The settlers in the New Zealand Company arrived belatedly in
1839, decades after the first foreign visitors to Port Nicholson and
Cook Strait. The leaders of the new colony clearly sought to downplay
and ignore the vital preparatory role played by their pakeha
predecessors. Wakefield wanted the new colony to begin with a
clean slate, to be an unsullied replica of ‘English society’. Anyone
present before the ‘new home’ was established on Wakefield’s
ideals, was judged to be out of place, to be ignored and cast out of
polite society before they might pollute the new model. The Nobs
and Snobs of the new colony clearly preferred to ignore those who
had preceded them.
The first sealers, whalers and traders around Cook Strait and Port
Nicholson before 1839, were indeed a motley lot, but they should no
longer be denied their rightful place as Wellington’s first pioneers.
Included are 50 mini-chapters about those pakeha who were here
before the colony in Wellington began belatedly in 1839. There is
also a chapter by Charles Heaphy on what he saw at Port Nicholson
in 1839, and an appendix written by the late John O’C. Ross on ‘The
European Discovery and Naming of Port Nicholson’.