The Bay of Islands

New Zealand as a nation was born in the Bay of Islands, and in this fascinating and carefully researched book, Jack Lee has chronicled its birth. The Bay of Islands corrects the imbalance of earlier accounts, which tend to stress the missionary aspect of development to the virtual exclusion of the commercial ascendancy which the Bay of Islands achieved in the Pacific in the early nineteenth century. Similarly, the role of the Maori and the way in which their history and underlying politics influenced events, has often been ignored.