This three-year project was sponsored by the Royal Society of New Zealand for NZ$496,000. The interdisciplinary work that we undertook looks at the cross-cultural dimension of Pacific exploration from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

The team, of which I was one of the two main investigators, was led by Dame Professor Anne Salmond from the Maori Studies Department of The University of Auckland and counted with Dr Amiria Henare (Anthropology Department, Cambridge University) as associate researcher, as well as three doctoral students.

My contribution to the project was to study and trace primary and secondary sources from Spanish archives, as well as past and present scholarship. The project has continued with a forum sponsored by the French Pacific Fund in 2006 in Paris and some further developlents are currently been considered.