In the late 18th century several European naval expeditions visited southernmost New Zealand, notably the three of Captain James Cook, who did not land in Otago. However, Joseph Banks, sighted a fire on the Otago Peninsula in 1770 which represents the first indirect contact between Maori and Europeans in the Otago Region. As a consequence, following the settlement of Sydney Cove in New South Wales in 1788, visits by several private ventures followed. These saw the first European women to visit New Zealand (in 1792) and to sojourn there (1795–1797), the sojourn of 244 people on an inhospitable shore for several years, and the building of the first European house and ship in New Zealand. Some of these ventures resulted from the pursuit of seals and constituted the first sealing boom. The visitors encountered few Māori (few lived in the relevant areas), and their presents of iron tools perhaps led to those people's demise at the hands of their countrymen. The revival of New Zealand sealing in 1803 saw the detailed exploration of the south west coast and the penetration of Foveaux Strait from the west. At the same time visitors explored the east coast and the subantarctic islands: principally American ships, which produced Owen Folger Smith's charting of Foveaux Strait from the east in 1804. From 1805 to 1807 a boom took place at the Antipodes Islands — territorially part of historical Otago, and probably the source of the Creed manuscript's early European visitors to Otago harbour about 1806/1807. In any case, Sydney sealers operated on the Dunedin coast by late 1809 and had "long" traded for pigs and potatoes at Otago Harbour by 1810, the year in which hostilities broke out there been Māori and Pākehā in the thirteen-year-long feud called the Sealers' War.