After this meeting, it was interesting to know more about a possible Breton emigration to New Zealand. And for good reason since the first French to reach its shores, in the wake of James Cook, were native… from Brittany. So they were Jean François Marie de Surville, of Port-Louis, in 1769, and Marc Joseph Marion Dufresne, dit Marion-Dufresne, of Saint Malo, in 1772. Both of them were navigators, explorers and captains of vessels for the French East India Company.
Then, in 1840, a group of businessmen from Nantes and Bordeaux, grouped in Compagnie Nanto-Bordelaise, received a subsidy from the French government for a colonization project in the South Island. And so, the ship “Comte de Paris” left Rochefort in May 1840 with about sixty passengers on board coming mainly from Normandy and Charente. Failing to colonize the whole island, they founded the small town of Akaroa, whose actual inhabitants are still very much attached to their French roots.