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the propagandist rhetoric of the New Zealand Company. He saw his role of Company naturalist as
the precursor to colonisation, a necessary and important step to secure a promising future:
I have entered, on several occasions, upon questions intimately connected with the capabilities of
the country as a home for Europeans. In a time pregnant with the universal desire to search for
employment, and to open a new field for exertion, foreign and unoccupied countries, previous to
colonization, should be explored with a view of making ourselves acquainted with their soil and
natural productions. Natural history and the affiliated sciences should, in that case, be merely the
helpmates to noble enterprise; and even more than that – they should guide and lead it. (I:iv)
That is not to say that he fully endorses the colonisation of foreign lands, rather he sees its
inevitability, and therefore asks for it to be properly implemented whilst preventing the failures of
ill-prepared colonisation and minimising the oft-cited detrimental effects upon the indigenous
populations. However, in the case of New Zealand, “it appears evident, from the principle which
has guided the Government and the public, that we shall be indebted rather to an extension of
colonization, than to a previous examination, for a more intimate knowledge of the country”
(I:iii).
Unlike with Forster, the target audience here is a British-New Zealand readership, which
immediately asks questions concerning the extent to which Dieffenbach might limit his German
perspective in favour of a predominantly British one. In the main, he addresses primarily a more
scholarly than general readership, in particular English-speaking scientists, naturalists and
historians, although it additionally offers useful information for those educated members of the
English-speaking public who are likely to emigrate to New Zealand and have no doubt read the
propaganda of the New Zealand Company, or at least could be in a position to do so in the near
future, and also directs comments at the current group of colonists and officials already resident
in the colony. While a work of this type naturally requires the author to meet the needs and
expectations of British consumers on some level, he was aware that its scientific nature, at the
very least, would also prove valuable to subsequent German-speaking scientists, as would general
information to the non-British reader with a good command of English. Furthermore, it should
also be noted that ‘Anglophilia’ was prominent among historians and social scientists in Germany
between the 1830s and 1860s in particular, whereby ‘England’ represented “a complex of values,
associations, aspirations, and feelings”. 40 In contrast to the so-called ‘Anglomania’ of the late
eighteenth century, which used England as a model against the dominant influence of French
40
Charles E. McClelland, The German Historians and England: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Views. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1971, 3.
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