1. What contact was there between Maori and non-Maori before 1840?

Polynesians settled New Zealand from around 1250. Their first contact with pale-faced visitors on ships with large sails came in December 1642, when Dutch trader ships the Heemskerck and Zeehaen brought explorer Abel Tasman. English explorer Captain James Cook spent 328 days in visits to New Zealand between 1769 and 1774, After the British government founded a convict settlement in Sydney, Australia, in 1788, traders looking for flax and timber came to Australia and New Zealand, as did sealers and whalers.

The evangelical Church Missionary Society sent Thomas Kendall and William Hall from Britain to the Bay of Islands in northern New Zealand in March 1814 after an earlier attempt to establish a mission was delayed by the Boyd massacre in 1809. New South Wales chaplain Samuel Marsden held the first Christian service on land in New Zealand on Christmas Day in 1814, at Oihi Bay in the Bay of Islands. The missionaries funded their activities, setting up farms and schools, through trade. Kendall, like many secular settlers, sold muskets to local Maori.