<P> The great fleet scenario won general acceptance, its adherents even including the famous Māori ethnologist Te Rangi Hīroa (Sir Peter Buck), and was taught in New Zealand schools . However it was effectively demolished during the 1960s by the ethnologist David Simmons, who showed that it derived from an incomplete and indiscriminate study of Māori tradition as recorded in the 19th Century . Simmons also suggests that some of these' migrations' may actually have been journeys within New Zealand . </P> <P> Historian Rāwiri Taonui, writing in 2006 for the website Te Ara--the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accuses Smith of falsification: "The Great Fleet theory was the result of a collaboration between the 19th - century ethnologist S. Percy Smith and the Māori scholar Hoani Te Whatahoro Jury. Smith obtained details about places in Rarotonga and Tahiti during a visit in 1897, while Jury provided information about Māori canoes in New Zealand . Smith then' cut and pasted' his material, combining several oral traditions into new ones . Their joint work was published in two books, in which Jury and Smith falsely attributed much of their information to two 19th - century tohunga, Moihi Te Mātorohanga and Nēpia Pōhūhū" (Taonui 2006). </P>

How many wakas came to nz in the first wave of pacific migration