Bauza Island

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Bauza Island in Doubtful Sound.

The Spanish came through just 23 years after Cook had hove to off the cosy-looking waterway he named “Doubtfull Harbour”. Not trusting the prevailing onshore winds to take his ships safely in and out of the confined waterway, he headed north to warmer waters.

But Captain Alessandro Malaspina, an explorer of Tuscan origin captaining a Spanish-financed expedition, arrived from the tropics in 1793 with two ships, the Descubierta and the Atrevida. Having read Cook’s journals and being aware of the explorer’s reluctance to take a ship into the unknown waterway, he ordered a party of men to take a smaller boat past the obstructing island. These men, headed by the ship’s second lieutenant and cartographer Felipe Bauza, were the first Europeans to enter the sound. It would have looked exactly the same to them as it did to us 200 years later from the deck of the Tutuko that cloudy morning.

Bauza and his men rowed into their little-known place in history on February 25, 1793. Leaving the Descubierta at the outer edge of Doubtful Sound, off the point they named Punta 25 Febrero – the Spanish-speaking people have always been big on using dates for place-names – they slowly headed in, keeping the island on their port side as they passed through the southern channel into the sound.

The island was subsequently named Bauza Island, but they also called it the Island of Mosquitoes – to remember what we can only presume was a very unpleasant experience: in his 2002 book, The Fjords of Fiordland, John Hall-Jones quotes Bauza describing “a plague of mosquitoes whose bites made us bleed freely”.

Hall-Jones also suggests that the mosquitoes were in fact sandflies, as the Spanish made landfall on the island during daylight.

This insect-plagued landfall at Marcaciones Point is now marked by a plaque just above the waterline. Over time, many of the original charted Spanish place-names were replaced by English ones. Among them, Malaspina Channel, Marcaciones (“Bearings”) Point, Norte and Sur Channels and Quintano Point were discarded, although several were later reinstated. Acknowledgment of the Spanish contribution to this area culminated in the unveiling of the plaque at Marcaciones Point in 1984 by the Spanish Vice-Consul for New Zealand.