7. What happened to Mendonca after he left New Zealand?

After clearing Great Barrier Island, Mendonca’s priority was to set course for the Portuguese base in Malacca, Malaysia. By then, it would be around one year since he left Malacca, likely early autumn in the South Pacific. He would be sailing at the right time to take advantage of the strengthening southeast trade winds to return to Malacca and then India. Mendonca needed to reach Goa, the major Portuguese naval base for the Far East, by September 1523 to avoid the contrary winds of the winter monsoon. Assuming he left New Zealand in March 1523, six months should have been enough time to cover the distance.

In January 1990, a gardener in Cape Town’s Table Bay unearthed a flat stone inscribed in Portuguese, translated to English:

 “The Vitoria, Captain Cristovao de Mendonca, arrived here on the 26th Ma (March or May) 1524. A coin is buried here. All well. God be praised.”

During this period, it was common for ship captains to write ‘postal stones’ as they rounded the Cape to register their movements. Portuguese records show Mendonca took over the Vitoria in Goa to sail back to Lisbon.

Mendonca reached Lisbon, where he was rewarded for his services with a lucrative overseas posting by King John III. He became the commander of the fort and city of Hormuz, at the entrance of the Persian Gulf, allowing him to earn significant private wealth. Mendonca died from disease in 1532.

The Mendonca voyage to the North Island has only become known in recent times due to the research efforts of a group of investigators who managed through serendipity to find the evidence. Most of New Zealand history has been written by Dutch and English researchers who did not look outside their traditional sources.

How do you rate the case put forward for Mendonca sailing around the North Island in 1522/23? This does not discount the possibility there may have been other explorers before the Portuguese.