Kupe: who discovered New Zealand?

Kupe is the Polynesian navigator many Māori traditions name when they tell who discovered New Zealand: chasing a giant octopus from Hawaiki ‘the ancestral homeland’, he followed it across the ocean to Aotearoa, killed it in Cook Strait, named places from Northland to the Marlborough Sounds and sailed home again. This guide tells that story as Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, records it, with the tribal versions side by side, and then answers the history question too: Polynesian voyagers settled the country some time around 1250 to 1300, and Abel Tasman (1642) and James Cook (1769) came centuries later.

Updated 7 November 2026 · 10 min read

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Kupe’s story belongs to the iwi who hold it, and it is not told the same way everywhere. Te Ara introduces it with “according to some tribal narratives” and says there are several versions, particularly around Cook Strait and in the north. Where this page names a teller or a tribe it is because the source does; “one version” means there are others.

Who was Kupe?

Te Aka Māori Dictionary’s entry for Kupe is brief: “an early visitor to Aotearoa/New Zealand who returned to Hawaiki.” Te Ara counts him, with Toitehuatahi, among the explorers who are “important pre-canoe ancestors”, people remembered from before the voyaging canoes that tribes trace their descent from, and says that his arrival “is of great importance, and many tribes are at pains to cite a relationship to him”. Te Ara’s tribal histories bear that out: Muaūpoko trace Tara, after whom Wellington Harbour, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, is named, to Kupe as his great-great-grandson, and Rangitāne take their name from a child of Waipuna, a great-granddaughter of Kupe.

Te Ara also draws the line from the story before his: “Like Māui before him, Kupe’s arrival is a foothold in the land for Māori.” Māui fished the land up; Kupe is the first person to find it. The Māui stories are in Māui legends: the fish, the sun and fire.

The chase: Kupe and the octopus of Muturangi

In the version Te Ara tells, the trouble began with fishing in Hawaiki, and the problem was a great octopus, a wheke ‘octopus’, belonging to Kupe’s rival Muturangi. Kupe set out in his canoe to kill it, and the chase went on so long that it brought him all the way to New Zealand. With a companion, Ngake (or Ngahue), in a second canoe called Tāwhirirangi, he followed it down to Cook Strait, which Te Ara calls by its Māori name Raukawakawa, and there it was finally destroyed.

The octopus has a name of its own. Te Ara’s story of the Marlborough region calls it Te Wheke-o-Muturangi; Edward Tregear’s 1891 Māori-Polynesian dictionary prints it both that way and as Te Wheke-a-Muturangi. Either way it is the octopus of Muturangi.

Where the fight left its mark

Castlepoint, Wairarapa. Te Ara’s Wairarapa story says Kupe arrived here chasing the octopus, which hid in a cave at Castlepoint. Tregear’s dictionary also has the first encounter off Castlepoint.
Tory Channel, Marlborough. In the Marlborough story the struggle happened in Tory Channel, and the names there remember it: the bay Te Whekenui; the channel itself, Kura-te-au, “the channel red with the blood of the octopus”; and the Brothers Islands, Ngāwhatu-kai-ponu, the octopus’s eyes. Te Ara records that the islands were treated as very tapu: when canoes crossed the strait, only those who had made the crossing before could look at them, and the other paddlers covered their eyes with leaves.

A carved post at Tāne-nui-a-rangi, Waipapa marae at the University of Auckland, shows Kupe holding a paddle, a sign of his skill as a navigator, with the octopus of Muturangi; Te Ara’s photograph of it is listed below.

Kuramārōtini and the long white cloud

Kupe did not travel alone. Te Ara says his wife, Kuramārōtini, “devised the name of Ao-tea-roa (‘long white cloud’) on seeing the North Island for the first time”. The 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand gives the wife’s name as Hine-te-aparangi instead: in its telling, as the cloud over the land came into view she called out He ao! He ao! ‘A cloud! A cloud!’, and Kupe named the land after her greeting and the cloud that welcomed them. The two names come from different tellings; neither source says the other is wrong.

Te Ara’s caption to the Auckland carving records a darker tradition about how Kuramārōtini came to be with him: she was the wife of Kupe’s friend Hoturapa, and Kupe left Hoturapa to drown at sea so that he could take her. Te Ara gives it as “one oral tradition”. What else Aotearoa has been taken to mean, and why the name first belonged to the North Island, is in Māori place names.

The canoe: Matahourua or Matawhaorua

Te Aka lists Kupe’s canoe under two spellings: Matahourua ‘the canoe that brought Kupe from Hawaiki’ and Matawhaorua ‘the canoe on which Kupe sailed to Aotearoa’. Te Ara’s caption to a stone held at Te Papa, said to be the canoe’s anchor, spells it Mātāwhaorua. Ngāpuhi tradition, Te Ara says, is that after Kupe went home the canoe was re-adzed and renamed Ngātokimatawhaorua (“ngā toki” is “the adzes”) and came back to the Hokianga under Nukutawhiti. How the great canoes and their captains fit together is in Māori waka.

The tellings differ: Cook Strait, Taranaki, Wellington and the Hokianga

Te Ara says Kupe’s adventures happened mostly in the south Wairarapa, Cook Strait and Northland, that some versions take him as far south as Arahura on the West Coast and to the Coromandel, where Taputapu-ātea and Te Whitianga-o-Kupe remember his time in Hauraki, and that the versions differ most around Cook Strait and in the north. Four of them, each as Te Ara gives it:

Taranaki and Cook Strait: the Te Āti Awa account

In an account Te Whetu of Te Āti Awa gave the ethnographer Elsdon Best, Kupe sails down the west coast from the Auckland region to Taranaki and on to Cook Strait. From there he sends the two birds he brought from Hawaiki across to the South Island to survey it. One, the cormorant Te Kawau-a-Toru, is caught in the currents at Te Aumiti, off Rangitoto ki te Tonga (D’Urville Island), and breaks a wing. The broken wing made the passage now called French Pass; the reef where the water still boils is the bird turned to stone. Te Ara’s taniwha story adds another guardian Kupe left in the strait, Tuhirangi, later believed to have returned as the dolphin Pelorus Jack.

Wellington: his daughters and the red rocks

Te Ara’s Wellington story has Kupe resting at the harbour after travelling down the east coast. He named the islands Matiu (Somes Island) and Mākaro (Ward Island) after his daughters. A rock at Seatoun was named Te Aroaro-o-Kupe, “the presence of Kupe”, and the beach there is Te Tūranganui-o-Kupe. When Kupe was away so long across the strait that his people feared for him, one of his daughters threw herself from a clifftop on the south coast, and the rocks stained with her blood are Pari-whero, Red Rocks. Leaving, the story goes, Kupe made the islands of Kāpiti and Mana by slicing them from the mainland with his patu ‘club’.

Wairarapa: the sails and the gazing

Near Ngāwī, Te Ara records that Kupe and Ngake camped by the Mangatoetoe Stream and argued over who could make a sail first. Kupe finished by midnight and Ngake by dawn, and a triangular rock face there is Ngā-Rā-o-Kupe, Kupe’s Sails. The cape beyond, Cape Palliser, is Te Mātakitaki-a-Kupe ‘Cape Palliser’ in Te Aka, “the gazing of Kupe” in Te Ara. Across the strait, Te Aka gives Cloudy Bay as Te Koko a Kupe.

The Hokianga: the returning place of Kupe

Ngāpuhi’s telling, in Te Ara’s story of the iwi, brings Kupe into the Hokianga Harbour in his canoe, guided by light reflected from the mountain Te Ramaroa. Awed by the light, he named the harbour Te Puna-o-te-ao-mārama, the spring of the world of light, and the northern shore it struck Te Pouahi, the post of fire. When he left for Hawaiki he said Ka hoki ahau? E kore ahau e hokianga mai!, “Shall I return? I shall never return!”, and the harbour became Te Hokianga-a-Kupe. Hoki ‘to return’ is the everyday word for going back.

Te Ara’s other Hokianga accounts add more. Himiona Kāmira of Ngāpuhi told that on the morning he left, Kupe took his son Tuputupu-whenua to a spring and sent him into it, where he became a taniwha ‘guardian’. Kupe’s people cooked a meal for the voyage, the food came out cold, and Kupe cursed them, so the place is Kohukohu, “curse”. His taniwha Ārai-te-uru stayed at the harbour mouth as a reef. Te Ara gives the harbour’s full name as Hokianga-nui-a-Kupe in one story, “the final departure place of Kupe”, and as Te Hokianga-a-Kupe in others.

Places named for Kupe

Te Ara lists Arapāoa, Mana, Matiu and Mākaro in the Wellington region, and Kohukohu, Pouahi, Maungataniwha and Hokianga in the north, among the places Kupe named, and notes that while other ancestors’ names have been lost, “those associated with Kupe seem to have endured”. Te Ara’s caption on the Wellington islands says the coast has many more names for things he left behind, “a son, dogs, taniwha, sails, fishing nets and a canoe bailer”, and that “Kupe himself never came back to New Zealand.” Even the sea keeps his name: Te Aka gives ngā tai a Kupe ‘Kupe’s tides’ as the king tides, the highest spring tides.

So who discovered New Zealand?

Polynesian voyagers did, and the stories of Kupe are how Māori tradition remembers it. Te Ara’s history of New Zealand puts the first arrivals, from East Polynesia, between 1250 and 1300 CE, says the exact date is still debated, and says they found the country on deliberate voyages of exploration, steering by the winds, the currents and the stars. A 2011 study in the journal PNAS, which sifted 1,434 radiocarbon dates from across East Polynesia, found that people reached the Society Islands about 1025–1120 and then spread in one pulse to the remaining islands, New Zealand among them, about 1190–1290.

When	Who	Source
About 1250–1300 CE	East Polynesian voyagers, the ancestors of Māori; Kupe is the navigator “credited in some traditions”	Te Ara, History of New Zealand
13 December 1642	Abel Tasman, for the Dutch East India Company, sights the South Island, probably the Southern Alps	Te Ara, European discovery
6–8 October 1769	James Cook’s Endeavour sights land and lands at Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, Poverty Bay	Te Ara, European discovery

The 925 CE date

Older books give a precise date: Kupe discovered New Zealand from Tahiti in 925 CE, followed by Toi in 1150 and a “Great Fleet” of seven canoes in 1350. Te Ara explains where that came from. It was assembled by the 19th-century ethnologist S. Percy Smith with the Māori scholar Hoani Te Whatahoro Jury, who combined separate oral traditions into new ones, and research by the historians David Simmons and Keith Sorrenson in the 1960s and 1970s showed it to be largely false. Te Ara’s caption to the Te Papa anchor stone says it plainly: it used to be thought that Kupe arrived in about 925, and research now points to the late 13th century, with a number of voyaging canoes arriving at different times. What remains is the tradition itself, which iwi hold in their own forms.

Tasman, 1642

Abel Tasman sailed from Batavia (Jakarta) in August 1642 with two ships, the Heemskerck and the Zeehaen, and on 13 December sighted “a large land, uplifted high”. Anchored in what is now Golden Bay, one of his boats was rammed by a canoe of Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri and four of his men were killed; Te Ara suggests the people saw the strangers as threatening interlopers. Tasman named the land Staten Landt, and the Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu later called it Nieuw Zeeland, which is where the English name comes from. Te Ara says there is no firm evidence that any Spanish or Portuguese ship reached the coast before him.

Cook, 1769

James Cook’s Endeavour sighted land on 6 October 1769, first seen by the 12-year-old Nicholas Young, and two days later Cook landed at Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, which he named Poverty Bay. Te Ara records that his crew killed a number of Māori there, including the leaders Te Maro and Te Rakau. Cook then sailed round both islands and charted them. On board was Tupaia, a Tahitian navigator and priest whose language was close enough to Māori for him to interpret, and Te Ara notes that Māori afterwards remembered the Endeavour as “Tupaia’s ship”.

Were the Moriori here first?

No. Te Ara’s story of the Moriori, the people of Rēkohu (the Chatham Islands), says some Europeans once thought them Melanesian, but it is now clear they share the same Polynesian ancestry as Māori, and current research has them reaching the Chathams from New Zealand, or perhaps directly from East Polynesia, in the 1400s, after New Zealand was settled.

Going further

The words in Kupe’s story are everyday ones: waka ‘canoe’, moana ‘sea’, ao ‘cloud’, hoki ‘to return’, wheke ‘octopus’. Our free te reo Māori course teaches them from the first lessons. The mountain, river and canoe lines people use to introduce themselves are in how to write a pepeha, and the creatures of the same storytelling world, from taniwha to patupaiarehe, in Māori mythical creatures.