The bay was busy with motorboats, waterskiers, sunbathers and swimmers on the various island beaches, and, near Paihia, thrill-seeking para-sailers, towed by motorboats.

On the way back to port, many in our group left the tour boat to visit Russell, a well-preserved colonial town a simple ferry-ride across Kororareka Bay from Paihia.

Russell was once a rowdy whaling center — in fact, it was known as the "hell-hole of the Pacific" — a lawless enclave of rowdy sailors, grog-sellers, gambling and prostitution.

Charles Darwin was one of those early visitors who didn't like much of what he saw at the Bay of Islands. He visited in the 1830s during his five-year journey around the world on H.M.S. Beagle — the same trip that took him to the eastern Pacific's Galapagos Islands and resulted, years later, in his ground-breaking book about the theory of evolution, "The Origin of Species."

Many of those who disdain Darwin's theory of time, nature and life on Earth might be surprised at his praise for the missionaries in New Zealand, and the beneficence he attributed to the colonialists.

"I am disappointed in New Zealand, both in the country and in its inhabitants," he wrote in a letter to his sister Caroline from the Bay of Islands in December 1835. After the Tahitians, whom he had recently visited, "the natives appear savages. The missionaries have done much in improving the moral character, and still more in teaching them the arts of civilization.

"It is something to boast of that Europeans may here amongst men who so lately were the most ferocious savages probably on the face of the Earth, walk with as much safety as in England," Darwin wrote.

His opinions smack today of chauvinistic, well … "cultural-evolutionary" thinking, don't they?

Russell was originally known by its Maori name, Kororareka, and was the early capital of colonial New Zealand after the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, signed initially by 46 chiefs and subsequently by New Zealand's other Maori tribes. However, some Maoris across New Zealand today say their particular ancestral leaders never did sign the treaty; others say the treaty is broken. The national summer holiday, Waitangi Day, Feb. 6, regularly generates some controversy.

Besides the lovely bayside promenade and bay-front stores, restaurants and hotels, and a wonderful little museum, one of Russell's landmarks is Christ Church, New Zealand's oldest surviving church building, a white haven. The churchyard includes a wonderfully antique and historic cemetery, filled with the graves of settlers, seafaring captains, sailors and Maoris, including notable chiefs.