Today in History

1848 The John Wickliffe anchors at Port Chalmers

The arrival of the immigrant ship John Wickliffe is celebrated in Otago as the founding day of the province. The ship and its 97 passengers sailed from Gravesend, England, on 24 November 1847, followed three days later by the Philip Laing, which left Greenock, Scotland, with 247 settlers. The first of the Otago Association's immigrant ships, they brought Scottish settlers escaping an economic depression as well as a split between the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Presbyterians.

The settlement of Otakou on Otago Peninsula had been a fishing settlement in pre-European times. In 1831 the Weller brothers established a whaling station there. In 1842 the Scottish architect and politician George Rennie started planning ‘a New Zealand settlement for Scotland’, including a ‘new Edinburgh’. Dunedin - the Gaelic word for Edinburgh - was the realisation of these plans.

Rennie was concerned that the first New Zealand Company settlements in New Zealand had been dominated by the English. His original plan for a Scottish settlement were turned into a Free Church enterprise by John McGlashan, Thomas Burns and William Cargill. This was the result of a significant split within the Church of Scotland. In 1843, 400 clergy and about one-third of the lay people split from the established church in protest against patronage and state control of church affairs. Men like McGlashan, Burns and Cargill saw Otago as a home for the new ‘Free Church’.

Burns and Cargill both came to Otago as settlers. Two-thirds of the original Otago settlers were Free Church Presbyterians. The remainder were referred to by Burns as ‘the little enemy’. In August 1848, over half of Otago’s United Kingdom-born population of 403 was Scottish.