They were named on January 6 1643 by Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman who three weeks earlier had become the first European known to have seen New Zealand.
Tasman anchored at the islands when searching for water. As it was the Twelfth Night feast of the Epiphany, the day the biblical three kings known as the wise men visited Christ the child, he named the islands accordingly.
(Tasman also named the northern tip of the North Island Cape Maria van Diemen, after the wife of Anthony van Diemen, Governor General of Batavia (now Jakarta).
The Three Kings group has four main inhospitable islands on a submarine plateau which rises out of extremely deep water. The surrounding sea has very clear visibility and contains teeming fish life, attracting hundreds of divers. Another attraction is the wreck of the Elingamite which foundered there on November 9 1902.
The largest island, known to Maori as Ohau, plays an important part in the traditional Maori belief that the spirits of dead Maori return to their Pacific homeland of Hawaiki. Near Cape Reinga on the mainland, sometimes translated as the underworld, is a gnarled pohutukawa tree reputed to be more than 800 years old. The spirits journey to the tree and down its roots into the sea bed. They surface again on Ohau where they say a last farewell to New Zealand before going on to Hawaiki.
In 1945, G T S Bayliss made an amazing discovery on Three Kings when he found the last remaining specimen anywhere of a tree which is now called pennantia baylisiana, a Kaikomako. It was recognised internationally as the world’s rarest and thus most endangered tree. Extremely careful propagation in New Zealand has resulted in the species being reliably established, but it continues to be carefully monitored.