A pioneering study of early trade and beach communities in the Pacific Islands and first published in 1977, this book provides historians with an ambitious survey of early European-Polynesian contact, an analysis of how early trade developed along with the beachcomber community, and a detailed reconstruction of development of the early Pacific port towns. Set mainly in the first half of the 19th century, continuing in some cases for a few decades more, the book covers five ports: Kororareka (now Russell, in New Zealand), Levuka (Fiji), Apia (Samoa), Papeete (Tahiti) and Honolulu (Hawai'i). The role of beachcombers, the earliest European inhabitants, as well as the later consuls or commercial agents, and the development of plantation economies is explored. The book is a tour de force, the first detailed comparative academic study of these early precolonial trading towns and their race relations. It argues that the predominantly egalitarian towns where Islanders, beachcombers, traders, and missionaries mixed were largely harmonious, but this was undermined by later arrivals and larger populations.

Atua Wera, described as 'one of the major poems in New Zealand literature' and Smithyman's masterpiece, is a sequence of nearly 300 poems about the nineteenth-century Nga Puhi tohunga and prophet Papahurihia. It draws on a huge range of historical and oral sources, Maori and Pakeha, and it is dense with names and voices and vivid with places and happenings. Papahurihia, or Te Atua Wera, the fiery god, was a charismatic figure and Smithyman includes rumors, reports, dreams, myths and opinions about him, none of which is conclusive: he remains mysterious, powerful, elusive. But finally this rich and complex poem is, as the poet says, 'about more than Papahurihia', a New Zealand epic for the late twentieth century.

In Old New Zealand (1863), F.E. Maning recalls living alongside Maori in "the good old times before Governors were invented, and law, and justice, and all that." His account of the early contact period is widely acknowledged to be a masterpiece of some sort, but the extent to which it is fiction, autobiography, ethnography, history, or satire remains a matter for debate. This is the first scholarly edition of Maning's writings. It includes a revealing selection of Maning's unpublished letters, and Alex Calder contributes an introduction and notes that illuminate the works' historical, ethnographic, and literary contexts, showing how settler colonialism is an incomplete and contested process, the problems of which are enacted in Maning's writings, and repeated in the history of their reception.