As far back as 1772, Crozet, the French navigator, who came to the Bay of Islands with Marion du Fresne's expedition, noted this and other Caucasic characteristics of the race. Describing the Ngapuhi people, whose stockaded villages page 29 dotted the coast-line, he says, “Their colour is, generally speaking, like the people of Southern Europe.” Some of the men were as white as the French sailors, and there was a young girl of fifteen or sixteen “as white as our French women.” Crozet saw several people “with red hair.” But while noting the numbers of the tall fair-skinned, straight-haired people with little beard (no doubt the hair had been eradicated in the usual way with shell tweezers), and noting also the somewhat yellowish complexion of some, he recorded the presence of the more Melanesian type, shorter in stature, “slightly frizzled” as to hair, more swarthy
sea-faring peoples on the coast of Arabia, and on the shores of the Red Sea.

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