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dem hinreichende Mittel zu Gebot stehen die Souveränitätsrechte und die Gerichtsbarkeit über die
im Lande zurückbleibenden Europäer auszuüben, und die Eingebornen zu verhindern sich
gegenseitig zu bekriegen, sie aber im übrigen mehr als Föderirte zu betrachten, und der Zeit zu
überlassen eine Amalgamation der Racen herbeizuführen. 140
In the end, it is the role of the Company and the treatment of the Maori, rather than New Zealand
itself, which receives the harshest criticism that in turn tarnishes the overall image of the country.
It is certain that he still believed that with the right structures in place, New Zealand could reach
the heights that he envisaged.
Conclusion
Half a century after Georg Forster proclaimed New Zealand as the future “Königinn der südlichen
Welt”, New Zealand’s first colony had been founded, as had a broad set of propaganda-based
stereotypes and images which drew on traditional Arcadian values and popular racial theories.
According to Company propaganda, New Zealand was an antipodean British paradise in the
South Pacific with a healthy climate, fertile vegetation, rich trading prospects, an abundance of
unoccupied (and therefore empty) land, and an indigenous people who were the most European-
like of savages (and therefore also perfect candidates for a blending of races), desired colonisation
and British protection, and made reliable servants. At this important moment in New Zealand
history, Ernst Dieffenbach desired to convey to the scholar and intending colonist a more
objective stance than the views of certain British writers whose early literature often had hidden
agendas, even though his views had been formed and influenced to some extent by the latter or at
least in a wider sense by similar European influences. In doing so, Dieffenbach modernised the
impartial German perspective laid down by Forster and his German contemporaries. Although he
does not dispute every aspect of the Company’s image, that is not an admission of his simply
regurgitating the same content in order to cater to the British market, as the above propaganda
incorporated various popular European and ‘Anglophile’ beliefs, including ‘environmental
determinism’ and the suitability of Anglo-Saxon Europeans to a temperate climate, as well as
empty humanitarian promises of racial ‘amalgamation’. Dieffenbach instead set out to give
‘unvarnished descriptions’ of New Zealand and its population, and went out of his way to dispel
any exaggerations and inaccuracies concerning the potential of the colony in the 1840s and
beyond in order to give more balanced and moderate observations that were in the best interests
140 Ibid., 1524.
108