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It is here that we also see Dieffenbach being influenced by these same arguments as he
begins his introduction with the concept of colonisation and the necessity of the desired
destination being of similar climate to one’s home country: “It is with man as with plants and
animals; each kind has its natural boundaries, within which it can live, and thrive, and attain its
fullest vigour and beauty” (I:1f.). However, unlike plants, whose immediate environment can be
artificially altered to accommodate their growth, the same cannot be said of man, especially in
those colonies which have been created for commercial means, such as the West Indies, Senegal
and the Cape, which are “merely a factory, where the ease of acquiring riches by supplying a
certain commodity to the home market has rendered men reckless of the dangers of climate, and
regardless of the loss of life attending the speculation” (I:2). In these cases, “the European
population soon became decrepit, and degenerated from the strength and vigour of the stock from
which they descended”, either founding the colony on a “regular system of oppression and
extortion towards the original inhabitants”, often in the form of slavery, or else convict labour
which creates an “artificial appearance of wealth” and an “illusory value of landed property
which could not last as soon as the importation of convicts ceased, because the prosperity was not
borne out by the capability of the country” (I:2):
How different from all this is the case of New Zealand, where the climate is not only similar to
that of England, but even milder than that of her most southern counties, whilst at the same time it
is healthy and invigorating! The children of Europeans, born in this country, show no deterioration
from the beauty of the original stock, as they do in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. A
great part of the country possesses a soil which yields all those articles of food which are
necessary for the support of Europeans, especially grain, potatoes, fruit, and every variety of
garden vegetables; it possesses materials for ship-building and domestic architecture in its timber,
marble, and freestone; the coal which has been found will probably prove sufficient in quantity for
steam-engines and manufactories; its coasts are studded with harbours and inlets of the sea; it is
intersected by rivers and rivulets; its position between two large continents is extremely
favourable; in short, it unites in itself everything requisite for the support of a large population in
addition to the native inhabitants. No other country possesses such facilities for the establishment
of a middle class, and especially of a prosperous small peasantry, insuring greatness to the colony
in times to come. (I:2f.)
Furthermore, the influence of the New Zealand climate on the “physical and intellectual
conditions of its inhabitants”, to complement the already helpful atmosphere for rearing
vegetation and the “luxuriant growth of plants”, is both favourable to individual and numerical
growth of European families: “In the families of the missionaries and settlers I observed no
der Klimatheorie in seiner Reise um die Welt”, in: Georg-Forster-Studien 8 (2003): 139-61; Robert Grant, “New
Zealand ‘Naturally’: Ernst Dieffenbach, Environmental Determinism and the Mid Nineteenth-Century British
Colonization of New Zealand”, in: The New Zealand Journal of History 37:1 April (2003): 24-27.
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