The landscape of Fiordland has been constantly changing since the beginning of time. Local rocks and fossils tell the story of a land that has—at different times—been wet and dry, warm and cold, flat and mountainous.

Fifty million years ago, this whole area was at the bottom of the sea! The land gradually buckled and shifted due to a bit of jostling between tectonic plates, and by two million years ago you would have been standing on dry land–but it still wouldn’t have looked quite like this.

During the last ice age this region was covered by huge glaciers, which carved out the fiords and lakes and jagged mountains as you see them today. You can see how deep the glaciers were by looking at the sheer valley walls which they sliced away. As the ice melted, it left behind lakes like this one, and the rising sea flooded in to create the fiords around the coast.

The first people to arrive here were the Maori, about 1,000 years ago.

The Maori were still here when Captain Cook set up camp at Dusky Sound, which is further south, in 1773. He stayed for five weeks, ate seals and birds and made friends with local Maori families, even welcoming them aboard and showing them the ship’s cat.

One of the sailors on Cook’s ship remembered the abundance of seals, and returned in 1791 to hunt them. Within a year a sealing colony had been set up on the coast along with New Zealand’s first colonial building. The slaughter of fur seals began in earnest, and didn’t end until the industry began to fail 30 years later, because there were no seals left. In 1829 they started going after whales, and exactly the same thing happened.

Fiordland fell quiet for a time after that, as the Europeans concentrated on other areas. The Maori disappeared too, due to the outbreak of war between the two main tribal groups. The scattered survivors took became known as the “lost tribe” and the only trace of them that anyone ever saw was the odd smoking fire or fresh footprint.

In 1877 a mysterious man came to live at Milford Sound. Donald Sutherland was born in Scotland and made a living as a soldier, first in Italy and finally in New Zealand. He had visited Milford a few years before on a sealing expedition, and said that if he was ever to settle anywhere it would be there. And so when he was done with fighting, he bought a little boat and a dog called John O’Groats, and sailed into the wilderness.

Sutherland spent 40 years at Milford Sound. He was into exploring, and really got to know the country, right up through these mountains. He probably knew this land better than anyone. He was a solitary character though, and once spent two whole years alone in the wilderness with only the dog for company. Not surprisingly, he became known as the Hermit of Milford Sound. But his peace was shattered as the area became a tourist attraction, and all these steamboats and painters and trampers started turning up. In 1890 he became the fourth husband of a serial widow called Elizabeth Samuel, and together they built a hotel on Milford Sound and played host to the weary travellers. Elizabeth became known as the Mother of Milford, and Sutherland himself entertained guests with tall tales of sea monsters and hidden valleys full of rubies and diamonds.

But there was another group of people who settled in this area.We've mentioned the Maori, the explorers, the sealers and whalers, the surveyors, the farmers and the hermit. At one point, Fiordland was also home to about 200 gold prospectors. They all rushed here in 1886 after someone struck gold, but as it turned out there wasn’t much of it, and within a year there were only half a dozen gold miners left. People started looking for some other way to strike it rich.

They tried mining quartz, but it wasn’t very good quality. They found oil, but couldn’t extract it because the rock was all wrong. They quarried marble for a while, as well as mica, greenstone and asbestos, but those all eventually failed too.

In the end, someone realised the answer was staring them in the face. If there was one thing Fiordland had plenty of, it was trees! The timber industry survived well into the twentieth century, although of course it was stopped as tourism took hold.