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CHAPTER THREE: Ernst Dieffenbach (1811-55)
The New Zealand Company
With the inevitable move towards the British colonisation of New Zealand, an opportunity was
created for a monopoly on land purchases before annexation and a newly formed Crown could be
set in place. It is here that Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s New Zealand Association, which was
founded in 1837 but renamed the New Zealand Company two years later, stepped in with its plans
of ‘organised immigration’ and ‘systematic colonisation’ in the 1837 prospectus The British
Colonization of New Zealand, consisting of a careful use of selective readings and misinformation
to suit its objectives. 1 The plan was to buy the land cheaply from the local Maori and sell it at a
more expensive rate to prospective settlers and investors, thus, in doing so, creating revenue to
finance their free passages to the distant country. 2 The local inhabitants would meanwhile be
unconvincingly compensated primarily through their own conversion by means of contact with
the “virtuous organised immigrants” to the point where, as one historian cynically puts it, “Maori
chiefs would become brown gentlemen, sipping port and reading the Bible and the Wealth of
Nations on estates reserved for them by the company; [whilst] other lands would be set aside for
the education and welfare of lesser Maori”. 3 The resulting image of New Zealand was one of a
rich and fertile, well-watered country closest in geographical location to the antipodes of Great
Britain, with a climate described as “one of the most equable in the world” 4 and one which
seemed “to combine the warmth of Southern Italy with the refreshing moisture and bracing
atmosphere of the English Channel”, 5 as “rain falls plentifully in every due season, though never
to an inconvenient degree”. 6 When combined with the abundance of streams and rivers, there
could be no chance of drought or the hot winds that spoiled hard-earned crops in Australia. Here,
the refreshing showers not only improved the natural vegetation, but also complemented the
1
In the preface to the second edition of the Company’s Information Relative to New-Zealand, dated 23 December
1839, it states: “It has been endeavoured to collect, within the following pages, accounts from many sources, so that,
upon comparison with each other, their accuracy may be in some measure estimated by the reader. But if these
descriptions should, in any instance, turn out to be exaggerated, the compiler does not, of course, hold himself
responsible for them. On the contrary, it has been his wish rather to under-state than amplify the advantages of the
promised land; as it is plainly the duty of the advocates of emigration to place, so far as in them lies, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth, before the eyes of the intending colonist” (Ward, Information Relative to New-Zealand,
viii-ix).
2
See Burns, Fatal Success, 52-55, 99-110.
3
Belich, Making Peoples, 183.
4
Wakefield and Ward, British Colonization, 44.
5
Ibid., 79.
6
Ibid., 45.
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