Ever since Europeans had ventured across the oceans and "discovered" other continents, many were convinced of the existence of a terra australia incognita , an unknown southern land thought necessary to counterbalance the northern continents. In 1642, the Dutch East India Company, keen to dominate any trade with this new continent, sent Dutchman Abel Tasman to the southern oceans where he became the first European to catch sight of the South Island of Aotearoa . He anchored in Golden Bay, where a small boat being rowed between Tasman's two ships was intercepted by a Maori war canoe and four sailors were killed. Without setting foot on land Tasman turned tail and fled up the west coast of the North Island and went on to add Tonga and Fiji to European maps. He named Aotearoa "Staten Landt" later renamed Nieuw Zeeland after the Dutch maritime province.

New Zealand was ignored for over a century until 1769 when Yorkshireman James Cook sailed his Endeavour into the Pacific to observe the passage of Venus across the sun. He continued west arriving at "the Eastern side of the Land discover'd by Tasman" where he observed the "Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives" and meticulously charted the coastline - the only significant errors were to show Banks Peninsula as an island and Stewart Island as a peninsula - and encouraged his botanists, Banks and Solander, to collect numerous samples.

Cook and his crew found Maori a sophisticated people with a highly formalized social structure and an impressive ability to turn stone and wood into fabulously carved canoes, weapons and meeting houses - and yet they were tied to Stone Age technology, with no wheels, roads, metalwork, pottery or animal husbandry. Cook found them aggressive, surly and little inclined to trade, but after an initial unfortunate encounter near Gisborne and another off Cape Kidnappers, near Napier , he managed to strike up friendly and constructive relations with the "Indians". These "Indians" now found that their tribal allegiance was not enough to differentiate them from the Europeans and subsequently began calling themselves maori (meaning "normal" or "not distinctive") while referring to the newcomers as pakeha ("foreign").

Offshore from the Coromandel Peninsula, Cook deviated from instructions and unfurled the British flag, claiming formal possession without the consent of Maori, but was still allowed to return twice in 1772 and 1776. The French were also interested in New Zealand, and on his first voyage Cook had passed Jean Francois Marie de Surville in a storm without either knowing of the other's presence. Two years later, Marion du Fresne spent five amicable weeks around the Bay of Islands, before most of his crew were killed, probably after inadvertently transgressing some tapu (taboo).

The establishment of the Botany Bay penal colony in neighbouring Australia aroused the first commercial interest in New Zealand and from the 1790s to the 1830s New Zealand was very much part of the Australian frontier. By 1830 the coast was dotted with semi-permanent sealing communities which, within thirty years, had almost clubbed the seals into extinction. Meanwhile the British navy was rapidly felling giant kauri trees for its ships' masts, while others were busy supplying Sydney shipbuilders. By the 1820s whalers had moved in, basing themselves at Kororareka (now Russell, in the Bay of Islands), where they could recruit Maori crew and provision their ships. This combination of rough whalers, escaped convicts from Australia and all manner of miscreants and adventurers combined to turn Russell into "the Hellhole of the Pacific", a lawless place populated by what Darwin, on his visit in 1835, found to be "the very refuse of Society".

Before long, the Maori way of life had been entirely disrupted. Maori were quick to understand the importance of guns and inter-tribal fighting soon broke out on a scale never seen before. Hongi Hika from Ngapuhi iwi of the Bay of Islands was the first chief to acquire firearms in 1821, adding 300 muskets to his stock by trading the gifts showered on him by London society when he was presented to George IV as an "equal". Vowing to emulate the supreme power of the imperial king, he set about subduing much of the North Island, using the often badly maintained and inexpertly aimed guns to rattle the enemy, who were then slaughtered with the traditional mere . Warriors abandoned the old fighting season - the lulls between hunting and tending the crops - and set off to settle old scores, resulting in a massive loss of life. The quest for new territory fuelled the actions of Ngati Toa's Te Rauparaha , who soon controlled the southern half of the North Island.

The huge demand for firearms drove Maori to sell the best of their food, relocating to unhealthy areas close to flax swamps, where flax production could be increased. Even highly valued tribal treasures - pounamu (greenstone) clubs and the preserved heads of chiefs taken in battle - were traded. Poor living conditions allowed European diseases to sweep through the Maori population time and again, while alcohol and tobacco abuse became widespread, Maori women were prostituted to pakeha sailors, and the tribal structure began to crumble.

Into this scene stepped the missionaries in 1814, the brutal New South Wales magistrate, Samuel Marsden , arriving in the Bay of Islands a transformed man with a mission to bring Christianity and "civilization" to Maori, and to save the souls of the sealers and whalers. Subsequently Anglicans, Wesleyans and Catholics all set up missions throughout the North Island, playing a significant role in protecting Maori from the worst of the exploitation and campaigning in both London and Sydney for more policing of pakeha actions. In return, they destroyed fine artworks considered too sexually explicit and demanded that Maori abandon cannibalism and slavery; in short Maori were expected to trade in their Maoritanga and become Brown Europeans. By the 1830s, self-confidence and the belief in Maori ways was in rapid decline: the tohunga (priest) was powerless over new European diseases which could often be cured by the missionaries, and Maori had started to believe the pakeha , who were convinced that the Maori race was dying out. They felt they needed help.