G'morning Bo, 

 MM> There might be more than chance to that ... my memory of Abel
 MM> Tasman's first map of the area used a Dutch name like "Nieeuw
 MM> Zeeland" in 1642,  and I'm sure that there was an established
 MM> `Zeeland' at the antipode...

 BS> Aha. Ours is beeing called "Sjalland" in the native
 BS> langauge, but Zealand in English. Zeeland means "The land
 BS> of lakes" in Dutch? "Sjalland" can't be translated to that.
 BS> Not sure of what it means acutally.

That's interesting -  Apparently Tasman thought he'd found an 
extension of South America and named NZ "Staten Landt" at first, 
but when SA was shown not to extend to the west, the Dutch renamed 
NZ  "Nieeuw Zeeland" in 1643 - and it stuck.

"The land of lakes" is not so silly, either.  The bits of NZ that 
Tasman visited feature a set of islands that hid the Cook Strait 
entirely from the Dutch explorers,  and gave Captain Cook a false 
steer into the bargain.

But I suspect that some bit of Holland or its neighbourhood was 
also called `Zeeland' at the time  -  and somewhere close to the 
true antipode of NZ would make a lot of sense of the `New'...

:-))
 
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