At the beginning of the twentieth century, western historians working from traditional oral genealogies and narratives determined that a ‘Great Fleet’ carrying the Polynesian ancestors of the Māori left the Central Eastern Pacific to settle New Zealand in the year AD 1350. Over the past century, though the scholarship behind it has been thoroughly refuted, this date has become entrenched in New Zealand’s national consciousness and has remained largely unchallenged. Focusing on the crew of the Tainui and Te Arawa, and combining the sort of traditional sources used in previous studies with archaeo-astronomy, this paper argues from the mythologised description of what can only be a total solar eclipse that the celebrated ‘Great Fleet’ in fact arrived in December 1408, almost sixty years later than previously thought.