Kōrero: Empire and Commonwealth

New Zealand’s first trade goods included seals, whales and wood. The Royal Navy found New Zealand a good source of spars – long poles used as masts and booms – with kauri particularly favoured. This 1843 pencil sketch shows a cutter (at left) towing kauri spars to HMS Tortoise (middle distance, towards top) near the Tairua River on the eastern side of the Coromandel Peninsula. A canoe of Māori can be seen to the right of the ship. In this period there were more than a dozen timber export points, from Whāingaroa (Raglan) Harbour northwards. European sawyers worked with Māori to fell and mill timber, which was shipped to Britain, and, from the 1830s, Australia.