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By Root 1139 0

had superficial plausibility. British colonies could not develop, he argued, because they lacked labour, so he proposed that land there might be sold to those who wished to try their luck as farmers, and the money raised then used to transport workers from Britain. There were many holes in this plan, not the least of them being the need to define what was a reasonable price, to say nothing of who had title to sell anything in the first place. Wakefield promoted settlement schemes all over the place, from South Australia to Canada, but his most successful was in New Zealand, and in May 1839 he dispatched his brother and son to buy land at the other end of the earth. Their vessel arrived in New Zealand in the record time of ninety-six days, to be followed, a few months later, by the first group of migrants.

The circumstances under which the settler community came to dominate New Zealand still rankle with the islands’ original inhabitants. It is certainly true that a dozen or so Maori chiefs had appealed to the British for protection – mainly from European traders and the rowdy crews of whaling ships. It is also true that the government was troubled by the possibility of a French settlement being established there. And there were calls from missionaries for British intervention. The government in London dispatched an emissary, William Hobson, a straightforward naval captain, with strict instructions from the Colonial Secretary that he was to play fair with the tribal chiefs: any land he bought in the name of the government, for example, was to be territory they could surrender ‘without distress or serious inconvenience to themselves’. Hobson drew up what he thought was a document which safeguarded the interests of both parties and it was translated into the Maori language by a couple of missionaries. On 6 February 1840, at Waitangi, some forty Maori chiefs and a gathering of frock-coated Europeans signed the treaty. In the following weeks, messengers scurried about the country collecting the signatures of another 500 chiefs.

But what had they agreed to? Unfortunately, the Treaty of Waitangi was less than crystal clear, since the English and Maori versions turned out to be imprecise translations of each other. The Maoris appear to have believed that the treaty allowed Queen Victoria nominal government, in exchange for which the Maoris were to be offered protection and left to manage their own affairs. But there was no real Maori concept of sovereignty, for there was no single ruler of the whole country.* Settlers poured on to the land: at the time of the treaty there were reckoned to be about 2,000 white people in New Zealand and an estimated 125,000 Maori. Within the next twenty years the number of settlers would rise to 100,000. By the 1890s a (white) historian was explaining the imperative that drove things: ‘A fertile and healthy Archipelago larger than Great Britain’ simply could not be left in the hands of ‘a handful of savages – not more, I believe, than sixty-five thousand in all and rapidly dwindling in numbers’. One hundred years later, well over half the population was classified as European. Maoris made up fewer than eight in every hundred citizens.

A sort of settlement mania bubbled away. In 1870, even John Ruskin, the outstanding art critic of his day, delivered himself of the judgement that England faced the highest challenge ever presented to a nation:

This is what she must either do, or perish: she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men – seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country, and that their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea.

We have simply no idea how many indigenous peoples in the British Empire were killed either directly or indirectly by the settlers arriving from Britain to make real these dreams and schemes. No one bothered to keep a tally. But we can be certain that it was a