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Kupe is recorded as being the first to discover Wellington Harbour. However, it garined it's Maori name when it was discovered by Tara, son of Whatonga, from the Hawke's Bay. When Tara told his father of the harbour's fertile land, Whatonga and his followers moved to the harbour and established Ngati-Tara.
The first European settlement of Wellington was on January 22, 1840, when the ship "Aurora" of the New Zealand Company laned in the harbour. Colonel William Wakefield had arrived only weeks earlier to purchase land from the Maoris.
Colonel Wakefield has chosen an area that is now the southern shores of Port Nicholson, but surveyor Captain William Mein Smith favoured the flat area of Hutt Valley at Petone. He considered it to be the most suitable place for the generic town of one-acre sections and straight roads that had been planned. Finally, Thorndon was chosen because of the possibility of flooding in the Hutt Valley.
Local Maori denied ever selling the southern shores of Port Nicholson to the New Zealand Land Company and this began a land dispute between Maori and Europeans. Various major disputes were raised in the following thirty years as a result of the deceiving and illegal practices of the New Zealand Land Company. European settlers had paid the Company in advance for land the Company hadn't yet purchased from the local Maori.
In 1865 Wellington became the nation's capital city and many organisations moved there.
Geographically, Wellington originally had very little flat land, but as a result of reclamation of the harbour since 1952 there is now a far larger area of flat land. An earthquake in 1855 made a positive contribution to increasing flat land.
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