for fourty million years, and evidence in the form of limestone, sandstone and mudstones can be found in the eastern parts from Lake Hauroko in the south to Lake Te Anau and the Eglinton Valley in the north. |
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| Two million years ago the region was again raised from the sea and was dislocated by great faults. Fiordland is the work of over 500 million years of constant sculpting as the land was relentlessly ground, split, fired, and pressured by the elements. The towering and topographically tortuous landscape of Fiordland was largely brought about by the last major phase of glaciation which imposed itself on the region for a period of about 55,000 years. |
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| West of the mountains ice heaved and pushed directly into the Tasman Sea. To the east glaciers flowed into and gouged huge basins which, when the glaciers retreated, were filled with water to become the lakes which are one of the major attractions of the area. These lakes are very pure and remarkably beautiful. The largest of the lakes are Te Anau and Manapouri whose southern fringes are blocked by formidable moraines left behind by the retreating glaciers. |
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| In the west the glacial ice was so thick it gouged troughs hundreds of metres below sea-level, and when the ice began to melt the sea groped in to form the fiords that are such a majestic feature of the region today. |
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| The rocks of Fiordland are among the most ancient in New Zealand. They resulted from sandstone and limestone laid upon the sea floor 400 million years ago and which eventually emerged as the metamorphic rocks (schist and genesis) found in much of Fiordland. When these rocks were uplifted mysteriously ages 200 million years ago they were infused with igneous rocks (granite and diorite, for example) and, in the surface, volcanic rocks, of which basalt and and asite are the most common. Gneiss appears in tones of black, grey, green and white; granite rocks are often infused with pink and white colouring; diorite contains a white speckling and andesite and basalt are darkish green with a fine-grained texture. These latter rocks predominate on the ranges either side of the Eglinton Valley. |
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EUROPEAN SETTLEMENT |
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| Europeans approached Fiordland from the cold seas of the south and west, and from the south and east over a rolling and often rugged landscape. The great navigator and voyager, Cook, took Endeavour in close to Dusky and Doubtful sounds in March 1770, but the time of day, and the wind direction, forced him to sail prudently away. But he returned in 1773 and left us with a rich legacy of information and observation which fascinates to this day. |
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| One of Cook’s midshipmen, George Vancouver, returned to Dusky in 1791. The following year a party of 12 sealers went ashore from the Britiania. Within about a year they’d collected 4,500 seal skins, and so began a period of intense slaughter (which decimated and threatened fur seals around New Zealand’s southern coasts with extinction) before the activity became uneconomic and the carnage ended early in the 19th century. The sealers knew the wild coastline as well, and likely better, than anyone, and in the early 1800s there were sealing stations at Dusky, Dagg and Doubtful Sounds. |
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| In 1829 a substantial whaling station was built at Preservation Inlet but it to, due to indiscriminate killing of a kind that had quickly destroyed the sealing business, soon came to the eerie end that follows excesses caused by ignorance and greed. By 1838 the station at Preservation was deserted and the whales, those great and noble ’singers of the sea’, were given a temporary respite and reprieve. |
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| From then until 1851 when Stokes surveyed the West Coast in the Acheron, there was a lull in the exploration and charting of the Fiordland coast. Stokes and his party pieced together the work of earlier arrivals greatly added to the number of places and features named, and provided the basis for all subsequent maps. |
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| Land explorers, surveyors, gold-seekers and runholders approached the region via the Waiau and the upper Mataura and Greenstone valleys from 1852 on. |
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| The first Europeans were led to the area by Mäori guides in 1852 C. J. Nairn and W. H. Stephen reached Lake Te Anau in January 1852 (see the commemorative plaque at Bluegum Point), but Richard Henry was the first to settle. Two years later Quintin McKinnon arrived and discovered the now World famous McKinnon Pass/Milford Track. The McKinnon Pass was the most famous route by land to reach the port of Milford until the completion of the Homer Tunnel in 1954. |
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| In 1945 Lawson Burrows began his 3-year effort to rediscover the Te Anau Caves. His search was based on Mäori Legend, he combed over 400km of lakeshore to finally rediscover what now is the very popular visitor attraction, the “Te Anau Glowworm Caves”. |
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| Another notable Fiordland pioneer was the naturalist Richard Henry who lived in a hut on the south shore of Lake Te Anau from 1883 until he left in 1894 to become official caretaker on Resolution Island in Dusky Sound. Henry spent about 15 years on the island and for many years he attempted to establish hundreds of flightless birds such as the endangered Kakapo and Kiwis. To his dismay he discovered that stoats and weasels were swimming to the island and undoing all his efforts. Sadly, he wrote in his diary that he was beaten; ’I feel I cannot stay here much longer.’ It was another instance of introduced animals hastening the descent towards oblivion of native species. |
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| While Henry was making his heroic efforts in the southwest others were continuing to explore the country further north. Quintin Mackinnon was given credit for discovering the pass on the Milford Track (he was drowned in Lake Te Anau in 1892), Te Anau township, then called Marakura, was surveyed in 1893, and the real thrust of road and track construction was then set to begin. |
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| In 1853 the Crown purchased over seven million acres of land in the Southland region (the Murihiku purchase), for a sum of 2,600 pounds. As was the case with other purchase areas, the boundaries of the area to be included in the sale were not made sufficiently clear at the time, and Ngäi Tahu have always maintained that Fiordland was not to be included in the Murihiku purchase. |
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| Gold-mining and prospecting also lured people to Fiordland last century. In 1886 there was a small rush to Martins Bay but pickings were slim and within a year all but a hopeful handful of miners had left. The area around Big Bay was worked over in the 1890s, and there was a thriving gold-mining town, Cromarty, at the head of Kisbee Bay in Preservation Inlet. Sawmills also operated there and at other places along the south coast, some of them persisting well into the early years of this century. |
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| But the gold ran out, sawmilling slowed and then stopped, and the remote coasts of Fiordland seemed to have again withdrawn into a kind of primeval isolation and quiet - except for the birds, of course, the slow irresistible encroachment of the magnificent forests, the barking of seals, and the whistle and roar of wind and wild seas. |
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| After 1945 the crayfishers began to arrive in increasing numbers from ports around the South Island, and in the 1950s and 1960s crayfishing boomed. It became a major export industry; small fortunes were made, vessels and lives were lost. Since then catches have declined, but there is still a reasonable living to be made by the hardy people who engage in this hazardous occupation. |
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| Hazardous, too, is the business of live deer recovery and commercial shooting from helicopters. Though not as lucrative as it was, this high-risk activity is still of major economic importance to Fiordland. |
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| Farming in the Te Anau basin along the fringes of the World Heritage Park has grown rapidly in recent years, especially since 1960 on land developed with direction and assistance from the government’s Lands and Survey Department. Cattle and sheep farming (black sheep are a feature on some properties), and deer farming, are carried out with an intensity never envisaged before the depression of the 1930s. |
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| But the most important commercial activity in the Fiordland area is tourism. People come from all around the globe to visit the region and experience its magnificent natural features. Tourism has grown steadily over the years, starting in earnest, perhaps, with the opening of the Milford Track in the 1890s and blossoming even more when the Homer Tunnel went through and was opened to traffic after World War II. Jet travel firmly established the future of the region as a tourist attraction. Both commercial operators (of which Fiordland Travel Ltd is by far the largest) and the Fiordland National Park staff work together in an effort to protect and preserve the qualities and natural features of the region for the enjoyment of future generations of people. |
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| Each visitor explores Fiordland in his or her own way and contributes to the ongoing history of the region, parts of which have rarely - and sometimes never - felt the tentative and wondering press of a human foot. Curiosity endures, history goes on |
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