When His Majesty's brig the Chatham, under the command of Lieutenant Broughton, entered Kaingaroa Bay on 29th November 1791 it broke into a sealed world.

In the beginning the Chatham Islands were only known to the birds, to the seals, and the whales, and all the creatures of the sea. Then came the people who settled there. In time, in isolation, they had no knowledge of an outside world. They were the world. Nothing else existed. Yet their ancestors had come from the east coast of the South Island - the workmanship on their stone adzes points to that - and they were clearly of the Polynesian race.