Manawatāwhi / Three Kings Islands: History
During the Last Glacial Maximum when sea levels were over 100 metres lower than present day levels, most offshore islands of New Zealand were connected to the mainland. Manawatāwhi / Three Kings Islands, while connected to each other, were not connected to the rest of New Zealand. Sea levels began to rise 7,000 years ago, separating the individual islands in the group.
Manawatāwhi was traditionally settled by Muriwhenua Māori. In Māori mythology, Ōhau (West Island) is the final glimpse of New Zealand seen by departing spirits, after leaving the world at Cape Reinga / Te Rerenga Wairua. Some Te Aupōuri traditions associate the name of the island, Manawatāwhi ("panting breath"), with the ancestor Rauru, who swam to the islands and arrived exhausted. Members of Ngāti Kurī would periodically come to the islands as a refuge during times of warfare, and to harvest hāpuku, seabirds and eggs.
Most of the larger islands were inhabited, and the Great Island was cleared by Māori of vegetation to grow tuber crops such as kūmara. No defensive pā sites are found on the island, likely as the people who lived on Manawatāwhi did not feel threatened due to the islands' distance from the mainland.
Dutch explorer Abel Tasman bestowed the name Drie Koningen Eyland (Three Kings Island) on 6 January 1643, three weeks after he became the first European known to have seen New Zealand. Tasman anchored at the islands when searching for water. As it was the Twelfth Night feast of the Epiphany, the day the biblical three kings known as the wise men visited Christ the child, he named the main island accordingly. Tasman also named a prominent cape Cape Maria van Diemen, after the wife of Anthony van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). These are the only two geographic features in New Zealand to retain the names given to them by Abel Tasman. Tasman noted a group of 30–35 inhabitants and gardens on the island when attempting to come ashore to replenish water supplies, and saw no trees on the island. Since Tasman's visit, several European ships sighted the island, such as French botanist Jacques Labillardière on board the Recherche in 1793.
In the late 1700s, a party of mainland Te Aupōuri led by Taiakiaki travelled to the islands and killed the approximate 100 inhabitants, led by Toumaramara. Between 1800 and 1830 Te Aupōuri visited sporadically, however did not settle permanently. Tame Porena (also known as Tom Bowline) married Taiakiaki's granddaughter, and settled on the islands with his family of twelve children in the 1830s and 1840s, establishing large gardens, until starvation forced them to relocate to the mainland. Since then, nobody has settled on the islands permanently. Botanist Thomas Frederic Cheeseman visited the islands in 1887 and 1889, documenting the plant species present on the islands for the first time. Cheeseman noted that the Great Island had begun to reforest since Māori settlement.
The islands were purchased by the New Zealand government in 1908 from seven Māori people, and declared an animal sanctuary in 1930. A population of goats (left on the Manawatāwhi Island in November 1889 as a food source for shipwrecked people) had run rampant, reaching numbers of 300–400 by 1900. This led Baden Powell of the Auckland War Memorial Museum, who visited in a group, to petition the government to deal with the goat population. …