Two Worlds

This book is a provocative synthesis of two previously separate views of the dramatic, action-packed first meetings of Maori and Europeans in New Zealand. What were those first meetings? From one contemporary perspective - that of the tribal Maori of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - the first encounters with European explorers such as Tasman and Cook were, in Salmond's words, 'simply puzzling extraordinary interludes in the life of the various tribal communities'. From the vantage point of the Europeans, however, the view was quite different. These contacts were simply more…