Idea for a Wellington settlement thought up in prison
Cristina Sanders.
January 22, 1840, marks the anniversary of Wellington. Plots for the first settlement had sold out even before the first English ships arrived, writes
The arrival of the ship the Aurora in Port Nicholson on January 22, 1840, marked the beginning of New Zealand’s first systematically settled colony, one of many towns to be designed by Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the New Zealand Company in London.
Though we mark that date as the founding of Wellington, it wasn’t called Wellington then, and the first colonials were camping across the harbour at Pito-one.
They called the new settlement ‘‘Britannia’’, and the men who had arrived only a few weeks earlier on the survey ship the Cuba were busy trying to peg out a town for the settlers on the shifting gravel of the Heretaunga River. There were floods and fires and earthquakes. Within a few months they moved across the harbour to Te Aro, and the new town became Wellington 10 months later.
Wakefield came up with the concept of transplanting the best of a cross-section of English society to a new land while he was languishing in Newgate Prison, in London. He and his brother William were serving time for abducting an heiress – an early example of his get-rich-quick schemes – but that’s another story.
The New Zealand Company had already sold thousands of town and country acres to speculators in England before the Aurora arrived. In fact, it had sold out of plots for the first settlement before its exploratory ship, the Tory, with its cargo of guns and blankets to trade for land, had even arrived in New Zealand.
Confirmation that the purchase had been achieved would have taken at least four months, but by then the Company had eight ships of colonists on the sea, blowing south down the Atlantic and along the trade winds to New Zealand, all their possessions tucked into the hold ready to furnish their new land and make it feel like home.
The Tory, with Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s brother and principal agent, William, and son Jerningham aboard, might well have come to grief at sea, a not unlikely event for a tall ship in the 19th century and, in fact, she wrecked not two years later. Had the Tory gone down, the Cuba and the Aurora and the following six ships of the first fleet might have arrived at their meeting place in the Marlborough Sounds with settlers waving useless deeds to non-existent land.
But the Tory made quick time. The Wakefields smartly drew up the Port Nicholson purchase agreement, had an uneducated whaler convey the deal’s details to their new Ma¯ ori friends, and they bought all they could see.
The Aurora disembarked 148 settlers from its tenders on to a small jetty or, when the tide went out, into the arms of
Ma¯ ori from the pa¯ of Te Puni, who carried them ashore through the waves and made them welcome.
The Aurora’s long voyage had been without major incident. The provisions lasted the four months well, and the wine, spirits and porter were ample. Only one death was recorded on the ship, that of a sickly child, which is a remarkable record for the era.
According to a diarist, they’d faced a couple of strong gales rounding the Cape of Good Hope, where the topmast ‘‘more than once’’ was carried away, a yard arm lost and the ship was ‘‘repeatedly buried in water’’, but it survived ‘‘owing to her buoyancy’’.
They had seen no land from Dover to d’Urville Island in the Marlborough Sounds, where a whaler told them Colonel William Wakefield could be found across the strait in Port Nicholson. They may have been surprised to find, roaring in through the heads on a stiff westerly, that the only wooden building on the foreshore so far was a storeroom. Accommodation for the colony was a group of damp calico tents.
A week after the Aurora’s arrival, Captain Hobson landed at Waitangi in the Bay of Islands and set about taking New Zealand for the British Crown. He had very different ideas to the Wakefields on the business of colonialism and quickly got his treaty together, with a clause designed to stymie the Wakefields’ ambitions.
It asserted the government’s pre-emptive right to land. His call to bring every previous land sale before a land court to examine its validity, including the New Zealand Company’s purchase of Wellington, almost led to many of the Wellington settlers packing up for Valparaiso, in Chile.