Furneaux’s Adventure in New Zealand

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 91-92: After losing sight of the Resolution among the Antarctic icebergs, Captain Furneaux had sailed the Adventure to Tasmania, a large island about 150 miles south of Australia which the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had sighted and visited in 1642. The French had landed there in 1772, but the Adventure was the first British ship to anchor. For a few days they charted parts of the eastern coast, stopping briefly to fill up their water stores. They saw some abandoned huts and overgrown pathways but didn’t encounter any inhabitants. From there the Adventure sailed east to New Zealand’s Queen Charlotte Sound, where they arrived in early April 1773, two months after their separation from the Resolution. Like a vast river estuary, the opening of Queen Charlotte Sound was eight miles wide but narrowed as it stretched inland. Sheltered by mountains, the waters…