History of New Plymouth

The city of New Plymouth, New Zealand, has a history that includes a lengthy occupation and residence by Maori, the arrival of white traders and settlers in the 19th century and warfare that resulted when the demands of the two cultures clashed.

[1] The rapid growth of the colonist population, coupled with insatiable demands for land by the New Zealand Company[2] and the dubious practices it employed in purchasing it,[1][3] created friction with local Maori,[4] leading to a war in the 1860s.

[1] Barrett and his companions were welcomed by Te Āti Awa tribe, who realised that the Europeans, with their muskets and cannon, could assist in their continuing wars with Waikato Maori,[1] as well as providing cloth, food and utensils.

A month earlier Wakefield had claimed to have bought 80,000 km2 (20 million acres), comprising one-third of New Zealand, from certain Taranaki and other Maori in Wellington.

J. Houston, writing in Maori Life in Old Taranaki (1965), observed: "Many of the true owners were absent, while others had not returned from slavery to the Waikatos in the north.

"[8] The poor understanding by Maori of the nature and extent of the sale – confusion that later led to tension and warfare over land – was not aided by Barrett's translation skills: at subsequent Land Claims Commission hearings in Wellington he was invited to demonstrate his translation ability on a lengthy, legalistic document and was said to have "turned a 1600-word document, written in English, into 115 meaningless Maori ones".

Eleven months later, on 12 December 1840, Frederic Alonzo Carrington, the 32-year-old Chief Surveyor for the Plymouth Company, arrived in Wellington with the task of creating a 44 km2 (11,000 acre) settlement in New Zealand for people of the West Country.

Carrington invited Barrett to join his team and about 9 January 1841, the pair arrived at Ngamotu with a party of assistant surveyors on the barque Brougham, ready to choose a site for the new town.

[1] Biographer Angela Caughey claimed Barrett's choice of locations to show Carrington was part of a strategy, motivated by self-interest, to discourage the surveyor from siting New Plymouth in that area instead of Taranaki.

He wrote to Woolcombe in Plymouth: "I have selected a place where small harbours can be easily made and with trifling expense, close to an abundance of material being on the spot ...

"I once had made up my mind to have the town there," he wrote, "but the almost constant surf upon the bar has caused me to prefer this place ... the New Plymouth Company has the garden of this country; all we want is labour and particularly working oxen."

For decades, however, Carrington would come under attack from settlers who thought the location of New Plymouth had been poorly chosen because of the lack of a natural harbour.

George Cutfield, the head of the expedition, wrote a letter home, describing the settlement as "a fine country with a large quantity of flat land, but every part is covered with vegetation, fern, scrub and forest.

"[11] Temporary housing sites had been provided on Mount Eliot (the present-day site of Puke Ariki museum), and frustrations mounted as settlers were forced to squat in homes built of rushes and sedges through winter, amid flourishing numbers of rats, dwindling food supplies and rising unease over the prospects of a repeat raid by Waikato Maori.

Its 187 passengers were helped ashore by Barrett and his men over the course of two weeks, each small boatload taking five hours to row from the vessel to the shore.

The ship's precious food cargo, including flour and salted meat, was finally brought ashore for New Plymouth's starving residents on 30 September.

On 2 July Spain wrote to Governor Robert FitzRoy advocating the imposition of a military force to persuade the Maori that everything was in their best interests, or as he put it, to demonstrate "our power to enforce obedience to the laws, and of the utter hopelessness of any attempt on their part at resistance ..." As Spain saw it, New Zealand had been colonised for philanthropic reasons, "to benefit the Natives by teaching them the usefulness of habits of industry, and the advantages attendant upon civilisation.

After visiting New Plymouth in late 1844, FitzRoy formally set aside Spain's award, acknowledging that the land had been sold without the approval of the absentees.

According to the Waitangi Tribunal, the Fitzroy block deal was less a purchase than a "political settlement based on the reality that there were already settlers on the land, who had to be either accepted or driven out ... (the sale was) more akin to a treaty, because Maori also imposed two significant conditions.

In 1847 FitzRoy's bellicose successor, George Grey, responded to settler resentment by pressuring Te Āti Awa leaders to sell more land.

Grey's determination to secure more land despite Maori opposition had been made clear from the outset: in an 1847 letter to his newly appointed Inspector of Police, the former Sub-Protector of Aborigines Donald McLean, he said that apart from reserves set aside for resident Māori and those returning from the south, "the remaining portion ... should be resumed by the Crown for use by Europeans.

More than 3,500 troops poured into Taranaki, including the 65th, Suffolk, West Yorkshire, 40th and 57th Regiments,[14] during which New Plymouth was transformed into a fortified garrison town.