For two days they sailed North-west, distancing themselves from the trap they’d found themselves in. But on Dec 28th, they turned back towards the coast, to resume their exploration of the land.
They didn’t have to wait long, and at mid-day, they sighted land again.
They had seen Mount Karioi, near Raglan, and they marked it on the chart but gave it no name. Tasman did however name a place that he didn’t see.
As they were struggling to get out of the South Taranaki Bight, they’d seen that the land extended from them to the North West. Now that they were back against the land they realised they were in a similar longitude… so somewhere in between, there had to be a Cape… they just hadn’t seen it.
Tasman named this Cape Pieter Boreels and it was duly added to the chart.
We can know for certain that Tasman never actually saw this land, because it has a particularly striking and distinctive feature that he would have noted as an important navigational landmark. If he had seen it, then Tasman would have recorded this. Moreover, it is such a distinctive feature that it would have been drawn on a coastal survey, and its latitude would have been recorded for future mariners.
When Cook came past the Cape 127 years later, he wrote this:
Lord Egmont was a former first Lord of the Admiralty, and an important supporter of Cook’s voyage. These days we also know Mount Egmont as Mount Taranaki. It is 2500m high and in the right weather conditions can be seen from over 200km away.
But it was another mountain that Tasman saw when they came back to the coast; Mount Karioi.
For the next few days they had an uneventful passage up the West Coast of the North Island. But now they were rightly cautious about getting too close to shore. “we turned our course to the north-west so as not to come too near the shore and prevent accidents “
On the morning of December 30th they passed the entrance to the Manukau harbour, and two days later they passed the entrance to the Kaipara Harbour. However, Tasman mentioned neither of these; he was too far out to sea for them to be visible. When Cook came past in 1770, he too exercised the same caution, and these harbours weren’t marked on his map of New Zealand either.
On January 4th however, the lie of the land changed and fell away to their East. They had reached the northern extremity of mainland New Zealand.
They named the cape after Maria van Diemen, wife of the Governor of Batavia, and that name remains in use to this day. To their North West they saw an Island, and resolved to see if they could find water and vegetables there.
They had last filled their water barrels in Mauritius.