Three Kings Islands
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The Three Kings Islands are a small group of 13 islands about 55 kilometres (35 miles) northwest of the top of the North Island of New Zealand, where the South Pacific Ocean and Tasman Sea converge (). They measure about 4 km² in area.
They were named on January 6, 1643 by Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman who three weeks earlier had become the first European known to have seen New Zealand.
Tasman anchored at the islands when searching for water. As it was the Twelfth Night feast of the Epiphany, the day the biblical three kings known as the wise men visited Christ the child, he named the islands accordingly. Tasman also named the northern tip of the North Island Cape Maria van Diemen, after the wife of Anthony van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). These are the only two geographic features in New Zealand to retain the names given to them by Abel Tasman.
In 1945, G T S Bayliss made an amazing discovery on Three Kings when he found the last remaining specimen anywhere of a tree which is now called Pennantia baylisiana, a Kaikomako. It was recognised internationally as the world’s rarest and thus most endangered tree. Extremely careful propagation in New Zealand has resulted in the species being reliably established, but it continues to be carefully monitored.
The Three Kings group falls into two subgroups with four main inhospitable islands and a number of smaller rocks on a submarine plateau called King Bank which rises out of extremely deep water. The surrounding sea has very clear visibility and contains teeming fish life, attracting hundreds of divers. Another attraction is the wreck of the Elingamite which foundered there on November 9, 1902.
[edit] King Group
With 3.54 km² by far the largest island, Great Island or King Island, known to Māori as Ohau, plays an important part in the traditional Māori belief that the spirits of dead Māori return to their Pacific homeland of Hawaiki. Near Cape Reinga on the mainland, sometimes translated as the underworld, is a gnarled pohutukawa tree reputed to be more than 800 years old. The spirits journey to the tree and down its roots into the sea bed. They surface again on Ohau where they say a last farewell to New Zealand before going on to Hawaiki.
North East Island, the fourth largest, is about 1 km northeast of Great Island. Farmers Rocks are 0.8 km east of Great Island.
[edit] Southwest Group
Southwest Island, the second largest of the Three Kings Islands, is about 4.5 km southwest of Great island. Further southwest are the tiny Princess Islands, and West Island, the third largest.
