Mike Lee is known to many as an Auckland councillor and before that the chair of Auckland Regional Council. But he is also a keen historian, French speaker and enthusiast of the contributions that early French explorers made to New Zealand's history.
He has spent 12 years researching and writing his book, Navigators and Naturalists: French Exploration of New Zealand and the South Seas (1769-1824).
It's a work that hopes to shed more light on the work these explorers put in - often at great personal cost - to bring stories of New Zealand back to Europe.
