The Tuia Mātauranga GeoTour is about having fun discovering the history of Aotearoa New Zealand by finding sites of significance in local communities from early Pacific voyaging and migration, European settlement to present day. The interaction between people, and people and the land have provided a rich history that the GeoTour invites you to explore.
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Young Nick's Head is a headland at the southern end of Poverty Bay, and is commonly associated with the arrival in New Zealand of Captain Cook’s Endeavour in 1796. The area is also cited as the landing place of the Horouta and Te Ikaroa-a-Rauru waka which carried Māori settlers to the region around 1350 AD. The headland was known to Māori as Te Kuri o Pāoa.
Pāoa was captain of the Horouta waka, and Te Kuri o Pāoa translates to "The Dog of Pāoa". Māori legends recount that Pāoa lost his dog in the Poverty Bay area and the dog is still there waiting for his master to return. It is said if you look towards the white cliffs at dawn they resemble the outline of a dog in a crouching position.
When Cook arrived in 1769, he named the same headland Young Nicks Head, after 12-year-old Nicholas Young, the first person on board to sight New Zealand.
On Saturday 7 October, Nicholas Young, who was sitting on the mast head, called out land.
In the preceding week Cook had felt that they were near land having sighted seals and rock weed floating on the water. Sydney Parkinson, the artist on board the Endeavour wrote that the Captain had promised one gallon of rum for the man who first sighted land by day, and two gallons if it were discovered by night.
Nick may have been a servant to the surgeon William Monkhouse, the surgeon’s mate William Perry or the naturalist Joseph Banks. Subsequent research indicates that the land that Nicholas Young first saw was the peak of Arowhana Mountain, not Young Nicks Head, the name given to the southern headland of the Bay by Cook.
In 2012, as part of the Ngai Tāmanuhiri Claims Settlement Act, the headland was vested in Ngāi Tāmanuhiri as a national historic reserve and the name officially altered to a dual name, Te Kuri a Pāoa / Young Nick’s Head National Historic Reserve.
A bronze statue depicting Young Nick pointing towards land was erected at the mouth of the Tūranganui River, at Churchill Park on Waikanae Beach, in 1995 as part of the Bicentenary Celebrations.
The cache is a 400ml sistema hidden near the foreshore at a place where the headland Te Kuri a Pāoa or Young Nick’s Head can be seen across the bay.
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To be able to complete this Geotour and receive your special geocoin, remember to take a note of the codeword on the log book of the cache. This will need to be recorded in your passport which can be downloaded from here. If the passport is unavailable for any reason just keep a note of the codeword and try again later.