The Bay of Islands is one of those corners where nature and history go hand in hand. Scattered across a subtropical bay of turquoise water are some 144 green islands, home to dolphins, whales and bird colonies, where you can sail, dive and cruise out to the famous Hole in the Rock. It's postcard-perfect coastal New Zealand, just a few hours north of Auckland.
But this bay is also the birthplace of the nation. At Waitangi, on 6 February 1840, Māori chiefs and the British Crown signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the country's founding treaty. Across the water, the town of Russell (formerly Kororāreka) was the first European settlement and came to be known as 'the hell hole of the Pacific' for its reputation as a lawless port. And Kerikeri is home to New Zealand's oldest buildings. Few places pack in so much history.
This guide explores the Bay of Islands with a practical, friendly eye: which cruises and experiences not to miss, how to get around Paihia, Russell and Waitangi, what the Hole in the Rock cruise, the Treaty Grounds admission and the day trips really cost (in New Zealand dollars, verified in July 2026), and where to eat and stay. It's a place where scenery, dolphins and history come together like nowhere else in the country.
The Bay of Islands is 'the birthplace of the nation': here, in the heart of the territory of the powerful Ngāpuhi iwi, the first sustained contact between Māori and Europeans took place. Kororāreka (Russell) grew into the first European port, notorious for its lawlessness; Kerikeri saw the first mission and the country's oldest buildings; and at Waitangi, on 6 February 1840, dozens of Māori rangatira and the Crown signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Soon after, discontent with colonisation sparked Hōne Heke's Northern War. The full story is told on the history page.
Read the full history ↓The cradle of the nation: at Waitangi, in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand's founding treaty was signed in 1840, on the land of Ngāpuhi, the country's largest iwi. This is where the first missionaries arrived, where the rowdy port of Kororāreka thrived and where the first of the New Zealand Wars broke out.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before a single European ship arrived, the Bay of Islands was the heart of Ngāpuhi territory, the largest and most powerful iwi (tribe) in the north of New Zealand. Māori had reached Aotearoa from eastern Polynesia around 1250-1300, sailing great waka (ocean-going canoes) across the Pacific, and in the subtropical bays of the north they found an ideal place: a sea full of fish, fertile land, a mild climate and generous forests.
On the shores and islands of the bay, the different hapū (sub-tribes) of Ngāpuhi built pā (fortified villages) and kāinga (open villages). They lived from fishing, gathering shellfish, hunting birds and growing kūmara (sweet potato). Their lives were organised around whakapapa (the genealogy that connects each person to their ancestors, the land and the spiritual world) and governed by concepts such as mana (prestige, authority) and tapu (the sacred), pillars of Te Ao Māori, the Māori worldview.
The bay also held a strategic position: its sheltered waters and many islands made it a natural harbour. When the first European ships began to appear in the late 18th century, it was right here, in Ngāpuhi territory, that some of the earliest and most intense contact between Māori and Pākehā (Europeans) anywhere in New Zealand took place.
The Dutch navigator Abel Tasman had sighted New Zealand in 1642, but he never landed, and his encounter with Māori ended in violence. It was the British captain James Cook who, in 1769, charted the coast and named this area the Bay of Islands after its many islands. From then on, and especially from the early 19th century, the bay became a magnet for whalers, sealers, traders and adventurers from all over the Pacific.
The centre of all this activity was Kororāreka, the settlement now called Russell. In the 1830s it was the largest European settlement in the country and a lawless port where whalers, sailors, deserters and convicts who had escaped from Australia mixed with local Māori. Drink, brawls and prostitution were part of everyday life, and the place earned the nickname 'hell hole of the Pacific'. Meanwhile, Māori chiefs traded heavily, exchanging food, timber and flax for guns, tools and European goods.
That trade had a terrible consequence. Ngāpuhi got hold of muskets first, especially under the leadership of the shrewd and fierce chief Hongi Hika, and the guns gave them a decisive military advantage over other iwi. From his base at Kororipo pā in Kerikeri, Hongi Hika launched devastating campaigns to the south in what became known as the Musket Wars (1810-1840). They caused huge loss of life across the country and changed the tribal map forever.
Into that turbulent world came the missionaries. In 1814, the Reverend Samuel Marsden established New Zealand's first Christian mission in the Bay of Islands. In 1819 the Church Missionary Society founded a mission station at Kerikeri, right next to the powerful Kororipo pā. It did so with the consent and protection of Hongi Hika, who saw Europeans as a source of technology, literacy and trade.
The two oldest buildings in New Zealand survive from that mission. Kemp House (Mission House), built in 1822, is the oldest building still standing in the country. The Stone Store, from 1836, was built with local basalt and sandstone brought from Sydney; it is the oldest stone building in the country and still works as a shop. Together with the site of Kororipo pā, they form the historic heart of New Zealand's era of first contact.
The missionaries did something with enormous impact: they put the Māori language into writing. After creating an alphabet for te reo, they translated the Bible and taught people to read and write, and literacy spread quickly among Māori. Those skills would prove crucial only a few years later, when the time came to debate and sign a treaty with the British Crown.
By around 1840, the situation in the Bay of Islands, and across New Zealand, was chaotic. More and more settlers and land speculators were arriving, Kororāreka was a hotbed of disorder, and both Māori chiefs and the British Crown wanted to bring some kind of order to the relationship between the two peoples. The result was Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the Treaty of Waitangi.
On 6 February 1840, in the grounds of the British Resident's house at Waitangi, overlooking the bay, Captain William Hobson, on behalf of the Crown, and around 43 rangatira (chiefs), most of them Ngāpuhi, signed the treaty after intense debate. Speeches in favour from figures such as Tāmati Wāka Nene and Hōne Heke Pōkai himself, the first chief to sign, were decisive. Over the following months, the document travelled around the country and gathered more than 500 signatures from Māori chiefs.
The problem, which would haunt the country for a century and a half, was that the two versions of the treaty did not say the same thing. In the English version, Māori ceded 'sovereignty' to the Crown. In the te reo Māori version, the one nearly everyone signed, they ceded 'kāwanatanga' (governance) but kept their 'tino rangatiratanga' (full authority) over their lands and taonga. That difference, and the Crown's later failure to keep its promises, would be the root of countless conflicts and claims, many of which are still being settled today.
Discontent soon boiled over. After the treaty was signed, the colonial capital moved first to Okiato (near Russell) and then to Auckland. That diverted trade and ruined the Bay of Islands chiefs who had grown rich from it. Customs duties and the broken promises of colonisation fed their frustration, above all that of Hōne Heke, the very chief who had been the first to sign.
The symbol of that protest was the flagstaff on Maiki Hill (Flagstaff Hill), above Kororāreka. Heke had donated the pole to fly the flag of the United Tribes, but after the treaty the British Union Jack was raised there instead, to his outrage. Between 1844 and 1845, Hōne Heke cut down the flagstaff four times. The fourth time, in March 1845, coincided with an attack on Kororāreka by Heke and chief Te Ruki Kawiti, which ended with the town being looted and burned.
So began the Northern War (also called the Flagstaff War, 1845-1846), the first of the conflicts known as the New Zealand Wars. The better-armed British forces ran up against Māori military engineering: Kawiti built fortified pā with trenches and shelters against bombardment (such as the famous Ruapekapeka pā) that anticipated modern trench warfare. The war ended with no clear winner, but it made one thing plain: the colonisation of New Zealand would not be peaceful.
Over the decades, the Bay of Islands stopped being the country's political and commercial centre. That role passed to Auckland and later to Wellington, and the bay became what it is today: a destination for nature and history. Russell, the old 'hell hole', is a quiet, charming town; Kerikeri keeps its colonial buildings; and Waitangi has become the nation's great commemorative site.
Every 6 February, Waitangi Day is a public holiday. The events at the Treaty Grounds are both a celebration and a focus for protest, because the treaty is still a living and contested document. In 1975 the Waitangi Tribunal was set up to investigate the Crown's historical breaches of the treaty. Since then many iwi, Ngāpuhi among them, have lodged claims and received compensation, official apologies and returns of land. It is one of the most ambitious reconciliation processes with Indigenous peoples anywhere in the world.
That's why exploring the Bay of Islands today is much more than sailing among dolphins and rock arches. You're walking through the place where modern New Zealand was born: the ancestral land of Ngāpuhi, the lawless whalers' port, the first mission and its centuries-old buildings, the grounds where the treaty was signed and the hills of the Northern War. All those layers share the same turquoise waters of the far north.
