exploited wild foods such as fern root, which provided a starchy paste. Early contact periods Early European exploration The first Europeans known to reach New Zealand were the crew of Dutch explorer Abel Tasman who arrived in his ships Heemskerck and Zeehaen. Tasman anchored at the northern end of the South Island in Golden Bay (he named it Murderers' Bay) in December 1642, and sailed northward to Tonga following an attack by local Māori, Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri. Tasman sketched sections of the two main islands' west coasts. Tasman called them Staten Landt, after the States General of the Netherlands, and that name appeared on his first maps of the country. In 1645 Dutch cartographers changed the name to Nova Zeelandia in Latin, from Nieuw Zeeland, after the Dutch province of Zeeland. Over 100 years elapsed before Europeans returned to New Zealand; in 1769, British naval captain James Cook of HM Bark Endeavour visited New Zealand, and coincidentally, only two months later, Frenchman Jean-François de Surville, in command of his own expedition, reached the country. When Cook left on his first voyage, the sealed orders given to him by the British Admiralty ordered him to proceed "...to the Westward between the Latitude beforementioned and the Latitude of 35° until’ you discover it, or fall in with the Eastern side of the Land discover’d by Tasman and now called New Zeland." He would return to New Zealand on both of his subsequent voyages of discovery. Various claims have been made that New Zealand was reached by other non-Polynesian voyagers before Tasman, but these are not widely accepted. Peter Trickett, for example, argues in Beyond Capricorn that the Portuguese explorer Cristóvão de Mendonça reached New Zealand in the 1520s, and the Tamil bell discovered by missionary William Colenso has given rise to a number of theories, but historians generally believe the bell "is not in itself proof of early Tamil contact with New Zealand". From the 1790s, the waters around New Zealand were visited by British, French and American whaling, sealing and trading ships. Their crews traded European goods, including guns and metal tools, for Māori food, water, wood, flax and sex. Māori were reputed to be enthusiastic and canny traders, even though the levels of technology, institutions and property rights differed greatly from the standards in European societies. Although there were some conflicts, such as the killing of French explorer Marc-Joseph Marion du