ABSTRACT
New Zealand is the southernmost extent of colonization by Polynesians. It is believed that the colonization took place in at least two major waves, the first of which is thought to have occurred around 950 A.D. and the second around 1200–1400 A.D. In the late 1800s modern surveying had begun. Captain James Cook, son of a Scottish migrant farmhand, was apprenticed to a Quaker ship owner, and he learned his trade in the difficult waters of the North Sea. He studied mathematics at night during off-seasons, and later in Nova Scotia he mastered surveying with the plane table and alidade. The first use of triangulation to control local surveys was by Felton Mathew, the first Surveyor-General in 1840-1841; the limited area covered was near Auckland. In 1849 another small triangulation was begun near Christchurch. The specifications for surveying the New Zealand public lands with steel tapes originated with experiments on the Thames goldfields in 1869.
