May 11, 2016
Spanish helmet just lost trinket
A leading expert on Maori pre-European history says there’s no evidence to back up a suggestion recently added to the Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s Te Ara history site that Portugese or Spanish ships may have made it to New Zealand in before Abel Tasman in 1642.
Atholl Anderson says one or two items that have been picked up, such as the so-called Spanish helmet, have fuelled speculation, but if there had been visitors more evidence should have emerged by now.
They’re more likely to have been old items brought travellers or migrants and then lost, much like the finds of pounamu he investigated in Tasmania.
"In the 19th century there was a terrific amount of commerce between New Zealand, New South Wales and Tasmania and no doubt people going backwards and forwards were carrying tiki and other bits and pieces of pounamu, just as the Cook explorers took a shipload of Maori artefacts back to Britain, and if you found a tiki in a garden in Britain, you wouldn't immediately think the Polynesians had settled the UK," he says.
Atholl Anderson’s Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History, written with Aroha Harris and the late Dame Judith Binney, won the illustrated non-fiction category at last night’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Other notable Maori winners included Whiti Ihimaera, whose autobiographical Maori Boy won the general non-fiction category, and Melissa Matutina Williams, who win a best first book award for Panguru and the City: Kainga Tahi, Kainga Rua.
Another a best first book award went to Richard Nunns for Te Ara Puoro: A Journey Into the World of Maori Music
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