About the Treaty copies and lists
Facsimile copies of each of the nine treaty sheets were� made in 1877 and were printed by the Government Printer. These facsimile copies have been reproduced on this site and have been used in compiling lists of the names that appear on each treaty copy. Each treaty copy had the words of the treaty but only part of each facsimile sheet has been reproduced here; that is, only the section showing the names.
The treaty copies are arranged roughly in the order in which they were dispatched from the Bay of Islands in 1840. The signings at various locations, however, were often taking place at more or less the same time over the six-month period from February to September 1840.� Around 50 meetings were held to discuss and/or sign a copy of the treaty. Each treaty copy has a brief introduction which identifies key facts about the copy.
For easy reference, the name of each chief has been given a number on the facsimile reproduction. This�number is repeated with the chief’s name on the relevant list. The number does not always indicate the sequence in�which a chief signed. Kawiti, for example, appears as the first name at the top left of the Waitangi sheet and is listed as number 1, although he did not sign until May 1840. A few chiefs appear to have signed twice.
Many names on the sheets - chiefs, iwi and/or hapu - can be deciphered with confidence; others cannot. Tribal and hapu names have sometimes been found on the relevant treaty copy, presumably given by the chiefs who signed. Sometimes information from tribal sources has identified a name, or corrected a spelling; but in many instances identification has been made through research in documentary sources such as reports, letters, diaries and land court records.
Where identification of any name is not clear or is uncertain, this has been indicated with a query - ?.
�In many cases it has been possible to add the full name or other names by which a signatory was known; these additional names are enclosed in square brackets - [ ].
�A good deal of other information is available on many of the people involved in the treaty-making - both Maori and non-Maori. But there is still much that could be done to add to this information and research begun in the 1980s continues. The lists, then, represent 'work in progress'; that is, they are placed on this website in the hope that errors can be corrected and that new facts can be added. They are also presented with a view to furthering knowledge of the treaty and its participants.
A detailed description of the treaty negotiations, as well as its subsequent history, can be found in Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi, Allen &� Unwin/Port Nicholson Press, 1987 (reprint Bridget Williams Books, 2001), on which this exhibition is based.
Related topics:
Copies of the Treaty sent in reports
About the original Treaty copies
Claudia Orange
The author is solely responsible for errors and omissions in this work, and invites viewers to make any known: [email protected]