CHAPTER I. Historical Sketch.
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THE NEW ZEALAND "EMIGRANT'S BRADSHAW."
CHAPTER I
HISTORICAL SKETCH.
HISTORY. --Though New Zealand was first sighted and named by Tasman, a Dutch explorer, in the year 1642, the country was only fully discovered by our illustrious circumnavigator, Captain Cook, in 1769. Cook visited the islands three times to recruit his exploring vessels, surveyed a large portion of the coasts, held a great deal of friendly intercourse with the natives, and introduced the pig, the potato, and various European seeds and vegetables.
He formed a high, and a remarkably correct, opinion of the capabilities of the country for European settlement; and his report of the genial climate, fertile soil, fine harbours, and evergreen forests, so captivated the practical mind of Benjamin Franklin, that the American philosopher published a proposal for the colonisation of the newly-discovered Land.
Some years after Cook's visit, trade and intercourse began to spring up between Port Jackson (New South Wales) and New Zealand; in 1814 the first missionaries arrived; and by degrees, various rude little communities--whalers, sealers, sawyers, runaway sailors, and petty merchants--attracted over from New South Wales, settled themselves along the coasts, trading and frequently intermarrying with the natives; whilst the bays and harbours of the country became the favourite fishing grounds and recruiting stations of the British, American, Bremen, and colonial vessels engaged in the sperm and black whale fishery. The reports carried home as to the
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HISTORICAL SKETCH.
fine harbours; the forests of magnificent kauri spars and ship timber; the glowing accounts of the fertility of the soil spread abroad by the passing visitors from Australia; the testimony of the missionaries as to the bracing salubrity of the climate, eventually revived in England that desire for the regular colonisation of the country which Cook and Franklin had excited so many years before. In 1840, an influential body of public men, including the late Lord Durham, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, various members of Parliament, the Barings, Goldsmids, and many of the leading merchants of London, formed themselves into an association called the New Zealand Company, for the purpose of regularly colonising the islands from the mother country; whilst at the same time the Government formally raised New Zealand into a British colony, and sent out its first governor in the person of Captain Hobson of the Royal Navy, who planted the infant Capital of the Colony at Auckland, on the shores of the fine harbour of Waitemate.
The New Zealand Company were at first most successful in the great enterprise which they had planned. They acquired from the natives large tracts of land in Cook's Strait, where they planted their little Settlements of Wellington and Nelson, Wanganui, and New Plymouth--peopling them with five thousand pioneer emigrants of a stamp better fitted to subdue the wilderness and rough-hew the foundations of an infant State, than any who had left the mother country since the days of the cavalier emigrants of Delaware, or the pilgrim fathers of Massachusetts.
Unfortunately, however, violent dissensions soon arose between the Company and the Colonial Office, and suicidal quarrels soon followed between the Company's agents in the southern Settlements and the Government officials in the north. Two or three of the native tribes, encouraged by this enfeebling division between the two new powers which had appeared in the country, assumed a hostile attitude, ventured to repudiate the sale of the various districts which the Company's agents alleged had been fairly purchased, and committed numerous acts of trespass and petty violence. The Government authorities, instead of checking these first manifestations of turbulence with a firm and vigorous hand, pursued a feeble policy of over-conciliation and non-interference, until at last, the disaffected natives, believing themselves to be the stronger power, broke out into open rebellion. A small military force was brought over from Australia, and a series of smart skirmishes took place between the troops (ably supported by bands of friendly natives), and the rebels, led by the northern chiefs, Hone Heke, and Kawiti. Life
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HISTORICAL SKETCH.
and property now became insecure, both in the north and the south; many of the Company's pioneer settlers, driven from the lands on which they had expended their little all, now abandoned the country where they had been so ruined, others joined the troops and volunteered against the rebels; trade, immigration, agriculture, were stopped, and the little fields won from the wilderness were given up to the dock and the thistle.
At last, after a gloomy and inglorious period of several years of misgovernment, anarchy, and confusion, brighter days began to dawn. In 1845, an urgent petition from the remnant of the long-suffering pioneer colonists was laid before Parliament by the lamented late Charles Buller; it led to a three nights' debate, and was virtually supported by Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, Earl Grey, and a large majority, both in the Commons and Peers. The Colonial Office "aborigines-protecting" policy of pampering the natives to the destruction of the colonists was renounced, and Captain Fitzroy, (second governor) was superseded by Sir George Grey. Additional troops were sent out. Heke in the north was chastised and compelled to sue for peace, Rauperaha in the south was taken prisoner and his tribe broken up; and from that day to this, a period of eleven years, no native has ever ventured to appear in arms against the Queen, whilst life and property have been as secure in New Zealand as in Middlesex or Kent. Trade and agriculture, the progress of settlement and the arts of peace, which had long drooped so low, now began to revive. The Scotch Settlement of Otago was planted in 1846, the Settlement of Canterbury was planted a few years later, and about 1850 the robust young Colony, which had battled its way through such an Iliad of disasters, began a modest career of slow but solid progress which has never since received a check.
In 1851 the Australian gold discoveries took place, and at once gave a great impetus to every branch of industry in New Zealand. In 1853 the new Constitution, described hereafter, came into force, and placed the government of the Colony in the hands of the colonists. In this year, too, Sir George Grey, after a brilliant career of several years in South Australia and New Zealand, proceeded home, and received his present appointment at the Cape. Lieut.-Col. Wynyard, commander of the troops, became governor (pro tem.), and in 1855 this gallant officer was relieved by Colonel Thomas Gore Browne, under whose responsible rule, aided by the General Assembly and the provincial Parliaments, we may now hope to see the youngest but fairest colony of our empire become the favourite emigration field of thousands of our country-
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men who leave these dense-packed islands to plant new homes in some less competitive and more roomy land.
Such is the short outline of the history of New Zealand from Cook's time down to the present day. It has been asserted, by practical men who have seen New Zealand after visiting other colonies, that, if common good government from the first had spared the early disasters we have alluded to, the physical advantages of the young country, her soil and climate, her natural gifts, would by this time have attracted to her a population of a quarter of a million of the flower of British emigrants. Though, however, the deplorable misgovernment of New Zealand in her first days terribly crippled her progress and inflicted calamitous losses on her pioneer settlers, it has produced a counter, a beneficial, effect in making her a better emigration field for those who are emigrating now. Had it not been for this early misgovernment, the population of the Colony might have been tenfold what it is, when, necessarily, there would have been a tenfold appropriation of the best lands. Families emigrating to New Zealand in 1858 will find a population sufficiently large to have subdued the roughness of the wilderness, to have secured law and order, to have established society and social institutions, to have founded six thriving infant Capitals, and to have raised annual exports to the value of nearly half a million sterling; but they will not find a population sufficiently large--as in the United States and in the older emigration fields of Canada and Australia--to have taken the cream of the country by monopolizing town and village sites, garden valleys, water privileges, and the crack agricultural "estate-creating" lands. The present population of New Zealand does not exceed a handful of some 60,000 colonists, planted in six spots in a country larger, and by nature considerably more fertile, than the United Kingdom; and millions of acres, equal to the production of 30 bushels of wheat, or the grazing of five sheep per acre, are yet without trace of plough or fleece. Indeed, the early misgovernment of New Zealand has been well likened to the "thunder-storm," clearing the political atmosphere, and producing for the emigrant of 1858 such fruits as self-representation, security of life and property, cheap land and plenty of it, clear titles, and good laws.
