Today in History

1840 First European settlers arrive in Wellington

The New Zealand Company’s first settler ship, the Aurora, arrived at Petone, marking the founding of the settlement that would become Wellington. The new town was named in honour of Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington.

The New Zealand Company and its model of systematic colonisation was the brainchild of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Central to his plans for settlement was a package of land comprising a town acre (0.4 ha) and an accompanying 100 country acres (40 ha). There were 1100 one-acre town sections in the plan for Port Nicholson.

The plans for the Company settlement encountered problems from the beginning. The survey party led by Captain William Mein Smith had been sent to New Zealand before the Company had confirmed any land purchases. He arrived only weeks before the first settlers and had not had time to complete the survey.

The original site for the town at Pito-one (Petone) proved unsuitable. In early March floodwaters from the swollen Hutt River swept through the makeshift community. The town was relocated across the harbour at Thorndon and Te Aro. Here further problems were encountered: what land had actually been purchased?

The original plans for the Company settlement had been prepared in England by Samuel Cobham. It was an incredibly orderly design with a grid pattern containing familiar names to remind settlers of England. In the event, Covent Garden, Soames Square and Billingsgate Fish Market did not feature in the settlement that was actually laid out.

As was often the case with the New Zealand Company, there was a substantial difference between theory and reality. One settler recalled that when his ship entered Wellington Harbour, ‘disappointment was visible on the countenance of everyone’. Cobham’s design had been developed primarily to encourage investment. Neither he nor any of the Company’s principal agents had ever been to New Zealand. The geography that Mein Smith and the settlers had to contend with was very different to that imagined in Britain when the original plans were prepared.

By the end of the year 1200 settlers had arrived in Wellington. Wakefield had hoped to make the settlement the capital of New Zealand. He was to be disappointed when Governor William Hobson chose Auckland instead (although Wellington did become the capital when Parliament was moved to the city in 1865). The Crown also began an investigation of the New Zealand Company’s land purchases. This uncertainty and fighting with Māori in the Hutt Valley and Porirua contributed to Wellington’s slow growth in the 1840s. In 1850 the so-called ‘model settlement’ had a population of 5479. By comparison, the virtually unplanned town of Auckland had a settler population of 8301.

Image: detail from 1920s ‘Windy Wellington’ postcard (Redmer Yska collection)