Buzz
Old Mexico is simply Mexico, and Old York is just York. But what about Old Zealand? Where does it lie?
The first European explorer to set foot on the land now known as New Zealand was a Dutch navigator, Abel Tasman. When he arrived in the 1640s, he believed he had reached a part of Staten Landt, an island off Argentina's coast, and named it as such. (Tasman’s journey was long, which may have led to some confusion).
Shortly after, Dutch mapmakers Hendrik Brouwer and Joan Blaeu discovered that these large islands were not actually connected to South America. As a result, Blaeu renamed the region Nieuw Zeeland, after Zeeland, a province in the Netherlands. Zeeland, itself a collection of islands, means “sea land” in Dutch.
In the 1770s, the English explorer James Cook embarked on three journeys to Nieuw Zeeland. Originally, he set out to observe the transit of Venus across the South Pacific sky. However, after losing his way, Cook and his crew ended up in Nieuw Zeeland, a region that had remained mostly unexplored by Westerners since Tasman’s earlier visit. Cook went on to map much of the coastline, and it is he who is credited with giving the area its English name, "New Zealand."
