NORTHERN POINT OF N.Z.

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28250, 11 April 1957, Page 6

NORTHERN POINT OF N.Z.

Captain Cook’s Error

'"The Press’" Special Service

AUCKLAND, April 10. Most New Zealanders would give a quick answer if asked to name the northernmost point of New Zealand. They would say North Cape. But they would be wrong, according to a New Zealand Geographer researcher Mr K. J. Hesz. He says that the northern extremity has, in fact, no name.

The actual extremity is called Kerr Point by some people. But they too are wrong, says Mr Hesz. Kerr Point is really the name of the promontory at the eastern end of Tom Bowling Bay —about as far to the west of the true northern extremity as North Cape is to the east. Captain Cook made the original error. He wrote in his diary on December 19, 1769, that he gave North Cape its name, “judging it to be the northern-most extremity of this country.*’ But while we can pin responsibility on Cook for picking the wrong place, it is a mystery who was responsible for giving the wrong name to the right place.

Mr Hesz records that Kerr Point was named after a ship’s master who followed the northern coastline in 1851, and that it was correctly located on an Admiralty chart six years later.

He doesn’t know when Lands and Survey Department maps allowed the name to slip from the west to the far north. Mr Hesz says it is for the New Zealand Geographic Board to shift the name back to the west “and give a proper name” to the northern tip-