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expected to be sources of any considerable profit for some time to come” (I:6), not to mention the
erroneous notion of New Zealand as a refitting station for traders, as they went instead to the
Pacific Islands, “where they could be supplied with wood and provisions at a much cheaper rate”
(I:8). The same goes for the production of wool, silk, olives, oranges and wine which Dieffenbach
doubts will thrive in most areas of New Zealand (I:178). Moreover, in terms of the ‘peaceful’
exploitation of the local Maori workforce, “the colonist can at present depend but little; and
although he will find them in other respects sufficiently useful, he has to pay them at the same
high rate as his European workmen, without being sure that they will always work at his
command” (I:6). However, even though the “internal resources and geographical position which
secured to Great Britain its unequalled prosperity, are, although much inferior, yet similar, in
New Zealand”, he does believe the latter’s situation “may give her, in the course of time, as high
a position” (I:8), albeit through a hardworking peasantry, and bring the country to an “entrepôt of
commerce – a depôt for transit trade, and a manufacturing country, none of which it is at present”
(I:18). Thus, “New Zealand will rise slowly, but it must found its rise upon agriculture. Any
material check to its prosperity need not be apprehended, if expectations are moderate, and if the
land questions are liberally and speedily settled” (I:19).
This emphasis on the “laborious peasantry” (I:17) lends itself to the popular image of the
‘worker’s paradise’ which must be viewed in the light of the Company’s at times seeming
preference for absentee investors over labourers. Although he supports fixed price sales in
England to fund transportation costs for agricultural labourers and mechanics “in a just ratio to
the demand of labour, the price of provisions, the quantity of capital employed, and the actual
produce of the land, accompanied by a sound discretion as to the number of emigrants sent out”,
it is out of resignation, more than anything, that it cannot “be easily replaced by a better one”
(I:9). He does state, for example, that “if any other way could be devised to provide a fund for the
purposes of emigration besides that of selling new lands, no one can doubt that it would be better
to give to the emigrants the land for nothing, on the condition of their cultivating it” (I:10). In the
present case, Dieffenbach favours the working-class model over mortgaging sections of land to
create capital for “gentlemen colonists” as it is the best means of attaining the “real value” of the
land (I:17):
few years this trade, of which, from the geographical position of the ‘ whaling-ground,’ New Zealand might have
continued to be the centre, will be annihilated. Seals, which were plentiful in New Zealand, but were slaughtered in
the same indiscriminate manner, have already entirely disappeared” (I:53).
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