Gilbert Mair (23 May 1799 – 16 July 1857) was a sailor and a merchant trader who visited New Zealand for the first time when he was twenty, and lived there from 1824 till his death.
[2] Gilbert Mair senior was "present at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, and he and his family were acquainted with many of the noted men who visited the Bay of Islands".
He needed a ship to provision the mission stations and to visit the more remote areas of New Zealand to bring the Gospel.
When Gilbert Mair visited New Zealand for the third time, Williams asked him to assist in building the ship.
After the Herald was wrecked, Gilbert Mair purchased land from the natives, built his home at Wahapu and carried on the business of merchant and trader.
Many years later his sons removed his remains to the graveyard round the Church, where now only members of the Mair family are laid to rest".
And in that same year, he saw the remains of a fight at Te Papa pa at Tauranga Harbour, with "hundreds of bodies of men, women and children, dead animals and human bones, the remnants of a cannibal feast".
Five years before, in 1821, a Ngāpuhi taua (war party), led by Hongi Hika, had slaughtered the Ngāti Maru, living there.
In February 1830 Gilbert Mair purchased 159 hectares (1.59 km2) of land at Te Wahapu Point, some four km south of Kororāreka (nowadays Russell).
In that same year of settling at Te Wahapu, the so-called Girls' War broke out in Kororāreka, during which the chief Hengi was killed.
The Reverend Samuel Marsden had arrived on a visit and over the following weeks he and Henry Williams attempted to negotiate a settlement in which Kororāreka would be ceded by Pōmare II as compensation for Hengi's death, which was accepted by those engaged in the fighting.
An underlying cause of the fighting was a dispute as to the boundary line of the Kororāreka block that had been surrendered as a consequence of the death of Hengi some seven years previously in the Girls’ War.
[20] In 1845 the situation again became so difficult when the Flagstaff War began in the Bay of Islands, that Gilbert Mair asked the governor to send a vessel to take all settlers to Auckland.
[22] Samuel Marsden introduced the first horses to New Zealand, from Sydney; Gilbert Mair "bought the next lot from a shipment to Kororareka from Valparaíso.