Poverty Bay is the largest of several small bays on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island to the north of Hawkes Bay. It stretches for 10 kilometres (6 mi) from Young Nick's Head in the southwest to Tuaheni Point in the northeast. The city of Gisborne is located on the northern shore of the bay. The name is often used by extension to refer to the entire area surrounding the city of Gisborne.
The first European known to have set foot in New Zealand, Captain James Cook, did so here on 7 October 1769 (at which time it was known as Teoneroa). This first meeting led to the deaths of 6 local Maori during skirmishes with the crew. Although he was able to obtain some herbs to ward off scurvy, Cook was unable to gain many of the provisions he and his crew needed at the bay, and for this reason gave it the name Poverty Bay.
Poverty Bay is one of the more fertile areas of New Zealand and famous for its Chardonnay, fruit, vegetables and avocados, with abundant sunshine and fertile alluvial soil.
Read more about Poverty Bay: Catchment and Sediment Supply, Poverty Bay Massacre
Famous quotes containing the words poverty and/or bay:
“It is the women of Europe who pay the price while war rages, and it will be the women who will pay again when war has run its bloody course and Europe sinks down into the slough of poverty like a harried beast too spent to wage the fight. It will be the sonless mothers who will bend their shoulders to the plough and wield in age-palsied hands the reaphook.”
—Kate Richards O’Hare (1877–1948)
“Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)