Under the north side of the Taranaki or Mount Egmont volcano (Taranaki, Egmont National Park) is the port of New Plymouth (pop. 50,000), an industrial town and commercial center of a farming region. The harbor, formed in 1881 by the construction of breakwaters, handled dairy produce (particularly cheese) and now also ships raw materials for the
petrochemical industry. The proximity of rich offshore deposits of fossil fuels (at Kapuni, Maui and elsewhere) has brought a number of industrial firms to New Plymouth, creating employment.
New Plymouth, so called after its English namesake, was founded in 1841; the first settlers came from Devon and Cornwall. They are said to have found only small numbers of Maoris in this area - though the presence of many fortified settlements (pas) and kumara fields suggests the contrary. Probably the local Taranaki tribes, who had only clubs for combat, were so harried in the early decades of the 19th C. by the Waikato tribes, who were already equipped with firearms, that they moved south, where they sought to join up with Chief Te Rauparaha in order to get guns and reoccupy their tribal territory.
Strife blew up between the returning Maori tribes and the settlers (pakehas), and in 1860 the conflict escalated into fierce country-wide fighting, sparked off by a fraudulent land deal at Waitara, 16km east of New Plymouth.
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